New Brunswick’s Liberal government, worried about the deficit blowing past a billion dollars, has released a pre-budget discussion document called Difficult Decisions on how it can save and pull in more money.
Finance Minister René Legacy admits some of the ideas pitched by senior civil servants in the document won’t be politically popular, such as pushing more ailing seniors from expensive hospital beds to cheaper long-term care homes or raising hundreds, if not thousands, of fees for items like driver licences.
In an interview last week, the minister went through the ideas point by point, as he gets ready for the budget release on March 17, the second of the Liberal mandate.
“The ones I prefer – and most of them fit in this category – are the ones that are transformational,” Legacy said.
“I’m not really interested in just cuts for cuts because we know what happens with those. You pull back and then within a few years, it sneaks back in and you’re back at the same point. The ones that talk about doing things completely different are the most interesting.”
Nothing is set in stone, as the Liberals want to hear from the public before making decisions. People have until Feb. 20 to give feedback online, by email or by old-fashioned letter.
Here are the dozen items, divided between “savings” and “revenues,” in the discussion document:
1. Reducing the size of the civil service: Legacy told Brunswick News this was an idea he preferred. The civil service is now 13,000-strong, and grew recently much faster than population growth. The number of bureaucrats could be whittled down through attrition, early retirements, layoffs or a combination of the three.
2. Streamlining government operations: This one is about making some people take on the workloads of others. Under consideration is the consolidation or combination of the work of government agencies, boards and commissions, as well as the roles of eight independent legislative officers, such as the auditor general, the ombud, the seniors’ advocate and the like.
3. Reducing consulting contracts: The province spends $50 million on consultants each year. Legacy, a businessman in his private life, didn’t sound keen on chopping consultants. He said they add a lot of value to the work that government does, although the idea might be politically palatable for short-term savings.
4. Improving health and longterm care efficiency: Forcing seniors to move from hospital beds to nursing and special care homes. This has been talked about for decades in New Brunswick with no government showing much nerve to do it on a large scale, given potential blowback from families. Legacy said the province could start charging families for their loved ones’ stay in hospitals after they are medically discharged, encouraging them to choose a longterm care home instead.
5. Asset rationalization / divestiture: The province owns lots of buildings. How about closing schools with fewer than 100 students? And tourist sites with fewer than 5,000 yearly visitors? Legacy, who is from the small city of Bathurst, said consideration had to be given to small schools that are too far from other schools before closing them. He pointed out only certain tourist sites are funded, even though the province has hundreds. What makes only some of them more special than others, he asked.
6. Road surface policy: This would fulfill a recommendation made by the auditor general about 15 years ago. Given that New Brunswick has far too many roads for the number of people to pay for them, why not stop paving them all? Instead, roads with less traffic would be downgraded to chip seal, and the ones that are in the boonies would get gravel.
7. Assessing government grants: The government doles out hun- dreds, if not thousands, of grants to private groups and nonprofits each year. But Legacy warned that cutting them wouldn’t be transformational.
8. Reviewing government fees and exploring new revenue sources: The province has more than 2,000 fees, and the finance minister was surprised to learn some of them hadn’t been increased in 20 years. The idea would be to raise the fees and then hike them with inflation every year.
9. Tolls on non-New Brunswick vehicles: Legacy pointed out that Nova Scotia already does this to drivers with New Brunswick plates on the Cobequid Pass on Highway 104 in Nova Scotia on the way to Halifax.
10. Optimizing existing revenue sources: An old government favourite is mentioned here, hiking sin taxes on booze, cannabis, alcohol and cigarettes. But there’s also talk of taxing unreported lobster landings through better enforcement (as many as three out of 10 lobsters are estimated to be sold under the counter) and regulating online gaming.
11. Supporting timely and manageable repayments: Students have $125 million in outstanding loans at risk of default. The minister said it would be possible to be more aggressive to go after repayments. Again, he warned it wouldn’t be transformational.
12. Property tax and levy modernization: Compel public universities to pay property taxes and businesses and cottage owners in rural areas to pay the same road levy that homeowners do.
Legacy said one of the reasons he asked his department to set out these so-called difficult decisions was to warn different groups that they couldn’t expect the same kind of funding anymore. Normally, during pre-budget consultations, the government is inundated with requests from nonprofits and the like asking for funding. They came with cap in hand again, he said.
“Even when the premier started saying we had difficult choices to make, and we’re looking for transformational, new ideas, what we were getting was some of the same groups doubling down and really trying to tell us why they really need more money. That’s not the exercise. We’re not trying to hurt any organization. We’re just trying to make them relook at doing things.”
Provincial governments, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative, have launched these kinds of pre-budget consultations before.
The difference this time, Legacy says, is the need to deal with slower growth and less private investment, in no small part caused by global uncertainty, particularly around trade, which hurts New Brunswick’s export-oriented economy.
The government states on its website that the province’s projected tax revenues will be $13.7 billion and its projected spending will be $14.5 billion, creating a roughly $835-million deficit.
Provincial taxpayers already pay five cents of every tax dollar to paying down debt ($740 million a year).
However, Legacy noted those were the figures from the government’s second quarter last summer, right before it signed a new deal with the province’s doctors, paying them more. Even then, the finance minister acknowledged it would likely push the deficit over $1 billion.
Premier Susan Holt was so worried about the deficit she said in December she wanted every government department to find 10 to 15 per cent in savings by the budget, a massive undertaking.
Pushed on the latest red ink, and whether it would go much higher than $1 billion, Legacy said the third-quarter results weren’t finalized, as they were dependent on new revenue figures (he didn’t sound optimistic these would provide enough cash to tame the deficit dragon).
“I would rather work on the expense side, just because I think we are carrying some legacy programs and legacy spending that we haven’t worked on for awhile. So, I’d rather work on that for now,” Legacy said.
“We’re already a pretty solidly taxed jurisdiction, so I don’t want to go too much in that area.”
By John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Feb 09, 2026 at 14:39
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