New Brunswick provincial parties kick off campaigns ahead of Oct. 21 election

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New Brunswickers will be voting Oct. 21 after a 32-day campaign that’s likely to be focused on affordability, education and health care in a province grappling with a surge in population and the rising cost of housing.

Progressive Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs will try to retain power by riding the growing chill toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while selling his own economic record despite a polarizing debate over changes his government made to gender-identity rules in the classroom.

Liberal Leader Susan Holt meanwhile held a simultaneous press conference, promising to remove the provincial sales tax from electricity bills.

The Green Party kicked off its election campaign one day earlier with a rally in Fredericton, where Mr. Coon promised to implement solutions to health care, housing and climate. Earlier this month, he announced that a Green government would create an electricity support program to offset unprecedented power rate increases for low income New Brunswickers.

“The choice is abundantly clear,” Mr. Higgs told reporters Thursday at a press conference “We cannot let Susan Holt and and David Coon do to New Brunswick what Trudeau and Singh have done to Canada.”

The election will likely come down to a match between Ms. Holt and Mr. Higgs with key issues that include the skyrocketing cost of living and home prices, even in a part of Canada where housing costs were relatively affordable for a long time, said St. Thomas University political science professor Jamie Gillies.

He said the race appears to be between the “Liberal Party under Susan Holt offering hope and change, while trying to distance itself from the Trudeau Liberals, … or a Progressive Conservative Party under Blaine Higgs trying for a third mandate focusing on the economic growth the province has experienced over the last few years, but struggling to get away from the attention caused by the caucus revolt,” said Prof. Gilles in an e-mail response to questions from The Globe.

A third of the PC caucus members, some of whom were ministers, resigned or decided not to run again over changes his government made last year to sexual-orientation and gender-identity rules in schools, otherwise known as Policy 713. Mr. Higgs doubled down, fighting a Canadian Civil Liberties Association lawsuit that calls the new self-identification rules in the classroom harmful to gender-diverse students and violates their right to equality under the Charter. He has also threatened to dissolve four education councils that refuse to fall in line.

Thursday morning in Fredericton, Mr. Higgs didn’t seem fazed by any of that. He told reporters his campaign is focused on results and shrugged off questions from reporters on the controversy around changes to Policy 713. The new rule restricts youth under 16 from choosing their own pronouns without parental consent.

“We want families and parents to have a key role in raising their children,” said Mr. Higgs. “That shouldn’t be a controversial item.”

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When asked about his party’s election readiness – the revolt within his own party, the fact that PCs are still missing a few candidates, and a recent fundraising e-mail that said the party didn’t have enough money to run a campaign – he extolled the credentials of his candidates and said “It’s a continuous progress,” before criticizing his opponents. He compared the political collaboration between Ms. Holt’s Liberals and Mr. Coon’s Green Party as a “carbon copy” to the now-defunct agreement between Mr. Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh that propped up the minority Liberal federal government.

“It’s pretty clear what’s at stake. I mean this isn’t just an ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter.’ We’ve seen what’s happened to Canada,” he said.

It’s unclear however if the fed-bashing will work at the provincial level, Prof Gillies said, given that Mr. Higgs is the incumbent premier presiding over the same economic challenges as Mr. Trudeau.

He said other key issues New Brunswick is facing include stagnating services in both health care and education and extra demands on those systems because of an influx of people to the province. Since 2018, when Mr. Higgs was first elected premier, the population has grown by around 80,000, reaching 850,000 in the first quarter of this year, according to Statistics Canada.

In July, Mr. Higgs pledged to reduce the provincial portion of sales tax if re-elected, cutting it from 15 to 13 per cent over two years, at a cost of $450-million.

At a podium in the northern New Brunswick city of Miramichi, Ms. Holt revealed her plan to slash provincial sales tax on electricity bills, which would save New Brunswickers on average $192 per year, at a cost of $90 million per year in government revenue. The tax cut would come into effect April 1, 2025.

“You shouldn’t have to spend money to save money,” she said. “This will bring relief immediately. This is not a promise two years into the future.”