IN THE NEWS: Transport and energy committees’ travel tangle moves to the Senate floor
Holly Lake, iPolitics
Independent Sen. Tony Dean said when you spend hours sitting and waiting while bells ring, it’s beyond frustrating. What’s more frustrating for him and other relatively new senators, however, is that they expect there would be some effort to plan and organize their business in a more rational way.
“That’s the discussion we should have had last night,” Dean said. “It was a discussion that everyone wanted to have and was important, but it was delayed by the effort by some in this place to leverage or force decisions through other means.”
People on both sides of the aisle pointed to the successful organization around the cannabis bill last spring, which met its timelines despite the high level of controversy surrounding it. Dean who sponsored Bill C-45, said that happened because the course of the legislation was planned in a quiet nonconfrontational forum, where people looked at a calendar and figured out how to organize time and the process.
Although it took him two to three months to convince people to go that route and rationally plan things, he said it was worth it, as there were good debates, time wasn’t wasted, people knew what’s being debated when and they got their work done and done well.
“I don’t know when it’s going to dawn on people that we need to do more of that, rather than one-offs,” he said.
“There are a significant number of us who weren’t pleased with the antics last night. We’re still operating in a decades-old confrontational environment in which we argue about process and timing issues, which could be sorted out in a more business like way, frankly.”
Dean said making that shift will require leaders to put their heads together.
“There are significant benefits to taking a more business approach to how we plan our work. This is just another example to continue to argue for that instead of much more confrontational approaches.”
This excerpt is from an article in iPolitics, published on February 27, 2019 that Senator Dean was quoted in. Read the full article here.