Maclean’s published an article on New Brunswick days
ago which asked the age old question; can anything save New Brunswick? The
article has been up for days and last time I checked, there are no comments.
This could be because no one reads Maclean’s anymore. As a rule, I know I don’t.
Or it could be that no one cares. Of course, I would be remiss if I discounted
the possibility it could be a combination with a large dose of both.
It wasn’t a bad article – as far as it goes, but there
is one glaring omission. If you want to
discuss New Brunswick and omit any mention of the Irving family and their
generational strangleholds on the province, well, that’s a large part of the
how and why modern New Brunswick is the way it is. If you want to begin the
process of meaningful change it is hard to overlook how the Irving family has
been playing politics and treating the province as their personal fiefdom for
four generations. I’d put it this way; the Irvings are New Brunswick, and the
rest of us, are just tourists.
Take Saint John, the largest city in the province.
It’s an old international port city with some of the most interesting examples
of Loyalist Empire and Victorian architecture. The first and only time I
encountered Soviet sailors in Canada was in a Shoppers Drug Mart in uptown Saint
John. They were trying to buy perfume. The sailors were quite relieved to see
me and assumed mistakenly, because of my looks, I had to be able to speak
Russian. Alas, a few simple words were all I could muster. Nyet Soviet.
I have never
seen a city which goes begging for the process of gentrification as badly as Saint
John. It has the potential for being a crown jewel of Canadian cities, if only;
it could attract young families willing to invest in living in Saint John. Real
estate prices are 1/6th of Toronto’s, and for less than a $200,000
investment you could buy and restore, with top of the line upgrades, a home
which would sell for close to $2 million in Toronto, but those families won’t come
. There is very little work even though it is the kind of place your children
are safe enough to walk to school at age 6. Let me not mince words, a great deal of why that
is, is because of the Irving investments.
The smell of Saint John is all-pervasive and overwhelming.
Enter Saint John and you enter the smell of Dante’s Inferno. When I first arrived in Saint John in 1980, I
was could not believe how any modern government would allow a company to get
away with creating such noxious odors in an urban environment. It’s not just
the Irving Pulp and Paper mill, there is the Irving Oil Refinery as well, and periodically,
the smell of oil and gas gets added to the all-pervasive sulfur mix. I haven’t been back to Saint John since the 80’s,
but apparently, nothing much has changed.
I can say all this because, I don’t live there and I
am not dependent on the Irving's for my livelihood. One out of twelve of New
Brunswickers are directly employed by the Irving. It doesn’t sound like a great number, or a
number which would be an impediment, but when you start to understand how
interconnected the Irving’s business interests are, and how many non-Irving businesses are either
entirely or indirectly dependent with
Irving largess, that 1/12th starts to grow exponentially. Want to raise taxes on Irving interests or
make them clean up their environmental act? They’ll threaten to leave the
province and take away the jobs, send you a bill for paving a road or building
a needed causeway. Take your pick.
Take the Fourth estate. It is almost entirely and
utterly owed by the Irving family. There
is no other media monopoly exists in the country exists like the Irving’s media
interests. This is one place in the
country where people think, ‘Thank G-d for the CBC'. What happens when a non-Irving media tries to
establish a presence in the province? Take a look at this CBC report from 2007.
The federal government needs to take a
serious look at media concentration in New Brunswick, according to Senator Joan
Fraser, co-author of a June 2006 report that raised questions about Irving
media holdings. Her comments come as Irving-owned Brunswick News Inc. takes a
former publisher to court in the midst of his efforts to start a new newspaper.
"We didn't find anywhere else in the
developed world a situation like the situation in New Brunswick," Fraser
told CBC News on Friday. The senate report examined the state of all of
Canada's news media. All of the English daily newspapers in New Brunswick are
owned by Irving and its other entities, as are all of the weekly publications,
with the exception of the Sackville Tribune and the St. Croix Courier, and some
radio stations.
Irving is also one of the largest employers
in the province, with interests in the forestry, retail, construction, transportation
and food sectors. "The Irving interests are bigger in New
Brunswick than the whole federal government is in the whole of Canada, if you
see what I mean, proportionately," Fraser said.
Read about the saga of the demise of the Carlton Free Press and how the Irving’ used the courts and their wealth to drive the
little paper that didn’t grow out of business. Competition is for suckers, much
like environmental and pollution controls.
In fact, this wasn’t the first time the Senate
looked into the Irving Media interests. Senator Keith Davy’s warned about it in
the seventies. Nothing has change, and the Irving Media Empire has grown only
larger and more entrenched.
New Brunswick got on the bilingual band wagon early.
