Michael Camp: Outmigration looms over final days of the election

As the campaign entered its final week, it finally dawned on me that the New Brunswickers who have done the most to shape this campaign are the ones who spend most of their time in another part of the country.

Few Canadians have a longer commute to the job site than the thousands of New Brunswickers who travel back and forth to the oil patch of western Canada.

If you take a plane heading west, chances are the stranger in the seat beside you is on his or her way to Fort McMurray or to some other western destination where the pay is good and the jobs are plentiful.

Flying back from Toronto, as I did last Sunday, you might find yourself sitting next to a guy who just spent 20 days straight building homes for migrant workers in the tar sands.

He was heading home to Grand Falls for a week with his wife and two young kids.

He’d been working 16 hours a day and he looked worn out.

"You do what you have to do," he said.  

And who in this province doesn’t know someone — a friend, a family member — who isn’t part of that roving New Brunswick workforce, doing what they have to do?

To me, these mostly absent New Brunswickers are the human face of all our economic troubles, and you could feel their ghostly presence in the last week of the campaign.

Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward made sure to conjure them up in the final debate this week.

"Why should New Brunswick workers have to go out west to do what they could be doing here?" he asked.

It was his best line of the campaign, and he said it in every debate, in every speech, at every moment he had the chance.

With their weak record over the past four years — jobs lost, economy stagnant — the Conservatives have played the resource issue for all it’s worth.

They went all in on fracking, pipelines, corporate forestry - the whole bundle.   

"We’ve had some difficult times" Alward told the TV audience on Thursday.

"We’ve had to make some tough decisions."

But hope springs eternal in candidates seeking re-election. Good times are always just around the corner.

Conservative campaign literature tells voters that $10 billion in private investment is just waiting to flow into the province. All we have to do is "Say Yes."

How Alward came up with the number $10 billion is something of a mystery, as we have yet to see evidence that we even have a significant amount of natural gas to frack.

But such a big, round number made for a nice TV commercial and some nifty graphics on the Tory website.  

Outmigration an important election issue

Suspicious as I am of the Conservatives’ predictions of a bonanza waiting to happen, it doesn’t take a tactical genius to see that the problem of outmigration has been the dominant issue of this election, at least in the mind of the average voter.

How can we create opportunities at home — and stop New Brunswickers, mostly young and skilled, from leaving?

Is it not obvious that this is what everyone is talking about?

The Conservatives’ solution — full speed ahead on fracking, pipelines and corporate forestry — has apparently not had the effect on voters that the party clearly hoped for.

But if anything explains why the Liberals lost some of their momentum in the final week of the campaign, I would suggest that it’s the failure of their leader to deal with this problem in a realistic way.

It should be said, however, that Gallant’s own candidates were carefully letting the voters know that they understood the plight of those New Brunswickers who commute to the oil patch.

Driving to the grocery store last week, I heard the Liberal candidate for Fredericton South, Roy Wiggins, telling the story of his own son, headed west to find work.

(Alward has a son who is also an oil patch commuter. So do many other candidates, I suspect.)

One day I asked students in a class at St. Thomas University if they thought they’d have to go out west to find a good job, and almost every hand shot into the air.

The Green Party, which not only has grave concerns about fracking but also about the proposed west-to-east pipeline, is proposing massive investment in eco-friendly energy sources as a way to bring opportunity back to the province.

Dominic Cardy of the NDP was originally a supporter of natural gas development, but he turned sharply to the other side when he became the party leader in 2011.  

There’s some competition in this category, but I’d say Cardy’s worst moment of the week came during the final debate when he admitted he’d taken a stand on the fracking issue before he knew much about it.  

But the Liberal leader didn’t give it much thought either.

Brian Gallant, who proposes a moratorium on natural gas development until the "risks are fully understood," had to admit this week that he didn’t actually know what kind of fracking technology was being used in the province.

It sounds to me like he thought the problem through in political terms before he gave any consideration to the actual science of it.

It’s no wonder that Frank McKenna, arguably the last Liberal premier to move the province forward, was nowhere to be seen in the election campaign.

I thought he might show up in the final week, but then again, it would be awkward, to say the least.

Even though Gallant could use an endorsement from the old general, McKenna’s super-charged endorsement of fracking would have been difficult for the leader’s people to manage.

Not that they’ve blown the campaign entirely.

If you believe the polls, Gallant has managed to get through the past four weeks without paying much attention to fracking.

In the debates, he refrained for going on the offensive over the issue. As a palliative to our weakening economy, he is prescribing $900 million worth of infrastructure, which the NDP leader has correctly described as a fancy name for pavement.

Gallant says New Brunswick can afford all this spending on short-term job creation because it will be saving $250 million a year as a result of what he calls "program review."

As the Liberal website explains, program review is a process endorsed by former finance minister Paul Martin, who set the federal finances straight during the Chrétien years.

(The fact that a significant portion of Martin’s review was to scale back equalization payments to provinces like New Brunswick is not mentioned on the Liberal website.)

So, where will Gallant’s program review come up with savings of $250 million a year?

The Liberal leader is light on specifics. Will there be civil service layoffs? Health cuts? Reduced support to municipalities? Who knows?

Gallant’s stock answer to the program review question is to say that he can save $30 million in "back office" spending by fiddling with the organization of services provided by computer technicians and communications staff.

Where will the remaining $220 million come from?

I guess we’ll see. 

Prediction: Liberal majority.