The fall sitting of the BC Legislature will commence on Monday, October 6th. Two days later Premier Campbell and a third of his cabinet will depart for a glorified photo op with Alberta Premier Ralph Klein. The BC cabinet is so large that a third can go away and still leave a contingent that is larger than the cabinets of most former governments. The BC Legislature will continue to sit so the absent Ministers won't be available to account for their ministries.

The fall session will adjourn for the weeks of Thanksgiving and Remembrance day. They will sit four days a week, Monday through Thursday. Adjournment is already scheduled for Thursday, November 27th. Under the new rules all legislation that the government designates as required to pass for the session will become law whether it has been thoroughly debated or not. There are already 25 Bills on the order paper, and government is expected to introduce additional bills during the 24 days that the legislature will actually be meeting. The government that wants less red tape will pass more than one law per day for each of those 24 days. Of course that makes it impossible to give proper scrutiny to the hundreds of pages of new law. No wonder that one of the Bills, the Business Corporations Amendment Act, amends an Act passed by the Legislature in the fall of 2002 but not yet brought into force. In other words, they are having to fix legislation that was forced through in previous sessions.

One of the Bills before the legislature completely replaces the Waste Management Act. Bill 57, the Environmental Management Act, contains 179 sections. The Bill gives government the power to declare contaminated sites safe because the risk is "manageable". On March 18, 2003, the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection (MWLAP) released a discussion paper on special waste, and gave the public until May 2nd to respond. On May 13th the Environmental Management Act was introduced for first reading in the legislature. That issue deserves more than one day of debate.

Other significant policy issues are found in Bill 62, the Health Professions Amendment Act. The Bill that is before the legislature is the result of government backing down after ten years of consultation. The original plan would have allowed government to place a college under trusteeship by appointing a public administrator to take over the functions of the college. The watered down legislation provides for an independent investigator whose report to the Minister may result in an order to the college as long as it doesn't adopt certain standards, limits or conditions. The extensive reports that produced the legislation before the government backed down are available at http://www.healthplanning.gov.bc.ca/leg/proposals.html. These substantial changes will also receive no more than a day's debate as the government limits debate to fit the 24 days it has allocated for the session.

There will only be 24 question periods during the fall legislative session. One question that is more than just political trivia is how many of those days the Premier will make himself available during question period. His practice is to be absent most days for those hot 15 minutes - over half of which is wasted by stooge questions from the government backbench.