OPENHANDED SPENDING NEEDS TO COME WITH OPEN BOOKS

Michèle Raymond
Thursday April 30, 2009

I write this on a bright spring morning on the day the Nova Scotia Legislature is finally about to return to session.

It has been a difficult, even a devastating winter for people across North America as financial crisis has brought some of its giant industries to their knees.

Some of that crisis has been the result of uncontrolled use of credit, as huge American banks lent freely on inadequately secured mortgages; other industries have failed as a result of this crisis, which has poured a flood of foreclosed housing onto the American market, and driven down the demand for new construction.

Here in Nova Scotia we have not been immune, as the need for our traditional raw resources has fallen off: lumber, coal, and gravel are less needed now, and the luxury export market for our seafoods has dwindled. We are beginning to understand the effects of climate change, as weather extremes and rising sea level press their demand that we slow the heating process, reducing oil and coal consumption, and spending less energy on travelling and moving goods to distant markets.

Yet we, and everyone else, still need to eat; we still need housing, we still need heat, and we still need medical care. Banks, oil companies and automakers may stumble, but we, as individuals, cannot afford to.

The numbers are staggering. Newscasts talk daily of billions of dollars of loss, and potential replacement by government. Stimulus spending (government job creation) is proposed. The federal government is offering to share the costs of massive “shovel-ready” physical infrastructure projects with the provinces.

The Nova Scotia government has begun to promise individual projects, yet has presented no budget, and has flatly refused to provide any financial updates along the way. A province which in the past year has lost hundreds of fulltime jobs and per capita, more small businesses than any other, is the last in the country to see a budget with the spending proposals for the coming, critical year. Instead, a patchwork of individual promises has been laid out willy-nilly around the province. Some will be of longterm benefit to entire communities; others may not be as enduring, or of use to as many people. They may or may not be justified, but they will require the province to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars, in order to buy into the offered federal money.

This is just as Nova Scotia has begun to dig its way out of the debt incurred by a last spending spree in the 1990s, by using the hardwon money of the Atlantic Accord, which finally recognized the province’s right to the benefit of its offshore oil and gas resources. While Nova Scotia has been scrimping for years just to make the annual interest payments, Nova Scotians have gone without basic services, watching hospitals and schools close, roads crumble and bridges wear thin.

When Nova Scotia won the offshore offset money, the legislature passed a law requiring that it would go to pay down the province’s massive debt. Today, the legislature will reconvene, and will be asked to change that law for an assortment of shovel-ready projects.

Can we afford to buy the federal infrastructure money? Will these projects improve the lives of Nova Scotians? Do they make the best use of our existing built resources, as well as our wealth of natural and human resources: clean energy potential, farmland, coastline, firstclass research and educational institutions? Nova Scotians don’t know; they haven’t been given enough information about the choice of projects, or about the overall state of the province’s finances. Too much decision-making has been done by regulation, in the back rooms of Cabinet, when the House of Assembly has been closed.

It is a great failure that this year, more than any other, Nova Scotians have had to wait so long for the government’s budget and spending plans to be presented, and the chance to decide whether it’s worth going deeper into debt for those plans.

Public money is at stake, for public needs, and the openhanded spending should come with an open set of accounts. Government isn’t something that gets done to people; it should be done by and for people. Nova Scotians deserve nothing less.

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