The Politics of Stupidity: ER Cuts and Public Life in NB

Elections are never decided on a single issue ... but someone remind me: wasn't it health care cuts to small communities that helped do in Bernard Lord's government?  In New Brunswick we have a minority Progressive Conservative (PC) government that is propped up by a small anti-bilingualism third party called the People's Alliance of New Brunswick (PANB). The result of the 2018 provincial general election was improbable. The Tories secured a slim plurality of seats (which allowed them to claim that they "won" the election) on the basis of less than 32% of the popular vote. The Liberals garnered 37.8% of the vote but the character and nature of its distribution as well as the success of the Green Party relegated them to second place in seats. The Liberals tried to hang on to government, but the legislature was against them, their government fell, and current Premier Higgs and his 32% Tories were asked to try to form a government. Since that date, Higgs has governed with the support of the PANB.

Around the time Higgs assumed government, I attended a panel discussion of the provincial election results. The general conclusion was that New Brunswickers would almost certainly be back at the polls inside of six months. That did not happen. Higgs managed to govern by trying to give the PANB what it could -- rejecting the report of the NB Commissioner of Official Languages, making more room for uni-lingual anglophone health care workers in francophone regions of the problem, promising the end of the immersion education for anglophone kids. While there was a large community of interest between the Tories largely rural anglophone vote and the PANB, the PANB was holding the reigns of power. The Higgs government gave them no reason to stop supporting the government and I actually don't think they will now. 

PANB support was not the only reason Higgs has stayed in government. A series of other factors came together to help him out. First, the concerns of the PANB were actually easy to address because the party is, more or less, single-issue. Despite having a platform there is no evidence that its supporters were particularly interested in issues other than languages politics. But, the PANB's position on, say, fracking was almost the same as the PCs so no modifications needed there and it had no significant views on lands and forests, fishing, school curricula, social welfare, policing, immigration and migration, other forms of energy. In retrospect this has made it remarkably easy for the PCs to find common cause with the PANB.

Second, for its own reasons, the PANB has come to have a vested interest in the Higgs government, which is why I think they will continue to support it despite the mess in which it currently finds itself over health care cuts. The PANB has every reason to want a continued minority PC government that depends on them for support. They are unlikely to increase their seat count in any future provincial election and, even if they could, they were never close to winning enough seats to even be the leading party in a minority government. Moreover, the polls show them going in the wrong direct. They are losing support. The most recent poll numbers (admittedly before the current ER room closing fiasco) suggest that potentially none or only one of their three seats are safe if there was another election. So ... why would the PANB do anything but try to keep the Tories in power which guarantees their influence on the issue that matters that most to them. From their perspective, not only would an election almost certainly carry negative consequences for their party, but if things went the other way and, say, the Liberals returned to power, they would have no influence and a party committed to reversing what Higgs has done would be in the driver's seat.

Third, the Liberals had no leader. Former Premier Gallant resigned in the wake of his government's collapse. Without a leader -- and with just about no one seemingly wanting the job -- the Liberals themselves did not want to force any issue. Their francophone and middle class base was concerned with what Higgs was doing but the Liberals seemed to have little desire to fight an election. For its part, outside of language, the Higgs government was doing as little as it could to upset anyone. I will confess, I was surprised by its moderation compared to, say, the Ford and Kenney governments. The Higgs government may or may not have wanted to go after civil servants and teachers, but it must have recognized that it needed to keep its powder dry. It might have wanted to dramatically cut government spending, but took very few steps in that direction.

This moderation seemed to be working: the polls (see previous link), showed the PCs running around 40%, perhaps dropping a bit in late 2019 and the Liberals in the 30% ballpark. It does not look like the Tories were taking Liberal votes and I don't think they were. I think the Liberal bleed was going to the Green Party (more on this below), but they were taking a bit and likely siphoning off PANB voters.  This did not necessarily do the Tories any good because taking PANB seats was not going to actually increase their overall legislative support. It was just going to re-arrange the chairs on the deck, as it were. But, it did show that Tory moderation deprived the Liberals of an issue that could animate an election campaign.

