How N.B.’s online premier ‘throws out’ government proposals

Student Max Green got the news — that his university would survive Liberal budget cuts — late at night on Feb. 24, on his phone.

A fellow student at Fredericton’s St. Thomas University posted images of comments Premier Susan Holt had made on the social media site Instagram.

“We are not closing STU,” Holt said in one reply to a student’s question.

The idea was among a list of notions put to university presidents and community college CEOs by the government in a meeting Feb. 18.

Less than a week later, they were declared dead — not through an official government statement or speech but via Holt’s online exchanges with students.

“I thought it was good she was at least trying to dispel some of the things that were going  around,” said Green, an avid consumer of news. “But at the same time, it was horrifying the way she was communicating them.”

The first-year journalism student from Quarryville, near Miramichi, was surprised Holt revealed her thinking “on an Instagram meme page of all things, which is the last place I’d expect to get any relevant news."

It’s an example of the Liberal premier’s approach to communicating and decision-making, a novel approach to transparency that combines putting out ideas only to abandon them, plus revealing her thinking on social media.

The two-page list of proposals, first reported by the newspaper L’Acadie Nouvelle, was authored by Dan Mills, the deputy minister of post-secondary education.

“STU-UNB?” said one item on the list. “Could we move 1,700 STU students across the street and repurpose STU?”

The document was circulated to university and college administrators before a Feb. 18 meeting with Mills.

“The discussion was a discussion,” Jean-Claude D’Amours, the post-secondary education minister, said on Feb. 23. 

The 16 ideas were meant to stimulate creative thinking about how universities and colleges might implement a budget cut of $35 million to $50 million.

As criticism mounted, Holt repeated in a Facebook comment what D’Amours told reporters: no decision had been made.