New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt

Shortly before Christmas, New Brunswick Liberal Premier Susan Holt’s office issued a series of “empathy guidelines”: instructions for staff, intended to present what CBC News called a “kinder, gentler” perception of government. The guidelines came complete with illustrations of wording staff could use, such as “Thank you for sharing” and “I can see how challenging that must be,” and were intended to depict the Holt government as “warm and caring.”

It’s tempting to see this empathetic language as little more than a public relations campaign on behalf of a new Liberal government that has been struggling with bad press following from plans to locate a power generating station on the Isthmus of Chignecto and is heading for a record deficit. But I wonder if it might point toward something more: a different kind of politics.

The New Brunswick Liberal Party has not been able to secure more than a single term in office since former Premier Frank McKenna left office in 1997. McKenna notably moved the provincial Liberals to the centre, focusing on the province’s economy and foreign investment while ditching the progressivism that had dominated the party since Louis J. Robichaud’s time as Premier in the 1960s. Holt’s guidelines are the first real effort since then to recreate a different kind of liberalism in the province, and they raise a number of questions: What is empathy? What role could it play in public discourse? And what might it look like in practice?

The road to government

The 2024 New Brunswick provincial election was a watershed event. Most commentary focused on Holt as New Brunswick’s first female premier, but in important ways the election was a referendum on Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs’s approach to governance. Higgs had become Premier six years earlier by virtue of the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Despite securing a popular vote 6 per cent lower than the Liberals and with little representation in French-speaking parts of the province, Higgs’s PCs won a very slim minority and at first held government with the support of a small anti-bilingualism political party: the People’s Alliance of New Brunswick (PANB).

Higgs led New Brunswick into the COVID emergency and initially governed through an all-party consensus that introduced a series of restrictions similar to COVID-zero policies in other jurisdictions. The policies worked, and New Brunswick – at first – avoided the worst effects of the pandemic. Higgs won a majority in a snap election two years into his mandate.

At this point, he shifted ground. Higgs abandoned consensus government, began dismantling COVID policies and started to direct his attention to other matters, while pushing the PCs further to the right and openly courting extreme voices among evangelical Christians. In historical terms, Higgs’s government broke from the PCs’ own long-established political centrism, which accepted the reforms of the Robichaud era, such as bilingualism and a more inclusive politics.

The centrepiece of Higgs’s policies was a rollback in protections for queer public-school students, who could no longer use their preferred names or pronouns. Teachers were required to have parental permission if queer students wanted to use a name other than their legal name and would be required to inform parents of changes, in effect turning teachers into a gender-identity police force. Higgs also publicly ignored protesters concerned about these policies. His government opposed Indigenous land claims and ordered civil servants not to make land acknowledgements. He welcomed former PANB MLAs to this party and infamously told a civil servant he was not interested in evidence when assessing public policies. The rightward drift of the party alienated moderate Tories and promoted a series of resignations while drawing the support of religiously based anti-abortionists and antiqueer groups in the province and elsewhere in Canada.

The 2024 election could be interpreted in a range of ways, but it was a clear renunciation of Higgs, who lost his own seat, while the Liberals secured their most significant victory in two decades. During the campaign Holt’s Liberals attacked the government’s policy failures but also ran a remarkably upbeat and optimistic campaign. As might be expected, they drew attention to core issues – health care, education – but also portrayed themselves as a government-in-waiting that would listen to the people of the province. The Liberal Party’s election information on Holt listed her “empathetic leadership” approach as the number one thing it wanted New Brunswick to know about its leader.

Empathy and politics

Studies of political behaviour in the United States suggest that empathy is a complex approach to interpersonal and political relationships. To be clear from the beginning, empathy is about something other and deeper than simply being nice, with which it might be easily confused. As Stephen Morris, who has written about empathy and politics, puts it, on its most basic level “empathy is generally understood as the capacity to share in experiences or emotions that one apprehends in others.”¹ Empathy is not simplistic; it can involve several different dimensions, such as the ability to vicariously share emotions or imagine a response to a particular issue from another’s perspective.

While empathy alone does not determine how a person will vote, it does tend to be associated more with liberal or progressive politics. American studies suggest liberally and conservatively minded people have different forms of empathy. Conservative empathy tends to be reserved for other conservatives or for specific social groups – such as police officers – with whom conservatives identify. Liberal empathy tends to be broader in range.

Empathy is not an innate and unvarying psychological characteristic. A Canadian study, for example, links empathy for First Nations to knowledge.² In other words, education makes a difference. Empathy also mobilizes sacrifice, at least on some level. A study done in the United States suggests that empathy carries with it a willingness to forgo self-interest to meet public needs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, empathy generates policies that could be taken as a mark of a good society. University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath once remarked that a humane and caring society should be seen as a historical achievement.³ As the series of shocks that have affected public life in a host of countries illustrate, this is an achievement that should not be taken for granted.

In promising to listen to citizens, Susan Holt’s Liberals were engaging with a necessary condition of a democratic order. Governments that are indifferent to citizen needs, voices and aspirations cannot, by definition, be democratic. In this sense, there is something more at stake in a consideration of empathy than a political style.

