The Higgs Years: Leading and Dividing New Brunswick (review)

I didn’t know “The Higgs Years” would be a polisci textbook!

Coming from my background as a historian, a resident of New Brunswick since 2019, a former public servant with Service New Brunswick, and an elected official myself some years ago, I was eager to read this when I first saw the title, The Higgs Years.

I turned out to be mistaken by relying solely on the title, though. I wasn’t sure exactly how the book would approach the Higgs years, but I had no idea this was a political science textbook, with all the advantages (for political science students) and disadvantages (for general readers) inherent in that.

Blaine Higgs was Premier of New Brunswick from 2018 to 2024 and left behind what we could best describe as a mixed legacy. As is always the case with political leaders, how successful he was depends on whom you ask - it’s very difficult to render an objective assessment.

But Professor Gabriel Arsenault of the Univeristé de Moncton, an established academic, thought he’d try anyway. For this book, he assembled a stable of academics across various public policy fields and asked them to assess the Higgs government’s success or failure in their respective areas of expertise.

Can the Higgs government be adjudged by using a “polimeter”?

How does he attempt to do so objectively? By referring to the “Polimeter,” which is essentially a tabulator of promises a party keeps when it achieves power, relative to promises it has made during the election campaign(s) beforehand. I’m oversimplifying, but not by much.

As both a former chief elected official and a manager for some high-level political campaigns, I can’t count the number of reasons this approach is faulty, but chief among these is that it makes incorrect assumptions about what motivates voters.

Therefore, to assert that we should be concerned about New Brunswick’s democracy on the basis of the promises made/kept metric is tenuous at best. However, from the general reader’s point of view, the worst of it is that this type of analysis adds very little to our understanding of how the Higgs government operated during its six years in power.

Some essays interesting, some not so much

That’s not to say that the reader will find all 15 essays uninteresting – far from it, because they really do cover most aspects of governance, including Higgs’s centralizing style and fiscal philosophy, official languages, local government, Indigenous reconciliation, and many more.

I was particularly drawn to the essays discussing Blaine Higgs’s political journey (Chapter 4: “The Erosion of the Official Languages Compromise”) and what made him tick ideologically (Chapter 9: “Rental Market Housing Policy”). General readers would undoubtedly find any topic that offers insight into a leader’s thinking compelling.

But that doesn’t mean the reader will find every essay interesting or even readable. Some get so bogged down in granular numerical analysis (Chapter 10 – “The Political Economy of Cannabis Retail” and Chapter 11 “Representing Women,” for example) that the non-poli-sci nerds among us will weep, with the editor’s own introduction among the most plodding of these.

At that initial point, I already knew the book was something other than what I was expecting. And the fact that it lacks a concluding chapter to pull it all together underscores that it is a collection of essays that the frayed twine of the “polimeter” holds together rather than the telling of a cohesive story about the Higgs government that all New Brunswickers really should hear.

“The Higgs Years”: an opinion on readability and value for the price

Further to readability, the book includes both in-text citations and endnotes at the end of each chapter. The in-text citations detract substantially from what is already often a choppy read – placing both the citations and the endnotes into footnotes at the bottom of each page would make for a much better presentation.

The book could also use another proofreading. Chapter 7 uses British instead of Canadian spelling; Chapter 6 uses the cringe-worthy grammatical flop “having drank”; p. 149 includes “is” instead of “it”; and p. 232 uses “role” instead of “roll”.

Overall, the book is undoubtedly useful for a student of political science, but far less so for the general reader, particularly at $32.76 for the hardcover and a ridiculously overpriced $31.96 for the Kindle edition. If you choose to buy it, be well advised of what you’re getting. It may be about the Higgs government years, but it’s not an easy read.