At the risk of having my credentials as a pro-parliamentary zealot yanked, I have a confession to make: sometimes, I find myself wondering whether the House of Commons devotes too much time to debate.

Just typing that out made me feel unmoored from the ancient fundaments of Westminster-style democracy, so let’s put it another way: Is it possible for the Chamber to fulfill its due diligence in studying a particular bill without giving every last MP the opportunity to speak for his or her full allotted 20 minutes at every stage and on every motion?

For anyone familiar with the ebbs and flows of the calendar that governs life in Ottawa, there’s no mystery as to the timing of this particular question.

There are just five weeks — four and change, really — before the Grand Inquest of the Nation shuts down for the summer, which means the government is ramping up its efforts to get its highest-priority bills to the legislative finish line before time runs out.

That has traditionally meant resorting to measures like time allocation, and even closure, to meet that self-imposed — and, in most cases, arbitrary — deadline. Such measures produce outrage across the aisle as opposition MPs accuse the government of trying to dodge the full glare of parliamentary scrutiny.

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It happens every spring, although the pre-recess scramble to pick up the pace has definitely been more noticeable under the current government than it was under the Conservatives.

But where the previous administration had no qualms about imposing time allocation on virtually every stage of every bill to move beyond first reading, more than two years into their majority tenure, the Liberals are still strangely reluctant to bring down the hammer.

That doesn’t mean they won’t, of course — since the House re-opened for business in January, they’ve used their majority to cut off debate on four bills, and with the end of the sitting a little less than a month away, that number will almost certainly go up before last call.

That brings us to the latest outbreak of high political drama on the Commons floor, which has been centred, appropriately enough, on the Liberals’ long-awaited bid to overhaul the federal electoral machinery.

The bill — which would roll back some of the most controversial elements of the Conservatives’ self-styled Fair Elections Act, as well as bring in new measures to deal with issues that have cropped up more recently, including the threat of foreign electoral interference — was introduced last month and is currently at the top of the Liberals’ legislative priority list.

So urgent, in the government’s view, is the need for speed on this particular initiative that Team Trudeau blew the whistle after just four days of preliminary debate.

Unilaterally cutting the Commons’ collective mic requires at least one day’s notice, which gave the opposition parties the opportunity to pre-emptively denounce the government’s doing so as an attack on the very heart of our democracy.

Of course, as uncomfortable as the Liberals clearly find it to pull the trigger on time allocation in general, it’s doubly awkward when it involves laws related to campaigns and political financing.

As the opposition parties have repeatedly pointed out, it’s advisable to garner all-party support before rewriting the rulebook that could ultimately determine who sits where in the House, although as the government and its allies have been equally quick to point out, the Conservatives had no compunction about forcibly fast-tracking the Fair Elections Act over the objections of their political adversaries.

(That included the then-third-party Liberals, whose leader — one Justin Trudeau — even proposed changing the House rules to bar future governments from such unilateral acts of legislative aggression.)

And yet, to circle back to the question posed at the top of this page: Does the proposed election law overhaul really require unlimited time for second-reading debate — which is, at least in theory, supposed to be over the underlying principle and goal of the bill, not potential technical glitches in the fine print?

Or would three or four days — full days, mind you, not the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Wednesday and Friday half-sittings — give both supporters and opponents of the bill enough time to outline the rationale behind their second-reading vote?

Ideally, these logistical issues would be settled via all-party consensus — behind-the-curtains negotiations among House leaders to work out how many speaking slots will be needed for each party to put its position on the record.

Make no mistake: invoking time allocation is an inefficient, inelegant way to end a cross-aisle standoff, and it seems especially atonal when it involves a bill in which all parties involved have a very vested interest.

Canadian voters, however, can take some comfort in knowing that there will still be time for all sides to express their opinions and concerns at committee — where those arguments could potentially have a far greater impact, as far as actually resulting in amendments — and then again at the report stage and third reading, after which it will start all over again in the Senate.

In fact, thanks to the very same quirk of the House calendar, MPs will actually have more time to go over the bill when it comes back from committee, as the Commons is about to move to extended hours.

When it does, the new schedule will keep the Chamber up and running until midnight from Monday through Thursday until the summer break, giving its occupants up to 24 more hours of debate per week.

If, that is, there are sufficient speakers on the opposition side to keep the discussion going until the clock strikes 12.

If there aren’t — well, that would tend to suggest that it is, indeed, entirely possible to put the government’s legislative agenda through a rigorous parliamentary screening process while simultaneously giving it limited powers to speed up the Commons clock.

Kady O’Malley writes for iPolitics.ca, and also appears regularly on television and radio.