Ten years after public outrage over a toll on the then-new Route 2 of the TransCanada highway eastbound from Fredericton to Moncton sank Camille Theriault‘s government and brought the Lord Tories to power, the question of tolls on New Brunswick highways remains a contentious one. The toll had been put in place as a means of financing the construction of the much needed new highway; anyone who remembers travelling the old route will surely acknowledge the vital necessity of the new one (and those who are curious or incomprehensibly nostalgic still have the option of taking the old route, should they for some reason so desire).
The new highway was built through an arrangement often described as ‘P3′ – a public-private partnership, whereby a private company would undertake much of the cost of constructing the highway in exchange for toll revenue on traffic using that highway for a set number of years. Nova Scotia’s Cobequid Pass, which finally put an end to the ‘Death Valley’ of Wentworth, was built and continues to be operated by similar means. To get anywhere in Nova Scotia travelling east (or out of it travelling west) of Cumberland County, it is understood that a fee must be paid, unless one wants to either turn around or party like its 1959 on the old untwinned routes to Truro. For personal vehicles, that fee is a reasonable $4, especially compared to the decline in vehicle-related deaths in that area.
Route 2 was always intended to operate the same way, and given time, a similar public understanding would have been reached – and the fee here was just 75 cents each way! Alas, its completion happened to coincide with a not-far-off provincial election, and the issue proved convenient anti-Liberal fodder for a PC Party still on the rebound from 1987 and the COR-era. There was much anger to capitalize on and add to general public fatigue with 12 years of Liberal government. In small communities like Salisbury, Petticodiac, Hampton and the other towns and villages between Moncton and the capital, residents vented their frustration by voting Conservative. The long-haul trucking industry was similarly nonplussed with paying commercial tolls on their freight, long accustomed to blazing westward through New Brunswick leaving nothing but pollution and crumbling asphalt in their wake.
It should be noted that it was never stated PC Party policy in 1999 to eliminate the toll on Route 2, only originally to ‘renegotiate’ the terms of the contract with the Maritime Road Development Corporation. As Jacques Poitras details in his excellent book The Right Fight, however, during a public meeting in Salisbury in 1998, Tory leader Bernard Lord in the face of hecklers announced unequivocally that “we will take the tolls off.” Longtime Tory francophone-wing godfather and current New Brunswick Senator Percy Moeckler is suspected to have made a calculated appraisal of public opinion that the move would pay off, and it obviously did – Lord and party won 44 of the 55 seats in the Legislature that humid June election day.
It paid off politically, of course, but not financially for the province or its people – the province was saddled with paying the debt to MRDC that would have eventually been covered by toll revenue, and at a much quicker rate. This brings me to my main argument – that New Brunswick has for a decade missed an opportunity to benefit from its dismissal by Upper Canadians as the ‘drive-thru’ province on the way to a pseudo-mythical Nova Scotia of which their impression has been formed by Keith’s commercials and too many drunken choruses of Barrett’s Privateers at some corner pub in Toronto. A restored Route 2 toll would ensure the province derives some benefit from this otherwise ‘free-loading’ traffic, beyond filling up and stopping for a bite in Edmundston or elsewhere.
Residents along Route 2 were surely justified in initial anger at having to pay a small fee to access new highways whose very construction had briefly disrupted their lives and routines. The trucking industry would never have been as crippled as they claimed, as the Nova Scotia example reveals; internal regional trucking would have suffered a bit initially, but surely the New Brunswick government, if any, could find a way to subsidize or tax-credit the industry. A point often missed was the revenue that would have been generated through the tolls paid by the tens of thousands of vehicles, both personal and commercial, that pass straight through New Brunswick in either direction in the course of a week.
The saddest part of this missed opportunity is the deterioration already evident on parts of Route 2, natural to any highway with a large volume of truck traffic but it is of special concern in a small, poor province like our own. This is why I am of the opinion that tolls ought to be re-instated on Route 2, and that a P3 arrangement ought to be implemented to finally twin Route 7 from Fredericton to Saint John. Given the massive deficit position the province will soon find itself in, highway tolls would be a useful and tangible means of generating new revenue. As outlined in the piece from last week’s Times & Transcript, Tom Mann, Executive-Director of the New Brunswick Union, shares this view; the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association does not.
Community leaders in northern New Brunswick are concerned that any re-implementation of tolls would disproportionately, if not exclusively, benefit the southern part of the province; with twinning desperately needed on Route 11 between Moncton and the Peninsula, there are concerns traffic entering suffering northern communities like Bathurst and the Miramichi would be adversely affected if highway construction and toll revenue favoured the south. This just serves to re-inforce the necessity of careful reflection on the future of northern New Brunswick, and regional policy formulation. I will tackle this subject in future entries.
In summation, ten lost years need not equal ten more. Government has no higher duty than the safety of its citizens. For a province like New Brunswick in which vast distances must be spanned in order to reach any of our cities from another, our highways ought to be far newer and safer than they often are. Public-private partnerships are the means to achieve this, even if it means paying small tolls. The revenue generated from otherwise relative ‘free-loading’ traffic passing through the province will make them well worth it. After all, do the Premier and his government not dream of Self-Suffiency 2026? Highway tolls will help us get there.
