Staff of the Halifax Alehouse work outside the bar in Halifax in the early hours on July 7.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
The Nova Scotia Legislature is facing calls to implement rules to prevent governments from failing to activate statutes such as the province’s 2010 bar-bouncer-regulation bill.
On Saturday, The Globe and Mail reported on the death of Ryan Sawyer, who was allegedly killed by a bouncer last year and how successive NDP, Liberal, and now Progressive Conservative governments have not brought into force the Security and Investigative Services Act, despite all parties voting to approve that bill more than 13 years ago.
The initiative seeks to have a registrar oversee and licence security workers at bars and nightclubs. But a void in regulation came to the public’s attention in the past year, after 31-year-old Mr. Sawyer died in December outside a Halifax bar. A bouncer who had been facing a prior assault charge is accused of manslaughter in his death.
“The public has been let down and I think the whole democratic process has been let down,” said Nova Scotia NDP whip Gary Burrill.
Mr. Burrill said the Progressive Conservative government should not only revive the 2010 bill – which originated with the NDP – but that it should also put in place measures that can help lawmakers better track laws which have passed votes but have never been activated.
“I think it would be a pretty simple thing,” he said, “to have a provision under which any piece of legislation that has not come into force by a certain period – a year or two years – that that government department or minister is responsible to report on that to the house of assembly.”
Such feedback loops exist elsewhere, so members of a legislative assembly can know what is going on with statutes sitting in the machinery of government. The federal government and the governments of Alberta and Ontario have put in place repeal laws, which flag long-inactive legislation to elected members, and which let them know that that their initiatives are at risk of disappearing entirely if there is further delay.
Under parliamentary tradition, legislatures direct governments to take actions through statutes that come into force immediately after successful votes. But the final step – proclamation – can be delayed indefinitely if lawmakers write in clauses that give government politicians, such as premiers and cabinet ministers, the power to decide when a law comes into force.
Lawmakers across Canada now routinely use such clauses to give governments some time to put in place regulations. Yet some jurisdictions, such as Nova Scotia, lack mechanisms to let the legislature know when passed laws are lingering, and being left to fall through the cracks.
Nova Scotia’s bar-bouncer regulatory law is emerging as a clear example of never-ending delay. Shortly after it was installed in 2009, the province’s NDP government passed the bill but never proclaimed it.
The government’s former justice minister Ross Landry told The Globe last week that he doesn’t know why this happened. In an interview, he said the bar and restaurant industry raised concerns to his department, which was also struggling to implement a bar-bouncer training program. “We were asked to take some time in order to work on that,” Mr. Landry said.
Graham Steele, one of Mr. Landry’s former colleagues in the Nova Scotia NDP cabinet, said unproclaimed laws are problematic on many levels. Among other things, they create windows for third-party groups to privately urge civil servants and government ministers to reconsider measures that have passed legislative votes in public.
“When you routinely have bills that come into force on a date to be proclaimed later, you’re creating an opening for that kind of lobbying,” said Mr. Steele, who was a finance minister.
He said he had no insights into the stalled bar-bouncer legislation but that he has known since he was a 1980s law student that Nova Scotia has had a poor track record of proclaiming passed laws. He also said the province needs better mechanisms to keep the legislature apprised of how statutes progress. “Unproclaimed legislation is undemocratic – and that applies to the government that I was part of as well.”
The Nova Scotia Legislature posts online tables of statutes that have passed votes dating back to the late 1980s.
These tables list more than 100 legislative initiatives as “not proclaimed in force.” But it is not clear how many overall laws have been affected. “As items are sometimes listed in multiple places ... I do not have an estimate of how many provisions are unproclaimed,” said Philip Grassie, legislative counsel for the province of Nova Scotia, in an e-mail.
Long ago, Nova Scotia’s lawmakers passed a law to address this problem.
In 2001, the legislature passed a repeal provision similar to the statutes that exist in Ontario and Alberta. Ironically, that statute has never been proclaimed into force, after more than two decades. “You are correct that the provision is not proclaimed,” Mr. Grassie said.