Health, affordability top of mind for opposition as spring House session approaches
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NDP Leader Claudia Chender said her caucus will focus on what they’ve been hearing from people across the province, which are health care and affordability issues.
“On health care, we will continue to push for all Nova Scotians to be attached to primary care,” Chender said. “This is the key thing that we could solve and I believe would impact every other aspect of the system, if people could have timely access to primary care. We know that there are lots of other things that government must and should be working on but we’ve seen provinces like Prince Edward Island and British Columbia making radical changes to family practice and doctor compensation to make sure that people in their province have access to primary care clinics or what we call collaborative care. We really believe the same needs to happen here in Nova Scotia.”
As of Jan. 1, 129,321 Nova Scotians (13 per cent of the province’s population) were not attached to a family care provider. That number has increased by nearly 58,000 Nova Scotians since Premier Tim Houston and the Progressive Conservatives gained a majority mandate in August 2021.
“On affordability, in terms of the folks that we speak to, housing is a really dominant theme all across the province,” Chender said. “In more rural parts, it’s about the creation of affordable housing, the need for more emergency and transitional spaces but also a big fear around the rent cap coming off in December.
“We know that even with a two per cent rent cap, rents have gone up by nearly double digits in Nova Scotia, which points to the inadequacy of that kind of protection. We also know that the rent cap has been really challenging for some small landlords who can’t keep up with the increased costs with inflation. We have rent control legislation on the books, which we will continue to promote, and we also push for an end to the fixed-term lease loophole so that people don’t continue to get evicted when the landlord wants to raise the rent. We’ll also continue to promote our legislation which would ensure that there is a low-income energy program in Nova Scotia and that we’re meeting our renewable and climate targets and that people aren’t being taken advantage of by Nova Scotia Power.”
Chender said the government’s “big showy piece of legislation,” a bill passed in October and intended to limit Nova Scotia Power’s profit margins, “did nothing in the end to protect consumers and that is something that is sorely needed.”
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The House will also reconvene with somewhat of a Speaker mystery or controversy. In October, Keith Bain, the veteran PC MLA for Victoria-The Lakes in Cape Breton, said he was asked to resign as Speaker by Houston and to sign a letter of resignation that would make his departure from the chair effective April 1.
Bain told reporters that he did not want to resign and it’s not clear if he ever signed the letter.
Chender said there have been several instances of the premier putting people who are friendly to his agenda in places of power.
“This seems to be quite similar,” she said. “Keith Bain publicly sparred with the premier over COVID, attempting to exercise what is his jurisdiction over the legislative precinct regarding keeping his staff and MLAs safe and the premier didn’t like it. The premier was public about that and so was Mr. Bain. If we do see a change in the Speaker, that change will be because Tim Houston would like someone more friendly in that job and that is a real shame because the Speaker is an independent office so when the premier says things like this is succession planning, that is just completely spurious because there is no succession planning for the job of Speaker. The Speaker of the House is elected by the members of the legislative assembly.”
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“In their first budget, the government did spend a lot of money on health care but I have yet to speak to anyone in the province who would say that it has improved from an experiential perspective,” Chender said. “There are a lot of big promises from that (election) platform that have yet to be realized around more money in people’s pockets and local food and universal mental health care, so we will see what is in the budget.””