All of a sudden, it seems as though practically everyone has discovered New Brunswick. Premier Blaine Higgs’s intervention over Policy 713 on sexual orientation and gender identity put the province on the map in the North American culture wars, attracting national and international attention. Yet most of the armchair analysts are outside observers and few have ever set foot in the province.
The Curse of Politics podcast hosted by the ribald and unfiltered David Herle provides the most outlandish example. “What I know about New Brunswick politics couldn’t fit in a drag queen’s brassiere,” quipped regular guest Scott Reid, before jumping into a discussion linking the policy change to the rise of “right-wing” populism in North America.
Discussing Policy 713 must be good for clicks and social media shares. Why else would the video of the hour-long show be titled “drag queen’s brassiere,” when the discussion of Policy 713 lasted a mere 10 minutes? Shooting from the lip, sprinkling comments with expletives and firing-off snap judgments were the order of the day. Informed viewers and listeners deserve better.
Two University of New Brunswick assistant professors, Andrea Garner and Melissa Dockrill Garrett, for example, were quick to produce a piece of instant analysis. New Brunswick’s LGBTQ “safe schools debate,” the headline declared, “makes false opponents of parents and teachers.”
They claimed that tampering with the policy put “students, families and allies who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+” at great risk. Awash in sweeping generalizations, the commentary closed with a flourish: “Schools must continue to be inclusive and foster cultures of equity, acceptance and compassion where each student is valued and honoured for who they are.” Anyone who questioned the policy was, by implication, undermining that article of faith.
A more recent Conversation commentary, produced by McMaster PhD candidate Noah Fry, painted Premier Higgs in shades of black, comparing him to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Fry, who’s now based in Ontario, earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., which gives him some street cred. The Policy 713 debate, he claimed, revealed Higgs to be a politician with “a hard-line conservative record to make right-wing ideologues giddy.”
Fry dredged-up Higgs’ early flirtation with the Confederation of Regions (CoR) party, which opposed official bilingualism, and recited a litany of policies he claims are favourable to “top income earners” and hostile to underpaid nurses and Indigenous people. The young academic also insinuated that the premier was “proudly unilingual” and out to undermine French language education.
The Policy 713 controversy has brought the province’s social divisions into sharper relief, but they were always there, below the surface. Gender identity politics is radioactive and anyone daring to touch it gets burned, particularly among the Central Canadian chattering classes and in university common rooms. Even venturing a comment can make you persona non grata in the simmering culture wars.
Lindsay Jones, the Globe and Mail’s Atlantic reporter, took a more nuanced approach than most, choosing to focus on Premier Higgs’s actual intervention, his stated motives and the resulting cabinet divisions.
Most of her analysis is gleaned from Mount Allison University political science Prof. Geoff Martin, a Higgs critic who’s familiar with his CoR roots and attuned to social conservatism challenging “so-called woke policy.” Like most academics, he’s quick to associate the provincial upheaval with the broader political atmosphere across Canada and the United States.
After all this outpouring of drive-by political analysis, are we any the wiser? Reading between the lines, Premier Higgs’s surprising show of independence has pundits, academics and transgender advocates in a real tizzy. Surrounded on all sides by vocal critics, it’s hard to get a read on the so-called silent majority in a vast and disaggregated province like New Brunswick.
Political messages espousing family values have resonance in the province, especially in rural communities. A national Leger poll conducted at the outset of the Policy 713 controversy showed that 57 per cent of those surveyed agreed that schools should inform parents if school-aged children changed their pronouns. Just 18 per cent disagreed, while 25 per cent were unsure. Slightly over half of respondents, or 51 per cent, felt schools were “moving in the wrong direction.”
Few outside observers make any reference to the premier’s leadership style or to his parallel moves to revamp education governance that give parents less voice in the school system. It’s just not, pardon the expression, sexy enough to attract much sustained attention. Nor would they notice New Brunswick Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock’s measured critique that the changes were “shoddy” and “inadvertently discriminatory,” rather than purely reactive.
If there’s one thing Noah Fry got right, it’s that, “Higgs does not hide who he is. He is open with media and speaks his mind.” More people may be ready for that than the drive-by experts ever imagined.
