Never mess with a Cape Bretoner. That memo seemed to have missed Tim Houston’s office last week, when the Nova Scotia premier publicly pondered whether Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s choice to declare a state of emergency—one the region issued in the wake of historic snowfall that, quite literally, blocked some residents into their homes—was “just a kind of PR issue.”
Talk about a deep pile to shovel out of.
It didn’t take long for Houston’s political opponents to weigh in after the premier’s remarks. NDP leader Claudia Chender called the PC leader’s comments “rude” and “dismissive,” while Nova Scotia Liberal leader Zach Churchill labelled Houston’s words as “insensitive,” posting on Twitter, “This is not leadership.”
Easy points to score for the opposition, sure—and the kind of political snowballs you’d expect to see lobbed from two people who would like Houston’s job. But even Houston—or someone on the premier’s staff—realized he’d gone perhaps a bridge (or causeway) too far in his Monday remarks. Late Tuesday, Houston issued a statement that he “used a poor choice of words” and “made some unfortunate comments” that “took the conversation away from the important snow removal efforts that are happening.” (Sydney saw 150 centimetres of snowfall between Friday, Feb. 2 and Sunday, Feb. 4.)
The premier backtracked by way of explaining that his intention “was just to make the public aware that resources were coming regardless of a state of emergency being in effect or not.” (CBRM mayor Amanda MacDougall told CBC News, meanwhile, that a state of emergency has helped the region to clear snowed-in streets more quickly by giving police the power to tow vehicles at any time.)
Rest assured, though: Houston vowed on Twitter that when he makes a mistake, he “will always own it.”
Why don’t we take a walk down memory lane?
Houston: Minimum wage jobs aren’t “real jobs”
In one of the last days of the Nova Scotia legislature’s fall sitting in 2021, a recently-elected Houston found himself engaged in a tense exchange with then-NDP leader Gary Burrill over the province’s minimum wage. At the time, Nova Scotia’s minimum wage was $12.95 an hour—but a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found the hourly pay needed to live in most Nova Scotia municipalities was much higher than that. Burrill wanted to know why Houston’s office hadn’t raised the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour—an amount that would have equated to a pay raise for more than half of working Nova Scotians.
“What I’m focused on is the economy of this province and making sure that every Nova Scotian has an opportunity in this province and sees themselves as being able to thrive right here in Nova Scotia,” Houston replied on Nov. 4. Which, to be fair, wasn’t a bad start. But it derailed quickly.
“[That goal] is not driven by the minimum wage,” Houston continued. “I don’t know many Nova Scotians grow up thinking, ‘Boy, I hope I make minimum wage when I grow up.’ That’s not the way people think. They want real jobs.”
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Burrill called the comments degrading. He pointed to the work of many below-$15-an hour earners who had taken on major risks to do their work throughout the pandemic. (According to Statistics Canada, 390,000 Nova Scotians—or roughly 52% of the province’s working population at the time—were earning less than $15 an hour in 2021.)
Houston apologized, saying he chose the wrong words in the heat of the moment. What he meant to say was “better” jobs. He later told CBC News that no, he’s not an elitist, adding that grew up with “tremendous respect” for workers:
“My dad’s 76 and he still works shift work. I’m not an elitist.”
Houston tells striking CUPE workers he works part-time hours as premier
Last spring was a rough one for educational program assistants in Halifax. On May 10, 2023, the EPAs for the Halifax Regional Centre for Education—along with other members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, including early childhood educators and librarians—went on strike. It lasted more than a month. Talks had broken down between the roughly 1,800 school support workers and the province, and the CUPE members felt they weren’t being treated with dignity.
Pay was part of the problem.
“Gross pay is usually about $27,000 to $28,000 a year,” one EPA, Melinda, told The Coast from the picket lines. “But after [deductions], we’re down to about $20,000 to $23,000 a year.” And that yearly salary amounted to 10 months of pay spread out over 12. On a weekly basis, even the highest-paid EPAs—who might gross $37,000 annually—would clear less than $700 a week after taxes. Many would take home pay in the vicinity of $365 to $415 a week.
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The province had proposed a 6.5% wage increase—which, in Melinda’s situation, would have raised her weekly take-home pay from $442 to $471.
“It equals about $1.43 extra an hour,” she told The Coast. “And that’s for the three years that we were offered the contract. We can’t live like this. Most of our EPAs, we work two to three jobs just to try and survive.”
Houston met with striking school support workers when they picketed MLA Tim Halman’s office on June 13, 2023.
