Bill C-38 vote-a-thon: Canadian democracy at work

From an outsiders perspective, the Bill C-38 vote-a-thon currently taking place in the House of Commons probably looks extremely asinine.

There you have 300 plus members of Parliament reading books, playing on their iPads, tweeting on their blackberrys and even messing around with Play-Dough while their colleagues vote on hundreds of opposition amendments to the controversial omnibus budget bill.

Moreover, MPs are allocated scheduled pee breaks.

[Related: MPs prepare for marathon Bill C-38 session]

And here's the kicker: all the opposition parties can do is delay the bill's passage, not prevent it.

It's a foregone conclusion that all the opposition amendments will fail to pass because Stephen Harper leads a majority government. With a majority, a Canadian prime minister can essentially do anything he or she wants to do.

In fact, Ralph Heintzman, a professor at the University of Ottawa says that a Canadian prime minister is probably the most powerful executive in the world.

"There is nothing, once he has a majority in Parliament, to restrain him or her,"he told the Winnipeg Free Press in a recent interview.

[Related: Bill C-38: is it time for critics of the Bill move on?]

So what's the point of this marathon session?

Andrew Coyne of the National Post says that this is not about blocking a bill, it's about making point.

"To bloody the government's nose, to arouse public opinion and, it is hoped, deter the government from acting in a similarly high-handed fashion in future," he wrote.

"That strikes me as well worth trying. Obstructing Parliament, even for a day, is not ordinarily to be encouraged, and is rarely good politics. But when a government has abused its powers as regularly and as grotesquely as this one, it forfeits the benefit of the doubt."

So sadly, like it or lump it, this filibuster is one of the very few procedural tools at the oppositions' disposal.

To an outside observer it may look childish and pointless, but in Canada's parliamentary system, this is what 'democracy' looks like.

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