For nearly two months, 3600 personal care workers, clerks, nutrition staff, physios, occupational therapists at 36 (out of 84) nursing homes in Nova Scotia were on strike. Many racialized Canadians, women who had been working in care homes for years, and a smattering of young men and lots more young women starting out in a career of caregiving for seniors and the disabled were on the picket lines throughout NS.
Tim Houston doesn’t have a soft spot for seniors
Turns out our premier, Tim Houston, doesn’t have much of a soft spot for seniors. For his predecessor, Stephen McNeil, the mere suggestion that elderly people in the residential care system weren’t treated well caused McNeil to erupt with rage. One day in the lead-up to the 2017 provincial election, McNeil was gladhanding along the Halifax waterfront. His security entourage formed a large circle around him. McNeil is a tall man of six foot five inches; he walked quickly while his minders rushed ahead to distribute leaflets. I stopped him and asked how he could square his government’s support for seniors yet allow nursing homes only $5 a meal per resident. He turned all red, and started to shout that he was proud of nursing homes in the province (more than half are privately owned) and he would be proud to have his mother – mother of 17 children — live in one – were she still alive.
The most poorly paid clerk or caregiver in a long-term home earns $18.77 an hour. Full time that works out to about $34,000 per year (gross pay). For Nova Scotia as a whole, the living wage is $27.60 or more than $50,200 (gross) a year. Since some NS careworkers are paid barely 70% of the living wage, many have to take jobs for additional hours or shifts in other nursing homes to make up that difference. Typically, lower paid workers cannot afford to own cars, so those careworkers spend hours on buses that drive them to second, sometimes third part time jobs.
Cost of Living has gone up nearly 20% since the pandemic
The media notes that striking workers went back to work after nearly two months – and won a minimum $5 wage increase over the next four years. When you think about it, $5 doesn’t seem so much– it will raise the lowest paid up to $23.57 per hour — which is still below the current living wage in NS. Cost of living has overall gone up by 3.9% in 2023, and 2.4% in 2024, and 2.1% in 2025 or nearly 20% since the pandemic. Nursing home workers’ pay was probably lagging behind since the end of the pandemic. The only silver lining is that, according to a “me-too clause” in collective agreements, now the government will have to come up with the same wage package for all the other nursing home workers who are working for less and who did not go on strike.
Throughout the strike, the government has been relatively silent yet must have received hundreds of letters and emails to end the strike. But Houston and his seniors and long-term care minister Barbara Adams, herself a physiotherapist who worked in seniors’ care, were firm that more than 28,000 other continuing care assistants (CCAs and others) who worked in hospitals and delivered home care had already accepted a lesser package. So should the 3,600 CUPE workers.
The chance of a loss of a brand new seat going to the NDP made Houston blink
Strange to say, what likely got the Tory government to settle the strike was Trevor Poirier, a nursing home worker in Chéticamp – some 397 km from Halifax near the northern tip of Cape Breton island. In the midst of the strike, the premier called a byelection for June 23 for a newly created riding (by splitting another) to recognize the Acadian communities in the area. The former riding of Inverness is currently represented by a Tory MLA. Houston wants a Tory MLA to win the new riding of Chéticamp-Margarees-Pleasant Bay. The race is on. But Poirier, a rehabilitation assistant at Le Foyer Père Fiset long-term care home, is the NDP candidate, an outspoken critic of the government, and the president of striking CUPE Local 2031 at Père Fiset.
With all the protests at Province House, through the marches and the popular support of the striking workers, Houston didn’t break a sweat. But the chance of a loss of a brand new seat to the NDP has made him blink. The byelection is June 23.
Another ruined dinner party... 