Holt adopts Higgs COVID playbook, minus the hard decisions

Maybe it was appropriate that Premier Susan Holt chose last week for the launch of her weekly livestreamed press conferences on her government's tariff "action plan."

It was the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic's intrusion in our lives.

New Brunswickers got to know the media room Holt was using — and the image of leadership in crisis — during Blaine Higgs's frequent pandemic briefings, fed into laptop computers and smartphones.

"It's my job to connect with New Brunswickers in a time of uncertainty," Holt declared.

There are clearly important differences between the pandemic and U.S. President Donald Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs on Canadian products entering his country.

When Higgs and his officials began livestreaming, they were providing survival information: how to navigate what was literally a life-and-death challenge.

He was counting infections and deaths.

He was also announcing swift, hard decisions about closing schools, shuttering businesses, locking down households, sealing borders and, later, requiring masks and vaccinations.

The trade war isn't the same level of threat, and it doesn't require the same dire measures — and that's lucky, because Holt wants to avoid asking New Brunswickers to sacrifice or endure any discomfort beyond what U.S. tariffs themselves may create.

Cutting off N.B. Power electricity exports to 58,000 Mainers in a captive market across the border — or forcing them to swallow a surcharge — could provoke costly retaliation when our utility needs to import American power, she said.

"We need to respond in the most strategic ways possible that can be successful in eliminating those tariffs more quickly, or reducing them, without putting unnecessary pain on New Brunswickers," she said. 

The premier instead adopted the role of therapist-in-chief, pledging to use the weekly briefing to respond to questions sent to her office by anxious, frustrated New Brunswickers.

She said she empathized with their impulse to lash out.

"I feel you when you tell me you want to hit back, and you want to see us cutting off our neighbours because it's what the U.S. president has done, and they deserve to feel some pain from this."

Even on seemingly easier decisions than the shutting off of electricity exports, however, the March 13 action-plan update was lacking in new action.

Holt said her government will "look at" selling Teslas in the government fleet because the carmaker owned by Trump ally Elon Musk was "seeking to do New Brunswickers harm."

In contrast, British Columbia moved the same day to cut Teslas out of the province's electric vehicle charger rebate program.

Holt also pledged to "look at" ending government contracts with U.S. service providers, an idea she first talked about on March 4.

"None have been cancelled to date," spokesperson Bruce Macfarlane said by email.

Holt said she was also reluctant to levy an electricity threat "just for show," an apparent reference to Ontario Premier Doug Ford's blustery imposition of a 25 per cent surcharge on his province's exports to the U.S. a few days earlier.

"We're not sure that those actions make their way to the White House and prompt a change in behaviour there," she said.

The Doug Ford show did connect, however, with one key audience.

"The president woke up this morning and he saw it and he jumped right on it," Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told CBS News this week.

After Trump threatened to double some of his tariffs, Ford agreed to pause the surcharge, but the showdown got widespread U.S. media coverage.

It highlighted to Americans the potential cost of the trade war, and it landed Ford a meeting  in Washington with Lutnick, a small victory in the battle for American attention spans.

Holt, however, is not Doug Ford.

She prefers a friendlier, collaborative approach to politics, posting frequent social media photos that show her meeting New Brunswickers and listening to their concerns.

"How we work is just as important as what we work on,"  Holt said in the legislature Nov. 29.

Even the video she posted from a trip by provincial premiers to Washington, D.C. — a serious mission to lobby against the tariffs — had an upbeat tone, with the premier cheerily listing whom she'd met with.

Vibes-wise, Holt's energy and approach is, to her admirers, a refreshing change from the often-dour Blaine Higgs and his executive management style.

The risk is if the process becomes the point — if having meetings and holding briefings become ends in themselves, a measure of achievement.

"The government's tone is very positive and the doors are open for discussions," Norma Dubé, the president of a francophone seniors' association, told Radio-Canada last week about pre-budget consultations.

"But we mustn't forget that there's a need for a bit of action from time to time. It's not just process. Sometimes the result is important."

That may prove even more acute on the tariff issue.

Holt acknowledged the province doesn't have a lot of tools it can use on its own to pressure the U.S., which suggests her briefings will be more about responding to public anxiety than taking concrete action.

The premier said one solution to that anxiety is "to be with your friends, to get outdoors, to clear your head, to turn off the news."

The implication was that her soothing livestream appearances might be better for your mental health than credible journalistic reporting, or the amped-up Doug Ford show.

But if the public decides it wants something more concrete — sharp, combative responses to a brazen attack on the country's economy and sovereignty — New Brunswickers may tune out a Holt tariff show that fails to meet the moment.