In 2017, the House of Commons amended its Standing Orders to provide a definition of “omnibus bill”: an omnibus bill is a government bill that seeks to repeal, amend or enact more than one Act, yet it does not contain a common element that connects its various provisions, or it seeks to link unrelated matters. For the purposes of voting, the clauses of the bill can be combined thematically and these groups of clauses addressed separately as part of a single debate at each stage of the process. Although today the use of omnibus bills is well entrenched in Canadian parliamentary practice, it is often still seen as an exception to the usual legislative process. Nonetheless, few studies have attempted to answer recurring questions about these bills. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about omnibus bills.
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