HALIFAX—Gary Burrill, the leader of Nova Scotia’s NDP, has grave concerns about what he describes as a lack of affordability in the province.

In addition to being crushed by debt, he said far too many Nova Scotians are paid much less than they are worth, with many working up to three jobs to make ends meet.

He worries about the high grocery bills, rent costs and power bills many struggle to pay. He’s also alarmed by long wait times to access publicly covered mental health services through the province’s Medical Services Insurance (MSI), particularly when he sees how much easier it is to get help if you hold private insurance or have money to pay out of pocket.

“The core difficulty is that we’ve got these two systems. Imagine if a person experiencing a heart attack were to go to the emergency room and they would say ‘Well, if you have X amount of money, you go in this line here we’ll deal with you today. But if you don’t have that, we have another line of services and we’ll see you in three weeks,’ ” Burrill said in an interview Wednesday during his role as Star Halifax guest editor.

“The public wouldn’t tolerate it for this or if we did this for a broken leg or for anything else. But it’s what we do at the moment for mental health.”

Although Nova Scotia face some tough challenges, Burrill argues that tangible solutions are available when we look at not only what’s being done in other jurisdictions, but at our own province’s past.

There are so many issues close to your heart that you could have written about. Why did you choose affordability?

There are an awful lot of people for whom the financial struggle of daily life is chewing up every available brain cell every day. And the government of Nova Scotia needs to have this at the centre of its picture. So to me, when you’re in a situation as we are in Nova Scotia where we have the lowest median income of any province in the country and where we are the only province in Canada where the trajectory of child poverty is getting worse instead of getting better, it is hurtful that the government should speak about the economy as thriving and buoyant and strong.

When people don’t have enough money to live, the economy, by definition, is not thriving and buoyant and strong. When Stephen McNeil says our economy today is thriving when we’re in the situation of the lowest income? This is like saying the operation was a success, but the patient died. The operation is the economy, the patient is money in people’s pockets. If people don’t have the money, if people’s financial life is a deep daily burden of concern and worry, that means the economy isn’t working.

You talk about the fact that many Nova Scotians are consumed by figuring out how to pay for a place to live, dealing with their power bills, and facing the rising cost of groceries. Where does ensuring people are paid a living wage fit in to all of this?

Well it’s a huge thing. We know that in Nova Scotia, just short of half of people whose households are below the poverty line have someone in the house who’s working full time, year round. But their wage isn’t enough to actually get the household up to the poverty line.

We also know that right around a third of people who work for wages in Nova Scotia are working for less than $15 an hour, so no wonder our economy doesn’t work. I mean, fundamentally there are a few basic principles that all good economics is based on. One is people have to live. Another is businesses have to have customers. So when you have a third of your people working for less than $15 an hour, it ought not to be any great shock that, as economists would put it, there’s a chronic shortfall of demand in the economy. Or that businesses do not have enough customers to buy the services and the goods that they have to sell, and that as a consequence we have a comprehensive economic problem.

Low wages are deeply tied to this. This is why in Alberta and B.C. and Ontario, the provinces came to the conclusion this problem must be addressed in order for us to have a strong and buoyant economy. In my judgment, the failure to address this indicates a fundamental lack of understanding about both the needs of the people of the province and what the economy of Nova Scotia needs.

Because you often talk about the fight for $15, what would you say to the small business owners who say they can’t afford that?

A $15-an-hour minimum wage is one of the best things that could happen to the small and medium-sized business sector in Nova Scotia because there’s no business in our province that would not benefit materially from a major increase in the numbers of people who could afford to buy the goods and services they have to sell.

This a chronic common problem throughout the small business sector, that inadequacy of customers. At the root of this is people not having enough money. An economy where everybody had an income that was closer than where we are now to a living wage is as important a thing for the buoyancy of the small business sector as the sector possibly could have.

Regarding mental health care, you point to Newfoundland and New Brunswick, where they have provincially covered programs providing same-day or next-day appointments for mental health. Won’t this be challenging in a province where we’re struggling to find and keep doctors and other health care professionals?

We can’t have an effective, functioning health care system unless we have mental health care that is actually available to the population. The difficulty at the moment is we have two different streams of access to mental health care. For example, if a person should find themselves in a period of dealing with depression or dealing with anxiety, if you’ve got benefits from work or private insurance or you can borrow the money, there’s a wide range of private counselling services, private psychological services. And they’ll get you in if not today, tomorrow. It’s over $100 an hour, and people who are often facing mental health emergencies, this is what they finally have to do.

