A selection of key dates and events from latest session of Parliament
Posted June 19, 2014 2:22 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
OTTAWA – Some key dates and events from the last session of Parliament:
Oct. 18, 2013: Canada signs agreement in principle on trade deal with European Union.
Nov. 5, 2013: Former Conservatives Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau are suspended from the Senate.
Dec. 20, 2013: The Supreme Court of Canada overturns most of the country’s prostitution laws, giving the government a year to replace them.
Jan. 20: Prime Minister Stephen Harper becomes the first Canadian prime minister to speak before the Israeli Knesset.
Feb. 4: Suspended senator Patrick Brazeau and retired Liberal senator Mac Harb are charged with fraud and breach of trust in relation to their travel and living expense claims.
Feb. 4: The Fair Elections Act is introduced, leading to opposition charges that the Conservative government is trying to muzzle election officials and make it harder for people to vote.
Feb. 6: The government introduces changes to the Citizenship Act, which could make it easier to strip citizenship from people guilty of terrorism or treason.
March 12: New Democrat MP Olivia Chow resigns to run for mayor of Toronto.
March 18: Jim Flaherty, to date the only finance minister the Harper government has known, resigns from cabinet.
March 21: The Supreme Court of Canada rules that Justice Marc Nadon, a semi-retired Federal Court of Appeal judge, is ineligible to sit on the Supreme Court as one of three designated jurists from Quebec.
April 10: Flaherty dies suddenly at his Ottawa home.
April 21: Herb Gray, longtime MP and Liberal cabinet minister, dies at 82.
April 25: The Supreme Court rules that Conservative proposals to impose term limits on senators and create a “consultative election” process to choose nominees cannot be done by the federal government alone.
May 2: Shawn Atleo unexpectedly resigns as head of the Assembly of First Nations, leaving the federal government’s proposed changes to First Nations education in limbo.
May 7: Trudeau says Liberal candidates must support abortion rights.
May 15: NDP Leader Tom Mulcair appears before a Commons committee to defend his party’s use of parliamentary resources to pay for the party’s satellite offices outside of Ottawa, which included staff paid for by taxpayers.
June 6: Justice Minister Peter MacKay introduces a new prostitution law which makes it a crime to buy sexual services,but not to sell them. The law would also make it illegal to advertise sex for sale.
June 11: The board of internal economy, the secretive body which holds the House of Commons purse strings, says the NDP owes more than $1 million for a series of mailouts. The board earlier found that the mailings were political and violated Commons rules.
