New Brunswick’s new election map has two major party leaders facing uncertainty in their own races to return to the legislature as MLAs.
An imaginary line that runs down Regent Street is the boundary between two Fredericton ridings where Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Leader David Coon are on the ballot.
Both leaders have faced the dilemma of weighing how much time to spend campaigning at home when the demands of province-wide campaigns require them to be on the road.
“It’s always a bit of debate internally,” said federal Green Leader Elizabeth May, who campaigned with Coon at St. Thomas University this week.
May said during federal elections she tries to spend at least half the campaign in her British Columbia riding.Â
“It’s always a strategic call, a judgment call. You can get it wrong,” she said.
Coon and Holt have both devoted some time to local campaigning, but not as much as non-leaders can.
In one of two Fredericton-area ridings with a party leader on the ballot, voters vary on what drives their decisions.
At Holt’s riding headquarters, a squad of volunteers, mostly women, have been working phones and mapping their door-knocking routes while she’s been touring the province.
“She trusts us to be her representatives,” said Jackie Durnford, Holt’s campaign manager in Fredericton South-Silverwood.
The spectacle of two party leaders contesting local races side-by-side was created by the redrawn electoral map.
Provincial law requires it be updated every 10 years to ensure each of the 49 ridings are roughly equal in population.
In Fredericton, the independent commission overseeing the process split the former Fredericton South riding that Coon had represented since 2014. He won big majorities there in 2018 and 2020.
Now that strong Green voting base is split in two — and could be diluted in the two new ridings on the new map.
Coon is running in Fredericton-Lincoln, which, based on results from 2020 polling stations, would have gone PC in that election.
On the other hand, the Green leader wasn’t on the ballot in many of those polling stations, and his high profile could help him.
“I’ve known about at least one of the candidates for some time, and we’re now in that riding, so I made up my mind pretty quickly based on the individual I wanted to vote for,” said voter Brent Wilson, after a stop at a grocery store on the Lincoln Road.
Wilson wouldn’t say who he was voting for but it was clear from his description that he was referring to Coon.
“It was an easy choice for me,” he said.
Anissa Lavigne, a former teacher who now homeschools her children, wouldn’t disclose who she was voting for either, but her comments sound sympathetic to the PC party’s position on education and parental rights.
“I have a lot of concerns about the education system, I would say,” she said. “But also just in general, values, and where people stand on moral issues.”
Coon’s PC opponent Daniel Chippin didn’t respond to an interview request.
But PC candidate Nicolle Carlin, who is running against Holt in Fredericton South-Silverwood, said taking on a party leader is an “extra element” for a candidate.
“They have a higher profile and they’re in the news a lot more,” she said.
Carlin says as a former television journalist and spokesperson for Premier Blaine Higgs for six years, she hasn’t been a complete unknown.
“I didn’t start from scratch.”
Fredericton South-Silverwood has some of the same confounding calculations as Fredericton-Lincoln.
The PC vote there would also have been enough to win it in 2020 had the current boundaries existedÂ
The Greens would have been a close second and the Liberals a distant third in 2020.
But that was with Coon — and without Holt — on the ballot in the parts of the riding that were in Fredericton South.Â
“There was a lot of loyalty to David Coon, and David Coon is not in this riding this time,” Durnford said.
There are “ins and outs” to the local candidate also being a party leader, she added.
“Yes, Holt is elsewhere for a lot of the campaign, but “our local candidate has a lot of media presence,” Durnford said.
“It’s not like we’re trying to introduce her name and people go, ‘Susan Holt, I haven’t heard that name before.'”
The side-by-side contests, neither a sure thing for the two leaders, make Fredericton a key battleground on Monday that could reshape the political landscape.
The future of the Greens would be very different without their highly popular leader.
If the Liberals were to win the election but Holt were to lose her seat, she’d still be sworn in as premier, but it would be a blow.
She’d probably look for a Liberal MLA to step aside soon for a byelection so she could get into the legislature.
In the meantime, some voters are still sorting out in which riding they find themselves.
The Liberals are paying special attention to the Silverwood area running along the St. John River to the Fredericton city limit.
“Those are all new areas for her so we want to introduce her, so people can understand what she’s about and why she’s the best choice,” Durnford said.
Wilson said he and some of his Lincoln-area neighbours were surprised at first to see their list of candidates, including Coon.Â
“It took me a while to figure that out, why I was suddenly voting for these people. It didn’t click that there’d been a change,” he said.Â
