In January, at her annual State of the Province address, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt laid out her province’s scorecard. It was a mixed result. Housing starts were at a record high, literacy was improving, but about one in four New Brunswickers didn’t have access to a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

Then, in March 2026, it was Finance Minister René Legacy’s turn. His 2026/27 budget speech told us the cost: a record $1.39 billion deficit budget and a provincial debt expected to increase over the next three years.

Considering these two presentations together is how citizens can evaluate whether the choices being made on our behalf are working. While I’m using New Brunswick as an example, the same approach to reading government announcements applies to any provincial agenda.

Eight provinces have now released their 2026-27 budgets, all of which carry large deficits. PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador have yet to release new budgets, but neither is likely to buck national trends.

The size of what governments are up against

Although the Strait of Hormuz dominates national headlines, one of the growing pressures on provincial budgets has been decades in the making.

The Atlantic Economic Council projects that the combined health expenditures of the Atlantic provinces could climb from $17 billion in 2023 to nearly $40 billion by 2046 – and those numbers assume governments will achieve a 20 per cent improvement in productivity and service delivery.

According to the Council’s April 2026 report, Key Forces Shaping the Future of Health Care Delivery, collectively, the four Atlantic provinces spent $19 billion on health-related costs in 2024-25, about 46 per cent of total provincial program spending.

The Council found that inflation – not population aging – drove more than 80 per cent of that expenditure growth between 2013 and 2023.

That begs the question: are governments using debt to fund a transformation, or are they just buying time?

Is the debt burden getting lighter or heavier?

The debt-to-GDP ratio, which is a measurement of the size of government’s net debt as a share of the overall economy, has become a key indicator of whether the financial risk provincial governments take is sustainable. It is one of the indicators credit rating agencies use to assess each province’s fiscal capacity.

Of the eight provinces that have released 2026/27 budgets, four of them received negative signals.

British Columbia has been downgraded twice in two years, most recently last week, when credit rating agency Fitch downgraded B.C. to AA- from AA+, which, along with Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, assigned the province a negative outlook.

Nova Scotia’s long-term rating was cut a full notch by credit agency S&P to A+ from AA- in February 2026.

Ontario’s positive outlook was downgraded to stable in May 2025 due to tariff uncertainties and slower revenue growth, a soft warning.

Last week, Moody’s lowered New Brunswick’s baseline assessment, changing its outlook to negative, warning that deficits reduce the province’s capacity to absorb further negative budgetary pressures.

Lana Asaff, senior economist at the Atlantic Economic Council, says the concern is straightforward: rising debt costs crowd out everything else.

“As these debt servicing costs go up, that means governments have less money they can spend on the programs and services they want to deliver because they need to give more and more money to pay off that accumulation of debt.”

Is the economy actually expanding?

The debt-to-GDP ratio improves only when the economy is expanding. Rebekah Young, Scotiabank’s vice-president and head of inclusion and resilience economics, offers a useful frame: “At one level, GDP is a function of the hours people work, times the efficiency or productivity with which they work. You can add more people, or you can help them be more efficient by giving them more tools.”

The first test is population and labour force. Watch for increases in net migration, wages and labour force participation, the latter tracked monthly via Statistics Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey.

In March 2026, New Brunswick’s unemployment rate was unchanged at 7 per cent, while the other three Atlantic provinces recorded slight changes: PEI rose by 0.3 per cent to 7.3 per cent, Nova Scotia fell by -0.6 per cent to 6.6 per cent and Newfoundland and Labrador rose by 0.1 per cent to 7.3 per cent. Overall, Canada’s unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.7 per cent.

The second test is productivity and private investment. According to the Atlantic Economic Council October 2025 report, Unlocking Atlantic Canada’s Potential for Prosperity, productivity improvements drove more than 85 per cent of real GDP per person growth in each Maritime province between 1997 and 2024.

However, fewer than 39 percent of Atlantic Canadian firms adopted an advanced or emerging technology in 2022, compared to over 47 percent nationally. Watch whether Atlantic Canadian private sector investment can close the gap with the rest of the country.

What to ask when the next budget drops

PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador still have their budgets to release. When they do, the deficit figures will lead every story, but the better examination will ask where each province’s government wants to go and how long it will take to get there.

Consider whether the debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to improve; if it isn’t, ask what the debt is funding: inflation or transformation?

Examine what assumptions governments are making about population and economic growth, and what specific quality of life outcomes are being tracked, such as access to doctors, housing, youth employment, and education.

Provincial governments have laid their bets, choosing to increase government debt to weather external storms. Holding governments to account for those choices is our responsibility as we search for solid ground amidst a world in flux.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are now running with the big provinces. From B.C. to Nova Scotia, provinces are posting record deficits and edging closer to debt‑to‑GDP warning lines.

Finance ministers say it’s a calculated bet to protect health care and keep East Coast economies competitive, but in these smaller, older provinces, that wager is both more urgent and more precarious.

New Brunswick’s $1.4‑billion and Nova Scotia’s $1.2‑billion deficits naturally invite criticism. However, to understand what’s at play right now in Canada’s provinces – the middle layer of government in our federation – it’s useful to consider why governments are running deficits and what the money we’re borrowing is being spent on.

Let’s dig in, with some help from two experts on public finances and the Atlantic Canadian economy: Rebekah Young, Scotiabank Vice-President, Head of Inclusion and Resilience Economics, and Lana Asaff, senior economist at the Atlantic Economic Council.

Please note, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador have yet to release their 2026–27 budgets, but based on previous budgets, both provinces will likely face large deficits and increased debt.

Why are all provinces in deficit at the same time?

Because two forces have collided simultaneously: an aging population and geopolitical rifts.

The phrase “global uncertainty” is neat shorthand for the messy list of challenges confronting Canadians in the news every day. U.S. tariffs and trade disruptions have businesses holding back on investment and hiring decisions. Slower hiring means slower wage growth, which means slower HST and personal income tax revenue – the primary revenue streams for Atlantic Canadian provinces, which don’t have the same large royalty base as Alberta or the same economic scale as Ontario and B.C.

That means government revenues aren’t increasing fast enough to confront our accelerating government expenditures, which are being driven by our changing demographics.

How much debt is too much?

This year, you might have noticed provincial premiers and finance ministers referring more often to the debt‑to‑GDP ratio, an economic measurement that banks and financial institutions use to evaluate the risk associated with lending governments money. The higher the ratio, the higher the risk, because it indicates a government’s capacity to make its debt payments.

Financial institutions often treat a 40 per cent debt‑to‑GDP ratio as a warning line, but as Lana Asaff and other economists point out, no single number works as a hard cap for every province. What matters is whether that ratio is climbing or slowly coming down.

With that in mind, I classify the eight provinces with updated budgets into three groups: Nova Scotia (39.4 per cent), Quebec (38.9 per cent), Manitoba (38.2 per cent), and Ontario (37.7 per cent) are in the warning zone; New Brunswick (30.8 per cent) and B.C. (30.6 per cent) are in the “still got room but be careful” zone; and Saskatchewan (16.1 per cent) and Alberta (10.5 per cent) are in the “likely going to be okay if royalty payments bounce back” zone.

While we don’t have new budgets from PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador, if each maintains the trajectory from the 2025-26 budgets, the estimated debt-to-GDP ratios are 35 per cent (PEI) and 45.6 per cent (NL), the latter making The Rock the most indebted province in Canada.

What is the big pressure on Atlantic Canada’s governments?

On the demographic front, Atlantic Canada sits at the leading edge of a national story. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador, along with Quebec and B.C., have some of the oldest populations in Canada, which impacts government budgets in two ways.

First, it reduces government income tax revenues when older Canadians leave the workforce and are not replaced, and it increases government expenditures because health care needs, and therefore costs, increase as we age.

This is why Atlantic Canadian governments have, for well over a decade, embraced immigration.

“We need people now,” says Asaff, the senior economist at the Atlantic Economic Council. “This is why it is important to be able to attract and not only attract, but then also retain immigrants, interprovincial migrants, [and] non‑permanent residents that come to our region, so they can contribute to our labour force.”

This demographic problem is, in large part, on us.

We have known for decades that as the baby boom generation – that very large population group born between 1947 and 1965 – aged into their senior years, health-care costs would increase.

You don’t need to be an economist to understand that: we see it in the amount of care our family and friends receive, relative to their age.

“When I looked at all the provincial budgets, I did sort of suck in my breath,” Scotiabank’s Rebekah Young says. “Health‑care expenditures are increasing anywhere from four to six percent annually, which isn’t surprising given the pace of that aging cohort.”

For instance, an 85‑year‑old costs roughly three times what a 65‑year‑old costs the health‑care system, and about six times what a 30‑year‑old does.

