The End for Rural New Brunswick?
It can be argued that recent decisions taken by the Alward government are designed to destroy rural New Brunswick. Certainly, if our government could empty out the hinterlands it would save millions of dollars annually in health care, education, transportation, etc. It appears that the current government has a game plan to do just that. Here are but a few examples of government initiatives which support this argument.
Proposed changes to the Electoral Boundaries & Representation Commission Act would reduce the number of ridings provincially from 55 to 49 – the losses being primarily to rural representation. After all, if the plan is to disenfranchise rural New Brunswick one must first reduce/eliminate its voice in the legislature which makes it easier to pass future legislation to enhance urban areas to the further detriment of rural areas. Without proper representation in Fredericton, the pesky voice of rural NB becomes quieter and eventually is silenced.
To speed up the process of depopulating rural NB the government has come up with other initiatives as well such as reducing ferry service to Grand Manan. Eliminating the service entirely would be a much quicker solution to depopulating the island but government has always preferred death by a thousand cuts as opposed to a quick kill. Closing or reducing service to provincial parks such as Anchorage further eliminates rural employment possibilities and encourages out-migration.
Cutting road maintenance budgets is another tried and true solution. All of our road money has gone into the twinning of the Trans Canada Highway so as to better whisk goods and services to our major urban areas while at the same time pushing tourist traffic through New Brunswick as quickly as possible and keeping them away from the picturesque towns and villages dotting the Saint John River valley, the Acadian Peninsula and elsewhere. There simply is no money left to maintain the deplorable roads in rural NB so the government lets them rot away. Hey, this year we were awarded with 4 of the top 10 spots in Atlantic Canada’s Worst Road survey! Surely, rural folks will eventually tire of beating their vehicles to death and move to the cities. If not, fatal accidents due to poor road conditions will take care of them over time.
And just to make sure that they leave sooner than later the Minister of Health has recently released the Grant Thornton report which purports to identify unbelievably large savings in health care delivery if we would just all get ill in a more efficient manner. One certainty in this report is that it is the harbinger of even more draconian cuts to come in health care delivery in rural NB – this will drive the buggers out for sure! Cutting surgery and obstetrics at Hotel Dieu in Perth-Andover, for example, as well as imminent cuts to ER services will certainly clear out rural Victoria and neighboring counties and with no hospital service anywhere within a reasonable distance folks living in Plaster Rock and further up the Tobique, who hope desperately that their forestry industry will recover….well they can just forget about that for what company would want to invest in an area where there is no facility available that could offer anything remotely resembling a decent level of health care?
Minister Flemming is on record as stating that this report confirms what he knew all along, that there are inefficiencies in health care delivery. I am sure that there are and this issue needs to be addressed. But to blindly treat health care as nothing more than a dollar and cents issue is a grave (no pun intended) disservice to all New Brunswickers. It is, in fact, a dollar and sense issue and unfortunately, our government is really lacking in the latter. We are a rural province and it is an inconvenient truth that the cost of health care delivery in this province is likely to be higher than in more populous jurisdictions. To compare the cost of health care delivery in NB with Ontario, for example, will yield results which are skewed because of the huge difference in population if nothing else. Yet the Minister trumpets the report as proof that our per capita hospitalization costs and per procedure costs are out of line. Nothing is that simple. If it were, how would you feel about the following comparison which uses the same comparison model as that cited in the Grant Thornton report?
Ontario has a population of 13,505,900 and has 107 MPPs each earning a base salary of $116,550. As such, it costs each resident of Ontario $.923 annually to cover the base cost of all MPPs. New Brunswick has a population of 755,950 and has 55 MLAs (currently) each earning a base salary of $85,000. As such it costs each resident of New Brunswick $6.18 annually to cover the base cost of each MLA. That’s 670% more than Ontario pays! To get in line with Ontario would require an MLA pay cut to $12,000 or a reduction in the number of provincial ridings to 8! I, for one, could never imagine the former happening but the latter, unfortunately, is a possibility…..just completely disenfranchise non-urban New Brunswick.
New Brunswick is a rural province and those of us living in rural areas are proud to be New Brunswickers. We are not second class citizens and we refuse to be treated as such. It’s time this government realized that.
Al McPhail
Perth-Andover
