New Democrat MPs invoked an obscure parliamentary rule last week to extend by up to five hours debate on a bill that would impose market analysis on approval of new seed varities that contain genetically modified organisms.
With Conservatives and Liberals signalling they will oppose the proposal, it will die when it next comes before the House of Commons for debate and a vote.
But Alex Atamanenko, the British Columbia NDP MP who proposed bill C-474, saw the debate extension as some vindication because the House of Commons had refused several weeks ago to allow the Commons agriculture committee to extend hearings on his bill.
Now, the Commons will be forced into a long debate on the issue.
“We’ll be able to use the time to present the views of some of the folks who were scheduled to appear before committee but were denied their chance to speak,” Atamanenko said.
Based on a Dec. 1 NDP manoeuvre that caught the other parties by surprise, when the bill comes back for final debate and vote, debate will be allowed to go on for up to five hours.
Private member’s bill C-474 proposed by Atamanenko would require that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency consider possible export market impact before a new genetically modified variety is approved.
The Conservatives, supported by the biotechnology industry and some farm groups, have insisted that the legislation would inject politics into a seed approval system that is supposed to be science based.
New Democrats and their supporters argued that there are enough consumer and market questions about GMO technology to justify an economic market analysis before a new variety is approved. Several farm groups, including the National Farmers Union, supported that position.
“The government clearly believes that the biotech industry should be the only ones with any say over marketing decisions on GM seeds,” Atamanenko said. “Perhaps we should consider for a moment how we came to confer this enormous privilege on big biotech.”
Given the controversy surrounding GMO technology and the fact that many countries refuse to allow their import, it is common sense to include market analysis before any new variety is approved for the market, New Democrats argued.
The key to the future of the bill has been the Liberals in Parliament who voted to approve the bill in principle so it could go to committee for study.
When the vote on whether to approve another 30 days of committee hearing time, Liberals in the Commons voted for more hearings but so few MPs showed up for the vote, the Conservatives won the vote to shut the hearings down.
Last week, although the NDP managed to extend the debate, Liberals confirmed they will vote with Conservatives to kill the bill when a vote is called.
Agriculture critic Wayne Easter said the bill tries to make the government more accountable but does not spell out how the market impact analysis for proposed GMO varieties would be done or even who would do it.
“So I think there are major implications potentially on our science-based industry here, on the science-based approval process at the moment,” he told Parliament. “Therefore, we cannot support the bill.”
