Blaine Higgs speaking to party faithful after his party earned a majority government Monday night.
Blaine Higgs’ Progressive Conservative party will form a majority government when legislature resumes.
The PCs earned 27 seats, two more than they needed to clinch the majority, according to Elections NB’s unofficial count on Monday night.
After the votes were counted, the Premier-Elect said it is important for New Brunswick to take advantage of its current momentum.
“Investors are going to look at us now,” Higgs said. “It is going to have a game-changing opportunity for people to look at us.”
According to Monday night’s Elections NB results, Higgs earned 68 per cent of the vote in his Quispamsis riding, up 11 per cent from 2018.
Now, he’ll have the governmental stability he asked the province to grant him when he called the snap election in mid-August.
The Premier-Elect said Monday he will put his cabinet together over the next few weeks. Though he wouldn’t commit to gender parity within the cabinet, he did tout his party’s record number of nine elected women MLAs.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “It says a lot about the role strong women play in the future of governance of our province.”
While the Tories cruised to victories in the major cities and southern New Brunswick, they were mostly shut out in northern Acadien regions.
Higgs says there are parties up north that would vote Liberal no matter who the Tories entered into the race.
“You could run a lampshade and you’d get a Liberal candidate,” the Premier-Elect said. “That has to change. We want all voices heard.”
One knock against Higgs’ campaign this summer was his scrapped plan to close emergency rooms in rural hospitals overnight.
The Premier-Elect said that the controversy was never about closing emergency rooms.
“The issue was, how do we provide the services in our health system for the demographic we have?” Higgs asked. “We know we can’t hire enough professionals to meet our needs so we have to find innovative ways.”
The Progressive Conservatives now have four years to answer that question, and the many others that will face the province throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
