New Brunswick, Policy 713, And Blaine Higgs' Gamble

On The Looming New Brunswick Election

So, allegedly – I have no reason to doubt Dominic Cardy but I’ll still add the allegedly – New Brunswick is going to an election on Monday, and it’s going to be the rare campaign at least caused by a genuine, real policy disagreement. The Higgs government wants to change Policy 713, a pro-LGBTQ+ policy that was implemented in 2020 to ensure schools were helping gay and trans kids. What’s since happened is Higgs wants to mandate parents being told if trans kids under the age of 16 wish to go by a different name or different pronouns, and it’s causing outrage.

I’ll do a full election preview when the election’s called, but for now, let’s have an honest conversation about what Higgs is proposing from both a policy standpoint, and a political one – and why even though it’s crass politics at the expense of the safety of trans kids, it’s probably gonna work.

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If a child hasn’t told his family that they are trans, there’s a fucking reason for it. Now, not every family that has a child that doesn’t want to come out to them will end up being horrible monsters, but plenty of times kids have reasons not to trust their families will react well. Hell, my supposedly liberal, supposedly good with gay people parents took my homosexuality badly, and being gay is a cakewalk in comparison to being trans.

A policy of forcing kids to out themselves to parents that they haven’t wanted to tell – or having the school bring back up the issue to a family that has rejected the idea of their child being trans – will have the effect of hurting a lot of people. It will end badly for everyone involved, because kids will be forced to endure the consequences of family they’ve been hiding from knowing or they won’t be able to tell anyone at school, making school not a reprieve from the pain but a continuation of it.

This policy will hurt the most vulnerable, and it will end in tears. Whatever vague sense that “parental rights”, as ill defined and as malleable as they are being invoked are, should trump the right of trans kids not to want to kill themselves is harmful idiocy on stilts, and I genuinely would love to know if anyone has ever pointed this out to Higgs. Well, given that the Premier referred to gender dysphoria as “popular and trendy”, it doesn’t actually matter.

What shouldn’t matter in an ideal world, but definitely does in this one, is that Higgs isn’t on an island. He might be in terms of elite opinion and what Twitter users think, but we just saw a National Leger poll say that only 18% of people think schools shouldn’t tell parents in situations like this, against 57% who think the schools should have to. And before you start doing polling conspiracies, it’s Leger – not some right wing push pollster, Leger.

So many I see in my mentions and online talk about this like this will be the end of the Higgs government, and I think that attitude is incredibly dangerous. This not only might not be the end of the Higgs government, but this might actually be the thing that extends its life in office, because the comparison for this isn’t one that the left will like.

The last time a government went to an election on the basis of a controversial policy in the face of internal divisions that I can remember is the 2019 UK election, where the Tories were horrendously divided on the issue of Brexit and walked out with the biggest majority the right had since 1987. That campaign and the run-up to it was intensely terrible, because I kept having to make a version of the same point – just because it’s obvious to you and me that this is a terrible idea doesn’t mean the electorate agrees. Here, that same thing is apparent.

A lot of people in the next month – if this campaign happens, which isn’t, like, a lock by any means – will try to use the fact that this policy is wrong as a substitute for an argument about why the PCs won’t win again, and those two things are entirely unrelated. Plenty of wrongheaded decisions have been made in history with the full consent of the governed, and while I’m optimistic that if there’s an actual debate on the merits of the policy some people will understand why “tell the parents” isn’t as simple as it seems, it’s still the case it’s broadly popular and people won’t stop believing it overnight.

This upcoming New Brunswick election, if it comes, will be one of the worst campaigns we’ve had in a while for someone of my politics. It will see the PCs say wildly harmful things and hinge their campaign on a wildly harmful central plank, in my view. It will also see that be one of the things that keeps the PCs in office, if they win. A policy being morally disgusting and a policy being electorally helpful are not always mutually exclusive, and in Policy 713 he’s found a wedge issue that he’s on the right side of.

None of this should constitute a prediction of where we’ll be at the end of this, but if Higgs loses this gamble, it will be because Policy 713 wasn’t enough to save him, not because it sunk him. The policy’s a piece of shit. It’s also probably gonna help electorally.

What a time to be alive.