A Practical Education in Politics: New Brunswick’s Legislative Internship Program
Programs like the New Brunswick Legislative Internship Program (NBLIP) are justified largely in terms of job-seeking – turning universities into high-end vocational colleges. The point of a B.A., in this view, is a ticket to a good job and the university administration promotes the idea that applicants get value for money. But the NBLIP is not simply concerned with employment opportunities. Rather, it is designed so participants learn what is involved in a good, proper and accurate education in politics and government. In this article, the author provides an account of the effort involved in establishing a legislative internship program for New Brunswick and why an internship’s greatest purpose is to deepen a student’s understanding of his or her subject, namely politics and government. He also offers some suggestions for other people who may be interested in starting an internship program elsewhere.
Thomas M.J. Bateman
Thomas M.J. Bateman is a professor and chair of the Political Science Department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.
The Study of Politics
A colleague of mine had a cartoon on his door for many years. A man is applying for a job. The human resources officer asks, “Do you have any qualifications?” His answer: “I have a PhD in political science.” The HR officer replies, “I take it that’s a no?”
This captures our contemporary dilemma. A degree in political science is, as we say, “useless”; it will not get you gainful employment. In this sense, the political science conundrum is that of the liberal arts in general. In a world increasingly dominated by highly technical, mathematicized work, a general education in the humanities is useless. Disciplines studying humans have a chance only to the extent they adopt the mathematicized methods facilitating knowledge for the sake of control, and thus exploitation for commercial gain. George Grant examined this turn a long time ago.
As this view of the purpose of the liberal arts has taken hold, university administrators have feverishly tried to assure parents that their children’s bachelor’s degrees will in fact avail them a comfortable living. “Look,” they plead, “B.A.s eventually make more than those with only high school education. A B.A. opens doors to advanced professional degrees and even better incomes. CEOs once were philosophy students. Doctors once studied literature.” Arts students learn “critical thinking skills” and the ability to communicate. These are universal skills readily transferrable to other realms of endeavour and money-making.
Meanwhile, in a political science classroom, professors are in the grip of a paradox. They face students with little knowledge of politics as a practical activity and indeed little knowledge of history to support the myriad particulars that comprise the study of politics. There is a real sense that incoming students are too young, lacking the exposure to people, events, life, and discord that stimulate an appreciation of the possibilities and – more importantly – the limits of politics. Indeed, a surprisingly large number of undergraduate students in political science are essentially uninterested in politics. They do not read the news or political biographies, follow big crises and events, talk about political things with their friends, take up the opportunities afforded them to engage their elected representatives, and participate in any number of public policy processes.
The message many students get from their professors is that the actual practices and particularities of politics are not as important as the theoretical perspectives a student needs to analyze and understand politics. Similarly, for many English professors, reading literature is not nearly as valuable as learning the critical theories that are to be brought to the reading of literature. I have sat in many sessions at academic conferences in which the author of a paper begins by setting out his or her “theoretical perspective” and then proceeds to apply it to a political phenomenon of his or her choice.
This seems to me to put the cart before the horse. Once upon a time, the horse pulled the cart. Aristotle’s Politics subtly combines a sense of the best regime with a steady attention to particulars and what is attainable and sustainable, not simply what is ideal. As he puts it in Book IV, “We have to study not only the best constitution, but also the one which is practicable, and likewise the one which is easiest to work and most suitable to cities generally.” He followed a fundamentally comparative method, examining extant cases and thereby formulating generalizations.
How did we go off the rails? Isaiah Berlin suggests that the prominence and success of the natural sciences from Francis Bacon onward have tempted scholars to apply the same methods to the human things, hoping for the same outcomes of knowledge and control. Imagine a society whose movements were as predictable as those of the planets, or as those of bodily organs under the influence of this or that food or trauma. Writes Berlin:
Messianic preachers – prophets – such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, Marx, Spengler, historically-minded theological thinkers from Bossuet to Toynbee, the popularizers of Darwin, the adapters of this or that dominant school of sociology or psychology – all have attempted to step into the breach caused by the failure of eighteenth-century philosophers to construct a proper, successful science of society. Each of these new nineteenth-century apostles laid some claim to exclusive possession of the truth. What they all have in common is the belief in one great universal pattern, and one unique method of apprehending it, knowledge of which would have saved statesmen many an error, and humanity many a hideous tragedy.1
Of course, if the scientists know the inner laws of society, why should they merely advise the statesman? Why should they not themselves rule? The answer for Berlin comes from our experience. Rule by means of scientific “laws” known to an elite means the death of politics and the rise of totalitarian rule.
