OTTAWA—New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs says the move to undermine parental rights in Canada is a sign that the lines between right and wrong have become blurred.
“The very basics of what we would have considered right and wrong in the past are questioned now,” Mr. Higgs said. “Nothing is more evident of that than the whole idea of the parents’ role in the child’s education.”
Mr. Higgs made the comments during a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with The Epoch Times on April 11 at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa.
“I think it’s great to see from coast to coast people that are saying enough’s enough, and it’s time that conservatives were counted in this country,” he said.
Parental Rights
Mr. Higgs’ government was the first in the country to introduce a pronoun policy at schools to uphold parental rights.
Mr. Higgs said that as a parent and grandparent, he has “great difficulty” when “the family unit is being jeopardized by policy.”
“I’m a father of four daughters,” he said. “We have five grandchildren, and my wife and I have always been very involved in the raising of our kids, and we want to continue to be very involved in the grandchildren’s life. I think the continuity that parents or grandparents bring to the families, it helps people and helps the kids to grow into strong adults.”
Having a policy that put teachers in a position “not to be truthful with parents” was also unfair to teachers, he said.
Even if some parents may not be supportive of their child’s decision to change names or use pronouns, Mr. Higgs said it’s not right to paint all parents with the same brush.
“What we do in society today is rather than deal with some exceptions, we just rule everybody out,” he said. “There are issues that has to be dealt with and is part of our social assistance network, but you can’t rule out all parents.”
Carbon Tax
Mr. Higgs confirmed in jest that the prime minister hasn’t reached out to him yet after MPs voted for a meeting on the recent carbon tax hike.On April 10, MPs voted in favour of a motion asking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to meet with provincial leaders to talk about the recent increase in the carbon tax. The non-binding motion would see the meeting happen in the next five weeks and will include discussions of provinces opting out of the federal carbon tax and presenting other ideas to lower emissions.
Mr. Higgs said Canada has an opportunity to reduce carbon emissions globally by exporting natural resources, including liquified natural gas (LNG).
“We have an LNG plant in New Brunswick and it can be converted to export versus import,” he said.
He also noted the role Canada could play in helping China move away from coal plants.
“China is building one, two a week, and they have 1,100 coal plants running. So for every coal plant that we can shut down, or convert to gas, will reduce emissions by 50 percent.”
The premier noted that Canada has been increasing its coal exports over the past few years.
“The irony of the federal policy and the hypocrisy of it all is that since 2015, our coal exports in Canada have doubled. So on the one hand, we’re shipping coal worldwide, but we won’t ship a cleaner fuel. Something is wrong with that picture.”
Rise of Conservatives
Recent polling has put the federal Conservatives 20 points ahead of the governing Liberals, which is something Mr. Higgs believes comes from the ever-increasing drift of other parties from the centre to the far left.“It used to be that Conservatives were, let’s say a little right of centre, and Liberals were a little left of centre,” he said. “We’re still a little right of centre, but the Liberals and the NDP and Greens have gone right off the edge on the left of centre.”
He said people are beginning to realize that the extreme leftist policies are not working.
“I think the public are realizing policies that far-left are creating major havoc with everybody’s lifestyle, with everyone’s ability to live and work in our province or our country.”
Youth in particular are not served by the policies, according to Mr. Higgs.
“I think the youth of today—they want to own a house, they want to have a job, they want to afford the groceries, they want to afford to have a family,” he said, adding that younger voters are also concerned with helping the environment.
“They’re saying these policies don’t work, but we want to help the environment as well. Fair enough. We want to do the same, so our goals are all the same,” he said.
“When you go too far one way or the other, you eventually get people saying, ‘enough’s enough’ and we’re on that bubble,” Mr. Higgs said. “We need to find a moderate path forward to correct current policies and to build our country back.”
New Brunswick Election
An election is expected this fall in New Brunswick, and Mr. Higgs said he’ll be running on his record.“Our province is performing better now than it has for generations,” he said, noting record employment growth and increased investments.
“We have record investment, private-sector investment, people looking at us as a place to invest, work, and live.”
New Brunswick’s population, which had been stagnant, has increased about 10 percent over the last several years, he added.
Mr. Higgs acknowledged challenges in the areas of affordability, housing, and health care—issues all provinces are grappling with.
“But we have real signs of improvement,“ he said. ”So what I‘d say, and this would be my third mandate that I’m going for, look at the results and compare our results with any previous government in recent history—and it wouldn’t have to be recent history—you’ll see there’s a stark evaluation of improvement. There’s a stark contrast between myself and my opposing party, the Liberal Party [of New Brunswick], which is really just another faction of Trudeau’s government.”
The Epoch Times reached out to New Brunswick’s Liberal Party for an interview.
Mr. Higgs said he also has great plans for the future, including “bringing reality back to how we manage government services.”
“We’re bringing a ‘patient care first’ strategy back to government services so that the patients have an option,” he said. “In our province, we have 22 hospitals. I want to utilize the entire network both in Vitalité and Horizon, two networks, to work together to give a very positive health-care experience. ”
