Budget 2021-22 Response

CLAUDIA CHENDER: Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are in Mi’kma’ki, the beautiful ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people.

I’d also like to begin by thanking the Public Service, staff, workers on the front line who have toiled diligently for the year that we have been absent from this Chamber without a budget and without an opportunity to ask them questions or give them praise - as the case may be. We are truly appreciative and in your debt.

Before I offer a reply to the budget presented yesterday, I want to take a moment to remind us, to remind myself, of the context for this conversation.

Just over a year ago, we were here doing this very thing - debating a budget. This province has lived a full lifetime since then: COVID-19 and the loss of 66 Nova Scotian lives, including 53 residents at Northwood long-term care facility in Halifax; the murder of 22 Nova Scotians by a lone gunman in a beautiful, quiet pocket of our province; the loss of a small child on the banks of a river; servicemen and women lost far from home - six lives cut short off the southwest coast of Nova Scotia when a fishing vessel sank. Mr. Speaker, these are only the public stories. It has almost been too much for us to bear.

This past year has forced us to reckon with unspeakable tragedy and heartbreak. It has also in many ways brought out the very best in us. We have cared for our neighbours, our parents, our children, our neighbours’ children. We have advocated for justice, we have stood up, we have taken a knee, we have witnessed each other’s tears and frustrations, even if sometimes over Zoom. We’ve also celebrated weddings, graduations, new jobs, new babies, new beginnings. It’s been a lifetime of a year.

For the most part, we’ve done well as a province. So far, we have been spared the worst of COVID-19 but, please, no one write about that for the New York Times. That never goes well for us. We’ve done so well because we are so good at caring for each other. Nova Scotia exists atop a thick, informal network of support.

Mr. Speaker, kindness is our superpower. We falter in many ways, but the heart of our province beats collectively. So while I will outline first the things we appreciate and in some cases - if not many - might even share credit for in this budget, I also want to say we are disappointed that this kindness doesn’t get the strong structural support system it needs.

The caring economy is the economy of the future. The jobs are clean, the return on investment is high, the workers are the ones who most need support, employment and training. The work is real, tangible, and important and it’s right in our sweet spot - caring for each other.

There is a nod towards this need. A $100-a-month increase in Employment Support and Income Assistance is significant. It is needed. Importantly, it shows that this government can decide to help alleviate poverty just as quickly as it can decide to give a multi-million-dollar tax cut. It doesn’t take three years and a transformation project to intervene directly in the lives of people in ways that will make them better.

The road map for transforming the Nova Scotia Services for Persons with Disabilities Program, which was accepted by this government in 2013, is finally getting paid attention to in this budget. We are pleased to see action on this file, however late it has come.

We see in this budget an acknowledgement that we are in a housing crisis and the beginnings of a commitment to deal with it. That acknowledgement was not present a year ago - an acknowledgement that there is a need for immediate mental health care for people in crisis; commitment to finally addressing the historic wrongs that have resulted in thousands of African Nova Scotians without clear title to their land, land their families have been living on for hundreds of years in some cases; and a commitment to addressing the climate crisis that has been, is and will continue to be the defining existential challenge of our lifetimes, our children’s lifetimes, our grandchildren’s lifetimes, and beyond.

Each of these gestures points to a deeper issue that needs a more significant response - a just recovery. Building back better requires centring the caring economy, which includes child care, education, health care, and elder care, not just letting it exist alongside hundreds of millions in roads and infrastructure spending.

Again, these are the jobs of the future. In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, economist Armine Yalnizyan, who really coined this term in the current usage - and I can table that article - points out that in a normal recession governments are quick to do just what our government did following the original shutdown, which is to spend on shovel-ready infrastructure like roads and bridges. We did that, and we are doing that, in this budget.

This recession is different. This economist refers to this recession as the first “she-cession.” In a normal - “normal” - recession, we would see that employment loss centred in those male-dominated industries that I just mentioned, but not this one. This recession is different. To address the erosion of women’s gains in the labour market, and the disproportionate impact of this recession on not only women but on racialized people, poor people, and people living in very precarious circumstances - that spending, that recovery, that stimulus should be social infrastructure, because that is the infrastructure that has been hit the hardest.

Health care, child care, elder care, and education collectively make up 12 per cent of the GDP in Canada and 21 per cent of jobs before the recession hit. Those percentages will climb as we recover and as our population ages, and all of those sectors will grow out of necessity, whether or not we want them to, and as we see automation in other parts of the job market.

