Baffled by New Brunswick politics

These few weeks are going to be tough, with general accusations that yours truly is biased, clueless, ill-informed, incompetent, irrelevant and a general waste of oxygen.
No, I’m not talking about the guts of football officiating season. It’s that time that every editor ever to put ink to print dreads: election time.
See, this is the time when various political aspirants want very desperately for newspapers to write stories that make them look utterly amazing. Of course, if we dare to do something to make said political aspirants look like they may not be entirely in touch.
As we edged closer to this campaign, I mistakenly thought I could draw on my previous experience from other areas: almost a score of municipal, provincial and federal elections.
Nope. Toto, we’re not in Kansas, anymore.
Let’s start with the Conservatives. Most times, the PC/Tory amalgam (Saskatchewan Party in my former domain, Liberals in B.C. before that) are skinflints that cut programs, cut cabinet, cut taxes but programs and cut spending.
Not here. Judging by the multitude of press releases I keep getting, the PCs must have the inside line on a whole lotta money, because their spending pledges are bordering on the utterly ludicrous. (If our finances are in dire trouble because of government incompetence, how is spending more money going to help? What happened to the fiscal part of fiscal conservative?)
Then you’ve got the Liberals, who are quietly hoping everybody has kinda forgotten that whole mess about selling off public property without consultation. Isn’t gutting state-owned property more of a Tory gig? And, more recently, the Liberals are pledging 20,000 new jobs. Gosh, nice idea: too bad it didn’t germinate two years ago.
And in recent days, they, too, are starting to spend money we don’t have.
Here’s a clue: when the house is falling apart, the roof needs repair and the electricity bill hasn’t been paid in two months ... don’t suggest going out to buy a 56” plasma TV, because you plain can't afford it.
But that’s just what both the big guns are doing.
And the NDP, frankly, baffles me. Typically, a NDP government taxes more than it should, and spends more than it should, stifles business while driving the coffers into mass deficits – but in the process, the governments build long-term infrastructure such as affordable housing, medical facilities and the like. (Two things this area needs, desperately.)
The NDP here can’t organize a constituency association in a riding that by all rational logic should be an NDP stronghold, and hasn’t a hope of forming even a bare-bones opposition Sept. 27. Yet, it is the only party noticing that gosh, the cost of promises made by both the Liberals and the PCs borders on the utterly ludicrous. Fiscal restraint? From the NDP?
I gotta go find a pair of size 11 red pumps. That’s the only logical explanation for what’s going on right now.