Before looking at why the Senate made the last-minute call to hit pause on Team Trudeau’s bid to end the rotating strikes at Canada Post, a quick caveat: As an unabashed non-expert on labour law, Process Nerd is wildly unqualified to comment on the pros and cons of the legislation itself, so none of the following analysis is aimed at the substance of the legislation, and will instead focus on… well, the process, and specifically, the right (or not) of the upper house to defy the government’s preferred timeline in exercising its constitutional duty to deliver sober, second thought.

For those who may have missed the latest twists and turns in the legislative plot, a brief recap: After forcing through a pre-emptive motion limiting debate on its back-to-work proposal to just four hours, the government used its majority to propel the bill through the House of Commons in just one sitting day, with the bill landing on the Senate agenda on Saturday morning.

Initially, the upper house had planned to sit through the weekend in order to get it to the Royal Assent finish line by Monday.

But following a lightning-round committee of the whole with Team Trudeau leads Employment Minister Patty Hajdu, Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough, as well as senior officials from both Canada Post and the union representing striking postal workers, they decided to take a day to mull over what they heard before moving on to the final stage of debate, which is set to resume later today.

So, why the move to hold off on third reading?

In a nutshell: A critical mass of chamber denizens — including those aligned with both the Senate Liberal and capital-I Independent caucuses — simply haven’t been convinced that the current impasse is so dire that government intervention is needed. They’re also concerned that the bill as drafted could violate the Charter of Rights, which past court rulings have concluded explicitly protects collective bargaining rights.

For its part, the government did eventually produce a Charter impact statement on the bill, which was delivered to senators just after midnight on Saturday morning.

That statement, which is available for review online, attempts to make the case that the bill is “consistent” with the Charter, and lists all the ways the government attempted to bridge the gap between the two sides before turning to legislation, including appointing several mediators and urging the parties to “consider voluntary arbitration.”

But as retired federal judge-turned-parliamentarian Sen. Murray Sinclair noted, it fell considerably short of his expectation that it lay out the legal argument in support of the draft bill.

“It doesn’t even acknowledge that there is a Charter breach,” he pointed out to his colleagues.

“For a Charter assessment to be helpful to us, I think it at least has to acknowledge that the legislation is, on its face, very similar to what was done in 2011 with regard to that particular legislation, in that, by interfering with the right of employees to withdraw their services, it does, in fact, become a breach of the Charter.”

According to the precedent set by the courts, he noted, such breaches are not automatically verboten, but must be justified under section 1 of the Charter, which the statement fails to do.

“We don’t see an acknowledgment that there is a Charter breach,” he stressed. “We don’t see the section 1 analysis. There is a brief discussion about the importance of the legislation because it’s interfering with the public’s right to get mail, and businesses are suffering; however, there is no proof provided in the document, or in any of the information provided to us, that that is, in fact, the case.

Independent Liberal Sen. Serge Joyal — who tends to act as the chamber’s in-house constitutional scholar at large — commented that it seemed to have been “put together very quickly,” and, in his view, “doesn’t, in my opinion, satisfy those aspects of the course to be run to be sure that this legislation is constitutionally sound.”

Several senators, including Sinclair and one-time provincial New Democrat minister Frances Lankin, also questioned the use of “anecdotal evidence” to highlight the ostensible urgency of the matter — such as an oft-repeated claim related to the backlog of hundreds of trucks, which Canadian Union of Postal Workers president Mike Palecek dismissed as “fiction.”

So, leaving aside the merits (or lack thereof) of the bill itself, it’s worth noting that the Senate is, of course, master of its own destiny, at least as far as allocating time to consider proposed legislation — and that holds true, even if the government is pushing for a swift outcome.

In fact, the new reality of the Independent-dominated Senate makes the decision to hold off until Monday even more defensible, as it would be difficult, if not impossible, to claim that the majority who want more time to weigh the implications of the bill are being driven by partisan politics (particularly since most of the senators who expressed concerns about the bill during the initial debate were appointed under the current government).

It’s even possible — though unlikely — that when the debate resumes this afternoon, one or more senators could attempt to amend the bill, which would also be entirely within their mandate, even if it could delay final passage of the back-to-work order even further.

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