Bill No. 340 - Municipal Reform (2023) Act. - 3rd Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I will rise and say a few words. Much of what I have to say has already been covered, so I will stick to just a very few points.

The first thing that I will say is that our caucus will be voting against this bill because, while we understand that the bill as written is good for many municipalities, it's a bill that, like this government, picks winners and losers. We don't believe that the legislation that comes through this House should do that, particularly when we're dealing with the municipal units of this province.

The fact of the matter is that this bill will pass. This is a majority government. We want to be crystal clear that - for all of the reasons that have been outlined by my colleague, by the Leader of the Official Opposition, and by others - it shouldn't. It shouldn't, because it picked one municipality, and they stand to suffer from the implementation of this bill. It could have so easily been avoided, Speaker. It could have easily been avoided.

Now we're hearing backtracking, and the sky's not falling, and we had the conversations, and we tried our best. I think any reasonable person would agree that nobody tried their best.

In our constituency offices, we send letters all the time. Today, someone had trouble in public housing with mould, so hopefully I can grab the minister about that. In the meantime, we send a letter, we call the property manager, and we try to work with it. But then we can't say that we've had a full engagement with the department, because they send a letter back saying, Sorry, we're not going to do anything about it. That's what happened here. There was a meeting, as I understand, in August - an exchange of letters. Then the hammer dropped.

As has been pointed out, the CBRM is the second-largest municipal unit in the province. It has unique benefits. It has unique challenges. It has unique opportunities. None of those are possible if it is lumped in with all of the other municipal units in the way that it is in this bill. For that reason, we don't support the bill.

I want to say a little bit, again, about this idea that this government did anything close to trying their best. In their negotiations, they asked everyone to sign confidentiality agreements, non-disclosure agreements. That's not doing their best. That's wanting to hide something. In their conversations, they exchanged official letters but didn't sit down and have a conversation. That's not doing your best. That's avoiding the inevitable.

Doing their best is a thing we hear from this government a lot. What are you going to do about the people who are sleeping outside? Well, we're going to do our best. Will you actually raise income assistance rates to the point where people can contemplate being able to afford a place to live and something to eat? Well, we're doing our best.

Once again, this bill shows that this government is not doing its best. To the criticism that we are politicizing this bill, I will remind the members that we are politicians. We are in this House to express our political opinions. Our political opinion on this bill is that it picked a loser. It picked one municipality, which happens to be our second-biggest municipality, and said, That seems hard. This is a government that wants to deliver good news and doesn't want to do the hard work when the good news is hard to come by.

This was a situation where there wasn't an easy announcement, there wasn't a ribbon-cutting, there wasn't a photo op, there was a really difficult conversation that had to be had, over a long period of time, with people who knew what they were doing and were in power to make decisions, around a table where people's feelings would be hurt and there might be some upset but that you could get to the other side. That's something we haven't seen from this government. That's the conversation that didn't happen.

We in the NDP don't believe that legislation that moves through this House should make choices like that. For those reasons, we will not be supporting this. Before I sit down, I want to conclude by saying there is a very clear path here. The mayor and the councillors and the municipal staff who spoke at Law Amendments Committee didn't say, Give us $100 million more. They didn't say, Give us a charter. They didn't say, Grant all our wishes right now. They said, Sit down with us, give us a separate agreement, we're 10 times bigger than the next largest municipality. We're more like the HRM than we are like any of these people. We need our own agreement and without it this municipality will struggle and it will be the fault of this government.

I hope the government will take that seriously and after the discussion in this Chamber and after we rise, will think better of the stance they have taken - which frankly seems to fall on quite deaf ears - and will decide to give the CBRM its own agreement and let them be the wonderful, viable municipality that we all want them to be.