One of the common things on the agendas of the recent CBRM election candidates was the development of the CBRM Charter. With the municipality deep in economic crisis, Council will want to draft one as soon as possible.

As someone who likes to contributes ideas, I've made a few attempts at trying to imagine a charter for CBRM. But, whenever I do, I keep coming to the conclusion that whatever charter we have, should be about the island, not the CBRM. This is how I came to imagining a regional government, rather than a chartered municipality. By regional government, I mean splitting Nova Scotia's legislature into two parts: the normal legislature based in Halifax, and a regional legislature based in Cape Breton.

There are people who would like to see Cape Breton Island become a province, but there are a lot of flaws with this idea. Many people in Canada are unaware of the local issues in Nova Scotia. While the fisheries dispute has garnered a lot of attention and rightfully so, our issues with healthcare and municipal underfunding have gone on deaf ears. In order to become a province, Canada would need a constitutional amendment, and I doubt anyone outside of Nova Scotia would say yes to that, let alone those here on the island. Constitutional amendments, like the one in 1982, are best used for major sweeping reforms to the country, and an amendment for the sake of one tiny part of the country just wouldn't be supported by people in places like Toronto in my opinion (Torontonians would probably want to become a province themselves, I'd say yes to that).

The desire for more autonomy here on the island is between us and the provincial government, and it is my belief that the issue can be solved without a constitutional amendment and with little-to-no involvement of the federal government and the other provinces. This is not their problem.

I'm glossing over the benefits here, but they're fairly simple for regional government:

• We can unite the communities on the island in a legislative manner, and have the opportunity to market our unique culture.
• We can tailor our initiatives for our specific wants and needs.
• We can solve our own problems, and no longer fight a constant uphill battle with the provincial government for essential funding.

The idea is that we would have the opportunity to uplift our communities out of poverty, and be able to say that we did it ourselves. The desire of this achievement is the kind of thing that could create positive change in the minds of residents, and establish a culture of inspiration and entrepreneurship across the island, which has been lacking in my opinion. We don't need to antagonize Halifax, all we need to do is to make a proposal in good faith that we believe we can make significant improvements to the Atlantic Canadian economy with a regional government.

So anyway, I have a draft of a Region of Cape Breton Island Act, that comes with three foundational regional bylaws: the Regional Assembly Bylaw, the Executive Council Bylaw and the Amendments and Repeals Bylaw, because I thought it would be neater and more organized if the conditional amendments were in one spot. I structured the documents similar to how provincial legislation is structured, so Council would have an easier time presenting it to the provincial government.

Everything in these drafts are subject to scrutiny by professionals.

I'm not a lawyer or a lawmaker, but I did draft these documents section-by-section. They are complete enough to at least introduce to a committee so the actual lawmakers can make any necessary adjustments. However, I did not draft the rules of procedure for the regional government, because it would take a while and it's not necessary for this presentation.

Region of Cape Breton Island Act: Region-of-Cape-Breton-Island-Act.pdf

Regional Assembly Bylaw: CBI-Regional-Assembly-Bylaw.pdf

Executive Council Bylaw: CBI-Executive-Council-Bylaw.pdf

Amendments and Repeals Bylaw: Amendments-and-Repeals-Bylaw.pdf

Here are some innovations I made to help tailor a structure of government that works for Cape Breton Island:

