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Oh, that’s original. The New Brunswick Liberals, under what the CBC breathlessly describes as “the first budget delivered by a female finance minister in provincial history,” intend to deal with their fiscal crisis by continuing to spend recklessly. It’s enough to make one weep.

Not tears of boredom exactly. But frustration mixed with ennui. We’ve been hearing this for half a century now. And it always turns out that spending money you don’t have doesn’t cause the stuff to fall from the sky. It causes your credit rating to do so.

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In Finance Minister Cathy Rogers’ tiresomely familiar boilerplate, “New Brunswickers want their government to get our finances in order, but not at the expense of our social programs.” A classic now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, in which fiscal prudence blooms in the first half of the sentence and wilts and dies in the second.

The plan, if that’s not too kind a word, is to spend $9.4 billion dollars, an increase of nearly four per cent, in the process running a $192 million deficit while somehow adding $1 billion to last year’s projected net debt of $13.4 billion, partly to take advantage of matching funds from the feds’ infrastructure/stimulus program. And yet the Finance Minister chirpily insisted they are on track to balance the budget … in 2020-21. Free beer the day after tomorrow.