Should we suspend New Brunswick Day?
This column was first published in the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal on June 10, 2024.
I get the feeling New Brunswickers don’t see much to celebrate or to congratulate themselves about this year. The number of issues people are up in arms about, and are saying are being inappropriately addressed, is staggering. It is hard to find an issue where the current government is doing well.
The budget surplus, you say? Nah. That’s hoarding in the face of want – a negative, in my judgment.
The government’s trivial attempt to provide relief – a $300 workers’ benefit – was set up in such a bureaucratic way it is difficult to access even if it were worth it. And the wrong address was given to francophones. But we are told that the slow and low take-up is the fault of citizens.
The promise to keep politicians out of education, on which this government was elected, was broken at every opportunity.
Opportunities to meddle are even sought or snapped up. “I heard from someone” is enough, as in the Policy 713 debacle.
Critical issues such as housing and climate change are neglected. Offers of help on these and other issues are rebuffed because they come from our federal government, which ideologically differs from the province.
Life and death issues like emergency health care provoke, at most, promises of a plan to come, and laconic advisories urging us not to use emergency services. The way the government has dealt with New Brunswickers’ priority issue, quality health care, can be described as neglect punctuated by firings and accusations.
Almost all the big project spending in New Brunswick – over 93 per cent last year – went to the southern regions, as shown in the spending list managed by the province’s Regional Development Corporation, provided to the provincial Liberals following main estimates earlier this year. The north, with a third of the population, got less than seven per cent.
Premier Blaine Higgs has said his lack of success in northern ridings is due to the fact that he is unwilling to buy votes. So, then, is he buying southern votes?
The list goes on: the many court cases the provincial government has attracted; the lack of action on women’s issues, and on systemic racism; our preventable descent from best to worst in terms of COVID-19 deaths.
Finally, during this National Indigenous History Month, give a thought to the disrespect shown to First Nations on whose unceded land we live. Oops, Higgs has banned saying that, hasn’t he?
Is there one group with whom relations have not been made worse? One issue that has been advanced?
It baffles me how our system can allow the personal whims of one person to override decency and duty in governance. On New Brunswick Day, New Brunswick will not have much to celebrate.
Mon doux 