“We are at the table,” Houston told workers. “We were at the table on Saturday. We would have been at the table Sunday. I believe in the collective bargaining process.”
Caught in another exchange on video—which was posted that same week (and deleted Tuesday morning) by Halifax Atlantic MLA Brendan Maguire—Houston became more defensive, telling the CUPE strikers that he works 1,000 hours a year.
Redditors were quick to note that if a person worked 40 hours a week and took two weeks of vacation a year, they would still work 2,000 hours—or 1,000 hours more than Houston says he works as premier.
Houston to NS health care workers: “Go like hell”
Last January, Houston made headlines when he told CBC’s Power & Politics that his message to health care leaders was to “go like hell” to fix the province’s fractured health care system.
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At the time, there were more than 129,000 Nova Scotians on the province’s waitlist for a primary care provider. (The province used to provide monthly updates—if occasionally delayed ones—on the waitlist’s total size. As of September, that list had swelled to 142,000 Nova Scotians.)
That number was rather inconvenient for Houston, as he’d campaigned on a pledge to fix a provincial health-care system he described as suffering from “years of neglect.” He promised to cut surgery wait times, revamp mental-health care, give doctors pensions and improve access to primary care. In turn, he won a majority government.
Three years later, Nova Scotia’s primary care waitlist remains. Houston’s government’s pledge for transparency and accountability hasn’t passed muster, either. (The province hasn’t offered an update on its primary care waitlist since September.) And while the ruling PC Party deserves credit for some progress—a pilot project to publicly fund psychologists deserves kudos, for one—the bigger picture feels much the same as before: As recently as two months ago, the head of the Nova Scotia Nurses Union said her colleagues were “very frustrated” with the state of the province’s hospitals, which they described as overcrowded and putting pressure on emergency departments.
To some observers, Houston’s “go like hell” directive seemed like a message pointed in the wrong direction.
“Our healthcare workers are going like hell, and they’re going through hell. And he promised that he would fix this for them,” Nova Scotia Liberal leader Zach Churchill told reporters. (Again, easy points to score for the opposition. And worth mentioning that Houston was inheriting a health care system that Churchill’s party had overseen for the previous eight years.)
In the wake of Houston’s comments, the provincial government followed up with a plan to spend “tens of millions” of dollars to improve emergency room wait times and ambulance response times, among other things. But Nova Scotia Nurses Union president Janet Hazelton wondered if some of the effort would be better spent elsewhere.
“You can recruit [new positions] until forever, but if you don’t figure out a way to retain, it doesn’t matter what your recruitment efforts look like,” Hazelton told The Coast. “It’s keeping them once they’re there.”
Houston amid COVID spike: “Get back out there”
Back in April 2022, Houston and the province’s chief medical officer, Dr. Robert Strang, appeared side-by-side in a video that can only be described as… strange. The premier had been weathering a fair bit of criticism for his government’s handling of COVID-19, namely because the province stopped giving daily updates about the disease and dropped most public health restrictions while infections were surging.
Houston wanted to let Nova Scotians know it was time to move on. (Hence, the Apr. 6, 2022 video with Dr. Strang.) But it didn’t land with Nova Scotians as the premier had planned.
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Under a backdrop of cheery guitar music, Houston stared straight at the camera and began with the following:
“Look, let’s be clear, COVID-19 is present all around us. There’s lots of COVID around.”
(Inspiring! Uplifting!)
“It’s stubborn,” the premier continued. “It’s not going anywhere. And given how contagious the current strain of this virus is, we are going to see cases rise. They’re high now; they could go higher over the next little while, but eventually, we’ll start to see them come down.”
By this point, COVID had killed 151 Nova Scotians and hospitalized just shy of 800 people in the province between Dec. 8, 2021 and April 2022. The province reported 2,800 more positive PCR results on Apr. 6, 2022 than the week before.
“I can’t stress strongly enough the need to continue to take COVID seriously, but you don’t need mandates to tell you how to keep your family safe,” Houston added. “You already know how.”
Boy, did Twitter have some fun.
“Strang looks like he’s in a proof of life video,” Alex Braden commented.
“Every time Houston starts a sentence with ‘Look…’ I know the meaning will be ‘you’re on your own,’” Tanya Gray posted.
Two years onward, and COVID is still with us. And maybe it was wishful thinking that we could have stemmed the spread of COVID entirely. But goddamn, how hard is it to recommend good masks and ventilation?
—With files from Matt Stickland, Kyle Shaw and Lyndsay Armstrong
This article appears in Feb 1-29, 2024.