The Difference Between Cooking Spaghetti and Making Public Policy
Tuesday morning, the Premier of Nova Scotia partially responded to the concerns of Nova Scotians by reversing some of the budget cuts announced two weeks ago. These changes restore $53.6 million to supports and programming for people with disabilities, seniors, and African Nova Scotian and Indigenous students. According to the Premier, they had got it wrong and he was sorry.
While this announcement was welcome and an important step, it also suggested to me that Mr. Houston might benefit from a short lesson in the difference between cooking spaghetti and making good public policy.
When cooking spaghetti, one common method of testing whether it is ready is to throw a strand at the wall and see if it sticks. If it sticks, dinner is ready. If it falls, you keep cooking.
It is a perfectly acceptable technique in the kitchen.
It is a much less impressive approach to governing a province.
Unfortunately, Nova Scotians have now seen this approach more than once. When a policy “sticks,” it stays. When it slides down the wall after a loud public reaction, it disappears.
We saw this most clearly in May 2022 when the government introduced a controversial 2 percent property tax on non-resident property owners. The tax was presented as a measure that would help improve housing affordability.
But when opposition grew loud enough, the Premier abruptly cancelled the policy, explaining that the “reputation of our province is more important than any policy” and that the tax was not the right tool for the job.
Curiously, however, the government left another measure in place: the increase in the deed transfer tax on non-residents to five percent, which has since been increased to ten percent.
What made this episode particularly interesting was that during the debate a report from the Voluntary Planning Task Force on Non-resident Land Ownership in Nova Scotia resurfaced. The report had been commissioned by the government of Premier John Hamm, a government from the same political party as Mr. Houston, in 2001.
Its conclusions were quite clear. The task force recommended against imposing an extraordinary tax on non-resident landowners, concluding that such a measure would be discriminatory, unfair, and unsupported by evidence. The report also noted that non-resident property owners were often used as convenient scapegoats for broader economic challenges.
Yet in 2022 the government appeared unaware of this earlier work, even though it had been commissioned by its own party.
When the report was raised publicly, the Premier brushed it aside with little apparent concern about the rather obvious gap in the policy process.
If new evidence had emerged linking non-resident property ownership to the housing crisis, it was never presented.
This brings us back to the difference between cooking spaghetti and making good policy.
The “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” method works well in the kitchen. But good public policy is supposed to follow a different recipe.
Good policy is evidence informed. It looks at existing research. It considers what we already know about what contributes to healthy and prosperous communities.
Which brings us to the budget cuts that were partially reversed this week.
The restored programs, those that support people with disabilities, seniors, and African Nova Scotian and Indigenous students, are all important investments in Nova Scotia’s social and economic wellbeing. Reinstating them was the right decision.
However, other cuts remain in place — including reductions to arts and culture.
This is puzzling, because the evidence about the economic importance of the arts is not exactly obscure.
A recent report from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar invested in the arts generates roughly twenty-nine dollars in economic activity.
In Nova Scotia alone, arts, culture, and heritage contributed about $2.6 billion to GDP in 2023 and supported approximately 22,000 jobs.
In other words, these sectors are not luxuries. They are significant contributors to the provincial economy. Arguably, if the government had consulted the evidence before designing the budget, it might have discovered that cutting arts and culture is not particularly good economic policy.
But apparently these cuts stuck to the wall. Which suggests that, at least in this case, arts and culture may have failed the spaghetti test.
And so, for the moment at least, they remain.
Perhaps the lesson here is simple.
Cooking spaghetti requires a wall and a saucepan.
Making good public policy requires something slightly different: research, evidence, and a willingness to learn from what previous governments — including one’s own party — have already discovered.
Nova Scotians should reasonably expect that their government knows the difference. And preferably before the spaghetti hits the fan wall.
