On October 21, the Susan Holt Liberals shocked political observers by easily washing out the ruling PC government of Premier Blaine Higgs, in what everyone believed would be a neck-in-neck race.

Not only did the Liberal Party of New Brunswick win a strong majority, capturing 31 seats to the PC’s 16, but in a stunning turn of events, PC Leader Blaine Higgs, who was arguably the most admired conservative Premier in Canada because of his budget-balancing prowess and bold leadership on parental rights, lost his seat. At the legislature’s dissolution, the PCs held 25 seats, the Liberals held 16, the Greens had 3, and there was one Independent.

Since the election, a column by the far-left Toronto Star insinuated that Higgs’ parental rights stance may’ve contributed to the PC’s devastating defeat. On election night, a CBC reporter suggested the same. Could it be true?

Let’s examine the facts.

Higgs sparked a popular parental rights revolution

In 2023, Premier Higgs made New Brunswick the first jurisdiction in Canada to implement a gender identity rule (Policy 713) requiring schools to obtain parental consent before transitioning minor-aged children via the use of opposite-sex names and pronouns.

After Higgs’ parental notification and consent policy for children under 16 was introduced, similar parental rights legislation was announced in Saskatchewan and then Alberta.

Countering the Toronto Star and CBC’s innuendo is evidence that Higgs’ gender identity policy was enormously popular with a majority of Canadians.

This was attested to by a 2023 Angus Reid poll which found that 78% supported a policy of parental notification and/or consent, including 67% in Atlantic Canada. See graph below.

Even as late into the election as September 17-19, about a month before election day, a Mainstream Research poll of New Brunswick voters found that Higgs’ parental consent policy had the support of a strong majority. When one removes “undecided” respondents, we find that nearly 60% supported the policy.

Had the polling company included “parental notification” as an option to choose from, and not just “consent” the support figure would likely have surpassed 80%.

So why did Higgs lose, barely 30 days later?

If he was running on a parental rights policy that was so popular, how can the loss possibly be explained?

The simple reason for the shocking PC defeat, was that healthcare was perceived to be more important than parental rights.

Rightly or wrongly, in the final weeks of the campaign, voters cast their ballots for the Liberals, primarily because they believed that Liberal leader Susan Holt would fix the shortage of family doctors, nurses and the excessive emergency room and treatment wait times. On the flip side, they were led to believe that Blaine Higgs could not fix it, or else, had 6 years and did nothing.

For the majority of voters, solving the healthcare crisis was the number one driving priority, and everything else, including the parental rights policy they agreed with, came a distant second. And Susan Holt, not Blaine Higgs, is who they put their trust in to fix the healthcare system.

Not coincidentally, solving the doctor and nurse shortage was Susan Holt’s primary message, especially in the waning days of the campaign. She made numerous promises, for example, a $10,000 nurse retention bonus in her first year as government for nurse practitioners who stay in New Brunswick. She drove home that health care message incessantly… and the strategy paid off.

Curiously, Holt avoided talking about the school gender identity issue and Higgs’ parental rights reforms throughout the campaign. She clearly recognized it as a vulnerability for Liberals, contrary to the revisionist narrative that the Toronto Star and CBC are now trying to plant.

Only once did she quietly announce that she’d follow the recommendations of the province’s Child & Youth Advocate to scrap the PC reforms, before she quickly moved on to health care again.

After his concession speech, even Premier Blaine Higgs admitted that healthcare, along with affordability, were what caused his party’s historic defeat.

In response to a CBC reporter asking whether his parental rights policy played a part in the PC loss, Higgs denied the charge, saying:

“Any polls were showing 70, 80 percent support. So it wasn’t because of that. It was that the issues of affordability, which you know, we can talk about how we got here with that, and the issues around healthcare - you know, we’ve put huge amounts of money in healthcare - but the challenges we face in healthcare became paramount in the election, which it has been in many elections around the country. So, that overrode anything else, and it really didn’t matter what else was happening.”

As a registered third-party advertiser during the election campaign, CLC noticed this significant shift in public sentiment ourselves, during the final stretch of the campaign, where anxiety about healthcare reached a fevered pitch.

Whatever the Liberal Party was doing at the doors or on social media to induce panic in the electorate over the state of healthcare, it definitely worked.

One New Brunswicker who commented in the message board of one of our parental rights-themed, Facebook election ads summed up the growing sentiment:

“Susan Holt is here for the people and put the money where it’s meant to go, not to hoard in a surplus while people are dying in emergency rooms!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asserting these claims are true. I’m simply pointing out this is what many voters were feeling, including many who preferred Higgs’ parental consent policy over Holt’s “kids-can-transition-without-parental-knowledge” stance.

In terms of steering voting intentions through fear and panic, we mustn’t ignore the assistance that the Liberal Party got from the biggest third-party advertiser in New Brunswick – the mainstream media. It spent day and night carrying Susan Holt’s message that she would save healthcare, while blaming Higgs for all the problems.

