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Dear Friend,
On Friday, the government cut the Fall Sitting of the Legislature
short after 14 sitting days, immediately after having passed its
Capital Budget (see more below).
While this puts a pause on some things including a few Green bills,
our Green caucus still accomplished a lot to be proud of this sitting.
And with the change in the Legislative Calendar taking effect in 2021,
there will be a much shorter wait until the Spring Sitting, which will
begin on February 23rd instead of in April as it used to. The 2021
Fall Sitting will also begin earlier than it used to, starting on
October 19 instead of after Remembrance Day. The other big change
coming in 2021 - no more
evening sittings. This was a long-advocated change to help
ensure preserve better work-life balance for MLAs, especially those
with young families, and hopefully thereby encouraging more such
Islanders (and women especially) to consider stepping forward for
elected office.
Please read on below for a brief summary of our Green
Caucus' activities in the Fall Sitting, and register for our
online "Ask
Me" forum this Wednesday where you'll have a chance to
pose your questions to members of the Green Caucus directly.
And, if you can, please support the groundbreaking work Greens
are doing for a sustainable, prosperous and compassionate Prince
Edward Island by making
a year-end donation today, and/or becoming
a member. Remember: Donations of more than
$25 made by December 31st qualify for generous tax credits equivalent
to up to 75% of your gift, which you'll get to use right around the
corner at tax time!
Thank you, and happy holidays from all of us at the Island Green
Party!
Jordan Bober
Executive Director
Please join us this Wednesday, December 9th at 7pm
for our first "Ask me" Forum! We are planning to hold these hour-long
online forums regularly with groups of Green MLAs to give you more
opportunities to speak to them directly and ask your questions.
This Wednesday, we'll be joined by Green Party & Official
Opposition leader Peter Bevan-Baker, Hannah
Bell (Shadow Critic for Social Development and Housing, and
Economic Growth), Trish Altass (Shadow Critic for
Health and Wellness, and for Fisheries and Communities), and
Michele Beaton (Shadow Critic for Finance,
Agriculture & Land).
Please
register here to receive the Zoom link for this interactive online
forum.
 On the final day of the Legislature, the
government's $195 million capital budget - the largest in PEI's
history - was passed. By focussing more on investments in
pavement than on much-needed investment in people (mental
health, addictions, and affordable housing, for instance), this was a
difficult budget four our Green Caucus to support. Making matters
worse, the government also provided much less detail to the Opposition
parties on the line items in this budget than it had been for past
budgets - perhaps a reflection of the fact that it now has a slim
majority of seats in the Legislature.
In the end, the capital budget was passed 19-3, with Hannah Bell
voting against and Trish Altass, Ole Hammarlund, Michele Beaton and
leader Peter Bevan-Baker abstaining. Bevan-Baker said that he was
dismayed by allocations for affordable housing, a new mental health
campus at Hillsborough Hospital and school construction that went
unspent from the previous year’s budget.
"So far we've seen more of the dithering and lack of action that
typified the previous administration. In many areas of this budget,
government was unable or simply unwilling to give specifics, which
makes it very difficult for us on this side of the house who have
critical responsibilities to review and scrutinize government."
You can read more about the Green Caucus' reaction to the
capital budget, as well as what our Caucus would like to have seen in
the budget, here: https://www.greenparty.pe.ca/government_places_priority_on_pavement_over_people_in_capital_budget.
Watch Green Finance Critic Michele Beaton's response to the
budget here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yazhVaFNMvU
 The last week of the sitting saw the passage of
Lynne Lund's Net-Zero
Carbon Act. As Lynne said in the Legislature: "Essentially
the Net-zero Carbon Act is an accountability framework. It just gives
support to the commitments government has already made on climate
action. It gives greater transparency on the efficacy of what we’re
doing to contribute to actions against climate change, how we’re
spending money, the progress we’re making towards our goal. It also
allows us to be upfront on the risks to communities to help them
understand the need for action in the first place."
