PRESS RELEASE

“New Policy Directions” Urged for Nova Scotia
NDP will bring “Genuine Progress accounting into policy analysis”

Nova Scotia has to measure its progress differently if it is to strengthen its economy, protect its natural environment, improve the health and education of its people, save local farming, conserve energy, reduce crime, and strengthen communities.

That’s the conclusion of a new 185-page report released today by GPI Atlantic, the Halifax-based research group that has produced more than 100 detailed studies in the last 13 years measuring the province’s social, economic, and environmental wellbeing and progress.

The new measuring system, which contrasts sharply with the usual economic growth-based measures of progress, appears to have the support of the new Nova Scotia Government. Just prior to the election, the NDP committed “to incorporate Genuine Progress accounting into provincial policy analysis."

The new GPI report, titled New Policy Directions for Nova Scotia: Using the Genuine Progress to Count what Matters, is a ‘user manual’ for Nova Scotia policy planners and civil servants. It provides an overview and summary of all the GPI work, as well as the policy options that flow from the “best available data, evidence, and measurement methods.”

Twenty Nova Scotia health, environment, and community groups, including the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Nova Scotia, and Ecology Action Centre, have urged the Government “to adopt, use, and apply the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index as a core measure of progress in the Province.”

“A new government has the opportunity to pursue new policy directions that really improve Nova Scotians’ wellbeing, protect the environment, and ensure long-term prosperity,” says GPI executive director, Ronald Colman. Among the many specific GPI-based policies proposed in the document are:

• Reduce the pain of recession and improve quality of life by offering employees shorter work hours on a voluntary basis. Moving to a 4-day week to avoid layoffs allows firms and employees to tap into an Employment Insurance regulation that covers a portion of their salary for the fifth day, thus giving them 20% more time off for an 8-10% cut in pay. The new GPI report notes that Stanfield’s in Truro, Composites Atlantic in Lunenburg, and Michelin have already saved jobs by reducing work hours in this way, and it urges the new Government to promote this solution in other firms facing layoffs.


• Strengthen local agriculture by giving credits to local farmers for the avoided greenhouse and pollutant emissions that accompany long distance transport of imported foods.


• Reduce health care costs by boosting support for preventive measures that reduce poverty, smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity.


• Enhance the value of the province’s forest wealth by increasing silviculture credits for sustainable selection harvest methods and penalizing unsustainable clear-cutting.

“No jurisdiction in the world now has available to it as detailed, developed, and comprehensive a set of integrated measures of progress as this province,” says Colman. “As of today, Nova Scotia not only has a practical tool to measure progress towards genuinely sustainable prosperity, but also a straightforward, user-friendly instruction manual for using the tool.”

GPI Atlantic has proposed that the new Government set up an Office of Genuine Progress to monitor the province’s wellbeing and progress regularly across the 20 social, economic, and environmental dimensions of the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index. That Office would also produce policy briefs pointing to the policy implications of the GPI evidence.

The new GPI report, New Policy Directions for Nova Scotia, is available for free download on the GPI Atlantic website at www.gpiatlantic.org. For more information or interviews, contact GPI Atlantic Executive Director, Ronald Colman, at 902-823-1944 or 902-489-7007.