A year after defeat, former premier Higgs haunt debate over future of N.B. PC Party

He haunts them still.

In New Brunswick politics, most defeated premiers exit quietly, staying out of debates within their parties about what future direction to take or who should be the next leader.

Blaine Higgs was always different. He still is.

Over the week weekend, Higgs appeared at the Progressive Conservative Party’s annual general meeting and weighed in on possible leadership candidates, the 2023 caucus rebellion against him, and even on whether to rename the party.

He told reporters that trying to make the PCs a broad-based, “big tent” party was a fool’s errand because many “Progressive” Conservatives are really Liberal, NDP and Green sympathizers.

Former PC premier haunts party’s debate over its future

“So they shouldn’t be part of the party,” Higgs said.

Removing the word “Progressive” from the party’s name was an “interesting” idea, he added.

“Our party needs to decide who we are as Conservatives. We can chase the whims of the public, and people can say that’s the only way you get voted in to be government.”

“Is it all about being elected as government, or is it about making a difference in the province?”

That is the central dilemma facing the Tories after the defeat that ended six years in power: should they turn away from Higgs’s vision and broaden the base in an effort to win in 2028?

Over his 14 years in public life, Higgs often said the compromises and concessions of middle-of-the-road party politics were an obstacle to governing effectively and affordably.

He said Saturday that he tried the big-tent approach in 2017 when he lured former NDP leader Dominic Cardy into the party and it clearly hadn’t worked.

Cardy quit as education minister in 2022, and Higgs’s comments imply it wasn’t his fault.

Many of the former premier’s internal PC critics disagreed. They felt he neglected the basic obligations of party leadership: to consider different viewpoints, to make ministers and MLAs feel valued, to forge a consensus.

Higgs was at odds with that tradition from the beginning.

When he ran for the party leadership in 2016, most MLAs did not endorse him.

He signed up supporters who had no PC history and exhorted them to use the party as a “vehicle” to reshape New Brunswick.

In eight years as leader, he held no policy conventions to give grassroots members a say in government priorities.

In 2021, Dorothy Shephard, the health minister at the time, wrote Higgs a confidential letter urging him to change his approach, to stop seeing the push-and-pull of caucus deliberations as the tawdry, old-school partisan politics that he disdained.

“You do not have a team and it is your own doing,” Shephard wrote.

MLAs were legitimate reflections of their constituents and deserved to be heard, she wrote, “no matter how inconvenient it is, or how trivial you think the motives of any individual.”

The letter seemed prescient when it became public in 2023, after Shephard followed Cardy to the exits.

The premier’s changes to Policy 713, on pronouns and gender identity in provincial schools, was at odds with a compromise struck by the PC caucus, several MLAs would later explain.

Six of them broke ranks in June 2023 and voted to support a non-binding Liberal motion calling for more study of the issue.

Liberal pollster Dan Arnold later said on The Writ, a political podcast, that the Policy 713 changes were not unpopular, but the nasty, public PC split convinced voters Higgs was neglecting affordability issues and was no longer a competent manager.

In the wake of the rebellion, many PC MLAs decided not to run in the 2024 election.

Higgs brushed off the departures at the time, saying they created space for new candidates in the party more in line with his thinking.

On the weekend, however, his resentment was clear.

He called out PC stalwarts who, unhappy with his turn to social conservatism, supported Liberal candidates last year.

And he said it was “tough” to look kindly on former Moncton East MLA Daniel Allain’s campaign for the party leadership, given Allain was one of the six MLAs who broke ranks.

“My whole situation developed, of course, and he played a role in that,” Higgs said. “So it’s tough for me. But we all move on, and I’m trying to do that.”

In contrast, Higgs described MLA Kris Austin — a former leader of the People’s Alliance who jumped to the PCs in 2022 and stuck with Higgs during the caucus turmoil — as “a great candidate,” who “brings a lot of value to the party, honesty and integrity.”

Those comments could complicate things for Allain, Austin and others.

They send a signal to Higgs’s fans that Allain wasn’t sufficiently loyal, even though Allain worked for local PC candidates in Moncton last fall.

Allain’s been pushing the message that the party must return to a more “progressive” conservative orientation and welcome back moderate members and voters.

“So I disagree with Mr. Higgs,” he said on the weekend. 

For Austin, who is pondering a leadership run, the blessing of a former leader resoundingly rejected by the electorate, and by a large segment of the party, may not be much of a boost.

Austin himself sounded more conciliatory than Higgs on the weekend.

“I think the objective is how do we ensure that everybody’s got a voice at the table, that you’re open to everybody [and] all opinions, but yet still come out of that with values that are truly conservative in nature,” he said.

He added he had “a lot of respect” for Allain.

“He’s a good man, he made a good minister, and we’re all pulling in the same direction.”

Higgs’s intervention is also a distraction for interim PC Leader Glen Savoie, who will be trying for the next year to put the focus on the Holt Liberal government.

“I don’t want the next year to be wasted,” said Savoie, who told reporters the word “progressive” should stay in the party name and that everyone should feel welcome.

Savoie, who also stood by Higgs during the 2023 split, told delegates Saturday the party’s “only successful path forward is through forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption.”

Carleton-Victoria MLA Margaret Johnson said the party had to shed its “ultra-right-wing” image, make room for marginalized groups in the party and move on from Policy 713.

Even the two PC MLAs who endorsed Higgs for the party leadership in 2016 said they wanted to put the rebellion against him behind them.

“Everybody’s got their opinion on the things they do,” said Albert-Riverview MLA Sherry Wilson. . “They do things for a certain reason.

“I don’t decide what other people do so I don’t really have an opinion.”

Kings Centre MLA Bill Oliver said the split over Policy 713 is “in the past, we suffered the consequences, and we can go forward from there.” 

Everyone at the party meeting, it seemed, was united in their appetite for moving on — except, perhaps, Blaine Higgs himself.