It was a year ago this week that Tim Houston led the PC party to an overwhelming electoral victory, winning 78 percent of the seats in the Nova Scotia legislature. The sweep followed a particularly nasty campaign, dominated by attacks on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and his carbon tax, with a few side swipes at individual provincial election candidates. Sadly, the negative bullying tone set during the campaign and the months leading up to it has continued over the past year.
With both Trudeau and the carbon tax gone, and with Trump threatening our economy from the White House, Houston came up with new villains and new policy priorities to guide his enlarged mandate. Although he barely mentioned it during the campaign, he suddenly went all in on unrestrained resource development, while scapegoating imaginary “special interests” who are supposedly standing in the way of great wealth from our natural resources.
As reported here, natural gas and uranium were among “countless opportunities” Houston claimed are being impeded by “special interests (which) have captured too many parts of our economy and have had an out-sized voice in policy creation.” To show who’s boss, Houston brought in legislation at the first session of the newly-elected assembly to lift long-standing bans on uranium mining and fracking for natural gas.
And as discussed here, in a Trumpian move to intimidate opposition to his agenda, Houston used the throne speech and budget address in an unprecedented attack on imaginary foes. Instead of just outlining the government’s legislative and spending plans, Houston and his apparatchiks obliged the Lieutenant-Governor and the Minister of finance to read over-the-top screeds attacking “special interests” who allegedly stand in the way of the great wealth that will supposedly flow from mining uranium and fracking for methane.
Forestry next
After no one came forward to seize the uranium or methane “opportunities” created in the spring, the fall session of the legislature focussed on forestry, another resource whose extraction is supposedly being impeded by troublemakers.
Tucked away in an Omnibus Bill 127 that amended about a dozen different laws were changes to the Crown Lands Act to better protect forest access roads and forestry companies from interference, while increasing ten-fold the possible fine to anyone getting in the way.
Under the new rules, anybody who “erects, occupies or uses a structure” that harms the economic interest of the crown or impedes lawful use of crown lands is subject on summary conviction to a fine of up to $50,000 or to up to six months imprisonment, or both.
Whether through Machiavellian design or bumbling incompetence – still to be determined – the crown lands amendments came three weeks into a blockade of a forest access road in the Cape Breton highlands by Mi’kmaw activists and supporters. They were protesting the impact of clearcutting by Port Hawkesbury Paper on the moose population in the highlands.
To make matters worse, the government failed to consult the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Chiefs before bringing in the draconian legislation governing (unceded) crown lands. ”Making decisions at this speed, while clearly dismissing our Mi’kmaw voices and concerns, is not peace and friendship,” Chief Sidney Peters said in a news release issued by the Assembly, referring to the Peace and Friendship treaties that were first signed by the Crown and the Mi’kmaq 300 years ago.
Disparaging institutions
As the Assembly of Chiefs discovered, high-handed treatment is par for the course with the Houston government. Although it is a few decades younger than the Peace and Friendship treaties, the Nova Scotia House of Assembly (born 1758) was also dissed by Houston who accelerated the trend that’s been going on for the last decade – keep legislative sessions as short as possible and daily sittings as late as you can.
With Bill 127 limiting opportunities for debate and public input, the fall session lasted only eight days – including a couple of midnight oil burners. With the eight-day fall sitting added to 22 days spent in the house last spring, sitting days so far in 2025 add up to only 30, a modern day record.The legislature used to sit a lot more. Under the NDP government the House sat an average of 63 days a year. The McNeil Liberals lowered that average to 46 days a year (not counting the pandemic year).
Keeping the House of Assembly closed most of the time is not the only McNeil-era practice Houston has picked up and run with – there is also centralization of power. McNeil’s signature move was the abolition of school boards. Houston promised to restore them, but he didn’t, embarking instead on his own pet centralization project – taking over planning control in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
That initiative took place in the Houston government’s first term, but it didn’t prevent the PCs from taking seats from Liberals in HRM in 2024. Perhaps emboldened by this, the PCs have made more power grabs, affecting universities and municipal transportation policy. And in an effort to impose his resource extraction fantasies, he criticized municipal politicians in Pictou and Hants West who balked at the prospect of uranium mining in their areas. He delivered a not-so-subtle threat, a letter asking them to support resource projects, while listing in detail the discretionary money the province spends in their communities.
Court bashing
In other Trump-like moves, Houston has joined the growing trend among Canadian politicians of various stripes to criticize judges. He took issue with the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal’s refusal to rule whether the federal government had exclusive authority over the Isthmus of Chignecto. That was one of the issues – including the carbon tax – that Houston flogged in his successful effort to run an election campaign against Trudeau and the federal government.
