TOP-PRIORITY BILLS IN QUESTION

Parliament Not Likely to Sit After Next Week

OTTAWA -- It appears likely Parliament will not sit after the end of
next week, dooming several of Prime Minister Jean Chretien's
top-priority bills, such as the legislation to regulate reproductive
technology.

Instead of closing the Commons this week and keeping the Senate open
until Christmas, the government is trying to push a few key bills
through the Red Chamber this week, threatening senators that they will
have to sit next week, normally a week off, if they delay two top items.

The government wants to ensure that the bill to create ethics
commissioners for the Commons and Senate and a bill to draw a new
electoral map are passed before the session ends, the government whip
in the Senate, Senator William Rompkey, said.

This also is expected to be Mr. Chretien's last week in the Commons: He
will try
to avoid the awkward political situation of sitting alongside Paul Martin after
Mr. Martin takes over the leadership of the Liberal Party.

The practical deadline passed last night for the government to give
notice it wants to adjourn the Commons before the Liberal leadership
convention.

That means Mr. Chretien must prorogue Parliament -- shutting both
houses -- if he wants to avoid a Commons sitting after Mr. Martin is
crowned the new Liberal leader.

Because the Commons is not scheduled to sit next week, Mr. Chretien
could wait until the end of next week before proroguing Parliament,
while Liberal senators force their chamber to sit next week.

The Prime Minister's Office is pushing the passage of the ethics
commissioner bill as part of Mr. Chretien's legacy, while the
electoral redistribution is seen as essential to allowing Mr. Martin
to call a spring election.

"Ethics and boundaries are the two highest" priorities, Mr. Rompkey
said. "There are maybe three or four that we'd like to get finished
this week, and then others if we can. But, you know, there's only so
much time."

Some MPs on both sides of the House insist that by convention the
leader of the majority party in the Commons must take the reins as
prime minister without delay.

But that leaves the Prime Minister, in the last week of a 40-year
career in the Commons, pushing senators to complete about half of the
priorities he set for his last sitting of Parliament.

While adjourning the Commons would allow the Senate to continue
sitting until Christmas, proroguing means neither house can reconvene
until the Governor-General reads a new Speech from the Throne.

If the government had wanted to force the adjournment of the Commons,
it would have had to give a 48-hour notice yesterday to allow enough
time to have a debate and vote this week.

Yesterday, government House Leader Don Boudria backed off his
insistence that the Commons continue sitting through December, and
instead took a veiled shot at the Senate for slow work.

"Exactly when it would end, I can't say for sure. We're making
reasonable progress on legislation -- at least on the House side," he
said.

The government has now admitted that the Senate will not have time to
pass some of the nine bills that Mr. Chretien declared as his
priorities at an August meeting of his caucus in North Bay.

Bill C-13, which would outlaw human cloning and regulate reproductive
technology, will die, as will bill C-17, a public-safety bill with
antiterror measures. Bill C-46, a bill to toughen sanctions for
stock-market fraud, could be in jeopardy.

Two of the nine bills -- legislation to decriminalize marijuana (C-38)
and revise family law (C-22) -- will not even reach the Senate.

A bill to create criminal sanctions for companies whose negligence
causes employee injuries, inspired by the 1992 Westray mine disaster
(C-45), has passed. And the government is expected to push through the
ethics commissioner bill (C-34), the electoral redistribution bill
(C-49), and probably a bill to reform the public service (C-25).

A move to prorogue Parliament would shorten the fall sitting of the
Commons by three weeks and shave four weeks off the Senate schedule.
It would make this year's 105 days of Commons the lightest calendar
since 2000, when the House sat only 89 days because the fall session
was interrupted by an election. The Commons is usually scheduled to
sit about 135 days, but generally chops about 10 days by leaving early
each session. It sat 121 days in 2002 and the 131 days in 2001.