Conservative Richard Bragdon won the riding of Tobique-Mactaquac on Monday night. (Facebook)
A newly elected New Brunswick Conservative is hoping to make rural issues a higher priority in Ottawa.
Richard Bragdon flipped the riding of Tobique-Mactaquac for the Conservatives in the federal election Monday night after it went Liberal for a single term.
Liberal T.J. Harvey won the riding in 2015 against Bragdon but did not seek re-election. "You could sense there was a real appetite for change," Bragdon said Tuesday, the day after Conservatives improved their showing in New Brunswick but could only pull off a second-place finish in the country as a whole.
As he knocked on thousands of doors, the real estate agent said, he noticed a "disconnect" between decisions being made in Ottawa and people living in rural New Brunswick.
People on Parliament Hill aren't even hearing the concerns of people in rural areas, he said.
Richard Bragdon became the member of parliament in the riding of Tobique-Mactaquac, with 50.4% of the vote. He says one big issue he heard at the door was the challenge of affordability for seniors. 8:34
"I think that rural-urban divide, some of those issues and challenges kept coming up at the door." Bragdon wants the rest of Canada to understand the role small towns play in the agriculture and resource sectors, developing, producing and shipping "the nation's goods."
"Yet our region still gets overlooked," he said. "I think they're looking for a strong voice on their behalf."
In his riding, he encountered a lot of concern about the rising cost of living.
"The prices of everything kept going up. And yet, their incomes weren't going up at the same rate to be able to keep pace."
Richard Bragdon
Thank you to the people of Tobique-Mactaquac for your support. We will have to see what we are looking at for a government but i am so thankful for my family and my team. Thank you.
Seniors need to be able to stay in their own homes as long as possible, he said, but rising heating costs and the carbon tax Ottawa imposed on New Brunswick are prohibiting that.
"They feel like, 'Wow, we've got less and less money left over at the end of every month," he said. "That challenge is very real."
"The Conservatives took back three of the New Brunswick ridings they lost lost four years ago.
The members from these ridings will be sitting in opposition, but Bragdon said he plans to work with other party members to meet the needs of his constituents.
Elizabeth Fraser is a reporter/editor with CBC New Brunswick based in Fredericton. She's originally from Manitoba. Story tip? elizabeth.fraser@cbc.ca
With files from Information Morning Fredericton
2 Comments Commenting is now closed for this story.
David Raymond Amos Content disabled by me this time (Sometimes less is more) Methinks Bragdon's victory was no surprise to anyone any more than my loss to Rob Moore in Fundy Royal. Williamson's win in New Brunswick Southwest and of course Jacky Boy Harris' on the Rock were nobrainers as well. However although there were a lot of interesting close contests for a seat in the next circus I bet I was was not alone in being very surprised that the Conservatives did not win back a lot more seats throughout the Maritimes. Clearly most Maritimers do not trust Bragdon's Yankee boss whom I call Harper 2.0 N'esy Pas? Fred Sanford Congratulations Richard!
Daniel Rawlins Their first term in office MPs try to act in the best interests of those who elected them but after four years most come to simply accept the party line and do the bidding of the 'Party Whip' who's sole job is to keep MPs in step with the party line. I hope Bragdon's ideals are still in tact at the end of his first four years which would make him the exception rather than the rule...
Even though you have ignored me for way past too long I gave you the benefit of my doubts about your integrity and called you again When your assistant had no time for me I had even less time to suggest that your people Google your name and mine then answer my next email ASAP EH?
David Raymond Amos@DavidRayAmos Replying to @DavidRayAmos@FloryGoncalves and 49 others Methinks Rogers TV is as unethical as CBC. I posted a comment in their "Breakfast News" while Trudeau is in Fat Fred City and Moncton today and it went "POOF" Just like CBC they support the liberals N'esy Pas?
Tim Thompson is the Green Party candidate, Alaina Lockhart is running for the Liberals, Rob Moore is the Conservative candidate, James Tolan is running for the New Democratic Party, and Rudy Neumayer is running for the People's Party of Canada.
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Trudeau plays defence in Maritimes, Scheer fights for seats in Quebec
THE CANADIAN PRESS | posted Tuesday, Oct 15th, 2019
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is barnstorming New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on Tuesday, while his Conservative rival Andrew Scheer does the same in Quebec.
The difference is that Trudeau is spending his time in ridings the Liberal party is hoping to keep in the federal election on Oct. 21, and Scheer is hitting areas the Conservatives are hoping to pick up. Trudeau’s Liberals won all the seats in Atlantic Canada in 2015, so any campaigning he does there is defensive.
He’s in Fredericton and Riverview, N.B., before moving on to Cumberland-Colchester, Masstown, New Glasgow and Halifax, N.S., where he’ll end the day with a rally.
