N.B. premier defends ambiguous promise on balanced budgets

Premier Susan Holt is defending what now appears to have been a carefully ambiguous election promise to balance the provincial budget in every year of her mandate.

Holt repeated the balanced budget promise many times during this year's election campaign but never specified that it did not apply to the current 2024-25 fiscal year — even when questions from reporters gave her ample opportunity to clarify the point.

In a year-end interview with CBC News, the premier said the Liberals "talked pretty broadly" about things, suggesting that was why she hadn't been more specific.

The promise to balance budgets in every year of the government's mandate referred to "the budgets that we were putting together and that we were going to be governing based on," she said.

By that logic, this year, covered by a budget delivered by the previous Progressive Conservative government in March, doesn't count.

Just days after the government was sworn in, Finance Minister René Legacy announced that as of Sept. 30, the province was on track for a $92.1 million deficit this year.

Holt said that figure surprised her, though she decided to honour the commitment to $10,000-per-nurse retention bonuses at a cost of $74 million — $60 million of which is new spending that will be added to this year's bottom line.

Holt promised the bonuses on Sept. 20, the second day of the election campaign, at a time when the PCs had already projected a $27.6 million deficit for the year. 

She brushed off questions at the time about whether she'd send out the bonuses if there was still a deficit, and if she was willing to run an even larger deficit to do it.

"We have committed to balanced budgets every year," she said at the Sept. 20 event in Oromocto, without mentioning that the promise didn't cover the current year.

Holt said the cost to the health-care system of losing nurses would be "so much greater" than the expense of the retention payments. 

But she reminded reporters that over the last four years, the PC Higgs government projected small surpluses or deficits, only to have a flood of federal tax remittances boost revenues and create large surpluses — which she implied would happen again.

"We have very little faith in the premier's deficit projections because they have proven time and time again that they have forecasted deficits and then delivered an exceptional surplus," she said Sept. 20.

"We believe that our projections for revenue and for expenses for the next fiscal year — for this fiscal year that we're in — allow the space for this $74 million investment in the retention of our nurses."