As is the end of year tradition at Duty, we take you behind the scenes of major stories or the workplace of our journalists. Isabelle Porter says that in 2023, the song and the “bundles” of amendments were in the spotlight in Parliament.
” What’s going on ? For what ? » These questions suddenly assailed me on Saturday, November 18 at the convention of the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ), in Lévis.
Ange Claude Bigilimana, one of the candidates for the position of vice-president of the party’s executive office, decided to conclude his speech with… a song.
What’s going on ? For what ?
And the candidate enthusiastically intones when we only have love by Jacques Brel. From the back of the Convention Center ballroom, where we camped out with our computers, my two colleagues and I looked at each other with a mixture of amusement and amazement. Was he going to sing it in full too?
The answer is yes. Like Bernard Drainville who pushed the note on Autumn song of the Cowboys Fringants three days earlier. There is no need to detail this episode which will probably remain part of our cultural heritage and which no one doubts will appear in the magazines of the year.
But beyond the funny and/or embarrassing nature of the thing, a question remains: are we witnessing a new trend in the political world? The Sophie Trudeau episode — “ some people say, hum, hum » — from 2016 remained an isolated case. But what would happen this time? Could we have ignored warning signs?
At the end of October of this year, the day after the by-election, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon had in some way opened the way by singing a Roger Whittaker tune in front of journalists in the early morning, reported my colleague Alexandre Robillard.
Certainly, since the Cowboys-Jacques Brel sequence, our little political world has not been entitled to new impulses of this kind. But he was still able to witness a few vocal jerks.
Like November 30, when the deputies decided to sing, to the tune of People of the country, “My dear Sylvain…” to the deputy Sylvain Lévesque, who chaired the Assembly. The next day, the Minister of Tourism, Caroline Proulx, went to the Salon Bleu humming in the corridor “it’s Christmas, because it’s snowing in my head”.
Tremors, I say, but no earthquake. My colleagues and I are keeping our eyes — and ears — open. For the moment, it’s calm.
On the other hand, I am still looking for the link between the words of when we only have love and the vice-presidency of the PCQ board of directors in Nord-du-Québec, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Outaouais, Laurentides and Lanaudière. But after all, they say love is everywhere. And Mr. Bigilimana won his elections as regional vice-president. In any case, the day when, in the not-so-distant future, the question period includes a period reserved for karaoke, we will know that it was in 2023 that it all began.
Crazy amendments
If there is an incongruous word that we often heard during the session in Parliament, it is the word “bundle”. In reference to the “bundles of amendments” tabled by the government in parliamentary committee.
Rarely have we seen as many amendments as those that burdened the study of Bill 15 (health) and Bill 31 (housing).
The 15th was the subject of 588 amendments. The 31 accumulated 73, an astonishing proportion for a document of barely 38 articles.
Additions which partly explain why the government failed to have both adopted before the end of the session. The 15th was adopted under gag order; the second was postponed to the next session.
To understand what happened, we must take an interest in what we call “the detailed study” of bills, a crucial but little-known stage of parliamentary work. Even parliamentary journalists don’t normally take much interest in it. Except that this session, some of us had no choice in doing so.
After being presented to Parliament, bills must go through parliamentary committees before being adopted. The most strategic bills are first the subject of special consultations. These are often publicized because it is at this stage that civil society groups submit briefs and make themselves heard before MPs.
MPs must then tackle the much more tedious work of detailed study. They must then analyze, one after the other, each of the articles of the bill and estimate its potential effects. In cases like Bill 15, which includes 1,180, this work is titanic. We can then imagine the repercussions of the famous “bundles” denounced by opposition deputies.
“It is not normal that in a parliamentary committee, in each bloc, in each section, a minister realizes his errors, his omissions, and says: I am going to add some amendments,” lamented the liberal in particular André Fortin. “The bill is essentially being written as it goes along,” lamented Quebec Solidaire MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard.
The government, they argued for weeks, presented draft bills that were not ready. A criticism that was all the more virulent in the context of the housing bill as many amendments related to subjects that had not even been dealt with in the bill originally, zoning regulations, for example.
For the expert in constitutional law and former PQ MP Daniel Turp, this is “excessive” and it “distorts the consultations themselves”, in particular because the groups which presented themselves at the stage of the special consultations did not could not comment on the new points. The government could, he said, have proceeded differently. “It has happened quite frequently in our parliamentary history to simply make a new bill,” he said, citing the example of Bill 101. This was in 1977. After presenting Bill 1 on the language, the government of René Lévesque withdrew it to make modifications and then brought it back in the form of Bill 101.
The proliferation of last-minute amendments is certainly not good news for democracy, according to Daniel Turp. “There is a good chance that things have escaped the legislator’s attention. This is not very healthy for our parliamentary democracy. »
The lawyer is finally surprised that the oppositions have not contested the “admissibility” of several of these amendments, as allowed by parliamentary procedure. Questioned on this subject, the official Liberal Opposition said that it was precisely afraid of running out of time. “If we had done it, we would have lost hours and hours of work,” said press officer Catherine Dostie.