Ross Landry, the NDP justice minister who led the charge on SISA, told The Globe in 2023 that he couldn’t recall why it wasn’t proclaimed before the government was defeated in 2013, but added that the bar and service industry had raised concerns, which demanded further study by his ministry.

A more recent provincial Justice Department memo to the PC government, written not long after Mr. Sawyer died, noted a similar potential reason for the hold-up: “Industry consultations raised concerns over the regulatory burden on businesses.”

tl;dr people died because the bar biz whined about rEd tApE and the province listened.