A year or so ago I found myself across a chilly patio table from … let’s call him a graduate of the then recently-defeated Conservative government. He wasn’t even bothering to try to conceal his malevolent glee over the leisurely pace of the Liberals’ legislative agenda.

After rolling into power on an ambitious platform that featured all-caps signature promises to legalize recreational marijuana, rejig the federal electoral system and roll back controversial Conservative initiatives on everything from citizenship laws to financial disclosure requirements for labour unions and First Nations communities, the new government seemed curiously reluctant to actually convert those commitments into draft legislation.

Even when a Team Trudeau frontbencher did bring forward a bill, the government seemed even less enthusiastic about using the Liberals’ majority clout to force it through the various parliamentary stages on a specific timeline, preferring instead to let the debate come to an end without their interference.

Meanwhile, the prime minister appeared to be honouring his pre-election pledge to take a hands-off approach to the Senate — which meant that even those bills that managed to make it through the snakes-and-ladders in the Commons would come to an abrupt halt as soon as they made it over the threshold of the Red Chamber.

Trudeau’s only shot at getting even a few of his big-ticket items through Parliament during his first (and possibly only) term, my Conservative contact predicted, would be to bundle as many tangentially-related measures together as possible, as it’s far easier to plot out safe passage for one well-stuffed omnibus bill than for a flotilla of separate bills — particularly when it comes to the uncharted (and arguably unchartable) waters of an Upper House increasingly dominated by unpredictable independents.

Even then, he was skeptical that it could be done without occasionally resorting to time allocation to hustle it through the pipeline within a reasonable time frame.

At the time, both strategies were basically non-starters as far the Liberals were concerned – they had, after all, been actively campaigning against exactly those sorts of parliamentary “tricks” just a few months previously, and had even proposed bringing in new rules to prevent it or any future government from “using inappropriate omnibus bills to reduce scrutiny of legislative measures.”

With the unofficial halfway point between fixed election dates now in sight, most first-time majority governments likely would be starting to think seriously about hitting the reset button – requesting prorogation and cobbling together a Speech from the Throne. With the unofficial halfway point between fixed election dates now in sight, most first-time majority governments likely would be starting to think seriously about hitting the reset button – requesting prorogation and cobbling together a Speech from the Throne.

As for time allocation, a check of the record reveals that the government went 42 sitting days without putting forward a motion to shut down debate — which it finally did for the first time on April 20, 2016, in an effort to wrap up second reading debate on proposed changes to the regional operating requirements for Air Canada.

Since then, they definitely seem to have come around on its usefulness, as evidenced by the controversial proposal to change the House rules to make time allocation virtually automatic.

Meanwhile, the most recent Budget Implementation Act weighed in at over 300 pages and included at least a few measures that easily could have been turned into stand-alone items, which was sufficient for the opposition parties to decry it as an ‘omnibus’. For the most part, though, the Liberals haven’t really taken advantage of that particular time-saver – not, at least, as creatively as they might have (like slipping the pot legalization changes into the budget as a vaguely commerce-related add-on).

As a result, it appears my patio companion can cheerfully claim gloating rights.

While the Liberals have managed to keep the money flowing through supply bills and other fiscal measures, and did make it under the wire (only just) with a response to the Supreme Court ruling on physician-assisted dying, most of the substantive legislation brought forward in the 17 months that they’ve been in office is still cluttering up the Order Paper – some stalled in the Senate, but even more still way back at the starting line, awaiting second reading approval from the House.

With the unofficial halfway point between fixed election dates now in sight (depending on how you calculate such things, it will hit at some point this fall), most first-time majority governments likely would be starting to think seriously about hitting the reset button – requesting prorogation and cobbling together a Speech from the Throne to serve as a mission statement for the next two years.

In this scenario, however, there would be so many bits and pieces of unfinished legislative business left on the Order Paper that it might just draw more attention to Trudeau’s lack of progress on his 2015 to-do list.

Still, there might be one advantage to a parliamentary reboot: It could, in theory, allow the Liberals to do a post-prorogation review of the bills awaiting resurrection to see if there might be some way to roll them up into something … well, a little more omnibus. (While legislation can be reinstated in its original form at whatever stage it had reached at the time of dissolution, there’s no rule that says you can’t bring in a tweaked – or expanded – version as an entirely new bill.)

That would, of course, immediately give their political adversaries exactly the ammunition they’d need to call out the Liberals for utter hypocrisy, at least on the anti-omnibus front. At the same time, it might give the government the strategic advantage it needs to get at least a few of its most crowd-pleasing policies through Parliament before they have to hit the hustings in 2019.

It could even relieve at least some of the pressure that seems to be fuelling the sudden push to rewrite the Commons rules over the objections of the other parties – which, after all, risks doing far more lasting damage to Parliament than the occasional time allocation motion or omnibus bill.

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