It's The Economy, Stupid

I was reading a story where Premier Lord was once again touting his small business tax cut and how good that has been for the NB economy.

I have from time to time been reporting this Statistics Canada table but I haven’t given you the latest data. From June 2000 (or about the time the small biz tax cuts started), there has been a 4% decline in the percentage of businesses remitting payroll deductions (i.e. active businesses with payroll). Now the chart below says it all. In addition to this chart, if you look at the peak number of total businesses in Q1 of 2001, the number is down by 6%.

Before I dissected this number by small, medium and large biz and the small biz sector is actually harder hit than the larger biz sectors.

So, let’s just forget about politics for a minute. Politicians will say/do anything during an election cycle. Fair enough.

But when Premier Lord started getting this data in 2002, then 2003, then 2004, then 2005, then 2006, didn’t he, and his ‘advisors’, start to think there may be some problem here? That the tax cut was meant to spur new small business but they were actually witnessing a decline in small business?

I can’t even imagine what he was told by his experts.

I’ll tell you this. He should have figured out by at the latest 2003 that his tax cut was not doing what he thought it would.

That’s the rub. The Premier can say whatever he wants about job creation, small business, exports on and on with no real rebuttal.

But some Tory blogger wants Jacques Poitras to investigate whether or not Shawn Graham was actually a teacher.

Misleading the public in a callous way (Lord knows these numbers better than I do) is acceptable but digging around in the dirt to try and find some skeleton in Shawn Graham’s closet is fair game.

I hope Jacques doesn’t fulfill this silly request. Further, if he does, I hope he add that Bernard Lord was a failed politician before he ever ran for the provincial Tories. He couldn’t even win a seat on Dieppe town council.

And how about his long and extensive track record as a lawyer?

Let the dirt fly.