Graduation Address

"Atlantic Development" (4 October 1962). (UA Case 69, Box 1)

This is a great honour conferred upon me today. I like to think it is a mark of approval for the aims I have been advocating for the betterment of this area of Canada – the Atlantic Provinces.

For me it was to have been an added source of happiness that the hood should be placed on my shoulders by your Chancellor, Lord Beaverbrook. For he has been my friend for forty years, for many of them my employer, and for all of them a major influence in my life. We are all bitterly disappointed at not seeing him today. We are glad that his illness is not severe, and we wish him a quick recovery.

The people of this Province owe much to him. He has been giving scholarships for fifty years and he has 58 of them running at the present time, 42 here in the University of New Brunswick. These and his buildings and endowments have had a marked effect on the prospects of many hundreds of young men and women.

Lady Dunn is another giver on a great scale. She is paying half the cost of the Theatre. She has provided priceless works of art for the Gallery. She has built the great new Science Building at Dalhousie and the Skating Rink at St. Andrews; she is giving 19 scholarships at the present time and she is making plans for the future. All these things she is doing in the name of Sir James Dunn, through The Sir James Dunn Foundation which she set up in his memory with an endowment of $7 million.

It is right that we should acknowledge our common debt, and it is right, too, that we should remember Sir James Dunn each time we are reminded of Lady Dunn’s benefactions. For that is the purpose of them, that they should keep his memory alive in our minds.

The gifts of the Art Gallery and the Theatre now in building have created a new intellectual environment. The young men and women of the Province will henceforth be wiser and wittier, more cultivated, more self-assured and happier – for enjoyment of the arts makes happiness.

The Theatre will be a centre for drama and music. It has been designed to provide for the full-size New Brunswick Symphony Orchestra and is being filled with all the devices and equipment necessary for the staging of plays. It will seat a thousand.

The Theatre will complement the Gallery in making this corner of New Brunswick a cultural centre of Canada. The Gallery is a thing of beauty to which people return again and again. It stands of the bank of the St. John River as a testimony to the conventional good taste and judgment of Maritimers and a refuge from the monstrous assault of abstract art which affront is elsewhere. It is the antithesis of that other new Gallery, the Guggenheim in New York which seems to be built upside down as a symbol of the artistic merits of the strange daubs of paint that disfigure its walls.

Fredericton is an enchanting city to live in.

The question is, how many of our young people will be able to live here?

In the past only half the graduates of U.N.B. who had resided in the region at the time of University enrollment have been able to make their lives here. There has been a net loss by migration from the Maritime Provinces of more than half a million people since Confederation, and the loss has been primarily in our adults who leave home in search of employment elsewhere.

We believe that losing our talented and educated youth is a tragedy and a crime, like the stealing of our most precious raw material. The flight from the Highlands of Scotland was a bitter and painful episode in history, a source of reproach and shame in memory. We see in the persistent loss of our young men and women a similar wrong that has debilitated and impoverished this region since Confederation.

We believe in the right of our young people to stay if they wish and make their living in the place where they belong, in the nearness of family and friends whose door is ever on the latch, and welcome ever ready on the lips.

It is this conviction that has led to the tremendous movement that has been gathering strength in the past decade to bring about a restitution and a regeneration in the region.

The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council came into being. The resources of economics and political science were brought into play. Under its president, Professor W. Y. Smith of U.N.B., a series of pointed arguments have been shaped and flung into the fray.

On another front, the Chignecto Canal Committee has been revised to restate the case for the Canal which was to have been constructed at the time of Confederation. The case for it has been fortified and modernised, and joined with a proposal for the development of the tidal power of Chignecto Bay. Three leading engineering firms were commissioned by Premier Louis J. Robichaud to report on the electric power potential of the monstrous tides that twice in every 24 hours smash and surge into the eastern extremity of the Bay of Fundy.

