I don’t follow provincial legislatures too much, but this headline caught my eye—that the Nova Scotia legislature had just wrapped up an eight-day sitting, which absolutely rankles me as someone who cares (perhaps a little too) deeply about parliamentary democracy. While on the one hand, it’s not uncommon for provincial legislatures to have shorter sessions that we see in Ottawa, and for them not to have the same kind of fixed schedule that we do, eight days is frankly insulting.

What is perhaps even worse from this story is the fact that the Houston government rammed through a bunch of omnibus legislation, when clearly, they had the time and the ability to actually debate legislation on their own. Even more problematic is the fact that these omnibus bills included poison pills to try and trap the opposition parties into supporting disparate things. The one example was protections for renters, which the NDP supported, being in the same bill that imposed heavy fines or jail time on protesters on Crown land, effectively criminalising certain kinds of dissent, which they could not support (especially as these protests involve protests on logging roads). I’m sure Tim Houston thought that this was clever, when it’s just abusive. This is not how the parliamentary process is supposed to work. This is certainly a problem in most Westminster legislatures, and there are now mechanisms in the federal Parliament that can break apart omnibus bills in certain circumstances, and perhaps the province needs to adopt some of these measures on their own because that should be out of bounds.

Part of what irritates me about this is that Houston is doing this while he’s trying to sell himself to Canadians as this reasonable, progressive conservative who’s not tied to the federal party, and that he’s this kind of anti-Poilievre figure. I’ve certainly heard from people who used to sit in that legislature that he has a reputation for bullying, but even beyond that, these kinds of tactics demonstrate a kind of contempt for elected office, and for elected officials to be doing their jobs, which includes scrutinizing legislation properly, and holding government to account. A rushed eight-day sitting where you ram through omnibus bills is clearly not how a legislature is supposed to operate, and the people in the province should be raising a bigger racket about this—especially in Nova Scotia, which was where Responsible Government was first achieved in the colonies.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia targeted Ukraine’s natural gas facilities in an early morning attack on Friday, with much of the targets to being facilities in Kharkiv. A Russian drone also killed a French photojournalist on the front lines in Eastern Ukraine.

Good reads:

• Mark Carney is set to return to Washington on Tuesday with several ministers for more trade talks with the Trump White House (not that there is a deal to be had).
• Anita Anand will be meeting with her G7 counterparts in Niagara in November.
• Tim Hodgson says any plans to repeal the tanker ban on the northwest BC coast remain hypothetical because there are no projects or proponents.
• Hodgson also says it’s too early to see if the Norwegian/Quebec LNG meets the “national interest” test or not.
• The government has backtracked on a policy to limit the number of wreaths an MP can claim for Remembrance Day ceremonies in their ridings.
• Airport authorities in Canada want digital IDs and biometric processing instead of passports (but can you believe what kinds of privacy nightmares those would be?)
• The global Net-Zero Banking Alliance that Carney launched in 2021 has shut down.
• Former PBO Kevin Page has called out the new PBO’s comments on the fiscal situation as simply wrong, and is calling on him to walk them back.
• The debate over Bill C-3 on restoring citizenship to “lost” Canadians is descending into more fear-mongering over immigration, because of course it is.
• The Conservatives have largely been silent on the ostrich farm issue, in spite of the fact that it has been animating their convoy/MAGA base.
• Ontario mayors are calling on Doug Ford to cover the costs of their cancelling their photo radar contracts being broken by his making them illegal.
• The unity petition to trigger an Alberta referendum (to stymie the separatists) has more than two-thirds of the required signatures.
• Here is a look at the coming Yukon election.
• Justin Ling weighs in on the state of the NDP, and the need to find a leader who can give them a realistic purpose once again.

Odds and ends:

"Money-grubbing scheme."FFS

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-10-03T23:13:35.534Z

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