Premier Susan Holt Is Hurting the Credibility of Her Government, With Her Flip-Flop Decision Making on St. Thomas University etc.

Camila Baquerizo Bayona -Jacques Poitras, CBC photo

The chronology of the Holt government’s decisions on this file is dizzying: 

On Feb. 17, the Board of Governors of St Thomas U. (STU) announced that Sandra Irving had been chosen as the university’s next Chancellor. At that time Mrs. Irving praised the faculty, staff, and alumni for putting “students first and have a close-knit and successful learning environment.” She is to be installed on May 20.

On Feb. 18, the provincial government presented a document to the province’s university presidents and CEO’s of Community Colleges, including the president of STU and the University of New Brunswick (UNB), about a merger of STU into UNB. The document asked for ideas to be presented to cabinet “this week.”

Post Secondary Education Minister Jean Claude D’Amour told reporters Feb. 23: “The discussion was a discussion.” Why, we might ask, was the government floating something with no plan for implementation? D’Amour said the document in question was authored by his Deputy Minister, Dan Mills. “I realize the timeline is very short,” Mills wrote in his one-page document.

​On Feb.24 STU student Max Green learned on his cell phone late at night that his university
​was going to be “merged” with UNB.
​
Camila Baquerizo Bayona, the STU student union’s VP for education commented: “It’s completely crazy the way they thought about cutting post-secondary education without talking to a student…it would also imply that a lot of staff members and faculty that we appreciate would be gone.

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​On Feb. 26, Premier Holt said “STU won’t merge with UNB.” That day, STU President, Dr. Nauman Farooqi said he had “direct confirmation from the Premier that the government has “no plans to merge or close STU.

In less than 10 days the government had put a major policy proposal on the table and taken it off.
 

The above is not the only time that Premier Holt has leaped to a conclusion without a cabinet, caucus, or legislature debate on a proposal.
 
It was reported in the Telegraph-Journal on March 25 that the Premier and officials have met with a company planning to build Canada’s largest explosives factory since World War II.

It would involve a new Canadian company Nalagx which partnered last November with Eurenco of France, said to be Europe’s top producer of propellants and explosives “to build an industrial campus in Canada, including the construction of energy materials plants.”
 
New Brunswick is no stranger to military installations, having been the home of the Cape Gagetown military training base since the 1950’s.
 
The province has also seen metal de-fabrication plants such as the American Iron and Metal plant in Saint John which caused a massive fire in 2023 and heavy pollution of the west side of the city.

These are nice sounding words. But it is a fair question whether these are defensive armaments and if not, which of the current wars in the world, the Russia-Ukraine war or the more recent U.S.-Israel-Iran one would use them?

This proposal has a nice round figure of US$1 billion with another round figure of five hundred direct jobs attached to it. It is enough to catch the attention of any political leader.

Does anyone in the current provincial government remember the name Bricklin?

Another project that has glittered with hefty prospects recently, the Sisson Mine project in the Nashwaak River Valley which would employ 200 to 300 people for a mine life of 27 years.
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This was also touted as one of the federal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney as a project of National Importance, so the Holt government was not alone in pushing Sisson. These are all very large projects, not resolved quickly.

Yes, Sisson sounds like of jobs and wages for a small province like New Brunswick.

But the mine tailings from that project would require storage under water for generations. In this space earlier in March, an expert on treatment of mine tailings, Mike Sprague, would have warned: “all that glitters is not gold.”
 
Some economists and journalists have warned about the record spending in this week’s provincial budget. It is said that this will add about $6billion provincial debt by the time of the next likely election in 2028.

But in defense of Premier Holt and her government, the social side of the equation, not to mention the state of rural roads, had been hugely neglected under the tight-fisted former Premier, Blaine Higgs.
 
In the last campaign in the fall of 2024, Holt put great emphasis on the province’s near-starving health care system. Along with her health minister John Dornan, Holt has been touring the province and unveiling their promised network of collaborative care clinics. In under-serviced areas such as Charlotte County, where too many do not even have a family doctor, these announcements have been very well received.
 
Better pay for health care professionals was also needed for the system.
 
When a road past one’s rural home gets a paving, not just another patch job, that too is very popular.
 
That leaves us with the problem of the Premier tilting at windmills and carrying out reforms and projects without sufficient planning and study.

The experience of two other Liberal Premiers Frank McKenna and Louis Robichaud has important lessons for Premier Holt.

McKenna had a very strong “kitchen cabinet” notably including Fernand Landry and John Bryden, who also became well known along with the Premier even though they never held elected office. They provided damn good and selfless advice. Like any Premier, Susan Holt has high-profile cabinet ministers, but by and large, she seems to be flying solo. Too much so.
 
The other great Premier, and in my view the greatest ever, was Louis J. Robichaud, who undertook one great reform, Equal Opportunity (E0), which redistributed power and wealth in the province like no other. He devoted immense personal capital and almost his entire decade in power in the 1960’s to bringing in fundamental social fairness to the province, over the objections of New Brunswick’s strongest industrialist, K.C. Irving, and the ruthless campaigning against EO of the Fredericton Daily Gleaner which he owned.
 
Premier Holt, great reforms, require great study and planning and they require a number of years, more than one term to achieve. Go for it!​