Graduation Address

"UNB Graduates Told Time Ripe for Obtaining Jobs" Telegraph Journal (31 October 1983). (UA Case 69, Box 2)

Arthur O’Connor, who received an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick, told graduates he thinks this is a good time to be entering the job market.

Businesses are taking a fresh look at their future after going through tough times, he said.

"Business will need new technical and managerial inputs which can bring fresh ideas and a new zeal to a renewed economy," he told his audience of student graduating in engineering, business administration, physical education, secretarial studies, and education.

"This is the environment that awaits the new graduate and it offers a future quite different from the past."

It’s an environment that will "challenge the best in each of you."

His encouraging words were tempered, however, by a stern warning to graduates, governments, and industry leaders about what he said was an urgent need for investment in technology.

Time is running out for Canadians to embrace technology as a national priority, he said.

He told the graduates to "be wary of anyone who would hold back technology under whatever guise."

His concern is "very real and is one that must be addressed both socially and politically with some urgency."

Without greater emphasis on technology, the country’s economy will drift downward toward the level of the developing countries, he said.

In New Brunswick, technology offers new opportunities for expansion of small industry and has allowed promising advances in forest, food, metallurgy, shipping.

"The process is most important and must be accelerated."

He cited other countries where modern factories produce efficiently, unencumbered by "non-productive and restrictive work rules," and where employees take pride in setting new production records.

Such examples point the way to "our almost certain bleak future if we don’t get off our butts and quickly re-examine our strategy for the future."

Mr. O’Connor, who graduated from UNB in 1949 with an electrical engineering degree, lamented the fact that many New Brunswick graduates have left the province.

He said there’s a feeling in New Brunswick that "anything significant we undertake is likely to face failure."

That might discourage young graduates from staying in the province.

"There is a great need to develop a conviction within the province that success is possible."