Governments cannot hold the line on health expenditures when the population driving that cost is growing and aging simultaneously. And in Atlantic Canada, where tax bases are smaller and economies are more reliant on income and sales taxes than on resource royalties, those demographic pressures bite harder and sooner.

As the population ages, health‑care delivery costs rise too. The pressures showing up in this year’s budgets have been building for decades.

Is borrowing to cover that gap irresponsible?

Governments, like households, can borrow for different reasons. Taking on debt to renovate a house, which protects or increases its value, is a different decision than borrowing for a vacation. The question is what the money is for.

Young frames it this way: “We often think very simplistically about deficits as good or bad. But you have to look at which part of the deficit is intended to grow the economy, and which part is not.”

For provinces, that means looking at how much of the debt is going into things that sustain or expand economic capacity and how much is simply covering the rising cost of doing what governments already do.

To use the household expenses analogy: are your energy costs increasing because the price went up, or are you investing in energy efficiency changes that will lead to lower future costs?

This is where debt‑to‑GDP comes back in. A provincial economy that is expanding can carry more government debt sustainably than one that isn’t.

“The net debt‑to‑GDP ratio is a really important metric, but there is no appropriate ratio that all provinces should be aspiring to,” says Asaff. “The important part is whether that ratio is declining over time, because that gives you confidence that governments will be able to sustain the current level of services.”

Unlike Alberta, which draws on resource royalties, or Ontario, with its large and diversified private sector, the Atlantic provinces rely heavily on income and consumption taxes, along with federal transfer payments.

Increasing tax revenues means increasing the population and the wage base, but attracting and retaining workers requires the public services that chronically strain provincial budgets: health care, long-term care, and schools.

The budgets released this spring are, in effect, a wager.

Whether that wager pays off depends on factors no provincial finance minister can fully control: trade policy, immigration levels, private‑sector investment decisions, and the pace of a demographic shift decades in the making.

It’s a big, wicked problem that we, as citizens, need to understand so we can weigh the trade-offs, benefits, and risks our communities, companies and governments must make to ensure today’s bets pay off not that far into the future.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

I’m sending all of you away today to explore Be Giant, a new national news organization with a mission to tell the stories of the people, places and ideas that are putting in the work to move Canada forward.

And I’m proud to say my story about Atlantic Canada is the lead.

Led by former Macleans managing editor Alison Uncles and fully funded by the billionaire Weston family, owners of Atlantic Superstore, No Frills and Loblaws, Be Giant is a non-profit newsroom that requires neither advertising nor reader subscriptions.

Its mission, as Alison writes in her opening Editor’s Note, is “to explore the breakthroughs and innovations answering Canada’s greatest challenges, as well as the people relentlessly driving those ideas forward. Our core idea is that the knowledge of what is already being accomplished in Canada can inspire greater confidence to face down our existential challenges.”

Pragmatically optimistic in tone, I am excited to be a part of Be Giant, telling the stories of Atlantic Canadians who are stepping up and out to help this region and country progress.

I’m working on a few other Atlantic Canadian-centred stories, so be sure to sign up for the Be Giant newsletter and bookmark the site.

My story follows the entrepreneurs turning the small coastal communities of Canso, Nova Scotia and St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, into spaceports.

Leading the charge is Stephen Matier, a former NASA contractor who founded Maritime Launch Services and is building Spaceport Nova Scotia – Canada's version of Cape Canaveral – on a stretch of Crown land at the mouth of Chedabucto Bay in Canso, N.S.

Meanwhile, Toronto entrepreneur Rahul Goel is building a second launch site on Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula, with ambitions to control the full chain from satellite to rocket to spaceport with his company, NordSpace.

For the first time in its history, Canada is building the infrastructure to put its own hardware into orbit, and it is based in Atlantic Canada.

Here’s the start of my story, link at the end to keep reading and visit the full site.

Inside Canada’s race for space sovereignty

Atlantic Canada is launching the country into the final frontier

To understand Canada’s race to space, it helps to look out to sea.

Standing on the wind-whipped wharf in Canso, N.S., nothing but the icy blue-grey ripples of the North Atlantic Ocean extend out from this rocky outcrop on the northeastern tip of mainland Nova Scotia.

This view is why propulsion engineer-turned-entrepreneur Stephen Matier knew his search for a rocket launch site was over when he first visited this small fishing community in 2016.

“When people here say, ‘It’s not the end of the Earth, but you can see it from there,’ that’s exactly why it works,” says Matier, founder and CEO of Maritime Launch Services, which is building Canada’s version of Cape Canaveral on a 136-hectare swath of Crown land at the mouth of Chedabucto Bay. Construction on Spaceport Nova Scotia is underway, with its first commercial orbital launch planned for late 2027, building on two successful suborbital test flights in 2023 and 2025.

“We needed wide-open ocean and the right geography. Canso has both.”

To keep reading, please visit Be Giant, sign up for its newsletter and enjoy!

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There is no joy in a woman’s heart when she hears her doctor say, ‘scooch down.’

Naked from the waist down, covered by a hospital-grade sheet, with her feet in bootie-covered metal stirrups, she wiggles across the paper-lined table to its edge, lies down and braces herself.

That’s how the pap test begins. It ends with her doctor taking a swab of her cervix, so its cells can be tested.

So it is for trans, non-binary and Two-Spirited people too.

It’s an uncomfortable test for a horrible disease: cervical cancer.

The 2026-27 New Brunswick provincial budget, tabled on March 17, commits $5 million to expand cancer screening programs – including making at-home cervical screening available to New Brunswickers for the first time.

It would make New Brunswick the second province in Canada, behind British Columbia, to provide at-home cervical cancer screening.

The Numbers

An estimated 1,600 people in Canada were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2024 and about 400 died from it, according to the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, a federally funded non-profit that facilitates a pan-Canadian approach to cancer control.

There were 8.7 cervical cancer cases per 100,000 females in Canada in 2022, more than double the threshold of four per 100,000 that the World Health Organization (WHO) defines as required to eliminate the disease.

New Brunswick’s numbers sit at around 9.5 cases per 100,000. Nova Scotia sits at 10.7, Newfoundland and Labrador at 8.6, and PEI at 4.4 cases per 100,000 – the lowest in the country.

Cervical cancer incidence rates are higher among people in lower-income neighbourhoods and rural areas – the group of people that home-based screening is designed to reach.

It doesn’t have to be like this because cervical cancer can be eliminated through vaccinations, which New Brunswick has offered in schools since 2008, and is highly treatable when detected early.

Hence, the two-step public health policy approach to cervical cancer in Canada: increase vaccination rates to try to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040, and increase testing and early detection to treat it.

Beyond The Doctor’s Office

This is where the traditional Pap test at the doctor’s office falls short.

Getting to a clinic, booking time off work, arranging childcare, and then enduring the physical discomfort of a speculum exam are collectively significant deterrents. For survivors of sexual trauma, it can be much worse, and for people without a regular family doctor, it can be effectively impossible.

The at-home alternative works differently. Instead of a clinician collecting cells directly from the cervix, the test uses a small swab to take a sample from the vagina to look for human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus that causes cervical cancer.

A person collects the sample by turning the small swab inside their vagina for 20 seconds; the sample collected is just as accurate as a provider-taken sample. The completed kit is mailed back in a prepaid envelope, much like New Brunswick’s at-home colon screening tests.

British Columbia became the first province to offer at-home testing province-wide in January 2024. In its program, a clean HPV result means no further screening is needed for five years, compared to every three years with a Pap test.

New Brunswick announced its intention to make this transition back in 2023, but the rollout stalled. The $5 million in the 2026-27 budget is designed to get it moving.

Who Should Get It

Anyone with a cervix, including women and Two-Spirit, transgender and non-binary people, between the ages of 25 and 69, should screen for cervical cancer, whether or not they’ve had the HPV vaccine, whether or not they’re currently sexually active, and whether or not they’ve been through menopause.

People who are pregnant, or experiencing symptoms like bleeding between periods or unexplained pelvic pain, should still see a health-care provider rather than relying on self-screening.

HPV primary screening with timely and appropriate follow-up has been implemented or partially implemented in Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, Ontario, Québec, and the Northwest Territories, and is being actively planned in the other provinces.

Canada has committed to eliminating cervical cancer by 2040. Reaching that target requires 90 per cent of eligible people to be screened with an HPV test by 2030. Cervical cancer rates are especially high among people in rural or remote areas, people with low incomes, and likely, though data is limited, among 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals and people who identify as Indigenous or Black, due to structural and systemic barriers in the health system.

For those groups, a home kit that arrives in a plain envelope and can be completed in private may be the difference between screening and not screening at all.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI-enabled summary: New Brunswick’s latest budget commits $5 million to at‑home cervical cancer screening, expanding HPV testing and removing barriers faced by rural and low‑income communities. The move aligns New Brunswick with a national push to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040 through improved early detection and prevention.

