Higgs won't rule out reviving controversial education plans if re-elected

Premier Blaine Higgs is not ruling out reviving some controversial ideas to overhaul French immersion and weaken the powers of district education councils if he wins a new mandate in a provincial election this year.

Higgs said in an interview with CBC News that he is still concerned about problems in the anglophone school system and isn't sure recommendations in a recent report — which his government accepted and will implement — go far enough.

"I don't know what needs to happen, but our education system in anglophone New Brunswick is a mess," he said, citing examples of teachers and students being physically attacked. 

"We have a problem. We have a problem in academic achievement. … We have a problem — which I talked a lot about and I know I've been criticized about it —  but the fact that we cannot produce bilingual graduates, I think, is a huge failure of the province."

The government announced in the fall of 2022 that it would replace French immersion with a new second-language program for all anglophone students.

Higgs said he wanted all high school graduates in Canada's only officially bilingual province to have at least a conversational level of French.

But after a wave of angry public meetings and questions about the new model the government was proposing, the idea was dropped.

The government also abandoned legislation that would have weakened the decision-making powers of the four anglophone district education councils, putting them further under provincial authority. 

Higgs said he wants to "come back to a program" that will get the results he is looking for.

"So maybe we can agree on what the results should be and then the teachers tell me what we need to do achieve them," he said.

That appeared to be on track at the end of November, when Education Minister Bill Hogan released a report, drafted in partnership with the New Brunswick Teachers' Association, and accepted all its recommendations for long-term changes to the school system.

They included a "balancing" of class sizes to support students with extra learning needs while minimizing the potential disruptions for other students. 

It also advocated "holding students accountable" for academic work by rethinking the practice of moving students up a grade level for social reasons even if their marks fall short.

Higgs said the report was "part of" the solution but "it needs to be more than that."