For the Greens, perhaps, the stakes are highest, with the party hoping to build upon the 2019 win and blossoming support at the provincial level.
“But a couple of things happened,” said Wright.
Also, the provincial Greens had begun to make a breakthrough.
“Nothing else matters if we don’t have health care,” she said.
“I’m a constitutional law professor and floor crossing just strikes me as fundamentally anti-democratic,” said O’Byrne.
But, said O’Byrne, most of the people she’s talking to aren’t dwelling on the party switch.
Riding those issues to Ottawa is a more difficult task than it might have been a few years ago, though.
While the Green party is unlikely to form a government, or the Opposition, O’Byrne said, there are still ways to put some of those plans on governmental agendas.
What does need to change, she said — and here she’s in alignment with the other Fredericton candidates — is the way Canada Health Transfer funds are doled out on a per-capita basis.
“We are the most aging population, we are the most unhealthy population and the most overweight population in the country,” she said.