Top Saint John minister quitting Higgs cabinet, legislature seat
Arlene Dunn’s announcement comes hours after minister Mike Holland said he won't run again
A top minister in Premier Blaine Higgs's government says she is resigning from cabinet immediately and will also quit as a member of the legislature "in the near term."
Arlene Dunn says she made the decision "after much consideration and discussion with my family" but did not provide any reasons in a statement released Friday morning.
She said she made the decision "with mixed emotions. … Serving the people of New Brunswick and representing the wonderful people in my riding of Saint John Harbour has been a true privilege and honour of a lifetime."
Dunn told CBC News she would not be granting interviews about her resignation.
"Different people look at the political life and it certainly doesn't work for many," Higgs told reporters Friday morning.
"Politics turned out to not be for her."
The premier is not required to call a byelection to fill a vacant seat in the 12 months before a scheduled general election.
Dunn's riding is considered a key battleground in the provincial election scheduled for this fall.
The Liberals have nominated Saint John city councillor David Hickey to run there while the Greens have chosen Mariah Darling, an activist and education co-ordinator with a local LGBTQ organization.
They both said Friday that Dunn's departure was another sign of the Progressive Conservative Party veering further to the right.
"This is another example of more progressive members — whether it be cabinet, or progressive elements of the party — starting to erode and change," Hickey said.
Darling said Dunn's resignation "shows some cracks in the Conservative party right now" and called it "a real sign that people in Saint John Harbour need new leadership and don't need to look to a party that can't keep their own members currently."
Dunn was seen as a star candidate when she was elected in 2020 and was handed several cabinet responsibilities including economic development, immigration and Indigenous affairs.
She took on post-secondary education, training and labour in June 2023 after Higgs shuffled his cabinet in the wake of a revolt over his changes to the education department's Policy 713 on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Dunn opposed the changes but was not in the legislature the day six other Progressive Conservative MLAs voted against the government on the issue.
"I didn't think we should have touched that. I think we should have stayed away from it," she said of Policy 713 the day of the shuffle, but beyond that, "I do have confidence in the leadership of the premier."
Higgs said at the time the fact she was not there for the vote was why he kept her as a minister after dumping two of the others who broke ranks.
He told reporters Friday that he expected his internal critics to put Dunn's departure "in a negative light" but said, "I don't think that we should read anything more or less into the fact that it's an opportunity for others to get involved in politics."
Dunn's announcement came just hours after Natural Resources and Energy Development Minister Mike Holland announced he'll be leaving politics when the provincial election is called this year.
John Williston, a regional vice-president of the PC party who supported a push to remove Higgs as leader last year, said the two departures are a sign of "poor management and poor leadership in the PC party" that rests with Higgs.
"It just begs the question that we've been asking for months: why do people keep leaving? Why are our best and brightest people in our party either sitting on the backbenches or making a break for the door?" Williston said.
He said there was no mechanism to remove Higgs at this point, but said he hoped the premier might still step down before the election.
"This is just further evidence of the fact that people are obviously choosing to explore other options … and the common denominator I think is that people find it impossible to work with the premier."
Holland, however, said he was leaving because he's accomplished everything that was on his to-do list when he became minister in 2018 and it's time to pass the baton.
He added that his decision was "not whatsoever" influenced by divisions in the PC caucus and cabinet over Premier Blaine Higgs's handling of Policy 713.
Holland said he wouldn't have been able to accomplish initiatives such as the doubling of protected areas on Crown lands without Higgs's support.
"I know that as I walked through the work that I did, I had the support that I needed. There were times that Blaine Higgs and I might not have agreed on something, but we found mutually agreeable paths where we could continue to make progress."
Elected politics "is meant to be, you come in, you do your work and you pass it on," Holland said.
"When I looked at the work that I've done, I feel like it's a comprehensive body of work we can stand on … and I feel I can sit back and say 'job well done' and then move on."
The Progressive Conservative party has scheduled a candidate nominating meeting in the Albert-Riverview riding for Feb. 14. The riding on the new electoral map is a redrawn version of Holland's current Albert riding.
Holland, first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020, said his decision was also driven by the fact that his partner lives in Nova Scotia.
"It's been challenging to be able to make sure that we invest in each other to the degree that we need to," he said.
Economic Development Minister Greg Turner will take on Dunn's responsibilities for post-secondary education, labour, training and immigration, while Holland will absorb her Indigenous Affairs portfolio.
Higgs is facing the loss of other ministers when he calls the election this year.
Environment Minister Gary Crossman said in October he will retire when Higgs calls the election, and Health Minister Bruce Fitch also hinted last fall that he will not run again.
"There'll be an announcement on that in the not-too-distant future," he said this week.
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