A year after defeat, Higgs haunts debate over PC Party’s direction
CBC
He haunts them still.
In New Brunswick politics, most defeated premiers exit quietly, staying out of debates within their parties about what future direction to take or who should be the next leader.
Blaine Higgs was always different. He still is.
Over the weekend, Higgs appeared at the Progressive Conservative Party’s annual general meeting and weighed in on possible leadership candidates, the 2023 caucus rebellion against him, and even on whether to rename the party.
He told reporters that trying to make the PCs a broad-based, “big tent” party was a fool’s errand because many “Progressive” Conservatives are really Liberal, NDP and Green sympathizers.
“So they shouldn’t be part of the party,” Higgs said.
Removing the word “Progressive” from the party’s name was an “interesting” idea, he added.
“Our party needs to decide who we are as Conservatives. We can chase the whims of the public, and people can say that’s the only way you get voted in to be government."
“Is it all about being elected as government, or is it about making a difference in the province?”
That is the central dilemma facing the Tories after the defeat that ended six years in power: should they turn away from Higgs’s vision and broaden the base in an effort to win in 2028?
Over his 14 years in public life, Higgs often said the compromises and concessions of middle-of-the-road party politics were an obstacle to governing effectively and affordably.
He said Saturday that he tried the big-tent approach in 2017 when he lured former NDP leader Dominic Cardy into the party and it clearly hadn’t worked.
Cardy quit as education minister in 2022, and Higgs’s comments imply it wasn’t his fault.
Many of the former premier’s internal PC critics disagreed. They felt he neglected the basic obligations of party leadership: to consider different viewpoints, to make ministers and MLAs feel valued, to forge a consensus.
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