Keywords: New Brunswick cervical cancer screening, at‑home cervical cancer test, HPV testing Canada, Pap test alternative, New Brunswick health budget, cancer screening programs Canada, cervical cancer prevention, rural health care access, HPV primary screening, eliminate cervical cancer Canada.

Hi everyone – today we’re publishing Louis Léger’s second essay on the rise of Acadian rights, political power and cultural strength. In Part One, which we published last Friday, Louis traced how a generation of Acadians and their Anglophone allies built something extraordinary, transforming southeastern New Brunswick. This essay is about what followed.

Louis Léger knows this story because he had a front-row seat. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with concentrations in Political Science, History and Business Administration from the Université de Moncton, and spent four decades in the middle of the story he is telling, in politics, in business, and in government. He writes this with a sense of duty to share what he witnessed.

Here’s the link to Part 1, if you missed it.

In 1971, the Special Senate Committee on Poverty, chaired by Senator David Croll, tabled its landmark report. It opened with the words: “The poor do not choose poverty. It is at once their affliction and our national shame.”

Among the communities it documented was Kent County, which figured among the poorest jurisdictions in the country. Not among the poorest in Atlantic Canada. Among the poorest in Canada.

That is where my father won his seat. That same year. 1971.

This is the story of what came next.

In One Generation

Liberal Premier Louis Robichaud passed the Equal Opportunity Act; Progressive Conservative Premier Richard Hatfield proclaimed many parts of it and made it real. For 27 consecutive years, the government of this province operated on the belief that investing in the francophone community was the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.

When Hatfield took office in 1970, he inherited the institutional framework Robichaud had created: Equal Opportunity, the Université de Moncton, and the Official Languages framework. None of these was yet fully realized.

Hatfield chose to build on them rather than unwind them, and he had 17 years to do it. And it must be said: the federal government, sensitive to what the Senate poverty report had laid bare, paid for much of the physical infrastructure that made those reforms real. Ottawa contributed significantly to the cost of school and community buildings. The province could not have done it alone.

Federal Minister Roméo LeBlanc, the MP for Westmorland-Kent and Canada’s longest-serving fisheries minister, was the Acadian voice in the Federal cabinet during those critical years. He came from Memramcook, the village where the five thousand had gathered in 1881, and he made sure Ottawa understood what the investment required. His journey, from Memramcook to Rideau Hall as the first Acadian Governor-General, is evidence of this essay’s thesis brought to life

What this generation built transformed the province in a single generation. From among the poorest counties in Canada to the fastest-growing economy east of Toronto. In one generation.

It did not appear from nowhere. The Eudistes built Collège Sacré-Cœur in Bathurst and Collège Saint-Louis in Edmundston. The Pères de Sainte-Croix had built Collège Saint-Joseph in Memramcook, the oldest French-language institution in the province, founded in 1864.

Those classical colleges kept Acadian intellectual life alive for a century before a provincial university was possible. They educated a small elite class of young men – the priests, the lawyers, the notaries who carried the community forward when no one else would. That elite was essential. But it was small by design, and the community it served was not small.

The women religious orders built alongside them. In 1924, 53 Acadian religious sisters broke from an anglophone order in Saint John because they were told they could not have a French novitiate. They went to Rome, got permission, and founded the Religieuses de Notre-Dame-du-Sacré-Cœur. Within 12 years, they numbered 200 women.

They are estimated to have taught 200,000 Acadians across the Maritimes. Other congregations followed the same pattern: founded where no help was coming, staffed by women who answered when they were needed, sustained by faith and stubbornness in equal measure.

My father had aunts who were sisters. They visited, sent us birthday cards and Christmas cards, and they always had amazing apple pies. These were not distant institutions. They were family.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost much of its influence, and its history includes well-documented abuses that caused real and lasting harm. But the facts remain: without the religious congregations, the Acadian community would not have bounced back as well as it has.

Bringing Access to Higher Learning Home

It was Holy Cross priest Father Clément Cormier who brought the religious institutions together to create the Université de Moncton in 1963. For the first time, higher education in French was within reach of any Acadian family in this province who wanted it.

The Université de Moncton was the turning point. Before 1963, the choice for an ambitious young Acadian was simple and brutal: leave, or accept the ceiling.

The University of New Brunswick was accessible, but only the privileged few from well-off Francophone families could afford to get there. The community could not build an economy on exceptions.

The Université de Moncton changed the math. It put a university education within reach of families that had never sent a child to university before. It gave an entire generation the credentials to compete in law, medicine, engineering, and business administration.

The companies that those graduates built were not francophone companies in any narrow sense. They were companies built by people who finally had the depth of education to scale something.

The language was who they were; the degree was what made growth possible. Without that education, those businesses do not get built. Without those businesses, the economy of southeastern New Brunswick would not be what it is today. Without the university, this province would not be recognizable.

In July 2000, the Université installed alumnus Yvon Fontaine as its Recteur et Vice-Chancelier. Fontaine, born and raised in Saint-Louis-de-Kent, is living proof of what happens when we invest in community.

And because Fontaine understood that story, because it is his story, he understood that the next leap was not access. Access had been won. The next leap was to build out recognition and reputation.

During his 12-year tenure, he deepened the partnership with the Université de Sherbrooke to operate the first francophone medical school in Atlantic Canada, training doctors in French for francophone communities.

I was on the Board of Governors. I witnessed it. The university that today ranks among Canada’s top 50 research institutions got there because of what Fontaine pushed forward. It has now awarded more than 50,000 degrees. Its graduates earn incomes above the national average. It has more than 35 active research centres.

What History Actually Shows

The 1982 Grand Ralliement in Shippagan was a turning point few people outside that world remember. More than 400 Acadians gathered under the slogan Mon pouvoir j’y crois – I believe in my power.

Jean-Maurice Simard, the senior francophone minister in Hatfield’s cabinet, had negotiated the conditions for Acadian engagement within the party: financing for the Ralliement, an Acadian platform and an independent Acadian organization within the PC structure.

Hatfield won his largest majority in 1982, with 39 seats, including 10 Acadian seats. That coalition did not happen by accident. It happened because both sides showed up, negotiated in good faith, and delivered on their commitments. I remember putting up signs with “Encore Plus Fort” at le club des pompiers in St Antoine.

The years that followed were not easy. There were real tensions within the anglophone base, and those tensions never fully disappeared, just quiet during the years Conservatives were winning.

The Hatfield era lasted 17 years, nearly a generation, long enough for schools to educate a full cohort from beginning to end. Long enough for university faculties to mature. Long enough for institutions to move from fragile to foundational. Longevity under tension is not an accident. It is evidence.

Frank McKenna won the largest majority in New Brunswick history in 1987, sweeping every seat. McKenna finished what Hatfield’s government had built, proceeding with the constitutional entrenchment of Acadian rights.

In 1993, the McKenna government submitted the amendment that entrenched Bill 88 as Section 16.1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with Brian Mulroney’s federal government providing the national leadership to see it through. A Liberal premier and a Conservative prime minister, completing together what the argument demanded. Even for a Conservative like me, the consensus on this was always larger than any party.

La Grande Dame

Former Liberal deputy premier and McKenna-era cabinet minister Aldéa Landry began her career as a young lawyer in Hatfield’s Department of Justice, where she participated in drafting the law creating École Sainte-Anne in Fredericton and presented it to the Conservative caucus herself.

I remember the first time I met Aldéa as if it were yesterday. I was the special assistant to Federal Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) and Saint John MP Gerald Merrithew, and we were in Fredericton to discuss a federal-provincial cooperation agreement for mining development.

Aldéa, then McKenna’s Deputy Premier and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, opened by saying, “Gerry, I know what you want, and the province is prepared to do it. But I need something first. I need $4 million for a cultural agreement to support our arts community.”

He agreed on the spot. Colleagues joked afterward about Gerry’s negotiating skills, but they didn’t know what Aldéa did: Gerry wanted something for his community too – matching provincial dollars for the renovation of Saint John’s Imperial Theatre.

Everyone won that day. That is what the coalition looks like when it works.

Years later, Aldéa and I shared an office for our separate businesses. A Conservative and a Liberal, side by side. That is not unusual in New Brunswick. It is how things get built here.

Aldéa graduated from UNB Law in 1967 because no francophone law school yet existed. The nuns who educated her had recognized her drive and told her to enroll. She came back, practised law with her husband, Fernand Landry, and registered la Société des Jeux de l’Acadie pro bono, one of the many ways Aldéa quietly helped.

Les Jeux de l’Acadie is today the largest annual Acadian youth event in Atlantic Canada; a week of sport and culture that, every summer since 1979, has become a gathering place for Acadian young people from across the region. For many of them, it is the first time they understand that they belong to something larger than their hometown.

