At over 400 pages in length, the Conservative government’s budget bill includes sweeping changes to a whole host of completely non-budgetary parts of government. The bill’s name seems to acknowledge the scope of what it addresses, as it is poetically called “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures.”
In particular, Bill C-38 seems to gut a whole bunch of environmental regulations and gives the government the power to override the decisions of its own independent oil and gas regulator, the National Energy Board. Throwing dozens of new laws and regulations into an “omnibus” bill used to be rare and Stephen Harper even threatened to bring down the Liberal government over it in 2006, but he has evidently learned to like them.
Also in the omnibus budget bill: your mom.
Andrew Coyne/National Post