GNB: Setting targets in a turbulent time

If you haven’t had a chance to do the State of the Province (SOTP) address, you should try it once. I have missed the past few but went last night. It’s the equivalent of the Oscars - without the pomp. It’s a mix of top politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, pundits, etc. They tell me 1000 people are packed in.

I had the chance to sit beside the impressive Senator Krista Ross and got some inside baseball on the senate.

Premier Holt made a good speech - highlighting the serious challenges ahead related to US trade. She put some #s on it - if I recall 6,000 jobs at risk. As I have written before the even bigger, long term challenge is that any company here subject to high tariffs is a candidate to move to the US. If you serve Canada and the U.S. and you had to choose where to put your operations - 340M versus 40M. The risk is that places like NB lose most of what’s left of our manufacturing and end up truly as hewers of wood, drawers of fish and farmers of potatoes.

Holt put a lot of focus on targets. I won’t list them here but you can find them at GNB.ca. They were a little nerdy - one actually included a decimal - 4.1% -or something as a target and another had a number like 641 - probably could have rounded at 4% or 600. But the idea of accountability to results - in the area of health care access, timeliness of access, Grade 8 test scores, housing, is good. I’m not sure about a 3% per year wage growth target - that ends up looking like the opening bargaining position for public sector unions -even if inflation was low.

The problem with old geezers like me is that I have a long memory. Premier Lord had a ‘report card’ to New Brunswickers- with detailed metrics -as some of them worsened they strangely were left off the report card and by the end I believe they were not publishing it at all. Graham had targets but circumstances overwhelmed his government. So did Alward (quite wonky). I think Gallant had some metrics but nothing formalized like a report card (that I remember). Higgs had some metrics - around the economy for sure - the smartly titled “Economic Recovery and Growth Action Plan – Closing the Gap in One Generation.”

Lord wanted NB to be in the top 3 for R&D spending - depending on how you measure we are still last.

Graham wanted to be free of Equalization payments by 2026 (next year). It is $3.1 billion in 2025-2026 something like $7,500 per household in New Brunswick.

Alward wanted to diversify export markets and boost productivity. Not much luck there.

Gallant wanted to grow the population. A few good federal policies, a global pandemic and an expansion of international migration led to record population growth in the Higgs years.

There seems to be a lot of goodwill for the new Premier and her government. She brought five Cabinet members on stage to discuss their plan. It looks like she intends to rely a lot on her Cabinet which is an interesting trend.

Of course I wish them all the best. Even if I didn’t know Susan personally (we worked together at the NB Jobs Board between 2015-2017) I would wish her success. It would be borderline sociopathic to wish for your government to fail just because you didn’t like the party, politicians or policies.

My new phrase when I speak to people in positions of leadership “I live in Theoryland, you live in Realityland”. In Theoryland, we can say anything (e.g. put a wind turbine on every hilltop on Crown and industrial freehold land). In Realityland you have to actually deliver.

I’m more than ever aware of the riskless nature of the work that pundits like myself do for a living. But if there are a few good ideas pinging around in the old noggin, I’ll continue to put them down here.