Premier Blaine Higgs delivered his very first State of the Province Address last night.
To a packed House at the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce and to those watching live on Rogers TV, he told New Brunswickers his provincial government will balance the 2018-2019 budget, “I’m also pleased to say here tonight that the budget will continue to be balanced in 2019-2020, well we can’t go beyond that maybe, we’re not sure. For as long as we are here, the budget will be balance because it should be a given. It’s shouldn’t be an option, it should be a given.”
Higgs also noted in the next 10 years, about 120,000 jobs will become available in the province, which the Premier says will mean more jobs than people who can fill them. He says about 75,000 of these jobs will require some form of post-secondary education, “We can keep demanding more taxes from workers, but soon we will have fewer and fewer people.”
“The province we choose to be in the next five years will determine whether or not my grandchildren, your grandchildren, your children see a space for their dreams right here in New Brunswick,” Higgs says.
While making reference to the previous Liberal government, the Premier noted, the Auditor General recently confirmed that New Brunswickers have more public debt per capita than Canadians anywhere else, and New Brunswickers carry one of the highest tax burdens ever.
“When a government that take more taxes from you and hands more debt to your children and hasn’t delivered results in health or education, that is not a call reason to set up a study or create a focus group. That is a call to action,” Higgs says.
Premier Higgs spoke of the need to grow the private sector economy and focus on the challenges facing the province, “The last four years, the government took in a billion dollars more in revenue than it did in 2014. A billion dollars per year, mostly through higher taxes. That is a lost opportunity. We continue to borrow money to pay our bills, yet we are second last in Canada in economic growth. Our social program indicator, from literacy scores to child poverty rates to surgical wait times did not improve. A billion dollars is a lot of money. It is nearly $3000 for every working person in New Brunswick. We are incredibly reliant on public money to keep the economy going and that is the problem. If an economic plan is built around taking another billion dollars in taxes from the workforce of 320, 000 people every time things get tough, you do not have an economic plan. We will not be raising new taxes for government coffers.”
He also indicated some of the government priorities, including strengthening the economy and avoiding a credit downgrade.
Other opportunities his government is looking at include, building a national coalition of provinces which recognize the importance of a pipeline, challenging the federal government to develop a funding model that will help maintain infrastructure, developing the province’s natural resources, such as natural gas and doing away with the physician billing number system and working with health-care professionals to better connect people with care.
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