Valedictory Address

Valedictory Remarks (22 May, 1997) 2-4. (UA Case 68, Box 2).

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Madam President, honoured guests, fellow graduates, friends and family. I congratulate my fellow graduates. I also congratulate my sister and brother-in-law, Karen and Christopher Young, also UNB alumni, who are celebrating their 12th wedding anniversary today.

I’m very happy and proud to be your valedictorian. When I found out that [sic] would be speaking today, one of our fellow graduates asked that I mention his would otherwise go unmentioned. Of course, I had to say to him, “Listen, I can’t take the time to say your name, Ted Leopkey. That wouldn’t be fair to the other people I can’t mention, like Jon Kenyon or Alan Reid.” Sorry Ted.

Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight across the Atlantic Ocean in the Spirit of Saint Louis. Today is the anniversary of my Grandmother Margaret’s graduation as a nurse from the Victoria Public Hospital, where she too was valedictorian. I wonder if she spoke of this historic journey. She has much to talk about, the world was seeing change at an unprecedented rate. When Lindbergh has conquered the skies, the Bluenose was only six years old. Can you imagine that? We could fly across the Atlantic but we still fished it in the Bluenose, a wooden sailboat, albeit the very best wooden sailboat of its time. In 1927, Canada was a country in its infancy. The League of Nations elected Canada that year to its Council. Only a decade before, we had proven ourselves in World War I. The capture of Vimy Ridge by Canadian troops showed that Canada was capable of meeting great challenges on her own.

Thirty-six years later, in 1963, my father, Fred, graduated from UNB. Much had changed in those intervening years. Air travel and trans-Atlantic flights were commonplace. The Bluenose had long since been made obsolete and sunk. However, we Maritimers are not ones to ignore our history and traditions, so on July 26th of 1963, the Bluenose II was launched in Lunenburg. That same year trouble arose in Quebec as the FLQ started its reign of terror. A Canadian Army recruiting office in Montreal was bombed, killing a worker, William O’Neill. Those responsible were caught and sentenced within the year. The Federal government was not blind to the unrest and, in July of 1963, formed the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission. Canada was most definitely in its adolescence.

Thiry-four years later, today, much has changed again, although the Bluenose II is still sailing. Canada is still rebounding from the FLQ crisis. There is still a vocal minority in Quebec that wishes to separate from Canada. The neverendum-referendum is a perpetual threat to Canada, the country and the United Nations says to be the best in the world. Canada has almost reached adulthood, but we still suffer growing pains because of our incomplete Constitution.

We have come far in 70 years since my grandmother’s day. We have come this far since the say of the first solo trans-Atlantic flight because of the hard work and ideals of our grandparents’ and our parents’ generations. Today we look back at these bits of history and think of how much these people had to learn and how hard they worked to overcome their ignorance. Today we take for granted that we can reach the sky and beyond. We know that a single chip can do the job of a fleet of schooners. Like our predecessors, we are ignorant of a great many things, but as before, we are not apathetic. We will work hard to write our own history.

In 35 years when some of our children are here marking their graduation, what will they say of us? Will they wonder at how foolish the world was to spend $700 billion a year on weapons of war? Will they be proud at how we’ve learned to protect our environment? Will Canada have reached adulthood as a proud and united country? I hope so and I expect so.

But we must do more than hope; we must work, we must overcome. In our separate faculties we have been given knowledge specific to our disciplines. Whether we are graduating from Science, Administration, Forestry and Environmental Management, or Engineering we have all learned similar skills. Our years at UNB have made each of us leaders and problem solvers skilled in learning, critical thinking and the communication of our special knowledge, whether it be finance, biology, silviculture or thermodynamics.

To ensure that future generations will remember us kindly, we must faithfully apply the knowledge we have gained. UNB has given us the skills to do this; tomorrow we must begin.