Gary Waite: Voters deserve answers on Grasseschi’s views

Article content

Recent reporting in Brunswick News (Andrew Waugh, “PCs aren’t moving further to the right: Higgs,” December 26, 2023; and Paul Bennett, “The ‘Faytene Factor’ – a wild card in New Brunswick education,” January 13, 2024) on Faytene Grasseschi, the provincial PC candidate for Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins, has compelled me to look into this matter.

Curious, I found a copy of Ms. Grasseschi’s 2009 book, Marked: A Generation of Dread Champions Rising to Shift Nations, reading it to get a sense of her religious beliefs that would shape her political decisions.

What I discovered is that she saw herself then as a leader in a “take-over plan” of nations, such as Canada, which would “restore” God’s morality in the country. And what does this boil down to? Reversing Parliament’s 2005 legalization of same-sex marriages, which she feared would eventually lead to marriages between “a man and dog, woman and fish,” and so on (p.69).

To prove that God was angered by this move, as well as by the legalization of abortion in 1988, she links them causally to the decline of the Canadian dollar and economic recessions.

In this Ms. Grasseschi implies the central task of government leaders is to pray and enact God’s preferred social-moral rules, then the economy will prosper. I wonder if this means we have no need for solid economic policies or laws regulating greed in the marketplace? And a big question remains unanswered: who is to define what are God’s “righteous” policies? In her book, the answer seems to be her type of Christian who receives God’s messages through visions.

As a candidate, does Ms. Grasseschi still believe in what she wrote in 2009? To find out, I watched a couple recent online videos of her from 2022 and 2023. She has clearly not renounced her published views on Christian governance. I looked at her election webpage, but discovered not a single reference to her divine mandate to transform Canada into a righteous nation that would, among other things, roll back human rights legislation permitting same-sex marriages and end a woman’s right to choose.

When questioned by reporters about whether she still holds to the views described in her 2009 book, she replied she wrote that “decades ago” and that she can’t be expected to remember any of the details. This is disingenuous. As an author or editor of 10 scholarly books (and dozens of other publications), I can recall the central argument and major details of each of them, including my first from 1990.

As an historian of religion (sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe), I have observed as religious zeal increases, so does the demonizing and dehumanizing of opponents, often leading to violence. In 2009 Ms. Grasseschi wrote as a prophet proclaiming God’s anger toward a socially liberal Canada, targeting especially the LGBTQIS2+ community and those fighting for the right of women to seek an abortion. Does she still believe this?

The voters deserve to know if Ms. Grasseschi remains determined to force her version of “God’s righteousness” on the people of New Brunswick.

Gary Waite, PhD, FRSC, Professor Emeritus, Historical Studies, UNB Fredericton