Transcending Politics

Jean-Pierre Ouellette was Hatfield’s Minister Responsible for Sports. He told me the Hatfield government supported Jean-Luc Belanger, the father of Les Jeux de l’Acadie, in 1979. Ouellette is the last living francophone minister from Hatfield’s cabinet, a reminder that the clock runs in only one direction.

I remember attending the finale in Campbellton in 2006 and watching Stephen Harper take his place in the stands at the opening ceremonies. He was the first sitting Canadian prime minister ever to attend. For a community that had spent generations fighting to be seen, that kind of recognition carried more weight than most people outside the community would understand.

Evidence that cultural equity is not and should not be a partisan issue.

When Bernard Lord modernized the official languages legislation, he completed the circle that Robichaud began, and Hatfield built out. One of the most powerful symbols was Bernard Lord’s wisdom in inviting Robichaud to speak from his old seat on June 7, 2002.

The former premier became emotional. It had become unfathomable just a few years earlier, when the Confederation of Regions was the official opposition, that such a day would be possible.

Bernard Lord did not simply complete the legislative architecture that Hatfield had begun. He embodied it. A leader at ease in both languages and both cultures, who spoke of openness and lived it. The francophone vote did not come to him simply because he was bilingual; it came because he was the argument.

He was proof that the francophone ridings that voted Liberal generation after generation were not ideologically Liberal. They were attentive. They were reading the messenger. When Conservative messengers say, through their words, their silences, or their policies, that the community is a cost to be managed rather than a partner to be respected, francophones hear it and vote accordingly. When the messenger says something different, they hear that too.

Those francophone ridings were never safe for anyone; they were waiting for a reason to trust. Bernard Lord gave them one.

The pattern does not change. Only the faces do. It’s not personal; it’s structural.

A Bicultural Economic Engine

In 2021, Statistics Canada confirmed what I and others believed: the greater Moncton region was the largest metropolitan centre in New Brunswick. I was chief of staff in the Premier’s Office at the time, helping to support the municipal reform file, and I was curious what the numbers told us about this demographic shift.

The Université of Moncton helped drive that shift, attracting young francophones to Moncton, first from within New Brunswick, and then from within the global Francophonie. Many stayed to work in businesses that valued a bilingual workforce – a key selling feature of Premier Frank McKenna’s business pitch – or started their own. It’s why Dieppe went from a small town in the 1970s to a growing Francophone city in 2003.

It was a story so many of us knew – but I wanted to see the data. While I built my company in Moncton, I didn’t live there. I, like many Acadians, lived further afield, in my case, Ste Marie de Kent, while others live in Shediac, Memramcook, or Richibucto. So I asked the provincial statisticians to calculate the economic impact of this southeastern Acadian economic zone, which I describe as stretching from Saint-Louis-de-Kent through Bouctouche and Saint-Antoine, down through Shediac and Cap-Pelé to the tri-city area of Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview, south to Memramcook and Sackville.

Here is what the numbers say: this southeastern New Brunswick ecosystem centred around Moncton represents 32.8 percent of the province’s population and accounts for 32.8 percent of its total assessed tax base.

Kent County, the region that sat last in Canada in that 1971 Senate report, is now standing on top.

This larger economic zone drives the province’s economy. It employs nearly 40 percent of the provincial workforce, at the lowest unemployment rate in New Brunswick and the highest participation rate.

It added more jobs in 2024 than any other region in the province. Moncton, Dieppe, and Riverview together generate $8.5 billion in household and business incomes. Moncton, Dieppe, and Shediac all broke building permit records.

The southeast has grown faster than any economic region east of Toronto for two decades.

The most bilingual region in the province is also its most productive. The bilingual workforce is the reason the province has built a contact centre and back-office industry that generates $1.5 billion in annual export revenue and employs 15,000 people.

For every bilingual position these companies create, they create two unilingual English positions. The investment in bilingualism does not cost Anglophone jobs; it creates them.

Acadian-owned companies in the southeast, built by graduates of Francophone institutions, now operate across most sectors of the provincial economy. Several generate annual revenues that place them among the largest privately held companies in Atlantic Canada.

In 2029, Moncton and Saint John will jointly host the Canada Games, two communities bidding together and winning together. That is what the coalition looks like when it works.

For generations, the claim was that the Acadian community was a cost to the province. It was. That was the whole point of the investment.

The community that was told it could not build is now helping to pay the bills.

None of this erases the frustration felt in parts of the province where economic progress has not arrived. That frustration is real, and the Acadian community understands it better than most. We know what it is to watch from the outside while others build. We know what it is to feel left behind. The answer is not to dismantle what worked. The answer is to apply the model more broadly.

What We Cannot Afford to Forget

In my father’s time, the fight was for the right to exist. Today, the fight is for the right to be excellent. That is not a retreat from the original argument.

It is what winning looks like.

The Acadian story is not a story of dispersion. It is a story of a people who kept true to their values across 422 years of building and rebuilding in impossible circumstances, never stopping.

Determination was the investment.

What was built is our inheritance.

The next generation does not need to re-litigate the investment.

It needs to build on it.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

Cathy Bennett doesn’t need statistics to explain what is wrong with Atlantic Canada’s pitch to investors. She describes it like a contractor’s quote. A savvy homebuyer wouldn’t hire a contractor to build a house without some price assurance, an agreed deadline and appropriate permit planning.

Likewise, if a government or community prices a project but then cannot maintain that price – because the permitting slipped, or an election changed the framework, or four jurisdictions each want their own process, altering the timeframe – then that deal is lost, she explains. Worse, the investor’s decision to spend time in the region is lost.

As a longtime business owner, former Newfoundland and Labrador finance minister, co-founder of Sandpiper Ventures and current member of the Atlantic Economic Panel, Bennett has spent years watching capital approach the region and then quietly redirect.

Jurisdictional mathematics

Atlantic Canada is not a single market. It is four provincial markets, layered with federal authority and overlaid again by municipal permitting. For a large-scale investor, that arithmetic is not just complex. It is a reason to look elsewhere.

The region’s deeper problem is repetition without learning. Large-scale deals have been too infrequent to build institutional fluency, says Bennett. Every project starts from scratch; each negotiation is bespoke.

“We don’t have the muscle memory across the region or the frequency of experiences to get that flow of predictability for investors,” she says. Infrastructure capital operates on 20- to 30-year horizons; political cycles run to four. A framework built in one term may not survive the next.

“Does this strategy hold for 15 years?” is not a rhetorical question. For investors committing long-dated capital, it is the central one.

The execution gap

Atlantic Canada’s fiscal constraint is simple. The four provinces do not generate enough tax revenue to pay for the services their populations need. Recent provincial budgets tell the tale.

New Brunswick

$1.39 billion deficit

$15.9 billion debt

30.6 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio

Prince Edward Island - 2026-27 budget will be released this afternoon (March 24)

$367 million (December 2025 fiscal update)

$3.7 billion debt

38 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio

Nova Scotia

$1.2 billion deficit

$27.9 billion debt

39.4 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio

Newfoundland and Labrador (from December fiscal update)

$948 million deficit

$19.4 billion debt (2025-26)

44.4 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio (highest in Canada)

To close these gaps, the four Atlantic provinces need large-scale investments. But that investment has been consistently hard to attract. The result is a loop: without growth, there is no revenue; without revenue, there is no capacity to support the conditions that attract growth.

What’s missing is scalability, which in practice means execution. Are the physical, human and societal conditions in place to move projects forward at the pace investors require? Has the region made clear to investors what it actually intends to be known for? If Atlantic Canada wants to be an energy region, a mining region, a green technology region, or all three, that requires a strategy visible enough for capital to align behind it, Bennett argues.

Bennett is precise about a confusion that costs the region deals: operators and investors are not the same thing. A province may have ambitious operators who cannot attract capital. The government’s role is not to replace the investor, but to create the conditions that make operators investable.

“Does the province push them to be an operator that can attract capital?” she asks. The question is not what provinces can afford to spend. It is what environment they are capable of building.

Exporters or value-adders

Beneath these constraints sits a more fundamental choice. Is Atlantic Canada in the business of exporting its natural assets, or building value from them? These are, Bennett emphasizes, two entirely different strategies and they will define the region’s economic trajectory.

The export model is familiar. Timber leaves as logs. Energy, if developed at scale, will likely leave as electrons bound for New England. Value is realised elsewhere.

The alternative is more demanding. A value-add strategy requires something four provincial governments with separate mandates and four-year attention spans have never managed to build: a coordinated industrial supply chain.

Bennett’s vision is specific: green steel from Labrador, processed into aluminium in New Brunswick, manufactured into components used by Michelin in Nova Scotia.

“How do we coordinate the strategies?” she asks. At present, there is no mechanism to do so. The Atlantic Loop, a transmission project central to the region’s energy integration, illustrates the gap. Its importance is widely acknowledged; its progress remains stalled in negotiations.

