Finance bill back to House despite concerns

The Liberal government of Nova Scotia considers democracy an inconvenience, a law amendments committee meeting was told Thursday.

“I want to speak to the change that will actually provide the government with the ability to borrow money any time without having to first bring the matter before the Nova Scotia legislature,” Christine Saulnier, Nova Scotia director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said in the legislature's law amendments committee meeting.

“That is to borrow more than what has been approved in the budget.”

Saulnier said the government's reasoning for adding that measure to the Financial Measures bill is expediency but she isn't buying it.

“The message that is being sent right now is really one that democracy is inconvenient,” Saulnier said. “This is a very dangerous message to be sending, especially from a government that is not really known for its transparency,” Saulnier said. “The suggestion that an election every four years or so is enough accountability is frankly absurd. Why sit in the legislative assembly ever? Given that our MLAS had not been at Province House for more than 15 minutes in a year, during which we had a pandemic, what other conclusions should be drawn from a move that will give executive council (premier and cabinet) even more power.”

Saulnier said voting is only part of the democratic process.

“Given how many people feel disenfranchised by the first-past-the-post system, we know that this is not the only way to hold the government to account,” Saulnier said. “It's critical that the government is responsible for its decisions between elections. The very heart of any democracy is how easy it is to hold the government to account.

Saulnier said the Liberal government has unfortunately “eroded other ways by which local communities hold government to its decisions” between elections by getting rid of school boards, centralizing health services decisions and imposing restrictions to the public accounts committee so that it only deals with topics that stem directly from auditor generals' reports.

Saulnier's reservations about the bill piggybacked on concerns raised Wednesday during House debate by Claudia Chender, the New Democratic MLA for Dartmouth South and a member of the law amendments committee.

Chender, too, took issue with the clause in the bill that would increase the capacity for the government to borrow money without having to bring the matter before the entire House.

“It is emblematic of the pattern we've seen over the past eight years of increasing disregard for our democratic systems and oversight, concentration of power, including crucial borrowing and spending power in executive council,” Chender said.

Chender said the NDP does not seek to constrain the authority of government to spend in the face of an emergency, like a pandemic.

“There may be occasions when government must act quickly to respond to emergencies and when financial resources will be required in that action, but this enumerated borrowing power is not restricted to emergency situations,” Chender said. "In fact, there are no conditions at all that would constrain the government in their ability to borrow astronomical amounts of money without anyone in this chamber ever knowing about it.”

Chender said MLAS are elected to represent constituents and to hold the government accountable.

“Our tools for this task are debate and questioning,” Chender said. “A government that is not publicly willing to argue or even disclose their case and answer those questions is a government we might want to be wary of.”

Finance Minister Labi Kousoulis, who introduced the bill at second reading Wednesday, said that Chender's comments “make it sound like we are doing something nefarious as a government," adding that there is nothing new in the bill's clarification of past governments' practices.

“Since 1997, there has never been a single year in the history of the government of Nova Scotia that any government, Progressive Conservative, Liberal, or NDP, has not had additional appropriations,” Kousoulis said. “They never went into the legislature once, not once because this authority already exists.”

Kousoulis said the insinuation is “that on every single decision that changes the budget up or down by a dollar, we should be walking to the legislature.”

The minister said that would bog the government down in so much red tape that nothing would ever get done.

The majority Liberal membership on the law amendments committee on Thursday sent the bill back to the House unamended for third reading.