Resolution 15, Govt. Decisions: Reversal

CLAUDIA CHENDER: Speaker, I move that Resolution No. 15 do now be read.

We just heard a lot about making Nova Scotians' lives better, yet what . . . (interruption).

No, I can't look at the member for Halifax Atlantic because I am not permitted to do that. Instead of getting to work for Nova Scotians, though, what we've seen from the legislation and the rules that have come forward is a movement toward less accountability, less oversight, and in the Premier's own words during the election, less opposition.

That's what we're seeing, and that's what we want to discuss today because this is not what Nova Scotians expected. This is not what I expected. We've had a good chat today about some history: what it has been like in the Chamber and what has history been like.

I'll say for the record that I have passed legislation both with the consent of the governing Liberals and with the consent of the governing Tories. These things can happen in this House. I don't think one government, in my estimation - because I've been in opposition the whole time - is particularly better than the other on that scale.

This slate of legislation that is before us and that this resolution deals with is not what Nova Scotians went to the polls on. I sat here in Opposition, and as the member for Cumberland North said, heard my colleagues in the PC party support the idea of a legislative calendar, but I also heard them argue time and time again for increased transparency, for order-making powers for the Information and Privacy Commissioner, for information on health care. This was the PC brand - accountability - and I will say that in the first term of this government, they went to the polls and said: We're going to fix health care, that's what we're going to do. While we had lots of debates about whether they were doing that in the way that we would have done that or whether we thought that the approach that they were taking was right, the focus was on health care.

This time in the election the focus was clear and remains clear if you ask Nova Scotians what they care about: They care about affordability. They care about health care. They care about housing. Yet we have a slate of legislation and resolutions before this House with a singular goal, and that is to limit opposition, limit transparency, limit accountability, and ultimately to prohibit the voices of Nova Scotians who elected all of us to be heard properly in this House and outside of this House through the independent offices of the Legislature such as the Auditor General, such as the Freedom of Information and the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

I think this is something that we need to be really concerned about. I just want to take a moment and go through it because this is not democratic. What I will say is that this resolution is really about this kind of slate of lack of transparency that I just outlined, but certainly a part of that is Resolution No. 5, which the member for Halifax Atlantic so valiantly defended in his speech. Resolution No. 5 seeks to change the rules to limit debate and to limit the voice of the Opposition.

Guess what else would do that? The hours we had to abide by. Those were changed by the Liberal government, so the Liberal government in their first term also didn't love Opposition and were trying to do a lot of things that the public was upset about, and so what did they do? They stood up, and they made a resolution, and they said: You know how it says that we have sitting hours and that those sitting hours are Tuesday to Thursday from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. except for 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the hour of interruption, and then from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Friday? That's only unless we change our mind, and if we change our mind, then the sitting hours are whatever we want them to be.

If we wanted to take it down, if we wanted to be less over-the-top, if we wanted to be more responsible to the people who elected us - which is really what this debate is about - we would give them some certainty, and we would give the members some certainty, but instead of that, what we've seen is something that I would say is common to Conservative parties across the province and across the continent - the unilateral decision to move bans on uranium mining and fracking with no consultation; we're going to remove the ban so we consult. I think that was the language in the Throne Speech which - there's an English teacher in our caucus - is not rhetorically sound, I would say.

They're raising money to "bypass the media where necessary." That's terrifying to me. They're changing the access to information system or maybe not. We heard today from the Premier, and I look forward to details on that from the Premier or from the House Leaders, but as the legislation stands, the head of a department, institution, or municipality can veto requests instead of leaving it to the commissioner to do that, and this at a time when very strange changes are being made - very subtle changes - to our independent public service, people can be fired more easily. They can be fired without cause. They are being fired more easily. Those are the people who are supposed to decide if things are frivolous or vexatious, or maybe they're just supposed to decide whether they might be harmful to the government. It's really difficult to tell. If those people have to risk their jobs to make information public in the public interest, if they have to serve both the public interest and the political interest but the political interest pays the bills, I think that's going to be a tough choice for people.

