There’s A Glaring Problem In The Federal Budget, And It’s Not Spending
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
Every time I read about a big new government spending plan my first reaction is “where is the concurrent human resources plan?”
The new federal budget promises more than $5-billion for a new dental plan. But here in New Brunswick, many dentists are already scaling back or facing even longer waitlists—and the main reason is staffing.
New housing projects? Same deal. The childcare program? Aging-in-place funding? The problem is increasingly not the money, it’s the people.
What happens next boils down to Economics 101: either costs and prices go up, or wait times increase.
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If there was a concurrent HR plan, the expected results would come faster, without driving inflation.
Across the country, the number of job vacancies in technical occupations in dental health care and dental assistants has risen by 77 percent since before the pandemic. Who’s idea was it to pump $5.3-billion in new demand into a system with significant labour shortages?
Oh, and just for fun, here is the number of PSE enrolments in dental support services and allied professions across the country per 100,000 population (it’s down 15 percent).
You didn’t ask, but in case you are interested, New Brunswick had only nine people enrolled in dental support services and allied professions programs in 2019-2020, according to Statistics Canada. Don’t shoot the messenger.
I haven’t studied the new dental plan but let’s say New Brunswick gets its “share” of the federal money, which would be around $115-million. Let’s keep the analysis simple and say the average dentist needs one non-dentist staff person per $100,000 of revenue (these would be hygienists, assistants, administrators, etc.).
That means the feds have just created enough demand to support 1,150 full-time equivalent person years of employment in these occupations, just in New Brunswick.
And we have nine enrolled in PSE.
Giddy up.
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