The Government of Nova Scotia - Big Government Big Problems

Anyone complaining about this or that policy, party, premier, has a serious problem. One government looks very much like the last. The lack of dynamic change is the problem

“It is not our politicians who will lead the change. The only person who can change our politics is the engaged citizen.” Graham Steele

The Best Of Times and The Worst Of Times

The title quote is from Graham Steele's "Back To Balance" initiative where in 2010 the new Finance Minister traveled our rural regions and asked regular people to come out to ad hoc evening meetings and solve the problem of government spending more money than it was taking in.

There’s an old political joke. We’re all liberals in Canada. The NDP are liberals in a hurry. The Conservatives are liberals who want to go slower.

I think it’s true. In spite of all the fussing, we all want the same things. We all love our friends, home, and family. And we all want the best for Canada. But no matter what political stripe, we’re al also frustrated. Parties change. But nothing else does.

In Nova Scotia, 26.7 percent of all jobs are in civilian government

In 1997, there were 86 public servants (all levels of government) for every 1,000 Nova Scotians. In 2015, there were 101 per thousand, and 95,565 in total, according to Statistics Canada. A rise of almost one-fifth in 18 years shows a lack of discipline by governments of various stripes.

In July 2024 Statscan reported 508k jobs in Nova Scotia, down 8,000 from the spring, with 137k in government jobs!

With a current population of 1,072,545 that’s 128 government workers per thousand people in Nova Scotia.

Today the Nova Scotia government is by far the province’s largest employer with over 60,000 on the payroll directly.

How did it come to this?

When Canadians mark their ballots in upcoming local, provincial, and federal elections, they’re engaging in what seems like a simple act of civic duty. But increasingly they’re not just selecting a representative, they’re hiring a crisis manager to get into the ring with an immense heavyweight unyielding bureaucracy.

The one thing we know about their mandate is that it will be to do things differently than the way they had been being done. Their job will be to manage and lead 360,000 workers who've all been doing things a certain way for the previous 4- 8- 10 years. The new government will want to change that. That’s the job.

Imagine a scenario: the fresh federal government of whatever political stripe comes to power with a clear majority mandate — it’s democracy at work – say a majority team of 200 out of 338 parliamentary seats. This team of 200 might as well be the Greek Spartan 300. They’re tasked with not just governance but leadership over a colossal federal workforce of over 360,000 — the biggest in Canadian history and growing fast - a workforce defined by the procedures and practices of previous governments and their own policies.

Most voters believe they’re electing change. Yet, what’s hard to grasp from the outside is the Sisyphean nature of the job they're assigning. This isn't just about legislating; it's about managing people — a lot of them. There are few things more difficult than changing a large organization’s culture. Especially when you have very few tools to do it.

A 30-Year Story of Change in Nova Scotia Government

 
Per-person inflation-adjusted program spending is a key measure of government size.

Stephen McNeil (2.4 percent), John Buchanan (1.1 percent), Tim Houston (0.7 percent), and Darrell Dexter (0.4 percent) are the four premiers who have increased per-person inflation-adjusted spending the least during our period of analysis. John Savage was the only premier who presided over a decrease on this measure (a decline of 4.0 percent during his tenure). The problem is the government is already to big relative to the size of our population. Far above the national average.

How Did We Get Here?

Following a tumultuous end to the Buchanan years that lingered with caretakers until 1993, the Liberal party returned to government in Nova Scotia.  The 90's were punctuated by the efforts of Dr. John Savage. He tried to return to progressive values and bring the too-big, too-wasteful, too-slow, government into check. He was sabotaged by his own party elites. 

He resigned rather than fight his own party. He lost his wife to cancer. He was diagnosed with cancer himself and, rather than waste away, the last I saw him, not long before he died, he was on his way across the world on a Doctors Without Borders Mission. Just an amazing person.

It's very sad that the people of Nova Scotia never got to have their say about Dr. Savage and his vision for Nova Scotia at the polls. Probably the greatest missed opportunity of our generation. And it's surprising in hindsight that there was so little uproar about his political execution.

In this Welsh doctor, we found the kind of technocrat that the early Progressives dreamed of.
 
It Started By Accident

The Nova Scotia Liberal Party was having its annual general meeting in Dartmouth in February 1992. Savage attended a session of the meeting to bring greetings from the City of Dartmouth, in his capacity as its mayor. Little did he realize that the party's rank and file were about to oust their long-time leader, Vince McLean. He was approached to run for the Liberal leadership and was soon premier.

