Once-mighty People's Alliance faces crowded field on the populist right

Six years ago, the People's Alliance was calling the tune in New Brunswick politics.

The upstart party had elected three MLAs in a provincial election. Progressive Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs leaned on them to keep his minority government alive.

In the current campaign, the weakened party is struggling to be relevant, with just 13 candidates the lowest number it has ever had.

Leader Rick DeSaulniers says that's still an accomplishment.

"Considering what Higgs and Austin tried to do to our party they tried to destroy it I'm proud of where we are," said DeSaulniers, who was elected in 2018 and lost his seat two years later.

"Yeah, we've rebuilt. We started with zero, zilch, nothing, if you will. And I'm proud of where we are. I think we have some quality candidates, and it is what it is. We're moving forward and we're here to stay."

In 2022, former Alliance leader and founder Kris Austin and its only other MLA, Michelle Conroy, defected to the PCs, leaving the party with no members of the legislature.

Austin also de-registered the party, which led to all its money and assets being seized by Elections New Brunswick.

When the party was re-registered later that year, it had to go back to square one for fundraising.

"It kind of leaves us behind the eight ball when it comes to providing and supporting candidates at election time, but we're getting by," said DeSaulniers, who is running against Austin in Fredericton-Grand Lake.

Austin couldn't be reached for comment Thursday.

WATCH | 'Our party is still relevant': Alliance leader on party's future:

Peoples Alliance says PC government has gone too far right

3 days ago

Duration 1:54

Alliance leader says hes proud to have 13 party candidates in wake of former leader Kris Austins defection.

Alliance candidates like Kris Hurtubise, in Hanwell-New Maryland, acknowledge it'll be an uphill battle to get elected.

"We're definitely in the rebuilding phase. We're just trying to get back into it."

Equally difficult for the Alliance is that it doesn't have as clear a way to define itself in today's political environment.

When Austin created the party before the 2010 election, it was out of frustration that the two established parties, the PCs and Liberals, were in his view too similar to each other in the middle of the political spectrum.

The right-wing populist mood that swept through western democracies, starting in 2016, opened the door to an Alliance breakthrough.

"I would consider us an outsider of the established political way of doing business, and I'm proud of that," Austin said in 2018.

Now the PCs under Blaine Higgs have moved in that direction, something Austin took credit for after he joined the party and that he said allowed him to join the Tories.

DeSaulniers calls that a "convenient and typical argument" designed to justify his former leader's defection and it's the PCs who have become too extreme.

"I think Higgs and them have gone a little too far right with some of the things that they have and some of the positions they've taken," he says.

"That's not where New Brunswickers want to be."

Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins candidate Peter Graham sounded a similar note at an election debate last week.

"We are centrists in the tradition of New Brunswick, of moderationand tolerance and working in collaboration with everyone," said Graham, who said recent budget surpluses should have been used for health care and education rather than paying down debt.

"We are centrists who reject extremism. The extreme on the left, the extreme on the right it's getting us nowhere," he said.

At the same time, the new Libertarian Party is also advocating populist ideas, some of which overlap with the views of some Alliance candidates.

Libertarian Leader Keith Tays saidin an email that many of his party's supporters "opposed the tyranny" of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, such as mask and vaccine mandates.

The Alliance's Hurtubise also opposes those mandates and doesn't accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID vaccines are generally safe.

"I don't believe that anything should be mandatory," saidthe candidate.

Libertarian Party more candidates than Alliance

Graham said last week that while it's not official Alliance policy, he'd like to "completely eliminate" property taxes, which sounds like what the Libertarians espouse.

Tays, however, rejects the idea that the Alliance is comparable to his party.

"In our estimation the People's Alliance does not really stand on principles," he said. "A good example of this is their recent move to claim to be a centrist party. Libertarians do not merge with other parties or switch to other parties."

Nordoes he accept that the PC move to lower taxes and limit public spending growth align with his goals.

Higgs is too incremental and his COVID policies revealed him to be "equally as authoritarian as the rest of the parties" in the province, Tays said.

The Libertarians have 18 candidates in the election, more than the Alliance.

DeSaulniers said he couldn't comment on the new party because he didn't know much about them.

One Libertarian candidate, Barb Dempsey, was among the first New Brunswickers to lobby the Higgs government last yearagainst 2SLGBTQ+-inclusive education in the spring of 2023 and later took credit for PC changes to Policy 713.

"We're winning this battle. This is a battle between good and evil," she said in an online video.

The Alliance's Graham, on the other hand, tried at the Hampton debate to see both sides of the argument supporting the need for parental input but also calling for "safe spaces" for 2SLGBTQ+ students in schools.

"Let's get that in place, as well as protect the right of the parents."

It adds up to a stew of overlapping perspectives on the right side of the political spectrum that leaves the Alliance struggling to distinguish itself from the Libertarians and the PCs.

The Alliance has filed several campaign commitments with Elections New Brunswick, including a "reasonable rent cap" and action on recruiting and retaining health-care workers.

DeSaulniers says, however, the party isn't making any promises in the campaign.

"We're not putting a platform out. We are what we are," he said.

"People know what we are. We think it's hollow to go out and make a bunch of promises like the reds, the greens and the blues are doing. People see through that. It's nothing but BS."

He is explicit on one commitment, however.

If the Alliance manages to get back into the legislature and hold the balance of power again, it won't commit to supporting a minority government for an extended period, like Austin did with Higgs's PCs between 2018 and 2020.

"They would live and die every day in the legislature based on the results we get for the people," DeSaulniers says, "and if we didn't get those results, that support would stop, plain and simple."