Bill No. 215 - Invest Nova Scotia Board Act - 3rd Reading
CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Mr. Speaker, I just want to rise and speak briefly to what I will call this suite of bills but speaking to this bill. We just had a bill, and we have another one coming - they're all the same. They represent a new approach to economic development, but it's not new. It's an old approach. It's an outdated approach. It's an approach that has been largely discredited, and that's the approach of consolidating power and making sure that you have your hands on every lever and that there is in fact no independent accountability. That's what's on the floor right now.
They're having the opportunity to make the choice to all together get into a time machine and go back in time to the '80s. There was a public outcry about that move. There was a public outcry. The public, in the 1980s, talked about patronage, and it led to changes in government, because people were so incensed about the small circles of influence and favouritism and the complete lack, and I will say lack, in contradistinction to what the minister has said, of accountability. This is a government who in Opposition made their mark as the champions of accountability.
They sued the Province of Nova Scotia about accountability, and yet we are seeing in this session sweeping changes, and the thing that they all have in common is that they reduce transparency, they reduce accountability, and they reduce the ability of the public to have an impact on policy-making. To add a little bit of salt to that wound, we actually have no explanation for why. As my colleague, the MLA for Halifax Citadel-Sable Island, put it very eloquently, we have no explanation for why. We are not even deemed to be worthy of understanding this new approach to economic development.
In the absence of that type of explanation that is more than just hyperbole and bromides about how amazing it is, we are forced not to support any of these changes, because we are concerned on behalf of our constituents about what this back-to-the-future approach will bring us.