'Leading and dividing New Brunswick': New book explores Blaine Higgs's legacy

CBC

a day ago

Blaine Higgs "broke an all-time record" for low levels of support in New Brunswick's francophone ridings in both 2020 and 2024, says Gabriel Arsenault, a Université de Moncton political science professor.
Though it may have worked in the short term — Higgs was re-elected premier in 2020 — "in the long term that's not a winnable strategy," said Arsenault, editor of a new book of scholarship on Higgs's legacy.
Higgs led the Progressive Conservatives to defeat and lost his own seat in October 2024, when Susan Holt and the Liberals won a majority in the legislature.
Arsenault is the editor of The Higgs Years: Leading and Dividing New Brunswick, a collection of 15 essays by academics across Canada who looked back at Higgs's time as premier and his leadership.
Arsenault said that the book can also shed light on the most recent federal election because many of the things that led to Higgs downfall were paralleled federally.
The book is not only important to New Brunswickers but also to people across the country, Arsenault said, since "New Brunswick is in many ways a microcosm of Canada."
New Brunswick is in many ways a microcosm of Canada. - Gabriel Arsenault
In the most recent federal election, the Conservative Party would also have won "if it weren't for Quebec," according to Arsenault, because "Quebecers massively voted for the Liberal Party and that really cost him the election."
When he was first elected premier, in 2019, Higgs's main promise was to balance the books, Arsenault said:
"He was very motivated about that issue and he arguably won the election in 2018 because of that issue."
On this front, Higgs was successful every year, even during the pandemic.
"It was the only jurisdiction in Canada to do so and, even abroad, I would be hard-pressed to find another jurisdiction who managed to do a surplus during the COVID years."
One of Higgs's biggest problems, Arsenault said, was that he tried to appease both sides of a coin but actually remained highly divisive.
To manage the province's response to the pandemic, Higgs put together a committee that included the leaders of all parties in the legislature, including those with political views quite different from his own.
At the time, Higgs's approval rating "was around 90 per cent," Arsenault said, "which is absolutely phenomenal in a democracy.",
This flipped entirely in his second term, when Higgs began to face opposition from his own caucus, and eight of his cabinet ministers stepped down.
Arsenault also said that the financial surplus during COVID was not completely due to policy decisions because huge numbers of people were immigrating to New Brunswick from urban centres at the time.
"Housing is cheaper in New Brunswick and a lot of people from Ontario moved to New Brunswick, bringing with them their income, their money," Arsenault said.
But even if he could claim progress with the province's finances and economy, Higgs was divisive in many ways, said Arsenault, pointing to a French-English divide, the government's relationship with Indigenous peoples, and Policy 713, the province's gender-identity policy for schools.
This divisiveness was one of Higgs's biggest problems, and it even caused instability within his own party. Higgs underestimated the number of party members who "are 'small c' conservatives," and "think they have a responsibility to defend minorities."
Arsenault said the book is a balanced look at Higgs's legacy. He also said that to form a majority government, the Progressive Conservative Party usually needs to be more moderate or centrist than the Higgs government was.