Avalon

or
The Man of Steele

I recently went to the Upper Tantallon public consultation on Nova Scotia’s fiscal crisis hosted by Finance Minister The Honourable Graham Steele. I met with a few from Taxed Enough Nova Scotians (TENS) an hour before the meeting at the local Tim’s and serendipitously Mr. Steele and his assistant were also there, so we had a impromptu discussion.

He is affable and open, as was the consultation. The turnout was good with a great cross section of the public and they all appeared to have an earnest interest in the topic at hand. A brief overview of the problem by the Minister; our growing mismatch between expenses (growing 5% a year regardless of income growth) and income, followed by small group discussion on solutions. Each table was tasked with answering these four questions:

1. What should government do to increase revenues and reduce spending?
2. What changes should be made to programs and services?
3. What investments should be made today that will help grow the economy in the long term?
4. How soon should government bring Nova Scotia’s finances back to balance?

My table had great people. Social worker, a nurse, a retired teacher, a plumber. All fine and good. However there was a problem. None of us had ever been a Nova Scotian Finance Minister! Increasing revenues is a no brainer, raise taxes. But how would any of us know how to reduce spending by the appropriate amount? There was a strong opinion, at least at my table, that spending should be cut, but how? The Finance Minister should have presented a number of reduced spending scenarios for us to discuss. Mr. Graham also, perhaps subconsciously, discouraged talk of reduced spending. Cutting health, the largest government expenditure, was described in terms of ‘denying our elderly mothers the drugs they needed’, ‘cutting beds for our retirees’, and ‘not buying the best medical equipment for sick people’. Mr. Graham said repeatedly ‘cutting spending is hard’.

Since none were presented a reduced spending option was probably never in the cards. The NDP would prefer not to do something ‘hard’. The inevitable result was a very reluctant acquiescence to higher taxes but only because no other viable alternative on the spending side was presented. And that is a shame since there is no future in this.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.