Premier Susan Holt answering question on cut to Green Party caucus budget at her news conference last week
Liberal Premier Susan Holt says she has no intention of overriding the work of a legislative committee that decided to slash the Green Party caucus budget by $154,000 and give that money instead to her party’s caucus.
“The decisions on how the opposition and the government members’ offices are funded is a decision of the Legislative Administrative Committee,” Holt explained last week, adding the committee members agreed to a funding formula that they felt “was most equitable and fair across all 49 representatives in the New Brunswick legislature.”
She was responding to a question at her weekly news conference about the potential loss of effective opposition voices in the legislature.
The Greens have been forced to lay off two of their four caucus staff members because of the budget cut.
“There’s clearly an attempt by the Liberals to try to undermine the work that we do in the legislature,” Tantramar Green MLA Megan Mitton said today in a telephone interview.
“It’s frustrating because some of the work that we need to do is to read and research bills,” she added, “so that we are effective in dealing with them at committee.”
Mitton said that she and Green leader David Coon will continue to put in even more hours to do that work.
“I refuse to let them slow us down despite their best efforts,” she added.
She also pointed out that the new budget allocations have nothing to do with the Greens’ loss of one seat in the election last fall because the party’s caucus budget had already been reduced to reflect that loss.
“They’ve taken this further,” she says. “This is clearly an attack on the Greens.”
Cuts to Green statements
MLA Megan Mitton reading a statement in the legislature in 2020
Mitton says that yesterday she was writing a statement to read in the legislature when she learned that the rules had been changed and the time for Green statements had been cut in half, from two per day to one, with that lost time allocated to the Progressive Conservatives.
“What that means is, they’ve taken 40% of our caucus budget and they gave it to themselves, and then they took 50% of our member statements and gave them to the PCs,” she says, adding that those brief, one-minute member statements are important for calling attention to issues that matter.
She says the statement she wasn’t allowed to read yesterday was a follow-up to questions she had asked about how many people apply for social assistance and how many actually receive it.
“I finally got the number and I was shocked,” she says. “More than half of people who call and apply for assistance are screened out as ineligible. It’s like 11,000 people who call and ask for help and don’t get it. And so, I was going to draw attention to how the system isn’t working.”
She says the figures also showed that about 42% of those who apply for disability benefits get rejected.
“I was going to draw attention to how the government is failing thousands of people who are struggling the most.”
Two party system
Mitton says she has made statements every day she was in the legislature since 2018 when she was first elected — statements ranging from expressing concerns about cuts to road maintenance budgets, the rough shape of many roads such as Rte. 955, lack of access to primary health care, the need to reform laws for victims of sexual abuse, inadequate responses to the climate crisis and the urgency of protecting the Chignecto Isthmus from rising seas and violent storms.
“I speak for thousands of people,” she says, “and I was extremely upset yesterday when I learned that the government is trying to silence us.”
She says the all-party committee that decided on the caucus budget cut meets behind closed doors and discussions there are not made public, but she feels the Liberal majority and their PC colleagues were motivated by politics.
“I do think this is an effort to reinforce the two-party system that benefited both the Conservatives and the Liberals, because they basically just passed power back and forth, 100% of the power, you know, every four or eight years.
“And they were quite happy to do it that way,” she says.
Losing CBC coverage would be disastrous for New Brunswick
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in 2023. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilièvre’s threat to cancel CBC’s annual Parliamentary grant would, if implemented, be a disaster for smaller, rural provinces like New Brunswick where local news coverage is already on its way to the morgue.
Federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge issued a series of half-hearted proposals this month for strengthening the public broadcaster in the interests of national sovereignty and combatting the pervasive influence of U.S. tech Goliaths such as Facebook, Google and X.
But hostile federal Liberal and Conservative governments have relentlessly weakened the CBC with a 45-year string of budget cuts starting with Pierre Trudeau’s 12.3% cut in 1979-80. (See Knowlton Nash: “The Microphone Wars: A History of Triumph and Betrayal at the CBC,” page 440.)
In 2020, the non-profit Forum for Research and Policy in Communications calculated that Parliamentary funding for CBC’s operations had decreased in real, inflation-adjusted dollars by 36% since 1985, while CBC commercial income had fallen by 40% since 2014.
In its 2022 report commissioned by the CBC, the international consulting firm Nordicity concluded that Canada ranks near the bottom when it comes to Parliamentary funding for public service broadcasters (PSBs) at $32 per capita.
Poilièvre portrays defunding CBC as an exercise in cutting waste, but a Parliamentary grant of $1.4 billion is not even a drop in the ocean when measured against the $449.2 billion the federal government is spending this year.
CBC is by far, Canada’s largest journalistic organization with community-based locations from coast-to-coast-to coast including 27 TV and 88 radio stations as well as local and regionally based online platforms in every province and territory.
(In 1994, New Brunswick was the last province in Canada to receive full CBC television service thanks to the efforts of Premiers Richard Hatfield and Frank McKenna who wrested the partial service we were getting away from the Irving empire — paid from public coffers to carry a few hours a week of CBC programming on their private broadcast outlets.)
Nowadays, only two big journalistic outfits have outlets that are based in New Brunswick: CBC and the American-owned, Postmedia newspaper chain (which cut about half of its editorial staff after buying the Irvings out in 2022).
CTV and Global do provide some New Brunswick coverage from headquarters that are out-of-province.
In spite of Poilièvre’s constant harping on defunding CBC, a poll of 2055 Canadians conducted from August 28 to September 6 found that an overwhelming majority said they need the CBC. The poll was sponsored by The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University:
Poilièvre’s threat to erase Canada’s largest journalistic organization comes as other, like-minded politicians take calculated steps to sidestep scrutiny.
In Nova Scotia, Conservative Premier Tim Houston, in one of many anti-democratic moves, is dismantling the province’s communications agency that was supposed to provide journalists with factual information from every government department.
Henceforth, all inquiries will have to be funnelled through the premier’s office and by decree, no more media questioning of the premier and his ministers outside the legislative chamber, but only in the “media room” across the street where reporters may or may not get access to the power holders.
And perhaps worst of all, the Houston government is giving itself the power to obstruct freedom of information requests that both journalists and members of the public rely on to ferret out frequently hidden facts.
Meantime, in New Brunswick, reporters are forced to file access to information requests that take from weeks to months to get even partial answers and sometimes no answers at all.
Why is one lane of Sackville’s Main Street highway overpass still closed after recent attempts to repair the bridge? Repeated inquiries to communications staff at the N.B. department of transportation go unacknowledged and unanswered even when the minister’s office is copied.
And at the municipal government level here in Tantramar, question periods have been reduced from three per month to one and strictly limited to 15-minutes.
And was Mayor Black really serious when he told reporters that he would only answer questions e-mailed to him in advance?