When Parliament votes on the omnibus federal budget bill Tuesday, MPs will be dealing with legislation that’s shorter, less far-reaching and in many ways more innocuous than its recent forerunners. But that’s not saying much.

At 111 pages, Bill C-60 is dwarfed by its immediate predecessor, the 443-page 2012 budget implementation bill, which reshaped Canadian policy in ways that, by virtue of its length and diversity, parliamentarians could not have understood when they passed it. Yet the two budget bills have at least one unsettling commonality. Each amends or abolishes dozens of varied pieces of legislation, many of which, contrary to the purpose of budget bills, are non-fiscal in nature.

That means the House of Commons finance committee is charged with examining parts of the bill on which it has no expertise. In the case of Bill C-60, the committee was given only four days to hear expert testimony on the consequences of the legislation — an impossibly tight time-frame in which to do a job already beyond its competency. This is government by what Liberal MP Scott Brison calls “kitchen-sink committee,” and it’s what NDP Finance critic Peggy Nash rightly calls “a sham.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is used to these criticisms. At this time last year, under pressure from opposition parties and pundits of every political stripe, the Conservatives agreed to hive off some parts of the budget bill and submit them to five relevant committees. The same has been done with Bill C-60. That’s a good first check on the power of the omnibus tool, but it’s not nearly enough.

Take the case of the latest bill’s most controversial measures — unprecedented provisions that will allow the government to intervene in the collective bargaining and executive salary negotiations of more than 40 Crown corporations. This has deep implications for both federal labour relations and for the essential arm’s-length status of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Already, government unions are threatening a constitutional court challenge and some 173,000 concerned Canadians have signed a petition to protect the independence of our public broadcaster.

Yet, the measures won’t be studied by the human resources committee or the heritage committee or any other committee with relevant expertise. And because this particular amendment is near the end of the bill, it was given especially short shrift in the finance committee’s harried hearings.

Clearly this is cause for concern. In the absence of proper parliamentary scrutiny, our system can’t work. The opposition cannot alert Canadians to the risks of the government’s agenda and the government can’t strengthen legislation through study and feedback. If that sounds quaint or naive, it’s only because the recent abuses of omnibus legislation in Ottawa — and at Queen’s Park — have made it so.

Less than two decades ago, Stephen Harper, then a Reform MP, asked that a Liberal omnibus budget be thrown out on a point of order. He argued that the bill should have been broken up and its parts submitted to the relevant committees. He worried the budget was “so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.” He was right — and that bill was just 20 pages long.

That we now think of a railroaded 100-page omnibus budget as a step in the right direction is an indication of how far afield we’ve been taken. We ought to drastically change course, if only so we can know where we’re going.

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