Prorogation takes a toll on work of Parliamentarians
Liberal MP Raymonde Folco lost three private members’ bills
Published January 13, 2010
By Martin C. Barry • TLN

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament has given MPs more than just a vacation. A lot of work will now have to be started over and dozens of pieces of legislation, including private members’ bills, will have to be reintroduced after dying on the order paper in Ottawa. Raymonde Folco, the Liberal MP for Laval-les Îles, had three private bills queued for passage.

Was in the queue
The protocol for private members bills in the House of Commons is that they’re placed on a numbered list and they’re then chosen at random for consideration by the MPs. “I was coming up for probably the next batch,” Folco told the Laval News. “I was hoping that by next March or April mine would come up.” That all changed when the last session of the House came to an end with Harper’s decision.
The bill Folco considered most important was Bill C-295, an Act to amend the Canada Pension Plan with respect to a health problem known as episodic disability. According to a brief description of the bill produced as a draft before it was terminated, it would have amended the CPP to ensure that every person with a mental or physical disability, including ones that are episodic, would be considered disabled for the purposes of the act.

Episodic disability
As Folco explains, persons with an episodic disability have traditionally been treated in the eyes of Canada’s Employment Insurance system as though their condition did not exist. “They go on EI and then because they go back to work, the EI stops,” she says. “But then when the sickness occurs again, they lose their EI because it does not recognize the phenomenon of recurring sicknesses. My bill is a bill that would help EI to recognize that there are some illnesses that recur on a fairly frequent basis. People can go into the system who have this sickness and be able to withdraw from EI because they’ve paid into it.”
As Folco knows only too well, when there is a prorogation, everything dies. C-295 had risen close to the top. “It’s a personal disappointment to me and to the people who were hoping to see my bill come through,” she says. “On that bill, I did have a fairly good indication that quite a few members of Parliament from the other parties would support it.” As for the other work, Folco was serving as vice-chair of the Human Resources Committee, where, she said, “we had done some really important, really serious work” on poverty.

‘Killed’ past work
The committee work was supposed to culminate this spring in a formal published report. “What prorogation has done is it’s killed it,” she says. “In other words, the report no longer exists in any shape or form. We’re going to have to redo it. How much we can redo and where we can pick it up I have no idea. But what is very clear is that we will not be able to table this report in Feburary. All this hard work that we’ve done — all the parties, not just me, but also the government party — has just gone down the drain.”