This column was published in the Telegraph Journal on October 18, 2018.

The New Brunswick government needs to find savings fast, and the province’s new minority government should be open to any ideas raised during the election – including eliminating the duplication in the province’s services and bureaucracy, based on language.

Every dollar the government spends on its double bureaucracy is a dollar not spent on actual service delivery. New Brunswickers are paying twice for worse service.

Take health care spending. Taxpayers fund two separate health bureaucracies – the English Horizon Health Network and French Vitalité Health Network – which perform the same role for different language groups, instead of spending that money on frontline doctors and nurses.

While New Brunswickers of both languages pay some of the highest taxes in Canada, nearly 60,000 residents are without a doctor, according to the New Brunswick Medical Society. The province is on the brink of a major nursing shortage as 40 per cent of the nurses can retire in the next five years.

But if you look at the provincial budget, you won’t see surpluses to throw toward new doctors or nurses. After ten years of consecutive budget deficits, New Brunswick is facing serious warnings from credit rating agencies.

There is no reason for New Brunswick to have two health authorities, costing taxpayers twice what they should be paying in purely bureaucratic bills and starving the province of better services and necessary debt reduction.

One small example with a big price tag is the salaries for the top bureaucrats in each of these health bureaucracies. Instead of paying one health authority president’s salary, New Brunswickers pay two. Each president is paid between $275,000 to $325,000.

Other top bureaucrats in the English and French health authorities make at least $150,000 to $300,000 each, topping the long list of bureaucrats for which New Brunswickers pay double, not to mention health bureaucrats’ travel expenses.

At Horizon Health, 144 employees make over $100,000, and 392 employees make over $100,000 at Vitalité Health.

Consolidating the two health boards may not cut those numbers in half, but it should eliminate the duplication in bureaucracy, saving a significant sum of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent on tax relief, actual service delivery or most importantly: curbing the province’s impending fiscal crisis.

Of course, New Brunswick is an officially bilingual province, and services must still be provided in both French and English. But providing the exact same service twice shoots administrative, infrastructure and operating costs through the roof, whether it’s spending on two health bureaucracies or separate school busses to divide children based on language.

The top priority for New Brunswick’s new minority government should be ensuring New Brunswickers receive services where they need it most, but they can’t do that if they run out of money.

French and English New Brunswickers deserve access to family doctors; to emergency rooms without dramatic wait times; and to schools without declining test scores. There are lots of ways for the province to innovate and introduce new delivery models but saving money on bureaucratic costs should be an easy decision.

Culture and language live within the people, not the government. And the people in New Brunswick will only be able to maintain a good quality of life (without leaving the province) if their government doesn’t go broke and begin taxing them at previously unfathomable levels. 

New Brunswickers should be engaged now in how to best offer bilingual services – that is, to offer services in both official languages, not offer the same services twice.

With the need to cut spending, the New Brunswick government should be looking at

Paige MacPherson is Atlantic Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a citizens’ advocacy group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government.

all options. As New Brunswick’s elected officials move closer to forming a government, they should keep duplication costs in the spotlight.