A pair of releases last week from Statistics Canada may force Nova Scotia politicians to amend their messages on the state of the economy and the rates of poverty in the province.
Let’s start with the economy. To justify his high-handed approach to resource development, Premier Tim Houston has stated as a matter of fact that Nova Scotia has the worst economy in North America. Nova Scotians may find it either unbelievable or frightening that our economy is worse than that of Mississippi, Alabama or West Virginia – States that evoke media images of grinding poverty. But there is stuff on the internet to that effect, which may be the source of Houston’s CLAIM.
It would take someone with a lot more knowledge of economics than I possess to sort out all of the variables and arrive at the conclusion that Nova Scotia is indeed worse off than States of the Deep South or Appalachia. However, there is no need to get into comparing apples (States) with oranges (Provinces) to debunk the Premier’s claim that Nova Scotia has the worst economy in North America. We just need to look to our Maritime neighbours.
According to Statistics Canada data released last week, and reported in great detail by Nova Scotia Finance, Nova Scotia’s real (inflation-adjusted) GDP per capita was $47,451 in 2024, just ahead of Prince Edward Island ($47,199) and almost $1,000 per person better than New Brunswick ($46,467). For Nova Scotia, it’s the third lowest in Canada (and who knows, maybe all of North America) but we were not the worst last year, or for that matter, in 2023 either.
Preliminary estimates for 2023 showed that after having the lowest GDP per capita in the country in 2022, Nova Scotia moved ahead of New Brunswick in 2023. But the revised data released last week reveals that in 2023 Nova Scotia also had per-capita GDP that was higher than that of Prince Edward Island. So Houston’s claim of “worst” was dubious even before the estimates for 2024 came out last week and completely repudiated it.
And there’s more.The GDP figures cited above are income and expenditure based. This week, Nova Scotia Finance published estimates of GDP by industry. The article provides a lot of interesting detail which you can read more about here. Because they measure specific sectors of the economy, GDP by industry numbers are slightly lower than totals for the income and expenditure accounts. However, the pecking order remains the same for 2023 and 2024 – Nova Scotia ahead of both New Brunswick and PEI. And GDP by industry shows that was also the case in 2022 – Nova Scotia $43,240 per capita, followed closely by PEI ($43,205) and New Brunswick ($42,852). So Houston’s claim is refuted, whatever metric you use.
With the Canadian economy showing no growth and unemployment in Nova Scotia up, it is unlikely that the province will see a repeat this year of the economic performance experienced in 2024 when Nova Scotia had the second biggest increase in per-capita GDP in the country. Thanks to that growth rate exceeding the national average, Nova Scotia’s real GDP per capita increased to 79.7 percent of the national average last year, up from 78.9 percent in 2023.
Given Canada’s overall middling economic performance in recent years the fact that Nova Scotia is gaining ground in a slow field is no grounds for complacency. And things are bound to get tougher thanks to the Trump regime, a prospect that Houston has seized upon to justify his push for unbridled natural resource development.
But before dictating that to meet the new challenges we must mine uranium, frack for gas, ravage the forests or surround our coast with drilling rigs and wind turbines we could try to figure out what has been working in Nova Scotia’s economy the last few years. Instead of dubious claims about how bad it is, Houston could engage Nova Scotians in a discussion about the reason for our recent positive economic performance and figure out how to maintain it without destroying our environment.
The possibility that Nova Scotia’s economy has not actually been doing too badly relative to the rest of the country provides a segue into the poverty rate. During the few days in the legislature that passed as the fall session of the House Opposition Leader Claudia Chender’s had her own “worst” – the poverty rate – which at 12.9 percent in 2023 tied with Saskatchewan for the highest in the country.
Making matters worse, although all provinces experienced large increases in poverty since 2020, when rates were reduced because of income support programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), Nova Scotia’s increase in poverty between 2020 and 2023 was second highest in the country.
However, figures released last week present a more optimistic picture.
An update of StatsCanada’s Dimensions of Poverty Hub shows a big change in Nova Scotia’s poverty rate relative to other provinces. While the Canada Income Survey released in May showed an overall poverty rate of 12.9 percent for Nova Scotia, the update pegs the rate at 11.5 percent. As noted, the 12.9 percent rate tied for the worst in the country. The update, based on the Market Basket Measure, Canada’s official poverty metric, shows that Nova Scotia had only the fifth worst overall poverty rate among provinces in 2023.
The table below presents overall rates and rates for children under 18 for 2023 and 2020, from lowest (Quebec) to highest (Saskatchewan).