The Net-Zero Carbon Act requires the government to report annually
on its progress towards meeting our targeted emissions reductions, and
what it is doing to ensure that we reach those targets. It also
"strikes an advisory committee, which would consult with Indigenous
people, local governments, environmental organizations, academics,
unions, business people, and anyone else the minister deems necessary
to get feedback on both, climate actions that should be taken,
potential risks, opportunities for a low carbon economy and possible
pathways, legislation, policies, programs, and essentially anything
else the minister deems necessary."
In the media: Green
bill cements 2040 net zero climate target for
P.E.I.
Special Committee on Climate Change recommendations
In addition, the Special Committee on Climate Change, with Green
members Lynne Lund (chair) and Steve
Howard, tabled it's
latest report to the Legislature, with two additional
recommendations:
- For the Climate Change Secretariat to develop its own
in-house capacity to calculate carbon abatement costs
(i.e. figuring out how bang for our buck we get from different
initiatives to reduce carbon emissions - essential for planning and
prioritizing but astoundingly not something currently being done by
government);
- That Government begin planning now for a direct incentive for
zero-emissions vehicles in order to include it in
budgeting for the 2021-22 fiscal year.
These come on top of 14
recommendations already made by the committee in July. The
Committee will now focus on preparing its final report to the
Legislature, which will be tabled next year.
Rectifying our Electricity Rate Structure
One important measure to support energy conservation is to reform
our electricity rates in this province so that, instead of providing
customers who use more power with lower rates (as is the case
now), higher blocks of power consumption would trigger higher
rates. As Steve
Howard points out in this letter, not only is the current
rate structure counter-intuitive from a conservation perspective, but
it effectively increases electricity costs of the vast majority of
Islanders in order to subsidize the lower rates for large power
consumers.
That's why Steve Howard has introduced the Act
to Amend the Electric Power Act, which would turn our rate
structure on its head. The bill only got through First Reading in this
sitting, but will be back on the table in the spring.
 This sitting, Charlottetown-Victoria Park MLA
Karla Bernard introduced the Election
Age Act - a bill that would, quite simply, lower the
voting age from 18 to 16 for provincial and municipal elections. You
may recall that Peter Bevan-Baker had introduced a similar bill in
2017, which ended up being defeated by the government of the day.
As Karla Bernard said in the Legislature while introducing her
bill: "What are the benefits of extending the right to vote? Voting is
acknowledged as a habit- forming activity. In other words, voting
early in your life makes you more likely to vote again in the future.
Because youth are still engaged in the education system, it is easier
to reach them and to educate them about civic engagement."
PEI has actually been a leader on extending the franchise to youth.
In the 2016 plebiscite on electoral reform, Islanders and young as 16
were allowed to vote - a first in Canada. If PEI lowers the voting age
for elections to 16, we would be the first in Canada to do so, but we
would be following Scotland and Austria where experience so far shows
positive results for engaging youth in the democratic process.
While the bill has not been able to come to a vote during this
sitting, it is expected to be back in the spring, and Karla Bernard
feels confident that it can gain the support needed to pass.
In the media:
Should
16- and 17-year-olds be allowed to vote? A Green MLA thinks
so
Researcher
backs up P.E.I. student's opinion on teen voting
 For the past year, Tyne Valley-Sherbrooke MLA
Trish Altass has been chairing the Special
Committee on Poverty, an all-party committee in which Hannah
Bell is the second Green representative. This is a committee
established by a Green motion in 2019, mandated to explore the idea of
a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) and to bring costed recommendations to
the Legislature.
Last week, Altass presented the
committee's final report to the Legislature. The all-party
committee unanimously recommends that the government begin immediate
negotiations with the federal government to implement a BIG on PEI,
but that we should proceed even if the federal government does not
prove to be a willing partner at this time. The committee also
recommends that the government proceed straight away with a full-scale
Basic Income program, but provides recommendations for a pilot project
in case the government decides that it would prefer to start with a
pilot first.
