Damien Kurek: The Liberal plan to silence the House of Commons

Parliament of Canada is pictured with empty street during morning rush hour March 23, 2020 in Ottawa, Canada. Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images

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The narrative being spun about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new majority is all about stability, making progress and even evoking wartime language referring to a “unity government.” But this talk misses something fundamentally important: without a single vote being cast by Canadians, the Liberals are poised to silence parliamentary dissent. And while headlines talk about a majority in the context of elections and confidence votes, there is a lot more to it.

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Let’s be clear about how we got here: the Liberals did not win a majority mandate. They also didn’t pick up any new seats in the recent by-elections; they held on to what they had after two high-profile resignations and one result invalidation. Instead of earning a parliamentary majority, or even more importantly, respecting the makeup of the House of Commons that Canadians elected, the prime minister cobbled a majority together.

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This was only possible because of the five floor-crossers who handed Carney this power. These MPs didn’t just commit an act of disloyalty to what their constituents voted for; they facilitated a profound consolidation of power into the hands of the prime minister and backroom power brokers.

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This majority commits a democratic sin far graver than what Jagmeet Singh ever managed, even with his coalition agreement with former prime minister Justin Trudeau, because a majority government has the abilty to force changes to the rules, known as the standing orders, of the House of Commons — and as a result change the composition of committees.

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Committees are structured based on the makeup of the House of Commons after an election, something carefully negotiated and agreed upon by all parties. For all the years the former NDP leader propped up the previous Liberal government, he at least allowed his NDP caucus to perform the constitutionally essential work of holding the government accountable at the committee level by refusing to give Liberals the majority of the seats.

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Right now, most committees have five seats for the Liberals, with four for the Conservatives and one for the Bloc Québécois; the NDP and Greens, not having official party status in the House Commons, do not have an assigned seat on standing committees. The Liberals are now signalling that they plan to unilaterally rework the structure.

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By securing a majority on committees, the Liberals would be weaponizing a system of accountability to silence their opponents. Committees may not get the same airtime as question period and confidence votes, but they are powerful agents of Parliament. They dictate what studies happen and which witnesses testify; they can demand documents and make amendments to legislation, among other powers.