By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – The Conservatives managed to get an amendment on social media passed just before clause-by-clause voting starts.
Late Wednesday, the Conservatives moved an amendment that we wonder who really listened to, seeing as it was at the end of four hours of debate. It was still being debated when the meeting ended that night.
So, when it came to a vote on Thursday morning, at 11 a.m., and no one opposed it, the chair, MP Scott Simms, looked startled and said “Wow.”
Heritage Department staff seem to have indicated the amendment would not materially change anything, but it was still interesting to see the Liberals acquiesce for it.
The Conservative amendment read as such: “An online undertaking that provides a social media service is deemed not to exercise programming control over the content uploaded by any user of social media service who is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate or the agent or mandatory of them.”
Then, the normality of the work of the committee returned with Conservative members seemingly speaking too long and in the end no other debated amendment was adopted. The morning meeting ended and when the second meeting, scheduled at 3:30, there remained just 54 minutes in the five hours allotted in the time allocation motion, voted by the House of Commons, on Monday.
So, after this time the chair called for a health break and came back and explained the rules: The amendments would be called for a vote one after the other, by calling them by the party affiliation of the mover and the number of the amendment in the sequence of the Bill (an amendment to modify Section 5 would have a lower number than one to modify Section 6).
No debate is to be held and the amendments themselves were not to be read out loud, much to the frustration of outside observers. Amendments are considered confidential until they are moved and reading them would be akin to engaging into a debate, so we don’t actually know what the committee is deciding – until Bill C-10 comes to third reading and debate in the House of Commons.
The committee meeting then went on smoothly, with recorded votes being called on each amendment – a dozen or so in the 20 minutes until the end of allotted time.
The committee will meet Friday, and we can expect by the end of the meeting, Bill C-10 will be out of committee and onto the House. The Committee’s legislative staff first must integrate all those amendments in the revised version of the bill and the House of Commons should receive the package on Monday or Tuesday if all goes well.
Then, we move onto another realm. The House voted this morning for longer sitting hours: on Mondays and Wednesdays until midnight, and on Fridays until 4:30 p.m.
The time allocation motion was only valid for the committee, and we can either see stalling in the House by the Conservatives or another time allocation for the next two phases in the House.
