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Originally Posted by FiftyBelow
The legitimacy of the contempt motion is laughable. The majority of the parliamentary committee that found the government in contempt was composed of OPPOSITION members. Its the same thing as asking a jury of mostly black people to determine the guilt of a white guy. There was inherent bias in the motions.
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You don't think that the government should be required to provide the cost of programs to parliament? How could parliament operate? The whole basis of parliamentary democracy is that the acting government cannot act without the support of the majority of the parliament. They shouldn't be free to do as they wish (unfortunately we have insanely strong party discipline in Canada, so majority governments can pretty much do what they want as long as it is constitutional).
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Its also laughable that opposition members are actings as if the Harper government was some kind of dictatorship and a villian of democracy. If anything previous governments have done worse. Heck the sponsorship scandal is still fresh in mind.
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It doesn't seem like he's a very big fan of our democratic system. The sponsorship scandal was definitely worse than anything done by the Harper government, but I wouldn't say it was an attack on democratic institutions so much as it was blatant stealing of tax-payer money.
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If anything, I think the opposition has set a bad precedent of using the motion of contempt on relatively miniscule issues and thus watering down its actual function in the future. There's a reason why the commonwealth hadn't used it before, and thats because there hasn't really been scandals of the magnitude that actually warrant its use. All the opposition has done was to turn the motion into a political tool to be used whenever an opportune moment for gain arises.
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They were found to be in contempt of parliament because they would not report the cost of purchases to the committee. It wasn't a new rule that the committee made up and it didn't spring the judgment on them. The government could have avoided that judgment by providing the information (or if they couldn't because they didn't have it, they shouldn't have gone forward with the purchase in the first place).