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.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.
Instead, the government has intentionally created a confusing legislative hodge-podge designed to minimize debate.
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.
Absolutely, and, having been canned, those folks no longer have the fear of being "Richard Colvin"ed by The Harper Government.
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope for a lot of seriously pissed off ex-bureaucrats.
ReplyDeleteOf course the government will first pass the new copyright laws, then assert copyright on any and all docs and use all those lovely new powers to raid everyone and go fishing all over for the evil infringers. Then put them all in the shiny new Corrections Corporation of America gulag.
ReplyDeleteI hope no brown envelopes get passed to the Globe and Mail. The Globe'll just burn them.
ReplyDeleteChances are they won't make it to the National Archives given the deep cuts to that institution.
ReplyDeleteI'd be happy if they made their way into the hands of Anonymous and Wikileaks.