Senator Tannas: I don’t believe it is a confidence vote. We’ve seen budget implementation acts amended before. In fact, we’ve seen in this government’s time frame that they have been amended. The government didn’t fall.

That is one of the pressure tactics that is used, but if that’s the case, if we can’t touch the budget implementation act, then how could a government ever resist sticking something in there that no one can do anything about?

It goes to what those bright-eyed people in 2015 said about frustrating the work of Parliament and making it undemocratic. I think that it is intellectually dishonest to say that this piece, because it happens to be in a giant omnibus bill that is named the “Budget Implementation Act,” that our changing something in it would, in fact, cause a government to fall.

I would also say that we are at the end of the session, but we’re not at the end of the session. The government is still over with their colleagues in the House of Commons. They are still meeting today. They haven’t upped and gone home like sometimes when we get the budget implementation act and we have to deal with that issue. I would also say that they have voted and approved hybrid, so them coming back isn’t them coming back at all. They just have to get on their laptops at home to deal with whatever it is that we have sent.

I reject completely the idea that something that is not to do with the budget somehow becomes a confidence vote if you stick it in a budget implementation act. Thank you.

Senator McPhedran: As I understand it, Bill C-47 is, in effect, a confidence vote. It’s a budget bill. Could you please help me understand the nature of this amendment? What impact will this amendment, if we were to accept it, have on the ability of the government to function?

Senator Tannas: I’m glad you raised this. It’s a good one that goes to an episode of “The Crown.” The finance minister did not say one word about this in her speech. You’re right; it was in an annex to the budget. It was on page 254 of Annex No. 3 of the budget plan for 2023. It says:

. . . the government proposes to amend the Canada Elections Act to establish a uniform . . . approach in respect of federal political parties’ collection, use, and disclosure of personal information in a manner that overrides overlapping provincial legislation.

That’s what it said. There is not a peep about it in the budget speech, and here we have one paragraph of two sentences in the back.

Yes, the rules have been sufficiently torqued such that all you have to do is stick it somewhere in the volumes of budget documents, and it qualifies as a budget. If I were asking you the question, I would say, “Can you point me to any line item of spending at which this particular division applies?”

Senator Gignac: As you know, Senator Loffreda, I mentioned this week in the Senate that I will support the budget implementation bill. However, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable that the government is including things in the budget that have nothing to do with its economic or fiscal policy. Our colleague Senator Deacon talked a bit about that. I look forward to listening to all of the arguments.

My question is as follows. If ever this amendment is accepted, if the majority of senators vote in favour of this amendment and in favour of the bill, are we going to send everything back to the House of Commons? The House of Commons is free to reject the amendment and send it all back to us. That would bring us to Friday, rather than tomorrow, but either way, we do not have much time. It would be the same as other times that they had already come to an agreement.

However, we still need to send the message that the Senate is independent. The government should not be including anything and everything in the budget implementation bill. It should only be including things that are related to economic and fiscal policy. In this case, we are talking about Elections Canada. We are talking about the ground rules for a democratic country.

My question is the following: If we vote on this amendment, is it a confidence vote? I do not believe so, since there is no monetary aspect at play. We can vote in favour of the amendment and vote for the budget implementation bill at the same time. There would be no vote of confidence in this government. I would just like to understand. You are the sponsor of the bill and I need clarification on how we should conduct ourselves. Thank you.

Senator Batters: Thank you. I’m very sympathetic to your point of view on this. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of how this government, several years ago, used a budget implementation act was to plug a 200-plus-page carbon tax into a budget implementation act, with no ability to really debate it or amend it or anything like that in that sort of fashion.

I’m part of the Legal Committee, and we were discussing this Canada Elections Act change and found that it was not a great way to do it, to say the least. Is that what your amendment precisely purports to do — simply remove that part of it? It wasn’t specific in the actual amendment, so I wanted to give you a chance to explain.

Hon. Scott Tannas: Honourable senators, let me say, first of all, I’m speaking as a senator from Alberta and not in my capacity in any way as the leader of the Canadian Senators Group. I rise to speak to Bill C-47, known as the budget implementation act. I would suggest that it should probably be renamed the “budget implementation and a bunch of other stuff act,” but we’ll leave it where it is.