• Cape Breton Island becomes officially named the "Region of Cape Breton Island".
• We would have a Regional Assembly, with one house but two members for every district. The drafts assume thirteen districts, but they could be any number. The goal was to maintain districts of decent size and population, while also maintaining a decent number of representatives.
• Members of the Regional Assembly, or MRAs if you prefer, would be referred in the legislature as, for example, "The First Member for Glace Bay", or "The Honourable Second Member for Richmond".
• I copy+pasted the part in the House of Assembly Act relating to a Mi'kmaq representative, so there is a Mi'kmaq MRA in addition to the districts.
• The elections use a pick-two voting system. In earlier versions of the draft, I was going to include ranked-choice voting for one representative every two years, but then I realized that it would only lead to wasted campaigning costs for the person who would always come in second-place every two years, because a party can run for both seats in a district under this model. Using pick-two every four years, you still have the opportunity to vote for the left/right (likely to be Liberal or Conservative) and for your personal preference, and the second-place person wouldn't be out of their luck all of the time.
• There is a "County Chamber", which means that there is one county vote for the districts in each county. Whenever the majority of the MRAs in a county vote yes on a bill, their county vote counts as a yes. Otherwise, the county vote is a no, or not counted if the respective MRAs are absent from the decision. The purpose of the County Chamber is to help leverage the interests of the other counties outside of the CBRM, since a lot of our population is located here. Based on 13 districts (8 for CBRM, 3 for Inverness, 1 for Richmond and 1 for Victoria), that's 30 votes in total, 17 of which are from the CBRM, or 56.67%, which is a lot smaller than the 71.73% based on population in 2016 (and likely to grow if CBRM urbanizes as a result of a regional government).
• It's not mentioned in the drafts, but the Speaker in the case of a County Chamber would be required to always vote on decisions in order to contribute to their county vote. A tie would be counted in the negative.
• Our equivalent of a Premier would be the Regional Minister, and our equivalent of a Lieutenant Governor would be the Chief Commissioner. Like a territorial commissioner, except it says Chief in front of it.
• I included a specific way of how the Regional Minister is chosen. An MRA, the current Regional Minister, or the leader of a registered party can be nominated by their party or an independent MRA, and the Assembly chooses by ranked-choice who becomes Regional Minister. It's similar to how a government continues the way it is under the Premier system after being reelected, but in this case sometimes when you elect a minority government you could end up with a Regional Minister from another party. The reason why I did this is because as an island of only 130,000 people and 26/27 members in the Assembly, even with a majority government there would likely be members from other parties chosen as cabinet ministers, so I wanted to make sure that the bylaws support the normalizing of coalition governments.
• I changed the cabinet ministries a bit. I replaced the Minister of Acadian Affairs, the Minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs and the Minister of Gaelic Affairs with the Minister of Linguistic and Historical Communities Affairs, the Minister of Mi'kmaq Affairs and the Minister of Visible Minorities Affairs. The reason why I did this was to be more general, but also because going forward, if we want to prevent international students from booking it to Toronto after they graduate from CBU, we need to start incorporating them (Punjabi speakers in particular as of lately) into our government affairs.
• There would be a transition period:
• Year one (or two if necessary). Only MRAs and government staff, to prepare bylaws to replace provincial laws. Still under provincial laws and taxes. Budget handled by provincial government.
• Year after one/two. Regional bylaws and taxes take effect, and regional government has authority over budget, but it is still transferred from the provincial budget (likely an amount to make sure that both budgets have the same budget-to-GDP ratio).
• Every year afterward. Budget based on tax revenues and federal transfers. Equalization would be distributed through the transfer to the province by a formula that the regional and provincial governments agree to, but I included a part in the Act that gives the federal government full permission to override the "without altering the legislative authority of the provincial legislatures" part of section 36 of the Constitution, so we could be removed from the equalization formula and transferred a completely different transfer designed specifically for Cape Breton Island, agreed to between the regional and federal governments.
• Until the regional bylaws and taxes come into effect, the provincial government would have full authority over our elections, budget and freedom of information rules, however they see fit.
• Whenever there is a constitutional amendment for the country, the Regional Assembly's votes are transferred proportionally into provincial MLA votes. So for example, based on our current 8 electoral districts, if 16/31 regional assembly votes are for a yes on the amendment, that's 4/8 for yes, 3/8 for no, and another 1/8 for no because the final contested vote does not have a majority for a yes.
• The Regional Assembly can participate in provincial decisions during the transition period, but I only recommend it for very important matters because otherwise it's just a waste of time. In these cases, the final contested vote is simply omitted from the decision, so the 16/31 scenario would be a 4/8 for yes and a 3/8 for no.
• There would be a Minister responsible for the Region of Cape Breton Island Act. An MRA can be chosen as this minister, but MRAs cannot be chosen for any other provincial cabinet office, and MLAs cannot be chosen for any regional cabinet office.

The transition period wouldn't be that difficult. I'd estimate the costs would be under $50M, most of which would go towards lawmakers and incentives for advisory councils to help expedite the transitional process of each department. Expect these groups to prepare omnibus bills (big bylaws containing smaller bylaws related to a particular topic), so instead of trying to have over a hundred bylaws in one year, it's just one for every department and miscellaneous things like agencies, limiting the government to just a few dozen decisions during the second half of the year, so the first half can be spent working in the committees and drafting everything.

We could use the Sherwood Park building on Terrace St in Sydney as the government building until a more suitable building is made available or built. The classrooms could be retrofitted as offices, the cafeteria could be turned into a press conference room, and if I remember correctly from when I attended the school from 2007-2010, there are a few large classrooms that could be used for caucus meetings, committees and the legislative room. I don't know what the gym would be used for, maybe for community events not related to the government.

Well, that's the draft. If you like these ideas, let your new councilor know that you would like to see them in the charter committee. I also recommend that the new council discusses the idea of a regional government with the other municipalities and Mi'kmaq communities on the island. The more that are in agreement, the more credibility we have when sending the proposal to the provincial government.

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