This vast profusion of power, driven like mighty battering rams into the Fundy bays and inlets, is at present wasted energy. Proposals have been made to harness to tides. Successful pioneering of tidal power development has been carried out in France and in Russia. It is certain that here in the Bay of Fundy almost limitless power can be generated at a cost comparable with the great hydro-electric installations elsewhere.

The complex of Chignecto is a prospect to excite the imagination. Transportation could be transformed through the development of coastal shipping that would make a busy channel out of a landlocked deadend. An abundance of cheap power, together with our winter ports, would make the Maritimes an ideal production area for processing not only our own plentiful raw materials but imported commodities also for re-export to world markets. The final planning of the Causeway linking New Brunswick with Prince Edward Island would be incorporated into the general design.

These are some of the great public works projects that have been asked for. Another is the Corridor Road through Maine, a new straight-line highway linking Vanceboro and Sherbrooke which would bring the Maritimes, in effect, 140 miles nearer to industrial Canada. There is support in the United States for the project and there is every reason to believe that it could be brought about by mutual effort of the two countries, to the benefit of both.

Other proposals have been made for methods and policies required to promote a higher rate of economic growth in the four Provinces. The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council has estimated that 155,000 new jobs will be needed by 1980. It has presented proposals to the four Premiers, and the four Premiers have in turn made their submission to the Government of Canada.

The program of development requires an agency dedicated to the task of promoting the economic development of the Atlantic region of Canada. The creation of an Atlantic Development Board became our prime demand. Its establishment was announced in the Speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament last week.

We are, then, at a turning point in the history of the Maritimes. We are about to take a new course which will lead to a fair sharing of Canada’s heritage.

Let there be no doubt that there has been deep-seated injustice in the past. The Maritimes entered Confederation in 1867 with a standard of living that was higher than that of Canada, as Ontario and Quebec were named. Then came the end of the wooden sailing ships, bringing devastating losses to the Maritimes. The coup de grace was the national policy of tariffs in 1879. Ever since, the factories of Central Canada have thrived and the Maritimes have paid tribute to them in higher prices for everything their people buy, each purchase a subsidy to industrial Canada. It has been reckoned that the Atlantic Provinces spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in goods and services supplied from outside the region. The economists of the region are engaged in attempting to establish that figure. The taxable profits on this turnover make a considerable reckoning.

On the other hand, the Government of Canada spends something in the order of $170 million a year in aids and subsidies and insurance benefits which prop up the Atlantic economy but do nothing to increase productivity. All of this expenditure is lost without a trace by each year-end.

How much better, we have argued, to make massive investment in the area to increase productivity. Industry can be attracted to the region if certain prerequisites are carried out on the lines I have suggested. With new industry bringing employment and profit, annual payments in unemployment benefits and other aids could be curtailed. The new industries would pay taxes. The investment in the Atlantic region would be both wise and prudent. No other course is open. It is a reproach to Canada that the poverty of the Maritimes has been permitted to endure. I think perhaps it shocked me more than it does a native. Custom tends to blunt perception.

When I came here twelve years ago I was on a continuous tour of discovery. Having been much with Lord Beaverbrook in former years I had heard stories of the people of New Brunswick and the places, the rivers, the streams, and the forests. Instead of finding the host of Indian names queer, esoteric and unpronounceable, I found I knew them as old familiar friends. When Governor MacLaren reeled off his favorite rhyme of James de Mille about the river of New Brunswick that amazed his visitors from abroad, when he talked of the Sweet Maiden of Passamaquoddy, of how Miramichi waters are bluer, Restigouche pools are more black, how green is the bright Oromocto and brown the Petitcodiac, the names sounded in my ears as old friends of long ago. It is from these Lord Beaverbrook named his racehorses in the twenties. The cockney bookmakers had great sport with them as they shouted the odds against them.

I discovered the beauties of New Brunswick but I found too, a poverty more acute than anything I had seen elsewhere in my wanderings.

