Several companies have already expressed interest in becoming part of this project, as the article details. This is exactly the sort of private-sector investment and development that New Brunswick needs, assuming the project does come to fruition. One can imagine the likes of David Coon and the Conservation Council of New Brunswick presenting court challenges and doing everything they can to halt the project, depriving hundreds of New Brunswickers of potentially well-paying jobs in the process. Not to overly deride the Council, as it has been partly responsible for several notable and noble initiatives over the years; but one hopes it will refrain from trying to stall this development.

On another note, this is an excellent example of regional co-operation between the smaller jurisdictions on the north-eastern corner of the continent. The Maritimes and New England share a great deal of history, and through development projects like this one, look set to share a bright future as well. One should be cautious however, as the language used in the joint announcement was very carefully worded – especially the use of the word ‘explore.’  The New Brunswick government has a long history of unrequited exploration, after all (second refinery, second reactor, the years taken to replace the Gunningsville Bridge in Moncton, and so forth).

Is anyone else already as sick as I am of the radio ads touting how great the Graham government’s tax cuts supposedly are? The voice-acting is almost as contrived as the hoodwinking being perpetrated on the people of this province. I cannot help but feel bad for the myriad of New Brunswickers who are misled by these ads into thinking they will save “25 dollars a week”, because the amount of New Brunswickers who earn enough money to qualify for such savings can hardly be described as a myriad. How many New Brunswickers make $150,000 a year or more? Didn’t think so.

On top of this, little attention has been paid to the swathe of user-fee increases and implementations on everything from camping fees to vehicle registration. As this editorial in today’s Moncton Times & Transcript points out, it takes little more than 5 minutes of a Service New Brunswick employee’s time to make a few mouse-clicks and give you a new tiny sticker to place on your license plate – after you’ve waited two hours to see that employee, of course. Obviously vehicle registration is a necessary measure long in place, but to increase the fee from its already unnecessarily high rate to just under $100 ought to qualify as robbery. It will be the New Brunswickers benefitting least from Graham and Boudreau’s tax cuts that suffer the most from these across-the-board fee increases.

How much longer are New Brunswickers going to let themselves get hosed like this year after year?

Re: Moving back home

As a former New Brunswicker who has been trying desperately to move my family back to the province, I must express my disappointment with the government of New Brunswick.

My husband and I are professionals in our early 30s and supposedly the target demographic for the repatriation efforts. We contacted the repatriation secretariat, only to find out that all they do is send you links to job hunting websites (which we already search daily).

It seems that all they are trying to do is track people so they can take credit if someone actually manages to find a job and move back.

Now, this budget. Why is the government punishing its own loyal employees by chopping 700 positions? Why are they cutting services, why are they punishing school libraries? We are in a recession and they are cutting taxes.

I am currently in a competition for a provincial government job, and I had a small hope that I would be successful and my family could finally move back home. Now I see that even in-progress competitions are being halted and all hiring in the civil service has been frozen.

How are you going to repatriate talented professionals if you have nothing to offer them? The job I applied for pays over $20,000 less per year than my current job. This was a sacrifice that I was willing to make to come home.

Professionals will not return to New Brunswick for call centre jobs.

Please, take the future of New Brunswick seriously.

Laura Peters

Gatineau, Que.

First Nations leaders throughout the province and across Canada are singing the praises of accomplished New Brunswicker Graydon Nicholas, the first aboriginal judge in the Atlantic provinces now set to make another regional first.

The likely pick for New Brunswick’s next Lieutenant-Governor is described in today’s Daily Gleaner “as someone who is beyond reproach and ‘highly respected for his principles and sense of fairness,’” with one First Nations Chief inviting comparisons to the 44th President of the United States. Current Provincial Justice Nicholas “is looked upon as a role model,” St. Mary’s First Nation Chief Candace Paul says. “”It’s like Barack Obama. Dream big, it is achievable.”

However fitting the comparison, it is symbolic of the contributions made by and vitality of New Brunswick’s First Nations communities that often go unrecognized. Not only this but his successful career in academia and the law right here at home are an example any New Brunswicker would want to follow. And I certainly cannot help but personally cheer the success of a fellow StFX alumnus!

Current Lieutenant-Governor Hermeneglide Chiasson finishes his term after the Congrès Mondial Acadien (Acadian World Congress) is held in late August.

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.

Moncton Times & Transcript

• The lead editorial suggests that a better name for the province’s “disastrous” home heating assistance program would be ‘No Heart, Cold Homes’. I was critical of this program from the start, especially since it would be administered by the Salvation Army on a very limited budget. “More than 7,000 New Brunswickers applied for assistance this winter in the face of high fuel costs. Close to 4,000 of those applications were never even processed by the Salvation Army, the non-profit agency contracted by the province to handle the program. The paltry $1 million put in place by the Liberal government for heating assistance this winter didn’t come close to meeting the demand.”

• Bill Belliveau believes the government has good intentions, but questions whether its policy prescriptions are the correct ones. “Tax reforms financed by wage freezes, cuts in the public service, cuts in ferry services and a massive deficit in a time of recession strike me as ill-timed and overly ambitious. We are in survival mode. We should be laying the groundwork for change but we should refrain from actions that align with the past rather than the future.”