Scheer’s day begins in Quebec City, where he’ll lay out another element of his plan for his first 100 days in office if the Conservatives form a government, and then he’ll visit Trois-Rivieres and the Montreal suburb of La Prairie — two seats held by Liberals and one by a New Democrat.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, whose party has been on the rise in recent polls, is campaigning in Toronto, and the Green party’s Elizabeth May is talking about the Greens’ tax plans in Kamloops, B.C.
The first in a series of three Election Campaign Political Panels focused on the ridings of Fredericton, Tobique-Mactaquac and New Brunswick Southwest. On the panel, the incumbent, Liberal party candidate Karen Ludwig, John Williamson, the Conservative Party Candidate, the Green Party Candidate Susan Jonah and the People's Party candidate Meryl Sarty.
Dr. Chris Goodyear, the society's president, says the clinic provides a valuable service to women and the LGBTQ community and deserves full government support.
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Oversees all initiatives of the NBMS and its affiliated organizations and partnerships. Anthony KnightChief Executive Officer (506) 462-4670 aknight@nbms.nb.ca
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---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Amos To: rbragdon76@yahoo.ca, kelseytm2019@gmail.com, "Gerald.Butts", "Ian.Shugart", "Kevin.leahy", "tim.thompson@greenparty.ca", "rudolf_neumayer@yahoo.ca", "robmoorefundy@gmail.com", "alaina@alainalockhart.ca", "James.Tolan@ndp.ca", "johnevans.nca@gmail.com" Cc: motomaniac333 , sturgeon.nathalie@brunswicknews.com, Newsroom , "David.Akin", "Jacques.Poitras", "steve.murphy" Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:09:33 -0300 Subject: Hey Richard Bragdon I just called and left a voicemail you should remember this email I must say It was an interesting live streams on Rogers TV last night Trust that I called the lawyer Jodie van Dieen at 613-957-5726 and she played dumb just like every bureaucrat does particularly after my debate in Sussex and the email from Paul Shuttle of the PCO office Nesy Pas Mr Biutts?
Miramichi-Grand Lake Candidates Debate - October 9, 2019 471 views •Streamed live 17 hours ago
Rogers tv 28.5K subscri
A Mackenzie
You can bet thin Canadain dimes to Fat Yankee Petro dollars that I caled evey one of the people below and tried ttalk about my lawsuit in Federal Court
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Shuttle, Paul"<Paul.Shuttle@pco-bcp.gc.ca> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2019 12:26:21 +0000 Subject: Automatic reply: Methinks it was interesting that CBC shut down the comment section about Moore, Williamson and Weston just before our debate last night but Rogers TV recorded it N'esy Pas? To: David Amos <david.raymond.amos333@gmail.com>
Please note that I am no longer at PCO. For immediate assistance, please contact Ms. Jodie van Dieen at 613-957-5726 or Ms. Guylaine Létourneau at 613-957-5252.
Veuillez noter que je suis plus au BCP. Pour une assistance immédiate, veuillez contacter Mme Jodie van Dieen au 613-957-5726 ou Mme Guylaine Létourneau au 613-957-5252.
The second in our series of three election campaign political panels, we sit down with the candidates for the riding of Tobique-Mactaquac. The candidates are, for the Liberal party Kelsey MacDonald, for the Conservative party Richard Bragdon, for the Green party Rowan Miller, and for the People's party Dominic Guay.
---------- Original message ---------- From: Jody.Wilson-Raybould@parl.gc.ca Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2019 01:09:33 +0000 Subject: Automatic reply: RE Federal Court File No T-1557-15 and my many calls and emails about my concerns about the lack of Integrity of the ----- Message truncated -----
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In New Brunswick, being leader of the struggling NDP is a fourth job for 22-year-old
What happened with the defection of 14 prominent members on Tuesday wasn’t much of an aberration; it was the acceleration of a long trend in the province
Mackenzie Thomason, the 22-year-old paperboy who is the interim leader of the New Brunswick NDP.Facebook
Before he goes to bed, six nights a week, between 5 and 7 p.m., Mackenzie Thomason sets two alarm clocks in the bedroom of his small apartment in uptown Fredericton. The first, the conventional, old-fashioned kind, goes off with a standard, grating beep at 12:55 a.m. The second, on his iPhone, starts chiming five minutes later. Thomason, who turned 22 at the end of July and lives alone, is terrified of oversleeping. He’s terrified of missing work, of showing up late, of not getting everything done.
By 2:30 a.m., every Monday through Saturday, Thomason is usually sitting in the driver’s seat of his silver Ford Escape at the yard outside the old Daily Gleaner building on Prospect Street. Depending on the day, he’ll pick up somewhere between 250 and 350 newspapers there. He’ll spend the next four hours driving out to New Maryland and back, dropping papers on doorsteps and in mailboxes before continuing on to one of his three other jobs.
