The tide goes out for Blaine Higgs, anti-politician

Early in his tenure as premier, Blaine Higgs pointed to his work at Irving Oil — and the immutable rhythms of the tides in the Bay of Fundy — to explain how he would govern.

Ships heavy with refined gasoline could only sail out at high tide, Higgs told a Saint John business audience in April 2019, forcing him to carefully time when they left port.

"I remember all the years working, with ships coming and going, and making the tides, and people said, 'Those tides must really mess you up, loading the ships and getting ships out,'" he recalled. 

"'Nope,'" he said. "It kept you focused, because you didn't dare miss one … It kept you focused on getting the job done."

He would bring the same deliberate, disciplined approach to the job of premier, he said.

But Higgs also defined himself as an anti-politician willing to depart from old, predictable patterns of governing.

It worked for him at first, but it caught up with him Monday.

As a rookie minister of finance from 2010 to 2014, Higgs was a breath of fresh air.

He refused to endorse an old-style Progressive Conservative patronage appointment by Premier David Alward.

He uttered inconvenient political truths, such as how parties, including his own, often made opportunistic campaign promises that doomed them to deficit spending once in power.

As premier, which he became in 2018, he remained a maverick. He included the three opposition party leaders on a cabinet advisory committee on COVID-19, an unusual move that helped forge public trust.

But after Higgs won a majority government in 2020, the iconoclastic approach began to clash with his fondness for calibration and discipline.

After the death of a patient in an overworked hospital emergency department in July 2022, he abruptly shuffled his health minister, fired Horizon Health's CEO and replaced the province's two partly-elected health authority boards with appointed trustees.

"I'm not kicking it down the road … I'm prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect and improve the health-care system in our province," he said.