The Premier has said publicly that he wants to measure the economy differently. This was reiterated in the budget speech, and yet the omission of any additional investment in child care causes us to question this commitment. Alternate economic measures, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the work being undertaken by Engage Nova Scotia and many others across the province, throughout the country, and around the world, function in part to reveal the true economic and social drivers in society that are missed with more conventional GDP measures.

Think back to that thick informal network I spoke of earlier, the basis of how we do things in this province. That’s what gets measured. This budget shows an improvement in figuring out what counts, but the math still isn’t right.

We entered the COVID-19 pandemic with more than 41,000 children in Nova Scotia living in poverty - the highest rate of child poverty in Atlantic Canada. Nothing in this budget addresses that stark fact. The 2020 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia states that “children in families that depend on welfare are poor by design.” I’ll table that.

While we’re glad to see the increase in ESIA rates, families that rely on government support as their only source of income will continue to live dramatically below the poverty line. Single people and single parents with one child will continue to have the unfortunate status of having the lowest welfare incomes of any province in the country, notwithstanding the massive increase in rates. It’s not massive enough.

Between February 2020 and February 2021, 2,000 women in Nova Scotia left the labour market. Between February 2020 and February 2021, the number of women working part-time due to family responsibilities doubled. It seems we have found the source of the former Premier’s “organic child care.” It was women - women and families who made the difficult decision to leave or reduce their paid employment, often while seriously impacting their own mental health, to take on the unpaid labour of child care and home school and elder care and all of the other things that were required.

The government’s business plan acknowledges this. It states that “the pandemic has highlighted difficulties faced by women in the workforce, especially around issues of child care.” However, the budget allocates no new resources to address these difficulties.

Per dollar - I feel like this is the thing I’m going to say over and over again this session - per dollar, the child care sector creates more jobs than any other industry. It creates jobs. It is not a cost centre. It is an economic engine if we treat it that way.

The introduction of pre-Primary was welcome, but it destabilized an already precarious and essential sector. We were glad that government kept child care centres whole during the pandemic, kept them open, but more is needed. Expansion in the early learning and child care sector in Nova Scotia would provide more short-term economic stimulus than investing in almost any other major sector of the economy. It would help families. It would add to the GDP. It would increase consumer spending. Importantly, it would help vulnerable children. It would also create jobs. But this budget fails to make that investment. It is the single largest gap in the hundreds of pieces of paper we received yesterday.

We have seen that a beloved child care centre in Dartmouth, in Dartmouth South - the child care centre my own three children went to - announced this month that they would be closing their doors after over 25 years in operation. They attributed that directly to the crisis facing the early childhood sector. There is another daycare down the street in my constituency that is set to lose their lease this Summer. I fully expect, from talking to providers, that we will see more.

While we wait, Mr. Speaker, other provinces have made investments to make child care affordable while also supporting early childhood educators. British Columbia, three years into a plan to implement $10-a-day child care over ten years, went ahead without the federal government. Alberta established a pilot project to provide child care spaces to families at $25 a day. As of January 1st of this year, all child care spaces in Newfoundland and Labrador were $25 a day. By January 2022, all child care spaces in Prince Edward Island will be $25 a day. But here in Nova Scotia, parents pay an average of $45 a day for child care. In fact, parents pay the majority of the cost of child care under the current funding model. Government funding makes up about 20 per cent and parents pay the rest.

Meanwhile, early childhood educators, despite a wage floor, continue to make less than a living wage for the most part, and are unlikely to have benefits and often retire in poverty - essential workers, frontline heroes.

The government would like us to believe that the solution to this problem is ongoing conversations with their federal counterparts about a national strategy for child care, the same national strategy we were promised in 1993, when I was in high school; in 2004, after I graduated from university; and again in 2011.

There is no acknowledgement in this budget of the additional costs incurred by families that had to find care for school-aged children so they could continue to work while schools were closed. We have a school closed in this province right now. Parents are scrambling to make alternative care arrangements, and for those who don’t have access to the organic child care that we’ve been promised, those arrangements are not free.

Our caucus put forward a proposal of an immediate one-time payment of $200 per child, equal to about the cost of a week of child care. We were pleased to provide our costing for this proposal to the Premier’s office at their request and we are disappointed to see this gap.

