N.B. Liberals, Greens would ban out-of-province party fundraising
PCs say Susan Holt’s Liberals have more money from outside New Brunswick than they did
The leaders of the Liberal and Green parties are both promising to ban out-of-province donations to New Brunswick political parties.
Susan Holt and David Coon made the commitment in response to a Progressive Conservative Party fundraising trip this week by Premier Blaine Higgs to British Columbia and Alberta.
Most provinces don't allow political parties to raise money from non-residents.
"Yeah, we'd get rid of it. It's only common sense," Coon said.
Holt said the practice is "uncomfortable and distasteful" and she would figure out how to outlaw it if she wins this year's election — a new position she adopted after first telling the newspaper L'Acadie Nouvelle a day earlier that she couldn't commit to a ban.
She said Thursday she has since heard from many party members and New Brunswickers who want the practice eliminated.
PC
campaign manager Steve Outhouse posted a photo on social media Tuesday
showing N.B. Premier Blaine Higgs speaking to a crowd of people in a
large room in Abbotsford, B.C. (Steve Outhouse/X)
Holt's switch also came as Progressive Conservatives accused the Liberals and others of criticizing something that Holt and her party had engaged in.
"The online outrage appears to be about stopping Conservative fundraising, rather than standing up for any actual principle," PC campaign manager Steve Outhouse said in a social media post.
Premier Blaine Higgs attended events in Abbotsford, B.C., and Calgary this week. There were no tickets sold, but the party suggested invitees make donations.
Progressive Conservatives pointed out Thursday that out-of-province donations to the Liberals in 2022 — the last full year for which figures are available — were a larger share of net contributions than they were for the PCs.
According to public records, Holt also raised almost six times as much money from outside New Brunswick for her 2022 Liberal leadership campaign as Higgs did for his 2016 PC bid.
Higgs
has another fundraiser scheduled for Toronto next month, a
$1,000-per-ticket dinner and reception at the city's Albany Club. (Ed Hunter/CBC)
Public records show Holt collected $15,918.54 in out-of-province donations of $100 or more when she ran for the leadership, compared to just $2,700 collected by Higgs.
Donors who give less than $100 aren't identified on financial returns filed with Elections New Brunswick.
But out-of-province donations of $100 or more represented 15.9 per cent of Holt's and 5.2 per cent of Higgs's.
When Higgs ran for the PC leadership, donations from corporations were still allowed.
His only out-of-province corporate donation was $2,000 from the Toronto Dominion Bank.
Even with that included, Holt still collected more out-of-province money than Higgs.
Holt's donors included one from outside Canada: Tim Coates, a former Fredericton entrepreneur now working for a technology company in the New York City area.
The Liberal leader said Thursday that Coates was a personal acquaintance that she once babysat and later worked with, and that other out-of-province donors included a sibling and a cousin.
According
to public records, Liberal Leader Susan Holt raised almost six times as
much money from outside New Brunswick for her 2022 Liberal leadership
campaign as Higgs did for his 2016 PC bid. (CBC)
The list also included John Bragg, president of Nova Scotia-based Oxford Frozen Foods, who gave Holt $1,000, and businessman Scott McCain, a Toronto resident and chairman of New Brunswick-based McCain Foods Ltd.
He gave $3,000 to Holt, the maximum allowable. He gave $1,500 to Higgs's leadership campaign in 2016.
His mother Margaret McCain, who lives in Toronto, also donated $3,000 to Holt's campaign.
Holt said there is a difference between "passively" receiving donations and actively leaving the province to ask for them, but she would look at how to outlaw both.
"In general, I think going out of province and engaging with interest groups to fill your political coffers is uncomfortable and distasteful," she said.
"It begs the question: Who is buying influence in New Brunswick decision-making and why is it not New Brunswickers?"
Coon said the existing law is likely aimed at allowing people originally from New Brunswick to contribute.
He added that it will be unfair to smaller parties if the two big mainstream parties take advantage of it to use their resources to travel the country holding events.
A ban is the best way to "create a level playing field and ensure that no party is going to go off and try to raise huge amounts of money from elsewhere in Canada," he said.
"Not that that's happened yet, but certainly the premier's forays into Alberta and British Columbia and his plans in Toronto suggest that's a concerted effort this year."
