N.B.: Hope restored
Published Monday August 4th, 2008
Canada can trace its origins to the arrival of explorer Samuel de Champlain, 404 years ago this summer. New Brunswick is where Canada began - the battleground of two European empires and the meeting place of many cultures.
This is more than an historical footnote. People feel they belong in New Brunswick. Long-time residents and recent immigrants alike can attest that life just doesn't feel the same in other provinces.
Here, the Canadian experiment in nation-building has been more successful at producing a bilingual and multicultural society.
Travelling around New Brunswick, it is easy to see what is working. The economy is on the upswing. Expatriates are coming home to take on new jobs.
The provincial government is reaching out to immigrants, and for the first time in years, New Brunswick is attracting new residents.
Today is a day to celebrate these opportunities and the bedrock on which they are founded - a province of many voices, which allows people to be what they wish to be.
Two centuries ago, New Brunswick's founders adopted the phrase "spem reduxit" as the provincial motto. It means "hope was restored," and that has been the story of New Brunswick from the beginning.
The Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy peoples survived warfare, the loss of traditional lands and attempts at assimilation to remain in this place.
The Acadian settlers who followed Champlain endured deportation and exile, or lived the lives of fugitives, to return to this place. The British Loyalists arrived as refugees and lived in tents on Saint John's rocky shore until they could build new homes in this place. To these founding peoples, the hope of a new beginning was worth dying for.
Hope prevailing over hardship became the common experience of later immigrants, from the famine Irish, Scottish settlers and Dutch farmers to more recent arrivals from Europe, Asia and the Americas.
People once divided by nationality or language have been united by their common commitment to community values and profound determination to build better lives in this place.
New Brunswick also has been shaped by its geography. Bordered by two bays and the Northumberland Strait and crossed by a network of rivers, New Brunswick became both an inroad and an outport, a place of small, close-knit settlements and growing trans-Atlantic trade. The territory that began as Acadie remained a virtual frontier for nearly two centuries as the border between the Canadas, Nova Scotia and Massachusetts shifted. Little wonder it produced a different set of values - the entrepreneurialism of Acadian and New England traders, mingled with the British expectation of public order and good government.
New Brunswickers have always been free traders and optimistic survivors - and what has survived with us is more than quaint architecture and beautiful views. Through good times and hard times and good times again, the fundamental values on which this province's communities were founded have not changed.
Visitors can see these values expressed in a hundred different ways, from the joyous noise and spectacle of an Acadian Tintamarre to the streets of Saint John, where drivers still stop their cars in respect as funeral processions pass by. While keeping pace with others in an energetic, high-tech, knowledge-driven world, New Brunswickers have not lost sight of human values. That is this province's strength and one source of its appeal to new immigrants.
The assumption in other parts of Canada seems to be that New Brunswick is home by default, and that New Brunswickers would rather be where great things are happening - as if great things weren't happening here.
New Brunswickers know better. Great things are happening, and the majority of this province's residents want to be right here, right now, where the action is.
The reason why can be glimpsed in the kind of experiences countless New Brunswickers are having this holiday weekend.
On a hot summer evening when friends and neighbours are gathered outside with drinks and bugspray, one or two people might start singing together, just for fun. Then, quietly and efficiently, someone comes in, adding a voice that somehow transforms the impromptu performance into something memorable and authentic.
That easy and compelling harmony is the secret of this province's success.
New Brunswick is the blend of voices that makes music out of the song of Canada.
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