St. Thomas University campus in Fredericton. Photo courtesy St. Thomas University/Facebook.

In a development that left our campuses and those of our colleagues across the province—indeed, the country—in disbelief, it has been revealed that Susan Holt’s Liberal government in New Brunswick is contemplating slashing 10 percent of the province’s higher education budget while simultaneously freezing tuition.

It is a move that can only be characterized as a major assault on some of the most venerable institutions on the continent, and one the government cannot claim to have a mandate to enact, given it was nowhere to be seen in its election platform.

Stunning proposals also include privatizing Mount Allison University and merging—which is to say subsuming—St. Thomas University into the University of New Brunswick.

The cuts alone would amount to as much as $50 million from the budget of the province’s four universities, manufacturing a needless crisis.

This issue is not purely economic. Despite being routinely ignored—colloquially deemed “the drive-through province”—New Brunswick is an important territory both to Canada and to the world. For the country’s third-smallest province, New Brunswick business leaders have ranked among the country’s richest. The province is also an important site of resource extraction, both today and in the past. Yet the wealth generated there has never been fairly shared with the province’s residents.

The........

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