No. 105, Financial Measures (2021) Act - Third Reading

Mr. Speaker, I rise to say a few words on the third reading of the Financial Measures (2021) Act. I will, in fact, be brief - I know there are other speakers to follow.

I want to revisit in particular the way in which we tried to adopt and change this bill in the recent days. The Financial Measures (2021) Bill enables the government to enact the budget. That budget has now passed. We have, in other places and in other ways, expressed our opinions on that budget and probably others will tonight.

I want to talk about this bill because when this bill was introduced, all eyes, all commentators came together on this procedural bill around a single provision, and that was Clause 8 of this budget. What that does is authorize or clarify - depending on who you are talking to - the Minister of Finance and Treasury Board to borrow beyond the appropriations in the budget as long as he tables a plan with the Governor in Council.

That immediately raised eyebrows. We raised this issue at second reading of the bill, and we were told that in fact this strengthened the financial oversight of government. Again, this is allowing government, or clarifying the government's power, to borrow whatever it wishes for a period beyond 365 days. So with respect to the notion of expanded oversight and the usefulness of this provision, we obviously disagree and therefore introduced an amendment.

Did our amendment call for every additional borrowing sum to be debated in a partisan fashion on the floor of the House? No, we introduced what I referred to as a friendly amendment. What that amendment would have done would have been to propel the government to file any such additional amount borrowed in this House, and all that does, Mr. Speaker, is make the amount of that borrowing transparent.

To us this was a very simple and uncontroversial change that we were asking for. There has been lots of conversation in recent years about government transparency and accountability and, in fact, Newfoundland and Labrador has a Transparency and Accountability Act. In that Act, their Finance Minister is required - just as we suggested here - to table additional borrowing amounts in the Legislature.

I gave a number of other examples last day, but I will say that at the federal level, when the Act was passed to authorize emergency borrowing power by the Finance Minister federally, he was required to report on the use of those powers every two weeks. I tabled numerous other documents that suggest but should by no means be required that back up this sort of common-sense approach that I believe we have taken here, but nonetheless the amendment failed.

In Law Amendments, we heard from Dr. Christine Saulnier of the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives, and she also appeared to speak against Clause 8, and what she said is that this clause sends the message that democracy is inconvenient. I think that that really sums it up, because in the past eight years, as has been referred to in tonight's debate and previously, we have seen this. We have seen the weakening of the Public Accounts Committee, one of the truly functional, I would say, committees that we have here in the Nova Scotia Legislature in terms of genuine oversight of all members of the House. We have seen a resistance to strengthening the office and order-making power of the Information and Privacy Commissioner in this province.

Of course, since COVID, we have all stood together. We have stood with the Premier, current and past, in deferring to Public Health and maintaining our public safety. Nonetheless, as that was happening, we saw legislative committees cease to function when schools and workplaces were open. We didn't have a Fall sitting of the Legislature, which I should mention is in fact contrary to the Rules of the House of Assembly, and it is our position that the sitting such as it was, the prorogation - I had better choose my words carefully - was a swift procedural step that was taken. Let us put it that way. I see the Speaker's microphone on, but I do not think he can catch me on that one.

Anyway, we did introduce a bill this session to get around that and to clarify what a sitting is - what it means to have your public representatives sit in this House and fulfill their legislative duty. Respectfully, witnessing, in protest I might add, the prorogation of this Legislature again at a time when children are in school, people in their workplaces, did not constitute that sitting. When we talk about the message that democracy is inconvenient, this is a signal that is been being sent for quite some time. I think this is one of the reasons that this particular little provision of this, what is generally essentially a pro forma bill, stood out. It stood out to policy-makers, it stood out to legislators, it stood out to those following the Nova Scotia Legislature and its legislative work.

With our amendment, what we were asking for was basic accountability and transparency. We will continue to push for a great deal more than basic, and I referenced another bill that we introduced, and there are several that are available to view, but the notion that such transparency would be an encumbrance is anathema to the way that we think about government in the New Democratic Party. We think it would be a commitment to responsible government.

The minister, in responding to one of the few back and forths we have had on this, has said - and also has said in the media - that Nova Scotians have the opportunity to participate in and pass judgement on government spending every four years. Certainly, at some point in the next year they will have the opportunity to do that again, and that may be true in terms of the direct ways that constituents can have their say on exactly how government money is spent. But we believe, I believe, that as legislators we deserve a different opportunity, so this change we suggested was one such opportunity. That's an opportunity for the government to show that they value accountability and transparency, that they value Nova Scotians, that they value our basic intelligence and ability to look at and understand financial documents, and that basically we have a right to know what the government is doing.

When I spoke last day in Committee of the Whole I used the analogy of a family. It was a bit off the cuff, but I'll use it again here. We've heard many times from this government and from other governments how it's like a family budget: we need to make sure we look at what's going in and what's going out and we need to balance our chequebook at the end of the day - for those of us who are old enough to have had chequebooks. I think that's probably most of us in this House, but not all of us. Sure, I'll take that analogy, as far as it goes, I guess.

My response to that is show us, don't tell us. It's true that up until recently I probably wouldn't be able to go out and get a loan without asking my husband, and conversely, my husband maybe would have put our major assets in his name only and would have gone out and leveraged that, whether or not I wanted him to.

That's not the case anymore, Mr. Speaker. In my family - in most households, I think - we don't make those massive decisions without at least a heads-up to those of us who are sharing the burden and who are directly implicated in the best interests of our household and how it functions.

Similarly, I would submit that we are all grownups here. We all have capacity. We're all trying to do this work. Certainly Executive Council and the Ministers of the Crown have a certain responsibility, but we all stand here representing our constituents, representing their desires and their wishes. I submit that we all stand here wanting the best for our province, so to be constantly curtailed and shut down when we try to understand and contribute to the ways in which we achieve that is frustrating.

Mr. Speaker, I'll close with a short quote. Albert Einstein once said something like, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.

With the unprecedented challenges facing us as a province, I hope this government and all of us really take this to heart and start thinking differently and working differently to achieve the same goals, ultimately, that I think we all have in mind. Thank you.