The Right Fight:Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma

Richard Wilbur is author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and H.H.
Stevens, 1878–1973, and co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy
Weirmen’s Story. His latest book is Horse-Drawn Carriages and Sleighs:
Elegant Vehicles from New England and New Bruns

Over the past few decades, New Brunswick has been a microcosm of how
English–French relations in Canada play out on the political front.
Journalist Jacques Poitras has been covering New Brunswick politics
since 1995 as the CBC Radio provincial affairs reporter. In this
detailed and illuminating account, he takes us back to the Hatfield era
(1970–1987) to establish how Conservative support was almost fatally
weakened by the rise of a anti-French single-issue party called the
Confederation of Regions Party (CoR), which was made up of hard-core
WASPs.

Despite the book’s title, New Brunswick’s youngest-ever premier
doesn’t enter the story until page 233. Poitras’s reasoning is
logical. He had to describe just how far down the Conservative Party had
gone and especially how it had lost the French support so carefully
built up during the Hatfield years, only to be obliterated in the total
Liberal sweep of the McKenna forces in 1987. The bilingual and
bicultural Bernard Lord, “the perfect candidate” as Poitras aptly
describes him, was able to unite what most considered a mortally wounded
party and lead it to a surprising victory in 1999. Lord’s cautious,
middle-of-the-road approach and the fact he had entered the fray with no
personal political baggage clearly swayed many English voters to
overcome their anti-French bias, while French constituencies (especially
in the Acadian north) also decided to support him.

Writing a political story that is still unfolding in the case of Lord
himself is no easy task, but Poitras’s skilful use of both archival
and interview material leaves this reviewer hoping that he will have the
time and opportunity to produce a sequel.