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New Brunswick has the second-lowest employment rate in Canada — only 57% of the population over 15 years of age is working

I took in the latest debate among New Brunswick’s party leaders and I didn’t hear many ideas about how to fix New Brunswick’s slow growth and growing debt problem. There was one exception: the fledging People’s Alliance party, currently at a distant third in the polls behind the Liberals and PCs.

Gallant’s Liberals are offering more spending on infrastructure, education and health but largely missing from their plan are economic growth policies. Instead, they promise to toughen labour laws and hike the minimum wage to $14 per hour (in a province with low productivity, a minimum wage that high would aggregate to an annual income not much lower than the median among all workers in the province). Gallant also promises to freeze power rates for four years and to refuse to accept any carbon policies from Ottawa that would make energy more expensive.

The PCs, under leader Blaine Higgs, have promised not to increase taxes but still balance the budget. They will end the double property tax hit on non-owner-occupied homes, offer tax credits for kids’ sports and arts, and support shale-gas development. But they’ve offered nothing like the ambitious pro-growth tax-reform policies that previous PC governments have tried.

The interesting ideas in this election belong to the eight-year-old People’s Alliance party led by Kris Austin, a former minister. The PA is promising to reduce taxes, eliminate corporate subsidies, reform the public sector to improve the cost of operating separate linguistic-based agencies, and balance the budget. The party’s recent rise in the polls, growing from around five per cent to around 13 per cent, suggests that the public is hungry for bolder ideas. Sooner or later, with a growing fiscal crisis in the making, the province is going to need much more than the weak offerings coming from its two main parties.

• Jack M. Mintz is president’s fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. He has provided advice on growth strategies to four New Brunswick governments over the past two decades.