• ‘Sleuth’ describes a rocky-start to the relationship between the Premier and Opposition Leader David Alward during the new Legislative session. This is the second-item in Sleuth’s gossip column, the first item being one confirming a major concert announcement – seemingly an annual tradition for the people of Moncton in recent years.

• Provincial PC Party Executive-Director Marie-Claude Blais unsurprisingly laments the wide and varied cuts in the budget, particularly those to education, including school library and bus funding. “Sure, there was some good news in the budget: tax cuts and help for student debts, but overall this budget is an incoherent mess. Our Minister of Finance makes predictions on flawed numbers and on growth of the economy that do not hold up. This government has now lost all credibility and was put to the test to clarify their numbers and refused to do so.”

• The Opposition Tories accuse the government of putting the lives of low-income New Brunswick seniors at risk by re-implementing ambulance fees at a higher rate than when they were eliminated by the Lord government in 2005.

Fredericton Daily-Gleaner

• The lead editorial discusses the province’s apparently inadequate youth social safety net, citing the case of 17-year old Fredericton resident ‘Steven’ who is too old to be taken in by social services, but too young to legally live at a homeless shelter. The editorial attacks the government’s lethargy on this issue, saying that its hope to have the ‘design phase’ complete by the end of the year, and not the program in place, is indicative of how seriously the Graham government takes the issue of youth homelessness.

• New Brunswick Student Alliance and STUSU President Duncan Gallant discusses the budget’s implications for post-secondary education policy and student debt in New Brunswick.

• City Hall and the universities are both expected by the provincial government to fall in line on freezing wages for the next two years, or at least, their grants and other funding will be adjusted to reflect such an expectation.

Saint-John Telegraph-Journal

• Provincial Court Judge Graydon Nicholas is expected to be the Premier’s recommendation to Prime Minister Stephen Harper for appointment as New Brunswick’s next Lieutenant-Governor, which would make the Maliseet from Tobique First Nation New Brunswick’s first Aboriginal viceregal representative.

• Reflecting the provincial Liberal support base in Saint John (which some suspect has already collapsed after the fiascoes of 2007 and early 2008), the paper’s lead editorial takes a much more supportive line of the budget than the other two major dailies. “New Brunswickers are all in this financial mess together – and a sense of outraged entitlement doesn’t go over very well, when the taxpayers who support civil service jobs are worried about losing their own.”

• Western academics in the employ of the Fraser Institute claim that New Brunswick is taking the lead in showing the way out of recession. “Canadian governments looking for ways to improve the economy and emerge from the recession in better position to attract businesses and skilled workers should look to New Brunswick and emulate the plan released on Tuesday by Premier Shawn Graham and Finance Minister Victor Boudreau.”

Miramichi Leader

• Reflecting the added pain the recession has brought to a region already suffering from mill closures and general decline in pulp and paper in the province, Keith Vickers argues for a new Employment Insurance scheme whereby Ottawa would “reform the system so that it is more generous in tough times and less generous in prosperous times.”

Woodstock Bugle-Observer

• An excellent editorial in the small Carleton County weekly that discusses Premier Graham’s attempts to emulate former Premier Frank McKenna, while also pointing out that McKenna’s strength as Premier was not necessarily any bold leadership traits, but instead effective communication strategy:

“Did McKenna renew, remodel or restore the province into something bigger, better and kinder? No … that was actually accomplished by the two men who preceded him as premier – Louis Robichaud and Richard Hatfield…The one area where McKenna shone brighter was in delivering the message. If we had a communications hall of fame, McKenna’s people would be to it what the Montreal Canadiens are to the Hockey Hall of Fame or the New York Yankees are to Cooperstown. Premier Graham lucked out by convincing some of McKenna’s spin all-stars to come out of retirement to join his team.”

That’s all for today; my next entry will be an opinion piece on why the toll on the TransCanada eastbound from Fredericton should never have been removed in 1999, why it should be re-instated and why a similar arrangement ought to be used to finally twin the highway from Fredericton to Saint John.

Age shall not weary, nor the years condemn. RIP.

It has become known that one of the four Canadian soldiers killed in two separate incidents in Afghanistan today was Trooper Corey Joseph Hayes, a native of Ripples, New Brunswick, in rural Sunbury County. He was described by Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance  as “a proud and dedicated soldier who always put his friends and family before himself…his friends remember him not only as a friend and a comrade-in-arms, but a brother who inspired them to stand up in the face of danger and do what was right.”

This comes just days after another New Brunswicker, Corporal Chad O’Quinn was laid to rest in Gagetown. New Brunswick has a proud tradition of military service, and today contributes disproportionately to the ranks of Canadian Forces. Eight New Brunswickers have now fallen in Afghanistan.

Also, it should be noted that a private-sector driven recovery policy almost exclusively favours southern New Brunswick – which given that most of the North Shore lives in Moncton now anyway, is not such a big deal. I kid. But in all seriousness, this budget is just the latest sign that residents of northern New Brunswick face an increasingly necessary period of reflection about the future prospects of their region.  Provincial NDP leader Roger Duguay purports to have “a vision” for the region, but the weakness of his party at the provincial level here ensures that few New Brunswickers learn what he has to say.

Click here to view it. Fitch makes some worthy points, particularly that this round of tax-cuts over four years will not even return rates to what they were in 2006.