Standby for the brown envelopes

#Cdnpoli - 

Greg Weston points out that Harper, instead of providing separate bills to alter or repeal several pieces of critical legislation has bundled them all together in a single bill which will prevent them from being properly vetted at committees appropriate to their content.

In short, the single catch-all bill slipped into the Commons last week includes at least a dozen major pieces of legislation that could have been — and should have been — introduced in Parliament, debated, reviewed by the appropriate committees and passed separately.

Instead, the government has intentionally created a confusing legislative hodge-podge designed to minimize debate.

This is now a Harper trademark. And it's misnamed in such a way that in the future he can point at the opposition and state that they voted against, jobs, growth and long -term prosperity.

Weston brings up something else however. How does a government give the boot to 20,000 public servants without some of them taking the information they had hidden in the back of the filing cabinet with them? It's called "insurance" and it ends up on some reporters desk.

History also suggests that thousands of public servants being showered in pink slips risks the government's being buried in a hail of brown envelopes, all those politically embarrassing secrets in bureaucrats' filing cabinets magically transferred to the desks of the national media.

Should make for good reading in any case.