N.S. government weakening democracy by packing bills with many changes: opposition

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston speaks to reporters following the tabling of the provincial budget at the Nova Scotia legislature in Halifax on Thursday, March 23, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

HALIFAX — The Nova Scotia government is weakening democracy by packing bills with an unreasonable number of legislative changes, say opposition parties and political scientists.

Alex Marland, a political scientist at Acadia University, said the government appears to be using its dominant majority — it has 43 of the 55 seats in the legislature — to ram through legislation and reduce debate with what are known as “omnibus” bills.

“At a high level, this really says that a democracy is not functioning very well,” Marland said.

Each of the five omnibus bills introduced so far this session are connected by a theme, a spokesperson for Premier Tim Houston’s office said in an email. Bills are bundled, the email said, to “make it clear that the government has made certain areas a priority.”

“When you look around and see what is happening around the world, and then to suggest democracy is in jeopardy here is irresponsible.”

However, while the government says all of its bundled pieces of legislation have a unifying idea, some are composed of subjects that are, at best, loosely related.

For instance, the government says its “Protecting Nova Scotians Act” is filled with amendments that offer protection to citizens. The bill would make it illegal for protesters to block forest access roads on Crown land; limit the access of companies to clients’ social insurance numbers; enable victims of domestic violence to stay in their rental units after their abuser has moved out; and require bouncers at bars to have a criminal record check.

NDP Leader Claudia Chender said this bill is a good example of how problematic omnibus legislation can be. “It does a number of things, some of which are problematic and controversial, some of which seem to be good,” she said Tuesday.

Were these changes broken out into individual bills instead of crammed together, Chender says there would be a chance for adequate debate and conversation with the public to ensure the new law would meet peoples’ needs.

Marland said government is meant to reflect the will of the elected, and if the legislature isn’t getting a chance to have a detailed debate on various pieces of legislation, it means the government is “getting its way and moving things forward without the benefit of proper scrutiny.”

The political scientist said when governments lump together multiple pieces of legislation, reducing the chance for questions from the public and opposition, it increases the chance that mistakes or problems in the bill could go unnoticed.

“When your only goal is to ram something forward. You’re prone to errors happening, and people not finding out about a law until it’s already been passed,” he said.

Tom Urbaniak, a political scientist at Cape Breton University, said omnibus bills are especially difficult for the Nova Scotia Legislature to handle, even more so that in the federal House of Commons, because “process gives almost no time for MLAs or the public to digest the bills.”

“The bills race through the (legislature). The committee stage is largely inconsequential because bills go immediately — and as a large group of bills— to a marathon session of the public bills committee, where MLAs usually have no subject-area expertise,” he said in an email Tuesday.

Chender said the government’s reliance on these sweeping types of bills has “no comparison.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this. Certainly not in the almost decade I’ve been around, but I suspect not prior to that either,” she said.

“This government has a disdain for public accountability.”

Chender estimates that so far this session, which began last week, the public has had on average about 24 hours between when a bill is released and when a public hearing is held. “It’s a farce,” she said.

The government also put forward omnibus bills last sitting, including controversial legislation that would have made it easier to block audits and fire government officials. Those changes were eventually voted down after heavy criticism from the public and opposition parties.

“This session, almost every government bill has been an omnibus bill, and that’s a troubling pattern,” said interim Liberal leader Derek Mombourquette on Tuesday.

“Government is making it harder for opposition MLAs to do their job and nearly impossible for the public to know what’s really being passed,” he said.

Marland said the high number of omnibus bills is a direct consequence of the Progressive Conservatives’ dominant majority.

“If a government has a super majority, it’s common to just treat the legislature as an afterthought,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 1, 2025.

Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press