Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 02

March/April 2020 // Canadian Government Executive / 15 GOVERNMENT Senate of Canada Building. Columns line the side, typical of the Beaux-Arts style, which intends to convey wealth and excitement. Photo: Library of Parliament /Martin Lipman of the legislative process. The motion to remove group C is also an amendment, but does it count towards the total? While the bill now reads that groups A and B are eligible – which may look like one amend- ment has been made since the bill started – three separate motions in amendment brought the bill to its current form. Suppose now that a further amendment is made to revise terminology: for exam- ple, group B was phrased in terms of “Ab- original peoples” but legislators now be- lieve it should read “Indigenous peoples.” The bill, as amended, still only has two groups eligible (A and B) but four motions in amendment have passed. However, here there’s an additional twist: this vo- cabulary change is only necessary in Eng- lish and so the French version of the bill shows no change even though this addi- tional motion in amendment was passed. Practitioners, scholars, and pundits all have differing ideas about how amend- ment counting should occur. The truth is that there is no one universally accepted way, and they all can lead to confusion. In- deed, some scholars propose not attempt- ing to assess any number of amendments but instead to measure legislative change in other ways. One of the more creative contributions to the discussion is a 2019 work entitled “Mapping Mutations in Legislation: A Bioinformatics Approach,” 4 which examines how much text variation there is in a bill from one state to the next, drawing parallels to DNA code mutations. The fact that an amendment is made reveals nothing about the impact or the extent of its associative change. A single amendment to a bill can correct a small typo or attempt to insert an entirely new enactment within a bill. The single addi- tion of “not” in English or “ne pas” in French can change the entire way in which a pro- vision is to function. Indeed, depending on the procedure of the legislature, there may also be multiple ways to effectuate the same legislative change, which could lead to misleading amendment statistics. For example, if a bill creates a scheme where something is approved in three phases, each lasting 30 days, it could be that one amendment changes all refer- ences from “30 days” to “60 days” in the bill (this is possible, for example, in the Senate at Third Reading). Or, this same change could be accomplished through three in- dividual amendments, one for each phase. Amendments are not always as efficiently packaged as possible, and in some cases, it may be politically advantageous for legis- lators to divide their amendments. For ex- ample, parliamentarians of a caucus may seek to slow proceedings by forcing more votes, or they might simply divide amend- ments to involve more members in a par- ticular debate. A slight wrinkle can also come from how one considers clause deletions. In the case of a committee of the Senate or House of Commons defeating a clause of a bill, this is not accomplished through a vote on a proposed amendment; rather, the commit- tee does not agree to carry the clause, and the result is an amendment to the bill de- leting the clause. Yet, a motion in amend- ment to delete a clause is the proper way to accomplish this same modification at a later legislative stage in both the Senate and House. Accordingly, if one counts “mo- tions in amendment” one might not cap- ture committee deletions but could cap- ture deletions later in the process. Again though, the number of clauses deleted might not provide a reflection of anything: In Bill C-69 as received by the Senate,