'Quality of time,' N.S. premier says of long days, short House session
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Claudia Chender, the New Democratic MLA for Dartmouth South, said there is always procedural wrangling in any contentious House sitting, “but what I saw from where I sit in the chamber was the premier yelling at the clerks and at the chair (of the committee of the whole) and the chair and the two clerks trying to do their job and manage the House as best they could.”
Chender said the government wanted to “ram through a controversial piece of legislation late at night.”
The premier denied losing his temper.
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Chender said she witnessed “a government that wants to debate the Financial Measures Act at 10 o’clock at night and pass the budget when people are sleeping, which is something that they (PCs), along with us, railed against for the past several years.”
Chender said Nova Scotia MLAs spent the fewest number of days in the legislature compared with other jurisdictions across Canada over the past several years.
“People want to know what’s going on in here, this is the people’s House, we come here as representatives of our constituents and the people deserve to have a voice and a window into what’s happening here,” she said.
“This session has been structured in such a way to make that very difficult.”
Chender said the push to end the session quickly is “political expediency,” and it calls for a sitting calendar that is common in other legislatures that would make the way in which business is conducted in the House less subject to partisanship with respect to timing.
“We’re being told by the premier that by sitting until midnight, he’s giving us time to speak,” Chender said. “With all due respect, we could have that time when people are awake and paying attention and we could have the time to in fact understand, digest, communicate, criticize maybe, the bills that are presented to us.”
That lack of productive time is a common theme in the law amendments committee, too, she said.
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Chender said the expectation for the health plan was to see it in time to discuss it in the legislature.
"That one has already been dashed," she said. "I certainly hope that we will see something that addresses the tens of thousands of Nova Scotians who don’t have access to primary care, the tens of thousands of Nova Scotians who are waiting for surgeries and the huge, huge health-care issues that are getting worse and worse in our province.
“I would have liked to see a plan for transparency, the reinstatement of a (health authority) board but the premier seems to have dashed our hope on that as well.”
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