$1 Million a day

New Brunswick’s Finance Minister Greg Byrne came out last week with news that the projected debt for the province could be higher than the $740 Million already projected for 2009-2010. For those of you who have been reading the news, the past month has just been terrible for the provincial Liberals. There has been increasing pressure from official opposition party leader, David Alward of the Conservative Party along with a series of blunders on loan guarantees from the province to failing interests.

The Point Lepreau reactor has been getting a lot of coverage lately, because of the delays that have recently been announced, bumping the completion date for the project into February, at a cost of $1 Million a day to replace what could have been processed at the plant. Finally, there was an announcement last week explaining that because of the costs arising from the refurbishment delays, there will be a 2% hike in billing, placing the burden on to citizens of New Brunswick to pay for a private industry fail.

Moncton has been having issues with completion dates as well, while the town has been busy signing Russian superstar hockey players, and spending millions to bring CFL games to town, a move that Shawn Graham claims will more than break even, they have also been caught in the spending game when they approved the building of multi-million dollar conidium’s close to Royal Oaks Golf course and now the province is on the hook for $4.8 Million that Moncton has only paid a fraction back of.

All of this, accompanied by Bell-Aliant closing 11 call centers in the province, and the LNG disputes going on in Saint John, where New Brunswick trades workers are protesting Albertan trades people getting jobs the New Brunswickers are completely competent to do themselves, in an ironic twist of the early 2000’s that had thousands of New Brunswickers heading westward for work has conservative leader David Alward speaking up.

Alward has been more and more vocal of late and has been making some big promises. I don’t want to make it seem like it’s a two party contest, but I haven’t heard boo from other parties on any of these hot topics. What I do know is this; with Shawn Graham adding almost $2 Billion to the New Brunswick deficit on his path to bringing New Brunswick to self-sufficiency, it’s not going to take much more than a couple open ended promises to beat him.