Call me a Liberal hack if you want but I think the Tories need a new voice with a new message. Here’s another quip from our friend Volpé in the Telegraph Journal:
Opposition Leader Jeannot Volpé [said] his former government used the low-tax regime to lure people to the province. “My biggest problem with this budget is they have just destroyed in one year what we built in the last seven,” Volpé said.
I don’t know much about journalism but typically a wildly inaccurate statement like this deserves some type of balance.
During the seven years Volpe was in power, there was a net out-migration every year. More people moved out than in. From 1999 to 2006, the population of New Brunswick actually declined slightly. Volpe’s government was the first [elected government]in the province’s history to actually have a decline during their mandate.
And he can freely say in the press that his ‘low tax regime’ was used to ‘lure people to the province’.
You know what? If Volpe had a serious economic development program to go with those small tax cuts, he may have been able to make this claim. But otherwise, this is just silliness.
I hope the Tories find a new voice. With a clear message focused on real solutions to our economic challenges. In the old days, the Liberals were ‘tax and spend’ and lovers of Equalization and federal transfers (or so some say) and the Tories were about fiscal responsibility and less Equalization. Now Tories are about fast growing spending (as I have pointed out NB’s budget increased in line with Ontario – which had a fast growing population), more Equalization and no real economic development plan and the Libs are talking about self-sufficiency.
But these days who knows. By the way, Volpe. Why don’t you tell people how much gas tax revenue went up during your regime? How about all those pesky fees and charges levied by government? And to the consternation of MonctonLandlord, why don’t you tell people how much property taxes have increased?
Tee hee hee.
Cut a tax, raise a tax.
Nothing changes.
Same crap, different day.