The tide goes out for Blaine Higgs, anti-politician

Early in his tenure as premier, Blaine Higgs pointed to his work at Irving Oil — and the immutable rhythms of the tides in the Bay of Fundy — to explain how he would govern.

Ships heavy with refined gasoline could only sail out at high tide, Higgs told a Saint John business audience in April 2019, forcing him to carefully time when they left port.

“I remember all the years working, with ships coming and going, and making the tides, and people said, ‘Those tides must really mess you up, loading the ships and getting ships out,'” he recalled. 

“‘Nope,'” he said. “It kept you focused, because you didn’t dare miss one … It kept you focused on getting the job done.”

He would bring the same deliberate, disciplined approach to the job of premier, he said.

But Higgs also defined himself as an anti-politician willing to depart from old, predictable patterns of governing.

It worked for him at first, but it caught up with him Monday.

As a rookie minister of finance from 2010 to 2014, Higgs was a breath of fresh air.

He refused to endorse an old-style Progressive Conservative patronage appointment by Premier David Alward.

He uttered inconvenient political truths, such as how parties, including his own, often made opportunistic campaign promises that doomed them to deficit spending once in power.

His time as premier

As premier, which he became in 2018, he remained a maverick. He included the three opposition party leaders on a cabinet advisory committee on COVID-19, an unusual move that helped forge public trust.

But after Higgs won a majority government in 2020, the iconoclastic approach began to clash with his fondness for calibration and discipline.

After the death of a patient in an overworked hospital emergency department in July 2022, he abruptly shuffled his health minister, fired Horizon Health’s CEO and replaced the province’s two partly-elected health authority boards with appointed trustees.

“I’m not kicking it down the road … I’m prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect and improve the health-care system in our province,” he said.

It was bold, but it was also a political gamble premiers often avoid.

By taking personal ownership of the issue, Higgs was ensuring he’d get credit if the system improved — or take the blame if the public didn’t feel tangible progress.

In 2022, he welcomed two People’s Alliance MLAs into his caucus, including leader Kris Austin, whose views on bilingualism, were anathema to some PC members.

Austin later took credit for pulling the PC Party further to the right.

Higgs then grabbed the third rail of New Brunswick politics, declaring he would replace French immersion, a provincial touchstone, within a year — something a previous Liberal government had tried and suffered for politically.

The premier backed off, but the episode cost him his centrist education minister, Dominic Cardy, who resigned and accused the premier of making decisions based on impulses and biases, not the careful calibration of evidence.

“Government is not the same as building oil tankers,” Cardy said.

Policy 713

Then Higgs pushed ahead with changes to Policy 713, about gender identity in schools, disregarding a compromise with his own caucus to adopt a more cautious approach.

“There was a common agreement of how we were going to proceed,” PC MLA Andrea Anderson-Mason later explained. “But that’s not what happened.”

Six Tory members, including Anderson-Mason, voted against Higgs on the issue in the legislature. Two ministers quit.

Maintaining caucus unity is a key measure of a party leader, but Higgs shrugged off the exodus from his government.

The departures, he argued, opened the party to newcomers like Faytene Grasseschi, a Christian conservative activist running in Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins.

“I’ll call it a movement, I’ll call it a revolution. … part of an opportunity to change the face of politics,” Higgs said at her nomination.

But Grasseschi’s nomination further alarmed many longtime PC members who believed the premier was abandoning the political mainstream.

Some tried in vain to remove him as leader. Others went to work for other parties or decided to sit out the campaign.

The Liberals, meanwhile, argued that Higgs was too focused on culture-war issues and internal party fighting rather than helping ordinary New Brunswickers with their priorities.

A $300 affordability benefit didn’t reach most of the people eligible for it.

And travel-nurse contracts signed in 2022 as a desperate fix for staffing shortages — a response to Higgs’s impatient drive for improvements — were revealed as poorly managed and costly.

For a premier who had taken ownership of health care in 2022, it was a blow.

By the time the campaign began, Higgs had the lowest approval rating of any Canadian premier.

A poll by Mainstreet Research early in the campaign found 53 per cent of respondents saw him unfavourably, compared to 37 per cent who were favourable — a warning sign for a premier whose campaign argued for staying the course.

His Liberal opponent, Susan Holt, was seen favourably by 46 per cent and unfavourably by 31 per cent.

Higgs made one major new election promise: to cut the harmonized sales tax.

It was eye-catching, but once he’d laid it out, he had little else to offer other than rebuttals and criticisms of Liberal promises on health care and affordability.

The result: a campaign fought on Susan Holt’s preferred terrain, in which the HST cut was seldom discussed.

Nine days before the election, Higgs suddenly rolled out a new promise: to listen more to nurses and to help fund their long-term disability premiums.

A campaign in trouble

In retrospect, the hasty commitment made on a holiday long weekend was a sign of a campaign in trouble.

And, as Monday’s results make clear, it wasn’t enough.

Despite the defeat, Higgs leaves politics with a significant legacy.

He reformed public-sector pensions and local government. He effectively managed — at least for the first 18 months — the COVID-19 pandemic. He reduced the province’s debt and launched new approaches to health care that may yet yield permanent improvements.

But the PC leader also leaves a fractured party behind him. The battle for its leadership — and its direction — may prove divisive.

In 2020, Higgs suggested the concerns of some of his own PC MLAs were politically driven and parochial compared to his own vision.

“I understand individual MLAs, individual cabinet ministers, have pressures on them in their ridings,” he said. “I get it.

“I’m fortunate to be representing a riding, Quispamsis, that is very focused on the big picture of New Brunswick.”

What that comment revealed was Higgs’s unwillingness to read and adjust to the constantly shifting emotions and moods of politics, both inside his caucus and in the wider electorate.

That ability to “make the tides” in his Irving Oil job was ultimately not transferable.

In that 2019 speech in Saint John, Higgs made clear he relished the discipline forced on him by the Bay of Fundy, but he also acknowledged those tides were unforgiving.

“In my job, if I missed too many of them, the job was a little tense,” he said.

So too was the job of premier.