Bill 35 - Government Organization Amendment Act, 2008
October 23, 2008 - Second Reading
Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m pleased to be able to rise in second reading and speak to Bill 35, the Government Organization Amendment Act. I’m aware that a number of my colleagues have spoken to this act and have raised some questions. You know, I’m always interested when the government starts to take away controls, regulations, limitations that have been put in place. I’ve had the opportunity recently to go back and try to get that sort of 10,000-foot viewpoint of what’s happening in this province. Are we about to repeat history?
I’ve been looking at our budget process and also the revenue coming in from oil and gas, and those actually run on more or less parallel lines. What’s really interesting is that we are coming to a point that almost exactly mirrors the choices the government started to make in the early 1980s. We’re 25 years later, but we’re repeating history. What started to happen there was that the controls, the limitations that were in place on government spending and how it could do it and, you know, under what circumstances and how much, all of those sort of restrictions that government places on itself to sort of keep itself on the straight and narrow, they started to lift them. I think almost anyone in this House would agree that we saw a period of spending that got quite out of control and then a period of time in which the previous but two Premiers tried to rein it into control. Then there was a period of very steep cuts that happened in the mid 90s under the previous Premier, most of which, by the way, were in the social sector and in the health sector.
How many bills have we had before us this week, Mr. Speaker, in which we’ve seen a systematic lifting of legislative controls on government spending? A lot is the answer.
Mr. MacDonald: What did Alan Greenspan say today?
Ms Blakeman: He did say something, that this is the very time when we need to be having more restrictions in place, not less. Yet what this government is doing in this piece of legislation and a number of other ones that have come before the Assembly during this fall session is to lift those limitations, to repeal the sections right out of the act, to take those limitations away. Well, I guess, over history you have many examples of government not paying attention to the historical lessons that they could learn and, in fact, repeating those historical lessons. I guess I’d be content to let the government make fools of themselves except that I’m an Albertan and I’m going to suffer what’s going to happen as a result of that along with everybody else. I represent a number of people that live in this very fine and fabulous constituency of Edmonton-Centre, and I don’t want to see them have to suffer because of the decisions that this government is making.
This bill is another one of those places. You know, often what I’m seeing is a phraseology, a series of phrases that are being put in place. If you read most of the bill, you go: “Okay. All right. They’ve got pretty good limitations in here. They’ve got everything under control. I believe that they’ve got ways of making sure that things are going to be looked after. There are limitations. There are regulations. There are requirements about things here.” Then you get some of these phrases. Essentially, the phrase that I’ve now seen used at least twice in legislation recently is the one that says: and then the government can do anything it wants. Here we go; boy, that didn’t take me long to find. It’s under item 2 in the amending bill, which is amending schedule 11 in section 10. It’s (3)(c): “Under circumstances authorized by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, subject to any conditions that may be imposed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council.”
So you can have all the limitations and regulations and prescriptions that you want, and then it can get wiped out because the Lieutenant Governor in Council, which is the cabinet, the front bench, has decided that they don’t want to do that. What you get out of that is an order in council. It does get published in the Gazette. Fair enough. But, boy, you’ve got to watch that Gazette and make sure that you catch it on the day that it comes out with that particular order in council. Of course, it never actually says what the order in council is. It says, you know, pertaining to something, something. You’ve got to go get it, phone, or go to the library and actually look it up. How easy would it be for the front bench to decide that they’re going to change their mind on something and override any protections they’ve put in place? Pretty easy. How long would it take the public or members of the opposition or the media to find out? It could take us a long time. What’s the phrase? The horse could be well out of the barn by then.
Ostensibly this act is to change the way government sells public lands, and that is always an issue that the public is very live to. They understand that there’s a lot of Crown land. They changed the wording. They changed the way they talk about that. They call it public land now, not Crown land?
Mr. MacDonald: Sometimes.
Ms Blakeman: Yeah. Sometimes they call it public land. I grew up calling it Crown land.
The government is able to sell that Crown land under certain circumstances. Well, again, there we have the prescriptions and the limitations that we hope are there – right? – but they don’t have to be there because now through this act the government is going to give itself permission to, like, wipe that out. “Well, no, we’re just not going to apply that this time around. We think it doesn’t apply this time or in this particular instance or for this particular sale because we have some reason.”
