The dangers of misdiagnosing

I have told this story before but I bring it up occasionally because it is so instructive. In the early years of the Bernard Lord Tory government, a staffer in the Premier’s office and I were chatting about a new report out of an Ottawa think tank that argued for more federal incentives to encourage population mobility within Canada. The report concluded, rightly, that there were not enough workers in Alberta and high unemployment in rural New Brunswick or Newfoundland and the solution would be for government to encourage more mobility. Viola, lower unemployment in Atlantic Canada, jobs filled in western Canada.

This staffer told me that if the Miramichi region has “10,000 less population it would be a smaller but much stronger regional economy”.

I told him that didn’t sound right to me. We agreed to disagree.

I think about that example a lot because it points to the problem of misdiagnosis.

Don’t get me wrong, population mobility is a healthy attribute of a strong national economy. The 2021 Census reported that over 920,000 Canadians were interprovincial migrants between 2016 and 2021 and over five million moved to a different city or town within their province over the same period.

But a deliberate strategy to depopulate certain regions without a serious effort at regional economic development based on local assets and attributes could end up leading to MAGA. There is much more anger in much of Appalachia than northeastern New Brunswick and that has a lot to do with the impression of being left behind.

What are some areas that are being misdiagnosed today? There are potentially many but I think the backlash on immigration - fueled in large part by almost daily stories in the media and reports from think tanks, could end up hurting places like New Brunswick the most.

The growing view among some that free-ish trade, investment and people flow across borders was a bad idea could end up hurting places like New Brunswick the most.

The view that Canada cutting its relatively limited oil and gas supply (development) will lead to lower carbon emissions globally is not a particularly good idea. New Brunswick imports hundreds of millions of dollars worth of natural gas every year from as far away as Alberta. Shipping natural gas thousands of kilometres is very carbon emission intensive. It looks like NB Power will be increasing its natural gas fired electricity generation capacity to support winter peak demand. Where will that gas come from? Likely Pennsylvania or western Canada. FYI, gas is much more expensive when you are at the end of the line.

We need to make sure we have a sober second look when folks come by with easy solutions to complex public policy issues. Misdiagnosis can have long term negative impacts.

As for the Lord political staffer in 2002 advocating to depopulate much of northern New Brunswick, he ended up changing his mind. I talked to him a decade later and he was living in northern NB and advocating for a robust economic development focus in the area.