The Bruce Report

If, as New Brunswick Finance Minister Blaine Higgs suggests, elections are actually auctions for the affections of the electorate, bid with promises, then someone has neglected to pay the bill, which is, in a way, the besieged cabineteer’s politically unorthodox point.

“There is nothing that is more like an auction than an election,” he brazenly declared last week during a pre-budget consultation in Saint John. “What are you going to promise me? It was who was going to get there first, who could promise the most.”

Interim Liberal Leader Victor Boudreau seemed to agree, at least with the analogy. Reflecting on the result of most recent provincial election, and echoing his rival, he told the Telegraph-Journal, “Every time we promised something, they out bid us. We promised to have the catastrophic drug program in place within two years of our mandate, they said ‘it wasn’t good enough, we’ll do it in a year.’”

Now, the Grit honcho reportedly wants the Tories to come clean and concede that they had no intention of keeping their pricey promises when they made them. “If you are to be a responsible party,” he said. “you have to come up with the costing.”

Astonishingly, Higgs concurred. Sort of.

“Creating controls around elections so we don’t create this massive shopping list of any kind will help us get back in shape,” he said. “[It is] what has driven the situation we are in. . .The tremendous pressures that are put on [civil servants] through the election process. . .They are left to fill that requirement. . .We do that every election.”

There’s nothing like a little well-timed acquiescence to confuse your enemy, which may only indicate that Higgs is more chess master than auction bidder.

Whichever is the case, the pre-budget roadshow, a putative exercise in the Alward government’s already shopworn principle of consultation, is shaping up to be an unexpectedly dynamic campaign of managing expectations.

Higgs comprehends the dimension of the province’s fiscal dilemma better that any. Now, he wants the rest of us to wake up and pay attention, even if that means he’s willing to shoulder a large burden of blame, on behalf of his government, for New Brunswick’s $550-million annual deficit and $9.5-billion longterm debt.

It’s a brilliant strategy: Concede what everybody already knows about politicians as a way to defuse the opposition’s inevitable charges of breaking promises and willfully misleading the public. “Oh, right,” Higgs might rejoin. “Are you telling me you don’t also overpromise and underfund? Come on, boys, it’s in our DNA.”

But that doesn’t mean – the message might continue – we can’t be more responsible, realistic and circumspect in the future. It won’t be easy. In fact, it will be downright painful. It will take a concerted, coordinated effort by everyone of all political stripes to right the ship of state and return her to a safe harbour.

Or purple prose to more-or-less this effect.

Still, and for the moment, it’s impossible to estimate the degree of reform that will be necessary and, therefore, the likely temperature of public reaction when some version of hell breaks loose.

The Tories have promised no new taxes. Should they renege and introduce, say, a hike in the provincial portion of the HST or higher levies on alcohol and tobacco products, consumer rights advocates as diverse as the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and the New Brunswick Anti-Poverty Association will marshall their forces in a way that will make the shale gas controversy seem, by comparison, a high-school debate.

Likewise, deep cuts in the public service or dramatic adjustments to civil pensions, bonuses and retirement pay-outs could easily provoke protracted job action at a time when the province can ill afford any further malfunctions in the variously spluttering engines of its so-called prosperity.

Ultimately, though, New Brunswick’s choices are either perishing or becoming perishingly small.

Someone has neglected to pay the bill for the promises successive governments have actually kept. We cannot assume there’s money to cover the cost of those that remain merely empty.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

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