Higgs faces the pros and cons of a one-promise campaign
Rather than make costly commitments, PC leader attacks Liberals for what he says is a $6B platform
On the very first day of his re-election bid, Blaine Higgs predicted how the campaign would probably unfold — and so far, he's been proven right.
Other parties would flood the electorate with hundreds of millions of dollars in promises, the Progressive Conservative leader said ruefully as he stood outside Government House.
He would stand alone, he vowed, refusing the temptation to follows suit, and instead stick with his single, marquee commitment: to lower the harmonized sales tax by two points.
He recognized his pitch might require a bit of extra effort from voters to grasp.
"I'm hopeful that people will look a little deeper than what we'll see as probably a continuous string of election promises, or possible musings about election promises, or concepts that could be adopted," he said.
"We're focused on making it cheaper for people to work here in the province and live here in the province."
What's new? Not much
Since then, the PC leader has been visibly frustrated as Liberal and Green promises have piled up, hogging attention and forcing his campaign to denounce them.
His signature promise, reducing the HST, is plastered in giant letters on the side of his campaign bus, but it's not easy to stretch that single message to fill the entire campaign.
"How do you find 32 days of things to say, other than potentially critiquing your opponents?" asks Acadia University political scientist Alex Marland, an expert in political messaging.
"If you're not going to fill that with promises, the question is 'what are you going to do?""
Higgs has made some other, smaller commitments, such as changes to the scope of practice of medical professionals to improve access to primary care.
But increasingly he is spending his time trying to poke holes in his opponents' spending commitments.
Total turmoil
Early in the campaign, the PCs released their estimate of the cost of Liberal Leader Susan Holt's promises, a multi-year total they pegged at $6 billion.
Their list is expansive, going well beyond the official campaign period.
It takes in everything from non-binding resolutions at a Liberal Party policy convention in February, to topics raised during a Holt "listening tour" of the province, to ideas the Liberal leader has outlined in media interviews.
One example: an eye-popping $300-million cost estimate to address the need for 30,000 housing units, which Holt made during an Oct. 6, 2023, CBC interview.
"It's not small," she said of the sum.
Holt repeated the commitment to 30,000 units early in the campaign, but the $300-million figure doesn't appear in the costing document the Liberals have filed with Elections New Brunswick, a requirement under the Transparency in Election Commitments Act.
The Liberals also claim their promise to improve pay for doctors and other primary-care providers carries no cost at all — because Higgs's government announced a new compensation model for doctor billings on Sept. 12 that took effect a few days later.
"This is presumed to be covered and in the fiscal framework due to the September 2024 announcement by the government," the Liberals say in their costing disclosure form.
That led Higgs to complain on Friday that the Liberal promise is "largely a copy" of his own.
"Nothing new here, except less of it," he said. "The only other difference is it's printed in red, so that it'll be covered in red ink."
As of Monday, the Liberals had pegged the total cost of all their promises at $203 million over five years — leading them to brag that their platform promises are less pricey than Higgs's HST cut, which would cost $1.6 billion in lost revenue a year during the same period.
"The premier has made the single most expensive campaign commitment of anyone on this stage," Holt said during last week's CBC News leaders' debate.
"In fact, his commitment is more expensive than the entire platform that a Holt government is going to put forward, with that single expense."
Holt's campaign did not respond directly to CBC's questions about the PC calculation of $6 billion in Liberal promises or their no-cost promise on primary-care compensation.
Instead, they said in a statement that Higgs "waited until the month before an election to shovel money out the door" to avoid the transparency law's costing requirements.
"Higgs is focused on us, we are focused on New Brunswickers," the statement said.
But the PCs are sticking with their calculation that the Liberals have promised — or at least created expectations among voters of — a lot more spending.
"They promise everything to everybody. Whatever anybody wants, their hands are out, they promise it — but somebody's got to pay for it, and that scares me," said Moncton South PC candidate Greg Turner.
Marland says research indicates that voters tend not to focus on the complex cost calculation of promises, but the math can still influence the campaign narrative.
"If one party is making all these wild promises, opponents and journalists and others want to have a sense of what the implications are all of these promises," he said.
"I'm not sure the average person is going to look at it, but the average person is going to depend on other people to bring it forward, so in that sense it matters."
Historic aversion
Higgs's aversion to costly platforms goes back to his belief that the large government deficits of the past were largely the result of a vicious cycle of impulsive campaign promises.
"What puts governments behind is an elaborate campaign position, spending all kinds of money, and then you can't get out of it, and you're in a [financial] hole for the next two or three years, and by the time you get out of it, you're into another election," he said.
"I refused to get into that cycle when I started this, and I continue to be in the same frame of mind."
Fredericton North PC candidate Jill Green says voters have warmed to the Higgs approach.
"I think we've shown in the past that we don't make promises we can't keep," she said. "So when we say we're going to do something, they know we're going to do it."
Higgs said last week he hasn't seen a downside to a one-promise campaign — "not in my elections in the past," he said.
But it's unclear that's what voters were endorsing when Higgs won in 2018 and 2020.
Six years ago, the Liberals won the popular vote over the PCs by a wide margin. The Tories only scraped into power — with a minority government — thanks to vote splits and a handful of very close wins.
Two years later, the Tories got a majority, but that may have been less about Higgs's aversion to promises and more about his steady management of the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic — and his notably weak Liberal opponent, Kevin Vickers.
Which could make this campaign the first real test of his faith that the party that promises less can win more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
