Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 02

14 / Canadian Government Executive // March/April 2020 GOVERNMENT By Stuart Culbertson How Many Amendments? House of Commons Chamber. Photo: Library of Parliament/Martin Lipman When the Senate returned the government’s energy legislation (Bill C-69) to the House of Commons last spring, media attention focused on the unprecedented number of amendments proposed by the Upper House. The only problem: nobody quite agreed on the number. A ccording to the CBC, “The Senate passed an unprec- edented 188 amendments.” 1 For its part, The Hill Times reported there were “nearly 100 amendments from the Senate.” 2 Mean- while, the National Post stated that, “The Senate passed more than 229 amend- ments.” 3 They can’t all be right… or can they? The reality that takes many by surprise is that there is no one way to count amend- ments. Indeed, “amendment” is an ambig- uous term. In the parliamentary world, amendments are made by motion. A mo- tion in amendment in its simplest form is a parliamentarian advancing the proposi- tion “I move that Bill X be amended….” A single motion in amendment, however, might have multiple elements: that is, “I move that Bill X be amended by changing the title and by adding a preamble….” To that end, when speaking of “an amend- ment,” is one speaking about a motion or the individual elements of a motion? Even if one has clarity about whether “amendments” refers to the number of mo- tions moved or the number of individual elements in motions, the actual metric of “amendments” made to a bill is unlikely to yield useful information. To illustrate some of the challenges with counting amendments, let’s take a hypothetical bill establishing a tax credit for which group A is eligible. While being considered before a committee of Parlia- ment, suppose a parliamentarian moves to add group B and another parliamen- tarian moves to add group C – and both these amendments are adopted. If the legislation were to pass in this form, the list would read that groups A, B and C are eligible. While two separate amendments – corresponding to two motions – were moved, some may suggest that only one amendment was actually made because only one thing changed in the bill: the list of eligible groups. Imagine now that this same hypotheti- cal bill leaves committee with groups A, B, and C eligible, but group C is struck from the bill by an amendment at a later stage A Counting Conundrum: By Charlie Feldman