Platform – Nova Scotia Liberal Party

The Nova Scotia Liberals are ready to put in the hard work and bring back hope for our shared future.

Nova Scotia is a great place to live, but things just aren’t like they used to be. Your paycheck doesn’t stretch as far, housing costs have become an enormous stress, and government services—from housing to healthcare—are buckling under the weight of record population growth.

Tim Houston made a lot of promises during the last election, but where is the progress? With billions of your tax dollars spent, I believe things should at least be moving in the right direction. But instead, the doctor waitlist has more than doubled, housing prices have skyrocketed, and families are struggling to put food on the table. On top of that, the Conservatives continue to want to double the population with no real plan to support that growth.

This election is a pivotal moment for our province. Now, more than ever, we need principled leadership that puts you and your family first. Our plan is all about getting the fundamentals right—making sure you have a roof over your head, access to healthcare, and more money in your pocket. We’re proposing bold tax cuts to save families thousands every year on basic necessities like groceries, fuel, and maintaining your home. We will tackle the housing crisis head-on by building 80,000 homes through a wide number of initiatives, supporting renters, and helping seniors stay in their homes longer. And we’re offering bold solutions to make sure you and your loved ones can access the healthcare you need closer to home.

The future is uncertain, and people are struggling. Nova Scotians need bold, new thinking—not more empty promises. And our team has a plan to do just that.

Let’s deliver a Better Deal for Nova Scotians.

Zach Churchill
Leader of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party

Our Top Priorities

Team Churchill’s Better Deal for Nova Scotia will deliver bold solutions to address our shared challenges on affordability, housing, and healthcare.

Make life more affordable for every Nova Scotian

We’ll do that with targeted actions to provide immediate relief to Nova Scotians dealing with the current affordability crisis, including: lowering taxes by $3,000 for the average family—by reducing the HST and income taxes, lowering your power bills—by making sure that power generated in Nova Scotia stays in Nova Scotia, and lowering grocery prices—by removing taxes on all food sold in grocery stores and increasing competition.

Make housing more affordable and accessible across the province

We’ll do that by building 80,000 new homes by 2032, protecting renters, and fixing our broken property tax system.

Improve access to healthcare

We’ll do that by building and expanding 40 collaborative healthcare centres across Nova Scotia to attach people to primary care providers, reduce wait times, and keep people out of emergency rooms.

Stop Houston’s efforts to double the population

We’ll do that by limiting population growth to in-demand workers and their families until we have enough housing, healthcare, and schools to support more growth.

More Money in Your Pocket

The first major step a Nova Scotia Liberal government will take to address the cost of living crisis is to implement a package of tax cuts that will save the average family $3,000 each year. This includes a 2-point HST cut—saving individuals an average of $700 a year, and changes to income taxes so that thousands more of your income will no longer be taxed—saving you hundreds more each year at tax time. We’ll also move to stabilize electricity prices with legislated standards for clean energy and power rates.

A Roof Over Your Head

Housing is one of the most important challenges we face, and it’s a problem that drags down our economy, drives up everyone’s cost of living, and increases the strain on our healthcare system. It’s easy to say we need to build more homes, but doing it requires bold thinking across a number of policy areas. We have a multi-pronged plan based on tried-and-tested strategies that will make a real difference toward our goal to build 80,000 new homes. They include establishing province-wide minimum zoning standards and eliminating red tape to hasten development, reforms to property taxes that will give relief to middle- and working-class families, eliminating the deed transfer tax to help seniors downsize and young people buy their first home, targeted support for renters, and more. Our goal is to create a housing system where no Nova Scotian needs to pay more than 30% of their income on housing.

Rethinking Health(care)

We need to rethink how we approach healthcare in this province, from increasing the availability of primary care providers to keeping hospitals and emergency rooms open. We’ll fundamentally change the NSHA business practices to increase availability of Collaborative Care and Primary Care Clinics embedded in communities. We must remain focused on attaching people to primary care providers to ensure every Nova Scotian can access the healthcare they need and manage their own health outcomes. But we also aren’t going to fix healthcare unless we focus on our health more broadly. That means broader access to preventative screening, more gyms, recreation centers, and parks, a focus on anti-poverty and housing-first policies to keep people healthy and out of the ER, closing the gap on women’s health, supporting chronic care and home care, and making more investments in health research and the health economy.

Sustainable Economic Growth

Growth is critical to our province, but we need to do it sustainably. We’ll immediately reduce Houston’s unsustainable immigration levels until we have the housing and services to support more newcomers while focusing on economic growth driven by increased productivity. We’ll increase workforce participation by making more affordable childcare spaces available. We’ll also drive innovation and job creation by cutting the small business tax for income under $700k, making Nova Scotia the best province in the country for small businesses. And we’ll further support communities with a comprehensive infrastructure development strategy.

A Government That Works For You

Nova Scotians know that the old ways provincial governments did things aren’t working anymore. That’s why we’ll take bold action to reform the provincial government so it can address modern challenges. We’ll reform the political process so that the legislature reflects the will of the people, we’ll take long overdue action to protect our coastline, and we’ll ensure Nova Scotia has a strong justice system.