‘They were emphatic in their foolishness’: Senate defers to House on Bloc supply management bill despite concerns
Despite their opposition to a bill banning supply management concessions in trade talks, some Senators say they couldn’t thwart the will of the elected House of Commons.
The Senate quickly passed Bill C-202, which was first introduced in the House of Commons by Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet (Beloeil-Chambly, Que.) on May 29. The bill passed the House through a unanimous consent motion on June 5, and later passed the Senate on division through a June 17 voice vote.
The bill bars increasing the tariff rate quota in a trade agreement for the supply-managed dairy, egg, and poultry sectors.
Independent Senator Yuen Pau Woo (British Columbia) said he didn’t want the Senate to collectively “armwrestle with the House” over the bill.
“They were emphatic in their foolishness,” he said. “I accept the complementary [role of the Senate] … we understand the importance of the elected Chamber.”
“The fact that this has gone through twice now was an indication that it would not have been a good use of our time to send it back with an amendment, or worse, to defeat it,” he said.
A replica of the bill was passed by the House in the previous Parliament, receiving cross party support at the time. The Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade subsequently completed a lengthy study of the bill and moved an amendment to have the law only apply to negotiations with countries that Canada didn’t currently have a trade agreement with. That bill ultimately died on the Senate Order Paper at report stage upon prorogation. The reintroduced version of C-202 does not include the amendment.
This time around, C-202 skipped the committee stage in the Senate.
Woo said despite Bill C-202’s passage, his view in opposition to the bill has not changed.
“I think the issue will come back to bite us, and there will be no crying over spilled milk,” said Woo, who sat on the Senate Foreign Affairs committee in the last Parliament.
He said the fact that a duplicate bill was passed by the House unanimously in this Parliament changed the dynamic of what the Red Chamber could do with it.
Woo said he personally would have welcomed more debate on Bill C-202 and greater reflection, though he didn’t think the outcome would change.
Conservative Senator Leo Housakos (Wellington, Que.), leader of the opposition in the Senate, said in a statement that due to the level of consensus from MPs in support of the bill, there was “broad agreement” among the Senate factions to “move the bill forward expeditiously.”
“The Senate’s decision to respect the unanimous will of the House reflects our role in supporting the democratic process, especially when legislation has already undergone significant scrutiny and consultation,” he said.
Housakos noted the fact of the bill passing on division, remarking that there “remains a diversity of perspectives on the issue.”
‘Sometimes you lose an argument’
Independent Senator Paula Simons (Alberta) told The Hill Times that the Senate made it “abundantly clear” to the government and the House what it thought about the bill.
“Reprising that debate wasn’t going to change anything,” she said. “Once the bill has unanimous consent, it becomes even more difficult for us to push back.”
Simons said that another committee study would have produced the same results as the previous one in the last Parliament.
She said there was a feeling that the government was putting pressure to have the bill pass quickly.
“What was telegraphed to us—pretty clearly—is that we were to pass this expeditiously,” she said.
She said that it’s a concern—and not just with Bill C-202—that the government wants the Senate to pass legislation rapidly, noting the cases of bills C-4 and C-5.
“Sometimes going faster is actually going slower,” Simons said. “If you’re going to have a Senate, you might as well get the benefit of what we do.”
But she said that with Bill C-202, she didn’t think sending it to committee would have accomplished anything new, given the past study of the mirroring bill.
“Sometimes you just lose an argument,” she said. “It is not the Senate’s role to defeat legislation just because we don’t like it.”
“The feeling in the Senate was not so much that we were giving in. It was [that] sometimes you have to know when you’ve lost a fight,” she said.
But she said the passage of Bill C-202 doesn’t mean the topic of supply management concessions in trade negotiations is over.
Access to the Canadian dairy market is almost assuredly going to be addressed by the United States during the upcoming review of Canada’s North American trade pact. And trade talks sputtered with the United Kingdom over Canada’s refusal to allow increased levels of British cheese into the Canadian market, something that will likely have to change if Canada wants to complete a comprehensive trade pact with London.
Senate role isn’t to oppose: Harder
Bill C-202 was stickhandled through the Senate by Progressive Senator Pierre Dalphond (De Lorimier, Que.), who helped pave the way for its quick passage.
Independent Senator Mary Coyle (Antigonish, N.S.), who sat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in the last Parliament, said “many voices were raised to utter the words on division” during the voice vote, but that Dalphond had requested an expedited passage of Bill C-202, and it was out of deference to the House that it was agreed to.
“Many members of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and other Senators had the same concerns we had had with [the previous version of the bill],” she said in an email. “Some of us saw the bill as a flawed piece of legislation, which ties the hands of our trade negotiators and goes against Canada’s commitment to the rules-based international trading system.”
The Bloc blamed Senators for stalling the previous version of the bill in the last Parliament.
Bloc MP Yves Perron (Berthier-Maskinongé, Que.) told The Hill Times that there was “no legitimacy” for the Senate to slow the passage of the bill because it was passed unanimously by the House.
“Everybody agreed on this bill and we want it to go through,” he said. “That’s what the Senators accepted. And they did the job very fast because they did all the job that was to do in the previous legislature.”
Perron said negotiations in the House on the bill were done mostly by the parliamentary leaders.
Progressive Senator Peter Harder (Ontario), a vocal opponent of the bill in the last Parliament, said he remains strongly opposed to it, but remarked that it is essential that the Senate not be put in opposition to the House.
Harder moved a fast-track motion to pass the bill, but ultimately that wasn’t successful.
“I thought further debate would only antagonize the stakeholders as well as our trade partners,” he said.
Echoing Simons, Harder said that the conversation about supply management in trade negotiations isn’t finished.
He highlighted the case of Canada-U.K. trade talks and noted that a trade pact is likely not achievable without some movement on supply management protections.
“If we are to achieve a trade settlement in various scenarios that involves some level of supply management, the government is going to have to explain itself,” he said.
Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance (CAFTA) president Greg Northey said the fact that the bill received unanimous consent in the House was a surprise.
CAFTA was one of the leading voices in opposition to efforts to ban supply management concessions in trade talks.
Northey said that with the previous version of the bill having some opposition in the House, there was more of a runway for the Senate to study and amend it.
“But because it received unanimous consent this time—just from a purely institutional aspect—there was not a lot of room for the Senate to do anything about it,” he said.
“If there’s no debate from the elected side, there’s a real reluctance in the Senate to push back on it in a more formal way, and so that’s essentially what happened,” Northey added. “It became a foregone conclusion.”
—with files from Eleanor Wand
nmoss@hilltimes.com
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