Sitting days

Earlier today I came across a local CBC news story in which Duff Conacher, out-going leader of Democracy Watch, criticizes the Government of Nova Scotia's decision to have the legislature sit for fewer than 70 days since their election in June 2009. Conacher suggests that a "Politicians [sic] role is to solve systemic problems and a lot of those solutions mean making legislative changes and those can only be done when the legislature is open." In light of this view it is argued that the legislature should sit for about 150 days a year.

The suggestion that Nova Scotia would be well served by a legislature sitting twice as many days a year struck me as strange, even if we accept the role that Conacher has assigned it.

First of all, is there universal agreement that there are "systemic problems" that need to be tackled? While I suspect that most people, including members of the government, would acknowledge that there a number of problems but I don't think that everyone would agree on the set of outstanding "systemic problems" that require the attention of the legislature. Some things that some people think are problems might not even be considered problems by others.

Secondly, if we accept that such a set of problems do exist and that provincial legislators are the right people to deal with them, given such a sitting schedule, when would the politicians tackling 'systemic problems' have the time to investigate and examine such issues? How does one analyze and understand such problems when they are spending more than half of their working year in adversarial meetings? I just don't see how more time in the legislature is necessarily good - even if we are just looking at Conacher's concerns.

Thirdly, though this point is related to the second point, with which resources are the legislators supposed to examine these 'systemic problems'? As it stands now government backbenchers and members of the opposition do not have access to resources that would allow them to conduct the quality of work conducted by the government (through the public service). I am not sure exactly what would be accomplished if we just increased the number of sitting days without introducing fundamental changes to things like committee and funding structures. Is it possible that we could just end up with twice as much uninformed meddling as we have presently?

(If I put a few more minutes into thinking about this issue I could probably come up with a few more problems with the proposal. Since it seems unlikely that the Government of Nova Scotia will consider such a change this extra time seems hardly worthwhile.)

While it is quite likely that the aforementioned article does not do justice to Conacher's arguments (and may have abandoned some key components of his position), the ideas that do come across in the article seem somewhat ill-conceived and possibly more problematic that advantageous. Arbitrarily adding more days to a legislature's calender without also making other changes will likely lead to more of the same rather than a new approach to politics. Much more change is needed if the role of the legislature is to change fundamentally to start examining "systemic problems," and those changes may not include increasing the number of days a year that the legislature sits.