The MacNeil government has gifted a new holiday to all Nova Scotians. The third Monday of February will henceforth and forever be a provincial holiday for Bluenosers. Although originally thought of as a ‘family’day, it is officially designated as Heritage Day with each year a different Nova Scotian of note being the honouree of the day.
There will of course be some kind of competition for the honour of the day name but ultimately the name of the day will be of import to those involved in that process and not to most others. But we didn’t need a holiday to honour the hundreds of former citizens who will be in competition for the position. We could have simply named the day and not make it a holiday.
Our government deserves a big thank you from a grateful citizenry. Holidays are wonderful – you don’t have to work or if you do you get paid extra. But of course, there aren’t nearly enough of them. So it makes you wonder. Why don’t we have more of these holidays. And why did it take so long to get this ‘family day’ in place to break up the long winter months? We have been talking about it for at least the last twenty five years.
Well, there is a reason why we don’t have a holiday every week and why it seemed to take forever to obtain this new addition to the lists. Its called the economy. Every holiday affects productivity or the cost of productivity. And as it turns out, when government gives us a holiday, they didn’t actually give us anything. We citizens pay for the holiday. We pay directly because we close our businesses and have to pay to make up the loss of productivity later, or if the business has to stay open then employees are paid extra for working a holiday. This all has an impact on employment and income.
But we also pay increased taxes or more indirectly suffer the knowledge of assuming the greater debt burden accumulated by the province. For public servants – teachers, civil servants, health care workers – it is paid holiday. Vital work is not being done that day. Schools are closed, government offices are closed. For those services remaining available for citizens, the employees who must work are paid double overtime.
We citizens pay for the lost productivity and the extra wage costs . And there is a cost to lost productivity – we either make it up with additional work performed at some other time – overtime perhaps – or we pay for it on the lost service. Interestingly, one wonders whether the school year will be extended by an additional day. Given the well known correlation between the length of the school year and performance on international testing and the recent tests results of students in this province, it is surely on governments agenda to ensure our students futures do not suffer as a result of this.
What is truly remarkable is that for the past several years a great many words have been uttered and profusion of ink spilled in the collective anxiety ensuing from the publication of the Now or Never Report on the Nova Scotia economy. We are, it is reported, in dire straits. Our demographics, our public debt and our economy are all moving in the wrong direction and the clock is ticking on a kind of doomsday scenario – at least for anyone who wants to live in Nova Scotia twenty years from now. The MacNeil government adopted this report and have been working assiduously to develop a plan to implement a cure for these collective ills.
So how exactly does this new holiday fit with this planning? How will this new time off improve our demograhics, eliminate the public debt, make our civil service more efficient, improve health care, advance student education and test scores, assist small and big business and generally strengthen our economy?