Holt barometer: How well is the new premier doing at keeping promises, 100 days in?

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt made a lot of promises in her election campaign.

Now, more than 100 days into her mandate, a team at the Université de Moncton is keeping track of her progress in fulfilling them. 

Gabriel Arsenault, a political science professor at the Université de Moncton, recently launched the Holt polimeter tool, which keeps track of a list of pledges Holt made and her progress in fulfilling them. 

The tool was first established by PolitiFact, a nonprofit fact-checking project run by the Poynter Institute in Florida. 

Arsenault's team made a list of all the pledges made by the premier during campaign.

He said the polimetre is not a partisan tool — same process was used in 2019 to create one for promises made by Blaine Higgs. 

According to site, the premier has kept nine of her 81 pledges so far. 

"What is striking is the orientation of these pledges," Arsenault told Information Morning Moncton. 

The first promise fulfilled by the premier was to eliminate a barrier to abortion by amending regulation 84-20, eliminating the legal restriction on public funding for procedural abortions outside hospitals.

"This is the first time we have a female premier and this is the very first pledge she's kept, very symbolic" said Arsenault.

The premier then modified the controversial Policy 713, eliminating the parental consent requirement. She also delivered on a promise of retention bonuses for nurses.

"To me, this is a clear feminist orientation," said Arsenault. "People are always wondering, 'Does it make a difference to have a female premier?'... so far it does." 

According to Arsenault, the premier has yet to break any promises. He said the government's decision to not "immediately" repeal the so-called "Higgs carbon adjustor" as the campaign platform pledged may be counted as a partially kept promise if it happens later this year. 

Arsenault noted that Holt's pledge to balance the province's budget for each year of her mandate is looking dire. 

The province announced in its third-quarter fiscal update last week its budget deficit had exploded to almost $400 million as a result of higher health-care costs. The premier said the province's pledge to avoid deficits wouldn't apply for the 2024-25 fiscal year, as it began under the Progressive Conservative government. 

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Gabriel Arsenault is associate professor of political science at l'Université de Moncton.

According to the polimeter website, that was a post-election amendment to the government's original promise. And so a deficit as of March 31 will be considered a failure to fulfil that pledge. 

Finance Minister René Legacy told reporters last week that while balancing the budget before the end of the fiscal year wasn't impossible, it would be difficult. 

"The conjuncture is not favourable to Holt," said Arsenault. 

While this pledge is important, he said it's not one that will lead to a ripple effect. 

"If she had to break one pledge without affecting all of the others, it would be this one," said Arsenault.