Acadian groups have been caught off guard by amendments to a government bill regarding minority ridings.
The changes to Bill 99 would affect the terms of reference of an electoral boundaries commission.
Marie Claude Rioux, executive director of the Acadian Federation of Nova Scotia made a presentation to the Law Amendments Committee.
She says there were two clauses that caused them great concern.
“The first one is the fact that the commission could create ridings from non-contiguous ridings or districts. So in other words, it could be, for example, joining Clare and Argyle or joining Cheticamp and Inverness or any other ridings that are not neighbours. If you go that way, where’s the limits ? Are you going to join African Nova Scotia ridings of Shelburne or Preston ? For us, this is very dangerous. It is certainly not what we want with regards to Acadian ridings. We want our old ridings back and I think we’ve been very clear on that.
Rioux says the other clause would give the power to the legislative committee to establish the maximum and minimum number of ridings.
“If they do that, they could very well say ‘we have 51 ridings now and it will stay, the maximum is 51.’ It will tie the work of the commission which is supposed to be independent.
She says they were surprised by the amendments.
We’ve been working very closely with the legislative committee and FANE presented a draft of what we thought should be in the bill. We only had verbal reaction. It was just through a leak through the media that we found out about the clauses. We certainly didn’t discuss that in the committee.”
Rioux says FANE was told that the law amendments committee will consider the presentation of Acadians and will probably amend the bill based on the presentation by the organization and other Acadian groups.
“We’re just hoping that our message was heard and that they saw the logic of removing those two clauses from the bill. We’ll see.
