Data and Comments on New Brunswick Issues
The Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) is a student achievement assessment that is administered every 3 years to Grade 8 students across Canada. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) is responsible for preparing these standardized tests, then collating data from the assessments. Roughly 30,000 Grade 8 students participate in each Reading, Mathematics, and Science...
Who should pay for local roads in New Brunswick? Towns and cities take care of their own road maintenance, with some cost-sharing from the provincial government. In rural areas, that responsibility is taken on by the province. Is that fair? Should rural residents, most of whom live in ‘one-acre-lot’ rural suburbs, be asked to pay...
[Note: this is an updated version of an older post. The most recent data on airport traffic (2014) have been added to tables and figures below and some text has been modified to reflect those data.] What do we want from airports in New Brunswick? The three airports of New Brunswick’s three largest urban centres have...
[Note: I suggest reading these two previous posts, found here and here, on this subject for additional background material.] Do residents of Local Service Districts (LSDs) in New Brunswick pay too much or too little for the services they receive from governments? That is a question that has been raised before in this Province and...
Two years ago (2012), the government of New Brunswick released a new forestry management policy for Crown land. The 2012 plan was a compromise between those asking for more conservation / different management approaches and those who wanted more access to wood on Crown land. The annual allowable cut for softwood in the 2012 plan...
Many New Brunswickers have no doubt heard at least some of the details surrounding the recent court case involving civil servant Peter Andrews. Mr. Andrews, the executive director of corporate services in the provincial Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries, is accused of interfering with an enforcement action by the Department against Donat Robichaud, who just...
The Finn Report (also known as Building Stronger Local Governments and Regions: An Action Plan for the Future of Local Governance in New Brunswick) was released in December 2008 and contained a number of recommendations regarding local governance in New Brunswick. The Report was produced by the Local Governance Commission that had been established in September 2007 by...
[Note: The Chartboot plugin used to create charts and graphs is no longer maintained; new charts were prepared using interactive Google Sheets in October 2015. These differ somewhat from the previous charts, but the same datasets are used] [Note: Data and commentary updated April 2015, to reflect data added up to Sept 30, 2014 (i.e....
As a follow-up to a previous post, I’d like to provide some more of my views on a possible re-alignment of universities in New Brunswick. Recent statements by politicians, newspaper editorials, and others have underlined the importance of research and development (R&D) to the future of the province. R&D is a source of innovative goods...
For the average NBer, getting a grasp on the size of some of the province’s fiscal issues and financial shenanigans can be difficult. So I am proposing that New Brunswick develop its own unique monetary denomination in order to help interpret the relative importance (in dollar terms anyways) of some of these predicaments. I’ll call...
A few months ago, the government of New Brunswick released its plan for reforming local governance. This has been a long time coming and it appears that fiscal pressures have finally forced action. While problems in local governance and cost-sharing have long been recognized, political resistance to change has prevented action until now. The Province...
The Atcon controversy in New Brunswick stemmed from accusations that former Premier Shawn Graham and his Cabinet had used the power of office to influence decisions that resulted in the use of taxpayer dollars to prop up the Atcon Group, a construction company located in the Miramichi area. The taxpayer support came in the form...
Recently, the Mining Commissioner of the Province of New Brunswick released his report on the complaint by residents of the Penobsquis area regarding damage to their property they claimed was the result of mining activities by the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. As is detailed below, the Commissioner’s report deals mainly with a land subsidence claim...
In a previous post, we saw that if provincial government spending in New Brunswick over the past few decades is adjusted for inflation, non-health care spending has not increased since the mid-90s. Rising health care expenditures are largely responsible for spending increases since then. And how are those health care dollars being spent? The numbers...