The fiscal logic is direct. Driving up provincial GDP through raw extraction, while value leaves the region, produces revenues that look respectable in aggregate and feel inadequate per capita. “We like to think that because there’s an asset, there’s an implied revenue, and there isn’t,” Bennett says. ”If nobody buys it, there is no revenue.”

Building purchase agreements and demonstrated demand into the investment case from the start is not a detail. It is the strategy.

Friction: Rubbed the wrong way

Nowhere is this execution gap more visible than in emerging sectors. “Regulatory velocity” a term common to venture capital, measures how quickly regulatory frameworks evolve relative to the industries they govern. Lags in regulatory velocity create ‘friction,’ and when technology outpaces regulation, it creates uncertainty. When friction rises, investors cannot model risk and capital moves on to greener, smoother pastures.

Regulatory standards, despite their stubborn intergovernmental abundance, should not be misinterpreted as negative. Bennett, for instance, does not want to strip out regulation.

“Canada is recognised as being one of the most progressive regulated communities to do work in,” she says. Regulations mean safety, fairness, rule of law, financial governance and social licence. Our difficulty is coordination.

Change is afoot, Bennett says. Nova Scotia has eliminated 150 of 300 regulations. New Brunswick has built a mining framework. Newfoundland is working on health sector regulation. Progress is real.

The spirit is willing

Atlantic Canada’s marine carbon removal sector demonstrates the friction problem right now. Planetary Technologies, a Halifax company, leads the world in ocean alkalinity enhancement: adding minerals to coastal waters to capture and store atmospheric carbon. It delivers verified carbon credits through Frontier, a carbon removal purchasing alliance backed by Google, Stripe, and Shopify. Unfortunately for Atlantic Canada, its technology is advancing faster than the frameworks that govern it.

More than five federal bodies oversee Planetary Technologies’ operations, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Transport Canada, and the Impact Assessment Agency. Each applies different statutes to the same activity.

The result is not oversight, but overlap. Investors struggle to model timelines and risk. In such conditions, delay is not neutral. It is decisive.

In February 2026, the Senate committee’s report, “Carbon Removal, From Air to Sea,” recommended a single regulatory sandbox to consolidate federal oversight, targeting a unified framework by end-2027. The risk is timing.

By 2027, the commercial market may have moved on. Capital does not wait for regulatory alignment; it prices delay as risk.

Still, the recommendation signals movement. The regulatory sandbox, introduced in Budget 2024 as a government-wide tool, is intended to let frameworks evolve alongside emerging sectors. In principle, it could apply to tidal energy, offshore wind, or any industry where legislation lags technology. What is new is its application. This is the first time a parliamentary body has formally proposed its use for an Atlantic Canadian sector. Whether it is deployed more broadly will depend on political will.

What is Atlantic Canada capable of?

“Status quo isn’t going to get the job done anymore,” Bennett says. The world is reorganising around clean energy, critical minerals, and carbon removal; precisely the assets Atlantic Canada holds in abundance. The opportunity is real. So is the risk of missing it.

The region has ambition. It has assets. It has, at intervals, interested investors. What it has not demonstrated consistently is the capacity to execute: to move projects from conception to completion on timelines that make capital deployment rational.

The federal regulatory sandbox, the Senate committee’s marine carbon removal report, the progress on provincial regulatory reform: at this point these are only signals. Turning them into solutions requires governments to treat regulatory infrastructure as a competitive asset, to make commitments that outlast electoral cycles, and to build the kind of predictability that capital, unlike voters, rewards generously.

Atlantic Canada has been managed for stability. It needs to be built for growth.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI Summary for Search: Atlantic Canada holds world-class assets in clean energy, critical minerals, and forestry, oceans and agriculture but fragmented regulations across four provinces, unpredictable political cycles, and a persistent execution gap keep driving investors elsewhere.

Former Newfoundland and Labrador finance minister Cathy Bennett argues the region’s problem isn’t its assets – it’s predictability. With combined provincial deficits exceeding $3.9 billion and no coordinated industrial strategy, Atlantic Canada is caught in a growth loop it can’t escape without structural reform.

A 2026 Senate committee report recommending a unified federal regulatory sandbox signals movement – but capital won’t wait long for alignment.

Key themes: Atlantic Canada investment, regulatory reform, clean energy, provincial deficits, economic development, Cathy Bennett

Hello everyone! Today, we’re welcoming my friend Louis Léger to Side Walks with the first of two reflections on the growth of Acadian rights, political power and cultural strength. Louis Léger had a front-row seat. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with concentrations in Political Science, History and Business Administration from the Université de Moncton, and spent four decades in the middle of the story he is telling, in politics, in business, and in government. He writes this with a sense of duty to share what he witnessed. Louis is the co-chair of the Moncton and Saint John 2029 Jeux du Canada Games bid committee. Next week: Part Two – What the Record Shows.

I was there near the beginning, or close enough to it that the memory runs in me.

The people making decisions today, and the people criticizing them, mostly weren’t there. They didn’t see what Kent County looked like before. They didn’t sit in the rooms where the arguments were made, the risks were taken, and the compromises were struck.

The awakening was happening in every Acadian region of this province, in the Peninsula, across the north to Madawaska.

This essay tells it through the southeast because that is where I lived and that is what I know. It does not pretend to capture every detail or every name. It is one witness, from one seat, of what was built.

To understand what was built in New Brunswick, you have to know where it started.

The first Acadians arrived in 1604, before any other Europeans established a permanent community on this continent. For 150 years, they thrived in what is today the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. Then came 125 years of misery.

The Acadians had tried to remain neutral between Britain and France. The British were unconvinced.

The Acadians had lived alongside the Mi’kmaq for generations and would not turn on their friends. Families were forcibly separated to ensure the community would not survive. It was deliberate, but it did not work.

Some survived in Nova Scotia. Some became Cajuns in Louisiana. And many disappeared into the woods of New Brunswick, sheltered by the First Nations, and from there slowly, quietly, rebuilt.

In 1880, through the structure of the Catholic Church, Acadians were invited to participate in a national convention in Quebec City. It was the first time they had been invited to anything.

But something became clear in those rooms. The Acadians were warmly welcomed as French Canadians. And that was precisely the problem.

They were not French Canadians. They were Acadians, with their own history, their own survival.

The turning point came the following year.

A message went out through the parishes: it was time to come out of the woods and discuss the future. In 1881, with no telephone and no internet, word of mouth alone, five thousand Acadians descended on the village of Memramcook in New Brunswick. All expectations were blown away. They would make clear to the world who they were.

It would take another 80 years before the conditions existed to act on that declaration. What happened when they finally did is what follows.

The people who built it are the place to start.

The Field in Kent County

Before the generation that built in the same direction as political currents, there was the generation that built against it with nothing but refusal.

Msgr. Marcel-François Richard was a curé from Kent County, and what was done to him and what he built tells you everything about the era that preceded the investment.

Father Richard was born in 1847 in Saint-Louis-de-Kent, the son of a farmer. In 1874, convinced that Acadian children needed access to education in their own language, he founded the Académie Saint-Louis. By 1876, it had become a college.

His bishop, the Irish-Catholic James Rogers, ordered Father Richard to make it bilingual or close it. Father Richard refused. He understood what bilingual meant. It meant English. Bishop Rogers shut Académie Saint-Louis down in 1882. His reported verdict: it was too French.

The year earlier, in 1881, Father Richard attended the first Convention nationale des Acadiens at Memramcook, the first time since 1755 that Acadians had gathered as a people.

At that convention, Father Richard argued successfully for August 15 as the Acadian national holiday, the Feast of the Assumption. Deliberately not June 24. Not the Feast of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which is Quebec’s national holiday.

The choice was a statement: to ensure no one got confused, Acadians were not Quebecers. Acadians are Acadians, with their very own history.

When a second convention was planned in Miscouche in 1884, Bishop Rogers ordered Father Richard not to attend. He went anyway, and he did not go empty-handed.

He had arranged for a flag to be sewn in secret: the French tricolour, with one deliberate distinction: on the blue field, a gold star representing the Virgin Mary, patroness of the Acadian people. The delegates adopted it.

That was strike three. Bishop Rogers stripped Father Richard of his parish and sent him into the wilderness, literally. A new mission, deep in the woods, far from conventions and colleges and the trouble he had caused. Bishop Rogers named the new parish after himself – Rogersville.

Father Richard built it anyway. Because that is what he did. What he built, he built against the current. The generation that followed him would expand upon it. The conditions had finally changed enough to make that possible.

Two of those who followed were the men closest to my own life.

