The Bruce Report

I can almost imagine the good fellow reviewing the final page of the finished draft on Monday, looking around the room at his team of weary advisors, and sputtering, “Good, good. Now, have we missed anything, forgotten anyone?”

In 19, single-spaced pages, the premier manages to talk about pharmacists, post-secondary education, mandatory coroner’s inquests, property tax relief, new standards for drinking water, kindergarten, a trust fund for the Petiticodiac River, a new literacy strategy, a tidal power policy, and living wills.

He weighs in on Sunday hunting, trades training, a new Species at Risk Act, a new infrastructure strategy, student debt, immigration, a natural gas feasibility study, economic development, cancer coverage for firefighters, a new framework for rural schools, and foreign direct investment.

Some measures are vague and imprecise, such as the section on post-secondary education: “New Brunswick must have. . .a system that is student-focused, integrated, accessible, affordable and of high quality.” (It would have been front-page news, indeed, had it called for inaccessible, unaffordable and low-quality colleges and universities.)

Others are more detailed, if not exactly brimming with specifics: “Our strength will help retain our family and friends in our home province and make New Brunswick a more attractive place to return to or settle in as new residents. Your government is committed to achieve a net population increase of 100,000 people by 2026.”

Predictably, the reviews have been lukewarm. Some have welcomed the scope and breadth of the government’s aspirations. Others have criticized its unwillingness or inability to get down to the brass tacks of self-sufficiency more than a year after taking office. “I was hoping for more,” said Opposition Leader Jeannot Volpe.

“I was hoping there would be something in there that we could start building on because when the premier is talking about transformational change, it does mean that something has to be done very differently than what was done before.”

He has a point, as far as it goes. But the real problem with the speech – and the self-sufficiency action plan that preceded it last week – is not that it fails to reflect the government’s so-called Charter for Change. In fact, it reflects it all too well.

The whole notion of long-term self-sufficiency – the proposition that New Brunswick can and will achieve effective independence from Ottawa’s equalization program – is mind-boggling in its complexity. It involves every thread in the fabric of provincial society: the economy, the public school system, higher education, organized labour, the business elite, the health care system, social services, municipalities. And no other government has attempted anything even remotely as ambitious.

If the commitment is genuine and authentic, Graham’s initial status reports and statements of principle are doomed to appear oddly insubstantial as they cast the widest possible net to include the greatest number of opinions and perspectives. More than half-a-dozen major studies have yet to be completed with their requisite suggestions and recommendations – all of them implicitly begging New Brunswickers to be patient.

Still, at some point, we’ll demand real answers, real initiatives, and real budgets. And that time is coming soon. As a wise man of my acquaintance, Donald Savoie, recently told me, “Sure this is all terribly ambitious. Sure, it’s wishful thinking. Who in their right mind would not be sceptical? But what is the alternative? We can’t just go on being dependent forever? So what do we do? We aim high, and we go off.”

At the same time, Savoie says: “A lot of New Brunswickers are waiting. They want to know what their roles are. And this hasn’t been spelled out quite yet. You really have to start articulating people’s roles.”

Will 2008 be the year of living urgently?

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