The Houston government’s much-anticipated austerity budget, with its proposed cuts to arts and disability support programs, has hit very close to my home.
Thankfully, Houston rescinded, and apologized for, the cuts to community-based agencies that support persons with disabilities such as our son Sam. This followed widespread criticism and anti-budget rallies which also led to rollback of plans to cut some services for seniors and scholarships for African Nova Scotian students.
However, despite the loudest anti-budget outcry coming from the arts community, as they paused the budget debate for March break the PCs stood firm on their plan to cut over $14 million from the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage.
As the name suggests, the department has a multi-pronged mandate, and no tine was spared from attack.Getting the chop were community fitness programs, tourist information centres and a dozen provincial museums – including Prescott House, just down the road from my ancestral home at Starr’s Point. And in this household, that’s not even the half of it.
Formac, which has published all three of my books and hosts this blog, had its grant through the Publisher’s Assistance program cut entirely. Thirty percent cuts were also inflicted on Nova Scotia’s network of live theatres – two of which in past years commissioned plays by my partner, Wendy Lill, that went on to be nominated for Governor-General’s awards for English drama. So although my bias on this topic is predictable, this blog is fact-based and will remain in that territory.
In the days ahead, as people get another chance to protest the arts cuts you may hear perfectly reasonable arguments about the fecklessness of cutting a few million from arts and heritage grants to deal with a billion-plus budget hole. And others will cite analysis – most recently presented in this report supporting the economic multipliers of arts investments. That’s all good, but there is also something to be gained by delving into publicly available documents to shed more light on the poor choices the Houston government has made.
To that end, let’s start with the key talking point of Houston and other Conservatives use to defend against claims they are against the arts community. Asked why they are cutting arts funding, Houston had this to say:
“I don’t consider a $66 million investment in a sector to be an attack by any stretch of the imagination,” he told the legislature. “That $66 million investment that we are continuing to make with this budget is up from $50 million to the government’s previous, and it was stuck at 50 for almost a decade. We are investing.”
Sounds somewhat convincing, but going from $50 million to $66 million is a 32 percent increase in funding for the arts – however defined – which is significantly less than the 43 percent increase in overall spending over five years recently highlighted by the Auditor-General. Clearly, the arts aren’t the government’s top priority – and there is another problem with the government’s defence.
It is impossible, from budget documents and public accounts to find either the $50 million spent by the the previous government in 2020-1 or the $66 million in 2025-6 supposedly spent on the arts and culture sector. Those numbers and a matching category are simply not among the eleven expenditure items listed in annual estimates for the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage (CCTH). So we’ll have to take Houston’s word for it – with a grain of salt.
Houston’s numbers may be factual but concealed somewhere between the lines in the estimates. Meanwhile something that does stand out glaringly is the fact that the department, employing the kind of additional appropriations criticized by the Auditor-General, has been drastically overspending its budget the last five years – and apparently doing it in a way that generally excluded the people and organizations that are now being cut.
According to figures in the Public Accounts the Houston government overspent the CCTH budget by more than 50 per cent between 2021 and 2025, as shown in the table below, a shocking number even by that government’s lax standards.
Table 1: Actual vs. Budget spending CCTH 2021-25
| Fiscal Year | Estimate $m | Actual $m | Overspent $m | Overspent % |
| 2021-2022 | $137.8 | $245.2 | $107.4 | 77.9% |
| 2022-2023 | $142.0 | $249.6 | $107.7 | 75.8% |
| 2023-2024 | $172.0 | $209.1 | $37.1 | 21.8% |
| 2024-25 | $171.8 | $242.3 | $70.5 | 41.0% |
| 4-year total | $623.6 | $946.2 | $322.6 | 51.7% |
Source: Public Accounts, my calculations
As the table shows, over the four-year period the legislature approved spending of $623.6 million for the Department, but the government spent $946.2 million, an additional outlay of $322.6 million without legislative approval. That’s a large chunk of change, considering the government has now resorted to nickel-and-diming individual artists and arts organizations into crisis with relatively smaller cuts in the tens-of-thousands.
Over-spending concentrated
The obvious question arising from the numbers is why, given all of the overspending, arts groups are up in arms over cuts contained in the budget that amount to less than $10 million? The answer, it would appear, is that most of that overspending did not directly benefit the organizations and individuals now being negatively affected.
The Public Accounts do not break down spending within departments. For that, we must rely on the Budget documents which contain only estimated and forecasted spending, rather than the actual amounts. However, despite that limitation, the budget documents give a pretty good indication of where the over-spending took place.
As Table Two shows, that was primarily in two areas – a category described as Development Programs and the Film and TV Production Incentive Fund.
