Op-Ed: Spend smart, up front

By: Gary Burrill, NDP Leader

Back at the end of February, Nova Scotia’s MLAs entered the recent sitting of the Nova Scotia legislature at a moment of pressing sharpness in the lives of the people of our province. It was, and continues to be, a moment of the health care crisis, of the climate emergency, and of the urgent situation of stagnant family and household incomes.

Instead of meeting this moment with meaningful initiatives to really address and grapple with the situation, the McNeil Liberal government tabled a tepid program of business-as-usual half-measures.

What was eminently clear, as they trumpeted the wonders of surplus accumulation in the face of the deep, life-undermining difficulties faced by the people of the province, was the Liberals’ stubborn adherence to an outdated and inadequate type of economics.

It boils down to this: refusing to spend smart, up front, thereby creating a situation where we end up spending stupid, later.

It’s not much different than a car. People spend money on oil changes, repairs, and replacement parts, even if it is financially inconvenient. We do this because we know the alternative is your vehicle falling totally apart. The longer the necessary investments are put off, the worse the damage.

This is where we are in Nova Scotia. In the sixth year of the investment-phobic McNeil Liberals, our economy’s engine is sputtering, the transmission of health care is grinding gears, and on all kinds of other important fronts, the wheels are falling off the car.

Look at the mess we have in long-term care. The government is spending over $1,000 a day per person keeping seniors in our hospitals, while they wait for nursing home places that don’t exist, when the cost would be a fraction of that if they were in the facilities they’re supposed to be in. Wouldn't it be better to spend smart, up front, on a comprehensive program of new nursing home construction?

Last year the government failed to hire the number of nurses needed to provide adequate care to patients, and overran the nurses’ overtime budget by $15 million, adding to the stress and burnout of nurses across the province. Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to spend, up front, what we needed for an adequate complement of nurses?

The situation is much the same with kids’ teeth. Children with tooth decay are more susceptible to oral health problems leading to increased risk of chronic diseases. The NDP put forward legislation this spring providing for kids to get their teeth professionally cleaned, for free, at school. Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend up front, on prevention, than on caring for all manner of chronic problems later?

If not the decay of children’s teeth, surely the decay of our natural environment should be enough to move even the most complacent government to action. Not so in Nova Scotia.

During the session, the NDP brought forward legislation that would establish a fund to support municipalities with the cost of climate change adaptation projects, like dike improvements and energy efficiency projects. We were disappointed to see no provision for any such funding in the provincial budget.

We also proposed a Green Jobs Plan to establish the policy framework for the economic mobilization needed to position Nova Scotia within the new green economy that's bursting out all around the world. The words “climate” and “climate change” do not even appear in the Liberals’ budget address, let alone anything resembling such a plan.

But perhaps the Liberal policy most deserving of our condemnation is the government’s refusal to address the daily urgency of household incomes.

Nova Scotia is the only province in Canada where child poverty is getting worse instead of better. Our province has the lowest median income in the country. And we have the fastest-rising rate of food bank use in Canada today.

Surely it would be better to make investments in household incomes now -- a reasonable minimum wage, rent control measures, a social assistance system people actually could live on -- rather than when it’s too late to prevent the negative outcomes in health, criminal justice, and education, that inevitably result when these investments are not made.

A growing chorus of economic thought agrees with the NDP about this. Around the world, economists are arguing increasingly that it’s mistaken fiscal policy for a government in 2019 to be so obsessed with not adding to the provincial debt, that it fails to make the investments -- in universal child care, sustainable jobs, comprehensive health care -- that can support purchasing power in a way consistent with economic growth.

There is a distinctly different and better path that we have outlined in our legislative efforts. The sum of the NDP’s 29 bills introduced this spring is a ‘spend-smart-up-front’ policy framework -- a program of economic stimulus that is socially inclusive and environmentally proactive.

What we have before us, instead, is a government that has no evident understanding of the struggle people face in order to stay afloat. A government that continues to deny the crises in health care and climate change, and which, with the budget it has just passed, has defined itself through band-aids and disappointments.

Gary Burrill is the Leader of the Nova Scotia NDP