Shockwaves ripple across province in wake of People's Alliance defections

People's Alliance supporters in New Brunswick found themselves bewildered and without a political home on Thursday, while some francophone Progressive Conservatives were questioning their own futures in their party.

The stunning defection of two Alliance MLAs to the PCs followed immediately by the dissolution of the Alliance as a party continued to reverberate both inside the New Brunswick Legislature and across the province.

"It's kind of a sad day. It's kind of an end to it," said Doaktown village councillor Art O'Donnell, who came within 35 votes of getting elected as an Alliance candidate in the 2018 election.

"It was a controversial party but they did stand for some good things, and I feel bad. I feel actually a little bit betrayed by PANB."

Meanwhile, a PC candidate who welcomed Higgs and other Tory ministers to campaign alongside him in the 2020 election said he was tearing up his party membership card in the wake of Wednesday's political earthquake.

"These two individuals as MLAs in the party they were in, the People's Alliance, reflect what I don't want to be associated with," said Mathieu Grald Caissie, who ran in Shediac Bay-Dieppe.

He said he feared that having former leader Kris Austin and Miramichi MLA Michelle Conroy join the government would slow the advancement of language equality in the province.

Austin has insisted over the years he doesn't oppose official bilingualism but objects to some of the ways it's been implemented, such as the creation of two language-based regional health authorities and the requirement for bilingual ambulance paramedics.

But those positions have been anathema to francophones who see those measures as constitutionally required and fundamental to their minority-language rights.

Austin and Conroy said Thursday on CBC's Information Morning Fredericton that they still favour merging the health authorities and eliminating the official language commissioner's position.

"I'm not going to change my views just because we changed a colour," Conroy said.

That led the Liberals to accuse Premier Blaine Higgs of making "backroom deals" to weaken language rights in exchange for the two MLAs joining his government.

"What a sad day yesterday," Liberal Leader Roger Melanson said during Question Period in the legislature Thursday, as Austin and Conroy listened from among the PC benches.

The People's Alliance Party is no more. Leader Kris Austin and Miramichi MLA Michelle Conroyspeak with our host, Jeanne Armstrong, about why they decided to cross the floor.

Higgs said the two new MLAs will adhere to the PC party constitution "without question" like any other member, including its support for official bilingualism and language equality.

"One could say this is good for the future of reducing language tensions," Higgs told reporters, "because now a party that was being labelled as an anti-bilingual party no longer exists. It's gone."

Caissie said however that the two MLAs should have been required to sit as independents until they were officially nominated as PC candidates for the next election, a way for party members to give their approval to the move.

The Alward PC government passed a law to that effect but the Liberals later repealed it.

"It would be wise to say 'OK, if you are for the Acadian community, you have to prove it and not just jump from one party to the other,'" Caissie said.

The premier said with no law in place, he acted based on his own dealings with Austin and Conroy that persuaded him they were trustworthy.

The three-member Alliance caucus elected in 2018 helped keep Higgs's minority government in power until the 2020 election.

Caisse ran as a PC candidate the 2020 campaign.

He said the earlier PC-Alliance arrangement was easier to defend to voters than this week's defection.

"Here you have it being made official. It's one thing to talk to other parties but it's another thing being the People's Alliance, with their policies and positions one day, and the next day being welcomed as MLAs in the PCNB."

Not all francophone PC members condemned the move, however.

Former PC MLA Rjean Savoie says he has "not a bit" of hesitation seeking the nomination as the party candidate in a June byelection in Miramichi Bay-Neguac.

He says he'll explain to voters how Austin and Conroy have committed to adhering to the PC constitution.

"If they understand the process of how it happened, there shouldn't be any problem."

For Alliance supporters, the issue was more existential on Thursday.

"I'm of course very disappointed by how things played out," said Rudy Walters, president of the party's board of directors since last November. "We worked really hard to build up what we had as a party and it feels like a lot of that has come to an end now."

Walters says he was aware Austin was thinking of resigning as leader, but didn't find out until Monday that he was going to dissolve the party completely.

He and the party's executive director had hoped to keep the organization alive and maybe look for a new leader, though he admits it would have been tough to carry on.

Still, he said, "I believe the board and the membership should have been consulted better and given the opportunity to continue."

He said he was surprised that under the provincial elections law, a party leader has the authority to single-handedly dissolve it as an entity.

Austin said in an email message Thursday that he consulted "several" board members and supporters and the dissolution of the party wasn't a condition imposed by Higgs.

"The board had several members resign over the past couple months and it was clear the internal structure of the party was eroding which coincided with support overall," Austin said.

Walters said while many Alliance supporters will probably follow Austin and Conroy to the PCs because of their personal reputations as good MLAs, he won't be among them.

He said he joined the Alliance because of its opposition to corporate subsidies and he doesn't believe the two new PC MLAs will have enough influence on that issue.

"That's truly what got me involved and I don't see that message coming from the Conservatives," he said. "I think that is something that is so entrenched in the Conservative party that it's never going to change."

O'Donnell said he spoke on Wednesday to someone who had been planning to run for the Alliance in the Southwest Miramichi-Bay du Vin riding, another byelection scheduled for June.

"He was crushed," O'Donnell said. "He found out an hour before there was no longer a party."

The village councillor said he'll be encouraging people he knows to look at individual candidates in the byelection, including a potential Liberal candidate from Doaktown, rather than the party they represent.

Even so, O'Donnell said he felt the Alliance had played a role on the political spectrum by raising language issues and other subjects that the two main parties didn't want to touch.

"I liked the fact that we had a third party that was in there that was trying to find a way to do that and I hope the big parties, the big two, will do that.

"But I don't know. I don't think it's going to work because Kris seemed to be that guy, that good leader who was going to 'make' that third party, and now that he's crossed the floor, it's not looking good."