Liveblog: Omnibudget all-nighter at Finance committee

As promised/threatened -- and, I might add, predicted in yesterday's OotD -- the Finance committee is now officially in marathon mode.

Voting on the omnibudget bill started at midnight and continued until 6am, at which point the chair suspended the meeting until noon today.

The stats so far, courtesy of a helpful staffer: 519 recorded votes so far, 3,159 to go, which, at the current rate, means the omnibudget won't be reported back to the House until Friday at the earliest -- and even that may not avert an all-nighter in the Commons.

In what was almost certainly an attempt to avoid the scenario I laid out earlier this week, government members used their majority muscle to overturn a ruling by Conservative chair James Rajotte in order to ensure that all 3,000+ amendments tabled at committee would be defeated, rather than allowing him to follow his interpretation of the time allocation, which would have had him call only the remaining clauses, leaving hundreds of amendments in procedural limbo.

Rajotte was even prepared to give members the opportunity to withdraw amendments that hadn't yet come up during debate, but that, too, appeared to meet with the displeasure of the government side.

That move will almost certainly prompt the Liberals to request that the speaker restore the
original ruling -- which, for the record, he can do if he agrees that the chair was correct -- which could open the door to every one of those amendments being reintroduced in the House.

All of which is to say ... stay tuned to the liveblog for breaking news on the procedural battlefront.