Climate change frames fall legislative session
Why is the Nova Scotia legislature sitting today? The obvious answer is that the House of Assembly Act says it has to.
More precisely, the Act requires that the legislature sit sometime during the first six months of every year, and again in the last four.
It can meet for weeks or for a day, but there’s no way to get around a spring and fall sitting, short of calling an election or amending the Act.
The start of this fall’s sitting precedes, by a day, gatherings that will take place in Nova Scotia and across the world to demand action on climate change, and NDP leader Gary Burrill says the climate crisis frames everything, including the work of Nova Scotia’s legislature.
Nova Scotia’s Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act (EGSPA) is more than 10 years old. While that law is almost exclusively responsibility for whatever progress has been made in Nova Scotia to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it effectively expires at the end of this calendar year.
The government is conducting consultations in advance of drafting a new sustainability act that should mandate an increased effort to reduce GHG emissions.
In fact, if Nova Scotia is to play its part in limiting global heating to the 1.5 degrees Celsius scientists say is necessary to escape the worst impacts, the province needs to reduce emissions to half of what they were in 1990, and it needs to get that done by 2030.
Despite the EGSPA, which was ground-breaking legislation when it was adopted in 2007, the province is a long way from that 2030 goal.
On Thursday, for example, more than half of the power in the province was coming from coal-fired generators.
The consultations on a new sustainability act aren’t over until Saturday, leaving some doubt as to whether the government will have a new bill ready for this fall.
If it doesn’t, Nova Scotia will be without a legal framework to address climate change at least until the spring.
One bill the government will certainly introduce this fall will amend the House of Assembly Act, not to alter when the legislature meets, but to change its makeup.
The Electoral Boundaries Commission recommended that the number of seats in the legislature increase from the current 51 to 55, to create four “exceptional” seats that ensure Acadian and African Nova Scotians are more effectively represented in the House.
But the commission itself was divided on its recommendations. A minority report recommended yet another seat be created — taking the legislature to 56 MLAs — to provide effective representation to the Acadian community in and around Cheticamp.
The bill will force MLAs to wrestle with the same competing principles that vexed the commission.
That is how to balance voter parity — the notion that every vote carries the same weight — with effective representation for minority communities.
When the legislature sits, governments generally have pretty much one objective. Get in, get done what must be done and get out.
That’s because the legislature is the one place where the opposition is on relatively equal footing with the government.
The official opposition Progressive Conservatives enter the fall sitting with four rookie MLAs who won byelections since the House last sat.
The Tories, under their new leader Tim Houston, have won every byelection since the McNeil Liberals were re-elected in 2017.
Health care tops the list of issues the PCs intend bring to the House, with a particular focus on access to primary care.
The NDP will talk plenty about health care, too, but Burrill also hopes to highlight what he sees as the government’s self-satisfied detachment from the stark reality faced by too many Nova Scotians.
The province has the lowest median income in the nation, is the only province where child poverty is actually increasing and the number of Nova Scotians who depend on food banks continues to increase.
But against that rather dismal backdrop, last week Finance Minister Karen Casey released the province’s quarterly financial statement, punctuated with self-congratulations for the government’s fiscal stewardship and the province’s growing economy.
Burrill says many, or most, of the province’s problems are “within our grasp” to resolve, but Stephen McNeil’s government, now in its six year, has become a managerial administration that has adopted a “defensive denial” of those problems, which renders it incapable of addressing them.
The government may be going into the House with a limited agenda, but the opposition parties have plenty that they want the government to answer for.
If the government is looking to place blame for finding itself suffering the political insult that comes in the legislature, it was the reform-minded government of Liberal Premier John Savage that, in 1993, amended the House of Assembly Act to force it to sit spring and fall.
And governments of all stripes have cursed that change ever since.
The province has the lowest median income in the nation, is the only province where child poverty is actually increasing and the number of Nova Scotians who depend on food banks continues to increase.