When I read this tweet earlier today, I had to bite my fingers (not my tongue, because it's Twitter, y'understand) to avoid picking a fight when I had other windmills at which to tilt. I've been in New Brunswick long enough to pick up on the political zeitgeist, so I know darned well that I'm being generous by assuming that MLA Higgs was just limited by the 140 characters, and not merely channeling his Inner Albertan (as is fashionable these days among Tories).
Having come from south of the border where shills like Grover Norquist have twisted the definition of "corporate taxation" to include concepts like "rescinding corporate subsidies and sweetheart tax breaks," I've come to realise that the first casualty of debt reduction is any grown-up concept of "debt."
And so huffing that you are "...saying
NO to 900m in new spending, higher taxes, and a mortgaged future" immediately on the heels of "I am saying YES to Nat Resource Dev, Forestry, Energy East" to me demonstrates a staggeringly simplistic concept of how books are balanced for the wider world.
Yes, there is public debt. It's important. We all get that. (I just paid my Sept. 15th tax installment. I probably get it even more than most people right now.) But it's not the only kind of debt. And our soi-dissant leaders are supposed to grok that.
There is environmental debt. Given how skewed the provincial economy is to basically just taking stuff from the earth (trees, natural gas) or the sea (lobster, et. al.), and how economies of scale and naked cronyism favour the large companies, that's a foregone conclusion. Particularly when the Premier insists that regulations are strong enough while tailing ponds are leaking and rivers somehow aren't supporting the number of salmon that they should. If that mentality isn't heading straight for "a mortgaged future," I don't know what is.
There is socialised private debt. That's largely an extension of the above. When fracking companies insist that it's none of our business what they're pumping into our groundwater, it's again a foregone conclusion that when the bills come due, said companies will simply declare bankruptcy and vanish. When lakes and rivers are polluted because the Alward government ignored its own DNR recommendations when handing the keys to Crown forests to Irving, it darned certain won't be Irving's mess to clean up. Lac Magantic is the writing on the wall that only the willfully blind cannot read.
There is entrepreneurial debt. An economy skewed toward "taking stuff" only innovates for "taking more stuff faster." Granted, I'm biased toward information technology and "making stuff." And while I wholeheartedly applaud the efforts to provide free online training to New Brunswickers, it's with the goal of making them more valuable employees. Not the same thing. (In fairness, there are three courses on writing a business plan here. But the bulk of the skills don't apply to someone starting a business in their garage.)
There is technical debt. When crumbling roads make it difficult to ship goods between Points A and B, that's not fiscal responsibility, that's kicking the can down the road. When educating children loses the focus because rabble-rousers pit anglophones and francophones against each other in the funding equivalent of "The Hunger Games," that's just another dent in the can. (And btw: Why is it that our electricity can come from a Crown corporation, but we can't seem to manage community-owned broadband? I'd hate to know what the profiteering of Rogers/Bell/Telus/Etc. is costing our economy.)
And so saying that the province can't afford more debt while doubling down on a robber-baron resource economy is either breathtakingly naive or cynically opportunist. Either way, it shouldn't be parking its backside in Fredericton--much less Ottawa. Luckily for Mr. Higgs, I can't vote in this election. I can only hope that by the time I do, there will be a choice of candidates who both understand and acknowledge the fact that not all costs are immediate, and that they aren't always reflected on the official books.
