Why a Liberal-Green 'coalition campaign' to beat Higgs is an unlikely fantasy

Listen carefully: the New Brunswick Liberals are nervous.

They're nervous that Green voters will deprive their party of a shot at beating Blaine Higgs's Progressive Conservatives in the provincial election this October.

You could hear it last weekend at the Liberal nominating convention for Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins candidate John Herron, who said he was attracting not only disgruntled PCs but "Green-inspired voters" to his campaign.

"We want to make sure that we deliver this seat, so [we are] bringing everyone together to have the broadest coalition possible," he said.

The Greens, of course, have a different take.

Herron's Green opponent, Laura Myers, says she's not running just to prevent a PC victory but to offer voters a real alternative to the old two-party system.

"You can't get what you want by voting for what you don't want," she said.

You could hear the same Liberal angst in a video by Pat Finnigan, the former federal Liberal MP forMiramichi-Grand Lake, explaining why some voters in Kent North are urging him to run provincially.

"Firstly, most people I talk to in the region, in the riding, want the Higgs government out," said Finnigan, who would be challenging incumbent Green MLA Kevin Arseneau.

An alternative plan

Kendall Harrison is pitching an alternative to this Liberal-Green jostling.

The self-described "data person" and keen follower of provincial politics who lives outside Fredericton says the two parties should run "a coalition campaign."

WATCH | 'A very fortunate seat.' A proposal to avoid vote splitting:

The pitch for a Liberal-Green coalition campaign

5 months ago

Duration 1:06

Politics watcher pleads for two parties to identify key ridings where they can co-operate to defeat PCs.

In January he wrote to Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Leader David Coon, pleading with them to consider an agreement to not run candidates against each other in key ridings to ensure the PCs lose.

He offered to broker the deal over coffee and oat cakes.

"I am asking the two of you as leader[s]to think more boldly than the false limits of party politics usually allow in our North American context," he wrote.

Harrison has crunched the numbers from the 2020 election. He identifies five ridings where a combined Liberal-Green vote would have prevented the PCs from electing MLAs.

That would have deprived Higgs of a majority and might have opened the door to a Liberal-Green arrangement to govern together.

The Liberals now lead in opinion polls, but because a lot of their support is clustered in northern francophone ridings, Harrison points out, they still may not win the most seats in our first-past-the-post system.

So he says the two parties must, through "honest discourse and debate," determine which ridings are the most winnable by which party so the other party can bow out.

Coon's response

The PCs won Saint John Harbour, for example, with 41.4 per cent of the vote in 2020. Combine the Green and Liberal vote and you get 46.1 per cent.

The Liberals and Greens could also agree, he says, to not run candidates against each other's leaders both of whom are running in newly redrawn ridings with PC voting histories.

Harrison says Coon responded to his letter, "saddened" that the proposal wasn't realistic, while Holt did not answer.

"I can see that there maybe are folks within a camp who are saying 'You know, we've been out of power for a while now and maybe it's our turn. We've waited a long time,'" Harrison says.

"And I just think that's the wrong paradigm."

Alex Marland, an Acadia University political scientist who studies political party behaviour, says Harrison's concept is "a flight of fantasy."

No party is likely to give up on the possibility, however remote, of winning a seat for itself, Marland says.

"If it causes you to lose the ability to elect people and to have influence in the legislature, you know, parties don't work that way."

In Hampton on the weekend, Herron argued the political resethe's calling for requires a Liberal majority.

"We're not going to get that by minority governments and the like," he said.

Myers says Herron is presenting a false binary, disproven by the presence of three Green MLAs in the legislature since 2018.

"People don't have to choose between 'I don't want this person so I guess I have to vote for this person,'" she says.

Harrison's proposal "in theory sounds like a good strategy but in practice I think it would be a very, very difficult thing to pull off," says Myers, who was nominated last October.

"I'd hate to get the knock on the door to say, 'we decided this is a riding where the Liberal could win.'"

Her comments, and Herron's, are why it's unrealistic Harrison's concept could take hold, Marland says.

"An established party that has its eyes on government sees itself as unwilling to give much up. They feel the smaller opposition party should give things up," he says.

"On the other hand, the smaller opposition party exists for a reason, and they get really worried about having everything they're doing all be consumed by what they perceive as a takeover."

The Greens have an even stronger rebuttal to Finnigan's strategic voting message in Kent North, a riding now held by Arseneau, one of three Green MLAs.

Green Leader David Coon has already said that if the PCs fail to win the 25 seats needed for a majority, he'd negotiate with the Liberals, not with the Tories likely meaning the end of their time in power.

Replacing Arseneau with a Liberal MLA wouldn't change the anti-Higgs math required for that scenario to become reality.

The second reason Finnigan is thinking of running, he said in his video, is to get the riding the benefits of being onside with a Liberal government.

"I will represent the best if not the only chance of being at the table with the next government."

But with a Liberal minority government propped up by the Greens, Arseneau would have a lot of leverage too.

That's the argument Fredericton North Green candidate Luke Randall made in the 2020 election, pointing to a Green initiative on domestic violence that the PC minority government incorporated into legislation.

"We've actually gotten the conversation going," Randall said at the time.

Four years later, however, Randall is running for the Liberals. He now argues voters need to unite behind "a party that can win" to beat Higgs.

His switch shows how strategic considerations can change from election to election.

"Campaigns matter," Marland says.

Voters wanting a change of government often end up settlingon the best vehicle for that by election day, he says.

On the other hand, the average person may not know how best to vote strategically.

That's why Harrison says it's better for the Liberals and Greens to sort this out now.

But with dozens of candidates already nominated already,"I fear it's not going to happen before this next election," he says.

"But I tell you: if in fact we get the same result, none of them can come out on election night and say, 'we wish the results would have been different.'

"They can't say 'we didn't see it coming.'"