This budget bill is overstuffed

Conservative Senator Doug Finley sounds quite eager to fight an election over his party's omnibus budget bill. “I think there's more than enough issues here to run an election on, and I'm ready,” Mr. Finley, the Conservative's federal campaign director, told The Globe this week after the legislation suffered a setback in the Senate.

There is no shortage of issues at stake with the Harper government's overstuffed budget bill. But those issues – abuse of process, contempt for Parliament and unseemly political threats – hardly seem like the sort of platform one would want to take to the public for approval.

The bill in question is nearly 900 pages long. It's so big, in fact, that parliamentary expert Ned Franks observes it is nearly half the length of the sum total of all legislation passed last year.

This monumental size is due to the presence of many matters entirely unrelated to the budget. Among other things, the bill includes significant changes to environmental assessments, an end to Canada Post's monopoly in overseas mail delivery and the possible privatization of parts of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with these moves, all properly deserve attention as standalone bills. The proposal on Canada Post, for instance, was twice a separate bill that died ignominiously on the Order Paper. Now the government claims the entire package is a matter of confidence.
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