Premier Tim Houston stood in Wolfville this week and told a room full of business people the deficit might hit $2 billion. He sounded like a man who just found out the credit card bill is due. Let's back up a bit. Besides his own spending rage last fall and spring, now it’s all the Liberals’ fault,
Here is what our premier, who is an accountant, doesn’t say: He put a big chunk of the charges on the credit card himself. The McNeil Liberals passed Bill 148 in December 2015. They used it to impose wage caps on thousands of public sector workers and took away their severance pay and more, looking to balance their books on workers’ backs. That is on them.
Mr. Houston ran for premier in 2021 promising to scrap Bill 148. He called it unconstitutional. He called it wrong. Voters believed him. Then he won the election, and once he sat in the big chair, he changed his mind. He kept the law. He fought the unions in court for five years and the liberals for 6 before that. Together they spent millions in legal fees defending the indefensible. It was under the Houston government that brought in the Toronto Lawyers, not McNeil. Both governments own it, but only one campaigned on killing it and didn’t.
Is there a lesson to learn? Sure. Unions have won award after award in cases just like this. Every time a government tries to legislate away the right to free and fair collective bargaining, the courts have said, "No, not so fast." The Liberals lost that 2021 election, and yes, Mr. Houston watched them lose.
Then he did the exact same thing. He chose the courthouse over the bargaining table. The unions tried to reach an offer to settle without a trial. His government said no. They rolled the dice. They lost. Now that the Supreme Court has struck it down, the unions and the government have 12 months to reach a settlement. That clock is ticking.
Houston is the accountant. He knows numbers. He knew full well they could lose. Any responsible premier would have set money aside. He did not. He neglected to prepare for a loss, and that is on him. Now he warns of a $2 billion deficit. He says the settlement is not in the budget. He acts like this fell from the sky. It did not.
This is the cost of his government and the decision of the one before him. Both his government and the one before chose the path. Working people did not create this crisis. They did not pass Bill 148. They did not want to drag this through the courts for years, but they did what they were required to do and defended their members. They just wanted a fair contract. They want their Charter rights respected. They wanted to sit across a table and bargain in good faith, and that didn’t happen, so now they are not about to reject the court’s decision.
It’s time for the premier to stop the blame-shifting at chambers of commerce events or elsewhere and own it and pay what is owed. The price will be steep. But it only got steeper because they chose to keep this fight going. When the next budget lands, let us be clear about who swiped the card. It was not the workers. It was not the taxpayers. It was the premier who kept it in court for five years longer than needed. If he had repealed the law when he said he would, he could have paid up and blamed the Liberals, but he didn’t. He owns this result as much as Steven McNeil does.