Berlin’s main point is that politicians – the good ones, the ones we once called statesmen – “grasp the unique combination of characteristics that constitute this particular situation – this and no other.” They are keenly sensitive to the particulars of political life and refrain from imposing on the social world a homogenized pattern touted by some scientific account, bogus or otherwise. They have a capacity for synthesis above that of analysis, “for knowledge in the sense in which trainers know their animals, or parents their children, or conductors their orchestras, as opposed to that in which chemists know the contents of their test tubes, or mathematicians know the rules that their symbols obey.”2 This corroborates Aristotle’s account that polities are necessarily pluralistic, not homogeneous; if they were not, they would be families or hellish gulags, not political communities. In Bacon’s New Atlantis, the scientific elites run the well-ordered society, but this technocracy is totalitarian: there is no freedom, no questioning of the direction of society, no politics.
I stand with Bernard Crick, for whom politics is not some epiphenomenon of class warfare or patriarchy or some other ideological totalism. It is its own (limited) human activity, in which people are confronted with the freedom of others, the pressing reality of scarcity, constraints, trade-offs, and opportunity costs. It is the activity in which basic pluralities and particularities have to be managed, not crushed. It is the realm of accommodation, compromise, abeyance, and adjustment – at once moral and practical.3
Graham Steele was a Nova Scotia MLA and cabinet minister for many years. Since leaving active politics he has written books brimming with the gritty realism born of the daily practical realities of representing people in the Assembly and in government. His books are light on “theory” but heavy on the conflicting pressures on MLAs who have little time, too few resources, too many demands, and sky-high expectations imposed them from different quarters.4 His books are about the real world of democratic politics and are essential reading for any student of politics.
Reading is good and necessary. Lectures can be very illuminating. We all know the transformative effect teachers can have on students. But a practical immersion experience can also be invaluable. Students exposed to the practical operation of the machinery of government will observe:
the frailties of human nature and the alacrity with which arguments of justice are conflated with arguments of interest;
how processes interact with substance to influence and sometimes steer policy results;
how the political executive relates to the legislative function and how party ties them so closely together in our version of parliamentarism;
how complex and sometimes disappointing are the mechanisms of political accountability;
the use and abuse of evidence in public policy making;
relatedly, how, “[a]s a theatre of illusion, politics does not reveal its meanings to the careless eye”;5
how the election cycle affects public policy making;
how the realities of scarcity, trade-offs, and opportunity cost constrain decisions and confound settled worldviews;
how history and other examples of path dependency limit choices and define the possible in the art of politics;
how the media represent, simplify, and sometimes mislead in their accounts of the working of the political process; and
how politics is local – about persons, personalities, grudges, hopes, prejudices, fears, and visions.
This, I suggest, is the best argument for a legislative internship. It exposes students to the real, human workings of the political and governmental order. Students are exposed to all the human frailties and all the incongruencies that are the stuff of even decent political life. They are immersed in the particular details of issues and problems and realize there is no obvious “scientific” solution. They observe the many forces pulling on an MLA or a committee. They see the many forms of power exerted and resisted. And they see both the dignifying and the unseemly in politics.
Legislative Internships in Canada
My acquaintance with LIPs began when I applied to the Alberta LIP in 1984, as I was completing my B.A in Political Science at the University of Calgary. The Program was a welcome chance for me to postpone the crisis of deciding what I was to do with myself after graduation.
The Alberta LIP was operated out of the Speaker’s office and involved eight interns working for 10 months, September to June. Admission was by means of a competition and applicants were selected by a large committee composed of the Speaker, MLAs, and professors of political science from around the province. Applicants had to be graduates of Alberta universities. Interns worked full-time, were paid a stipend, and spent five months in the government caucus and five in one of the two small opposition caucuses. At that time 75/79 seats were held by the Progressives Conservatives under Peter Lougheed; two were held by New Democrats (one of them Grant Notley who died in a plane crash in October 1984), and two were held by former Social Credit MLAs, now Independents, but in the process of forming themselves into a new party called the Representative Party of Alberta. A draw determined what interns went where and when.