When I look at some of the recent public land sales the government has been involved in where questions were raised about it, very quickly Fort McMurray comes to mind. First of all, there was the government’s reluctance – I don’t know why – to release that land so that the municipality of Wood Buffalo, essentially the city of Fort McMurray, could get on with preparing and servicing the land to make it available to citizens who wanted to build houses. There was a long delay there, and I’m sure there’s a story, but I don’t know what it is, Mr. Speaker. Then there were a great deal of questions raised about how the land was actually sold and who got to sell it and what kind of money they made off it.
This is an area that does come under immense public scrutiny and if not scrutiny then speculation. We all get letters from people – sometimes anonymous, sometimes with illegible signatures, sometimes signed outright by people with their proper home addresses – saying, “Oh, this is a scandal; you should look at this particular sale,” or whatever. I say that to underline that the public are very aware that this is an area that they feel the government can make big mistakes on. I know that they would like to be reassured that there are pretty severe limitations and processes in place that the government needs to follow so that we have a fair selling of land.
You know, ultimately, that Crown land, that public land, it belongs to all of us, and we should all be reaping the benefits of that land sale. So if the land is sold for less money, or if it’s sold at a time that’s inappropriate – I mean, I love the one that happened where for some reason everybody forgot that we were going to build Anthony Henday, and we sold the land for two bucks, and then we had to buy it back for millions later. I love that one. Gee, I shouldn’t get off on those tangents.
The point I was trying to make there was that the people really watch that. They want to make sure that the government does have those processes to follow and that land sales are fair and that they get their money’s worth out of it as citizens. You know, for most people selling a little piece of land, often these are little kind of odd pieces that are, you know, in between an interchange on the highway and surrounding farmland, and a little chunk of it has been left. Well, that could actually be quite valuable land. If it’s sold off because, “Oh, well, heck, it’s just a little triangle, and who cares anyway,” but it’s a prime spot with an off-ramp, well, that becomes pretty valuable commercial land. If it got sold as a deal to somebody who was, you know, a good party member, a good friend, a nice businessperson in that community, that really affects the rest of Albertans. We need to make very sure – I’m getting a little tired of saying this – that not only has a process been done, but it’s been seen to be done; not only is it above board, but it’s seen to be above board. I think there’s a struggle in this.
I think what I see the government doing is one step forward in putting in some of the regulations that are anticipated in this act and two steps back when they then put in essentially a gigantic out clause, a gigantic “I didn’t really mean that” clause, a huge “don’t watch for the next couple of minutes while I do this” clause. That’s a problem. I think the government is doing itself a huge disservice in doing this. As I stated when I started this debate, we need to be putting more stringent restrictions and controls and processes in place in this day and age.
One of the reasons why we haven’t done as badly in Canada as they have in the U.S. and in some other countries is because Canadians tend to be more cautious. We did have stronger regulations and a regulatory regime around our banks and around our lending practices. I’m sure people could argue that they should be more stringent, and I’m sure someone else will, but we didn’t do as badly as some others because we had those regulations in place. We have in many cases in this province some pretty good legislation in place, and I am watching a systematic dismantling of that. I’ve got to assume, with the number of brains that are over there and the number of experts that they are able to hire, that this is not an accident, that this is a plan, that they are moving forward with this for some specific reason. I don’t know what that reason is, and I probably don’t need to know what the reason is, but it does really concern me on behalf of my constituents, who may lose out on some things or may not gain as they should, and on behalf of all Albertans.
We need those restrictions to be in place. We need those processes to be transparent. I am not seeing that in this bill. Those are the comments that I wanted to make in second reading of Bill 35. I would ask the government to really consider whether they need to give themselves this out clause. You have other emergency ways of dealing with things that are, you know, incredibly urgent or catastrophic or whatever. You have other acts that you can call into play if you need to do something for a huge public health emergency or acts of war or civil unrest. You have the ability legislatively to put things in place and override if you really, really need to. I don’t think you need to be giving yourself those big out clauses, those big “look the other direction for a couple of seconds” clauses that I keep seeing appearing, and I’m seeing one of them appear in this bill. I would urge the government to go back to the drawing board and to take out that clause that I enumerated.
Thank you for the opportunity to put my concerns on the record. I would urge my colleagues in the Assembly not to support second reading of Bill 35. Thank you.
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