Trish Altass, whose work on advancing a Basic Income Guarantee and
eliminating poverty proceeds her time as an MLA, grew emotional as she
wrapped up her report to the Legislature: "Chairing this committee has
truly been an incredible and humbling experience. For members from all
three elected parties to come together and engage in meaningful and
informed discussions, many of them quite complex and lengthy
discussion, all with the goal to ensure every Islanders, no matter
their circumstance, can live with basic health and dignity, for the
wellbeing of individuals, families and communities – sorry, it’s a
little emotional. I may be the first person to get emotional reading a
committee report. It’s incredible. It was a great honour and more than
I could’ve possibly hoped for as chair of this committee. I am so very
proud to have been part of this committee and to present this report
to the Legislature.
The committee's report was unanimously adopted by the Legislature,
and the recommendations now lie with the government to move forward
with them.
In the media:
P.E.I.
should push feds to support $260M basic income program, committee
says
 Our Green Caucus passed a number of
important motions during this sitting. Motions do not have the force
of law, but they are important tools for raising and debating
important issues that can influence government policy and lead to new
laws. For example, Green motions established the Special Committees on
Climate Change, Poverty, and Government Records retention that have
been doing such important work in the past year.
This motion by Trish Altass was inspired by the
experience of people like Lucy
Morkunas, who had seemingly arbitrarily had her request
to cover a drug needed to survive a rare disease rejected, even though
the drug is on the provincial drug formulary. The motion passed, and
government has now agreed to revamp the way such decisions are made
and communicated to patients.
This motion, also promoted by Trish Altass, called on the
government to make mental health and addictions services a priority by
investing in a safe and suitable space for patients who have been or
might yet be displaced from Unit 9 due to COVID-19, increasing
capacity at Lacey House, and finalizing plans for the long-awaited
Mental Health Campus. The motion passed.
This motion by Peter Bevan-Baker called on the PEI government to be
proactive in affirming and supporting the treaty rights of Mi'kmaq
people to a moderate livelihood fishery, as per the Peace and
Friendship Treaties and upheld by the 1999 Marshall decision
by the Supreme Court of Canada, and called for peaceful dialogue
between all parties to reconcile conservation concerns and treaty
rights and to avoid the kinds of violent disputes that we have seen
crop up in Nova Scotia recently. The motion passed with unanimous
support.
Every year, hundreds of PEI seniors get shingles, which can cause
serious health complications especially in those who are
immunocompromised. Shingles is easily prevented by a vaccine these
days, however the shot costs more than $240 and is out of reach for
many seniors, who live on fixed incomes.
There have been calls for the PEI government to fund the Shingrix
vaccine for several years, and with COVID-19 the urgency has grown, as
the capacity of the health system can come under strain. The passage
of this motion means that seniors can likely expect good news in the
near future about government support for shingles vaccination.
This motion by Michele Beaton was unfortunately defeated. It called
for IRAC to once again publish its land transaction-related orders as
it routinely did prior to 2014 but not since, and to support a
movement of land transaction decisions away from the secrecy of
Cabinet and to IRAC as a quasi-judicial body.
A couple of Green motions have also been called for debate
but did not come to a vote this sitting:
As the Official Opposition, so much of the important work of
holding the government to account takes place during daily Question
Periods.
One good example of this was on November 19th, when our
caucus dedicated the entire Question Period to the ongoing housing
crisis in PEI.
From the stretched capacity at shelters, to the continued lack of a
government point person on housing since the firing of Clifford Lee
last year, to the need to better support the needs renters and
seniors, the Green Caucus will continue to hold the government's feet
to the fire on this important issue.
In the previous sitting, a Green motion resulted in the creation of
the Special Committee on Government Records
Retention. This committee, chaired by Mermaid-Stratford MLA
Michele Beaton, was mandated to both investigate the
case of the infamous missing (or deleted) emails in the E-gaming
affair, and to recommend how to prevent important government records
from going missing again in the future.
While the committee was unable to get to the bottom of the E-gaming
emails, it did come up with a number of good recommendations to
improve government records retention going forward. You
can read the Committee's final report here.
None of this would be possible without
your support.
Please consider making a year-end
donation today, and benefit from tax credits worth up to 75% of your
gift at tax time!
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