Who a political party chooses to stand with often tells us more about them than what they say they stand for.

No truer is this than the debate over changes to government employees’ pensions.

Both the Liberals and the NDP have sided with the pension mob, and against hard working taxpayers who have been propping up government worker pensions for years.

Opposition Liberals now say they want to “halt” pension reforms. They waited until this week to make the announcement after the government committed to changes during the election, introduced specific recommendations over a year ago, spent months traveling the province consulting with thousands of current and former government employees, and even made amendments based on what they heard during the consultations.

The NDP not to be out done, doubled down on the Liberals, demanding the Liberals use legislative procedural tricks to try and delay any pension bill until after the next election.

But more feet dragging on pensions is certainly not the answer, we have seen enough of that already.

It is time to pass the government’s very modest, necessary and reasonable reforms.

Working families in New Brunswick have already kicked in $650 million over and above the regular payments into government employees’ pension plans. Despite the cash infusion government employees’ pensions are still $1 billion dollar in the hole.

Delaying or halting these reforms means that the 75 per cent of New Brunswickers outside government who have no pension at all, will remain on the hook to fund government employees’ pensions.

There is something inherently unfair about this; working families who can not afford their own pensions are stuck paying for the pensions of others.

And pension costs are rapidly increasing. Ten years ago in 2003-04 total pension costs to government were around $155 million. By 2013-14 those costs are predicted to increase to $395 million, or an increase of 154 per cent.

That means hundreds of million of dollars that could be going into putting more books in our children’s classrooms, doctors in our hospitals or repairs to make our roads safer, are instead going to into pensions.

Employees’ pensions cost more than the total budgets of 20 of the 23 departments in the New Brunswick government.

Rising pension expenses and unfunded liabilities are what are at stake if changes are not made to fix the pension fund.

The Pension Coalition of New Brunswick who has led the fight for current retirees say they will not accept the shared-risk model of pensions.  

A “deal is a deal,” they say.

In other words, by refusing shared-risk, they want taxpayers to bare any and all responsibility for ensuring that their entitlements are protected – even if that means hurting taxpayers who can not afford to save for their own retirement.

Many New Brunswickers had their retirement saving battered in the markets over the last few years, why should they pay more taxes to ensure that someone else’s loses are covered?

The snipping between political parties and the Pension Coalition is concealing perhaps a bigger discussion: do these reforms even go far enough to address the plan’s deficit?

These reforms are so modest that the sum of them will not be implemented until 2062 or nearly 50 years from now.

And if the government can not get these small reforms passed, how can we ever expect it to deal with the half billion dollar deficit we all face?

Kevin Lacey is the Atlantic Canada Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, more information can be found at taxpayer.com