New Brunswick opposition parties are deep into election preparations

As persistent rumours of a fall snap election continue to swirl, both opposition parties say they are deep into election preparations.

Green Leader David Coon says his party is acting as if a call is coming any day — “all the things we need, from wrapping our campaign vehicle to finishing the platform.”

“There’s a lot of moving pieces to an election campaign.”

Premier Blaine Higgs has refused to rule out calling a snap election this fall, saying that a group of his caucus may force him into sending the province to the polls a year early. In June, eight government MLAs skipped a day of routine business in the legislature as a protest over Higgs’ handling of a review of the province’s school gender identity policy. Six of those MLAs later voted for an opposition motion to ask the province’s child and youth advocate to hold further consolations on the policy.

The revisions now require parental consent for children under 16 to go by a preferred name or pronoun if it doesn’t line up with the gender they were assigned at birth. Higgs has said that he is sticking up for parental rights, while critics have said that the new policy may be harmful to children who don’t have parents who accept their gender identity.

The government uncertainty has Liberal Leader Susan Holt preparing for an election a year earlier than she expected to, about 14 months after taking her party’s top job. That condensed timeline means less time to flesh out the policies that will form the platform for her party.

“I think good policy is built by lots of voices and lots of people at the table and engaging our membership and bringing resolutions forward for debate and to be voted on in policy conventions and a snap election doesn’t give us the ability to do that in the way that I know our members really want and in the way that policy really should get built, with a lot of input from New Brunswickers,” she said.

Holt said that getting candidates in place is also tough, but that her commitment to recruiting is paying off as the party looks to put together a full slate. Right now, the party’s only confirmed candidates are its 16 sitting MLAs, but the party has two nomination conventions scheduled next week and a decent pool of candidates to choose from should Holt have to begin appointing them after a snap election call.

“I started recruiting the day I got this job, because we know that good candidates, and particularly underrepresented candidates, need to be asked and asked and asked and need to take time with the decision and be encouraged by lots of people,” Holt said.

“That work has been underway for the last 14 months — and thank goodness, because it meant that we have a long list of folks who were already in the process of making a decision, so we just asked them to accelerate their decision-making process.”

Coon said the party has taken lessons from the last snap election in 2020 and is heavily focused on recruiting right now to ensure it has a full slate by the end of the first week.

“Most of our local campaigns didn’t get a lot of grip on the ground until week two,” he said.

“There were a number of ridings where we finished a very close second and our candidates won the vote election night but they lost the advanced polls before their campaigns really had the time to connect with people. So that’s a really important lesson.”

The Progressive Conservatives did not respond to questions asking how many candidates the party has in place.

While the two opposition parties are left guessing when or if an election will be called, ultimately it’s in Higgs’ hands whether to send the province to the polls.