MPs will vote for up to 15 consecutive hours on Thursday and Friday on more than 200 Conservative amendments to the government’s Sustainable Jobs Bill.
The amendments are the remainder of around 20,000 changes proposed by the Conservatives to Bill C-50 in a Commons committee last fall.
Liberals now claim that the Conservatives used artificial intelligence to come up with the amendments to fudge government policy.
The Conservative Party denies the accusations.
Canada’s Sustainable Jobs Act, as it is known, provides government support to prepare energy workers for the new skills and job requirements associated with the global economic transition to clean technology. It outlines how you should help.
Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the bill would ensure government accountability and engagement with those most affected as the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
This requires a five-year action plan, regular reporting, and involving labor and Indigenous leaders in discussions.
The Liberals say their bill is not aimed at killing energy jobs, but rather sets out how to create more energy jobs in renewable energy. are doing.
Conservative commentator Shannon Stubbs calls it a blueprint for what she sees as the Liberal Party’s “massive and radical economic restructuring.”
She argues that prioritizing renewable energy at the expense of oil and gas will put thousands of energy workers out of work.
Committee meeting descends into chaos
The bill passed second reading in October, but Conservatives voted against it.
When it moved to the Natural Resources Committee for investigation in November, debate descended into chaos and a lengthy filibuster, at one point with lawmakers yelling at each other to shut up.
At the final meeting in early December, the noise was so loud that it was difficult to hear what was being proposed, and two councilors voted against the motion.
In that committee, the Conservatives proposed 19,600 amendments to the 18-page bill. That number dropped to 200 when the bill left committee and returned to the House.
Government House of Commons leader Stephen McKinnon said on Thursday that the amendments were “robo-fixes created by AI”.
The Liberals will revisit the bill for the first time since December, when they removed it from their order book to prevent another voting marathon days after the Conservatives forced a 30-hour vote on the government spending plan. He hasn’t shown any movement.
Mr McKinnon said the Conservatives were in a “time out” but it was time to move the bill forward.
”[Conservative Leader Pierre] Mr. Poièvre will now have to force lawmakers to come here and vote, as long as he adopts the hundreds of amendments that survived the robot-fixing process that they admitted was carried out by artificial intelligence, robot caucus members, and robot legislators. “It won’t happen,” he said. He said.
“This is not the way Canadians will make progress, this is not the way we will make progress on climate change, this is not the way we will provide economic opportunity for Canadian workers.”
Mr McKinnon said the amendments did not make “a single constructive suggestion” to the bill.
In late March, during a committee debate on an unrelated topic, Mr Stubbs denied that amendments to Bill C-50 were computer-generated.
“For the record, they are not generated by AI,” Stubbs said.
He said Thursday that the Liberals made a last-minute move to add the bill to the agenda to force a vote.
“In reality, a ‘just transition’ is a global, top-down, socialist agenda for centrally planning a forced economic transition not just from energy but from the sectors and businesses that support the entire Canadian economy. , such as energy, agriculture, construction, transportation, manufacturing, etc.,” she said.
Mr Wilkinson called Mr Stubbs’ accusations “incredibly ridiculous”.
Speaker Greg Fergus moved Thursday to break up the amendments into groups and vote on them all at the same time, so the vote won’t take as long as it used to.
He cited judgments from his predecessors to support his decision, including one made by Conservative MP Andrew Scheer when he was speaker in 2012. Mr Scheer is currently the Conservative Party leader in the House of Commons.
The number of individual votes is not 207 and is not expected to exceed 64. Still, each is about 15 minutes, so it could take more than 15 hours to complete all the votes.
The first vote took place Thursday just before 6 p.m.
During the 30-hour marathon in December, voting took place continuously throughout the night without a break. But a motion passed by the Liberal Party in February means that will not be possible this time.
To protect the health and safety of MPs, as well as Mr Hill and staff in the House of Commons, ministers at midnight can ask that voting be suspended until 9am the next day.
