NP View: New Brunswick will miss Blaine Higgs. He saved it from fiscal ruin

The voters in New Brunswick have spoken clearly, handing a majority government to the Liberals and defeating Blaine Higgs after six years in power.

That’s a clear mandate to govern for Susan Holt, the Grit leader who’s become the first female premier in the province’s history.

But the Liberals would be advised not to throw away the new and improved direction that Higgs brought to the table, significantly improving New Brunswick’s economic prospects.

When Higgs was first on the political scene, taking the reins as finance minister in 2010, the Atlantic province was struggling with a structural deficit, coming in at nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars annually.

The province’s struggles were so profound, an infamous 2016 Maclean’s magazine story asked “Can anything save New Brunswick?”

It turns out there was. Immediately upon taking the reins from the Liberals in 2018, Higgs balanced the budget and used nearly every new public dollar to wrestle down the province’s worrying debt.

The results speak for themselves. In just over half a decade, the Progressive Conservatives took a province that was fiscally moribund and turned it into the cleanest balance sheet in the country — paying down $2.5 billion in public debt.

For a province of some 850,000 people, that’s a significant reduction which has already started to pay dividends: lower interest costs and more flexibility for public services.

New Brunswick has no shortage of challenges, including an embattled public electrical utility and low productivity growth. But it has a fighting chance, now that its fiscal back is no longer against the wall.

Ironically, it is Higgs’s discipline that made Liberal promises of higher spending possible in the first place.

As Holt now ascends to power, the strong ship she’s inheriting is the result of sound management. It’s a fiscal record the PCs can be proud of, and the Liberal leader should recognize.

It’s also a governing philosophy she shouldn’t run away from. Her pledge to continue balancing the budget is at least a nod to the importance of fiscal responsibility.

Only time will tell if she can keep that important pledge.

Much was made on Monday night, especially by the CBC’s commentary on the election, about the importance of school gender policies — specifically “Policy 713” which the Higgs government reformed last year to much national attention.

It was, at the time, decried by many LGBT activists as discriminatory. Yet, Higgs’s policy actually amounted to a balanced approach, which respected the rights of older students to use a different name and pronoun in school.

But his changes also elevated the right of parents to be involved in these important decisions when kids are under 16.

That’s not an extreme position. Indeed, it’s a middle ground for which Higgs should have been better recognized. Instead, he was unfairly villainized by the political left.

The fact Holt amended her position partway through the campaign — to once again revise the policy, recognizing parental rights but at a younger age — is a testament to the fact the public was not comfortable with parents being kept in the dark.

In his concession speech, Higgs said: “We stand for what we believe in, maybe we fall for what we believe in, but we don’t lose our conviction in the process.”

The Tory premier is a notable person of conviction, starting with his promise never to buy votes with public spending. Instead of lavishing New Brunswickers with goodies, he ran every campaign on a simple message of good governance.

Monday’s loss does not take away from that conviction, or his success. The result is not what conservatives in New Brunswick, or throughout Canada, wanted to see. But we’re confident history will judge him as a transformational figure who left the Picture Province far better than he found it.

National Post