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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 38

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 1, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 38 - Mar/1/22
Mr. Louis Plamondon
Madam Speaker, I appreciate your intervention. Only the specific conditions of the Canada Health Act are affected. The Speaker has ruled on many occasions that playing within these standards does not generate or reallocate an expenditure and therefore does not require a royal recommendation. In the 27 years since the start of the 35th Parliament, when bills began to be tracked in the LEGISinfo parliamentary module, no fewer than 31 private members' bills have proposed amendments to the Canada Health Act. All of them added new conditions. Some required the province to develop new services in order to receive the Canada health transfer. Others imposed requirements on how health services had to be delivered in order to receive the transfer. Others prohibited access to the Canada health transfer for provinces that provide certain free services, in this case abortion. I will let the members guess which party recommended that. The Chair did not require a royal recommendation for any of these bills, not one. Of course, not all of them were on the order of precedence, so the Chair did not have to rule on many of them. However, in some cases, the Chair did have to do so. Take Bill C-282, introduced during the 36th Parliament by the Liberal member for Ottawa—Vanier, the late Mauril Bélanger, a great defender of the rights of Franco-Ontarians. He introduced the bill in response to the crisis surrounding the Montfort Hospital, a francophone hospital in Ottawa that the Ontario government had tried to close. The bill introduced a new condition in the Canada Health Act to set new language requirements for French-language services in the provinces and English-language services in Quebec. If the province did not meet these conditions, the minister could cut the transfer. The bill was placed on the order of precedence without the Chair indicating that it required a royal recommendation. It was subsequently debated. If members consult the March 19, 2003, Hansard, they will see that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health spoke on behalf of the Crown in the debate. He never made any mention of a royal recommendation. On the contrary, he asked members to refer the bill to the Standing Committee on Official Languages before second reading because “The federal government cannot and must not act unilaterally in a shared provincial jurisdiction. Any decision to broaden the scope of the Canada Health Act requires extensive consultations with the provinces”. In short, he asked the House not to pass the bill, even while recognizing that it had the right to do so. I will give another example, that of Bill C-213, an act to enact the Canada pharmacare act, which was introduced by the member for New Westminster—Burnaby and voted on by the House at second reading on February 24, 2021. This bill basically creates a new transfer. According to clause 4 of this bill, “The purpose of this Act is to establish criteria and conditions that must be met before a cash contribution may be made in respect of public drug insurance plans.” After setting out the specific conditions, the bill indicates that the minister “may” make a transfer to the provinces to fund a provincial drug program. It is important to note that the bill does not set out a specific amount. I understand that it was specifically written that way so as to not generate any new spending and therefore not require royal recommendation. It worked. Even though the bill created a new transfer, even though it set out specific goals and conditions, it did not require royal recommendation because it did not generate any new spending. If we apply the same logic to Bill C-237, we can come to only one conclusion. This bill does not require a royal recommendation.
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