New Brunswick is sinking... and I don't wanna swim.

I am not a native New Brunswicker.

I was born and raised on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, and aside from a couple years of work and my University education I spent the majority of my life there. Cape Breton Island is a place I love dearly and I saw myself living there until retirement, but the economic reality of the Island is that it’s a dying place that has nothing to offer to young individuals or families looking for a future there.

In the summer of 2004, my girlfriend at the time (now my lovely wife) and I decided that Cape Breton was no longer for us. Despite our love affair with my home and native land, we realized that what ‘The Cape’ had to offer us didn’t exactly gel with our future aspirations.  My lady had fallen in love with the east coast way of life after moving here from Ontario, so we decided that we wanted to take our respective skillsets and try to carve out a life somewhere amid the Atlantic Provinces.

We chose the rapidly growing city of Moncton, New Brunswick and moved in the middle of a freak blizzard in November of 2004. We married, bought a home, had two beautiful children and nailed down stable careers. We have made this wonderful city and beautiful province our home for the better part of a decade.  Moncton is where we want to be.

So why do I feel as though the sentiment toward my family and I isn’t mutual as it pertains to the leadership of the province of New Brunswick?

The government of this fair province doesn’t seem to be in line with my family’s priorities as of late. Every day I see news of another bilingualism brouhaha, more essential services like health care being axed, questionable use of our education dollars, and suspect judgment from our elected officials that makes my head spin worse than the Tilt-A-Whirl at the old Bill Lynch Shows.

We have the debates over shale gas and the proposed pipeline that would bring oil from the western oil sands to be refined in St. John. With these two endeavors we’re promised a land of milk and honey where jobs are plentiful and well-paying, and everyone will live in a gumdrop house on lollipop lane. Good paying, stable jobs are something this province needs to bolster its sagging economy but one would be insane to ignore the possible environmental risks involved with both of these projects. 

What a sensible governing body would do might be to commission studies from both financial and environmental experts impartial to an outcome and actually pay attention to the findings. What’s our government doing, though? They’re playing the part of the political eunuch and having their strings pulled by every business and special interest group with a stake in the outcome. The province needs to get with the program and realize it’s not the business community or the environmentalists with the most at stake here, it’s the people of New Brunswick that call this province our home who will have to live with the decisions surrounding these endeavors for the next century.

I think the last straw for me was the budget that was just released by the powerful folks in Fredericton. As a preface to the document being drawn up, our esteemed Premier was bandying about the idea of holding a referendum to ask the plebiscite whether or not to raise taxes – a somewhat comical gesture after building a cornerstone of his election platform on the promise of no tax hikes.  You see, I have two University degrees, but neither one of them has anything to do with taxation. So why, pray tell, is the elected leader of my province asking me what to do?  I don’t ask the mailman how to fix my leaky faucet, so when it comes to how you’re going to fix our suffocating deficit problem the ball is in your court, sir. That’s what I thought we paid you for.

Regarding our budget, it would seem as though the best solution to our ever- growing debt in this province is to reach in and take more money from the already light pockets of ‘we the people.’ It looks like my wife and I will increase our contribution to our province’s coffers by way of personal income tax by roughly 25 per cent each. As if my bi-weekly deductions weren’t enough to make me nauseous to begin with, these new amounts are sure to contribute to my lifelong dream of a bleeding ulcer.

Believe me, folks, I want to “Be…In this place” but the events of the last few years are making it really difficult. We have a government with no direction, a population that is so used to being beaten down that they accept it as normal, millions of dollars being spent ridiculously trying to dictate what language we should be speaking when there are much bigger fish to fry, and what seems like a concerted effort to take every dollar of our hard-earned money to fund an ineffective group of elected officials that probably shouldn’t be managing a lemonade stand – let alone an entire province.

As someone relatively new to New Brunswick, I implore you all to take back control of this province. Voice your concerns loud and often and remind your government that they work for you and not the other way around.  If you don’t, this beautiful province will die; believe me. I’ve got a whole Island that’s proof of what happens when people become complacent and let poor decisions by government dictate their situation.

I’ve left one place that I love already because I couldn’t see a future there. I’d prefer not to have to do it again.