Signs of welcome change at the legislature

This is promising. If only it would last.

It’s early days, but the first couple of question periods in the Nova Scotia legislature’s fall session were a marked departure from recent past practice.

Opposition MLAs asked questions, as they always have, but the newly minted Tory ministers actually answered – or tried to answer – the questions as put.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? Ideally, yes. But it didn’t work that way, at least not very often, under the previous Liberal government.

NEW AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT?

If the attempt at candor from the novice ministers, and from Premier Tim Houston, are a sign of things to come, Nova Scotia may be about to embark on a new age of enlightenment.

OK, that hyperbole is way over the top, but maybe, just maybe, this government will give it to us straight, good and bad. Only time will tell, but I like their start.

As noted, the PC cabinet’s behaviour in the legislature – and again, it’s early – is in sharp contrast to what we saw from former premier Stephen McNeil’s government.

McNeil and company were infamously parsimonious with information, and that frugality extended to the legislature, where Liberal ministers took to heart the old trope that there’s a reason it’s called “question period” not “answer period.”

GOVERNMENT-BY-STEALTH

For the most part during eight Liberal years, opposition questions drew pre-packaged responses – talking points painfully crafted back in the ministers’ departments – that only tenuously approached the general subject area of the question-at-hand.

And the government-by-stealth approach permeated the permanent government, too.

Civil servants charged, we thought, with answering questions from news folk, employed the same obfuscation – ignoring the query and responding with talking points that may or may not be in the same ballpark as the question.

Dare we hope that the Houston government will continue to answer, as honestly as they can, questions from the opposition?

Will his government free up communications staffers to give real answers to reporters’ real questions, instead of the useless fluff they’ve pumped out lo these many Liberal years?

Not likely, but at least we can hope.

REAL POLITICAL TEST WILL COME

Sooner rather than later, the government will face a real political test that can’t be laid at the doorstep of its predecessor nor parried with protestations of innocence after a few short weeks on the job.

Then we’ll see if these Tories’ can be forthright with their feet to the fire.

There was another welcome sign in the PC government’s initial foray in the legislature. Maybe it was the awestruck first-time MLAs, but there was a respect for the place that’s been missing for too long.

While Liberals may protest, the evidence doesn’t help them. They treated the legislature with outright disdain. It was an evil necessary to get their bills and budget passed.

McNeil and his ministers regularly dodged questions from the opposition, only to answer those same questions when posed by reporters outside the chamber.

That’s contemptuous of the legislature and a ploy to frustrate opposition MLAs and grab top billing in news reports. It worked on both scores.

Few, if any, of those opposition politicians was more frustrated by all of this than was former opposition leader, now Premier Tim Houston.

To his credit, he mostly managed a calm exterior despite the evasion and derision he endured.

Rather than learn the partisan lessons of his predecessor, maybe Houston’s decided to do things differently.

Maybe he won’t adopt and sustain measures calculated to cloud issues and muddy the political waters.

While the legislature was a more cordial place this week, it was still the legislature, so not without rancour.

PASSIONED PLEAS

NDP leader Gary Burrill’s passionate pleas for the government to address, with urgency, the homelessness and affordable housing crisis, initiated a heated back-andforth with Houston that got personal on the premier’s end.

In fact, the government struggled to answer questions about the affordable housing crisis and its response thereto, promising that a plan was in the works.

Additionally, Liberal questions tended to draw predictable reference to the shortcomings of the recently defeated government.

But, the rancour was more the exception than the rule.

Maybe it’s the afterglow of an election won or contrition that follows defeat.

Maybe it’s simple courtesy that’s natural even to politicians, at least when the partisan wars that precede and define election campaigns are still years off.

But there’s a hint, so there’s a chance, of a new, more open approach to governing.