As the debate surrounding Bill C-6, An Act to provide for the resumption and continuation of postal services/ Loi prévoyant la reprise et le maintien des services postaux appears to be coming to an end (not holding my breath), the next question, of course, will be whether either the Conservatives or the Opposition members of the House of Commons, or both or neither, have been burned by this drawn out exercise in Canadian parliamentary process.
Midnight, Friday and only a few minutes until the vote is taken. At this point everyone will be scrambling to assemble their members and make sure that, from the Conservative side at least, they have enough members back in their seats in the House of Commons to ensure that they have sufficient members present at vote time to pass the motion. I haven’t been following the process closely enough to know whether this upcoming vote is on the Bill itself or simply a vote on the motion that the NDP leader, Layton, moved to start this whole debate process more than 24 hours ago. Given the nature of the event, I expect that the Opposition will be calling for a Recorded Vote on the matter.
Saturday 6PM – Missed about 18 hours of the debate that continued through another night and all day again. I just tuned in to CPAC to find that another clause by clause vote is now underway but I have no idea how much closer they might be getting to their holiday time. One of the MPs suggested earlier that this process was similar to the movie ‘Groundhog Day’. :-). Getting closer to the truth with each step, maybe! If one ever accounts for all of the overtime that will be paid to the support staff and the security folks, hopefully history will view this as an important point in historical terms with a meaningful outcome!!!
In keeping with my more normal non-controversial photo-blogging approach, here is a groundhog photo taken at the base of Parliament Hill almost exactly a year ago.
I have no idea how much longer this might continue.
