The election results will help bring stability to the province, the Agricultural Alliance of N.B. said
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Members of New Brunswick’s ag sector look forward to working with the government following the recent provincial election.
Premier Blaine Higgs won a majority government Monday as the Progressive Conservatives captured 27 out of 49 seats in the election. A party needs 25 seats to earn a majority.
Higgs’s victory comes after two years of leading a minority government.
Monday’s results bring much-needed stability to the province and the sector, said Lisa Ashworth, a dairy farmer and president of the Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick.
“I think all of us will benefit from knowing who is going to be in government for the next four years,” she told Farms.com. “We’ll likely have the same people in the same positions, and that really helps with long-range planning.”
Lisa Ashworth
Ross Wetmore, the provincial ag and fisheries minister, won re-election in his seat in the district of Gagetown-Petitcodiac.
An item Premier Higgs mentioned on the campaign trail was the New Brunswick Food Basket. The program would help the province become more self-sufficient in terms of food production.
The government needs to identify products that New Brunswick can produce well, Ashworth said.
“We have to be realistic about what we can and can’t produce because our climate limits our competitiveness,” she said. “We can do potatoes and we can do blueberries but there are (products) that other people do well, and it wouldn’t make sense for us to try because of how much it would cost.”
It would be cheaper, for example, for New Brunswick to import some fruit from Ontario than to try setting up greenhouses, Ashworth said.
The premier also committed to expanding rural Internet access in the province.
He initially announced his intentions in January to increase rural broadband capabilities in about 70,000 households to 100 Mbps over the next three years and create a provincewide 5G network.
Farmers are increasingly doing business online and need the faster broadband, Ashworth said.
“It’s critical to have reliable Internet,” she said. “In order to be effective as a businessperson, you have to be connected; there is no alternative. A lot of us buy tractors and equipment that have GPS or other features that require a good Internet connection and we simply can’t use them. Getting more people connected and able to conduct business online is so important.”