Blaine Higgs, a visitor to the PC Party, may soon be shown the door
Blaine Higgs has always been a difficult visitor in the Progressive Conservative Party.
He’s like that person who shows up at a house party as a virtual stranger or a new acquaintance barely known by the hosts.
They liven up the evening, but sometimes the partygoers look suspicious when they become disruptive.
“I didn’t grow up in a political family,” Higgs said when he launched his 2016 campaign to win PC leadership. “I didn’t come from deep roots politically.”
Higgs had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer for one term in a previous Tory government, but had never held an electoral position before 2010 or even been a member of the PC Party.
He portrayed himself – accurately – as an outsider, the kind of person the party and the province needed to lead what he called “a movement” to save New Brunswick.
“I have the independence of thought that this county desperately needs,” he said.
Now Higgs is being pushed from within for a leadership review, with more than half of party chairmen signing letters to kick-start the process.
And his willingness to defy long-established partisan norms comes back to haunt him.
As Treasury Secretary from 2010 to 2014, that willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom of partisan politics was often invigorating and refreshing.
Inconvenient truths
He expressed uncomfortable truths that political veterans never acknowledged: that costly, ill-conceived campaign promises accounted for much of the county’s large deficits and debt.
“It’s a case where politicians are most vulnerable and people say, ‘I’ll make him promise this,'” he said.
Blaine Higgs responds to a 2021 letter from Dorothy Shephard saying his leadership style “destroyed” the team around him.
Another example was Higgs’ refusal to endorse Prime Minister David Alward’s endorsement of Cabinet Secretary Margaret-Ann Blaney in a lavish job as CEO of Crown.
Longtime party members just don’t do that. They fall in line.
Higgs was different. That became his greatest asset, central to his brand.
Even Higgs’ past involvement in the anti-bilingualism Confederation of Regions party – alarming to many French speakers – underlined that he was truly different.
He once described how he threatened to resign when political staffers in Alward’s office rewrote his budget speech on the eve of the speech.
They then backed out, he said, but in 2016 he argued that he needed the top job to overcome those tired, same-old political considerations for good.
“I’m running for prime minister because I can’t pull it off as finance minister,” he said.
Little support from MLAs
Only three incumbent PC MLAs endorsed him, an indication of how his more conventional colleagues viewed his idiosyncrasy.
So he signed up countless new party members to go around them.
He told those recruits that “it doesn’t matter what the party’s name is — use the PC Party as a conduit to change politics in New Brunswick.”
Saint John Lancaster MLA Dorothy Shephard, who left cabinet last week because of Higgs’ management style, wrote in a 2021 letter to him that most of his leadership supporters “never [PC Party] or had a connection with someone in the party.”
And, she added, most of them “are now nowhere to be found.”
Most of the MLAs who worked with Higgs in the Alward cabinet supported other leadership candidates in 2016 and were annoyed by his open disdain for old-fashioned party manners.
“When done right… politics is what makes things happen,” veteran Portland-Simonds member Trevor Holder said at the time.
“Sometimes it takes political friendships and alliances to make that happen.”
Higgs says schools should inform parents if a child under 16 wants to change their name or pronoun, and that young children should not be exposed to drag queen stories.
Holder was one of several cabinet ministers who defied Higgs last week by voting in favor of an opposition motion calling for more consultation on changes to LGBTQ protections for students in Policy 713.
Higgs won leadership and the skeptics fell in line, then watched his unconventional approach become a political liability in their minds.
Critique of caucus
The main accusation from his caucus critics is that he cuts them out of his decision-making process.
His push for health reform in 2020 — including the proposed closure of small hospital emergency departments — cost him his only French-speaking MLA at the time, Robert Gauvin.
Gauvin’s father was the late Jean Gauvin, a longtime member of Richard Hatfield’s cabinet who helped flicker the embers of PC support in Shippagan during the party’s 12-year exile from power.
Jean Gauvin also stood by Hatfield when party rebels tried to remove him from the leadership in 1985 – so his son’s move to the Liberals is another symbol of Higgs’ break with party history.
Another francophone who supported Hatfield during that struggle, Jean-Pierre Ouellet of Madawaska-Les Lacs-Edmundston, is now part of the effort to dump Higgs, arguing that the prime minister is putting forward ideas hostile to the PC Party.
“As far as I am concerned, he is trying to implement a platform that was the CoR platform when he campaigned for the CoR party in the 1980s,” said Ouellete.
The outsider status can be a threat
So the Prime Minister’s outsider status – the very thing that brought him to power – now threatens to undo him.
Its best defense is its track record: large budget surpluses, lower national debt, low unemployment and unprecedented population growth.
But recent comments from Higgs suggest he doubts that a potential new PC leader would live up to what he considers the high standards of success he has achieved.
“That weighs heavily on my mind: Are we going to keep the ball rolling or are we going to back down and go back into the political process?”
That is another alarming heresy for party veterans who value continuity, succession planning and long-term political viability.
Higgs dismissed the review push in a statement Wednesday in which he failed to acknowledge that there are letters from most riding presidents.
Instead, he called it “a strategically planned political drama” that “has been a focus of a certain group for a few years now,” now amplified by the Policy 713 debate.
In her 2021 letter to Higgs, Shephard said that when he launched his leadership bid, she concluded that he “didn’t want to be leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick; you just wanted to be ‘leader’.”
But the two cannot be separated: If the push for a leadership review succeeds, Higgs would face the end of his tenure as PC leader and prime minister.
That is the choice now facing party members: what to do with this guy who is slacking on welcome for many.