Of course, media outlets in New Brunswick don’t have to register as third-party advertisers and have no spending limits, so, combined, they probably gave Susan Holt millions of dollars worth of free advertising to frighten voters and influence the election result.

CLC’s postcard campaign saved the PCs from an even more devastating loss

Starting August 20, 2024 Campaign Life Coalition blanketed the province using Canada Post to distribute 615,000 postcards to New Brunswick households.

The postcards promoted Higgs’ parental rights policy for schools, and also warned voters that the Susan Holt Liberals promised to repeal it.

ABOVE: The first two postcards mailed out by CLC, starting Aug. 20th

The mass postcard mailing ended September 18th, the day before the writ was dropped. In a province of just 765,000 people, that’s a powerful campaign that gave our message tremendous reach, hitting almost everyone in the province. In fact, the postcards and their messaging were a main focus of news reports by New Brunswick media outlets, including Global News, CBC, Telegraph-Journal and others, thus amplifying our message to voters.

We know for a fact that our postcards arrested and reversed a growing Liberal lead over the PCs for the entire month that they were hitting voters’ homes throughout New Brunswick. A graph below makes that clear in numbers.

It shows that from September 2, 2023 the Liberals had been leading over the PCs, and that lead was widening. But all of a sudden, on August 27th, 2024, just seven days after we began flooding the province with postcards, the Liberals started sinking and the PCs began surging.

Until that August 27th inflection point, it had been a sleepy New Brunswick election. Nothing else occurred on the campaign trail which could explain the sudden dislike of the Susan Holt Liberals and the sudden favourability of the Higgs PCs. Only our postcards can explain that.

The postcards warned about the harms of transgender ideology in schools and that Susan Holt wanted kids to be transitioned without parents’ knowledge, while praising Blaine Higgs for protecting parents and children.

This shift in voting intentions continued until September 23rd, bringing the PCs to almost tie with the Liberals. As the graph illustrates, our postcard distribution ended on September 18, due to the fact that the election writ would be issued September 19th, and a “third party advertiser” spending limit was imposed on us, which meant we could no longer do huge mailouts through Canada Post.

So, five days after our postcard distribution ended and voters began to focus on other issues placed before them by the media, the Liberals began to surge again. That surge continued unabated until election day, giving the Liberals a sweep.

So, what this data proves beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that the PCs had long been on a trajectory to lose the election, and only the parental rights issue kept them in the game. Clearly, any suggestion that parental rights was a losing issue for the PCs, is simply wrong.

Residual benefit of parental rights likely saved some seats, kept races more competitive

We are convinced that had that issue not been part of their platform, and had CLC not conducted the massive postcard campaign, the PCs would have been hit with an even more crushing defeat, a lower vote total, and quite likely, the loss of more seats.

For example, PC MLA Glen Savoie in Saint John East, who won by a mere 34 votes, might be out of a job today had the PCs not locked in the parental rights vote.

Quite likely, Premier Higgs would have lost his personal seat in Quispamis by more than 193 votes.

Today, PC candidate Faytene Grassesschi in Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins can hold her head high because during a big Liberal wave, when longtime PC MLAs were crushed, she came close to winning, losing by only 224 votes. However, if she didn’t have Higgs’ parental notification and consent policy to attract voters who were concerned about indoctrination in schools, it might not have been so close.

Children were sacrificed

So, the truth is that while the vast majority of New Brunswickers agreed with Premier Higgs’ parental rights policy, voters sacrificed the province’s children on the altar of transgender ideology in exchange for the promise of doctors and nurses.

Some would argue it was a selfish choice made by older people at the expense of vulnerable youth, given that almost 2/3 of the young kids who will get steered into social transitioning by teachers will move on to take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, thanks to Holt’s inevitable repeal of the PCs parental consent policy.

And of those, a large percentage will end up doing sex-change surgeries to cut off perfectly healthy genitalia, breasts, and to remove their uteruses. The most authoritative study in the world, a Swedish cohort study, found that post-operative transsexuals experience a 19.2 times higher rate of death by suicide. No doubt, this is because they eventually come to regret the irreversible mutilation of their bodies. So, in a very real sense, a decision to elect Susan Holt, is a decision to potentially condemn many New Brunswick children to death by suicide, later in life.

One more reflection...

Ironically, the very same taxpayers who are angry about the cash-starved and collapsing healthcare system in New Brunswick will end up footing the bill for these unnecessary and harmful sex-change surgeries, up to $65,000 per operation, depending on the procedure. That doesn’t even include the cost to taxpayers of puberty blockers and hormones taken when they’re school age.

In closing

Pro-life and pro-family leaders in New Brunswick have their work cut out for them. However, with perseverance, prayer, and humble reliance on almighty God, we will prevail. Indeed, despite the election of an essentially godless Liberal government, thanks to Premier Higgs, the foundations have been laid down for a powerful revival of parental rights and family values in New Brunswick.

In closing, we wish to thank the many candidates who advocated for parental rights during this election cycle, and to Blaine Higgs for his service to New Brunswick... and to all Canadian parents!