Speaking to reporters following losses in a pair of byelections, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs shrugged off the poor results, pointing out that the races took place in traditional Liberal strongholds.
“Those ridings have always been very, very solid in the Liberal camp and we weren’t expecting much different than that last night,” Higgs said on Tuesday.
While that may be true of Restigouche-Chaleur, an area that has voted for the Tories once since the province moved to single-member ridings in the 1970s, that’s not the case in Dieppe. The Progressive Conservatives won the area three straight times in 1999, 2003 and 2006. In fact, the party has won plenty of francophone-majority ridings in the last 50 years.
The party’s Dieppe candidate Dean Leonard placed a distant third on Monday, capturing just 8.6 per cent of the vote, one of the worst results for a PC candidate ever.
But Higgs claims that his party’s recent struggles with the province’s francophone community are due to his linguistic capabilities, not the policies he is fronting.
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“It shouldn’t be a measure of whether, in my situation, whether I speak French or English, it should be a measure of are we growing together,” he said.
That claim is disputed by Gabriel Arsenault, a professor of public policy at Université de Moncton. Arsenault recently completed a paper with fellow UdeM professor Roger Oullette that found the province is more politically divided along linguistic lines than at any point since the start of the 20th century.
Arsenault says the current aversion to the Tory brand in majority francophone ridings is almost entirely rooted in policy, pointing to the decision to do away with the mandatory 10-year review of the Official Languages Act as a recent example.
“There’s no shortage of policies that can be attributed to his government that are problematic from a francophone perspective,” he said.
“So the focus really is on policies, not on his personal linguistic ability.”
Arsenault says other Tory premiers, including the unilingual Richard Hatfield, have found success in northern ridings.
Higgs has often seemed resigned to a lack of support in francophone areas of the province. The premier quipped to reporters on election night in 2020 that the Liberals could successfully run a “lampshade” in northern New Brunswick.
But Arsenault says that attitude can have a negative impact on the political culture of the province.
“It’s worrying because it does suggest that Higgs really isn’t governing for the whole province, or the common good, but really a fragment of the population,” he said.
“That’s the message.”
Others say Higgs shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the dismal result in Dieppe. Jamie Gillies, a professor of communications and public policy at St. Thomas University, says the party can’t afford to bleed too much support in the Moncton area, which has become a crucial battleground over the last few elections.
“That should terrify the PC MLAs and cabinet ministers from the Moncton area,” he said.
The party saw a 14 per cent drop in support in Dieppe from 2020. Should the party lose similar levels of support in and around the Moncton area, several seats would be in danger.
“Dieppe stretches and borders three of the ridings that you hope to hold in the next election,” Gillies said.
“It’s the same media market, the same messaging.”
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