Time limits, assisted death and the conscience of Parliament
It must be hard for the average Conservative MP to vote nay on a Liberal government motion of time allocation … with a straight face.
Time allocation is a Parliamentary tool which limits further debate on a bill to a specified number of days or hours. The Trudeau Liberals have imposed time allocation twice in recent days — on May 4 with C-14, the physician-assisted death bill, and again on May 10 with the budget implementation bill.
It has to be awkward for veteran Conservative MPs to claim that democracy is under attack — that a parliamentary majority is stifling the Official Opposition’s right to speak to a measure — when those same MPs were comfortable enough with using their majority to limit debate over 100 times when they were in power. Under Stephen Harper, time allocation became a routine process — hardly worth a mention in the news. In the latter stages of the 41st Parliament, debates were rarely (if ever) allowed to run their natural course.
On the other hand, the Liberal veterans who felt so oppressed by the former government’s high-handed tactics now seem all too eager to deploy closure’s slightly less annoying cousin to expedite votes — now that they’re the ones tabling the bills.
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