Today, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainablee Development was to hear testimony from Mark Jaccard, an environmental economist at Simon Fraser University, who has often found himself at the centre of some policy debates. When Environment Minister John Baird, for example, wanted to trash Liberal attempts to force his government to abide by the Kyoto Protocol, Baird turned to Jaccard (and four other economists) to support his contention that if Canada did abide by Kyoto, it would put the country in recession.
But turnabout is fair play, as they say, and when Baird unveiled his own green plan shortly after that, Jaccard was one of those who held his nose up at it. And so today, the opposition members of the Environment Committee were going to give Jaccard a chance to trash Baird’s plan. The government didn’t want this to happen and so Bob Mills, the Conservative who is chairman of the committee, tried to change the agenda — and keep Jaccard off of it. The committee called a vote on the agenda with Jaccard back on it. Since the Conservatives are the minority on the committee they lost the vote. Mills then resigned as chairman of the committee.
Or at least, that’s how the Liberals tell it.
The Conservatives say Mills was just trying to re-arrange the agenda to produce a better meeting and they had no intention of trying to shut Jaccard down. And Mills did indeed walk out of the meeting but, in their view, it was a matter of confidence not over the issue of what should be on the agenda but — and again, this is what the Conservatives — because the opposition was demanding Mills apologize for trying to change the agenda.
However it happened, the Environment Committee is without a chairman.
Now, according to the rules of the House of Commons, a government MP must be a chair of this committee. The government refused to nominate one of their MPs to be chair. And without a chairman, — again, according to the rules of procedure around here — the committee is unable to meet.
And that’s how, a few days before Parliament is to break for the summer, the work of the Environment Committee has ground to a halt.
Whooee! Davey, this is just another example of the utility of CPC's 200 page manual of parliamentary sabotage. More'n'more, it's lookin' like Harper is puposely making parliament and even federalism, itself, seem unworkable. I previously thought his motive was to demonstrate the futility of minority government and a tactic to ask for a majority. I no longer think so.
Harper is a separatist.
By creating and fomenting interprovincial and federal-province strife, Harper moves us closer to fragmentation. Post Canada, Harper will ascend the throne in the Oil Sheikhdom Formerly Known as Alberta.
I think this is the first time in Canadian history that we've had a PM who doesn't believe in Canada.
JimBobby