One Man's Perspective

Picture this; it’s the summer of 56. A hot sunny day in July and around noon the Greyhound bus pulls into the bus terminal (Brown’s Restaurant) in St. Andrews. A few days prior our mother had returned from Hamilton Ontario to collect me my younger sister Yvonne and my younger brother Gordie.

 After a year of working in a restaurant she was able to scrap together enough money to pick up the tab for the trip on a bus to Hamilton. We had been left with our failing grandmother and since I was the oldest I was to help my grandmother maintain law and order. As the old saying goes it was “hard times in the Maritimes”. It’s a story that had repeated itself thousands of times for several decades; thousands of families were uprooted and left, reluctantly, for the “land of milk and honey” Ontario.

After a few decades of living in BC, Nova Scotia and Ontario we pulled the plug and decided to take our chances in New Brunswick.  No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get the salt water out of my veins; as well we didn’t want our kids growing up in a concrete jungle. So in 1974 employed with IBM we pulled up stakes and headed for Saint John New Brunswick.

 Once we settled in I began to pay a little more attention to municipal and provincial budgets, finance and the economic climate. What was our municipal or provincial economic engine?  Where and what were the business growth opportunities?  I had left IBM and started my own company (Fundy Computer Services Ltd. est. 1975). As a business owner I became painfully aware of the need to have; a long term vision, growth objective and a time line. I soon became aware of mundane things like money going out (payables) and the money coming in (receivables) and the difference between “spending” a dollar and “investing “a dollar.

First a little New Brunswick history, New Brunswick’s opportunities and growth came with the industrial age. However, over the decades international trade and competition made our capacity to compete challenging in the sun-set industries. I and my company were products of the “information age”. Microsoft an “information age “company was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, today Microsoft has a market capitalization of over 3 trillion dollars. Microsoft’s success was born out of a vision and strong leadership.  Were our visionary provincial and municipal leaders aware of both the impact and opportunity brought forward by the “information age” in 1975?

Enter Premier Frank McKenna.

In 1987, although the Liberal leader, based on his party policies he could very well have been a Conservative. I was inclined to see Frank McKenna as a “pragmatic problem solver”, as opposed to a politician.  A number of his policies were at the time were controversial however, he put New Brunswick on the map with his job creation priority. He was known to have said that the "best social program we have is a job”.

McKenna was a man on a mission, a classic example of a vision and strong leadership. He brought New Brunswick kicking and screaming into the information age with the formation of the “New Brunswick Information Highway Secretariat”. New Brunswick was the talk of Canada with its advanced ITC infrastructure. Ten years later when Frank McKenna our provincial debt was a little over $2 billion dollars.

…….and then New Brunswick went into a period of what I less affectionately refer to as provincial “flip flop politics”. Four years of a Liberal government followed by four years of a Conservative government with each administration promising more and more until the provincial debt ballooned to $14.5 billion dollars by the end of Brian Gallant’s Liberal administration in 2018 leaving the interest costs on the provincial debt  $650 million dollars per year. We had two full decades of the provincial ship without a rudder.

Enter Blaine Higgs

With his Conservative government, and “Let us have a kick at the can”. It probably wasn’t the best time to take over a government since the world was hit with COVID19 less than a year later. None the less in June 2020 Higgs received an , unparalleled, public approval rating of 80 % for his leadership in guiding the province through a very difficult period. Over the past few years the Higgs government has managed to reduce the provincial debt by $2 billion dollars, from $14.5 billion dollars to $11.5 billion thereby reducing the  interest paid on our debt by $75 million. Thereby making it possible:

·         reduce personal income tax,

·         cut child-care fees by 50 per cent,

·         eliminate the interest on provincial student loans,

·         increase the minimum wage,

·         invest in two rounds of the Emergency Food and Fuel Benefits,

·         while increasing the Low-Income Seniors’ Benefit by 50 per cent as well as reduce spousal contributions for facility-based care to ensure at least 60 per cent of the household income stays with the spouse who remains at home.

New Brunswick’s population had been stuck at 750,000 for decades, as of April 2024 our population has increased by almost 100,000 to 850,000 and yet Higg’s public approval rating has sunk to one of the lowest in Canada at 33%.  WTF!

If we are lucky, once in several decades we'll have a leader that bucks the spend, spend, spend trend and puts in place fiscally responsible "common sense" polices and we the public give him a 33% approval rating? I don’t get it.

In previous articles I had written about “provincial flip flop politics” I have been critical of both PCs and Liberals with each election season on the horizon promising more and more. As each party out promised one another “we” the people of New Brunswick ended up with a $14.5 billion dollar debt.

This may come as a shock to some folks but “there is no government money”! That $14.5 billion dollar debt is our “public debt”. It’s a debt that will have to be paid by the current and future generations. Any financial planner, worth a pinch of horse dodo, would advise any of us to “live within our means”. Why should that advise be any different for a government that is responsible managing “our tax dollars”?

Edward Prescott an American economist who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics wrote: “You can’t spend yourself to prosperity” We as a province would be wise to heed his advise.

In the 1800’s James Freeman Clarke wrote- A politician thinks of the next election; a statement of the next generation. A politician looks for the success of his party; a statesman for that of his country. The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift.

It’s time to continue steering our province to a brighter future, we are not going back, we’ve had enough of “drifting politicians.”

Think about it.