Higgs will make aggressive school cuts, warn Liberals, who made aggressive school cuts

Pop quiz: which former New Brunswick finance minister uttered the following statement in a budget speech?

"With less than 100,000 children attending our schools, we need to ensure that our staffing levels reflect this new reality. This is why we will be eliminating 249 teaching positions."

If you've been following the pre-election rhetoric in the province, you might think it was Progressive Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs, from his 2010-2014 stint as finance minister.

After all, a Liberal advertising blitz claims Higgs will make cuts to education if he wins the election and that only a Liberal victory can stop him and ensure the spending continues.

But those comments about teacher cuts were made by Liberal Finance Minister Roger Melanson in 2015 when he delivered his first budget.

Education spending has been a political cudgel for years — an issue used by Liberals and Tories to accuse each other of austerity and short-sightedness. It's a debate marked by misstatements and reversals.

The Liberals, who now warn darkly that Higgs plans to slash schools, adopted an aggressive approach to school closures themselves in 2015.

And Higgs, who vows to take the politics out of decision-making, cancelled a planned $30-million cut to education — including possible school closures and teacher layoffs — just before the last election.

Higgs targeted surplus schools

Higgs started his four-year tenure as PC finance minister clearly preoccupied with what he saw as surplus schools.

He publicly questioned why the province was not closing schools that were half-empty because of declining enrolment.

In his first budget, he vowed to target "school utilization," and he said the education department — along with all other departments except health — would see spending cuts.

Planned cuts cancelled

Documents leaked to CBC News last year show that consultants working for Higgs were recommending a "reduction in the number of teachers" and the "closure of schools with low student population or not offering a reasonable academic experience."

But in the final year of the Alward government, the PCs cancelled a planned cut of $32 million to education.

The chair of one district education council, Jane Buckley, said in 2015 her DEC had been told by the PC government to not launch any more school-closure studies before the election.

Higgs later acknowledged that election timing got in the way of the cuts. He said last year that "absolutely they'd have come back" if the PCs had been re-elected in 2014.

But he has also refused to commit to any spending cuts if he wins this year.

Liberals claimed increase

The cancelled PC cut of 2014 allowed the new Liberal government elected that fall to exaggerate its own education spending increase.

Melanson claimed in his 2015 budget that fall that education was going up by 3.1 per cent.

But his math was based on the original PC budget and its $32 million cut. With the cut cancelled, the Liberal increase was only 0.038 per cent.

Higgs' comment that the cuts would have "come back" following a 2014 PC election win also gave the Liberals ammunition to warn against putting him back in power.

Melanson took Higgs-like approach

Initially, the Liberals sounded decidedly Higgs-like on education, declaring that declining enrolment warranted a reduction in the number of teachers and schools.

In his 2015 budget speech, Melanson spoke of "finding available efficiencies in our infrastructure" to free up money for classroom programs.

But the Liberals actually went further than Higgs had by tweaking a school-closure policy so that more buildings were put on the chopping block.

Under Policy 409, a district education council can launch a study of whether an aging or under-enrolled school is still viable. The Liberals added a "trigger" that forces a DEC to study the viability of any school with fewer than 100 students.

The final decision still rests with the DEC, and the minister can only reject a closure. He or she can't overrule a decision to keep a school open.

But in a court ruling earlier this year on the closure of École Saint-Paul near Moncton, Justice Zoel Dionne suggested the change "is a tool for imposing on education councils … a list of schools that should be closed."

Eight schools closed under Liberals

Twenty-seven schools have vanished from the map under the Liberals, though most of them have merged or been replaced, and all the decisions originated with district education councils.

Here's the breakdown:

• Eight schools closed altogether: Brown's Flat, Lorne Middle, Pennfield Elementary, Coles Island, Millville Elementary, Saint-Paul, La Découverte and Séjour-Jeunesse.
• Four merged into neighbouring schools: Dalhousie Middle, Bath Elementary, Stanley Elementary and  Marée-Montante.
• Fifteen other schools closed in Woodstock, Miramichi, Saint John and Campbellton, but they were replaced with new schools. In each case, one new school replaced multiple schools that closed.

A government spokesperson said on top of that, four brand-new schools were built, though one of the schools on that list, Moncton High School, replaced an older building in a different location. Some of the new schools listed were started under the PC government.

Four schools in Saint John and two in Moncton have been recommended for replacement, and earlier this year Gallant announced funding for the Moncton replacement.

Reversal on teacher cuts

There's also that Liberal slashing of 249 teaching positions in their first budget. The decision justified by declining enrolment and a need for fewer teachers to maintain student-teacher ratios.

"We are facing a fiscal reality," then-education minister Serge Rousselle said at the time of the cuts. He blamed them on the PCs not reducing teacher numbers earlier to match enrolment declines.

But last year the Liberals turned that logic on its head by agreeing to a five-year contract with the teachers' union that guaranteed the number of positions would not drop below 7,280, even if there were fewer and fewer students in the system.

Higgs questioned the logic of freezing the number of positions. The number of K-12 students in New Brunswick has been dropping since 1991, with the exception of 2016-17, when the arrival of 650 Syrian students briefly halted the decline.

He didn't go as far as saying he was against it, but the Liberals are using his skepticism to warn in pre-election advertising this year that he would resume cutting into education.