Bill No. 180 – Fatality Investigations Act. - Third Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER: Mr. Speaker, we are also generally supportive of this bill.

 I think it's important that we begin to investigate these types of deaths for a number of reasons, many of which the minister has spoken of, but also in particular we are pleased to see that trend analysis will be conducted. Our caucus has often pushed for better data collection because we believe that that can lead to better approaches, particularly in these kinds of tragic situations.

 We know there are systemic aspects involved in these issues - deaths of children in care, and intimate partner violence - and we have to identify where those systemic failures are so we can take steps to address them. But there are many ways, Mr. Speaker, that this bill could be improved.

 We heard at Law Amendments committee and in the days following the introduction of this bill from organizations like East Coast Prison Justice, the Elizabeth Fry Society, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and others, that this bill is simply not good enough.

 Based on the feedback that we got and in the spirit of collaboration and offering constructive suggestions to our colleagues in government, we presented four amendments. I will briefly revisit those amendments for the benefit of the members of this House and anyone else interested.

 First, we introduced an amendment, which was suggested by the Acting Information and Privacy Commissioner, to remove the clause from this bill which exempts it from the protection of our information and privacy regime. The commissioner and our caucus saw no reason for this clause to be included. If there is a concern about the liability of people participating on these panels, our understanding is that if a professional is asked to participate in one of these review panels, they would be participating in a professional capacity and liability would attach to that professional capacity, just like it would in any other case. 

There are a number of other things that I could say. I think the main one is that, as I said, although we are pleased that there is a death review panel being established for children who die in the care of the Province, we in the NDP have been pushing for a long time for a child and youth advocate office, an independent child and youth advocate office. While this addresses some piece of that need, we will continue to push for that because it does not address the totality of that need. Again, I think some of our amendments could have addressed that, could have had more investigative powers, et cetera, but because they were all rejected we will continue to push for that.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, I just want to say that, again, on the topic of collaboration on this and many other bills, the NDP caucus literally works overtime - probably like triple overtime, if we were being technical about it - trying to come up with good clear non-partisan helpful amendments to add to the bills put forward by the government. We do so in not nearly enough time with not nearly enough resources. It's just disappointing that they are almost never considered. If they are considered, we don't hear about it. We don't hear about it on the floor, except one member who debated us yesterday - that was nice. We don't hear about it anywhere else. Occasionally, we will hear about it in the media.

I guess I will just end by saying that I hope, I really hope, that that changes. I think that this Chamber could be a really productive place, actually. There are not very many of us. There are not very many people in this whole province, really. We could come up with some really good solutions together, but we are not given the chance. The Opposition is not given the chance; we are not consulted, we are not brought into the conversation. In the tiny slivers, the tiny openings and opportunities we have, we throw everything at it. We do our very best, and we are constantly thwarted.

Back to the bill - we will be voting for the bill, but we wish that we could have been able to collaborate on it.