Nova Scotia's new Liberal leader says he wants to rebuild party, hold current government accountable

The Nova Scotia Liberal party's new leader says he plans to rebuild the organization, recruit good candidates who are energized and excited to run for office, and hold the current government accountable for promises made to Nova Scotians, particularly when it comes to health care.

Zach Churchill won the leadership Saturday with 65 per cent of the vote over Angela Simmonds.

Churchill first joined the legislature in a 2010 byelection and has since served as cabinet minister for the departments of education and health.

Churchill will replace former premier Iain Rankin, who stepped down in January after the Liberals were defeated in last summer's provincial election.

Churchill believes Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservatives won the election, in part, due to a campaign focused on health care.

"It was very focused and they made really big promises to people at a time when people were looking for big promises to be made on health care," says Churchill in an interview with CTV Atlantic on Sunday.

"They promised 24/7 surgeries, 300 new doctors a year, universal mental-health care, 2,500 new long-term care beds, so they made really big promises that people bought into, but I don't think we're going to see them deliver on any of those."

Churchill says, despite the Conservatives’ promises, Nova Scotia’s health-care system continues to worsen.

"There's 30,000 more people without a family doctor. Tim Houston had said there was a crisis when there was 60,000 people without a family doctor under our government. There's now 90,000 people and that's only 10 months into their mandate," says Churchill.

"We've seen our hospitals get overrun, particularly during the last two waves of COVID-19, and I do think these things happened precisely because of decisions that this government has made. They fired folks that knew what they were doing in the health-care system and appointed one partisan lawyer with no health-care experience to run our health-care authority, and they ran a 'get back out there' marketing campaign during what would become the most deadly and severe wave of COVID-19, which impacted our hospitals and impacted operations in our hospitals... So, I think because of those decisions, we're actually seeing our health-care system degrade much more quickly than we ever saw it degrade before."

Churchill insists he would have done things differently if his party had been in power during the Omicron wave.

"Well, we wouldn't have taken away public health information from people during the last two waves of the pandemic, or run a 'get back out there' marketing campaign at a time when Omicron variant was spreading very quickly though our province. I really think that was misguided and resulted in the very rapid spread of that wave of the pandemic. We went from being the safest place in the country to being literally the most deadly, and that has consequences for our health-care system and we're still living with those consequences now," he says.

"Up to 800 people were out sick with COVID -- that's going to impact operations. Surgeries were delayed, including really critical cardiovascular surgeries, so these things really matter. There's a link between public health and health-care delivery, even primary health care, and we certainly think that they should have done a better job during that time period. After all, they did tell everyone that they were the solution and they had the solutions to health care, that they had built a plan over the three previous years and that they were going to execute it and we haven't seen them move on any one of their major platform commitments to this date." 

When asked what he would do differently to help health care, Churchill says new access points for primary care are essential.

"The reality is that physicians are practising differently. While we've done really well at recruiting doctors to Nova Scotia, less of them are getting into family medicine, and the ones that are, are taking less patients. So, that means we have to utilize the other folks in our health-care system more, I believe, like pharmacists who I think can be doing a lot more if their scope of practice is properly expanded to do prescription renewals, even ordering bloodwork and tests for people," says Churchill. "And also utilizing our nurse practitioners to create new access points for primary care for people who don't have a family doctor."

Churchill says he was happy to see the Conservative government expand the province's virtual care program, which was previously introduced by the Liberal government.

"I think that it is important to take pressure off of our emergency rooms, but we do have to keep that work going to expand access points for people that need primary care," he says.

As far as critical staffing shortages among paramedics, Churchill says that's another example of something that has only gotten worse under the current government.

"There's a labour shortage with our paramedics and that's affecting our emergency response for people across the province. You have to work with the union, we began that work when I was minister of health," says Churchill. "We looked at removing the non-emergent transportation from paramedics so that we could have more ambulances on the road. That's really important."

Churchill says he would also make changes to the province’s COVID-19 response, including continuing to report all data to the public.

"We do have to live with COVID and that's the reality, but people need information about the virus to know the risk involved to know if we are in the midst of a wave, or how many cases that we have that can help inform people’s decisions if they're going to wear a mask when they go to the grocery store, or if they're going to host a big party," he says.

"And what this government has done is remove that critical information from people that was being reported every single day and they're now reporting it once a month, so I don't think that that's acceptable, particularly when our health-care experts are telling us we're going to be in the midst of another wave, either at the end of the summer or in the fall."

"So, it's really about informing people so they have what they need to make good decisions in their daily lives."

Churchill says health care will continue to be a significant priority for his party, along with issues like affordability and the impacts of inflation.

"We also have a housing crisis across this province, particularly in rural Nova Scotia, we have no emergency housing for homeless people, this is a big problem and this is an area where government intervention is really needed," says Churchill. "We also have a labour shortage that's affecting everything from health-care delivery to the education system, to small businesses, fish plants, everybody's experiencing this issue with our labour shortage, and we haven't seen any actions from this government on any of these really big issues that are affecting people in very consequential ways."

The Liberal party says more than 3,400 registered delegates were eligible to vote. Of those, 95.9 per cent voted in the leadership race.