A
ban is the best way to 'create a level playing field and ensure that no
party is going to go off and try to raise huge amounts of money from
elsewhere in Canada,' says Green Leader David Coon. (Jacques Poitras/CBC)
Higgs has another fundraiser scheduled for Toronto next month, a $1,000-per-ticket dinner and reception at the city's Albany Club.
The PC party began promoting Higgs to Conservatives across Canada last fall, creating a "Help Higgs Win" website that promoted his policy positions and described this year's New Brunswick election as a campaign of national importance.
In 2016, the PCs, in opposition at the time, complained about then-Liberal Premier Brian Gallant holding fundraisers in Vancouver and Calgary.
The criticism was because Gallant held the events during trips to the two cities on government business and at taxpayers' expense.
The PC Party paid for Higgs's travel to British Columbia and Alberta this week.
"We will continue to abide by all rules," Outhouse said in a post on the social media site X.
In 2016 the New Brunswick Liberals held a fundraiser in Fredericton that featured Gallant, two other Atlantic Liberal premiers and several federal Liberal cabinet ministers visiting the city for government meetings.
"If we want to give access to business stakeholders and whatnot to advance their projects, their causes, hey, rightfully so," then-cabinet minister Donald Arseneault said at the time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Why is it I am not surprised?
Actually their main hiring hall is The RCMP retirement Association .There they are contracted out to provincial and federal dept. That is if you mean the xrcmp officers .
How many times were you successful ? not trying to be nasty but I think we know that money can make a big difference
Actually their main hiring hall is The RCMP retirement Association .There they are contracted out to provincial and federal dept. That is if you mean the xrcmp officers .
I did my own research, and found essentially the same as posted by MR Cain.
macleans
McKenna Re-elected
Article by John Demont
Published Online March 17, 2003
This article was originally published in Maclean's Magazine on September 25, 1995
McKenna Re-elected
It was 11:30 on the morning after the New Brunswick Liberal party's third consecutive election landslide, but Frank McKenna was still celebrating - his way. Operating on just 4½ hours of sleep, he had followed his usual morning ritual: after waking at six a.m., he took a 20-minute walk along the Saint John River and was eating breakfast at his desk at the New Brunswick legislature in Fredericton by seven. Since then, he had done media interviews, discussed new business opportunities with aides, and dug into the foot-deep stack of files on his desk. Finally, though, the chunky, tightly wound elder statesman of Canadian premiers felt like indulging himself a bit. And as the smoke from one of his beloved Monte Cristo Cuban cigars encircled the red balloons and streamers hanging from the office ceiling, McKenna cracked a weary smile. "I am euphoric," he said. "I feel at peace."
Well he might. At a time when public cynicism about politicians remains formidable, McKenna's restraint-minded, eight-year-old government managed the improbable - not only winning its third straight mandate but increasing its standing in the legislature by capturing 47 of 55 seats, compared with 46 in the 1991 provincial election. McKenna said he feels personally vindicated by wiping out the anti-bilingualism Confederation of Regions Party - reviled throughout francophone New Brunswick - which won eight seats in 1991 and formed the official Opposition. That privilege now falls to the Conservative party, which elected six members - including leader Bernard Valcourt - while New Democratic Party leader Elizabeth Weir will continue to hold her party's only seat in the legislature.
But the real drama will likely take place on the government benches: McKenna has repeatedly said that after a decade in office he will begin thinking about how to make the transition back to private life. In fact, the subtle jockeying for recognition among some of his key cabinet ministers was already under way last week in anticipation of McKenna's eventual departure from the premier's chair. "The preparation time could be long or medium term," the 48-year-old premier told Maclean's last week. "But the ultimate act of leadership is preparing for succession." And as the 30-day provincial election campaign amply demonstrated, McKenna seldom leaves much to chance.
Called in the dog days of summer, the campaign was the shortest in New Brunswick's history - and certainly one of the least suspenseful. The Liberals entered the race with a 30-point lead in the public opinion polls, and ended up with 51.3 per cent of the popular vote, compared with 31 per cent for the Tories, 9.8 per cent for the NDP and 7.2 per cent for COR. "Everything went according to plan," said John Bryden, the New Brunswick Senator who ran the Liberal campaign. "We saw no reason to change anything about our strategy."