For their part -- and despite their opposition to just about everything the Higgs government was doing -- the Green Party did not want an election either. I don't think Green activists see themselves as a viable alternative government in NB, at least as of yet.  They did well in the 2018 election, but were exhausted by it. The Greens in NB are incredibly grass roots. Their supporters are devoted and enthusiastic and committed but they are by and large not a professional organization. That is an incredible strength and one of the reasons for their victories in 2018. But, it also carries with it a downside and that downside is that fund-raising is more difficult and organization tough and it can tire.  I also think that the Greens were not 100% certain of how solid their vote was.  They garnered 11.8% of the vote (less than the PANB), but was that support or the product of circumstances and popular local candidates and the collapse of the NDP?

Finally, the one issue that really might have been divisive was fracking but the energy glut took that off the agenda. Where fracking had been a wedge issue that drove votes away from the Tories in 2014, it is now absent because there is no reason to frack in 2019 and 2020. Even if the Tories wanted to frack -- and I think they do -- it has become a non-starter for industry.

So, you put all this together and the PCs were riding high. They had no particular reason to force an election themselves because they were already in power and needed time to increase their support.  They had easy PANB support; the other opposition parties didn't want an election. There was, in fact, no threat to them. They were in power, they were guiding the ship of state and there were no storms on the horizon .... until ...

Until the engaged in an act of unmitigated political stupidity. They returned to the issue that contributed to their demise in the past (was it Lord? Am I mis-remembering that?) as if they did not know their own party history. Whatever the particular merits of health policy in general, here is what the Tories did wrong with their recent announcement that they will scale back emergency services at six rural NB hospitals.

1. They picked an issue that will drive some of their core voters away. I drove by the protest in Sackville yesterday against the ER cuts and the protesters were an incredibly diverse lot. This has upset people who I've known as lifetime conservative voters. There were a lot of +50 people at the protest and those people vote. IOW, they did not upset, say, just young people (whose voting record is more checkered), but people who will vote and for whom this issue is important. IOW, they upset people who will *vote* on this issue. 
2. The issue resonates. The problem is not just the six communities that will lose emergency services, but that other communities and other voters will start to wonder about their health care services. It turns out that in Sackville, for instance, scaling back emergency services is just part of the changes being introduced, which include ending acute care hospitalization and the already modest ambulatory care that was available. The Sackville Memorial Hospital, it appears, is to be turned into a weigh station for seniors on their way to care facilities. 
3. The Higgs government does not seem to have briefed their own caucus on ER closures. Two Tory MLAs seem poised to vote against this measure and seemed, in fact, broad-sided by it. If one were going to do something controversial, a government should make sure its own members are in the loop. 
4. They handed the Liberals a key and easy to understand election issue. It took less than one day for Liberal social media to state clearly and unequivocally: if you elect a Liberal government, these hospitals will stay open.  It is clear, quick, and sets up a dichotomy that everyone can understand: vote Tory and lose your health care. Vote Liberal; keep it. 
5. The announcement was mistimed. It is rushed: implementation is to begin in early March, which looks really really bad. It looks like a government, whose claim to democratic legitimacy was already shaky, is trying to rush a policy through because it knows that it will be unpopular. It looks like they are saying "screw you" to rural communities and that is not a good optic. It is made worse, however, because the Liberals now have a leader, an anglophone with some name recognition. Will he be a good premier? Who knows? But, from a political perspective, that might be at least a bit beside the point. 
6. The Tories seem not to have recognized that times have changed in other ways. While the declining popular support of the PANB likely means they are not interested in an election and so will continue to support the PCs come what may, the Liberals are now not afraid of an election, Nor is the Green Party. The polls show its vote increasing and its strong showing in NB in the recent federal election also bodes well for it. Green Party leaders can read these numbers as easily as I can. 

Put all this together and the Tories are in trouble. Even if they withdraw the policy, they have created a wedge issue that will drive votes away from them. Even if they survive an impending non-confidence motion (and they could; the math is tight but they could survive), the issue will not go away. The protesters, in Sackville at least, are well organized, make effective use of social media, know the community supports of them. In Sussex, the news reports suggest real anger.  

This all makes me ask: why did Higgs do it? Is this really a response to health care problems in NB? I suspect that there was a political calculation. Four of the six hospitals affected are in Liberal or Green ridings. And, I do think there is another level of calculation here that relates to the unwinding of the Tories plans for economic rejuvenation in NB. I just think that they made the wrong calculation.