Back To Square One

Kady on why the anti-drug-crime law (Bill C-15) and consumer safety law (C-6) are well and truly dead:

But because the House was prorogued before the messages could be officially received, the bills were still technically before the Senate, which has no mechanism, automatic or on demand, for reinstatement of government legislation from the previous Order Paper.

As a result, those bills will have to be reintroduced in the House -- or, if the government prefers, the Senate -- at first reading, and go through the whole process again."

...which is to say that, with these bills at least, there is no way to reintroduce them at the stage they had reached when Parliament was prorogued. On the other hand, had the Tories simply appointed their five Senators and returned to a non-prorogued parliament in January:

Although at that point the Senate could, in theory, simply re-amend the bill and throw it back to the Commons, setting off what could turn into infinite legislative loop, with those five (or thirteen) additional Conservative votes in the Red Chamber, both bills would have almost certainly have survived a second attempt at sober second tweaking, and could have been given Royal Assent within days.

So the Tory government could have got several of its key-note pieces of anti-crime legislation through the entire legislative process, and passed into law. They chose not too, thus disappointing some of the stakeholders involved and, most likely, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, whose been working on some of this stuff for months with little to show for it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Harper doesn't want to pass this legislation; he wants to campaign on it.