But if you’re in the situation, which is very common for people in the province, that you don’t have benefits, you don’t have private insurance, you don’t have the room on your credit card to borrow the kind of money needed... then you can’t go that route. You have to go the route of the services that are covered by MSI in the public system. All across Nova Scotia, the wait times for that service are way out of proportion to the urgency of what a mental health care crisis is. We have major parts of the province where this wait time is six, eight, nine months.

Other jurisdictions have looked at this and said “We can’t do this.” We have to develop a system, which they have, of same day or next day appointments when people call in an urgent situation. One of the ways this is accomplished is by a path that’s set out in our legislation called the Mental Health Bill of Rights, which establishes that, and this is not a random number it’s following: World Health Organization guidelines suggest that 10 per cent of your global health care budget should be allocated to dealing with mental health and that we should move to that over a period of the next five years.

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This is not an abstraction nor a pie in the sky. Other provinces that don’t have any more money than we do have dealt with this problem, and we can deal with it, too, and we should. There’s models for how to do it, but you have to begin by saying we have to say we are not going to say to someone overwhelmed with anxiety or depression or other mental health issues in our province that you can’t be treated, you can’t get the help you need for six months, unless you’ve got some money. We can’t do that. That’s not a fair thing to do. And I think that the people of the province expect the government to do better.

What would the ideal, re-implemented provincial rent control system look like to you?

We need to have a system, and this is in the legislation (rent control bill) that we introduced for this, where landlords could make application for higher than a set annual limit in special circumstances or where they had made investments in the property and so on. This would then be heard and adjudicated by an independent third party.

Right now, the problem is that this is being determined entirely by the market, and in a market where you have a fast-shrinking vacancy rate like we have in the HRM, then the upwards pressure on rents is tremendous. This is having a major negative impact on an awful lot of people. It’s very significant that we’ve now got in the province a fifth of the people who are renting pay 50 per cent or more of their whole income in their rent.

Well, people can’t live this way and our economy can’t survive this way.

What do you say to the many Nova Scotians who feel hopeless about all of these issues and who believe that while all parties talk a good game, once in power they just don’t seem to be effectively creating policies or addressing the issues of marginalized Nova Scotians?

These are big problems for sure. But the path toward solutions is laid out before us by what is being done in other jurisdictions. So the chronic shortfall of income, which is rooted in low wages, we’ve seen what B.C. and Alberta and Ontario have done as they’ve moved through dramatic increases in the minimum wage in the direction of $15. That’s not a solution to the whole problem, but it’s a major, dramatic first step.

In our view, a major, dramatic first step is the thing that’s called for. Similarly, on the subject of mental health. We know that with the epidemic of mental health issues, the government of Nova Scotia is not going to be able to snap its fingers and deal with this across the board. But we know that we could make the major, helpful first step as other provinces have done to see that anybody that reaches out for help in our province today is going to get that help today.

We also know with all the problems around the rental market, we’re not going to solve all of those overnight. It has to do an awful lot with the available housing stock and so on. But we know that we could make a major dramatic first step quickly in the government if we went back to the system that we had in the 90s before the Liberal government then did away with it and implemented rent control. Landlords wouldn’t be able to just snap their fingers and say “Your rent is going to be up in three months by X hundreds of dollars” and people are unable to deal with that and have to move.

It’s not the case that any of these problems are kind of beyond our ability to make a move or to make an improvement. We see how to make the move, we see how to make the improvements when we look toward other jurisdictions. Or in the case of rent control, we look to our own past, how we actually dealt with it ourselves before.

These are major moves the government could make. They could do this by the end of the year, which would make a great deal of difference in a great deal of people’s financial lives. But this is not very likely to happen because the government is lost in the thought that in fact our economy is doing, from their point of view, quite wonderfully.

What we’re saying is all the exports in the world, all the bond holder approval in the world, all the demographic positive indicators in the world do not make a positive economic picture when you have profound numbers of the people of your province who actually don’t have enough to live.

Some answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Yvette d’Entremont is a Halifax-based reporter focusing on health. Follow her on Twitter: @ydentremont

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