Building Out From Kent County

My wife Jacqueline’s grandfather, Prospère Girouard, took over the family farm at Sainte-Marie-de-Kent in 1929, the year the world fell apart. He would operate it for the rest of his life. Those who knew him called him le parrain, the Godfather of Kent County. The record bears that out.

He was a county councillor from 1942 and county warden from 1958. He served as president of the Rural Municipalities Association, president of the Union of New Brunswick Municipalities, chairman of the advisory committee at Stella Maris Hospital, president of the Kent County School Trustees Association, and a member of the New Brunswick Board of Commissioners of Public Utilities.

He was also a member of L’Ordre de La Patente, the quiet network that worked in the background to advance Acadian interests in the years before those interests had any other organized home.

He was, in short, the man who ran the civic infrastructure of Kent County for a generation: schools, hospitals, agriculture, municipal governance.

Before the 1960 election, Premier Hugh John Flemming drove out to the farm in Sainte-Marie and personally asked Prospère to run. That image has stayed with our family for over 60 years: a Conservative premier, on foot, in an Acadian field, making his case.

Prospère considered it but said no. He had known Louis Robichaud for years; they were friends, they fished together, and La Patente, the network Prospère belonged to, wanted that moment to land without interference.

But the decision was his, and it was clear-eyed. He was already at the table, and no one in Kent County civic life could ignore him. He had spent decades building real control over the institutions that mattered to his community. That was not something you walked away from to lose a seat in Fredericton.

Prospère made things happen. This was one of them.

Years later, he would encourage my father, Omer Leger, to run in 1971, and by then the groundwork was already laid.

Prospère had arranged for Omer to chair the newly created local school commission, with a new high school for Bouctouche in the works. That was how he operated. He did not recruit candidates. He built the conditions that made them ready.

Prospère was also among the men who led Sainte-Marie parish to establish its Caisse Populaire, and who helped neighbouring Kent County parishes do the same. It was quiet work. Nobody held a press conference. But it was the kind of work that compounded across generations: capital kept in the community, lent back to the community, building the ecosystem that would eventually make everything else possible.

The institution that these men built, known today as UNI Coopération Financière, now holds over $5 billion in assets and serves more than 155,000 members. It is the largest New Brunswick-owned financial institution in the province. It began, parish by parish, with men like Prospère Girouard walking their neighbours through the paperwork.

That purpose ran in families. My father-in-law was sent to the University of Notre Dame to obtain his PhD in Physics, not only for personal advancement, but with a clear purpose: to come back and help create a science faculty at the Université de Moncton.

He did.

This was not accidental. The community understood that a university without qualified professors was a building without a foundation. So they sent their own people out, on purpose, with the expectation they would return. Many did.

That is how you build an institution from nothing: you decide, before the institution exists, who will staff it.

But institutions alone are not enough. The same generation that built the civic infrastructure also understood that without culture there is no soul.

Culture Made Real

Author Antonine Maillet gave the Acadian people a character they did not know they needed. Her novel La Sagouine was a fictional washerwoman, but drawn from life, someone who could read a room and understood things that people with more power and more education had missed.

My father knew Antonine Maillet and Viola Léger, the actress who brought La Sagouine to life, and it was a story he could never let go.

He, with Lionel Mills, a former mayor of Bouctouche, convinced Antonine, one friend to another, that La Sagouine deserved her pays. That she could rise up from the written word and have a place of her own.

It was not universally welcomed at first. For some in the community, a washerwoman as ambassador was an embarrassment, not a celebration.

Today Le Pays de la Sagouine is a testament to Acadian cultural richness, for everyone to enjoy, a place to laugh and to think.

La Sagouine left behind a saying that was written to me personally on a poster, signed by Viola Léger in the character she made immortal: “C’est pas d’aouère de quoi qui rend une parsonne bénaise… c’est de savoir qu’à va l’ouère.” It translates to: ‘It is not having something that makes a person happy…it is knowing that she will achieve it.’

That is the philosophy of a people who survived on faith and the long view. The servant has her own country now.

Gérald Leblanc, a poet from Bouctouche, Kent County, gave a generation a language for what they were living.

He wrote most of the lyrics for 1755, the band named for the year that scattered a people, the most celebrated band in Acadian history, formed in 1975 at the height of the transformation.

Gérald walked everywhere he went. I loved giving him rides when I spotted him around town. He left his tuque in my car once. I still have it.

Before politics, there was the institution.

My father’s career began and ended at Assomption Vie, the Acadian insurance institution whose CEO was Gilbert Finn, a man whose leadership is impossible to fully measure; his distinguished public life would eventually take him to Government House as Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick.

My father’s first boss at Assomption Vie was Léopold Belliveau, who would go on to become the first Acadian mayor of Moncton. The institution that trained them both was doing more than selling insurance policies. It was producing the leadership that would go on to govern the city itself.

My father kept his Assomption Vie licence until the day he died. He knew exactly what it meant.

What My Father’s Generation Built

My father won the by-election created when Louis J. Robichaud, having lost the government in 1970, resigned his seat. Robichaud was a neighbour who lived three minutes from our house.

The man who lived three minutes down the road had set in motion one of the most transformative acts of governance in this province’s history: the Equal Opportunity reforms that created the framework for a modern provincial government, equalizing services across New Brunswick and dismantling a system where the county you were born in determined what education, health care, and public services you could access.

My father Omer Léger was, as those who knew him would say, like a fish in water when it came to politics. He couldn’t help it. His famous quote was that “he felt like a blueberry in a strawberry pie.” If he had $20 in his pocket and someone needed it, he gave it.

In his last days, well into his nineties, he was still giving me lists of constituents who needed help and projects that deserved attention. The impulse never left him. It was not ambition. It was his vocation.

He came of age in a New Brunswick where social services were delivered, if at all, from the home of a member of the legislature because the infrastructure to deliver it any other way barely existed. He understood with the clarity that only poverty teaches what it means to govern a community that had largely been left to fend for itself.

I remember hearing someone say, with genuine indignation, that the government was building too many Acadian schools. The implied criticism was that resources were being lavished on one community at the expense of another.

What that criticism conveniently omitted was the baseline: we didn’t have a school system. A few buildings were finally going up. But there were no francophone school boards, no standardized training, no professional teaching corps.

Where francophone schools did exist, many classrooms were staffed by teenagers with no formal training, and counties were so broke that Gloucester County, which includes Bathurst and the Acadian Peninsula, once mailed out teacher salary cheques and ran out of money.

The investment in Acadian schools wasn’t preferential treatment. It was the first instalment on a debt that had been accumulating for generations.

When the Hatfield government announced the construction of l’école Ste-Anne in Fredericton in 1974, it was met with anger by a small but vocal segment. The school was meant for Acadian families who had moved to Fredericton to follow jobs created by the transfer of county government responsibilities to the province.

The anger was not about a school. It was about Acadians breaking through the glass ceiling that had been imposed on them, and being blamed for it.

It did not matter to those opposed to l’école Ste-Anne that the capital region benefited more than any other in the province from the transfer of government responsibilities. The hostility was real enough that RCMP protection was necessary, even at our home in Saint-Antoine.

A French-English Coalition Rises

My father’s generation built important institutions alongside anglophone colleagues who understood, whatever their disagreements, that a province is only as strong as the institutions it chooses to invest in. They argued, they compromised, they sometimes got it wrong, and they kept building anyway.

The coalition that built southeastern New Brunswick had anglophone faces as well as francophone ones, and it is worth naming some of them. Not as a list, but as what they were: people whose way of being in the world made the coalition possible.

Larry Nelson was CEO of Lounsbury, one of the great anglophone business dynasties of southeastern New Brunswick. But what he practised was relationship building.

Every golf tournament, every networking event, every room he organized had every community in it. He always ensured that all members of all communities were invited. That was not a policy. That was how he did business. He connected people together.

One day, he came to see me. He said: every time you asked me for support, I tried to give it. Now I need you to sit on the major donor committee of the Moncton City Hospital. The anglophone hospital. I said yes. That was Larry’s way, and all who knew him understand what that means without explanation: fair, inclusive, respectful always, and as honest as they come.

Roger Clinch had been mayor of Bathurst and the public face of Brunswick Mines. He carried a big stick and used it as a force of good.

He grew up in an environment where he had seen the hostile attitudes up close and chosen a different path. When he was asked to run in Gloucester County in 1984, he won the heart of the Acadian Peninsula not because he spoke their language perfectly, but because his body language matched what he said.

He was generous, wise in his counsel to many, and an example at the provincial level of exactly what Larry was in the southeast. The people who knew him had a name for it: Roger’s way. It meant the same thing Larry’s way meant. Everyone trusted him. Without people like Roger Clinch, the coalition does not work.

Dan Skalling was my father’s Deputy Minister of Tourism, an anglophone who understood what the government he served was trying to build, and who lived it in practice.

