Lord says money on its way from feds

Ah, politics. The Telegraph Journal is reporting today that Premier Lord says money on its way from feds with the ‘coming days’. Check out this text from the article:

Without specifying what projects he was talking about, Mr. Lord said he was “very confident we will be able to make some announcements in the coming days.”Since coming to power, the federal Conservatives have already nixed a proposal from Mr. Lord that would see $1.5 billion in federal funding flowing to the province in a federal-provincial side deal.

The new federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has also said the current equalization formula, that sees funds transferred to have-not provinces such as New Brunswick, is a mess, and that it could take some time to sort out the fiscal imbalance in the country, a priority of the country’s premiers.

Mr. Lord said it’s all good news for the province.”We’re not going to end up with less,” he said, noting that he took Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments during the recent election campaign about fixing the fiscal imbalance to mean New Brunswick would definitely see more money flowing from Ottawa.

You gotta be optimistic to be a politician these days. The federal finance minister says no to the ‘side deal’ with New Brunswick – Accelerating Prosperity – (don’t forget the TJ reported that Harper was supportive of this side deal). In fact he [Flaherty] says that the Equalization program itself is a mess and that the side deals with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were inappropriate. It is mor than likely Flaherty’s view of Equalization is about the same as the emerging majority thought in Ontario – Ontario puts in too much. Ergo, New Brunswick gets too much of Ontario’s money.

But our Premier says it’s ‘all good news for the province’. Lovely.

By the way, if the so-called money to be announced in the ‘coming days’ is for Saint John’s harbour cleanup, that project was in place before the election so to count that as ‘new money’ is a political gimmick. In fact, if you’ll recall, the Feds were saying that it was Premier Lord that was dragging his feet by not ponying up his share.