Controversial pension legislation may extend fall sitting of N.B. legislature

All three parties of the New Brunswick legislature are discussing whether to extend the fall sitting by a week in order to provide more time for debate on controversial legislation that would convert five unions from defined-benefit pension plans to the shared-risk model already provided to most other public employees.

With the legislature scheduled to rise for the winter next Friday, the government is running out of time to pass the bill that it hopes will take effect in February.

Liberal house leader Guy Arseneault said that a bill with such wide-ranging consequences deserves proper scrutiny.

“We have workers in those unions that are spread throughout the province, so they’re in every constituency,” he said.

“All our MLAs have some of those workers. They are coming to our offices. They’re asking us to speak on it.”

The bill deals with the pension plans of two Canadian Union of Public Employees locals representing school bus drivers, custodians and school district staff, along with nursing home workers.  The shared-risk model, says Premier Blaine Higgs, is more sustainable for the public purse.

Both CUPE locals had a memorandum of agreement with the province to negotiate a new pension model, part of a new collective agreement signed after a two-week strike in 2021. Higgs says since that MOA is expired, it is therefore not relevant, while the union says the province is circumventing the process both parties agreed to.

Iris Llyod, the president of CUPE local 1253, says she hopes opposition MLAs fight the changes.

“I would like the opposition parties to support the unions all across this province and really all across this country and say no to this legislation going through,” she told reporters on Friday.

Each MLA is able to speak for 40 minutes on each reading of a bill and significant time is allotted for lawmakers to question the bill’s corresponding minister and their department staff at the committee stage.

With just three normal sitting days left, the opposition could try and run out the clock.

In similar situations the government will often move to put a time limit on debate, an option that government house leader Glen Savoie says is still in play, though he’d rather extend the sitting by an extra week to allow more time for debate.

“Simply, what the government is saying is we’re open to discussions and seeing if the opposition needs more time on this bill, so we’re happy to talk about it,” he said.

The Green Party is less than enthusiastic about the proposal.

House leader Kevin Arseneau said that the government is just trying to give the appearance of proper scrutiny of a piece of legislation that should not go forward.

“It’s theatrics,” he said. “If there’s more sitting days, fine, we’ll be here, we’ll very gladly be here and we will debate that bill, but we will do everything that we can to scrap it.”

The house leaders of the three parties are scheduled to meet again on Tuesday to speak about whether they’ll sit an extra week, or not.