Parliament grinds to an anticlimactic halt — but 2024 could be chaotic

One morning last week, Pierre Poilievre invited reporters to watch him deliver a speech to his caucus. With cameras rolling, the Conservative leader vowed to "block" the government's agenda until the Liberals agreed to his demand to roll back the federal carbon tax.

"You've ruined Christmas for Canadians, [so] common sense Conservatives are going to ruin your vacation as well," he said, addressing the prime minister directly. "You will have no rest until the tax is gone."

The Conservatives proceeded to force 136 votes on the government's spending estimates — a run of votes that kept the House of Commons sitting through the night Thursday and all the way into Friday evening.

But when the House met again on Monday, it was the Liberals who appeared exultant.

Whatever hardships the Conservatives imposed on the governing side (in addition to forcing round-the-clock voting, the Conservatives effectively wiped out Friday's schedule), they also gifted the government with a series of votes against specific line items.

On Monday, the Liberals were happy to list all of the things the Conservatives explicitly voted against: funding to construct new affordable housing, support for those affected by Hurricane Fiona, military assistance for Ukraine, money for the upkeep of the national historic site at the Plains of Abraham.

And the House has carried on more or less as usual in the meantime. The government passed legislation on housing and competition law on Monday, then advanced its modernization of Canada's free trade agreement with Ukraine on Tuesday.

There may be more procedural games to come — the Conservatives are proposing 173 amendments to a government bill that might be debated on Thursday. But it's not clear how the Conservatives would be able to keep the House sitting much (if at all) past the previously agreed-upon adjournment, scheduled for Friday afternoon.

In other words, the prime minister's vacation seems secure.

But even as Parliament's year grinds to what promises to be an anticlimactic end, it is fair to wonder whether the last few weeks portend a particularly tumultuous 2024.

Obstruction and delay are legitimate tools in the opposition's parliamentary toolbox — just as the government has ways of making things move faster. But both sides have to make tactical decisions about when, and how forcefully, those tools are deployed.

The modern federal standard for vote marathons was set when the opposition parties used dozens of amendments to force hours and hours of voting on a budget bill tabled by Stephen Harper's Conservative government in 2012. But in that case, the obstruction was directly connected to the thing that was being obstructed — opposition MPs objected to the omnibus nature of the bill and so decided to stage what amounted to a public protest.

In the case of the Conservatives' tactics last week, the connection was tenuous. While they claimed they were taking a stand against the carbon tax, the Conservatives forced dozens of votes on one of the bills through which the government obtains Parliament's consent to spend money.

And the Conservatives don't seem to have thought through the explicit implications of each vote. Which explains why, by Tuesday, they were left trying to argue that what they voted against was not what they voted against.