With everything coming up sixes and sevens in provincial politics these days and everyone speaking out about the lack of vision, leadership and accountability in government it is worth revisiting what Dr. Savage tried to do and what got him killed politically.
 
I was there and saw it happen. At the time it made me swear to myself to never get involved in politics. Now it seems like the best reason in the world for getting involved in politics. I wonder if the people of Nova Scotia are ready to revisit his ideas... and his mistakes?
 
Where we now seem to be lacking in ideas, Dr. Savage was full of them.

John Savage is quoted below from a speech given in Toronto explaining his plan shortly after his election as premier. He laid out the incredible scope of his vision and his courage. It also sealed his fate.

Savage said,
 
      “But to achieve our cost-cutting goals, programmes will be eliminated. There is no other way. In the weeks and months ahead, we face tough decisions.
 
We must maintain and improve delivery of those services Nova Scotians, indeed all Canadians, value most. Necessity demands that we eliminate, or fundamentally alter, the remainder. In Nova Scotia, an uncompromising review of every aspect of government is well advanced.
 
We have initiated management audits in seven major departments. They are being conducted by outside accountants with no vested interests. Only two have been completed so far, but already, the process is uncovering a maze of inefficiency, needless red tape, isolated bureaucratic empires, high stress, low morale, dismal productivity--in short, broken government, and an inefficient, rule-driven bureaucracy that is completely ill-adapted to respond to the demands of a world in transition.
 
The solutions include cutting out layers of bureaucracy; wholesale elimination of departments, agencies and divisions; decentralized decision-making; new management ideas and radically altered attitudes. It won't be easy.
 
Establishing working structures and systems to replace stifling bureaucratic controls is only half the equation--the easy half. Changing attitudes, altering the very culture of the public sector will be more difficult. The days of guaranteed job security, regardless of performance are gone. Productivity, creativity and flexibility will be requirements for success in the public sector, just as they are in private business. We will be hiring more senior managers on term contracts; bringing people in from the private sector to do a specific job. This would allow constant renewal, new ideas, new styles, a more vibrant workplace. Changes of this magnitude are frightening, there is no question. But they are also a source of new hope.”
 
That's a vision!


Savaged and Left Adrift
 
Dr. Savage government also led the country in the creation of tougher anti-smoking legislation, consolidation of school boards and local health authorities, creation of the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, the establishment of one of the most modern emergency health services in North America along with province-wide emergency field communications systems. 

Dr. Savage waged a tough and ultimately successful fight against an entrenched patronage system in the provincial Department of Transportation and Public Works, as well as within his own political party.
 
His anti-patronage policies caused the made men in the backrooms of his party to conspire against him. In its editorial page on March 22, 1997, The Globe and Mail, after citing his list of reforms, called him "the best premier in a generation," and berated both Liberal party members and the public for forcing him to resign.

The Progressive Conservatives returned with their own technocrat, Dr. John Hamm was elected premier in 1999. After taking office, Hamm returned to the Progressive era ideals and what had worked in the Stanfield era for Nova Scotia. He invested more in education and health care. Like Dr. Savage, he took on the waste, mistakes and inefficiency of the Buchanan days, closing and selling government-owned industries such as Sydney Steel and introducing tax cuts that, though modest, were understood and appreciated by most people. That gave a boost to the economy. Unlike Dr. Savage, he was part of a party ready to embrace these ideas and it turned out the public liked this country doctor's style too.

His government also passed tough lobbyist registration legislation, introduced smoking cessation initiatives, provided new funding for community college modernization - more education - and achieved historically high economic growth and employment numbers. His government was the first to truly balance provincial finances in 25 years in 2002. He retired from his public service in 2006 after 10 years in the party - never becoming a career politician.

The party continued for yet another term under Rodney MacDonald. But again, like the Buchanan era, too long in government, too much waste and inefficiency, combined with a lack of ideas and ideals. “Mistakes”, as they say in government, “were made.” The province, along with all its political parties was adrift.

In the years since each and every political party in Nova Scotia has been given a term in government supported by enthusiastic majorities of voters who have given clear mandates about what matters to them and what they want.

What did we get? Some colossal economic development schemes gone wrong.  A lot of stuff that is just popular with the political class and activists. A much bigger government. A much bigger debt. And a lot of lost ground on important issues like the economy, the environment, taxes, infrastructure, jobs, and healthcare. That last is maybe most notable. Though not unique to Nova Scotia, we now spend fully half our provincial budget on Healthcare. It’s a huge mega-organization even by the standard of big multinational corporations. And if we’re being honest, it doesn’t seem like our elected government has much, if any, sway over how it operates.

It doesn’t seem to matter at all which party is elected. Government keeps getting bigger.

