At the request of the prime minister, the Governor General has prorogued the 44th session of Parliament. The country has been thrown into limbo at an extraordinarily inopportune time—but there is a silver lining!
Prorogation means that all government bills and other items of business in progress effectively die on the order paper. Here are six ill-considered legislative proposals that are on ice while Parliament is prorogued:
1. The capital gains tax increase
The Trudeau government proposed raising the capital gains inclusion rate proposal in June 2024 from 50 percent to a stunning 66.6 percent. The proposal never made it past the notice of ways and means motions stage, meaning the corresponding legislation was never introduced or debated. It is actually ordinary practice in Canadian tax law for new proposals to take effect immediately, even before confirmed in the House of Commons. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) recently said it would continue to apply the proposed increases even if an election is called, but also issued guidance to tax advisors that it would not actively enforce it. Given the Conservative government’s stated opposition to the tax hike, it’s likely the capital gains proposals will never be passed, a huge relief for small business owners who are trying to sell their businesses to retire.
2. An act to amend the Bank of Canada Act
Senator Diane Bellemare of Quebec has proposed Bill S-275, which aims to reform the Bank of Canada’s governance structure and mandate, proposing a nine-member Permanent Committee on Monetary Policy, including six external members. It sets dual objectives for monetary policy: price stability and “full employment.” It would expand the Bank’s mandate to include financial stability and “sustainable and equitable prosperity.” The addition of “sustainable and equitable prosperity” to the mandate is vague and broad enough that it could justify almost any intervention in the economy, inviting mission creep. And expanding the Bank’s mandate to ensure “full employment” suggests—disturbingly—that the central bank should actively manipulate the economy to achieve employment goals, rather than letting the market determine optimal employment levels.
3. Universal Basic Income
Senator Kim Pate has two zany proposals. First, Senator Pate has introduced Bill S-233, which requires the minister of finance to develop a national framework for implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) program for all Canadian residents over 17. While the most compelling rationale for UBI is that it is a more voluntary and decentralized way of ensuring basic needs are met, Pate specifies that in her vision, “the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income program does not result in a decrease in services or benefits.” That would mean essentially doubling taxation and entitlements while proposing extensive administrative bloat in the form of stakeholder consultations and oversight. This is also likely an unconstitutional violation of the division of powers.
Chairs and desks sit empty in the Chamber of the House of Commons, in Ottawa, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press.
4. Reforms for incarcerated individuals
Senator Pate has also proposed Bill S-230, which proposes certain reforms for incarcerated individuals. It mandates mental health assessments for prisoners and transfers to hospitals or psychiatric facilities if necessary. It would mandate that any inmate’s request to a healing lodge be approved unless a court decides that a transfer would “not to be in the interests of justice.” The mandate for mental health assessments and hospital transfers will strain already limited resources in corrections and health-care systems. About this bill, Senator Claude Carignan remarked, aptly, that, “I’m convinced that Bill S-230 will cause many serious problems and is unworkable in practice.”
5. Expansions to Canada’s MAID regime
Senator Pamela Wallin has proposed a bill that would expand the availability of MAID in two ways. Bill S-248 proposes first to allow individuals whose death is not “reasonably foreseeable” to make advance arrangements for MAID on a specified future date, even if they lose decision-making capacity before that date. Second, it would allow individuals diagnosed with a serious and incurable condition to waive the requirement for final consent through a written declaration, which would remain valid for five years. By allowing advance consent, the bill removes the safeguard of requiring a person to confirm their wish to die at the time of death. This creates a dangerous situation for vulnerable individuals who may change their minds but lose the ability to communicate that fact.
6. The Online Harms Act
Finally, there is the Liberals’ legislative centrepiece for this session which proposed to regulate the internet and expand speech crimes: the Online Harms Act. By the end of last year, much of the roundly critiqued Bill C-63 already looked like it was dead— specifically, parts two and three, which proposed increasing criminal penalties for hate speech and creating a new crime for any “offence motivated by hatred.” But the Liberals were still posturing to push ahead with part one of the bill, which is perhaps even more insidious than parts two and three. Part one obliges social media platforms to “implement measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that users of the service will be exposed to harmful content.” Harmful content includes “content that foments hatred,” a vague standard sure to lead to blocking of protected content. In light of the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that Meta would no longer use independent fact-checkers to police content on its platforms, this proposal seems wildly out of step with the current zeitgeist.
It’s not over yet
There is an important caveat to consider: none of these bills can be confirmed dead for good yet. Once Parliament resumes, the Liberals can bring a programming motion which, if supported by another party in the House, would bring all bills from the previous Parliamentary session back to the stages they were at. The Conservatives would be unlikely to support such a motion, but the NDP might.
Nonetheless, this government is clearly not long for this world, and hopefully, neither are these illiberal and poorly advised legal proposals.
Joanna Baron is Executive Director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a legal charity that protects constitutional freedoms in courts of law and public opinion. Previously, she was the founding National Director of the Runnymede Society and a criminal defence litigator in Toronto. She studied Classics at St John's College in…...
