This is by no means politics as usual

Changes to public accounts committee designed to keep taxpayers in the dark

Nova Scotia’s Liberals are systematically dismantling long-standing legislative checks on the power of the provincial government.

There’s even an air of smugness about it that suggests they’re confident Nova Scotians either don’t know or don’t care about the violence Stephen McNeil’s Liberals are doing to the democratic institutions of the provincial legislature.

One of those institutions – the public accounts committee – evolved significantly over the past four decades to become the opposition’s best opportunity to hold the government to account. Certainly, more truth emerged from the public accounts committee in recent years than from the government’s $16-million-a-year spin machine.

But those days are gone. The Liberals are turning back time, debasing democracy and ducking accountability.

Every move the Liberals make in the legislature’s public accounts and health committees seems designed to impede the opposition’s ability to get any nearer to the truth.

What’s happening in these committees should not be confused with politics as usual. This is not merely another partisan squabble between the governing Liberals and the opposition Tories or New Democrats.

Rather, it is an attack on the fundamental right of Nova Scotians to know what their government is doing.

The Liberals are eviscerating legislative committees in order to keep Nova Scotians in the dark.

There are only a couple of reasons why a provincial government might want to keep the truth from the people. The most obvious is that the government’s record simply can’t withstand the scrutiny.

The second, equally disturbing, reason is that the government is determined to control the information flow. Control of what information the people receive is generally job one for your average tin-pot dictator.

That’s not to say Nova Scotia is descending into a tin-pot dictatorship. For starters, where’s the tin pot? Plus, sometime in the next three years, the government will face the people in a fair election, something dictators avoid.

But, by gutting the legislature’s key committee, the Liberals are stacking the electoral deck in their own favour. They are limiting what Nova Scotians can know about how they are governed to what the government decides to tell them.

As for the five Liberals on the legislature’s public accounts committee – the members who vote on cue to enfeeble the committee – they are either blissfully ignorant of the opposition’s role in a parliamentary democracy, or utterly contemptuous of that role.

Ignorance is the better defence. The alternative – that they have some vague notion about the basic tenets of democracy and willingly trample them anyway – raises even more serious concerns about the nature of this crowd.

There’s no place in the Nova Scotia legislature for MLAs who actively work to diminish the rights of Nova Scotians. Yet, these five Grits are fully engaged in an effort to limit the right of Nova Scotians to know what their government is up to.

The five Liberals who have taken on that objectionable task are Gordon Wilson (ClareDigby); Ben Jessome (Hammonds Plains-Lucasville); Hugh MacKay (Chester-St. Margaret’s); Brendan Maguire (Halifax Atlantic); and Suzanne Lohnes-Croft (Lunenburg). They are either unwitting dupes of a paranoid government or good soldiers fighting for a bad cause – just following orders, no matter how disagreeable.

Nova Scotians who are appalled by events south of the border where a president openly attacks the democratic institutions that threaten him or stand in his way, need to recognize exactly the same thing is happening right now in their own province. The McNeil government is threatened politically by a public accounts committee that is allowed to function as it has for years and uncover some inconvenient truths.

This week, the Liberals drove another nail into the coffin of the committee. They’d already limited it to subjects covered by the auditor general and voted healthcare completely off the committee’s agenda forevermore.

Wednesday, the Liberals moved to limit the public accounts committee to just 12 meetings a year. The committee has held weekly meetings over much of the year for the better part of four decades.

Nova Scotia has just about the weakest economy in the country. The health-care system is strained to the point of breaking. The government seems intent on waging perpetual war against teachers and it refuses to tell taxpayers how much they’re paying to subsidize the Yarmouth ferry.

Maybe keeping Nova Scotians in the dark is the only hope this government has left.