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A veteran educator who witnessed Premier Blaine Higgs’s decision-making style up close has decided to run for the Liberals in the next provincial election.
George Daley, whom Higgs fired from his position as the deputy minister of education in the anglophone sector in October 2022, will seek the party’s nomination in Hautes-Terres-Nepisiguit, a riding near Bathurst.
Daley was removed as the government embarked on a plan to replace French immersion contrary to his advice, a plan Higgs eventually abandoned after a strong public backlash.
Former education minister Dominic Cardy identified Daley as the target of Higgs’s comment “data my ass,” after Daley presented the premier with statistics he did not agree with.
Daley also wrote in June to eight PC MLAs who were pushing back at Higgs’s review of Policy 713, encouraging them to resist what he called the premier’s centralized style of decision-making.
Six of those MLAs later voted with the opposition Liberals on a motion on the policy, provoking a split in the PC caucus that Higgs has cited as the potential rationale for a snap election.
Daley told CBC News the two controversies showed the need for a change in government.
“I understand how government is supposed to work and we need to get back to having a government working that way, a stable government, stable for all the citizens of this province,” he said.
“You’ve had many people come out and state their issues with what they’re seeing and the feelings that the appropriate processes of governance are not happening in this province right now.
“The fact you have the potential of an election coming because you have a leader who can’t find a way to make their own caucus work, that states volumes itself.”
Daley was president of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association before being named deputy minister of the anglophone school system by Higgs in 2019.
A resident of New Bandon, in northeastern New Brunswick, he worked as a teacher and vice-principal in Bathurst.
Daley says he’s not the only Liberal planning to seek the party nomination in the Terres-Hautes-Nepisiguit riding, which opened up Wednesday after Liberal leader Susan Holt announced she will run in Fredericton South-Silverwood.
Holt was elected in an April byelection in Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore, the riding on the previous election map that has been redrawn for the next election.
The Progressive Conservatives did not run a candidate against Holt in April.
The second-place finisher in the April byelection, Green candidate Serge Brideau, said Thursday he will run again in Hautes-Terres-Nepisiguit.
Brideau said he was encouraged by the 35 per cent of the vote he captured in the byelection.
“It was kind of last minute. I ran for three weeks, and I still felt like there was a momentum building behind me,” he said.
Brideau planned to record a new album with his rock group Les Hôtesses d’Hilaire this winter but said he’s been forced to put that on hold.
“There’s a lot of sacrifices to be made but to be honest, I think this is my calling. This is what I want to do at this point in my life. I want to be part of a solution.”
Daley said he’s not aware of a date for a Liberal nomination convention in the riding.
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