Where’d the politicians go?!

If you blinked, you might have missed it.

The Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly’s fall sitting wrapped on Thursday, which means the legislature sat for a total of 15 days this fall, and just 39 days in all of 2023. MHAs will reconvene in March, 105 days from now.

Asked by reporters last spring why there were so few days scheduled in 2023, Premier Andrew Furey said the total number of hours MHAs spend in the legislature is comparable to other provinces. “If you look around the country, other jurisdictions, we’re pretty much in the middle with respect to the number of days sitting,” he said.

The idea of deliberately placing ourselves in the middle of the pack when it comes to how much time our elected officials spend in the legislature reminds me of an op-ed Rhea Rollmann wrote in 2015. In that piece, she critiques government and Memorial University for ‘benchmarking,’ the practice of “adopting somebody else’s standards as your own.” Benchmarking is “idiotic,” Rollmann says, because it often entails lowering your own standards.

“Anytime you hear somebody defend an action with some variant of, ‘Well, it’s actually on par with what other places are doing,’” she writes, “you can be assured that the person you’re speaking with is providing no substantive argument at all.”

Given the state of affairs in Newfoundland and Labrador right now, one could be forgiven for believing it’s not a great time for our elected representatives to go home. We need better policies and legislation to address the crises we’re facing in health care, housing, climate change, cost of living, and inequality. And we need the parliamentary and public debate that would lead us to those solutions.

As MHAs head back to their ridings, unhoused people are still living in tents outside Colonial Building and in the trails of Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The bare necessities remain out of reach for so many in our province. People are sick and dying without sufficient access to medical care. Parents still can’t find child care. There are labour shortages. Seniors face barriers to supports and services that should be available to them so they can live the remaining years of their lives in dignity. Indigenous communities are dealing with all these things, and much more. The list of unresolved issues and crises… is long.

Rather than staying and doing politics with the urgency our province deserves, MHAs packed their bags and headed home. But not before the Liberals touted their accomplishments this fall, like the implementation of Clare’s Law. Furey also praised his government’s passing of legislative amendments to the Change of Name Act, even though those changes outraged advocates for gender equality.

Is there any point?

When the fall sitting wrapped, only one of the two other party leaders were even able to speak in the House of Assembly.

NDP Leader Jim Dinn never retracted his October 19 question about whether the Liberals lied about the number of affordable housing units built over the past two years. On separate occasions in 2023, Housing Minister Paul Pike and Finance Minister Siobhan Coady told the public the Liberals had built 750 new houses or housing units. A CBC investigation discovered the actual number was 11.

Pressed on the matter by PC Leader Tony Wakeham on October 23, Coady, who also serves as deputy premier, accused the opposition of “playing gotcha politics,” while the Liberals are “over here helping the people of the province.”

Dinn, who was sanctioned and prohibited from speaking in the House of Assembly by Liberal MHA and House Speaker Derek Bennett, stood his ground on principle and spent the rest of the fall sitting… sitting in silence.

On Thursday reporters asked him why he didn’t just retract the question and give himself the ability to be heard in the legislature. His response should give us pause for concern because it says a lot about the state of politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Dinn pointed to an exchange that happened earlier in the day Thursday, when Labrador West MHA Jordan Brown directed a question to Health Minister Tom Osborne during question period, but then got a response from Environment Minister Bernard Davis on a completely different matter.

He suggested that, given the current state of discourse in the House of Assembly, legislative debate may not even be worth participating in.

‘Be aware,’ says privacy commissioner

The PC’s and NDP’s concerns about the deteriorating state of democracy in Newfoundland and Labrador are supported by Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey, who released a damning report on November 14 warning MHAs that the “government has changed the way that it consults” the privacy commissioner in accordance with the province’s access to information laws, “thus changing the extent to which the Commissioner is able to discharge his obligations” under the Act.

Specifically, Harvey writes, MHAs “should be aware that bills introduced have not had the same level of consultation as had previously been the norm.” He also says that the Liberals’ decision last spring to stop submitting draft legislation to Harvey’s office for review to ensure it is compliant with access to information and privacy laws is preventing him from doing his job.

Harvey’s prior ability to review draft legislation also gave opposition parties the ability to hear the privacy commissioner’s feedback on proposed legislation.

With that ability gone, he writes, “the Commissioner recommends that Members undertake their own careful and in-depth analysis, to the best of their ability, of the access and privacy implications of bills.”

In other words, the Liberals have forced our province’s privacy commissioner to tell opposition MHAs they will now have to do his work.

Harvey ends his report by telling MHAs to also “be aware that consultation with this Office is now fundamentally diminished from how it has been for the past eight years.”

This suggests that the waning transparency and accountability around the development of government legislation isn’t necessarily a Liberal problem — but a Furey government problem.

It’s too bad that our elected officials don’t have more time to discuss the privacy commissioner’s report.

If only the Furey government felt it was important for MHAs to be in the House of Assembly more than 15 days.

This article was originally published Nov. 19, 2023 in Indygestion, The Independent’s weekly newsletter. Sign up and be the first to receive new articles, investigations, podcasts, and behind the scenes looks at The Indy’s work. It’s free!