Dissenting minister who survived New Brunswick cabinet firings puzzles scholar

Premier Blaine Higgs is entitled to appoint or dismiss whomever he wants to his cabinet, but not all scholars are buying his argument that two government ministers who voted against a government policy inside the legislature had to be fired to uphold parliamentary traditions, while a third who voiced the same opposition outside the legislature did not.

"The convention of cabinet solidarity was broken by all three," said Emmett Macfarlane, a political scientist at the University of Waterloo.

"Arguablythe premier has misunderstoodthe convention."

On Tuesday, Higgs shuffled his cabinet and removed former local government minister Daniel Allain and former transportation minister Jeff Carr.

Two weeks earlierthe pair, along with then social development minister Dorothy Shephard and thenpost secondary education minister Trevor Holder and two additional backbench government MLA, voted for an opposition motion to further study government changes to Policy 713, which covers the treatment of LGBTQ students in public schools.

Shephardsubmitted her resignation from cabineton June 15following the vote, as did Holder days later.

A fifth government minister, Arlene Dunn, was not in the legislature for the vote but publicly announced thefollowing day she, too, would have sided against the government had she been there.

On Tuesday, while Allain and Carr were fired,Dunn retained her job and was given additional responsibilities.

Higgs explainedthat although Dunn had publicly opposed the government's plan in interviewsand public statements, that wasn't the same violation of cabinet solidarity committedby those ministers who voted against it.

"When you have cabinetministers who take aposition against thegovernment inthelegislature, it'svery significant," said Higgs.

"If you look at the parliamentary system we operate under, cabinet support is paramount."

But Macfarlane said that is not a full understanding of the principles and traditions involved.

"The convention does not apply to voting.It applies to any public disagreement with the government,"said Macfarlane.

He explained that in a parliamentary system the premier and cabinet ministers are "collectively" responsible for government policies and decisions and are required to defend all of them, even those they might disagree with privately, or resign.

Dunn,he argues, was in the same positionopposing the government's changes to the 713 policy outside the legislature as Carr and Allain were voting against it inside the Legislature.

"You have a real problem when a cabinet minister even just articulates dissent," said Macfarlane.

"Under our traditional view of the convention of cabinet solidarity the minister should have actually resigned."

Dunn has not changed her position and on Tuesday outside Government House, where she was being elevated by Higgs to minister of post-secondary education, training and labour, she repeated her concern about the government's decision to change its LGBTQ school policies.

"I didn't think that we should have touched that," she said. "I think we should have stayed away from it.

No 'hard' rules

Greg Flynn, chair of the department of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, said Higgs can do as he pleases because parliamentary traditions are not "hard and fast rules" and can be applied or not at the premier's discretion.

However, he said it is difficult to argue any parliamentary tradition would suggesttreating Dunn differently than Allain and Carr.

"Generally speaking, any deviation or expression of disapproval from a government's position/policy should trigger either a resignation by the Minister or dismissal from Cabinet," wrote Flynn in an email about the issue.

Yan Campagnolo, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, does see some room for Higgs to treat Dunn's opposition to the government policy differently than the other ministers, but said all three were on thin ice.

"In a system of cabinet government, a minister who cannot publicly support a significant government policy would normally be expected to resign," said Campagnolo.

In his view, a minister voting against the government in the legislature is "the ultimate form of dissent" that no premier would tolerate, but hesaid it's not clear to him if Dunn's absence from the vote was a scheduling problem or a deliberate decision not to embarrassHiggs.

"Arlene Dunn's case is not as clear cut," he said.

Higgs had publicly announced prior to the vote in the legislature that he would not be requiring government MLAs to support any particular position and on Wednesday Carr said that signaled to ministers they were free to vote their conscience.

"It's not a whipped vote and nobody asked us how we were going to vote," Carr told CBC News.

But Macfarlane said that's not how cabinet solidarity works, either.

He said free votes for cabinet ministersare rare and always explicit, and he saidevery minister who feels it important to be publiclycritical of a government policy or to vote against it, normally would resign their cabinet position on their own beforehand.

"We would always, except for very rare exceptions in Canadian history, expect cabinet members to vote with the government.That is in fact the convention of cabinet solidarity," said Macfarlane.