Despite its current appearance, the main committee website has not, in fact, been hijacked by a fringe group of malicious political geek hackers looking to unleash parliamentary chaos by cancelling scheduled meetings with wild abandon. (Although come to think of it, that would actually be pretty cool.)
Despite its current appearance, the main committee website has not, in fact, been hijacked by a fringe group of malicious political geek hackers looking to unleash parliamentary chaos by cancelling scheduled meetings with wild abandon. (Although come to think of it, that would actually be pretty cool.)
No, this particular drive-the-whips’-offices-crazy bit of housekeeping business is required under the Standing Orders, which state that a report on committee membership must be tabled in the House within ten days of the first Monday after Labour Day — even if nothing has changed since the previous session.
That, of course, means that the committees have to be re-struck, chairs and vice-chairs re-elected, and all those routine motions that the Conservatives tried to tweak last time around to give their members more time at the mic re-passed. All that gets underway on Wednesday afternoon, which means that we likely won’t see any meetings on, say, taxpayer-funded partisan advertising, or H1N1 preparation, or anything else that could give the opposition parties a stage for political theatre until next week at the earliest, and makes last June’s decision by Team Ignatieff to agree to a week-long get-out-0f-Ottawa-free card for the government look even more shortsighted.
Oh well, at least now we’ll have more time to speculate wildly over whether the Coderre Affair has irreparably damaged his leadership, or just left him fumbling pathetically in the dark, his ultimate fate still to be determined. So there’s that, at least.