On housing, this budget fails to demonstrate the urgency felt by the many Nova Scotians who are precariously housed. Think about that - precariously housed. They don’t know if they’ll have a roof over their heads. This is the situation for hundreds and hundreds of people who live in our beautiful, sparsely populated province. I know the government loves to talk about how our population is climbing, but we’ve all seen the endless aerial photos of our province covered in a canopy. Yet people don’t have a place to live.

Lots of people don’t have a place to live. We have more than 5,000 people on the waiting list for public housing, and a plan that will create 150 new units in the future. We have 241 rent supplements this year, in a market - at least here in HRM - with less than one per cent vacancy, where the Premier has acknowledged that we have a supply problem, although maybe not quite acknowledged the supply in non-market and public housing problem. What good will these do? What is being done about supply? Why are we not investing public money into public and non-market housing?

We are in a housing bubble. We could be buying rental units, we could be converting them. We could be offering grants to co-ops and non-profit housing providers - real funding, Mr. Speaker - funding like the federal money that flowed to municipalities that was tied to tight timelines. Already these new units - not enough but at least a start - are being built, not in five years or 10 years. They are going to have residents, I think, within 12 months. That’s the kind of action we need. That’s the kind of urgency that’s required.

Our shelters are full, there are people sleeping in sheds on public property throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality. There are people sleeping in cars across the province. There is no shortage of space and yet there is a housing problem. It was caused in part by a gradual but significant reduction in public and non-market housing over the past couple of decades, and in what increasingly looks like a bubble, we need massive reinvestment to avoid an even bleaker situation going forward.

On long-term care - we’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years talking about longterm care, Mr. Speaker. I can’t, in good conscience, reiterate the need because I would be underestimating the intelligence of my colleagues, who have heard this case put to them time and time and time again. Again, our investments do not match the urgency of the need.

We are glad to see that the recommendations of the report commissioned after the Northwood tragedy were accepted but, quite simply, it is not enough. In the same way that I would submit that we are not properly caring for our children, we are disregarding our elders. Mr. Speaker, 230 new beds in the planning stages, as my colleague discussed earlier, are cold comfort to the hundreds of seniors in multi-occupancy rooms and alternate level of care beds in our hospitals, the 1,000-plus who are on the wait-lists for long-term care, and the thousands more sharing rooms and bathrooms across the province, in direct contravention to what we now incontrovertibly know to be good public health advice.

In terms of justice, Mr. Speaker, the Budget Address commits the province to consulting with the community on African Nova Scotian land claims in historic African Nova Scotian communities. They also commit to consulting with the community on an African Nova Scotian justice plan and on issues of systemic racism in policing. Quite honestly, I would submit that we don’t need that consultation if it is going to look like all the other consultation we’ve heard about in the past several years. African Nova Scotian communities have developed the solutions and they have done that because they have had to, because you can consult 150 times and the result still seems to be nothing.

Action is needed. The African Nova Scotian justice institute and policing strategy are ready to go. The African Nova Scotian health strategy is ready to go. We need concrete changes that address systemic racism in institutions. We need to measure the impact and the way that that racism shows up. We have lots of bills that we have put forward in previous sessions and in this one that would do that, including just good data collection.

I once spoke with one of the public health leaders in this province who said to me just after I was elected, data is the great myth buster - I’m talking about public health - that you need to be making decisions based on the facts. We’ll take more data and going back to all the consultations we’ve done in the past.

We need policies that address the over-policing and over-incarceration of Black Nova Scotians. We need policies that tackle inequality. We need data that reflects those inequalities. We need alternatives to policing, for addressing lack of social supports in communities that so often end up in criminalization and further harm. There are ways to address these issues and many of them are already on the table in Nova Scotia, thanks to long-standing efforts of Black organizations and advocates.

We know that COVID-19 has also presented many challenges in Nova Scotia with regard to access to justice. We need to see investments that will help address the backlog in the courts and update court processes and systems to enable more to happen digitally, Mr. Speaker. These investments are not obvious in the budget. Maybe they are there but I look forward to having an opportunity to discuss them with the minister.

On the environment, we appreciate the Premier’s stated commitment to addressing climate change. It certainly resonated with Nova Scotians. With only about 10 years left to make serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, addressing climate change and protecting the environment is top of mind for many in our coastal provinces. For those for whom it isn’t top of mind, it will be once there isn’t a choice anymore. We have 10 years left, Mr. Speaker.