Probably the potential for graft and
handouts from the federal government was seen as too lucrative an opportunity to
be denied to the political class. The
act of becoming a fully bilingual province was considered to be ‘forward-thinking’
and the prevailing political wisdom of
the time was that an entirely ‘bilingual’ province would give a provincial economic leg up against the rest of the
Canada with a thoroughly bilingual population. Just like theories of a flat earth, this
promised economic reward never got off the ‘dreaming the impossible dream’ stage.
If anything, the reality of
provincial bilingualism saddled New Brunswick with unnecessary debt which
continues to bleed provincial coffers dry. The province can barely afford one public school system, let alone two. The province of Quebec has nothing on the signage bullies in Dieppe.
It’s geographically a large province and the
population is spread out. Public transportation linking rural communities with
the cities is practically nonexistent. The car is king here but you were never
know it from the state of the roads. There
was a time when New Brunswick was thriving, then it entered Confederation, and
well, it’s been downhill ever since.
And yet, it is undoubtedly, one of the most
beautiful provinces in the country.
While parts of the province are definitely snowy, the climate is much
milder than what can be found in other parts of the country. Growing
up, one of the treats of my mother’s annual track home was eating at any of the
fish shacks or roadside diners that use to dot the roads and by-ways of the
province. It was probably one of the few places in the continent where (in
season) freshly caught salmon or lobster could be considered fast food. The bread was divinely ‘home-made’ fresh, much
like the pies and cakes.
Those places are mostly gone, and in their stead, are
Irving gas station diners where processed food is more often the norm - not always, but all too often. Contrary to what you make think, New
Brunswickers are a resourceful people, but like institutional racism, the
entrenched fiefdom of poverty means anyone who can hightails it out of the
province as soon as possible or be ground down.
I was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick; my mother
was born and raised in Northumberland Country. She lives in the house she born in, the same
house her mother was born in, the same house my great-grandfather was born in –
and so on all the way back to two escapees from a life sentence of indentured
servitude brought them to the New World. The house started as a log cabin and each
generation added their mark. Now it is a large rambling 5 bedroom home, the
last homey house at the end of the road going nowhere. The house sits on 100
acres of prime timberland but the market value of the house and land is about
$35,000. I jest not.
My mother met
my father when she was working on the air force base as a civilian clerk. The
air force base outlasted their marriage, but it too is now long gone. I spent the first two years of my life in New
Brunswick and never returned until my 17th birthday when I came back
with my mother. Her father was ill, all her sisters had moved back. She wanted
to go home but would not return without me. I managed two weeks, before I made the
decision, I had to get the hell of there or spend a life toiling in despair.
The people were some of the most decent you could
find, but to them, I was always an outsider. I remember one woman in a clothing
store asking me where I was from as she couldn’t place my foreign accent. See what happens when you are raised by Eastern
Europeans in Upper Canada?
I worked the
hardest I have ever had to work in order to save every penny I could. I had a
job as a chambermaid, waitressing at truck stops and fish shacks. At one point,
I had three jobs and got by with only 5 hours sleep a night. I even worked as
an assistant lumber broker for Leonard Ellen Lumber. I held the dubious
distinction of being the worst lumber broker in the Maritimes. It took me nine
months to save $3,000 and I returned to Toronto May 1, 1980. It might not seem
like a lot of money, but when the minimum wage was around $3.25 or less (if you
worked in the hospitality industry) and I still had to pay to live. My first
work’s pay in Toronto was for $175.00. I felt like a queen. My knees, hands and
back thanked me. I never went back to live. What I did learn was that survival
in New Brunswick meant working at a Sisyphean task.
My mother is old and quite frail and still manages
to live in her girlhood home. Last year she
came to spend the winter with me and the Last Amazon. This summer, her twin sister had a stroke, so
my mother refused to leave her Mamie. I
worry about her. Toronto scares her. It’s
too big and loud, and more importantly, she feels the innately the vulnerability
of old age here. The hard edges of
Toronto citizenry makes her feel like there is always a knife poised at her
throat.
Toronto depresses her and she feels there is no room to breathe. The
restaurants are better than when she was young, but she tells me everyone looks
so used up and worn out. She sees no joy
in the faces of the crowd. And I get that now. But since she used her beauty to
marry for looks rather than wealth; it is only here I can make a living.
I have gone back, now and then, to visit my mother,
I have sent all my children to spend time in the last homey house at the end of
the road going nowhere. It’s a place of
great beauty and where the stars shine so bright and hang so low at night it
makes you believe you only need to stretch out to grasp them in your hand. I miss the solitude of the woods and the sound
of the river but one cannot feast on beauty alone.
Can New Brunswick be saved? I sincerely don’t know,
but I suspect it will take more than any provincial government to put all the things
right which are so clearly so very wrong.
