Alberta’s Official Opposition says the government is changing the rules as it sees fit after it shut down the legislature on Monday afternoon, voting to adjourn rather than sit through the last period of private members’ business scheduled for the current session. The decision meant the Alberta NDP and independent MLAs now won’t be heard or debated until spring, as the legislature is expected to break this week. It came after the ruling United Conservative Party proposed moving the debate over two of its bills up earlier. To change the schedule, there needed to be unanimous consent, which the NDP refused to provide. The UCP says the NDP has repeatedly asked for longer debate times. “You can’t have it both ways,” Justice Minister Mickey Amery told reporters in the Alberta legislature rotunda on Monday afternoon. “You either have to choose one or the other. You can’t argue that there isn’t enough to argue in this legislature and at the same time decline the opportunity to have more robust debate on those bills.” NDP health critic Sarah Hoffman told reporters on Monday that the government showed its entitlement by adjourning the day early. “They believe that this is their sandbox and they get to set all the rules and decide who talks about what,” she said. “The government only wants to talk for a very limited amount of time about the things that they want to talk about. And, even then, they won’t talk about it for long.” Hunter Baril, the press secretary for Jobs, Economy, Trade and Immigration Minister Joseph Schow, said Monday that the session, which was set to continue that night with government business, has gone two weeks longer than planned. He said the NDP had repeatedly asked for more debate time. UCP MLAs said they spent the afternoon preparing for the debates they wanted to move earlier. Those ended up going until after midnight. With files from The Canadian Press