This is my eleventh year here and the eleventh June when I have seen a budget implementation act come through.

I want to make my comments today really around three things, first of all, the growing problem, as I see it, of omnibus legislation on a wide range of issues, unrelated to the actual implementation of a budget.

I want to highlight what I believe is one of the most egregious items that would stand as an example of the growing problem which we have in this bill that we are being asked to pass today.

Finally, I will propose a simple amendment that would provide a vehicle for us to improve this legislation, which I believe is our job, as always.

I’ll start with the budget implementation problem that I believe we have. Page 30 of the Liberal 2015 electoral platform states:

Stephen Harper has . . . used omnibus bills to prevent Parliament from properly reviewing and debating his proposals. We will change the House of Commons Standing Orders to bring an end to this undemocratic practice.

I believe it’s as true today as it was then that this is an undemocratic process, at its worst; at its best, I think it adds efficiency.

Nonetheless, that was a platform of fresh ideas and new ways of doing things. I believe it was brought forward with the best of intentions.

A few months after Parliament reconvened with a new government, the first budget implementation act under the Liberal government was proposed, and it ran to 179 pages, which was seven pages longer than the egregious last budget implementation act of the Harper government. We didn’t start out very well on the fresh and good idea of limiting omnibus budget bills. We now know that we are over 400 pages — for the last six or seven budget implementation acts that have been presented, we’ve reached up to 800 pages, in one case.

Colleagues, a budget implementation act, in its absolute purest form, should be a list of required legislative items that are tied to the spending and the revenue lines in a budget. Much of this budget implementation act does, in fact, do that. But budget implementation acts now — and going back many years — contain a litany of legislative items that are unrelated to the actual budget, but have been placed in the bill for convenience, efficiency or time sensitivity.

Sometimes — and I worry it is happening more frequently now — items are also stuffed into the budget implementation act for the purpose of avoiding proper scrutiny. I think that should concern us all.

My wife and I enjoyed the Netflix show called “The Crown.” I don’t know how many of you saw it; I recommend it if you haven’t. In the opening episode, a dying King George has the young mother and bride Elizabeth — the soon-to-be queen — in his study because he knows he’s dying, and he needs to start schooling her on the practical elements of being the monarch. In that episode, and in that particular scene, he’s there with the red box in his study. The red box has all of the papers that the king is supposed to read regarding what is happening in the government. He explains that to Elizabeth. He said, “Here is a very important thing to do.” He lifts up the box’s lid, takes all of the papers out and turns them upside down. He said, “What they don’t want me to see is on the bottom.”

That brings me to Division 39 of our budget implementation act. It is, in fact, on the bottom. It is on page 409, and it is the last division in the budget implementation act.

It deals with the privacy laws that apply to federal political parties. Essentially, up until 2018, federal political parties were exempt from privacy legislation. In 2018, the government passed legislation that required federal political parties to develop and adopt a formal privacy policy. They never said what had to be in it. They never said there had to be any consequences. They just had to have one — that is the legislation that exists today.

In 2018, when they included that tiny provision — that forced political parties to have a privacy policy — it was proclaimed by the minister as the first step in the protection of privacy for citizens.

Five years later, nothing has changed. As far as I can tell — in the research that my office and I did — there is not a single other organization in this country that is not subject to privacy laws except for federal political parties.

What did we get in this bill? It’s interesting — we got nothing. If you read it, we have a declaration that said that what exists is a uniform, exclusive and complete regime to protect citizens’ privacy in regard to political parties. That’s all it said. It didn’t provide for anything other than that — there were no details; there was nothing.

All we have at this moment are those words that mean exactly nothing.

Some would suggest — and I think Senator Loffreda mentioned this — that the declaration sets the stage for future legislation, just like the first step five years ago set the stage for future changes. In fact, Senator Loffreda, in his second-reading speech, said the following when talking about the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee that studied this particular provision:

In its report, the committee reminds us, “The amendment creates a framework for a potential future regime. It does not actually establish any such regime.”

