Now I know why the Times and Transcript newspaper hardly ever says a critical word about the provincial government and their economic development approach. They state in a recent We Say segment that the ‘real danger’ is “that unthinking and unduly negative reporting.. …can affect and deter future efforts to bring yet more investment to the province”.
If I may be so bold, there is a difference between legitimate criticism and an overall climate of negativism. I recently did a little tally of all new company investments to New Brunswick under the Conservative government since 1999 (all new companies that have come here from outside the province and were assisted by the province) and compared that to the previous five years. From that unscientific approach, new investments are down by 80%. The Times and Transcript either knows this and refuses to report it or they don’t know it and can’t do even basic journalistic research.
The reality is that the province needs to increase its attraction of new business investments by five fold or more if they ever want to dent our economic problems. One little 40 person brewery is a great start but after five years of bragging about cutting economic development funding, I suspect there are not many more investments in the hopper.