New Brunswick budget has historic $1.4B deficit, plans for highway toll into N.S.

FREDERICTON — The New Brunswick government says health-care spending helped push the budget for the next fiscal year into a record deficit, and the province plans to raise revenue with a new toll on a highway into Nova Scotia.

Introduced on Tuesday, the $15.6-billion budget is in deficit by $1.39-billion — the largest shortfall in the province’s history, according to Finance Department staff.

“While we are making these historic investments, we are also acutely aware of the financial challenges facing our province,” Finance Minister René Legacy told reporters.

Health care is the centrepiece of the budget, he said, with spending in the sector up by $710 million, or 17.4 per cent. “This is a budget that reflects the voices of New Brunswickers …. It is a budget that makes generational investments in health care,” he said.

Premier Susan Holt’s government is forecasting deficits for the next three years, with a projected $1.3-billion shortfall in the 2027-28 fiscal year and a $1.26-billion deficit the following year.

Calling the deficit “significant,” Legacy said it reflects the province’s increased spending on health care and “global uncertainty and trade pressures.” Government, he said, is taking steps to ensure its spending is sustainable.

“We are committed to addressing this challenge head on. This means making some difficult decisions,” Legacy said.

The minister said among those difficult choices are planned cuts to the civil service, which is scheduled to be trimmed by 12 per cent over three years. The government expects to reach those job reductions through attrition, projecting to save $100 million over the three-year period. Legacy said the civil service has grown at a faster rate than the province’s population.

In order to raise revenues, the government says it will add a toll by 2028 for out-of-province vehicles on the Trans-Canada Highway by Aulac, N.B., near the boundary with Nova Scotia. The province estimates it would bring in $10.4 million annually.

Megan Mitton, the Green Party member who represents the district of Memramcook-Tantramar where the toll would be located, said there was no consultation about the plan. Mitton said she’s worried about how a toll would impact Nova Scotians who regularly frequent her area to shop and work.

“We need to have a discussion about exactly what all of this means. This is kind of blindsiding to the region of Tantramar,” she told reporters, adding that Tantramar and the Amherst, N.S., region, on the other side of the boundary, are “like one big community.”

“Many people travel across the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick (boundary) daily to work, to take care of relatives, to do lots of things, to spend money,” Mitton said.

Provincial staff said the Aulac area was chosen because it’s the best catchment area for non-residential traffic given that the boundary with Quebec, near Edmundston, N.B., was not an option because of an existing agreement with the federal government that does not allow tolls there.

Other measures to recoup costs include selling off 10 properties, including a number of heritage properties and museums that had fewer than 5,000 visitors annually. New Brunswick also plans to phase out its provincially run field veterinary services over three years, handing off animal medical care to private providers. As well, it intends to crack down on unreported lobster sales and contraband tobacco as a way of recovering millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Progressive Conservative finance critic Don Monahan called the budget a “disaster,” saying it punts hard choices about spending down the road.

Holt and Legacy had warned New Brunswickers that cuts were looming, Monahan said, which spread “a lot of fear, there was a lot of talk around that. And in the end, there weren’t really major difficult decisions made.”

Monahan said Holt is failing to live up to her election promise of balancing budgets. “That was what was expected, that is not what we’re getting,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 17, 2026.

Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press