A3

Rob Linke
Telegraph-Journal

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OTTAWA - It's tough to twin a highway - with all that blasting, rock-hauling and pouring of asphalt to make two lanes into four.

Enlarge Photo

Greg Thompson

But the task looks easy compared to getting the Graham government and Ottawa to agree publicly on which pot of money will pay to twin the final stretch of Route 1.

Normally, it wouldn't matter - particularly to the public - where the money comes from to finally improve this vital link between Saint John and the border crossing at St. Stephen, one of the country's busiest.

This time it matters, in any analysis.

It's different because political relationships - and the fate of other important transportation projects - are at stake.

This week a regrettable and unusual dispute became public when Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson gave provincial Finance Minister Victor Boudreau a hard open-ice hit worthy of intense playoff hockey.

Boudreau didn't see Thompson's hit coming.

Neither did Premier Shawn Graham's office.

But Thompson maintained it was a clean check - one Boudreau deserved.

It all seemed to start fairly innocuously.

Boudreau sat down at a closed-door meeting with his fellow finance ministers, including Jim Flaherty, Monday at Meech Lake in a former lumber baron's mansion perched on a cliff above a pretty beach.

On the agenda: a frank assessment of the economy and government efforts to stimulate it through infrastructure spending.

Boudreau gave his report, which included a plea for Ottawa to move faster on decisions to approve projects under the Atlantic Gateway initiative.

That's a $1.25-billion pot of money to improve eastern Canada's major transportation links and, two years after it was announced by the Harper government, it's still unclear what projects will be funded.

Needless to say, four provinces are getting impatient to know which items on their wish-lists they can tick off as done.

After the meeting, Boudreau shared his criticism of the Harper government's supposed slowness with the Telegraph-Journal.

"We can't seem to get them to approve any (gateway) projects," he said.

When he read that Tuesday, an upset Thompson lined up Boudreau for the bone-crunching bodycheck.

"What he's saying defies logic," said Thompson, adding he deliberately chose to call the newspaper to give Boudreau a public "wake-up call."

At the core of the dispute is that Route 1 funding announcement, a $275-million federal-provincial deal announced Sept. 4 in Charlotte County.

Identical passages in news releases issued that day by the feds and the province say the federal contribution of $137.5 million will come from the Building Canada infrastructure fund.

Nothing was publicly said about it coming from the gateway fund.

But Thompson now maintains $87.5 million is coming from gateway, and that Graham, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and he all knew that to be the case at the time.

"There was a clear verbal agreement - at the highest level of our two governments - that this was a logical project for gateway funding," Thompson said Wednesday.

"There was never any doubt or confusion about that."

But a senior provincial source said Wednesday that the first "official word" the Graham government got that the Atlantic Gateway fund was being tapped came when they read the story with Thompson blasting Boudreau.

That appears consistent with other views the Graham government has expressed about gateway money not yet being spent in New Brunswick.

Yet the feds counter that Infrastructure Canada has documented the gateway sourcing with the province's Regional Development Corporation and that Thompson's top staff has confirmed it with Graham's chief of staff.

Nobody has produced any internal corrrespondence in support of their version of events.

It's all taxpayers' money, so at that level, the dispute doesn't matter.

Indeed, one federal staffer ventured that the media was not told of Route 1's after-the-fact formal switch from Building Canada to gateway-fund sourcing because it would have been "inside baseball."

Making two treacherous lanes into four safer, faster lanes of traffic on Route 1 is long overdue and - given the border crossing - undoubtedly worthy of coming from a national fund for transportation gateways.

But if that money came from gateway, will that mean less gateway money for other New Brunswick transportation projects? That's anybody's guess.

It's impossible for the public to tell how fairly or sensibly gateway money is flowing if the public is left in the dark.

A lack of transparency just compounds the worries that politics of the worst kind will determine who gets what.

These worries, in New Brunswick at least, have some origin in the observations that Defence Minister Peter MacKay, the region's most powerful federal politician, is in charge of the Atlantic Gateway, that he's from Nova Scotia, and that Halifax is the region's biggest container port.

For months, businessman David Ganong and others - who are meeting again today - have been earnestly trying to advise the government what projects most merit funding because they have business cases that meet the test of national economic interest.

Didn't they deserve to know a big chunk of money was already gone?

This morning, Thompson and Graham are expected to be in the same room in Ottawa.

The topic is the lobster fishery, not the gateway, and they won't be alone.

Theirs is normally a friendly, even warm relationship.

Over this, it may show some strain.

And, if so, that's not good for New Brunswick.