His gift was diplomatic repair. When bad management created a language incident – a security commissioner facing a barrier, a service failure that could have become a headline – Dan fixed it.

He found the accommodation, smoothed the edges, and kept the system working. He did not treat every failure as evidence that the framework was wrong. He treated it as a problem to be solved.

He took me everywhere. Into rooms I had no business being in as a kid. Years later, he became my boss in Saint John MP and the senior federal Minister for New Brunswick Gerald Merrithew’s office. That relationship ran across two decades and two governments. That is what real trust looks like.

Gerald Merrithew attended the Caraquet Acadian Festival on August 15 virtually every year he was in office. He understood how much it mattered. He once told me directly that he was proud to have been part of the government that built the Village Historique Acadien.

Larry built the room and made sure everyone was invited. Roger and Gerry carried the authority and used their stature as a force of good. Dan kept the room from breaking, treated every failure as a management problem, not a structural one. Different men, different functions, all essential to the same coalition.

I could name many more. It is not the names that matter. It is what they represented: anglophone New Brunswickers who understood what was being built, chose to be part of it, and made it stronger by showing up.

They were not unusual. The vast majority of anglophone New Brunswickers were fair-minded people who understood that lifting one community did not come at the expense of another. The resistance was always louder than it was large.

Challenge Assumptions

There is a belief held by some people with influence in this province that what that generation did was not an investment. It was patronage. It was vote-buying. That the Acadian community rose not because the institutions worked but because money was spent to purchase political loyalty.

I know this belief exists because it was said to me during my time as deputy minister and chief of staff. “I will never do what Richard Hatfield did. I will not buy the Acadian vote.” It stopped me. It hurt because of my history.

What the record shows is not favouritism or patronage. It is a community that started with nothing and built what it needed to survive and then grow.

The schools were not gifts. The hospitals were not favours. They were the first response to generations of absence. And the return on that investment is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of public record.

The belief persists anyway. It lives under the surface. When it goes unchallenged, it becomes the basis for real decisions. People begin to draw judgments from feelings and exceptions rather than from the documented record. That carries a price this province cannot afford.

Brenda Robertson was my father’s friend and the first woman elected to the New Brunswick Legislative Assembly. Together they championed the extramural health program, a first in Canada. It would eventually care for him in his own home in his final years.

He fought for the modern hospital where he would draw his last breath. At 92, he died in a system he had helped establish, cared for by institutions his generation had built from almost nothing.

That is what investment looks like 50 years later. It is not a politician enriching himself, nor is it votes being purchased. It is a man dying with dignity in a community that had the infrastructure to care for him, infrastructure that did not exist when he was elected.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI Summary: A firsthand account of how Acadian communities in southeastern New Brunswick transformed from a historically marginalized people into a thriving, institutionally rich society. Spanning from 19th and 20th century, the essay traces how determined leaders, priests, farmers, politicians, and artists built schools, hospitals, financial cooperatives, and cultural landmarks against enormous resistance. Anchored by Louis Robichaud’s landmark Equal Opportunity reforms and figures like civic leader Prospère Girouard and author Antonine Maillet, the story argues that Acadian advancement was not political patronage but the long-overdue return on generations of deliberate, community-driven investment — made possible in part by fair-minded anglophone allies who chose to build alongside them.

Keywords: Acadian history, New Brunswick, Louis Robichaud, Université de Moncton, Caisse Populaire, La Sagouine, Kent County, Equal Opportunity reforms, Acadian institutions, Maritime heritage

The Government of New Brunswick needs more people so it can receive more money.

Provincial finance minister René Legacy delivered a St. Patrick’s Day budget that included a record-setting $1.39 billion deficit, an increasing debt burden and no obvious pot of gold.

It also revealed how dependent New Brunswick is on federal government policy, particularly immigration.

“The biggest thing that’s recently had an impact on our revenues was population growth,” said Legacy, during his budget day media briefing.

“If our population growth goes faster than other provinces, then our share of the transfers from Ottawa also grows.”

Although New Brunswick’s population continues to increase, sitting at 869,682 as of Canada Day, 2025, the government projects a tiny increase of 0.3 per cent in 2026.

“We’re still growing, but we’re growing at a slower pace than other provinces, so now our share [of transfer payments] is shrinking,” Legacy said. “So, with the new policies in the federal government around immigration, I think the key for us is...we can still keep lobbying to get more, but we need to keep whatever we get.”

Transfers to New Brunswick

The numbers show why that matters. The Department of Health’s budget now sits at $4.8 billion, accounting for roughly one‑third of all government spending and almost matching the combined value of the three major federal transfer payments, which are projected at $4.9 billion in 2026–27.

Those transfers help define Canadian federalism: equalization, the Canada Health Transfer, and the Canada Social Transfer, formulated to redistribute wealth so that provinces like New Brunswick can maintain comparable standards of health care, education and social supports despite having a weaker tax base.

For 2026–27, the provincial government estimates $3.36 billion from equalization, $1.2 billion from the Canada Health Transfer, and $376 million from the Canada Social Transfer. Together, federal transfers account for roughly 37 per cent of all provincial revenues.

While the province is banking on major projects – such as the proposed Sisson Mine, J.D. Irving’s planned Brighton Wind Farm, upgrades to its Saint John pulp mill, and upgrading NB Power’s Point Lepreau, which was allocated $9.9 million in the budget for additional nuclear development – to drive economic growth and, eventually, tax revenues, Legacy warned those benefits are neither immediate nor transformational on their own.

He offered a reality check: even a $1‑billion private‑sector investment might only translate into $30-$40 million in actual tax revenue for the province.

“You need a lot of those projects to really move the needle.”

There are indirect gains. Legacy pointed to the busy aggregate operations at the Port of Belledune and ongoing work at Mactaquac as examples of projects that put people to work, generate income taxes and support local businesses. But he stressed that New Brunswick lacks the kind of quick‑hit revenue source that other provinces enjoy.

“As much as our net debt‑to‑GDP is very good compared to other provinces, our issue is we’re not Alberta,” said the finance minister. “When oil goes up $30, $40, we don’t benefit as quickly. We need to have more structural industry to keep building forward.”

No Easy Fixes

That structural deficit looms over every decision in this budget. The province is forecasting a $1.39‑billion deficit in 2026–27, with it persisting through at least 2028–29, when the shortfall is still expected to be more than $1.2 billion and provincial debt will be approaching $20 billion.

Legacy argued that what’s on the table now is only the first phase.

“We’ve started… and it’s just the beginning,” he said. He noted that the out‑year projections are built on a set of assumptions and not all of the underlying decisions have been finalized. “There’s more decisions happening.”

Some of those decisions are already clear. The government plans to cut Part 1 of the civil service by 12 per cent through attrition over three years. Provincially owned heritage properties with fewer than 5,000 visitors will be transferred to community partners or shut down. Field veterinary services and provincial vet labs, including foreign animal disease services, will be phased out and handed to the private sector. A toll on non‑New Brunswick vehicles near Aulac is slated to be in place by 2028, with expected net revenues of about $10.4 million per year.

These moves are meant to chip away at what Legacy calls a structural deficit – the gap between what New Brunswickers expect from public services and what the province’s tax base can reliably support.

Asked why the government isn’t cutting more deeply now, given the scale of the shortfall, Legacy said that 82 per cent of the deficit is tied to the rising cost of existing services, not new political promises.

“Our campaign promises and our strategic government decisions only represent about 18 per cent, just a shade over $220 million,” he said.

Instead, the government is trying to buy time while it waits for long‑term industrial projects to come online and quietly hopes for more generous federal rules on immigration.

Legacy’s own answer suggests there is no easy way out. The province can’t get to balanced books quickly through private investment alone, it can’t cut its way there without undermining the very services residents demand, and it can’t count on federal transfers to keep rising if Ottawa’s immigration policy keeps New Brunswick’s population growth slower than the national average.

In this budget, the government has chosen to lean into record‑level deficits while it tries to stabilize health care, expand education supports and keep households afloat — a gambit that depends, more than ever, on decisions made in Ottawa and on whether newcomers to New Brunswick decide to stay.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

The Government of New Brunswick’s annual Flood Watch notification program has opened for the 2026 freshet season, providing residents with updates on river conditions, including possible ice jams and flood risks. In 2018, I wrote New Brunswick Underwater, which told the story of that spring’s flood, a historic once-in-one-hundred years flood. Then it happened again in 2019. Below is an excerpt that explains how experts monitor and regulate the Wolostoq/St. John River.

For 20 days in spring 2018, Wolastoq/St. John River reasserted its power over the land and people of central and southern New Brunswick. Water barrelled through the southern reach of the river at over 328,000 cubic feet per second – four times its normal rate – damaging over 12,000 homes, cottages and buildings, washing out roads and bridges and requiring $39 million in federal disaster relief.

