Data and Comments on New Brunswick Issues
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: 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
New Brunswick is currently experiencing a fiscal crunch. Revenues are below expectations and expenditures are proving difficult to control. Meanwhile the Federal Governmnent has announced a new formula for allocating equalization payments that will tie increases in health care payments to GDP growth, plus those payments will (after 2015) be allocated on a per capita...