Nova Scotia appoints new AG with reputation for tough reports on government spending

Nova Scotia's gain is New Brunswick's loss.

Nova Scotia Premier Iain Rankin announced Thursday that the province's next auditor general will be the woman who has been in the job in New Brunswick for the past decade.

Kim Adair-MacPherson, who has a reputation for not pulling punches when it comes to scrutinizing government spending, is the first woman ever appointed to the post in Nova Scotia. She starts her 10-year-term on May 3.

Before being appointed to the job in New Brunswick in 2010, Adair-MacPherson spent 30 years with the New Brunswick government, including serving as provincial comptroller at the Department of Finance.

Nova Scotia's previous auditor, Michael Pickup, left the job in July to take an eight-year post as auditor general in British Columbia.

In her latest report, published just last month, Adair-MacPherson said the New Brunswick government failed to address the increased demand for nursing homes.

"My biggest concern is the lack of progress since we last did work on this area back in 2016," she told reporters after delivering her report.

Last fall, she issued a report scathing in its criticism of New Brunswick's ambulance service and the bonuses paid to the company providing the service.

Ambulance New Brunswick has been paid millions of dollars for hitting performance targets that are biased against rural areas and that conceal lower response times to those remote communities, according to Adair-MacPherson.

She said the existing system for measuring ambulance response times had concealed problems that, in some cases, would have seen Ambulance New Brunswick miss out on performance payments worth millions of dollars.