The “rights revolution” – as Michael Ignatieff and Dominique Clément called it – that defines the very basis of modern citizenship in Canada is both predicated on empathy and develops it as an outcome of the political process.⁴ The extension of individual rights was built around two core ideas: inclusion and communication. Inclusion suggests that as people we are a lot alike and share with one another hopes, dreams, concerns and fears. The differences that divide citizens are not so great that they prevent recognition of a common humanity. In this way, empathy becomes not only a core aspect of modern citizenship but the basis of inclusion and solidarity. Without it, difference becomes stereotype, indifference and often injustice.

On the second point, we can start by thinking about communication on a personal level. How do you want to be treated? If you have a concern, a problem or a matter you seek to raise, do you want to be dismissed or do you want to be heard? This is empathy’s key feature: it works on – and thus reproduces – some kind of caring humanism. When we speak, we look to others not simply to hear us but also to understand and share our perspectives. What is reproduced by empathy is a higher form of communication.

Will actions match words?

In the 2024 New Brunswick election, perhaps precisely because of the divisive policies of the previous government, significant sections of the electorate were looking for a positive and empathetic message. But what if it doesn’t work? This is the situation in which Holt’s government seems to find itself.

Empathy could help to fashion the kinds of reforms that are needed to improve health care and create better education, and to think about what constitutes fair wages for poorer people. An empathetic perspective would allow for a renewed discussion of the proper boundary between state and civil society, and between social action and individual responsibility. The key question is: how strongly does this government believe its own injunctions? And belief is demonstrated not through assertion but through practice. Amid what looks like a mounting budget crisis, the Holt government’s discourse is shifting.

In the short run, the government appears to have backed away from some of the more extreme budget-cutting policies it broached (such as merging St. Thomas University into the University of New Brunswick and privatizing the institution where I teach, Mount Allison). I hope it did so under the weight of both argument and empathy. The student protesters who converged on the provincial capital to oppose cuts to higher education were making their point, but they were also taking the government at its word: will you listen?

What happens next? There is more than one possible answer. There might be an inherent problem with empathy. The short way to explain this is that one could fake it. This has certainly happened before. Opposition parties will often try to increase their popularity by seeming to support policies they have no intention of implementing once in power. The Holt government has shifted to a different kind of language that laments “difficult decisions” that have to be made, without acknowledging the uneven effects difficult decisions carry with them.

In addition, liberalism itself can run into problems. Holt’s government seemed, at least, unprepared for the current budget crisis and it was clearly not what had been forecast. The discourse of “difficult decisions” suggests that the government will back away from its commitments and away from meaningful conversation because of the pressures of the times.

It would be a shame if that happened. Instead of being challenged by circumstances, empathy might be the answer to them.We can catch a glimpse of this on the national stage. Mark Carney’s victory in the last federal election was the product of many issues, including the need to respond to shifts in American trade policy and the dynamics of American imperialism. However, another factor was that large sections of the Canadian population simply don’t like Pierre Poilievre and find his right-wing populist approach to politics uncongenial.

To go further, some level of empathy might be needed to address environmental issues effectively, promote reconciliation, provide access to health care and higher education and tackle homelessness, among other policies. New Brunswick has such a legacy in the Equal Opportunity Program of the 1960s which, while often associated with bilingualism, addressed a host of social issues, inequalities and labour rights across the province.⁵

Thinking about empathy provides a mechanism to address the divisive “freedom convoy” politics of right-wing populism and to leverage consensus around a different kind of politics and policies. It suggests that an appreciable number of people are willing to make sacrifices to build a better society and that that process can – and should – be seen as a historical achievement instead of a set of policy injunctions.

I strongly suspect that the road ahead will not be easy for political leaders and movements looking to take these steps. Arguments made in favour of empathy will be rejected by those aligned with populist politics.⁶ However, to my mind, it is the very dangers of populist politics that make empathy even more necessary. I, for one, am glad that political officials are being asked to empathize with citizens. The alternative seems far worse.

Notes

¹ Stephen G. Morris, “Empathy and the Liberal-Conservative Political Divide in the U.S.,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2020), p. 8. This paper along with Morris, “Empathy on Trial: A Response to its Critics,” Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2019), pp. 508–31 provides an effective and pointed overview of the scholarly literature on politics and empathy.

² Katelin H.S. Neufeld et al., “‘The More You Know’: Critical Historical Knowledge About Indigena Residential Schools Increases Non-Indigenous Canadians Empathy for Indigenous People,” Political Psychology, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2022), pp. 617–33.

³ Joseph Heath, The Myth of Shared Values in Canada, the 2003 John L. Manion Lecture (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 2003), p. 35.

⁴ Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Anansi, 2007), and Dominique Clément, Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movements and Social Change, 1937–82 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).

⁵ Laurel Lewey, Louis J. Richard and Linda M. Turner, New Brunswick before the Equal Opportunity Program: History through a Social Work Lens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), ch. 10.

⁶ One of the points Stephen Morris notes is that levels of empathy differ according to family socialization. In the United States, self-defined liberals are far more likely to teach their children that empathy should guide their interaction with others than conservatives. But, a majority of conservatives still believe that learning to empathize is vital for children.