The New Brunswick general election on Monday will test whether the Tories’ message still resonates with voters after six years in power.
“When any incumbent government has been in that long it’s always you defending your record,” said Paul Dempsey, a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick in the riding of Saint John Portland-Simonds.
“It’s more of a challenge.”
Neither major party can claim to have a strong hold on the province. For nearly a century, voters have flip-flopped between the PCs and New Brunswick Liberals. The Tories won the past two elections, unseating a majority Liberal government in 2018 before going on to win a majority themselves in 2020.
Now, the tables may be turning again. Polling aggregator 338Canada projects a win for the Liberals, and gives them 52 per cent odds of securing a majority.
“Health care, housing [and] affordability are central in this campaign,” said David Hickey, Liberal candidate for the Saint John Harbour riding.
Waitlists
In its 2024-25 budget, the Progressive Conservatives pledged to invest a record $3.8 billion into health care. The funding is to be used to attract more health-care workers and expand midwifery and mental health and addictions services in the province.
But Hickey says the funding reflects an “old way” of delivering health care, which still leaves family doctors bearing the brunt of patient care.
In a province of 850,000 people, more than 180,000 are waitlisted for a new family doctor, he said, citing data from the New Brunswick Medical Society. The governing Tories have contested this number; in April, the health minister said the waitlist is actually closer to 84,000.
The Liberal platform proposes creating 30 new community care clinics, “where health-care professionals can plug into a network and the team of health-care providers [can] better offer care to folks,” said Hickey.
The Liberals have also pledged to lengthen operating rooms’ hours of operation, and to modernize the digital health-care system so records can be shared between different health-care providers.
‘Steady flow’
As in most parts of the country, housing and affordability are some of the top concerns of New Brunswick voters.
The Liberals have pledged to increase public housing and eliminate provincial sales tax on new multi-unit developments to boost new builds, says Hickey. They have also promised to reform the property tax system so rates are not tied to commercial, government and industrial properties tax rates — a system that has resulted in yearly tax hikes for homeowners.
The Tories are aiming to address voters’ affordability concerns by cutting the HST, from 15 to 13 per cent, and building up to 6,000 new homes.
Dempsey says New Brunswick’s housing and health-care challenges have been exacerbated by Ottawa admitting too many newcomers. The province has welcomed about 100,000 new residents since 2019, he said.
“We know that we need a steady flow of newcomers into our province,” he said. But “we need to bring our newcomers into our country at a rate that doesn’t undo the social contract that we’ve had between Canadians and newcomers.”
A Tory government would call on the federal government to increase funding levels to better support new New Brunswickers, he says.
But Hickey says any mismanaged immigration is the New Brunswick Tories’ responsibility, not Ottawa’s. He says provinces set provincial immigration targets.
“They’ve set the targets,” he said. “If they’re saying a whistle needs to be blown, well the whistle is around their neck.”
‘You have my vote’
The election will also signal where voters stand on the Tories’ controversial education policies.
In 2023, Education Minister Bill Hogan revised the province’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Policy to require students aged 15 years and younger to obtain parental consent to change their name or pronouns used at school.
The policy says students who do not consent to talking to a parent are “encouraged to communicate with the appropriate professionals to develop a plan to speak with their parents when they are ready to do so,” Canadian Affairs reported in September 2023. If there is a risk of harm to the child, a student should be encouraged to speak with professionals, the policy says.
Conservative candidate Dempsey says he generally hears voters voice support for this policy.
“There’s a percentage of the families in the community who will jump you immediately into that issue,” he said. “Often, when it’s parents, if you tell the parent you support [Policy] 713, they’ll respond, ‘You got my vote’ — so you can see this is really meaningful to the parents.
“We’re finding other communities, other groups within the community, might take a different view, but we’re finding they’re the minority.”
Hickey says the Liberal party intends to restore the original Policy 713, although he declined to provide specifics. Previously, school staff could use students’ preferred pronouns and chosen names without the need to obtain parental consent.
General support for the policy may be convincing Liberals to be less vocal about their plans for changing the policy, says J.P. Lewis, a professor in the Department of History and Politics at the University of New Brunswick Saint John.
“Even though there’s been a lot of pushback to the revisions that [Education Minister] Hogan made, public opinion is somewhat with the government on this,” said Lewis. “Looking at this strategically, it didn’t look maybe as a winning issue for the Liberals to be the champions of.”
The New Brunswick Green Party is trailing in third place, but projected to win two seats. The Green Party and People’s Alliance of New Brunswick, a right-wing party, have won three or fewer legislative seats since 2014 and 2018, respectively. The New Democratic Party has not won a seat since 2003.
Dempsey thinks it is unlikely that a Liberal win in New Brunswick would foreshadow a change of fortunes for the Liberals federally. The federal Liberals lost two former strongholds, in Toronto and Montreal by-elections, in recent months.
But New Brunswick’s Liberals are distancing themselves from the national party to improve their chances of winning, says Lewis.
“That’s a big X-factor of this election,” said Lewis. “How much does the unpopularity of just a Liberal brand hold back the [New Brunswick] Liberals?”
