Building our budget together? The limits of Nova Scotia’s “consultation”

With the 2027-28 Nova Scotia budget likely to be tabled in early 2027, the Nova Scotia government is beginning a public consultation process, which the Premier has described as an opportunity for people to have their say. On the surface, this might seem like a good thing: after the significant outcry and protests that followed last year’s budget and its $350 million in cuts to programs and services–some of which were subsequently reversed–surely listening to the public in advance of the budget would be a good idea?

And so it would–if the government had any intention of doing so. However, the impression one gets from the government’s “Building Our Budget Together” website is that it is simply intended to justify the government’s own choices–and to mislead people into thinking that their preferences and thoughts have been taken into consideration in the process.

Consider the “Build your own budget” tool on the website. A budget necessarily has two sides to it: revenues and expenditures. However, after page three summarizes Nova Scotia’s revenue sources, page four states that any policy change to increase revenues in the short-term simply “isn’t on the table.” In other words, half of the entire budgeting process is exempt from the “public consultation process.”

If you, like the authors of the CCPA’s 2026 Alternative Budget, think that we should reform our tax system–by increasing the top marginal tax rate, or increasing the capital gains inclusion rate, or making more tax credits refundable, or any number of other reasonable reforms–then the government doesn’t want to hear from you.

If you think that Nova Scotia’s strong long-term fiscal outlook, with a low debt-to-GDP ratio, would make a somewhat larger deficit a sensible way of financing long-term investments in housing and poverty reduction (among other things), you’re also out of luck–that is also off the table.

What is on the table is on pages five and six, where you can reallocate the existing budget across departments, and then across programs within departments. This is a useful exercise on the surface, and ultimately it is how a provincial budget is constructed. However, it would be challenging for any member of the public to wade through this amount of detail, across dozens of programs; even for an economist like myself with a research focus on public finance, it was hard to assess how much I should increase or decrease funding on individual programs. For example, is $98.0 million an appropriate amount to spend on highways and bridges? Is $263.1 million enough of an investment in cyber security and technology? I don’t have the knowledge or information to be able to answer these sorts of questions.

Rather than collecting meaningful information on the top priorities of the people of Nova Scotia, the whole process seems to be designed to be a public relations exercise, allowing the government to claim that they have listened to the people when they make their spending cuts. The lack of any choice on revenues, and the excessive choice on expenditures, also seem to be designed to emphasize the complexity of the process and make people throw up their hands and give up.

To return to the question of revenues, the “Build your own budget” tool does emphasize that “A stronger, growing economy (more businesses, more investment, more jobs) naturally brings in more revenue over time without raising taxes or fees.” This is true, of course, but it leaves open the question of how to ensure a stronger, growing economy, and whether the government’s approach will achieve this goal. Rather than an ineffective approach based on tax cuts and corporate handouts, the CCPA’s 2026 Alternative Budget includes investments in areas such as the care economy, green energy, and public transit: more accessible child care to allow parents to return to work when they are ready, supports for workers with disabilities, more affordable and sustainable electricity, and a reduction in traffic congestion when transit is a better option for more people. All of these promise to be much more successful strategies for encouraging inclusive growth.

Finally, the government’s public consultation process includes a series of “engagement sessions”, both online and in person across the province. But it is not clear how these sessions, and the information gathered at them, will inform the budget process. The government has appointed an “independent advisory committee” which will attend the sessions and publicly report on what they hear, but according to the CBC, the committee will not be authorized to make recommendations to the government.

The principle of listening to the public when preparing a budget is certainly a positive one. But at this point, it is hard to give this government the benefit of the doubt, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that the government is treating this solely as a public relations exercise to justify the cuts that will follow in the upcoming budget.

CCPA-NS encourages Nova Scotians to make their views heard by submitting their ideas directly to the Department of Finance ([email protected]) and by sending a copy to us at [email protected]. We suggest skipping the government’s budget tool and instead attending a consultation session, prepared to put forward your own priorities and ideas—including those outlined in the CCPA-NS Alternative Budget.