That meant no extravagant campaign promises and little mixing it up in the trenches with the opposition. The Liberals simply ignored their outgunned opponents and stuck to their basic message: vote Grit because Frank McKenna is a superb leader and because the government has proved that it can deliver jobs.
The opposition parties, on the other hand, just never found their footing. The NDP seemed preoccupied with getting Weir re-elected. And COR never recovered from a series of embarrassing internal squabbles, which at one point saw three people claim the party leadership within a matter of days.
The Tories clearly gained from the collapse of COR's support. But the party's campaign, which challenged McKenna's record as premier, suffered from underfunding and poor management - and the fact that Valcourt, a feisty francophone lawyer from Edmunston who held federal cabinet posts under Brian Mulroney, failed to stir support in anglophone New Brunswick, where his party won only two seats. All the same, the election may have signalled a rebirth of sorts for the Tories, who enjoyed their best showing since Richard Hatfield's scandal-plagued government lost all 58 seats to McKenna in 1987. It may also bode well for their federal counterparts, who managed to win only one of the 31 seats in Atlantic Canada in the 1993 federal election. "We have a new beachhead in New Brunswick," declared federal Tory leader Jean Charest.
Perhaps. But for the time being, it was hard to dispute McKenna's contention last week that his party's victory represented an "overwhelmingly, absolute mandate." New Brunswickers, therefore, can expect more of the tough restraint measures that they have grown accustomed to during the past four years, which included closing 250 hospital beds and slashing about 2,400 public service jobs. At the same time, McKenna promises to be at his aggressive best in convincing new businesses to set up shop in New Brunswick - a fact underlined by an ad that appeared in Toronto newspapers three days after the election, featuring a big picture of a smiling McKenna urging business executives to "give me a call" on his 1-800-McKENNA hotline.
How much longer will he answer the call? McKenna has recently taken pains to deny an earlier pledge that he would leave provincial politics by 1997, his 10th anniversary as Liberal leader. But even at Liberal victory parties last week, speculation persisted that he will not lead the party into the next provincial election, choosing instead to enter the business world or federal politics, where he is viewed by some party activists as a potential successor to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. As one insider put it, "After this, Frank's problem is, what can you do for an encore?"
Either way, his legacy will be considerable - innovative social programs, a vastly improved fiscal situation that this February saw his government produce its first balanced budge, and a new sense of pride among New Brunswickers. But it is on the economic front that McKenna ultimately wants to be judged. Towards the end of the election campaign, the Royal Bank of Canada predicted that New Brunswick's would be the second-strongest provincial economy in 1995-1996. And throughout the contest, the Liberals maintained that 20,000 more New Brunswickers were working now than in 1991. (The Tories claimed that the government actually created only 5,000 jobs during their last mandate.)
After the 1991 vote, McKenna says that he felt a lot of inner turmoil - ecstatic about his party's impressive victory but shaken by the emergence of COR and the defeat of a number of party stalwarts. Last week, he showed no hint of anguish standing on a stage at the victory party, dancing stiffly but enthusiastically next to his wife Julie - to whom he made the original pledge not to make a career out of politics - and daughter, Tina, a student at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S. Finally escaping the crowds, they headed back to the couple's white clapboard Fredericton home where McKenna called his son Jamie, a university student in Montreal and fellow political junkie, to provide a riding-by-riding breakdown of the results. Then, the premier-elect settled into an easy chair, grabbed the remote control and channel surfed until 2:30 a.m. "I missed a lot of sports scores throughout the campaign," he later explained. "I wanted to catch up."
Back in his office the next day, McKenna was still mulling over the implications of his victory. "Winning this kind of mandate means that you can't be complacent for a second," he said. "It is exhilarating but draining. I feel a huge sense of responsibility." But for all of the fretting, even McKenna - who runs every campaign as if trailing the pack - couldn't disguise the sweetness of the moment. And as he enjoyed his fragrant Monte Cristo, he looked truly serene.
Maclean's September 25, 1995
Methinks Higgy is taking somebody's advice N'esy Pas?
''In fact, the subtle jockeying for recognition among some of his key cabinet ministers was already under way last week in anticipation of McKenna's eventual departure from the premier's chair. "The preparation time could be long or medium term," the 48-year-old premier told Maclean's last week. "