The Prime Minister has posted his letter to Premier Graham and announced this by issuing a press release.
I can tell you there are mandarins reaching for their Zantac after reading this. They are moving their health and social transfer payments to an equal, per capita basis. Well, our ‘per capita’ is decreasing…
I have a hard time reading through the politics-speak, I’ll wait for the dumbed down version tomorrow in the local paper, but it does seem there will be more Equalization for NB under this new model.
Initial comments from NB are negative. Maybe the new method of calculating health and social transfers will lead to an offset of new Equalization cash.
Interesting week in New Brunswick politics.
They do say they ‘guarantee’ that it won’t be lower than under the current model. From reading the ‘politicalspeak’ I don’t see why response would be negative, except like you say, if it just makes the province more dependant on the feds?
OK, after reading it I can see the negativity. A 1.8 increase in equalization is, I’m pretty sure, LESS than the increases in equalization that the liberals handed out. To put it in perspective, a media story also claimed that thanks to gas prices, inflation rose TWO percent in the last month. So any thought that that will help NB taxpayers is out the window.
Meanwhile, as opposition members say, the 29% increase for Quebec is to get them elected there. Once again, lack of political representation rears its head. No representation-no need to ‘buy off’ voters. So as noted at Charles Leblanc’s website, no help for agent orange sufferers.
I also noted the interesting Irving slang. Seems they are warming up to Harper, as the story says “In as little as five years Saint John…” won’t have the worst polluted harbour, rather than an equally valid headline “Saint Johners will have to wait another five years for harbour cleanup”.
A 1.8 percent increase in the second poorest province while Quebec gets massive investment is simply an embarassment, that shows another feature of ‘party membership’ that Greg Thomson is praising it to the skies when clearly NB gets screwed. Seeing somebody from the area talk about how wonderful it is is truly bizarre.
However, it COULD have been worse, but it sure as hell could have been better. Thank heavens for minority governments.