Thomason has bright, rosy cheeks. In pictures, he’s always smiling. He looks even younger than he actually is. Still, it’s rare he gets recognized when he’s out delivering. Part of that is the hour. Not many customers are awake before 6 a.m. But part of it is the incongruity of it all, too. People see what they expect to see. And few expect to see the interim leader of the New Brunswick NDP tossing their Telegraph-Journal across the grass several hours before dawn.
On Tuesday, 14 prominent members of the NDP in New Brunswick publicly abandoned the party to join the federal Greens. Nationally, the story was played as a sign of federal leader Jagmeet Singh’s organizational weakness in the Maritimes. And it was that, to an extent. But the New Brunswick NDP has its own peculiar history and flaws, too. Organizers, ex-candidates, and even one former leader have been fleeing the party for years. So what happened Tuesday wasn’t much of an aberration; it was the acceleration of a long trend, one that helps explain how a 22-year-old newspaper delivery man ended up running the party in his spare time.
“What we’re seeing right now is the party coming apart at the seams,” said Mario Levesque, an associate professor of political science at Mount Allison University. “They can’t get along right now.”
New Brunswick, more so than almost any other province, has always been a two-party state. “There’s not a lot of folks in New Brunswick who are genetic New Democrats the way you get Liberals and Tories who pass on party affiliation between generations,” said Dominic Cardy, who led the provincial NDP from 2011 to 2017.
For years, the NDP had one provincial seat in New Brunswick — under popular former leader Elizabeth Weir. Since her retirement from politics, in 2005, the party has had none at all.
In the post-Weir era, the NDP has seesawed from far-left activism to pragmatic centrism and back again, said Levesque. Cardy, an avowed centrist, steered the party toward the middle in the 2014 campaign. He brought the NDP’s share of the popular vote up to 13% — an all-time high — but failed to win a single seat. Afterward, party organizers pushed him out.
Cardy said union activists in the party refused to recognize a core reality of the province: most New Brunswickers are politically in the middle. He said the division in the party boiled down to those, like himself, who believed Canadian society and government were strong and could be improved and those “who kept on looking for the revolution: ‘What’s the next big thing we can fight about to say everything is terrible.’”
When Cardy realized he was never going to win that fight, he left the party. He’s now the education minister in a provincial Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Blaine Higgs.
Mackenzie Thomason with then New Brunswick NDP leader Jennifer McKenzie during the 2019 provincial election.Facebook
Cardy sees parallels between the struggles of the NDP in New Brunswick — and of the weakness of the federal party — and the decline of social democratic parties around the world. Frank Graves, the president of Ekos Research, a public opinion firm, agrees. Self-identified working-class voters and voters without university degrees, he said, once the base of pro-union parties, now overwhelmingly identify as conservatives. Without them, pro-union parties have no natural constituency any more.
Green parties, meanwhile, have moved in to siphon off environment-first voters. In 2018, New Brunswick’s two-party dominance began to show cracks for the first time. But the NDP was again left out in the cold. Under leader Jennifer McKenzie, the party failed to win any seats and fell to just 5% of the popular vote. The Greens and the populist People’s Alliance won three seats each.
McKenzie, like Cardy before her, was pushed out. At a meeting of the party’s provincial council in March, Thomason, a New Brunswick native who spent his teens in Fort McMurray, Alta., put his name forward as interim leader. He won, he said, by a vote of nine to four, with two abstentions. The party tried to elect a permanent leader this summer, but the only candidate failed the vetting process. Thomason said they hope to try again, with more candidates, next year. When he first spoke to the National Post two weeks ago, Thomason was already working two jobs in addition to his duties with the NDP. After he finished his paper route, he usually delivered packages for several hours before driving into the party office, where he’d work from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Since then, though, he’s picked up another gig.
Thomason called in Thursday from his fourth job, selling furniture at Leon’s four days a week. “I’m still getting up at 1 o’clock in the morning, still going to bed between five and seven o’clock in the evening,” he said. “Personal time? Not a whole bunch,” he continued. “But I really enjoy working… I don’t feel like a need a whole bunch of free time.”
Thomason said he wished the 14 members who left his party Tuesday well. “They’re amazing people, and I do hope they find themselves in a positive spot,” he said. Levesque, the political scientist, said the NDP’s only path to relevance in New Brunswick was to compete for the centre. But Thomason disagrees. The Greens, he believe, have already staked out the centre-left. “I would like us to occupy the left.”
“In the past we’ve had policies and platforms that kind of got lost in the shuffle,” he said. “But going forward we’re going to make sure we’re different from everybody else.”
Mackenzie Thomason, the 22-year-old paperboy who is the interim leader of the New Brunswick NDP.