What Exactly Is Wrong?

It's the bureaucratic behemoth. These officials, having accrued power and autonomy over years, now present a formidable challenge to any significant change. They are the unseen counterforce to our elected representatives – unnamed, unaccountable, unfirable, and largely unknown.

---

---

The change needed to bring the inefficiency, bad deals, waste, and bureaucratic elites of government into check never went as far as it should have done. Each party in turn offered up expensive solutions but was never able to articulate the actual problem. Worse, each party’s capacity to stand up to and mange the layer of permanent bureaucratic elite that held sway in Halifax got weaker with every new election.

Even a commission led by Ray Ivany was not able to explain to Nova Scotians exactly what the problem was and what our goal should be. Nova Scotia was left with a Mousetrap game of expensive, distracting and quarrelsome means goals running this way and that to what end no one was sure. Many are discouraged, disengaged, and suspicious of government of all stripe.  Meanwhile, the bureaucratic fiefdoms grow bigger and stronger.
 
Though it’s easy to see the fault in bureaucracy truth is we need it. The bureaucracy is the arm of governments needed to honestly carry out the policies and paths defined by our elected representatives. But democracy is called self-government for a reason. If we defer decisions of the day to bureaucratic professionals it’s not really democracy.
 

Government By Bureaucratic Elite


Government by bureaucratic elite is the biggest issue Nova Scotia faces today as one of the first truly mature democracies in all of modern history. It is the cause of the lack of dynamic change in Nova Scotia and the reason why one recent government looks very much like the last - no matter what party or political stripe. Far from being behind, we are on the very cutting edge. How we proceed from here will impact the fate of the whole world. The stakes are very high. Unfortunately, the modern bureaucratic professional has the advantage. They can commit themselves fulltime to their mischief. They are astonishingly well paid, unfirable, unaccountable, mostly unnamed. They know the words and the tricks of the trade and they can play a long game that a citizen representative elected for four years at most can only dream of. They enjoy the benefits of being specialists. Their training is superior. They can devoted themselves fully to their interests where the elected citizen is torn between competing interests. And most of all, in our modern society that so respects experts in all fields, no matter how well or passionately a citizen makes their case the bureaucrat, clothed in all the dignity and respect of their office can simply brush the often angry and self-interested citizen aside and say a few professional junk words, quote an internal study or review, may toss out a few numbers, and demand to be respected.
 

How Much Government Has Grown

Nova Scotia leads the country in one respect. We have the biggest government, relative to the size of our economy by far.

This also means we have the least productive bureaucracy in the country by far, producing less economic activity per dollar invested in government than any other province.

To put that in a global perspective, even famously socialist countries get more back for less government with Sweden equaling 47 percent of its economy; Norway, 39 percent; Iceland, 48 percent; Denmark, 45 percent; and Finland, 53 percent.

But there’s good news. If you reduce the size of government, you help unleash dynamic growth. When Ireland moved to shrug off its “have-not” status as northern Europe’s economic laggard, its key goal was to shrink government and broaden the space for the private sector. It worked.

Some Lies We Hear

It’s not good enough to say the population is growing therefore so is government. The idea was that we grow because it makes life and government more efficient. And in truth the size of government is growing at a higher rate than even the population. Worse, the population is growing more than the overall economy we’re investing in so the more government, and the more people, the worse off each Nova Scotian is when divided their share of the pie. a lot worse off. Per person, economic activity is less now than it was ten years ago. I don’t need to tell you that. You can feel it.

Time To Revisit The Parties

Can we ask Nova Scotia to reduce the size of its government towards the national average in ways Dr. Savage proposed, moving more workers to frontline positions and reducing the layers of bureaucracy and middle management where such a large portion of the workforce and our lost productivity reside?

The only solution is to rebuild parties with management tools needed, powered by the ideals and vision that animated the progressives, to stand up to big power. These parties need to be supported not by this or that corporate, powerful, organizational, or union interest but by regular households. Maybe in the end, Mr. Steele is right. It is up to citizens... but indirectly in making better parties, being less divisive (we're all in this together), and choosing better candidates.

We need to elect people into government with the experience, skills and fortitude to push the bureaucratic dragon back into its proper, and much-appreciated form.

Like dieting, it’s a health-conscious mindset and a direction as much as a destination.

With a clear end goal in mind, we need to make government in Nova Scotia, and our economy more productive by reducing it's bloated and growing size. It’s amply proven that we can afford to make mistakes – lots of them - but we can’t afford to lose control of government to a diabetic bureaucracy that is growing in unhealthy ways.