TRURO - The Hubtown's business community would be in much better shape if not for high taxes and economic bungling on the part of the NDP government, Conservative MLA Jamie Baillie says.
"First of all, Truro is on the front lines of an economy where the fundamentals have gone horribly wrong," the Progressive Conservative leader and MLA for Cumberland South said.
"The labour force for the north zone of Nova Scotia, including Truro, has shrunk 3,400 people in the two years," he said, citing figures from Statistics Canada.
"And, as a result, business owners are finding it hard to find employees," Baillie said. "The retail sales are struggling under the highest taxes in Canada, manufacturers are shedding jobs because they face among the highest power rates in the country and as the CFIB, the Canadian Federation of Indpendent Business is reporting today, the amount of regulation on business has gone from bad to worse."
Baillie, who will be in town for his party's annual meeting on Thursday evening at the Bible Hill Fire Hall to deliver his message directly, said his conclusions are also based on information from the CFIB and from talking with thousands of other business owners across the province.
"It is the NDP that raised our taxes to the highest in the country. It is the NDP who have added ever more regulation on the backs of small business. It is the NDP who are driving rural manufacturing jobs away with their bite-the-bullet electricity plan. These are things that are within our control and they have made them worse," Baillie said.
"As a result, Truro is facing the losses of some businesses that I certainly grew up with and many others did. Like Margolians, Cavanaghs, Suckling and Chase, M.P. Crowells, Walkers," he said.
"The fact of the matter is, if the fundamentals were going in the right direction those would be viable businesses today, whether under current ownership or some other ownership.
"So, yes, the government can't control the specifics circumstances of the family decisions of Margolians, or Walkers or Cavanaghs. But what it can control, what it is responsible for, is the fundamentals underlying in our economy. And they are all wrong and Truro is in the middle of it."
Baillie offered his comments "as a candidate for premier" and said that in order to get the province's business sector back on a solid economic track, the government must operate from the position of a balanced budget "... so that we can lower the HST and provide more support to small business."
Further, job creation must be at the forefront of "all that we do," which is the opposite of what the NDP government has been doing.
"I think the fact there is no buyer is something that has gone fundamentally wrong with our economy ... the retail sales are struggling because we pay the highest sales taxes in the country ... the regulations on business have gone from bad to worse," he said. "These are things that all businesses share in common."
costco... are you kidding?