“Let’s not mince words,” Jonathan Langdon tells The Coast. “Anybody who tells you that the evidence around fracking has changed–that it’s more healthy, that it’s safer–this goes against all the studies up-to-date which show the health risks are the same or more acute than they were 10 years ago when we put this ban in place.”
Langdon is a development studies professor at St. Francis Xavier University and a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Social Change Leadership. He’s concerned about a new provincial bill–Bill 6, or An Act Respecting Agriculture, Energy and Natural Resources–that would overturn longstanding bans on fracking and uranium exploration and mining if passed.
Langdon was part of the groundswell movement leading to the provincial ban on fracking in 2014. He says for the government to now turn its back on this massive public outcry and refer to it as a special interest group, “when it was clear this was voiced across the province” is a dismissal of so many people and so much work, including a government-commissioned report which found lifting the ban should rest on whether there’s public support to do so.
Bill 6 would repeal the existing Uranium Exploration and Mining Prohibition Act, to make way for research into potential uranium extraction, and would change the Petroleum Resources Act to “create the potential” for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to develop unconventional onshore gas and oil resources in Nova Scotia.
Premier Tim Houston and his government have said lifting these bans are part of a plan to make Nova Scotia resilient to economic challenges stemming from US tariffs. Don Trump’s will-he-won’t-he 25% tariff on Canadian goods came into effect March 4, although some have been paused until April 2. A 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum goods came into effect March 12. As reported by Lyndsay Armstrong with The Canadian Press, Houston said in February that it was “time to pull every lever that we have” because Nova Scotia is “rich in resources, and we can develop them safely,” while still meeting provincial greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Those claims–that developing fossil fuels through fracking or disposing of waste and byproducts made through uranium mining can happen “safely” without posing health and environmental risks–have been disputed.
On Monday, Bill 6 will appear before the Law Amendments Committee–renamed “Public Bills” this year–along with six other bills of new or amended provincial legislation. This is the chance for the public to weigh in before these bills become law. And it will be televised.
Beginning at 9am, the bills to be discussed are:
Bill No. 1 – An Act Respecting Government Organization and Administration
Bill No. 6 – An Act Respecting Agriculture, Energy and Natural Resources
Bill No. 11 – Administrative Efficiency and Accountability in Healthcare Act
Bill No. 12 – An Act Respecting Advanced Education and Research
Bill No. 21 – Justice Administration Amendment (2025) Act (with speakers)
Bill No. 36 – Free Trade and Mobility within Canada Act (with speakers)
Bill No. 68 – Financial Measures (2025) Act (with speakers)
Members of the public have signed up to speak on all bills except Bill 11. This includes two speakers against Bill 12: Scott Stewart, president of the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers, and Alexina St. Pierre Farrow, Nova Scotia’s representative for the Canadian Federation of Students. Several people will be speaking on Bill 6, including Barbara Harris and Ken Summers, both members of NOFRAC (Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action Coalition), and Barbara Gallagher, a member of the group Citizen Action to Protect the Environment (CAPE).
Because there is so much ground to cover in one day, it’s safe to assume the meeting will spill over into Tuesday.
Public criticism and recommendations for changing or scraping these bills can lead to action if legislative members take what they’ve heard at the committee back to the House for debate before the bill passes. Regardless, this is a necessary part of democracy and will likely receive widespread attention from Nova Scotians who care deeply about these changes, whether they support them, have questions or feel ignored and blindsided by them.
As a quick refresher, hundreds of Nova Scotians have shown they’ve felt ignored and blindsided by many of these bills’ changes.
As reported by Joan Baxter for The Halifax Examiner, the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs sent a sharp two-paged letter to Houston March 4 over not being consulted over Bill 6.
They wrote “it is unacceptable that this government is fast-tracking the extraction of natural resources that will permanently devalue and damage our unceded lands and adversely impact the exercise of our section 35 rights.”
The same day Houston received that letter, hundreds of people rallied outside Province House in the middle of the work day to protest the sweeping policy changes proposed in these omnibus bill packages, which they say they were not consulted on nor made aware of during Houston’s snap election campaign last November. They did so under the banner of “special interests.”
These two words have especially galvanized many diverse groups into collective action.
“What do you mean by special interest?”
Says Langdon, “we’re talking about a widespread coalition that is manifesting under the banner of, ‘What do you mean by special interest?’” To him, this means Nova Scotians who understand the issues these bills propose to intervene on without their consultation.
Langdon is not an environmental scientist; he’s a researcher of social movements that grow from strong community action over determinants of health, like access to safe environments, clean water, food, education, electricity and sanitation.
He’s also part of the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action Coalition (NOFRAC), a group of volunteers involved in local organizing across Nova Scotia who contributed to the process of public engagement for the Wheeler Report, which led to the fracking ban.