He went on to say:

I appreciate some may feel the division is not robust enough and does not go far enough, fast enough. So I would urge the government to make this a priority and not delay any further.

I think that is a fair and optimistic view by a self-proclaimed optimist, and I’m a fan. It’s important to look for the best in people and look for the best of intentions; I believe that way of thinking is my reflex as well.

A more cynical view of this potential division would be that this declaration is meant to be a shield to protect the status quo — where political parties operate with impunity, while provincial privacy commissioners are being bombarded with complaints because there is nobody else to complain to. They are looking to take action. In fact, in one province, they have begun a court challenge.

As cynical as it might be, some are of the view — and it was mentioned at committee, but it might not have been on the record — that there is no intention to change. There is simply the intention to place the shield here that would prevent the provinces from acting on behalf of the citizens of their own province in the vacuum that exists right now regarding accountability.

So my amendment, which I will get to in a few minutes, builds on the work and the words of our committees and simply provides a timeline in which this “new regime” must be developed and brought forward. It gives two years, whereupon if nothing is done, then this shield — this fig leaf — drops away.

If optimists are right, two years is plenty of time to get the proper legislation in place. If the cynics are right, then this shield — the fig leaf — to protect the status quo and keep other regulators away would drop off and allow provincial regulators to again take up the case on behalf of their citizens who believe that they have been wronged by political parties and their data and their privacy. That’s it. It’s that simple for me.

This isn’t the only division in the budget implementation act that is troublesome. There was a host of items. We’re going to change a bunch of items in the Criminal Code. There are other items that need proper scrutiny and were put in this bill for reasons that were not always explained. In fact, I asked Minister Lametti a question about this bill, and he had an interesting comment. It was quick and off-the-cuff, but he said that he doesn’t always like what goes into a budget implementation act, and he believes sometimes that they should be full bills, but it’s not always his decision, so fair enough.

Before I read my amendment, let me just say a couple more things. I think we have a growing problem, and I think it is the Senate’s problem. Clearly, the evidence shows that we are suffering not just through financial inflation in Canada, but our budget implementation is also suffering from the same inflation — 172 pages in 2015 to 430 pages today. I believe if we don’t do something, someday we will see more situations where governments are using both good and undesirable purposes in their budget implementation acts.

So, someday — maybe it isn’t today — we’re going to have to do something about it. If this government serves its full term, and there is a deal, as we know, on confidence and support, we’ll have two more budget implementation acts, one in 2024 and again in June 2025. We should reflect between now and then and prepare to better manage these — to actually manage rather than react — rather than have I don’t know how many times by how many people in how many reports we’ve said that there were items in this bill that were inappropriate to be in this bill, yet we’re not going to do anything about it today. I’m going to propose something. I expect to lose spectacularly. That’s okay. We’re all going to get a chance to stand and begin our reflection on what we need to do here.

I believe for the utility and the sustainability of the Senate, this is an issue that we need to tackle. We need to communicate what we want to do appropriately with the House of Commons going forward, and we need to do this before the government changes. Imagine if we delay and all of a sudden we all get the religion when the government that didn’t appoint us is now in power and we decide we’re going to do something like this; we’ll look like a bunch of hypocrites. So let’s think about it between now and next year, and let’s figure out how we deal with this issue between us and the House of Commons.

Hon. Denise Batters: Senator Woo, I think I may have missed a little bit here getting the translation, but I believe the exchange you were having with Senator Dasko was about how this issue of removing the Canada Elections Act — or that it’s not an appropriate place to have this provision in a budget implementation act — and I believe there was some discussion to indicate that this hasn’t been discussed in the chamber prior to today.

I just wanted to bring to your attention, Senator Woo, in case you didn’t realize that, actually, is not correct. Senator Loffreda mentioned it in passing in his second reading speech about how the Legal Committee presented a report from our chair, Senator Cotter, which referenced this and Criminal Code amendments that were included in the budget implementation act. We made observations indicating it was not appropriate.

Then, after Senator Loffreda made that remark, I brought that to his attention to say specifically that these Criminal Code provisions and the Canada Elections Act should not be in here.

Do you recognize that perhaps you missed that because this has been a matter that we have raised in debate in this chamber?