I knew the countryside of Britain and Europe. I had traveled in Asia and Africa and the Middle East.

Nowhere in the world, in my experience is the want so acute, the hardship so bitter, as in some areas of New Brunswick and the Maritimes, the region of rich cities and rural areas with standards near to starvation.

There are sectors where children are in actual want. Their fathers have no regular work, but eke out a few months with seasonal employment and spend the rest of the year on unemployment insurance and social assistance. Large families are living in inadequate housing with broken boards and tarred paper to keep out the sub-zero elements.

At a time when we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Colombo Plan, for we rightly concern our social consciences about the lot of the people in Asia, our own people suffer more from want than the distant recipients of our alms in warmer climates.

When I ask for first things first, that we first put our own house in order, I am not suggesting that Canada should not be greatly concerned with world affairs. Canada’s voice of sanity was never more needed.

Canada is saying today something that is more vital than anything else in the world, something on which the very future of the world may depend. Hon. Howard Green, at the United Nations Assembly, has put Canada strongly behind the proposal that all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, under water and in outer space, should cease on January 1, 1963.

The alternative may be world destruction. The threat of World War is real and menacing. The world is spending $120 billion or more on war purposes. Much of the capital investments made in the world today are for war or defence against war. Mr. Khrushchov has put it at half the total capital investments of the world today.

This is a form of Public Works in Capitalist as well as in Communist countries. If we do not go over the brink, if the world turns from the path of destruction, to take the highway of life, there must be a gigantic redeployment of investment from the Public Works of Death to the Public Works of Life.

Then we might see the first international force of the best creative faculties of East and West made up of physicists, chemists, economists, geologists, engineers, oceanographers all bent on planning a better, happier, richer world.

For the new era of international collaboration, youth should take control. The elders have not made a success of international co-operation during my lifetime. I was born in a world at peace. My own generation was largely wiped out in the war that started 48 years ago and so far has had no ending.

Millions upon millions have been slaughtered in the wars of this century or in the gas chambers or by the famines caused by the wars.

We have armed ourselves with nuclear deterrents sufficient to destroy the world. Each man and woman and child on earth today had his allotted quota in the equivalent of 10 tons of T.N.T. per head. And the quota is fast growing.

We have polluted our rivers, contaminated our are, poisoned our earth. High altitude nuclear tests have filled the skies with radiation. Our forests and farms, potato fields and gardens are sprayed with insecticides and weed killers. Drains are filled with insoluble detergents. For good measure we put sodium fluoride into our public water supplies.

We have had warnings from our experts. Dr. Kerswill of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada has warned us that we shall kill our salmon. Bruce S. Wright, director if the Northeastern Wildlife Station, has said our woodcock are poisoned from eating poisoned earthworms. The current Book-of-the-Month is Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. She derives her title from Keat’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

No birds sing because the birds are dead or moribund. On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, there was no sound. Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh,

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silence the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

The book will be the best-seller, the literary sensation of the fall of 1962. Miss Carson will tell her lesson, as Harriet Beecher Stowe told hers a hundred years ago. The book will give its warning. But can we heed? Can we control the cornucopia of drugs by international collaboration any better than we control our lust for nuclear armaments? One would suppose that it would be simple to set up an international body to control the testing, naming, and licensing of drugs and, acting as a clearing house of information on them, recommend their uses. One might suppose that this might be good practice for the more exacting controls of disarmament. Yet the tragedy of the infants deformed through thalidomide not only showed that three months could elapse before information on the deadly threat passed from Western Germany to Canada, but that no effective international body could be set up afterwards.

In very truth, the world is out of control. The elders have failed. What a glorious opportunity for the young men and women, before they reach the age of complacency, to take hold, to clean up the mess, to lock up their elders, and to set the world to enjoying the fruits of science and technology that can abolish want, curtail work, and allow men to live in the image of God in a new age of international order, peace and happiness.