Steppin' into Accounting Eden

NB copies NL's dubious financial management

“We are One! We reach!” In what the provincial comptroller calls holistic cash balancing, a committee of Government of New Brunswick finance and treasury board officials (not exactly as illustrated) will decide how to spend a new $13 million fund that doesn’t actually have any money in it.

Last fall, the provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador created something they called the Future Fund.

The Liberals made it look like this was a way of investing money from oil and gas royalties the same way Norway, for example, has banked some of its enormous oil and gas wealth.

Except it wasn’t that at all.

It was a convoluted, complex, and confused sham.

Plus, they earmarkedsome of the money to decommission oil fields. That’s something that is supposed to be the responsibility of the oil companies, including the provincial government’s *two* oil companies.

Suddenly those became taxpayer liabilities last fall without any explanation by the Liberals of what was *actually* going on.

Well, now the government folks in New Brunswick are up to the same kind of thing.