It is unfortunate that this government’s record is so poor on transparency and public involvement in key areas such as implementation of the Lahey report, developing new environmental goals legislation, protecting land, and involving the public in decisions with environmental impact. Importantly, they have no plans to transform Nova Scotia’s economy and create the thousands of new, sustainable jobs that are needed to meet this critical planetary moment. This is not an afterthought, Mr. Speaker, and I would submit it is not just a budget line. We need to fundamentally change the way we do things to address the threats that are coming toward us that we have no control over.

They can actually control a lot of the things that we have been discussing here today - they can control investments in health care. We can control whether or not people have doctors. We can control the speed of our infrastructure projects and housing. We can no longer control what is happening with our climate, and therefore we must be prepared. This budget does not give us faith that we are prepared in the ways that we need to be. The investments in this budget do not represent the ambitious economic mobilization plan required to transition Nova Scotia to an equitable green economy.

I was disappointed - and I hope my colleague from Dartmouth North will speak more to this in the future - that there was no acknowledgement in the Budget Address or the government business plan of the unprecedented challenge this year has presented for our arts and culture sector. During the height of the pandemic in Nova Scotia, when many were working from home or having very limited contact with other people, we looked to movies, music, virtual dance parties, crafts, books, the COVID-19 kitchen party, to maintain some semblance of our pre-COVID-19 lives, and so often people offered their artistry for free in various venues.

Even as we have increased our consumption of arts and culture, the artists - the people who create the works that we have relied on to get us through - have been hit particularly hard by this pandemic. Nothing in this budget helps these artists or this sector, the sector that is largely responsible, Mr. Speaker, for the ephemeral magic of this province, the thing that brings us closer and that draws people from around the world - and allows the government to talk about the amazing tourist attraction that our province becomes. We are building a new art gallery - yes, but what will go in it? We have a Neptune Theatre, but who will perform there? Without support and value of our artistic community, I submit that we will be in bigger trouble than we think we will, going forward in this recovery.

Last, just a moment on the $1 billion in appropriations that we got a little photocopied handout of yesterday after a year. We all agree that the unprecedented nature of this pandemic and the impact it has had on all of our lives required an urgent and robust response. We understand that it is within the government’s power to make additional appropriations outside of the budget to address unforeseen expenses, but it is important to state that this government saw no need for transparency, accountability, or legislative debate on $1 billion in additional appropriations that were made last year.

This government that has been so focused during my time in office in counting every penny, in standing up and patting itself on the back for balancing budgets, but $1 billion goes out the door without so much as a conversation among the elected officials of this Chamber. Mr. Speaker, I do not use this word lightly, but it is shameful. It is shameful.

All other provinces across this country met during the pandemic - during this unprecedented crisis that we have been facing - to debate and discuss the extraordinary measures required in the face of the pandemic. They met as the legislative body that is empowered and that ought to be consulted, whether or not it’s required by the letter of the law, on these kinds of expenditures.

They also met because each of the elected members in this Chamber represents thousands of constituents who have opinions about the future of our province. That’s why we have a democracy, so that we can be in this Chamber together and that we can bring forward the needs and wishes and desires and challenges of our constituents, and we were denied the opportunity to do that, Mr. Speaker. The Nova Scotia Liberal government stood alone in suspending our democracy for a full year, and I submit that is a black spot on their record.

We’re told that Nova Scotia was thriving. Then the pandemic hit. What we have before us now is a path that will take us back to balance, back to normal. Just a few years, and we’ll be back to normal. We in the NDP caucus have a different way of looking at it. Our GDP was doing well prior to COVID-19. Our credit rating was strong, but people were suffering. We had, and have, the highest child poverty rate in the country. We still do. Many were struggling to get by. They still are. So, things weren’t great for everyone.

Now we have an opportunity. We have the opportunity to build back better, to begin the road to a just recovery. While there are certainly pieces of this budget that we have been pushing for and that we are glad to see - that we can celebrate - we are not where we need to be.

The heart of our province beats collectively. Our superpower is kindness. In the end, the most powerful thing we have to offer each other is love. We’re looking for a budget that reflects our values as a province and the ways that we care for each other. This is a start, but in a place where we take pride in checking on our neighbours and taking care of our communities, too many are still left behind. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. (Applause)