An ‘exercise in deception’ is how the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of New Brunswick characterizes the Gallant government’s latest budget.
Blaine Higgs says that in many interviews, he predicted the contigency fund was purely a way to inflate the budget to make a statement lik they’re making now: that the deficit was cut in half.
“If you take the first budget they put in place with the contingency fund and now the numbers they’re quoting now are without the contingency fund,” says Higgs, “so they basically played with this $150-million to inflate it, and then take it out and make it look like they had an improvement.”
Higgs says that the new tax revenue is primarily all being used and spent and the concern is that the government’s philosophy seems to be — tax, spend and spend.
He’s called the education system in the province ‘broken’ and he asks where the money the Gallant government is investing into education — an extra $56-million or a nearly five percent increase.
“If you can go back in time, you can see we increased budgets in a lot of areas but we can’t find any results that that’s made any improvements,” says Higgs, “and only too often do people say ‘oh well, it must be getting better because we’ve put more money into it’ and that’s the philosophy of this whole budget.”
He calls the tax rate in this province unacceptable.
