Object scale not negative?

I wanted to find out if an object either had -1 or 1 in x scale so I thought using Object Scale would allow me to know this.
I disabled batch rendering, it seems however the only output I ever get from Object Scale is positive?!

This is a tree node that should detect if a sprite is scaled negatively in X and if it is scaled negatively, then it should still light the sprite despite the fact that its normal is flipped. However the Object Scale doesn't give me the output I expect: