Saint John Mayor Mel Norton is offering further details on his upcoming trip to Calgary.
The trip
has the aim of enticing big oil producers to ship their product to the
Port City, and is being financed by the travel budget of the mayor's
office.
Energy
Minister Craig Leonard and Port representatives will also be attending
the meetings, which will include a stop at the Calgary-based Irving Oil
office. Norton says he and the province have informed Irving of their
plans and consulted with them about which producers they should meet.
Norton
says we are currently in the midst of so-called open season, the period
when oil producers look to fill the pipelines that could ultimately
make their way to Saint John.
That
period typically lasts 60 days from mid-April to mid June; as a result,
Norton says he hopes to forge some connections, and secure some
commitments in short order.
At the
end of May the Mayor will travel to Ottawa with MP Rodney Weston to meet
with federal politicians who might support bringing the West-East oil
pipeline to Saint John. At the same time, they plan to consult with
bureaucrats from P3 Canada to get a sense of the progress on the city's
application for water funding.
Despite
public meetings on the shared risk model for the provincial pension
plan -- including one in St. Stephen -- the retirees and the Alward Government couldn't be further away
from reaching agreement.
The
Pension Coalition is accusing the province of trying to divide and
conquer by giving the impression that the retirees are greedy by not
agreeing to changes. The Coalition's Clifford Kennedy calls this
unethical telling Tide News the retirees, when they were working, agreed
not to accept wage increases so they could have secured and guaranteed
pensions.
Kennedy
charges the government claims the provincial pension plan is running a
billion dollar deficit but it's own records from March of last year
shows a 141 million dollar surplus.
He adds
when the province's pension task force was announced, it was supposed to
deal with private pension plans and nothing was said, at the time,
about public pensions and the Premier gave no indication the shared risk
model would apply to the retirees as well as those provincial
government employees still working.
A new
deal for healthcare... That's what the Council of Canadians claims
is needed but unlikely to happen given Prime Minister Harper's
inclinations.
The
Council's healthcare campaigner Adrienne Silnicki, who'll be speaking in
the city, tells Tide News Prime Minister Harper keeps talking about
alternative methods of healthcare delivery which is really a parallel
public-private system but they don't achieve the promised results.
Silnicki
warns the cuts we're now seeing in provincial healthcare are just the
tip of the iceberg if the Prime Minister goes ahead with cutting 36
billion dollars in transfer payments for health a couple of years from
now.
She says that translates into enough funding for 11 hospitals as well as 30 health care centres and clinics.
Silnicki
will be delivering a public talk on all this at the Church of St.
Andrew and St. David in Saint John on Germain Street tomorrow night at 6.
