P.E.I. party leaders reflect on the highs and lows of an 8-week spring legislature sitting
Personal attacks a low point of the sitting, leaders say
After eight weeks, the second session of the 67th General Assembly of Prince Edward Island wrapped up Friday.
The spring sitting was Rob Lantz's first in the role of premier after Dennis King's shock resignation back in February, which led to the legislature being prorogued by a month past its originally scheduled start date.
Safety in Island schools and the Progressive Conservative government's multimillion-dollar tourism deal with the National Hockey League were dominant topics of debate during question period.
MLAs are scheduled to return for the fall sitting on Nov. 4.
'A lot of hard work': Lantz
Lantz was sworn in as premier about a month before the spring sitting began.
"It's been a whirlwind couple of months for me," Lantz said, adding that he felt well-prepared to begin work in the legislature, but that the role of premier takes a little getting used to.
"I enjoyed it, but it's a lot of hard work and I'm glad to get to the end," he said.
The PC government passed 19 bills, including the Interprovincial Trade and Mobility Act, which Lantz said was a personal high point. He brought the legislation to the floor himself.
All provincial governments are working hard to smooth out interprovincial trade, and the act was P.E.I.'s effort to contribute, Lantz said.
Other bills that passed included the Funeral Services Act, the Tariff Response Plan and changes to corporate and personal income taxes.
Tense exchanges
As for a low point of the sitting, Lantz said the back and forth nature of the legislature can get under people's skin.
"Things get pretty prickly in the legislature sometimes," he said, adding that this spring saw more of that dynamic than usual.
The premier had tense exchanges with Official Opposition Leader Hal Perry this week following comments Lantz made about the P.E.I. Liberal Party's spending that cited inaccurate figures from an annual report.
Perry asked the premier to apologize, but Lantz doubled down.
"The books are the books, the numbers are the numbers," the premiers said. "We can squabble over the details, but I stand by what I said."
While some MLAs said they would have liked to see the legislative sitting continue so they could get more answers, Lantz said he thinks the government members answered the opposition parties' questions to the best of their knowledge.
"I can't imagine there's an opposition party that has walked out of any sitting of the legislature saying they were satisfied with the answers they got from government," he said. "I do my best to be open, honest and transparent when I'm answering questions, but sometimes, frankly, the opposition is just trying to set traps for us."
'Islanders deserve better': Perry
Over the eight weeks of the sitting, Perry said he and the other opposition MLAs took their jobs seriously.
"Our job is to hold government to account for the decisions they make, or lack thereof," the interim Liberal leader said. "We ask questions on behalf of Islanders that are either met with political spin or they're stonewalled, and Islanders deserve better."
Perry pressed the PCs on the NHL deal, a continuation from the previous fall sitting, during which the deal was brought up every single day.
"The government mismanaged this file terribly," Perry said.
"They are accountable for the taxpayers' dollars and they are not being transparent."
For several days of the sitting, Perry also sought answers to questions about the case of a former substitute teacher who recently pleaded guilty to charges related to child sex abuse images and an incident where he sexually touched a girl in an elementary school classroom in front of other students.
"It's a terrible low that Islanders had to go through this," Perry said. "The system failed these students. The system failed the parents and all Islanders."
Perry posed questions about the incidents involving Matthew Craswell to current and past education ministers, including the premier.
"This is a terrible situation. These are questions that I don't like to ask," Perry said, adding that parents have reached out with questions and concerns that they can't get answers to through other channels.
"We need to know what happened in the past in order to move forward."
Perry said his caucus did a wonderful job of holding the government to account.
"We've asked really, really good questions," he said.
"We may not have gotten the answers, which is unfortunate, but we went in every day being professional."
'Public pressure leads to change': Bernard
For Karla Bernard, the P.E.I. Green Party's interim leader, the spring sitting was "an exercise in patience."
"It got very personal this sitting, which isn't nice," Bernard said, adding that MLAs should be focused on attacking policies, not people.
"It makes it really challenging to have a good working relationship with someone who's willing to personally attack you."
Despite some "very uncomfortable moments," she said the sitting was productive overall.
"The Greens kind of carved ourselves out as how we would be different as a government, and how we would bring things forward and how we would listen to the public and come forward with solutions," Bernard said.
She called the two bills the Greens passed this session — an amendment to the Lands Protection Act and an amendment to the Education Act — "culture shifters."
The amendment to the Lands Protection Act will ensure that the province looks at farmland seriously, while the Education Act amendment will make a difference in how sexual misconduct is reported in schools, Bernard said.
The amendment to the Education Act was a bill Bernard herself brought forward, saying getting it passed was a high point of the sitting.
"It was a great example of what can happen when there's public pressure… and how that public pressure leads to change," she said.
"That was such a high and such a win for Islanders. I came out of there feeling like I had just done something with my team that was much bigger than myself, and that was by far probably one of my favourite moments in the legislature to date."
In addition to those two bills, Bernard said the Greens also felt strongly about ambulance wait times and private contracts for health-care companies.
The party was the first to reject the PC's call for unanimous consent to push remaining legislation through to third reading on Thursday.
"We've been asking for [information] on Health P.E.I. employees' salaries for weeks," she said, adding that getting those contracts was one of the party's conditions for ending the sitting. "Despite the fact we were told we were going to get them last night, we still haven't got them."
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With files from Nicola MacLeod