The Alberta LIP was structured to be rigorously non-partisan and interns signed the standard civil service oath of secrecy. It was also impressed upon us that the continuation of the Program depended on absolute discretion, made all the more important because interns would be working for two caucuses throughout their terms.
I drew the two Independents for the fall and spent the winter and spring in the government caucus. The Independent MLAs were experienced MLAs but one of them saw his role as distinctly part-time. It meant that the interns could do as much work as they wished and could even suggest projects. I recall writing questions for Question Period and noting with some satisfaction that some of them concerning energy prices and policy making their way onto the evening TV news.
The Executive Director of the caucus doubled as coordinator of the nascent Representative Party and spent most of his time gearing up for a founding convention in late fall 1984. He was a neophyte and I recall seeing on his desk books about American politics and the mechanics of political organizing. He was not clear on the non-partisan character of the LIP and my fellow intern and I were asked a number of times to do work of a partisan character, which we had to refuse. We did attend the founding convention (and other conventions of other parties) but only as observers. Unavoidably, I learned a lot about the seedier, cynical side of democratic politics and how things are often not as they appear. I recall the aphorism associated with Churchill: those who love sausages and the law should watch neither being made. But in fact, it is highly instructive to watch sausage-making. One gains new perspective on the product.
While on the government side, I was often given complicated constituency assignments, mainly researching constituents’ ideas for policy changes and drafting responses for the MLA to send to the constituents. I recall one complex proposal for coal gasification, about which I knew precisely nothing. The meant many hours at the University of Alberta libraries.
By and large, government MLAs made little use of interns. The Government Research Office had full-time experienced staff to do all that we might do. Interns on the government side actually shared a floor with those research staff. They helped us but could not and did not pass any work our way. Sometimes a PC MLA would take on an intern. A Calgary MLA had me do a fair bit of work for her. Harry Alger who represented a riding south of Calgary, had me accompany him on swings through his riding, and regaled me with stories.
I do not have a full picture of the funding of Alberta’s Program but I do know that in addition to some public moneys, a major benefactor was Benson & Hedges, a major tobacco company. It was a different time. Funding was generous enough to support two trips: one week in Ottawa to attend a variety of meetings and events; and a trip to the Colorado State Capitol for an immersion into American state level politics and government. In Denver we met counterparts who were younger, more immature, and much more given to fun and drinking than to policy work.
In all, the Alberta Internship Program was an excellent experience. It was discontinued in the early 1990s, I believe, and I had heard that the reasons were linked to government spending restraint. There are unconfirmed reports that at some point an intern did breach the confidentiality rule. If so, this itself would have dealt a severe blow to the Program. Internship programs like Alberta’s depend upon MLAs’ complete trust in the non-partisanship and discretion of participants. As it is, MLAs often choose not to share any work with interns. Interns need to know that the integrity and longevity of a programs depends crucially on their own comportment.
Other extant programs have a lot in common with Alberta’s. Major programs in Ottawa (the Parliamentary Internship program), Ontario, BC, Quebec, and Manitoba operate on the non-partisan principle and are intended preeminently as an educational experience for participants. They take in 5-12 interns, generally for 10 months, and offer stipends averaging $36,000 on an annualized basis. Selection is competitive. However, unlike Alberta’s program, several do not incorporate the principle of alternation. In the Parliamentary Internship Program, administered by the CPSA, interns work for one government MP and then for one opposition MP. Funds are all external,6 though Parliament provides some in-kind support. The Ontario program is very similar. Quebec maintains the same MNA alternation principle.
In Manitoba, interns are assigned for the duration of the program to a caucus and are employees of the Assembly. British Columbia’s Program is a six-month experience with a highly structured set of assignments: a four-week placement in a ministry or statutory office under the direction of an assigned mentor; a placement in a political party caucus at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, coinciding with the Legislature’s spring session; and one or two one-week placements in an MLA’s constituency office. Applicants can be graduates or in the process of completing a bachelor’s degree.7
The above are the major non-partisan internships. Other programs in some jurisdictions involve students in public service assignments under the direction of senior public servants. Sometimes these are the initiative of governments themselves as recruitment vehicles; others, like one I launched at St. Thomas University in January 2022,8 are academic initiatives that provide academic credit for internship placements as a form of experiential learning.
