Once upon a time, back when Frank McKenna’s was premier, New Brunswick was seen as something of a leader in Canadian public policy.  Balancing budgets, championing official languages, investing in telecommunications and the internet, creating jobs (even if a lot of them were in call centres) – New Brunswick was seen as having understood the nature of the Maritimes’ long-term challenges and moved decisively to address them.

It has been awhile since anyone thought of New Brunswick as a policy leader. Over the past decade or so, as power has passed back and forth between Liberals and Conservatives, governments have rung up growing amounts of debt (11 straight deficit budgets as of this year) come rain or shine, with seemingly little thought as to how ever-smaller future generations were going to pay for it all, particularly given demographic decline.  When your auditor general describes the problem as being “like turning the Titanic”, you have a problem.  Let’s just say concerns over debt have not made an enormous dent in the thinking of New Brunswick political parties, who face off today in a provincial election.  Three of them had frankly expansionary plans for public spending, while the Conservatives were promising balanced budgets, more doctors, no tax increases and no public sector job losses, a quartet which presumably involves the presence of some type of unicorn.

Down to the stuff we care about: post-secondary education.  The ruling Liberals, during their current term of office, killed an expensive graduate tax credit, and partly re-invested that amount in a Targeted Free Tuition set-up, which, after some initial hiccups, eventually came to resemble the one in Ontario: that is, grants equal to tuition for students from families under $60,000 in income, with a phase-out above that line.  For this election they are proposing raising the threshold to $70,000, though not until 2021.  They are also proposing to eliminate all interest on student loans, both past and present.  Normally, I’d say this is a waste of money – what possible access benefit is there in handing out cash to those who have already left post-secondary?  However, in this case, it’s a consolation measure for those who graduated too early to benefit from the free tuition program but too late to have graduated from the tax credit and are hence feeling somewhat hard done by.  Not the worst idea in the world from a fairness point of view.  The Liberals are also making promises on expanding trades, but only for secondary school students.  The Liberal education platform is here.

(An aside here: apart from their higher ed platform, the Liberals are also promising $10 million for…superclusters!  Only, in a province with essentially zero population density, the term cannot mean “concentration of talent and technology” in a Marshallian economic sense but is more likely indicative of “science-y things I’d like to spend government money on” in a Navdeep Bains-ian sense.  This being New Brunswick, there isn’t hat much science to spend on, so one of the proposed superclusters is for…blueberries.  You have no idea how much I wish I were kidding but this is actually a thing.  One weeps.)

The Greens are also all for wiping out student loan interest, but are also for increasing debt relief for students who complete on time and – for no earthly reason I can understand other than “it’s something Liberals did and therefore we would do the opposite” – bringing back the costly and frankly useless graduate tax credit.  The Green education commitments are here.

In literally their only promise on post-secondary education, the Conservatives are – cautiously – in agreement with the bringing back the tax credit thing, and seem to be prepared to kill the Targeted Free Tuition in order to pay for it.  They will, they say, “conduct a full impact evaluation of the Tuition Access Bursary and the credits they replaced”. (n.b., we here at HESA Towers actually did an impact evaluation of the tax credits for the NB government when the Conservatives were last in office there, and while there is presumably still a copy of it in the files, we’d be happy to re-send it if need be). For some reason, the Conservatives seem to think that this policy change under the Liberals has something to do with the decline in the number of students at New Brunswick universities and colleges.  Or rather, they want *other people* to think that, because I’m guessing the Conservatives are not actually so innumerate as to be unaware of the link between demographic decline and falling student numbers.  If they do decide to keep the Tuition Bursary, though, they’ll be extending it to private universities and colleges.  The Conservative platform is available here.

The NDP platform is simply one massive spending (sorry, “investment”) machine when it comes to PSE.  Interest on loans?  Fees at public community colleges?  Both gone.   Bring graduate students into the Free Tuition benefit programs?  Yep.  Reduced tuition fees for those students who do have to pay them?  Yep – how does 25% sound?  More money for mental health on campus?  More money for St. Thomas University, for some reason?  Check, check.  And so on.

You see the problem here of course: apart from the NDP’s promise to St. Thomas, not a single one of these parties is actually interested in providing more money to institutions for the purpose of education.  More money to students/families?  Sure!  No problem!  Institutions?  Fuhgeddabout it.  And this in the province where provincial funding has fallen the most over the past five years, as the figure from our recent publication The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2018 shows.

There is, however, a fifth party (which I had never actually heard of until researching for this blog) called the People’s Alliance, which is polling in low double-digits though probably won’t get more than one seat.  It has a Reform Party vibe to it, both in the sense that it is for leaner government and in the sense that it is anti-French; locally, it’s seen as a successor party to the Confederation of Regions Party which was briefly a thing in the early 1990s.  But its platform is the only one which actually suggests giving more money to institutions – 4% annual increases for the next four years, albeit offset in the beginning with a tuition freeze.  The People’s Alliance platform is here.

All I can say is, none of this leaves me with much optimism for the province.  Thoughts and prayers, as they say, to all my New Brunswick readers.