With that out of the way, I'd like to talk about the New Brunswick election.
New Brunswick's provincial elections are less than a week away, so for today's political post I've decided to get things extremely local and talk about the parties, their platforms, and my thoughts on the whole thing.
Theoretically, we've got four political parties. But this is kind of not true, really, when you get down to it, because the Greens are really a pretty sorry excuse for a party. In fact, it's even stretching the truth to claim that we have three parties, given that the NDP won a sum total of zero seats and a mere 5% of the popular vote in the last provincial election. In fact, in the entire history of the New Brunswick NDP, never has more than a single NDP member been elected to Legislative Assembly at a time. So, really, we've got the Liberals, the Conservatives, and... I dunno, maybe one-tenth of an actual leftist party. Plus the People's Alliance, which is completely untested and nobody really knows what to make of them
New Brunswick is not a healthy province, and in truth hasn't been for some time. We don't even have a boom-bust cycle, like some resource-rich provinces (e.g., Alberta). We're lucky to get almostboom-bust cycles, and often it feels more like bust-bust-almostboom-doublebust. We've had several opportunities to slowly crawl out of our economic pit, but have squandered each and every one with a dedication and reliability that's almost courageous in its masochism.
New Brunswick's unemployment rate stands at 9.6%. This, too, is pretty much a lie; honest unemployment statistics haven't actually been tabulated since at least the 80's, possibly much longer than that, but then the dishonest definition of "employment" and "unemployment" used throughout North America is well-trodden ground and beyond the scope of my post. Regardless, even the underestimated figure of 9.6% puts us among the worst rates in Canada - though we're doing ever-so-slightly better than Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Newfoundland (in order of best to worst). However, we're also losing more jobs than those other provinces - Newfoundland and PEI are actually improving their employment rates. So it's doubtful that we'll maintain our lead in the Maritimes for long. And it's still pretty shameful compared to the rest of Canada, no matter how you measure it.
Seven out of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada, with a median income of under $14,000, are in New Brunswick. Per capita, our deficit is second only to Ontario’s. For every dollar the province takes in from income tax, 48 cents are paid out to the interest on our debt. 42 cents of every dollar the Province gets comes from Ottawa in the form of transfer payments.
So, it should come as no surprise that the economy is at the forefront of everyone's minds; voters, politicians, journalists. I'm not going to make the claim that this is a super-important election - none of the parties would be able to fix all our economic woes no matter what happened, but they all certainly stand in a position to make things significantly better or worse... So I do rank this election as "more important than most" for New Brunswickers. Sadly, the plans the parties have on offer to tackle the problems the province faces have little to distinguish themselves from one another, but I'm going to examine them each anyway.
Because of this, starting tomorrow and going through until Friday, I'm going to be going over each of the provincial parties and their platforms (as well as any historical information I find relevant), and posting summaries here, in order to educate myself before election day. Hopefully it will be informative to any of my meagre-but-not-quite-as-meagre-as-one-would-expect readership, so that the effort will enable even more people to cast informed votes on the 27th.
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