Major political parties operate internships at the federal level as mechanisms to introduce young partisans to parliamentary politics and the policy process. In addition, for years third parties and foreign governments have sponsored internships, particularly at the parliamentary level. These initiatives have been considered a form of soft-power diplomacy, a highly oblique assertion of influence. Examples are the Canada-Poland Youth Internship, Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program, the Canadian Parliamentary friends of Tibet Internship, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Parliamentary Internship Program.9 Some of these programs have recently been wound down, in part because the federal Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner issued an opinion in 2018 declaring that such internships constitute gifts to MPs. Mario Dion notes in his advisory opinion that internship services provided to MPs are gifts and are banned if they create a reasonable impression that political influence is being exerted by means of internship services.10
The New Brunswick Experience
I moved to New Brunswick in 2003 to take up a position in Political Science at St Thomas University. After two years or so I began to think about an internship program for this province and learned that a professor at the University of New Brunswick had proposed such a thing in the early 2000s, to no avail. That proposal, generated with the support of a consortium of faculty members from across New Brunswick, was similar to the models operating in other Canadian jurisdictions. It proposed a seven-month program involving four graduates (or senior undergraduates) of New Brunswick universities. Each intern would be assigned to a government MLA for three months and then to an opposition MLA for another three months. Funding would come from the Legislative Assembly budget. I made a few tweaks based on my Alberta experience and made presentations to some MLAs and then to the Assembly’s Legislative Administration Committee. My proposal was for five to 10 graduates of New Brunswick universities to work for 10 months in a program operated out of the Speaker’s Office for a stipend. Interns would alternate between government and opposition.
It was an ambitious proposal developed by a person who was new to New Brunswick’s political and legislative environment. It received a respectful hearing but no action. Unavailability of public funding was commonly cited as the chief obstacle. I persisted for a few years, sometimes with the help of a colleague from UNB-Fredericton, but I did not involve other universities at this point. In the meantime, New Brunswick politics became more interesting: we had the province’s first one-term government – Shawn Graham’s Liberal government from 2006-2010. Another one-term government succeeded it, then another. Some constituency electoral races were tight three- or four-way splits. David Coon of the Greens was elected in a squeaker in 2014. Two Greens were added in 2018. Three People’s Alliance candidates were also elected in the latter year. It was a minority Assembly. The steady two-party system which (with a few blips) prevailed in the province for generations was breaking down. It seemed conditions were becoming more favourable for a revived proposal. I began knocking on doors again in the years of the Brain Gallant government, from 2014-2018.
Critically, around this time the provincial government promoted an experiential learning initiative in which financial and other support was made available to universities to foster practical or experiential opportunities to students thought to be otherwise hopelessly unprepared for the so-called real world upon graduation.11 The provincial government had absorbed the view that university education is mainly about preparation for the world of work and economic progress. Although I did not share this employment-focused view, I did think experiential education was good because I had benefitted from my own internship experience and had been promoting the same for others. I was now presented with a new institutional vehicle through which an internship could be created.
The FutureNB initiative was for current New Brunswick university students so I had to modify my proposal to suit a current student, not a graduate. I developed a pilot program involving one student and had an excellent candidate recommended to me by a colleague. I made a pitch for a modest pilot to the Clerk, Speaker, and then Legislative Administration Committee. The proposal was for one student to work on a strictly non-partisan basis for any MLA of any stripe who wanted him to do some work. There was to be no formal assignment to a caucus or MLA and no alternation. The intern himself would drum up business. He would work from late January 2020 to late May of the same year. His stipend would be paid out of St. Thomas University funds, but with moneys transferred through FutureNB’s experiential learning program.
I must also mention the support and advocacy of an insider. Kim Adair-Macpherson was Auditor-General of New Brunswick throughout this period and years before had asked me to sit on her expert advisory committee (along with two others, a former senior public servant and a former auditor general). As I thought through the pilot LIP, I was concerned about the new intern having enough work to do for MLAs, especially early in the five-month term. What if no MLA gave him any work? The Auditor General proved to be very helpful. Not only did she use opportunities to discuss this pilot with MLAs; not only did she afford me space in a large MLA orientation session on the Public Accounts Committee process in 2019 to speak to MLAs about the program; she also committed to giving a new intern work in her office and possibly with the Public Accounts Committee. She also touted the LIP pilot to other Legislative Officers. She was an invaluable proponent, able to deploy her reputation for non-partisanship and her considerable credibility on behalf of this program.
