More women heading to the legislature, but diverse candidates remain shut out

New Brunswick voters are sending more women to New Brunswick's legislature, but no candidates of colour, members of a First Nations or people who identify as LGBTQ will be heading to Fredericton this fall.

Fourteen women won their ridings during Monday night's election, compared to 11 back in 2018.

Nine of those women will form part of the Progressive Conservative's caucus, a boost from the four they had after the last election.

"It's a new PC record," Premier Blaine Higgs said in his victory speech from Quispamsis, where he watched his party gain seven seats to a form a majority government.

The Liberals, whose overall numbers slipped from 20 to 17, elected three women compared to the five they had in 2018.

Michelle Conroy, the People's Alliance's lone women in the house, will keep her Miramichi seat, this time defending it from Liberal Leader Kevin Vickers.

Despite running a gender-balanced slate, the Greens also didn't see an increase of women to their caucus this time around. Memramcook-Tantramar's Megan Mitton won back her seat and will rejoin the party's two other male MLAs.

Few diverse candidates in the running

New Brunswickers didn't have many options when it came to voting for non-white candidates. While 227 candidates registered by the nomination deadline, just a smattering of candidates were persons of colour, Indigenous or identified as part of the LGBTQ community. 

The Liberals had a Black man, a self-identified Indigenous woman and a transgender woman on their slate, but they didn't win in their ridings.

Vickers had said the party wanted to promote diversity as much as possible, but there wasn't much time to tap new candidates during a snap election and said women in particular were challenged by the prospect of having to "drop everything" to run.

The Green Party boasted the most diverse slate with two Indigenous candidates, two women of colour and a candidate who self-identifies as queer — but they won't be joining the party's three MLAs in the house. 

While the PCs grew the number of women in their caucus, they didn't run any Indigenous candidates or have any person of colour on their roster.

Two PC candidates publicly identified as gay, including Kevin Haché, the candidate in Caraquet, who is a lawyer and the current mayor of Caraquet, and Mathieu Caissie, the candidate for Shediac Bay-Dieppe. Neither won.

The NDP registered one candidate of colour and another candidate who identifies as non-binary, but the party failed to elect a single candidate and secured less than two per cent of the vote.

The People's Alliance campaign chair Sterling Wright said diversity targets are not part of the party's equation.

"Gender, sexual orientation, age, race or religion, those are not things we consider to be of most importance," said Wright during the campaign.

"What we're interested in, is people of good character, who have a sincere interest in serving the people of their constituency, and who have a good work ethic. That's far more important to us than the colour of somebody's skin or their gender.