Will the new PM's to-do list be paralyzed by parliamentary tactics?

Globe and Mail

26-05-2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney declared last week that his government will fulfill its mandate 'with purpose and force.'
But with the Liberals a few seats sort of a majority, Mr. Carney's ability to keep his pledge - including bringing down costs and returning immigration to sustainable levels - may hinge in large part on whether Parliament descends into the prolonged stand-off that paralyzed the last government's agenda.
Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives deployed an array of procedural tactics to clog up the government's timetable in the last months of the 44th Parliament. The logjam that ensued stopped 26 government bills in their tracks.
Among the casualties of a prolonged Conservative filibuster was the mammoth online harms bill, a flagship piece of legislation years in the crafting that failed to pass the parliamentary stages needed to become law before the election.
A bill designed to improve First Nations' water quality was another victim of the procedural quagmire that gummed up proceedings in the months leading up to the election.
The Conservative filibuster followed the government's refusal to hand over an unredacted set of documents that the House ordered it to produce in a motion passed in June.
The Speaker ruled in September that this amounted to a prima facie case of privilege, prompting the Conservatives to table a motion to refer the issue to the procedure and House affairs committee for investigation.
Tory MPs set about filibustering their own motion, aware that as a privilege motion it would take precedence over other parliamentary business.
The government appealed to the Bloc Québécois and the NDP to come to its aid and end the Conservatives' delaying tactics. But they refused.
This time, the Bloc may prove more amenable. Its leader Yves-François Blanchet signalled after the election that he wanted partisanship to be set aside to allow Canada to address the threat of tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump. He indicated he did not want another election for at least 12 months.
'I genuinely believe Quebeckers and Canadians expect the new Parliament to be stable and responsible,' Mr. Blanchet said at a press conference shortly after the election.
'Unless there's another crisis or crass bad-faith partisanship, there is no scenario other than collaboration for the next year or so,' he added.
For such a truce to hold, however, the Bloc expects the Liberals to offer concessions, including giving Quebec more power over immigration.
Meanwhile, the NDP - the Liberals' former bedfellows in their now defunct supply-and-confidence agreement - has been reduced to a rump of a party with only seven MPs — five short of the 12 needed to be a recognized party in the House of Commons.
This will rob the New Democrats of their formerly active role on committees, where much of the nitty gritty of parliamentary work gets done.
Michael Wernick, former head of the federal public service, said the NDP's collapse means the government may now have to cut deals with the Conservatives and the Bloc for bills to progress beyond committee stage.
'The productivity of the Parliament will be determined at the committees. They control the pace and the quality of legislative review,' he said. 'The NDP can show up but can't vote on motions. It means getting one of the other two onboard. The opposition will have a lot of control of the selection of topics and witnesses.'
Philippe Lagassé of Carleton University, whose research includes unusual election results, agreed that 'committees are going to be much more of a two-party sparring match.'
'It's going to be a much more government-opposition dynamic that I think will make committee work more difficult,' he said.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan said the New Democrats' absence from committees would lead to far less scrutiny, but she predicted the mood in the Commons would be less belligerent in the short term.
'I would suspect that the atmosphere will be different, at least during that period where Pierre Poilievre is actually not in the House,' she said.
Mr. Poilievre, who if he wins the promised Alberta by-election, could be back in his seat by the fall, signalled in a speech after the election that Conservatives would be prepared to work with Mr. Carney to bolster Canada against U.S. tariffs and protect Canada's sovereignty.
But beyond that there will be no armistice and his party 'will be holding the government to account on behalf of the millions of Canadians who believed in the message of change.'
A fundraising e-mail sent to Conservatives by interim Opposition leader Andrew Scheer made it even clearer that the party is not prepared to give Mr. Carney's Liberal government a free pass.
'Hey friend, I'm PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN to reveal our Opposition plans for you as the House of Commons returns next week,' the e-mail said.
'If the Liberals listen to our common sense ideas, we will vote to back those ideas. If they do not, we will FIGHT TOOTH AND NAIL to stop them before they make your life worse.'
Mr. Scheer, the Opposition House Leader, is a former Speaker of the House of Commons and well-versed in procedural tricks to clog up a minority government's program.
Among the panoply of arcane tools available are questions of privilege - which MPs have used to argue they have been insulted by an opposition MP; points of order; concurrence motions, which can lead to hours of debate on a dusty committee report; and a variety of dilatory motions including 'that a Member be now heard.'
The new Conservative front bench retains many pugilistic Poilievre stalwarts including Melissa Lantsman, an old hand at using procedural tactics and landing rhetorical upper cuts in Question Period.
Veteran Conservative MP Mike Lake, newly promoted to mental health critic, suggested that co-operation with the Liberals would only extend to 'good policies that we think make Canada better.'
'If they put forward policies that we think are making life harder for Canadians ... we're going to do what we can, using the rules that we have at our disposal, to make sure that we're acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of Canadians,' he said.
In the Senate, combative former Conservative leader Don Plett deployed a variety of devices to stymie the government's program in the 44th Parliament, at times single-handedly filibustering bills designed to promote animal welfare so they failed to become law.
But Mr. Plett recently retired, replaced as Conservative Senate Leader by Leo Housakos, a former Senate speaker, who is seen by colleagues as less obstructive.
Progressive Senator Pierre Dalphond is hopeful that compared to the 'very, very unproductive' last sitting when 'the atmosphere was bad' and some parliamentarians behaved like naughty school children, that Ottawa will return to a more 'normal situation.'
'I think Canadians are tired of the poisonous atmosphere they had in the fall last year,' the Quebec senator added.
But he hesitated to predict how long a more collegial atmosphere might last.
'I think in the House of Commons, it might be short lived. I'd be surprised if they [the Conservatives] applaud the budget. I expect they'll become more aggressive,' he said.
Senator Tony Dean, former head of the Ontario public service, was not terribly optimistic either.
'I expect it to continue to be fractious. But new leaders always bring a different tone and approach,' he said. 'We will find out fairly quickly.'