The intern, Erickson Miranda, did very well. He learned a lot and brought the program good standing among MLAs. As I had anticipated, most of his work was for opposition MLAs, and particularly for the Greens. Erickson turned out to be the perfect intern for the pilot. He was an international student from Nicaragua, still registered as a STU student, but largely finished his studies by January 2020, and keen to stay in Canada. He was able to work full-time and still comply with FutureNB requirements that participants be registered university students.
After the successful conclusion of the pilot, it was relatively easy to push for a second iteration, this time with two interns. In 2020, I pulled in colleagues from Université de Moncton, Mount Allison, and both campuses of UNB. The Speaker’s Office assigned the Legislative Librarian to help administer the program from the Assembly’s end. The six of us formed a steering committee to arrange for recruitment of two interns. Ads attracted about 15 applications and two excellent candidates were selected by early January 2021. Each would work for 20 hours per week, combining the LIP duties with other course work. Bilingualism was not set as a qualification but rather an asset. It turned out that the two top candidates also happened to be fluently bilingual.
This iteration also went very well. As with the first pilot, the two interns in 2021 did most of their work for opposition MLAs as well as for Legislative Officers and the Public Accounts Committee.
An important note needs to be taken of the COVID-19 effect. Part of the 2020 pilot and all of the 2021 iteration unfolded during the pandemic. Erickson made the transition along with other MLAs and staff at the Legislature and completed his work. In 2021, Sue Duguay and Ian Richardson did all of their work remotely. This turned out to be something of a blessing in the sense that it made it much easier for a student studying outside of Fredericton to undertake a 20 hour/week internship. Accessibility to students outside of the capital was eased immeasurably. While the interns missed the experience of being in the fray in the Assembly and its offices, they still had a fine experience of the machinery and flow of legislative politics. Undoubtedly, a remote, web-based component will be part of all work and the internship for the foreseeable future. In the 2022 running of the Program, both interns performed tasks for MLAs, Legislative Officers such as the Ombud, standing committees of the Assembly such as the Public Accounts Committee, select committees such as the one on Accessibility, the Office the Legislative Assembly, and the Legislative Library. Most of this work was done remotely.
Initiating an Internship Program
This article is a reflection on my experience in getting a legislative internship program off the ground. We, in New Brunswick, are not there yet, but I think we are on track to have a regular, institutionalized program in place that will put this province in the ranks of other jurisdictions with good permanent programs that offer students an excellent experience to complement their university studies in politics and government.
Here are some suggestions for others who may be thing of initiating similar programs in their own provinces or territories:
Start small. It is easier to build on something modest than to implement a massive undertaking. Internships require building of trust. This is done one step at a time. My earlier proposals failed in part because they were too ambitious.
Mobilize contacts on the inside. I made a lot of cold calls in my promotion of the internship, but at least as effective were discussions I had with people I have known for some time. The Auditor-General is the best example, but I had met other MLAs in a variety of other contexts – from invitations to my classes, to old-timers hockey. The Minister of Post-Secondary Education was a champion from the moment I met with him and his senior staff. Champions on the inside multiplied my influence from the outside.
Be attentive to context. No two internship programs are exactly alike. Transplanting the Alberta program into New Brunswick did not work and would not work. This province is small and its politics have historically been very tribal. The idea of ‘non-partisan’ interns was greeted with puzzlement and suspicion. Further, funding limits dictate the size and structure of a program. Money will no longer come from external entities such as tobacco companies, for example. The trick is to read the local situation and craft a program that fits. A contextual factor that worked well for the program is that successive provincial governments have been bent on population retention and public service renewal. This made the case for the internship easier to make.
Be flexible. This is related to point 3. I adjusted the proposals as new limits and opportunities became apparent. For example, I was committed to a post-graduate experience that would realistically need to be a 10-month program to attract participants. But that would require a lot of money and raised to real possibility that there simply would not be enough work for interns to do. The Legislature sits only for a few weeks in the fall and MLAs are not often around. Another example is the switch to remote work during COVID-19. This makes a bigger province-wide program for senior students suddenly very viable. Who would have guessed?
