The Bruce Report

There must be something in the water. Or perhaps the unusually long, hot, sultry summer has cast a spell of muted complacence over a sizeable majority of New Brunswickers.

But whatever’s going on, a new poll confirms that 60 per cent of us think that everything in the purple violet province, just 27 days before what had been shaping up as a bitterly contested election, is just swell.

What’s more, the survey by Corporate Research Associates (CRA) undertaken for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal suggests the peaceful, easy feeling crosses all gender, demographic, geographic, linguistic, and income barriers. As CRA’s president Don Mills – a man not prone to overstatement – averred, “Given the level of dissatisfaction with the Graham government in the past year, I would have thought this would not be the case.”

Yeah, no kidding.

Still, it’s entirely possible the result is less an endorsement of the ruling Liberals’ policies and programs as it is a tacit acknowledgement that, compared with almost every other part of the world, life here is pretty darn good.

After all, we’re not beset by religious or sectarian violence. Improvised explosive devices do not kill our children. Our streets are safe, our nights are calm. Our politicians are (mostly) honest. Our businesses are (generally) prosperous. Legions of us still have jobs, or can find productive work. The bottom line: Things could be worse; a whole lot worse.

If these factors do, indeed, explain the prevailing “don’t worry, be happy” attitude, they imply a welcome degree of civic comprehension of serious issues elsewhere on the planet. Paradoxically, they also convey a deep suspicion and repudiation of politics as an agent for progress closer to home.

The past four years have comprised the “Big Idea” era in New Brunswick. “Transformational change” and “self-sufficiency” were the buzzwords of choice underscoring the government’s determination to reform, in equal measure, post-secondary education, early French language instruction, health care delivery systems, and energy. But apart from its well-intentioned (and cleverly timed) tax cuts, the Grits’ efforts to fire the public’s imagination on the grandly imagined future – to whet its appetite for innovative, systematic, institutional reinvention – have fallen like stones in still water.

The most we want from our public officials, it seems, are limited, strictly necessary measures to steady the course of provincial affairs. And that means no substantial cuts in public services and, crucially, no tax increases of any kind. The future, we insist, will look after itself, somehow and someday.

Perhaps we are right. But others, like Don Mills, are not wrong to point out that an $8-billion debt, a $750-million annual deficit, is nothing that should feed New Brunswick’s emerging contentment. “There’s a very strong sense in the survey New Brunswickers don’t really think they play a role in the debt of New Brunswick,” he told the Telegraph-Journal. “It’s almost as if it’s someone else’s problem.”

Of course it’s not, anymore than a credit card is the bank issuer’s burden to bear. Sooner or later the piper must be paid, as the sovereign debt crisis in Europe now wretchedly demonstrates. There, scores of formerly happy, highly paid, well-fed public- and private-sector employees are suddenly without jobs, pensions and homes all because international bond holders panicked over national accounts and demanded restitution and recompense.

Fortunately, New Brunswick is nowhere near this unhappy state of affairs. But the principle of fiscal prudence is universal. And without new taxes and deep spending cuts, the only remaining instrument in our particular toolbox is robust economic development – something successive governments in this province have prosecuted only haphazardly and with limited long-term success.

More archly (and ironically), it is another big idea of which the general public may yet grow weary as it debates the efficacy and optics of greasing foreign direct investment, rural versus urban needs, and the wisdom of prioritizing some business sectors over others.

Be well for now, New Brunswick.

Our complacency will last only as long as do our real opportunities for growth.

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