Good afternoon.
Here in New Brunswick, the provincial election was held on September 7, and the writ dropped on August 17, so that was a 28-day election period.
Our role at Public Health New Brunswick was not to endorse whether an election should proceed; rather, we reviewed the operational plan that was put forward by Elections New Brunswick and provided feedback to ensure agreement with public health guidance. WorkSafeNB also reviewed and approved the operational plan.
Public Health New Brunswick provided guidance to all the parties on how to safely host public gatherings. In terms of other activities commonly conducted during elections—for example, door-to-door canvassing—public health provided feedback on individual party plans submitted by parties, but it never provided direction on what types of activities could or could not occur.
Elections New Brunswick followed public health guidelines to make visiting polling stations and returning offices safe for electors and election workers. Electors were asked to apply hand sanitizer as they entered the building. Frequent cleaning of high-contact areas was conducted at all voting locations. Election workers were required to wear masks or face shields during their interactions with each elector. As much as possible, two-metre physical distancing was practised during an elector's visit, and electors wore a non-medical mask at polling stations when physical distancing could not be maintained. The number of electors allowed in a voting location was limited.
We also had the option to vote by mail. All New Brunswick electors could apply to receive a mail-in ballot, and the Department of Social Development worked with long-term care facilities to ensure that ballots were provided and that there was no unnecessary election-related visitation to these vulnerable settings. We also had advance polling stations.
There are municipalities in New Brunswick. Municipal elections will be held in May 2021, and all the best practices from the September provincial election will be built upon to provide advice for those elections. It is hoped that the favourable conditions in New Brunswick during the past summer months recur in the spring for these elections.
What is known is that New Brunswick is in a good position to contemplate its participation in a federal election, but there are aspects that remain unknown.
New Brunswick has alert-level phases that dictate varying degrees of societal limitations, ranging from yellow to orange to red phases. New Brunswick's red phase is as close as we come to returning to a lockdown.
It's difficult to contemplate a region of New Brunswick being in an orange or a red phase, with public health dictating that contacts be limited to those within a household, while simultaneously gathering for an election. However, I did look up what the New Brunswick Public Health Act says around this type of thing, and I believe that, based on the authority that public health has, limiting a democratic right would be something quite out of the range of the actions we would be taking.
Obviously, it would have to be quite a serious situation for us to ever interfere with the democratic process, so, again, stopping an election probably wouldn't be in the scope or the range of the things we would do. In this particular election that we just had, we were in the yellow phase throughout the province. There were no active outbreaks, and we were fortunate that nothing like that happened during the election period.