Rates of Poverty/Child Poverty by province 2023 and 2020
| Province | 2023 overall/children | 2020 overall/children | Change 2020-2023 |
| Quebec | 7.6/6.1% | 5.2/2.4% | 46%/154% |
| Alberta | 9.1/10.5% | 5.5/4.2% | 65%/150% |
| Prince Edward Island | 10.5/12.3% | 7.5/6.3% | 40%/95% |
| Newfoundland&Labrador | 10.9/13.7% | 6.3/6.2% | 73%/121% |
| New Brunswick | 11.3/14.5% | 7.1/4.0% | 59%/262% |
| Nova Scotia | 11.5/13.4% | 7.2/4.9% | 60%/173% |
| Manitoba | 12.1/14.8% | 7.7/7.0% | 57%/111% |
| Ontario | 12.3/14.1% | 7.4/6.2% | 66%/127% |
| British Columbia | 12.5/13.5% | 8.4/6.3% | 49%/114% |
| Saskatchewan | 13.2/16.1% | 6.8/6.6% | 94%/144% |
| Canada | 10.9/11.8% | 6.8/5.1% | 60%/131% |
Source: My calculations based on Table 11-10-0135-01
As the fourth column shows, all provinces have seen drastic increase in poverty rates since 2020, particularly for child poverty. Nova Scotia’s overall increase – 60 percent – is only fifth highest. The increase in child poverty is the second highest, behind only New Brunswick. Because of the small sample size percentage change by province for persons under 18 should be approached with caution. However, the 131 percent increase based on the numbers for Canada as a whole is a reliable indicator of the growth in child poverty.
Quebec and Alberta deserve some credit for keeping overall poverty rates below ten percent, but no government should be excused for letting rates of child poverty go up the way they have since 2020. In Nova Scotia’s case, the fact that such an increase in child poverty occurred during a period when GDP growth was strong is further evidence of the failure of the Houston government’s poverty reduction efforts.
The opposition may need to amend talking points, but there’s every reason for Chender to continue being critical of the Conservatives on the poverty issue. As for Houston and his downbeat pronouncements on the state of the economy, he needs to stop using out-dated numbers to push his controversial development agenda.
-30-
Thank you so much for examining that specious claim that Houston repeats – over and over – about Nova Scotia’s last-place GDP ranking in North America. I also took a look at it in June this year, in this article: https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/dismantling-democracy/premier-tim-houston-sends-reprimand-to-municipal-council-that-asked-for-pause-on-uranium-licences-doubles-down-on-natural-resource-extraction/ … This is what I wrote:
“Houston states in the letter that when you look “at GDP per capita across all 60 American states and Canadian provinces, Nova Scotia ranks last. We are 60 out of 60.”
Houston doesn’t cite the source of this information. But in February 2025, MLA Scott Armstrong, PC MLA for Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley and Minister of Opportunities and Social Development, said in the legislature that “Nova Scotia was 60th out of 60 jurisdictions in North America in terms of per capita GDP growth,” according to a “recent study.”
Again, unnamed.
An Internet search reveals a single 2023 commentary in The Hub – a right-of-centre digital publication – by Trevor Tombe at the University of Calgary, who is a senior fellow at the right-wing, corporate-friendly Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Tombe provides a table that places Nova Scotia 60th for “GDP per capita in 2022.” But this is in a commentary he wrote in 2023 using data from 2022. It is hardly a “recent study.” Progressive economist Jim Stanford handily refutes Tombe’s claims, saying per capita GDP is a deeply flawed measure of prosperity and living. “No, Canada is not poorer than Alabama,” according to Stanford. “Despite lower economic growth per person, most Canadians earn more, live longer and fare better than Americans.”
Houston drew on a simplistic and dubious claim by a single economist to conclude in his letter to the municipal council that Nova Scotia is the “worst performing economy in North America.”
I would agree with Stanford’s point. However, as to the accuracy of Tombe’s and Houston’s claim it may be true if Purchasing Power Parity is taken into account. That’s apparently what Tombe did, working with Statistics Canada data for 2022. But Houston et al don’t use that metric. They say GDP per-capita, and Nova Scotia’s is higher than PEI and New Brunswick.On the overall issue of Canada falling further behind the U.S. in terms of GDP, economist John Rapley had this to say in a recent piece in the Globe and mail. Ever since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 “the growth rate of nearly all Western economies has slowed to a crawl. the exception has been the U.S., but a large asterisk must be placed next to that case because virtually all the U.S.’s growth since then has been bought with debt. Take the massive national debt and deficit out of the picture and the U.S. economy might not have grown at all.”
This demonstrates that GDP tells us nothing about how people are doing. If you have a low GDP with fair distribution, people are well off. Contrarily, a high GDP with unfair distribution (I.e. capitalism) means more people are struggling. Ironically, environmental degradation brought on by big industry, especially mining and industrial forestry, raises the GDP in the first instance and again when the damage has to be remediated.