Opposition parties slammed the BC NDP for trying to use Standing Order 81 to expedite legislation that would end the consumer carbon tax.
Both the BC Conservatives and BC Greens questioned why the government waited so long to introduce the Carbon Tax Amendment Act, given the fact that the federal government made it clear weeks ago that its requirement would be dropped.
Bill 8 was introduced in the legislature on Monday by Government House Leader Mike Farnworth. He advocated for it to be expedited via Standing Order 81, which permits the government to advance a bill two or more stages in one day in "urgent or extraordinary occasions."
Farnworth explained that the bill "sets the legislated increase to zero dollars, and changes the consumer carbon tax to zero dollars," and also "amends the Income Tax Act to eliminate the Climate Action Tax Credit."
"This is an urgent matter because the government has created an urgency to it," BC Conservatives Finance Critic Peter Milobar responded, "not because they did not have the time to reasonably foresee what was going to be happening, nor the legislative tools to be able to react to that."
He noted that while Farnworth promised to let every member have their say, with 41 MLAs in the official opposition, it would take over 20 hours to go through the list.
"We'd be well past April 1 by the time this bill got to committee stage, let alone debate, ending on second reading," Milobar said. "What the government has failed to tell us yet again in an open and transparent way, is that they would be willing to bring in a guillotine motion later today to ensure that all debate was cut off in time for the lieutenant governor to get back here before midnight and make this law."
He pointed out that "the government had it within their powers to actually recall the legislature at any time over the past two weeks to actually deal with Bill 8, but here we are jammed up ... to try to deal with an extremely technical piece of legislation as it relates to charts and fees around carbon tax."
Milobar said he and his colleagues were not given a copy of the six-page bill in advance to "properly vet and read through and figure out exactly what is or is not gonna happen both on the consumer and industrial side of the carbon tax."
"Standing Order 81 is meant to be for those issues that are of extreme, urgent matters," he added, "not for government incompetence."
BC Greens leader Jeremy Valeriote was equally unimpressed with the compressed timeline, questioning why MLAs were given one day to scrap legislation that had been in action for 17 years.
"Why not take the time to bring forward a well thought out substitute for carbon price signals, revenue, and rebates?" he asked. "There's no requirement for [the bill] to proceed in this manner ... We do not support moving this bill under Standing Order 81 urgency."
Both Milobar and Valeriote called on the government to allow the bill to progress naturally, however Speaker Raj Chouhan ruled that Standing Order 81 was applicable, and granted the BC NDP's request.
Farnworth added that the legislature would be allowed to sit overnight to ensure all members have a chance to voice their opinions.