In PC leadership fight, Higgs's opponent is the legacy of Bernard Lord

In the fight over his leadership, Blaine Higgs faces an amorphous foe — a strain of discontent in the Progressive Conservative Party without a clearly defined leader or regional base.

In another way, his nemesis is the legacy of one of his predecessors as PC party leader and premier: Bernard Lord.

Lord was "looking for decentralization and giving power to the locals," says Université de Moncton political scientist Roger Ouellette.

"Higgs is doing the opposite right now."

PC party officials plan to clarify soon when they'll decide if letters calling for a review vote on Higgs's leadership are proper and can trigger the next step in the process.

If a contest happened, it would pit the current premier against many PCs who idealize the record of the man who held the job two decades ago.

Though they share a party affiliation, their approaches to the position are very different.

In 2000, Bernard Lord's Tories brought back elected school boards, which the previous Liberal government had eliminated. 

Local decision-making was back, he said.

Higgs now aims to weaken the decision-making powers of anglophone boards — and thus of local communities, his critics say — with legislation he plans to bring back in the fall.

Similarly, Lord's government added elected positions on regional health authority boards in 2002. Higgs eliminated elected RHA positions this year.

"Higgs is out of touch with the ideology of his own party," Ouellette says.

Lord set the tone early in his tenure as party leader. 

In 1998, he launched an exhaustive policy development process co-chaired by two of his former rivals in the race.

"It's not a closed process, it's wide open," he declared. 

At a party meeting in Saint John, grassroots PC members hashed out policy resolutions on issues from welfare to education to bilingualism.

There have been no such policy development processes since Higgs became leader.

The premier "ignores the party membership,"  Marc Savoie, president of the Moncton East PC riding association, said in a June 29 statement calling for Higgs to resign.

"What in the world are we doing here?" asked Andrew Dawson, a former assistant to Lord, at the party's annual meeting last fall. Dawson ran unsuccessfully to become party president, complaining about the lack of policy workshops at the event.

The two leaders also see the electoral map differently.

Lord grew PC support everywhere in the province, building on Premier Richard Hatfield's effort to expand into francophone New Brunswick. 

Higgs has done poorly in francophone areas and has publicly written off those ridings as mostly unwinnable for his party — despite the success Hatfield and Lord had there.

Another contrast: Lord gave his caucus broad input into legislation. If his MLAs had problems with a bill, it didn't even get to the floor of the legislature.

"There were times when people would say 'No, this is not going to work this way,' and it went back to the drawing board," longtime PC cabinet minister Bruce Fitch explained in 2017.

The current premier's caucus meetings are "less about consensus and more about him getting his own way," PC MLA Trevor Holder said when he quit Higgs's cabinet in June. 

Lord's style may have made him too cautious at times for difficult decisions, but it also helped him avoid splits in his party and in the province.

In 2002 he steered a potentially divisive overhaul of the Official Languages Act through his large caucus, which included a large contingent of francophones as well as former members of the anti-bilingualism Confederation of Regions Party.

The bill passed the legislature unanimously, with all-party support — a result Higgs failed to achieve with his minor tweaks to the law this spring. 

The contrast between the two premiers may explain why many Tories unhappy with Higgs grew up in the Bernard Lord era of decentralization and consensus. 

Holder was first elected in Lord's 1999 landslide win.

Jeff Carr, who joined the revolt over Policy 713 and was shuffled out of Higgs's cabinet, is the brother of former cabinet minister Jody Carr, another member of the PC class of '99.

Daniel Allain, dumped from cabinet for the same reason, was an assistant to Lord.

And former party president Claude Williams, who helped organize the push for a leadership review, was first elected as an MLA in 2001 when Lord was leader.

All of them worked in government during David Alward's single term as premier from 2010 to 2014, a mandate that was in many ways a continuation of the Lord era.

But during that four-year period, the seeds of the current battle were sewn.

As Alward's finance minister, Higgs often complained loudly about what he considered politically motivated decisions of past New Brunswick governments — including Lord's.

It amounted to an implicit criticism of his caucus colleagues, some of whom are now at odds with him.

At the same time, Kris Austin was building the People's Alliance on the premise that the PCs were not conservative enough.

Austin was eventually absorbed into the Tory caucus as Higgs shifted the party in his direction, away from the Lord legacy.

Now there's a potential battle looming over which vision will prevail.

The outcome will determine whether Higgs gets a shot to reproduce one part of Lord's record that no premier since 2003 has managed to duplicate: a second majority election win.