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Dear Friend,
Good Sunday morning to you! With the Legislature currently in
session, we plan to bring you more regular updates on happenings in
the Legislature to keep you in the know - because keeping up these
days can be especially challenging in spite of (or because of) all of
the different types of media competing for our attention.
 On Friday and Saturday, the
Legislative Chambers hosted the 32nd Annual PEI Rotary Youth
Parliament - a two-day event in which high school students from across
the Island act as MLAs and have the opportunity to present and debate
motions and bills on the floor of the Legislature.
There was lots of fantastic debate, demonstrating the
thoughtfulness of Island youth about a whole range of subjects. Bills
and motions debated this year covered topics from preventing fish
kills to affordable housing, and from coyote control to the creation
of a seafood marketing board.
Green Party MLA Hannah Bell (Charlottetown-Belvedere) made history
by presiding as the first-ever Green Speaker of the Legislature during
part of the Youth election Parliament, while Michele Beaton
(Mermaid-Stratford) helped chair the Committee of the Whole House
during lively deliberations on a Affordable Student Housing Act.
Actually for Hannah, this was her second time in the Speaker's
role! It turns out that Hannah Bell also served in the role way back
in 1985, during the very first Student Parliament, at the age of 16.
And notice the significance of the date of the newspaper clipping:
November 27th, 1985. That was exactly 32 years to the day before
Hannah Bell was first elected to the PEI Legislature in a
by-election!
According to Hannah: "Some of the topics we debated
included mandatory seatbelt legislation, increasing the drinking age
from 18 to 19, introducing an Island wide dental program for up to 18
(all things we of course now have!) as well as whether to allow Litton
Industries to open a manufacturing plant here in PEI (they built
microwaves but also weapons guidance systems) - we voted no on that
one."
Flash forward back to November 2019, and your Green MLAs are
hard at work helping make the laws of the land as well as holding the
government to account as the Official Opposition. Here are some
highlights from the past week in the Leg.
Active Transportation
 On Wednesday, Peter Bevan-Baker was honoured to
accept and table a petition from Bike
Friendly Charlottetown, calling for the current government to
build an active transportation lane for cyclists and pedestrians on
the Hillsborough Bridge within its mandate - as had been promised by
the previous government. In the photo to the left, he his pictured
receiving the petition from Sally MacDonald (mother of the late Josh
Underhay), Scott Brown and Josh Weale of Bike Friendly
Charlottetown.
With a total of 3,255
signatures, this petition is believed to be the largest ever
tabled in the PEI Legislature! Way to go to the many volunteers who
worked so hard to collect them!
The impetus for the Hillsborough Bridge Bike Lane was inspired by
the late Josh Underhay, who had spearheaded the
initial petition that caused the previous government to commit to the
project, and was an avid active transportation advocate. In table the
petition, Peter Bevan-Baker called it "the beginning of what I believe
will be a large and great legacy for a large and great human
being."
Related to this issue:
WATCH:
Mermaid-Stratford MLA Michele Beaton questions Finance Minister Darlene
Compton on the failure to include funding for the bike lane in the
current capital budget.
IN THE NEWS: Opposition
puts pressure on P.E.I. government for active transportation
Poverty, mental health and addiction
 One of the focusses of Green MLAs in the past week
has been on helping Islanders most in need, including those struggling
with poverty, mental health issues, or addiction.
MLAs
Hannah Bell (Charlottetown-Belvedere) & Karla Bernard
(Charlottetown-Victoria Park) highlighted the gaps and
shortfalls for necessities like food insecurity and feminine
hygiene that currently exist for Islanders receiving social
assistance. She pointed to impossible situations faced by many
recipients, including insufficient food budgets to properly feed their
families, and women unable to afford feminine hygiene products and who
suffer and are sometimes forced to miss work as a result.
MLA
Trish Altass (Tyne Valley-Sherbrooke) questioned the
Premier about the lack of mention of addiction supports in the
Health & Wellness Minister's mandate letter, and was assured by
the Premier that support for those struggling with addictions was
indeed one of the government's priorities, calling the lack on mention
in the mandate letter "an oversight". Altass went on to question the
Health & Wellness Minister about what can be done to better
coordinate addiction services on the Island.