This government is doing away with the emergency room accountability report. We're told that our apps are going to do that for us. Certainly, we have information through that reporting but it's not the same information. It's not a point in time. It's not year-over-year. It's not showing us whether things are getting better or worse. Again, this government's core commitment was to fix health care. That's what they were elected to do. Speaker, you would think they would want to track and broadcast how they're doing on that commitment. Instead, that commitment is disappearing.

We've already talked about - but it bears noting that this government appointed a Minister of Communications Nova Scotia whose job seems to have been to dismantle Communications Nova Scotia and then, quickly on the heels of that, let the supporters of the PC Party know that they were going to need some money to bypass the media. We're seeing that play out in other places. It's not in the public interest. It's not doing a service to people. It won't do a service to people here.

Last, as we'll be discussing tonight, they're restricting debate on important issues facing Nova Scotians. When we debate - because that's what we're doing - when we debate things like Resolution No. 5, we're not keeping people here. When we ring the bells on Resolution No. 5, we are giving the public and the media - that this government is trying to bypass, in their own words - time to tell the story. We're not debating Resolution No. 5 at four o'clock in the afternoon. We're not debating Resolution No. 5 at two o'clock in the afternoon. We are debating Resolution No. 5 at nine o'clock at night. That's when this government calls business.

Every government before this one, in the Estimates process, would call Estimates after business. We would sit, we would do Question Period, we would debate bills. The media would file their stories on those bills so people knew what we were talking about in the House, and then we would go through the Estimates process. This government got wise that it made it a lot harder for people to know what was going on, to turn that around. Now, in the last four years, every important piece of legislation that has come before this House has come after the hour of 6:00 p.m., 8:00 p.m. That is not something that Nova Scotians can easily understand.

Again, I have to ask: Why? We have heard so much about this vaunted majority. It's true, all the MLAs in this Chamber were duly elected by their constituents to represent them. I take them at their word when they say that is what they want to do. It's true. I will also say that none of the things that are before us right now allow them to do that. To the point of our being here and what's happening in terms of the accountability and the decisions that are being made, these are things that affect all Nova Scotians.

When we're in our constituencies, when we're in our offices, and someone comes to us and says, I don't know where I'm going to sleep tomorrow night, or I didn't get my cheque, or my immigration status is about to expire - whatever it is, we can help them with that, either ourselves or usually our staff - in my case my staff, because I'm often here or somewhere else - that is so great. That is such an important part of this job. It's such a meaningful part of this job.

But for every one person we're helping like that, there are a hundred other people, minimum, who are never going to come to the MLA office, who are never going to know that they can do that. Here is where we help those people. Here is where we change the laws and we change the policies so that those people can be helped, and we are not doing anything about any of that while we're in this House.

The people of this province have a right to know how their money is being spent and what is happening in here, and none of that is clear. It's not about partisan politics. Taking information away from Nova Scotians, imposing policies on them without consultation and debate, is wrong and it's undemocratic.

I'm going to close with an example. We've talked a lot about the changes that are going to be made to walk back the provisions that impact the Auditor General. Well, we haven't accomplished that yet in this House, Speaker, and here's why: because at some point this government and this Premier listened to the public and determined that they had to walk that back. They didn't reach out to the Opposition about that. They didn't let us know about the elaborate legal instrument that was required in order to do this on the floor of this House. They didn't even let us know it was happening. Instead, they stood up and they read a long script that wasn't available in paper form and that we had no notice of, so we were not able to respond to it.

Then we were asked yes or no, and we said no, because we wanted to see it. We wanted to have the basic decency of this government to understand the changes and to know if the changes were the right ones. The last time the House Leader had stood up and read a resolution - the last two times - one was to limit debate on Estimates and No. 2 . . .

THE SPEAKER « » : Order. Getting chatty.

The honourable Leader of the Official Opposition.

CLAUDIA CHENDER: The first time we had heard a resolution, it was to try to shut down the Estimates process in the Chamber, and the second was Resolution No. 5. So when the House Leader sprang a new resolution on us, we didn't know what it was, and so we voted against it. It hasn't come back yet. We have asked. We have said we're ready to support it. We've had the opportunity to read it. It hasn't been provided to us, but we've read Hansard and we've consulted - we've gotten legal advice and we've understood that the legal avenue by which they are attempting to amend the bill is valid, so we invite them to bring it back.