Conventional wisdom dictates that minority governments must play it safe. They must never do anything to rock the boat. Did Premier Blaine Higgs not get the memo?

This week’s decision to close down the overnight emergency services in six rural hospitals has drawn the expected response. Angry locals organizing in protest, and Liberal leader Kevin Vickers right on cue declaring he will bring down the government over it.

This decision on health care reform makes perfect managerial sense, but does it make political sense? That is a tad trickier to answer. But to give Higgs the benefit of the doubt, he was facing an unsustainable situation in health care, and one that was not going to fix itself and in fact promised to get worse.

No need to go over the details here as they have been well-reported, but isn’t it common sense that if you have a doctor available, and you have hundreds of people in each of these communities on a waiting list to find a family doctor, that you use that doctor to help alleviate that backlog, rather than have him sit in an emergency room that on average gets five overnight visits a night, most of them aren’t even emergencies? In fact you could argue that failing to make changes in an effort to make the system sustainable would be an irresponsible course.

And given that the none of these hospitals emergency rooms are more than 75 kilometers from one that would be open, it’s not as if these rural patients are being left out in the cold, especially with a beefed-up ambulance service with more Advanced Care Paramedics authorized to use the full extent of their skills.

We have a province with an aging demographic of patients but also of doctors and nurses. Efforts are being made to find more but the shortages are everywhere so it’s not easy, especially to attract doctors to rural areas.

The government has made some positive steps by eliminating billing numbers which had been an obstacle to hiring more doctors, and the announcement of hiring another 32 nurse practitioners will help a lot as well, assuming they can find them.  But this is the low hanging fruit. No placards will be drawn up to wave in front of the legislature or MLA offices over this. But it wasn’t enough, so now this move with the six hospitals.

When this was announced, I got a message from a political junkie friend asking – “Did Higgs just commit political suicide?”  I responded “I don’t think so, but maybe”. I know – Fence sit much?

Higgs admits it may cost his party power. In his words “if it costs us government, “I’ll rest easy, saying, “You know? We did what was right.”

Perhaps, but perhaps as well it is more calculated than that. He’s got at least two MLAs who may not support him. Kings East’s Bruce Northrup in whose riding one of the affected hospitals sits, and Deputy Premier Robert Gauvin, the MLA for Shippagan-Lameque-Miscou who, at the time of this writing has come out against it but hasn’t said how he will vote.

Technically, there doesn’t need to be a vote on this. The two health authorities can make these changes without it going through the legislature. But it could be turned into a confidence vote by the opposition.

As we know, Higgs grasp on power is razor-thin. With Northrup, and possibly Gauvin voting against, assuming there is a vote, the government could be lost.

So the question becomes – who loses then? Higgs is enjoying increased popularity with the New Brunswick electorate, which is basically supportive of his restraint agenda. The Alliance with their three members are benefitting from having some MLAs for the first time ever but they aren’t exactly surging, in fact lately they took a hit from some supporters who don’t think they are pushing hard enough against official bilingualism. Can’t imagine they would welcome an election.

The Greens with there three MLAs, one of whom lives in one of the ridings where hospital services will be affected, may not fear an election as much as some of the others, but like most of the other parties, they are broke.

Which brings us to Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Kevin Vickers hasn’t really caught on among the party faithful let alone New Brunswickers in general, so even though he talked a good game in vowing to bring down the government over this, I can’t see his party chomping at the bit right now to roll the dice.

As an aside, while expressing outrage over Higgs’ decision, Vickers was asked by a reporter what he would do, given the status quo isn’t sustainable? From what I understand, he mumbled a few platitudes but really had nothing.  This is another indication the Liberal party is not ready for an election.  “We want the unsustainable status quo” isn’t much of a campaign slogan.

If I had to bet, I would bet against the government going down over this. But this may be just the warm-up act.

While overnight ER services will be gone from six hospitals, that in itself is far from enough to make the system sustainable. To get to where we need to go, there would be pain. The question is whether the Higgs government has the fortitude to push more changes through, but also whether the people of New Brunswick have what it takes to accept them. As a population, we haven’t been real good at that, often choosing instead to go with a new government willing to simply kick the problem down the road.  The trouble with that, is that at some point the road ends.

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