Table 2: Department overspending by component and year ($000,000)
| 2021-22(f) | 2022-23(f) | 2023-24(f) | 2024-25(f) | 2025-26(f) | Total 2021-6 | % of total | |
| Total Dept. | $115.0 | $109.8 | $36.3 | $83.2 | $32.6 | $376.9 | 100% |
| Develop | $55.8 | $97.8 | $39.2 | $40.3 | $0.8 | $233.9 | 62.06% |
| Film&TV | $23.6 | $4.2 | ($2.7) | $38.0 | $29.7 | $92.8 | 24.62% |
| Rest of Dept. | $35.6 | $7.8 | ($0.2) | $4.9 | $2.1 | $50.2 | 13.32% |
Source: Budget Estimates, my calculations
(Note that the departmental overspending totals for the years 2021-25 don’t match those in Table 1 because they are based on budget forecast, rather than actual results as reported in the public accounts. However, for those four years the difference between the two sources is only about $20 million.)
As table two shows Development Programs – which some may call a slush fund – and Film and TV were responsible for about 87 percent of overspending from 2021 to 2026. In the most recent four years it’s even higher, close to 95 percent. Other programs in the department – including tourism, grants to theatres, publishers, museums, libraries and sports and recreation, along with Acadian Affairs, African Nova Scotian Affairs, Gaelic Affairs and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia – seem to have stayed more or less within their budgets.
That’s not to say that some of those entities did not benefit from the windfalls coming through Development Programs. Information about who received what from the department is reported in the annual supplements to the Public Accounts. Unfortunately there is no explanation of why a grant was made or from what section of the department it was funded. But given its bloated spending, it’s safe to assume that Development Programs would be the source of many of the grants.
When all of that non-budget pre-election money was flowing out between 2021-22 and 2023-24, many communities received large one-time grants – for example, $7.0 million to the Oxford Community Center, $6.45 million to Inverness, $6.05 million to Barrington, $6.0 million to New Dawn in Sydney and $8.2 million to Cape Breton University. All well deserved and well documented, one assumes, although not allowed to be debated in the Legislature.
Sports facilities and events also benefitted – $4.2 million to the Mariner’s Centre in Yarmouth (and another $3.0 million in 2024-5), $3.0 million to Dartmouth’s Banook Canoe Club, $3.1 million to Halifax’s Mayflower curling club and $3.0 million to the Sydney curling club on the facilities side, as well as $1.9 million for events like the World Canoe/Kayak championships in Dartmouth and $1.1 million to the Indigenous games in HRM. Hockey Canada also scored a $1.8 million grant in 2022-23.
A few arts organizations also popped up in the Public Accounts supplements as winners- about $7 million to Pictou’s deCoste Centre, and about $2 million each to Windsor’s Mermaid Theatre and Guysborough’s Mulgrave Road Theatre.
These kinds of expenditures, because they often come in response to requests from outside government, are likely hard to estimate at budget time. One approach to prevent over-spending is to put a cap on discretionary funding and say “better luck next year” once the cap is reached. Houston’s approach, as he explained in the legislature last week, has been and will continue to be completely different.
“When we can do more, we’ve done more,” he said. “We’ve done more with additional appropriations to support the sector. When our economy grows … when there’s more, there’ll be more for everyone.”
Another Conservative, ex-cabinet minister Brian Wong, added his thoughts about what happens when there isn’t more.
“When we have the money, we will spend it and invest in Nova Scotians,” he said. “When we don’t have the money that means we have to claw back some until we get ourselves in a better financial position.”
Not a recipe for stability of funding in the arts sector, and unfair to boot. As the record shows, there’s been a lot more money for some, a bit more for others. Now the cupboard is bare, and those who did not get very much more are the primary targets of the claw back. In this year’s budget, the Department is to get an estimate-to-estimate decrease of $5.3 million- but even after years of over-spending Development Programs and Film and TV receive modest increases. And as the Houston government has shown consistently, budget estimates are notional – who’s to say those two entities won’t continue to overspend?
Noteworthy about the discussion so far is that the imbalance in funding has gone unremarked. Perhaps that’s because no one – even when the scent of the pork barrel is in the air – wants to criticize government grants to community initiatives particularly when those grants contribute to lasting community facilities or help to sponsor events that bring in tourists or add to locals’ enjoyment.
As for questioning the overspending on film and television, subsidies to that industry have become a third rail of Nova Scotia politics, an expenditure that no politician seems prepared to challenge. We’ll look further into the politics behind that and discuss the need for further inquiry into the costs and benefits of the film and TV subsidies in a second post, coming soon.
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I admire your courage . . . not for challenging the arts cuts but for trying to make sense of the figures. My impression is that the cuts will most directly affect small local cultural enterprises – e.g. theatre – which are one of the things that make local communities attractive places to visit . . . and are among the reasons why people travel to Nova Scotia as a tourist destination. It is hard to equate such spending with the impact on tourism . . . but who wants to stay overnight in little places where nothing is happening?
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what comes up in your next run at the stats.
ip