Dominic Cardy has resigned as New Brunswick’s minister of education and early childhood growth.
Cardy introduced in a tweet that he was quitting the cupboard of Premier Blaine Higgs however would keep on as a Progressive Conservative MLA for Fredericton West-Hanwell.
In a scorching resignation letter to Higgs, Cardy slammed the premier’s management fashion, saying “change requires care, not a wrecking ball” and a few reforms to French second-language education “will stall due to your micromanagement.”
“You can not change deadlines on massive methods primarily based in your emotional state, with out undermining the standard of the work, or the morale of your group,” the letter mentioned.
“Government is just not the identical as constructing oil tankers,” Cardy wrote, apparently referring to the premier’s earlier profession with Irving Oil.
He additionally accuses Higgs of “selecting to yell ‘knowledge my ass’ at a senior civil servant” as a result of he did not like what the division’s numbers confirmed.
“That was the top of your political mission in my eyes: If you reject proof since you dislike it then you do not imagine in proof,” he wrote.
Cardy additionally mentioned Higgs’s abolition of partly elected regional well being authority boards represented “a gradual consolidation of energy in your arms” and that he was attempting to delay or undermine reconciliation between language communities and with Indigenous individuals.
Cardy didn’t instantly reply to a request for an interview.
The resignation letter mentioned Higgs has a plan to “abolish” French immersion by September 2023, one thing that was really helpful by an unbiased evaluate of this system earlier this yr.
Cardy mentioned eliminating this system was not within the authorities’s election platform or throne speech and has not been accepted by the PC cupboard or caucus.
Eliminating it “would place big stress on the education system and injury the education of our province’s anglophone younger individuals,” he wrote.
Liberal Leader Susan Holt mentioned the critique in Cardy’s letter “appears to replicate what we have been listening to from others and displays a number of the considerations we have had about this authorities and their strategy to management.”
Cardy, the previous chief of the New Brunswick NDP, joined the PCs in 2017 as an adviser to Higgs and ran for the Tories within the 2018 election.
At the time Cardy switched events, Higgs mentioned they have been “immediately aligned on so many points” however acknowledged they’d not see eye-to-eye on every part.
“I would like people who find themselves going to deliver concepts, and are going to deliver motion, into the group,” Higgs mentioned.
“We can work by means of any minor points that come up, as a result of I do it every single day with everybody.”
In 2020, Cardy failed to win sufficient assist from the PC caucus to get a bill handed that might have eradicated philosophical and non secular exemptions from the obligatory vaccination coverage for varsity kids.
And final yr, he criticised the federal government’s ban on provincial officers delivering Indigenous land acknowledgements at public occasions, saying it “added an pointless battle that’s creating confusion and justifiable anger towards our authorities.”
Cardy has additionally been a vocal supporter of Centre Ice Canadians, a bunch of reasonable conservatives who’ve criticized federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
The six chiefs of the Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick issued a press release Thursday calling on different PC ministers to be a part of Cardy in resigning.
“It is extra evident than ever that your chief is just not working inside the basic ideas of fine governance, nor the goals and ideas of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick,” the assertion mentioned.
“Stop standing by and permitting a single individual to conduct such dangerous practices. Indigenous individuals, and New Brunswickers, are watching intently and applauding the winds of change.”