The Liberals are shedding support and the Progressive Conservatives aren’t collecting it. On October 17, members get to decide why.

On October 17, some 5,632 New Brunswickers will decide who leads the Progressive Conservative Party into the 2028 election. That is under one per cent of the provincial electorate. It may also be the most consequential decision anyone here makes about who forms the next government.

The ballot has two names on it: Daniel Allain, the former Moncton East MLA, and Don Monahan, the rookie MLA for Arcadia-Butternut Valley-Maple Hills. But the argument underneath the ballot is older and louder than either man, and anyone who reads a New Brunswick political comment section or social media knows what it is. One side calls itself Conservative. The other calls itself Progressive Conservative. Increasingly, they do not appear to believe they belong in the same party.

The endorsement lists tell the story better than any platform document. Allain has seven sitting MLAs, a former premier in David Alward, and something close to thirty former MLAs — the party’s institutional memory, more or less intact. Monahan has six sitting MLAs, including former People’s Alliance leader Kris Austin, and the endorsement of Blaine Higgs. The caucus is split 7–6. The last two PC premiers are on opposite sides. This is not a leadership race so much as an unresolved argument that has finally been given a ballot box.

What actually happened in 2024

The Conservative wing’s reading of 2024 is that the party lost because it was mushy — insufficiently clear, insufficiently willing to fight. The Progressive wing’s reading is that Higgs drifted right, particularly on Policy 713, and moderate New Brunswickers left. The vote counts favour the second reading, and not narrowly.

In 2020, Higgs won a majority with 39.3 per cent. The People’s Alliance took another 9.2 per cent. Then Austin and Michelle Conroy crossed to the PCs in 2022, folding that vote into the tent — exactly the consolidation the party’s right flank had wanted for a decade. By October 2024, the Alliance was down to 0.9 per cent, its voters presumably absorbed. And the PCs finished at 35.0 per cent and sixteen seats.

Add it up: the combined right-of-centre vote fell from roughly 48.5 per cent in 2020 to about 35.9 per cent in 2024. Consolidating the right did not grow the coalition. It shrank it by nearly thirteen points, because whatever the strategy gained on one flank, it lost more than double on the other. Higgs became the first sitting New Brunswick premier since 1987 to lose his own seat. Five cabinet ministers went down with him. Roughly a third of the caucus elected in 2020 had already quit or declined to run again, some citing the party’s direction. Allain himself was removed from cabinet in June 2023 after signing a letter objecting to how Policy 713 was handled and then voting against the government.

Whatever else that was, it was not a party defeated for lack of ideological clarity.

The British Columbia warning

For a preview of the alternative, look west, where the same argument has been running at higher volume. The Conservative Party of British Columbia came within two seats of government in October 2024 — 44 seats, 43.3 per cent, the best conservative result there in nearly a century. What followed was not a government-in-waiting but a demolition. John Rustad was pushed out in December 2025 after twenty of his own caucus called for his exit. Kerry-Lynne Findlay won the 2026 leadership by a narrow margin and does not hold a seat. Twelve MLAs have since left the caucus: two founded OneBC, and five more, including Peter Milobar and Ian Paton, formed a separate centre-right party in September. The Conservative caucus now sits at roughly 28 of 93 seats.

An opposition that spent two years litigating its own identity handed a third term’s worth of breathing room to an NDP government that had been nine-tenths of the way to defeat. Nobody voted for that outcome. It was produced entirely internally.

The Nova Scotia Example

Now look next door, where the same voters produced opposite results five months apart. In November 2024, Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives took 52.5 per cent of the Nova Scotia vote and 43 of 55 seats — a supermajority, with the NDP as official opposition and the Liberals reduced to two. In April 2025, the federal Conservatives took 35.2 per cent in that same province and won exactly one seat out of eleven. That lone MP, Chris d’Entremont, crossed to the Liberals seven months later.

Same electorate, same year, a forty-two-seat gap between the two conservatisms. Nova Scotia is the cleanest evidence available that Atlantic voters have no allergy to conservative government, only to a particular flavour of it. Newfoundland and Labrador said the same thing in October 2025, when Tony Wakeham’s PCs took power, and Prince Edward Island has a PC premier. Three of the four Atlantic provinces are now governed by Progressive Conservatives. New Brunswick is the exception, and also the only one of the four whose PC party is arguing about whether to keep the adjective.

In fairness to the Conservative side, New Brunswick is not Nova Scotia. But the similarities would be dangerous for anyone to ignore.

The number both camps should be reading

Here is the answer, and it should unsettle both camps.

In August, Abacus Data found approval of the Holt government had fallen to 32 per cent from 42 the previous fall. The premier’s net favourability collapsed from +21 to +3. The Liberals shed eight points. New Brunswickers watched a deficit reported at a record $1.4 billion and did not like it.

The Progressive Conservatives gained two points. They sit at 31 per cent — below the share they lost with in 2024. The Greens are up to 14 per cent, and 29 per cent in central New Brunswick. In the francophone north, the PCs are at 22. Just 17 per cent of New Brunswickers approve of how the party is performing as an opposition.

That is the whole problem in one paragraph. Voters are leaving the government. They are not arriving at the Progressive Conservatives. A vacancy is opening and the official opposition is not being treated as the obvious tenant — which is precisely the condition under which a Green party, or eventually an NDP, stops being a protest vote and becomes an alternative. Nova Scotia’s Liberals went from government to two seats in three years. These things move faster than parties expect.

What members are actually voting on

So: can Conservatives win in New Brunswick? The last twenty-four months in Atlantic Canada suggest Progressive Conservatives can win anywhere in this region — provided they do not spend their opposition years fighting about the ideological differences.

The trap for the 5,632 people holding ballots is that the coalition required to win a leadership is not the coalition required to win a province. Roughly 2,800 members were signed up by one campaign and 2,400 by the other. Whoever wins will do so with a mandate from a group smaller than a mid-sized high school, and will then have to go looking for a few hundred thousand voters who owe the party nothing.

Both candidates say they can unite the party. That claim is easy to make and impossible to verify from a stump speech. So there is a better question for members before the ballot goes in the envelope, and it is not which candidate they prefer.

It is which candidate the party can win with on October 18.

British Columbia’s Conservatives never got around to answering that question. They are now three parties, and accordingly facing an uphill battle in the next election to take BC back from the NDP. The question is now whether New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Members learn from British Columbia’s mistakes. We’ll find out on October 17th whether they can come together as a team, or if they will continue to fight each other while the Liberals coast to another term.