Get good participants. The most well-designed program is for naught if the participants do it discredit. It is important that participants are mature, discreet, and intellectually able. They need to be good communicators and able to interact and work with all sorts of people occupying all sorts of offices. Sometimes good applicants are reluctant to apply. I have sought out good students and encouraged them to apply. This is all part of creating an attractive, respected, and prestigious program.
Make the program attractive to Government backbenchers. Government MLAs have access to research services. They are also responsive to the wants and needs of the cabinet and premier. They are reluctant to strike out independently by having people outside the tribe do research. This is just a feature of our form of parliamentary government. Internship programs can chip away at this reluctance but it takes time and the establishment of trust and integrity. This is why good participants are so important.
Think about questions of representation. New Brunswick is Canada’s only officially bilingual province and language is a key representational issue. We did not want to exclude applicants who are unilingual. Yet bilingualism is clearly an asset in the work of an intern. So we have bilingualism as an asset that operates in an applicants’ favour. Other key representational questions will arise in other contexts.
Figure out the money question. Internships of any appreciable duration provide a stipend to participants. This attracts good applicants and recognizes the real work they do for MLAs and other personnel. There may also be administrative costs. Many programs in Canada attract external funding or a combination of public and external. Some programs are entirely publicly funded. Finding adequate and stable funding is obviously important. This is a good reason for starting small and building up. External benefactors must understand that funding buys them no policy influence beyond good will and perhaps an image of a good corporate citizen.
Get lasting support from your department, your university, and from others in your jurisdiction. Programs that are sustained by the heroic efforts of one person will die with that person. The objective is to grow a program so that it becomes an institution that operates beyond the efforts of any one particular person or small group.
Most importantly, keep the interns at the centre of it all. The internship program is all about giving participants a rich, challenging, formative, and memorable experience in government from a unique vantage point. Their educational experience must be at the heart of all planning and execution.
Conclusion
It is too soon to say that the New Brunswick Legislative Internship Program has achieved permanence as an institution in the Assembly and in the province’s higher education environment. It remains small and its funding is dependent on the continuation of an experiential learning program operated by the provincial department of Post-Secondary Education Training and Labour. A new government, new fiscal challenges, and new priorities can change everything. Nonetheless, the Program is on its way.
While experiential learning initiatives can be shallow, formulaic, and sterile, adding little to a student’s intellectual formation, some can be valuable. My own experience and that of other interns suggests that legislative internship programs can operate as excellent complements to a university education in politics and government. They can deepen a participant’s understanding politics as a frustrating, necessary, and dignifying human activity.
Notes
1. Isaiah Berlin, “On Political Judgment” New York Review of Books. (October 3, 1996), 26.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics. 2nd ed. (Markham: Penguin, 1964).
4. Graham Steele, What I Learned About Politics: Inside the Rise – and Collapse – of Nova Scotia’s NDP Government. (Halifax: Nimbus, 2014); and The Effective Citizen: How to Make Politicians Work for You. (Halifax: Nimbus, 2017).
5. Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5-6. Politicians operate on the basis of two sets of reasons: those used to decide upon a policy, and those used to defend that policy. There is usually a gap. Ibid., 63.
6. The PIP’s list of benefactors is long and impressive, including sources like CN, Bombardier, the big banks, Rogers, and Unifor.
7. I am grateful for data supplied me by Matthew Creswick, Parliamentary Education Researcher, Parliamentary Education Office, Legislative Assembly of British Columbia.
8. I set up a senior level “special topics” course in which eight students each spent ten hours per week working under the mentorship of a DM or ADM in a department of the NB government working on policy files.
9. Paul E.J. Thomas, “Getting People on the Inside? The Expansion of Externally-Supported Internship Programs at the Canadian Parliament” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (2018).
10. Mario Dion, “Gifts or other benefits to Members – Services of interns provided free of charge” (Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, October, 2018). Welcome to the Office (parl.gc.ca). My thanks to Paul Thomas for bringing this to my attention.
11. See the provincial government’s Future NB initiative: Future NB (futurenewbrunswick.ca)