I would argue the provincial politics has played a huge role in Saint John's stagnation. The difference between Fton Mton to SJ is that the former have larger public sector employment with gov offices whether it's the feds or province. And with the situation in SJ as dire as it has become today, I think state intervention is vital now that the market has declined and Irvings rule. It is hard to do much in the city now that the Irvings own so much land. This one family is a huge problem for us, whether it's the property taxes they don't pay, labour they exploit or the smoke they spew in our air and waste in our rivers
With some of the largest per capital declines in manufacturing in Canada since the 1980s-ish— as we saw Lantic Sugar, Labatt's the shipyard, Simm's, Red Rose to name a few, even Saint John's fisheries has declined— we need some good old fashioned keynesian policies to target growth in Saint John. Maybe it be wise to establish some serious federal/provincial tidal power initiative centred in Saint John. I don't know
Amalgamation might be part of a larger strategy, but it would have to mean a redraw of the boundaries to not just absorb the suburbs. It would mean to lose some parts of the city that are sparse so that the overall square-km remains relatively the same. And it would mean the province finally has to step up. Canada's only shrinking CMA is pretty damning
Rough but ya get the idea:
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The sweet stench of rot from a winter's worth of litter and filth on the streets of what is already, at the best of the times, a very dirty city.
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