AL MUIR – PEOPLE’S PARTY OF CANADA
Q: What would your party do to improve rural economic development?
A: The most recent of many attempts to find solutions in this province was contained in the Ivany Report on growing the Nova Scotia economy.
A section of that report — The Government-Led Economy 1950-1995 — outlines the political divide between those who believe there is too much government spending dragging down the economy and those who believe continued government growth is the way forward. The report committed a serious error in ducking the issue. It states, “an extended debate about government versus private sector economic leadership may distract attention away from the tough choices we now face in Nova Scotia.”
In the 1980s a staggering 40 per cent of the province’s GDP, the highest percentage of any Canadian province, was generated by the public sector. That sector is still the single largest component of the provincial economy. A report by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies — Ideas for Alantic Prosperity in 2016 suggested that had the provincial government maintained a public sector similar in size to the provincial average it would have saved a billon dollars.
The role of government in not to pick winners and losers in business. That is the job of the marketplace. What government can and should do is to set policy that interferes as little as possible with the ability of entrepreneurs to create and maintain their businesses and their resulting jobs.
The first step on that path is to remove current interprovincial trade barriers. The second is to reduce regulations that do not have a proven public safety benefit. In particular, regulations that interfere with free market competition. The third is through taxation measures. Only the province can correct the imbalance and unfair taxation their inflated public sector created. As a federal government, we plan to reduce taxation on both individuals and businesses. We will also eliminate the capital gains tax which would further encourage investment.
Q
: Access to high-speed internet has been brought up as a topic of concern in rural areas. What would your party do to address those concerns?
A: For the most part, highspeed internet is a compact between customers and service providers. Market demand that justifies the expense of providing the service will naturally move providers into rural areas. We believe in free competitive markets and their ability to provide required services.
Presently, the CRTC administrates a Broadband Fund expected to disperse $750 million over five years to assist in improving rural access to highspeed internet. Develop Nova Scotia is a similar provincial program funded by $193 million of taxpayer funds. Telecommunication companies inflating prices to existing consumers with the intent of using those excess funds to improve services and attract customers in rural areas is a reasonable business tool. More questionable is the CRTC bureaucracy required to collect and disperse that $750 million generated from the telecommunications companies. In the case of Develop Nova Scotia, taxpayer funding rather than user funding is the issue. It’s a question of whether business or government is better suited to perform the task in an economical manner.
Supplementary to this, individual members of some rural communities have banned together to create public internet service providers rather than rely on existing businesses, in effect becoming businesses themselves, without the injection of public funds — a personal responsibility trend that needs to be encouraged.
Q
: What would your party do to improve mental-health care and resources for people in Central Nova?
A: While physical health-care access is an ongoing concern in Central Nova, mental-health care is in full-blown crisis.
The closure of hospital wards previously allocated to mentally ill patients has become a lightning rod for public attention but the crisis predates those closures. If there is a shortage of physicians dealing with physical ailments there is a famine of physicians equipped to deal with mental illness. For decades, the seemingly simple task of arriving at a diagnosis of what form of mental illness patients are afflicted by has often been a process spread out over a number of years. Resources have always been spread so thin that falling through the diagnosis cracks is commonplace and often not corrected for years.
The lack of resources to deal with this crisis is, in large part, related to the same broader health-care problem. A slavish public devotion to our existing health-care system and the resulting refusal to consider alternatives, like blended private/ public health care models. There are multiple examples to pick from around the world.
That refusal to consider other models of health care delivery squanders resources that could be used for extended care of mentally ill persons. We are in dire need of more residential facility care for people who are unable to safely live on their own and risk homelessness among our mentally ill and addicted without them.
Q
: What would you do to assist the provincial government in its efforts to recruit and retain doctors?
A: Premier McNeil's recent announcement the province will pay for 16 more seats at Dalhousie University for Nova Scotia students is welcome news. Particularly, it is hoped rural students will practice in rural areas because of their upbringing.
But there are problems specific to Nova Scotia and systemic problems with our current health-care system. Currently, Nova Scotia doctors are the lowest paid and highest taxed in the country. Despite substantially increasing amounts of money being applied to the problem Canada is last in rankings of developed countries when it comes to wait times in emergency rooms, to see a doctor or to undergo treatment.
Rather than repeat the failed policies of the last five decades, our party advocates a blended private/public-health care system. This system has been adopted all over the world, but to this point has been rejected in Canada.
Q
: What can be done to help keep young Nova Scotians working and living in Central Nova?
A: The exodus (out west) continues to be precipitated by the lack of economic opportunities and crippling taxation. Taxes can be alleviated by government as our party plans to do, but the entrepreneurial spirit is, unfortunately, something we do not teach in our grade and high schools.
It is convenient and welcome when businesses drawn by our resources, physical and human, set up shop, but homegrown initiative in the absence of them is the only recourse. Selfreliance is only part of the equation. Openly risking failure and facing ridicule when you do is something you must be willing to accept.
Government's job is not to throw up regulatory roadblocks but to offer vision on possibilities. Not in a monetary sense but in ideas. Ideas that consensus can be built around. Ideas that open businesses up to unthought about opportunities. Government that is willing to openly risk the same failure and ridicule business innovators face. Government that says to business you will be welcomed if you conduct your affairs without taxpayer dollars and as responsible corporate citizens.
As a candidate for your government I will offer ideas, risk failure and ridicule, work to build consensus and reject business that does not place people and the environment first and profit second.