Toll highway an unqualified success, 20 years later
Nova Scotia’s picturesque Wentworth Valley was earning the epithet “Death Valley” when Richie Mann, transportation minister in the nascent Savage government, decided to put an end to the human carnage. The answer was a modern, divided highway to bypass about 55 kilometres of road where 50 people had been killed over the preceding decade, in accidents that were an all-too-frequent occurrence. Mann’s highway announcement was good news but, like much of what the Savage government did in the 1990s, it came at a steep political price. In this case, that price was palpable. Drivers on the new road would pay a toll.
Fast forward 20 years, and the cadre of senior civil servants appearing before the legislature’s public accounts committee this week searched for superlatives to describe the unqualified success of the Nova Scotia’s only toll highway, the Cobequid Pass. Toll revenue means the Pass is better maintained than any other highway in the province. It will be paid for in 2019-20, six years ahead of schedule, and at least 100 unknown lives have been saved since it opened in 1997. The 45-kilometre twinned highway was built across highland wilderness in just 20 months, a remarkable feat by any measure. The only viable business case to accomplish that required tolls. A toll-free highway would have taken 10 years to build “the usual way.”
In its day, the Savage Liberal government was as reviled as any in Nova Scotia’s political history.
Elected to an overwhelming majority, the talented group of Liberals that took office in June of ’93 ended 15 uninterrupted years of Tory rule, primarily under the politically astute guidance of John Buchanan who recognized that “no” was not a popular word.
They discovered that Nova Scotia was a fiscal basket case, the cost of health care was increasing by 10 to 15 per cent annually and in Ottawa, Finance Minister Paul Martin was turning the financial screws on the provinces, so he could balance the nation’s books.
After a couple of decades of profligate spending, the Savage Liberals hit Nova Scotians with austerity that was unexpected and unwelcomed. Savage himself assumed a role for which he was ill-suited. His tough-love message was mistaken for arrogance when delivered in his hard Welsh accent. He rushed in to deflect away the political flack aimed at his ministers from both left and right. Municipalities were forced to amalgamate, the first casinos in Atlantic Canada came to Halifax and Sydney, the annual increase in health spending went from double digits to zero overnight, and Nova Scotia got a toll road from Masstown, Colchester County to Oxford in Cumberland. Three percent wage rollbacks sent public sector employees into the streets. Doctors moved away. One budget was postponed when upset construction workers took over Province House, filled and nearly collapsed the public gallery balconies.
It was also the government that brought professional emergency medical services to Nova Scotia, was the first in the nation to harmonize the provincial and federal sales tax and made all the tough financial medicine served up since a little easier to take, if only by comparison.
In April, the current Liberal government rejected tolls as a funding mechanism for new highways, so progress on needed twinning of the TransCanada near Antigonish and other 100 series highways will proceed at the usual pace, very slowly.
Fuel taxes don’t cover the costs of Nova Scotia’s highway system now, and with the advent of more fuel efficient and electric cars, a new revenue stream to support roads will be required. Many jurisdictions, particularly in the United States favour user pay tolls.
But in Nova Scotia, no one likes to pay tolls, so it takes a government with uncommon political courage to build a highway in record time, maintain it in near perfect condition with no additional drain on the public purse and save lives in the bargain. Too bad, it sounds like a winning proposition.