Liberal attack ads on PC leader out of date, candidate learns

A Liberal candidate says she's glad to learn that one of her own party's attack ads on Blaine Higgs may be out of date —and that the Progressive Conservative leader's views on abortion appear to have changed.

Amber Bishop, the Liberal candidate in Fredericton-York, was commenting on a Facebook video posted by the New Brunswick Women's Liberal Commission. It uses carefully selected clips of Higgs from the legislature.

"If abortion is to be treated like any other procedures, it is the doctor, not the patient, who will assess the necessity to perform this procedure," he says in a clip from Dec. 2014.

Higgs was one of many PC MLAs who spoke against Premier Brian Gallant's decision to repeal a regulation that required a woman to get the approval of two doctors before she could have an abortion in a hospital.

At first, Bishop said the Liberals were justified in using the clip.

Liberals release outdated Facebook ad on Higgs's abortion views

6 years ago

Duration 1:28

This Liberal Facebook ad attacks PC leader Blaine Higgs on his abortion views. But Higgs says those views have changed. So why is it popping up in the social feeds of women voters?

"Perhaps the offence that was taken was that he was suggesting that women themselves can't make these decisions themselves," she said in an interview.

She said she wasn't aware that Higgs had clarified his position in 2016.

During the PC leadership race that year, he promised not to reverse Gallant's changes to the rules.

"That's been settled, has it not?" Higgs told CBC News after winning the leadership in October 2016. "I don't have any intention of making any changes to the current rules. ... I have no plans to make changes in that regard."

Evolution 'a good thing'

Bishop wasn't aware of those comments but said she'd be happy if she could confirm the clip used in the Liberal video no longer represents Higgs' position.

"What I'm pleased to hear, if that information is correct, that Mr. Higgs is saying he will continue to support women — I think that's an evolution and that's a good thing," she said.

"Part of our job as leaders is we have to evolve. We have to learn and we have to learn more. And what we thought five years ago, [if it] was dead wrong, we change."

Bishop wouldn't say whether the Facebook video should be changed to more accurately reflect Higgs' current position.

"I would leave that responsibility to the people who put the video together," she said.

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The video also uses a clip of Higgs talking in November 2017 about gender-based violence, one the Liberals say shows that the PC leader "thinks sexual violence doesn't happen in Canada."

"It used to be, years ago, that atrocities of any nature, but certainly of [a] gender-based violence nature, were far away from our homeland, or far away from where we live in North America," he says in the clip.

"It seemed to be something that was happening in foreign parts of the world."

'Shocked and saddened'

Bishop said she was "saddened and shocked" that Higgs held those views.

"Our job as leaders is to be very cognizant of the realities," she said.

But the full text of Higgs' remarks suggests he was talking about an incorrect perception that sexual assault happened elsewhere, but that was changing as society discussed the issue more openly.

"People are either feeling more comfortable or feeling that they have an obligation to speak about the realities of here at home, and the truth of what people have experienced but have not talked about," he said.

"Improvement and resolution come only when you talk about it."

Reminder of cuts

The third segment of the video reminds viewers that in his first budget as PC finance minister in 2015, Higgs eliminated funding for the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

That attack has been more difficult for the PCs to refute. Fredericton North candidate Jill Green says there won't be a repeat of that episode if her party wins.

"That did happen under a previous government. I'm running for a Blaine Higgs government and he has been clear that he's not doing any funding cuts at all," she said.

"At a minimum we're status quo. We'll see what happens when we get in government. We need to strategically look at everything and build a plan."

In 2014, the PCs partially reversed course on the cut, setting up a new body, the Voices of New Brunswick Women Consensus-Building Forum, with an annual budget of $418,000.

The Liberals renamed the forum the New Brunswick Women's Council and doubled its budget earlier this year.