Minister Daniel Allain defended his approach to local governance reform on Friday in Sackville, shortly after a meeting with local elected officials from Sackville, Dorchester and surrounding areas. Allain spent about an hour and 45 minutes in the closed door meeting, and spoke to reporters for about 10 minutes afterwards.
Allain has been heavily criticised by some Sackville town councillors who feel he misrepresented the process of local governance reform. He surprised many by prescribing amalgamations in a number of jurisdictions, including Sackville, against the wishes of local councils. He has also been criticised for offering no further public consultations on the process after the plan for amalgamations was released.
Allain disagrees with that description of events. “I think that’s not right,” he said Friday. “We’ve consulted with New Brunswickers.”
“I go to legislative assembly on a weekly basis to talk about local governance reform. As I indicated there, nobody was forced to do anything,” said Allain. Both the town of Sackville and the village of Dorchester wrote to Allain opposing the amalgamation of Entity 40, but both are powerless to prevent it.
Allain also insisted that his department had done enough public consultation, detailing the process that happened before the plan was announced, and that fact that shortly after the plan was released, existing councils were given a tight deadline to suggest changes to proposed boundaries.
“We’ve been clear,” said Allain. “We have a website. You can check the kilometres of my car. We did over 65,000 clicks. We did over 200 public sessions, meetings with municipal representatives and LSD representatives, before January 2021.”
Allain also poked back at local councillors who have been critical of the process, without naming any names.
“There’s some councillors that were in constant communication with me, and constant communications with the department, and actually participated,” said Allain. “If there’s some people on council that did not do their job, that’s up to the population to look at that.”
Two councillors, Sabine Dietz and Bill Evans, chose not to attend the Friday meeting in protest of the process and the fact that the meeting was closed to the public and media.
When local journalist Bruce Wark asked Allain about the decision to exclude public observers from the meeting, the minister responded, “how would that have improved it?”
Inside the meeting, Allain indicated that he did not want a public meeting where councillors could openly criticize him and the process.
“We had a great discussion, said Allain. “My job as minister of local governance is to make sure we coordinate, make sure that we get this reform that we’ve been asking for 25 years. It’s not easy having these discussions. It’s actually emotional… We’re making decisions for the next 50 years, so we’re going to take our time,” with exercises both in private and in public.
Keeping rural, rural
The last time local governments were changed at such a large scale was 55 years ago when Louis Robichaud’s government abolished county councils, and created one of the main problems Allain’s reforms aim to fix: people living in rural areas without local political representation.
The Local Service Districts (LSDs) that Robichaud created in 1967 had the option to elect advisory councils, but to this day they do not have any legal authority. While some LSDs such as Point de Bute have active advisory committees, others such as Sackville and Dorchester do not. The Sackville LSD did actually elect an advisory committee for a short while, but the members resigned en masse in January 2021, claiming they were not listened to by the provincial government over their concerns about blasting at quarries near homes. Notably, none of the former advisory committee reps from the Sackville LSD decided to step forward to participate in the Entity 40 process.
Allain’s 2022 reforms will amalgamate parts of New Brunswick’s existing LSDs into new municipalities (the Point de Bute LSD and parts of Sackville and Dorchester LSDs will join Entity 40.) That means residents of those areas will now have local level political representation. Other rural areas, such as the predominantly JD Irving-owned forestland removed from Entity 40 at the last minute, will be left as is, but instead of being divided into hundreds of LSDs, the province will divide them into 12 rural districts.
CHMA asked Allain if concern over local government interference in resource areas was the reason behind the decision to maintain LSD-style rural districts in the province. Allain responded that the objective of the province’s plan is to “keep rural, rural. So if there’s no tax base, and there’s minimal population, that’s a rural area.” Allain admits that the advisory councils to be elected to the new, much larger rural districts are similar to the advisory committees of former LSDs, in that they won’t have legal authority.
“They’ll have more training,” said Allain. “We hope that it evolves. The objective is to evolve the rural districts in a more conducive way, so they have a better partnership and relationship with the departments and have more standard services.”
Allain said reform has been discussed for the past 25 years, and he feels the current reforms are “there to enhance our communities, to make sure that we reduce duplication, and we find efficiencies.”
Check out all of CHMA’s coverage of amalgamation in New Brunswick.
