Graduation Address

Anna Maria Tremonti

Encaenia Address

May 28, 2026.  2:30 p.m.

Ceremony C

Hello everyone, and first of all, congratulations graduates. It is so exciting to think about you graduating today with all your accomplishments, and to be part of this, and to receive an honorary doctorate from this university.

So, hello to you and to your families, your moms, your dads, your siblings, your extended families, your friends, and to your university family, and the university officials who are here today as well.

I am really sorry that I can't be in Fredericton to be with you to accept this award in person and to talk to you in person, but I've had some troubles here in Toronto that I have to deal with, so I'm pivoting. And I want you to remember that word about pivoting, because I'm going to talk to you more about that as we go on.

But Fredericton holds a special place in my heart because I showed up for my career. I liked it so much, I left and then I came back. But I was also pivoting. I was pivoting professionally and personally, and I really learned a lot about how to make choices in my life and how to take control of my own life in Fredericton.

So, I'm kind of happy to be talking to you today. When I first arrived in Fredericton, it was to work for private radio. It was a radio station called CFNB. It was powerful. It blasted many watts, all over the province. It was well-funded. It had a really great newsroom. It was really an indestructible private radio station. And now it's gone. It's been gone for years. It just doesn't exist anymore. I came back and I worked for CBC at a time when CBC was having budget cuts, and I was told, "Oh, you're not going to get another job at CBC." These cuts were threatening the very existence of the CBC. Well, I plowed ahead anyway, and I joined the CBC, and I spent almost 40 years at the CBC. It was still there.

So, the warnings that people were giving me, weren't actually correct. But you know, it was kind of like that, like you'd see something happening, and you'd think this is going to happen, and it's going to go this way, and things would unfold differently, and we had to keep pivoting, we had to keep changing and looking at the world. Because the world I entered when I began my career in the late '70s and early '80s, was really a constantly changing, unstable mess.

I left Fredericton for Alberta when the Alberta oil boom was going bust. I had friends whose houses were suddenly worth less than half of what they paid for them, and they would sneak away from them in the middle of the night, just run away from the homes and any kind of financial obligation because it was such a shift in the price of homes.

Europe had the Red Brigade terror cells. In Central and South America, there was conflict. There was the Dirty War in Argentina, Sandinistas in Nicaragua fighting an oppressive government. There was slaughter by government troops in El Salvador. The Shah of Iran had fled his country, and the Ayatollah Khomeini had come in with the Islamic Revolution and created the theocracy that is still today in Iran.

At home, we had an oil crisis. The Squamish Five bombed Litton Industries in Toronto because it was making guidance systems for cruise missiles. The FLQ was at its peak, pushing for a separate Quebec. All of this was happening in the early days of my career. And rights and equality, that was a really hard sell. So, if a woman wanted an abortion when I began my career, her husband had to give his legal consent. Sexual harassment was not a concept to be fought. It was something that happened to women if they had a job, and they didn't call it that. That phrase didn't exist.

Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, those phrases did not even exist when I started my career. The Canadian government was purging the civil service, the military, and the RCMP of people it suspected were LGBTQ+. They were surveilling so-called suspects. They were interrogating them, firing them, forcing their resignations. They were ruining their lives and their careers because of who they chose to love. And by the way, the federal government was doing this right into the '90s. It was, frankly, a time of social, political, geopolitical, religious, and economic chaos.

So why am I telling you this? Well, I'm mentioning all of this from when I started my career after I graduated because I know so many of you, as you graduate, are looking around this big world, with its wars and its economic imbalance, with its political corruption and its lack of official compassion, and you're losing hope. You're reeling from so much that is happening around you. But I want to tell you not to be afraid of your world. Instead, seize it. Whatever you have studied, whatever passions you follow, this is your world as much as it is anybody's, and you have a right to push for and fight for and craft a better world.

From climate change to conflict, to communication, from AI to algorithms, this is your world. It belongs to you, too. It doesn't just belong to somebody else. And you get a say in how it's going to move forward. If my generation screwed up things in this world, and it did, your generation can claim ownership and bring on the change that you believe matters. Now, that's not always easy, and it doesn't happen overnight, but nothing is impossible for those who dream of something better.

Now, you might be thinking, "Why do I have to upset my plans?" Because so much is affecting my world. Why do I have to upset my plans because some guy starts a war and somebody else is playing the markets, and all this stuff is happening? Why should I be responsible for that? And I'm going to suggest that you don't have to upend your plans. You have to use them. Use your plans to pivot toward plans that will be better for you and for our society at large.

Learning how to pivot may be one of the most important things you learn to do in your life. It may be one of your most important skills, because as you know, even after you leave a learning institution, you will learn all your life.

And sometimes pivoting means looking around to see how your skills and your chosen profession can evolve, and how you can help it evolve. I'm going to give you an example. When I became a journalist, we weren't shooting much video, we were still shooting film. We would fight for the video cameras, and we would do our stories on film. You know, you'd have to run from the developing place and get that thing on the air for six o'clock for the local news.

My first computer was a RadioShack Tandy, and it was connected to nothing. There was no such thing as connectivity unless you were studying electricity. In my first war zone, the cell phones didn't work. My satellite phone was the size of two large suitcases. The gear was so bulky. Try driving through a sniper zone when you're in a car full of gasoline because there's no gas stations, and your edit gear, and somebody's shooting at you. All of this stuff has changed now.

Today, you can shoot stories on your phone. You can take pictures through your eyeglasses. We embrace the technology, and it keeps on changing, and it was changing then. But it allowed us to access more information, it allowed us to share that information more efficiently and more easily. And sure, there are people who abuse it, but there were people that used that technology and evolved and pivoted to make their professions more helpful and to move them forward.

And then beyond the technology, and maybe because of the technology, journalism was changing again and again. So many layoffs, so many ways to spread false information. But then fact-checkers became the new stars. Data-driven journalism is now the spine of every investigative story that is done. So, the technology has helped us, and still people were saying journalism is dead because it's not the way we did it before.

But then I thought about it. The core of journalism, the true core of journalism, the search for truth, the quest for accountability, the chronicling of what is happening in our societies and the telling of stories, that's age old. That doesn't change. There are changes in how we deliver it. The business of journalism is changing, and the models are being left behind, the old models. But that's about evolving.

That's about pivoting. And people new to a field, any field, where they think things are changing too fast, people new to a field sometimes can see what others, even the most experienced and really good people in a field, sometimes you can come in and see what they can't see.

And that's where you can help change things and shape things to the way you think the world should turn, as opposed to just accepting the way the world is turning. So, as you leave here with your hard-earned degrees and your wonderful memories of friendships that you will hold onto throughout your life, and you think about the possibilities before you, I ask you to consider this. This moment in time is not your albatross. It is your opportunity. Do not be afraid of it. Seize this moment to imagine a better world, one that is kinder, one where ideas soar, and economies grow, and individuals connect. One where you understand you have agency, where you belong to a community of people, and together you can work and play and live and love and scheme to make a better world for all of us.

So, congratulations, and please go get them.