MLA Lynne Lund (Summerside-Wilmot) brought her motion
on Drug Treatment Courts up for debate. This motion calls on the
government to address the spike in drug-related incarcerations over
the past few years by using drug treatment courts, an approach which
has seen success in other jurisdictions which combine judicial
supervision with addiction services and long-term supports for
non-violent offenders, and has been proven to lower rates of substance
abuse and reincarceration among participating offenders. The motion is
still being debated.
Short-term rentals
 MLA Hannah Bell's bill, An Act to Amend the
Tourism Industry Act, passed second reading last week. If it
becomes law, the legislation would require short-term rental websites
to start sharing data with government around how many listings they
have in the province and how often they're rented out.
Hannah Bell hopes that data would lead to further government
regulation of the industry.
"Government needs to step in by actually bringing forward
regulations that limit the expansion and the number of short-term
rentals that are directly and adversely impacting our housing market,"
Bell said.
"We need to make those decisions based as much as possible on what
the evidence tells us, and having accurate, objective data is a really
important part of that."
>>Read
more
Sustainability of biomass heating
 As the P.E.I. government looks to convert more
public buildings to biomass heat, the Official Opposition is
questioning the net environmental impact.
The capital budget tabled by the government last week commits $6.6
million to add 13 more public buildings to the list of 33 schools,
hospitals and other buildings converted from heating oil to biomass
heat.
But as MLA Steve Howard (Summerside-South Drive) pointed out in
question period Friday, the environmental benefits of switching to
wood heat depend on how the wood is harvested, whether plantings keep
up with harvested trees, and how long trees are allowed to grow before
they're cut.
"When we burn biomass for energy, we initially and immediately emit
greenhouse gases, more than burning coal per unit of energy," Steve
Howard, who serves as the Green Party's Energy Critic, told the
House.
"We then draw the carbon back out of the atmosphere as trees or
other crops grow back, but the time to get those greenhouse gases back
can be decades."
>>Read
More
PEI's 2019 Vital Signs Report
 Green MLAs are welcoming the release of the first
PEI
Vital Signs Report, a collaboration between the
Community Foundation of Prince Edward Island and the University of
Prince Edward Island’s Institute of Island Studies, and supported by
the Rotary Clubs of Prince Edward Island.
Vital Signs is a national program that uses local knowledge to
measure and reflect the vitality of communities. Vital Signs reports
are unique in that they make data accessible to the general public on
issues identified by the community itself as important. The reports
serve as a catalyst for residents, communities, governments,
organizations, educational institutions, and others to increase civic
engagement and public debate.
The very first bill that Green Party leader Peter Bevan-Baker
tabled in 2015 (although it was not passed) was the Well-Being
Measurement Act - which would have mandated the government to
gather well-being data for the province of PEI similar to that which
is now being gathered by Vital Signs.
Watch
Peter welcome the release of the PEI Vital Signs report in the
Legislature, beginning with the question "How are
you?"
Support for Government Bills
While working to hold the government to account, our Green MLAs
were also pleased to support the passage of several pieces of
government legislation, making for a very productive fall sitting even
just two weeks in.
 Tackling the vaping "epidemic"
The dramatic and troubling increases in the use of electronic
cigarettes (vaping) by youth in the past two years, coupled with
growing health alarms around vaping, prompted the Legislature's
youngest MLA, Cory Deagle, to introduce a private member's bill that
both increases the minimum legal age for both vaping and smoking on
PEI to 21 (the first province to do so), and will eventually limit the
flavours that the vaping industry is allowed to sell on PEI, to limit
the appeal of vaping to youth.
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/what-should-the-legal-age-for-vaping-and-smoking-be-pei-government-says-21-378204/
A truly independent Child and Youth Advocate
When has former Premier Wade MacLauchlan created the position of
Child and Youth Advocate last January, it was criticized by both Green
and PC opposition MLAs for not being a truly independent role, but one
that was answerable only to Cabinet.
Now, with the unanimous support of the House, PEI has a truly
independent Child and Youth Advocate.
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/pc-bill-establishes-independent-child-and-youth-advocate-for-pei-378851/
Opening adoption records
The province has introduced long-awaited reforms that will allow
adoption records to be unsealed.
The amendments to the Adoption Act were introduced by Social
Development and Housing Minister Ernie Hudson on Tuesday afternoon.
The legislation would allow adoption records to be opened up by
default, but both parents and children will be given an option of
filing a veto on disclosure of their identity. However, current
adoption records will not be opened before Jan. 31, 2021.
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/pei-introduces-changes-to-adoption-records-378507/
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