House of Assembly Act - Bill No. 185 (MLA Salaries) - 3rd Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : We will be voting in favour of this legislation, but I just have a few comments to make.

People across this province are not all living in the positivity ditch. Many of them are having a hard time, and the seeds that they're planting are not growing right now. Their gardens are fallow, to use the government's analogy. And why? Because we are in an unprecedented in my lifetime inflationary environment. The cost of everything is skyrocketing. Why? Because we are also in an unprecedented-in-my-lifetime health care crisis.

Now as I think about travelling around this province over the Summer and the activities that my children are in and that I participate in, I actually have to think about the health care consequences in a way that I never have. I know other members have spoken about their own children who have had health care issues. Access to health care in this province right now is as precarious as it has ever been, and it continues to deteriorate. We have been talking about that.

We are experiencing one of the hottest Summers in my lifetime. That's the climate crisis. Yet we have grandstanding on the government's lack of willingness to do the homework that they need to do to get us out of it.

Nowhere on that list does MLA pay rank as a thing that we hear about from our constituents. All of the other things I mentioned I hear about every day. MLA pay, until the government decided to politicize it, is not something that I heard about.

The minister stood up in his opening comments and said he doesn't want it to be a distraction. In fact, Mr. Speaker, this government has made the issue of MLA pay a distraction. They don't want to talk about all of the real issues facing Nova Scotians.

I want to be very clear, because I think we need to be clear. When the parties were briefed on the report of the independent panel, we were told - explicitly - that if there was agreement between the three parties on what to do with this legislation, there would be no need to recall the Legislature until the Fall. I'm going to say that again: There was no requirement to recall the Legislature until the Fall.

So why are we here? We're here because the government wanted to be clear with Nova Scotians, I suppose, that they were - in their words - standing in solidarity. Again, Mr. Speaker, I don't think that many Nova Scotians struggling to pay bills would particularly see capping an increase to folks who make north of $80,000 a year solidarity.

We've been here proposing real things that the government could do. I should say I don't actually think it's the government's role to stand in solidarity. The government's role is to do their job. At this point, I think their job is to make a difference in the lives of Nova Scotians for the issues that matter most to them - that is the health care crisis, the cost of living crisis. Yet again and again, we have seen deflection of those questions in this Chamber.

I also want to take a moment and just say something about this report. The idea that this has happened at the earliest possible moment when the government found out about this, that is not true. This panel was struck months ago. The inevitable conclusion of this panel, after a 10-year pay freeze, was an increase in pay. Everyone knew that would happen, yet the government did not do what other Premiers have done, rightly or wrongly, which is to prevent the panel from meeting. No, the panel was empowered to do the work and they did the work.

They didn't just come back and say that MLAs should get a pay raise. They produced a 360-page report. In that report, they considered pay - and we've talked about that - but they also considered other things. They considered equity and representation. They considered child care. They considered Mi'kmaw representation. I'm proud to say that many of these things were, in fact, in our party's submission to the independent panel. This is what we asked the panel to consider when they came to us and said, what does your party want on the agenda? We said these are the things that are important to our party that we'd like to discuss.

Mr. Speaker, for organizations that care about equity and representation, access to child care is a workplace issue. The House of Assembly is not immune to that conversation, but the government politicized and blocked any real, substantive conversation of that issue.

I want to note that if we want this House to be more representative of the people who live here, we need to adjust and modernize the way we do things - child care in particular, the need for child care, or for care for other family members or dependants outside regular working hours. We're not talking about daycare. We're talking about the expenses reasonably incurred when you are doing business. Those expenses are different for different folks, and they impact different folks differently.

When I was deciding whether or not to run for office, I had coffee with a former MLA and he said to me very proudly, you know my children have never had a babysitter. He had three teenagers. I said, wow, that's amazing, what's the secret? He said, well, between my in-laws and my wife, we never needed one.

I think that the story of many MLAs in this Chamber over the last 250 years is that they had what I think former Premier McNeil referred to as traditional child care, or organic child care. That organic child care is women - spouses and mothers. We want those mysterious, organic child care fairies to sit in this House - we want them here. So we need to create a system and a structure that allows that to happen.

I think that's what the conversation was about in this report. Were all the recommendations right? I don't know, but we didn't actually get a chance to debate them, and I think that's really too bad.

We need to consider how all aspects of this job intersect with gender, race, culture and disability. There's consideration of these questions in the panel's report, but we have not been able to discuss them and now we are jettisoning the report entirely.

Mr. Speaker, contrary to aspersions cast during Question Period, I want to reiterate that the NDP caucus came here to work - to work on behalf of everyday families for the real emergencies that we are living through right now. We came here to do the work that we need to do to understand what people need, but instead, we have been subjected to political theatre. This is theatre.

All parties have agreed to forego a pay increase. We were told that it could wait. So why are we here? Are we here to talk about health care? Are we here to talk about the cost of living? Are we here to talk about how to meet our climate commitments in a fair way and ensure that people can afford energy? Are we here to discuss the makeup of this Chamber? According to the government, the answer to these questions is most decidedly no.