The judges correctly described the case put before them by Nova Scotia as an attempt to enlist the court in a political dispute – that is – who is responsible to pay for the remediation of the Isthmus? Legally, that was the end of the matter, but Houston couldn’t let it go without taking a shot.
“When the court is asked a question about interprovincial affairs, it should answer it,” he complained. That led the Canadian Bar Association to warn that his comments risked blurring the public’s understanding of the distinction between the roles of the judiciary and elected politicians, but that rebuke was dismissed by a Houston spokesperson.
Appeal Court judges are appointed by the federal government and therefore have some protection from bullying by provincial premiers. This is not necessarily the case for provincial judges, two of whom provoked the ire of the Premier when they allegedly banned the wearing of poppies in their courtrooms in Kentville.
Houston made national headlines when he posted that the “order was issued under the guise that the poppy is somehow a ‘political statement.’ This is disgusting. The poppy is not a political statement. It is a symbol of remembrance and respect for the fallen and those who served and continue to serve our country.”
The identity of the judges and the nature of the “order” remains somewhat murky, but what the incident makes clear is that while he has little regard for judges, Houston’s a fervent supporter of the military and Remembrance Day observance as important institutions – and opportunities for politicking.
Last year, in the midst of the provincial election campaign, he targeted staff at an elementary school in Sackville after a newsletter went out requesting that “to maintain a welcoming environment for all,” serving members of the armed forces attending a Remembrance Day gathering wear civilian clothing. Although the educators explained that they were making the request in deference to students recently arrived from war-torn countries, Houston would have none of it. “Leaders at the school are disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country.”
The polls
If the election result and recent polling is to be believed, the Nova Scotia public is okay so far with Houston’s style and the overall performance of his PC government. The latest quarterly Premiers’ approval ratings from the Angus Reid Institute show Houston with a positive rating of 53 percent, second best behind Manitoba’s Wab Kinew and 12 percentage points higher than the Nova Scotia Premier’s rating in September 2024, two months before the election.
An updated Premiers’ approval rating will be coming out soon from Angus Reid, and it’s not likely to show a lot of change. An online survey of 600 Nova Scotians (margin of error of 4.1 percent), conducted in mid-September by Abacus Data, found a 52 percent approval rating for the Houston government. The only place the PCs may be losing support is Halifax, where they are just ahead of the NDP. That slide is offset by support in the rest of the province, especially on the mainland outside Halifax, where the Abacus survey found that 67 percent would have voted PC had an election been held in mid-September.
But that level of support is unlikely to last. As argued here the size of the Conservative majority elected last November- 43 PCs against 12 in the opposition – was less a ringing endorsement of the PCs than it was a reaction to the carbon tax and the unpopular Justin Trudeau regime in Ottawa. That combination of Ottawa bashing, unprecedented attacks on individual candidates, a postal interruption interfering with distribution of election information and just-completed municipal elections was a recipe for a low turnout – well under 50 percent for the first time in recorded history.
Of the 788,427 people eligible to vote, only 357,048 went to the trouble of doing so. The Conservatives received 187,456 of those, meaning that only 23.8 percent of eligible voters supported Houston’s team, a smaller mandate than most majority governments have received over the last 40 years.
Many of the 54.7 percent of eligible voters who didn’t come out to vote in 2024 probably leaned in normal times toward the Liberals. But, testimony to the effectiveness of the Trudeau demonization campaign, only 80,000 voted for the provincial Liberals in November. That was a drop of almost 50 percent from 2021. But then, just six months later, more than 330,000 Nova Scotians embraced the Liberal brand once Trudeau left the scene to be replaced by Mark Carney and Trump-phobia.
The Trudeau departure alone creates a challenge for Houston and the PCs. With the level of support he received from Nova Scotians in the federal election Mark Carney is off limits, at least for now. Added to the loss of a federal punching bag is a predicted provincial deficit, caused in part by ill-advised tax cuts. After years of big spending, austerity looms, joining lingering criticisms of the PC record on health care, power rates and the cost of living. No wonder Houston has been keen to replace Trudeau bashing with new targets – be they environmentalists, municipal politicians, judges or educators.
This week, Houston and the Conservatives marked the one-year anniversary of their big win with a gathering of party faithful. Houston was there to announce that, despite some rumours about federal ambitions, he is planning to run for a third term.
And standing behind a podium with a sign reading “Defend Nova Scotia” he made it clear that what we have been hearing from him for the past year is only the beginning. “The PCs are the only party that can defend Nova Scotia,” he said. “We build it and they try to block us but we are the party that will build it.”
Who are they? And defend from what? Stay tuned.
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