Opposition members of the Nova Scotia legislature railed against the inadequacies of the province’s signature climate change legislation, right up until they voted for it.
The Sustainable Development Goals Act (SDGA) passed the legislature with unanimous, all-party support, just minutes after Tory leader Tim Houston called it a “sham” and NDP leader Gary Burrill said it was “profoundly disappointing.”
In the end, however, both parties voted for the bill. The NDP concluded it’s better than nothing while the Tories didn’t want to be portrayed as opposing climate change legislation, even in the form of the flawed SDGA.
The bill does contain the most aggressive greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction target in the country – a 53 per cent reduction from 2005 levels to be achieved by 2030 – but beyond that it leaves it up to the government to decide what other environmental and climate change action to take.
A new climate change strategy for the province will be developed over the next year, following public consultations, and then the cabinet will make regulations to put that strategy into action.
The SDGA is said to be the successor to the 2007 Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act (EGSPA). EGSPA is almost exclusively responsible for whatever progress has been made in Nova Scotia over the past decade to protect the environment and fight global heating.
But where EGSPA clearly articulated 25 defined environmental goals in the law itself, the SDGA offers just three goals and of those only the 2030 target is meaningful.
The bill itself, along with the unseemly haste with which the government forced it through the legislative process, illustrates the diminished role of the Nova Scotia legislature in law-making and the increasingly autocratic nature of the provincial government.
Where just a dozen years ago, legislators debated and passed the comprehensive environmental goals and provisions contained in the EGSPA, during this fall’s session of the legislature, MLAs had just six days to wrestle with a bill that vests almost total authority to combat climate change with the provincial cabinet.
And it was clear, as the bill moved inexorably along the law-making assembly line that the legislature has become, that the bill the government introduced was going to be the same bill the government ultimately passed.
Government MLAs listened politely to 85 individual Nova Scotians and groups who made presentations to the Law Amendments Committee, many of them offering amendments or suggestions to strengthen the bill, none of which were entertained by the government.
NDP House leader Claudia Chender picked up the cause of the “students, experts and grandmothers” who appeared before Law Amendments, and the NDP produced a raft of similar amendments that they took to the House. Each of those were summarily rejected by the government majority.
With a few exceptions, government MLAs did even not participate in debate on the bill. Their task was clearly to be there to vote – to vote down proposed amendments from the opposition without regard for their merit, and to vote for passage of the bill, unaltered.
It may be politically incorrect to point this out – who knows anymore? – but the most compelling and heart-wrenching contributions during the debate in the legislature came from the young mothers in the NDP caucus. They spoke less from the perspective of a legislator addressing a proposed law, and more as a mother urging action to ensure her kids inherit an inhabitable planet.
Dartmouth North New Democrat Susan Leblanc was “disillusioned and disappointed” by the utter disdain government members showed for the amendments from the opposition and from presenters at Law Amendments.
Lisa Robert (NDP-Halifax Needham) noted that the fall session of the legislature opened with an emergency debate on the climate crisis, but the government’s action, as expressed through the SDGA, falls far short of its rhetoric during that debate.
But then, when the bill came to a final vote, all members voted for it to pass. Why, after days of pointing out its flaws, would the opposition support the bill? Because they, and the people they represent, need hope.
In the end, they placed their hope in the current provincial government and its successors to do the right thing for the province’s environment and meet Nova Scotia’s obligations to fight climate change. Because, in the Nova Scotia legislature this fall, that was the only climate change hope on offer.