In 2013, the province commissioned an independent review of the environmental, socio-economic, and health impacts of hydraulic fracturing based on consultation with experts, the public, and all stakeholders, as well as a comprehensive literature review. The resulting 389-page Wheeler Report was submitted to the province to make an informed decision on the future of fracking in Nova Scotia, based on input from experts and the public. It led to the moratorium on fracking in 2014 and recommendation that this ban not be lifted without consultation and evidence of public support.
Chapters are dedicated to the report’s public engagement process, including with Indigenous communities, academics, farmers, labourers, entrepreneurs, medical doctors, veterinarians, chemists, engineers, faith workers, retirees and more. Many of these groups have weighed in against the new legislation since February.
Says Langdon, Bill 6 would overturn a ban “that came out of robust community, citizen and First Nation engagement, where there was a consensus of concern from voices deeply informed by science, health concerns and those who questioned what we should invest in for our future.”
He reminds us that the concerns raised in the Wheeler Report questioned, “why should we be putting time into a technology that clearly undermines health, community welfare, the environment, disrespects the treaties and Mi’kmaq rights to make decisions on the land and resources and not be looking for other ways to build energy security and vibrant communities and to support the transformation of our economy away from the kinds of oil and gas infrastructure that we know is contributing to climate change and climate crises in our world?’”
When that “public outcry happened,” he says, “our government of the day listened. To see undone in “a bill that’s trying to be rammed through in the middle of a whole slew of other bills without any public engagement beforehand,” says Langdon, “is dismissive and disrespectful to all the work people put in to making sure their informed, well-reasoned and well-documented opinions were heard.”
He recalls a part of the Wheeler Report in which contributing researcher and professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg Ian Mauro equated governments making environmental policy changes without robust community engagement or in the face of public outcry to “stakeholder silencing.”
“That’s really what we’re seeing now, as many groups are being excluded, silenced and characterized as bad citizens because they raise objections,” says Langdon, adding this is the real disrespect.
“I feel confident Nova Scotians are prepared to have conversations about what we need to do with our future and how that relates to what’s happening with the US, but I don’t think any of us feel happy when we’re told our concerns are not legitimate or represent some marginal opinion, or ‘special interest,’ that can be silenced,” says Langdon.
He continues, “it’s as if the government of the day has all the knowledge ever created in making these bills, yet we see over and over again that key people who should have been consulted on them beforehand–the auditor general, the information and privacy commissioner, university presidents, Mi’kmaq leaders–weren’t.”
Langdon calls the move along with the dismissal of the provincewide call for a ban 10 years ago, “the height of arrogance and disrespect.” He says, instead of being effectively silenced, hundreds of people rallied on the steps of the Legislature to make their voices heard: university workers, people concerned about the environment, the overreach of government in making decisions communicating with Nova Scotians, “all manifesting in the streets. The provincial government is really inviting a massive amount of community mobilization to say no to these things.”
As Langdon sees it, Houston’s government has two choices: engage with all affected communities to create well-informed laws and regulations which will be supported long-term, or don’t–and get widespread community mobilization and resistance.
Langdon has been a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Social Change Leadership for the past nine years. He says this has been for his work with social movements in Nova Scotia, as wel as Ghana, South Africa and, most recently, Guatemala. He says he’s been working with these movements to “help document how they’ve been learning through the process of engaging with different power players, whether in government or corporations.
“In all of these cases, people start from a place of wanting to work with, to try to dialogue with, to find a way to to live well in their communities without necessarily undermining the interests of corporations,” he says. “It’s not anti-investment.”
But “when the government and or corporate interests refuse to engage with people, especially people who are being affected by these policies or by natural resource companies coming in, then people get upset and mobilize to try to contest these processes, whether through legal battles, protests, contacting politicians or the media to let people know the about the struggles they’re facing.”
Through mobilization and learning how to push back and engage with power, “oftentimes, they find cracks and ways to slow down and stop process of dispossession, where people are being evicted from their homes or from their communities, or when the land is being seized to be used by different companies,” says Langdon.
The point, he says, is that strong community engagement benefits everyone.
“When communities make their opinions known and the government listens, really great things can happen,” he says. “People can work together to create smart, informed and responsive policy. But when governments decide they know best and they’re not going to listen to anybody except for those who help fund their election campaigns, we see a massive proliferation of conflict in our society–and the provincial government is really inviting that right now in how they’re behaving.”
He adds that, “for the record, most of these bills were not part of the mandate that they got elected on.”
He says Houston has “no social licence” to take the kinds of risks to the environment and health that Bill 6 proposes, especially without meaningful engagement with the Mi’kmaq communities on whose land the province sits, as the whose Peace and Friendship Treaties make clear.
He says he’s seen it enough times to know that, if communities are systematically ignored, dismissed or labelled as outside special interest groups, “you get a massive slowdown. You get real resistance.” When that happens, “it’s very difficult for any kind of policy to really manifest, because there’s so many people against it.”
Langdon wants Houston’s government to pay attention to the public’s outcry over Bill 6 and others and walk these changes back or engage in more consultation first.
“It’s not just about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the smart thing and working with people.”
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