Senate finance committee

I have recently been watching the Senate finance committee examine Bill C-9, the budget implementation act. They are very slow at it because Liberal Senators do not like the bill. Liberal MPs didn’t like the bill either but they received instructions from their leader Michael Ignatieff not to stall the bill. Liberal Senators are known for not following their leader. For example, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny recently wrote an op-ed in which he defended CSIS chief Richard Fadden about his espionage allegations and actually appeared to contradict his party’s message on this issue when he said “Fadden did Canadians a service by pointing out that too many Canadian politicians are effectively on other countries' dole.” That is a clear contradiction of the Liberal position that Fadden’s allegations are unfounded.

So it is evident that Liberal Senators have a tendency not to follow the party line. As a result there are a number of Liberal Senators who actively wanted Bill C-9 to be split into multiple bills and studied individually. They were disregarding the fact that a parliamentary crisis would ensue if they succeeded in doing this. Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray also wanted to break up the bill. Murray considers this bill an affront to parliament. I wouldn’t go that far but putting so much budget-unrelated content into a budget bill is very questionable.

During the committee meeting Ned Franks said in relation to the confidence issue of Bill C-9 that numerous financial bills have been defeated in the past in Canadian parliament and the government did not fall. Now Ned Franks is a parliamentary expert and knows in detail all the legislative history of Canada’s parliament all the way back to Confederation. But I found that comment odd. Most of those years he has studied had majority governments in which financial bills are never defeated. And my impression is that in the case of minority parliaments, if a financial bill is defeated then in most cases the government falls. My impression is that only if the bill does not meet the criteria as being “supply” would the government not fall if the bill were defeated. “Loss of supply” is an undisputed loss of confidence when it occurs. There was a case in 1967 when a financial bill the Liberal minority government introduced was defeated because it did not have support of any other party in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Lester Pearson was out of the country when the bill was defeated and there were serious questions at the time about whether the government had fallen or not when the bill was defeated. The government declared it was not a matter of confidence and continued governing and an election was not called until 1968. But this must surely be the exception and not the rule. The Liberals were defeated over a budget in 1974 when it is believed they purposefully introduced a budget that the NDP could not support in order for there to be a reason to call an election in which they believed they could get a majority government. When the Trudeau government was defeated over the 1974 budget, it was clearly a loss of supply and the government fell. The Liberals only stayed in power because they won a majority government in the ensuing election. So I do not see how there has been an opportunity in Canadian parliamentary history for there to have been numerous financial bills defeated in which the government did not fall and so I am unsure what Franks was referring to. It is possible that Franks is referring to times that budget bills have been defeated in the Senate. But again I think there is limited opportunity for this to have occurred because it has been quite rare in Canadian history that one party has a majority in the House of Commons and another party has a majority in the Senate. This anomaly would have been the case throughout much of the Mulroney years but I’m quite certain no such bill was defeated by the Senate then. Another possibility that occurred to me was did such a thing happen during the Diefenbaker years? Again that does not seem likely so I am unsure as to why Franks was referring to when he made that comment about budget bills being defeated.

The funniest thing Franks said was when he referred to a bill that legislated on navigable rivers. He said that he actually prefers non-navigable rivers because he likes going white water rafting!