The 2018 Wolastoq/St. John River flood was historic not only for what it did, but also for what it represented. This was New Brunswick’s eighth climate-related natural disaster in six years, all caused by fresh water – rain, snow and floods.

According to the New Brunswick Department of Environment and Local Government, climate change will lead to warmer winter temperatures, a rise in total precipitation falling in fewer but more intense events, more frequent winter thaws and larger fluctuations in river runoff.

Check, check, check and check.

“I believe there will be more events and we need to start preparing for what comes next,” said Saint John Fire Chief Kevin Clifford. “Those of us in disaster relief have a term for that: build back better. Citizens are always going to want to be close to nature but maybe we could take a step back.”

Forecasting the Flood

New Brunswick’s flood forecasting is produced by the Hydrology Centre within the Department of Environment and Local Government. This is how it works. First thing in the morning the team receives a weather briefing from the Atlantic Storm Prediction Centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia that gives them the daily high and low temperatures, barometric pressure, wind speeds and direction, and chance of precipitation.

Next, the centre’s data technologist collects all the information from the water level gauges located all along the river, in Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick. This information is then given to the forecast engineer who combines the two sources of data to create the hydrological model, which calculates how much water is coming down the river.

This information is then shared with NB Power, which uses it to calculate how much water will need to pass through the dam.

Mactaquac Dam, like the Grand Falls and Beechwood dams upriver, is a run-of-river dam. That means the holding pond created by the dam doesn’t actually store much water. That’s because of the St. John River’s geography, which is too small and narrow to allow for a large storage area. Instead, the water that flows into the Mactaquac head pond flows quickly through the dam’s turbines, creating hydroelectricity. Any water not used for power generation must bypass the dam through its spill gates.

During normal operations, water passes through the dam at 80,000 cubic feet per second. However, the 2018 spring flood produced far more water. On April 27, the first day of the flood in Fredericton, water was passing through Mactaquac at 297,000 cubic feet per second, over three times its normal rate. The next day – when the flood reached Maugerville – the water was at 327,000 cubic feet per second. It did not return to normal levels until May 13.

To enable the water to flow through the dam and its spill gates the river must approach Mactaquac at a downward angle, just as it used to before the dam was built. In order to achieve this slope, operators lower the head pond, which is why, according to NB Power and NB EMO, the head pond was so low during the flood.

Once NB Power has calculated its discharge levels for the day, the number is sent back to the Hydrology Centre to make a third and final calculation: the hydraulic forecast, which calculates the height of the water.

This requires three numbers: the hydrological forecast (water flow), NB Power’s water discharge estimate, and the height and timing of the Bay of Fundy tides. This final number allows forecasters to determine how much water will be able to pass through Reversing Falls and how much will be held back, left to linger in the lower reaches of the river basin.

It is the hydrological forecast that is delivered to NB EMO and then published on River Watch.

There is one fact that residents, experts, scientists and first responders can all agree: the five-day forecast is really a best guess thanks to New Brunswick’s fast-changing weather patterns.

The flood forecast, just like a regular weather forecast, increases in accuracy the closer it gets to the actual day.

New Brunswick was the first province in Atlantic Canada to introduce flood forecasting and flood mapping, which it did following the last historic flood, in 1973, basing its new system off the one developed for Manitoba’s Red River basin. Brian Barnes was one of the people tasked with creating it and remembers all too well the challenges of predicting Maritime weather patterns.

“The problem with flood forecasting in the East is weather. It happens very fast in a small area and the biggest problem is forecasting where the rain is going to fall,” he said, looking out at the St. John River from his living room in Fredericton. “By comparison the Red River is very big.”

The basis of flood forecasting is much the same now as it was then. To determine the level and speed of a flood, forecasters need to understand weather, rainfall, snowpack up north, daytime and nighttime high and low temperatures. Combined, these factors give an indication of how fast or slow the snow will melt in the upper reaches of the river system, in Maine, Quebec and northern New Brunswick.

Barnes says a lot has changed in New Brunswick over the past four decades. “Human geography was different then. The province was more rural,” he said, adding over the years economic considerations have oftentimes taken precedence over ecological realities. “We came out with flood risk mapping so the public could understand, but local politicians, real estate associations, municipalities and planning committees didn’t want to limit development.”

Matt Alexander understands too well the push and pull between land development and environmental protection. An environmental engineer by profession, Alexander is also the Deputy Mayor of Rothesay, a bedroom community that experienced flooding this year along the ribbon of residential development that runs along the banks of the Kennebecasis River.

Alexander says he sees the landscape changing as more people use the land, cutting down trees to improve their view of the river. It is further evidence he says of New Brunswick’s longstanding practise to allow low-density development, known as ribbon development, sometimes through granting exceptions to planning bylaws, and sometimes by simply not prosecuting offenders.

“Over the years we’ve really seen the Department of Environment whittle away. There really isn’t anyone out there to enforce the rules.”

Alexander says stronger enforcement of existing regulations under New Brunswick’s Watercourse and Wetlands Alterations regulation (WAWA) is a good place to start. In the wake of the 2018 flood, the provincial government announced plans to introduce new requirements for people and developers applying to build near rivers, streams and brooks to prove the project will withstand future flood damage. However, the existing WAWA regulations only apply to buildings within 30 metres of a watercourse or wetland – and the 2018 flood destroyed buildings set much further back from the shoreline.

Shawn Dalton understands the difficulty in trying to limit river-facing development along the St. John River. She is a Fredericton-based social ecologist and one of the authors of the Canadian Rivers Institute report on the St. John River and recognizes the desire to live and work along the river runs deep in New Brunswickers.

“We have a big problem on our hands when it comes to storm surges and floods. We’re on water and we will not back off it,” she says. “People expect the river not to move but rivers move. Rivers wander around their flood plains and flood plains are big. If you build in a flood plain you are going to get slammed.”

Dalton says as more trees are removed from the shoreline, whether through industrial forestry operations, agriculture, residential development or a simple desire for a view of the river, people can expect greater degradation of the shoreline, including erosion and flooding.

“We see more and more people moving out into the country and building with an urban aesthetic. I’d like to know if there were different impacts of the flood on people because of shoreline management,” she said. “We created this. It’s a climate event – and this is going to happen more.”

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI Summary: New Brunswick’s River Watch program launched today just as a major storm brings heavy rain and sleet to the province, raising concerns about flooding along the Wolastoq/St. John River. The St. John River system is one of the hardest in Canada to forecast because of its complex topography, unpredictable weather patterns, and fast‑changing flow rates. Experts say our ongoing development along riverbanks and floodplains – often in areas known to be at risk – makes forecasting even more challenging and increases the likelihood of severe damage during high‑water events. As the storm moves in, River Watch provides early warnings, but the long‑term risks remain tied to how and where New Brunswick builds.

Investors look at Atlantic Canada in much the same way people view Alexander Keith’s namesake brew – those who like it, like it a lot.

However, even knowledgeable investors still have questions about whether the region is truly investable.

That word, investability, is what’s on Cathy Bennett’s mind as she and her fellow members of the Atlantic Economic Panel conclude consultations and begin to consider how to increase the fortunes of a region chronically at the back of the provincial pack.

Bennett has sat on all sides of the economic table, first as owner of the Bennett Group of Companies, then as Newfoundland and Labrador’s Finance Minister, and now as the co-founder and managing partner of Sandpiper Ventures.

“Investors who have experience in investing in Atlantic Canada know the value of the incredibly hard-working entrepreneurs that are in the region,” Bennett said. “They know the opportunities to scale, but they also have questions around what I would call the investability of companies from Atlantic Canada.”

The Atlantic Economic Panel’s mandate is to consider how to increase the region’s economic output as part of the country’s larger move to diversify its trading relationships and reduce dependence on the United States.

Joining Bennett are: social scientist, podcaster and business leader Don Mills, who chairs the panel; Halifax International Airport Authority President and CEO Joyce Carter; Cassidy Group (Coach Atlantic; Maritime Bus) CEO Mike Cassidy; McCain Foods chairman, former Maple Leaf Foods senior executive and investor, J. Scott McCain; former Canadian Armed Forces member and Pabineau First Nations Chief Terry Richardson; and Bank of Canada lead director and CEO and principal shareholder of Seafair Capital, Anne Whelan.

A part of the panel’s mandate is to examine the region’s ‘culture and scalability.’ In other words, whether Atlantic Canada provides businesses with the regulatory stability, access to capital and growth mindset required to scale.

She describes a spectrum that runs across the region’s business landscape. On one end are early‑stage companies whose founders are long on sweat equity and ideas, but short on the structural support and financing they need to grow. On the other are century‑old firms that have already figured out how to operate at scale and sell into markets far beyond Atlantic Canada.

“We, as a region, have had companies that Sandpiper invests in, for example, that really struggle from the region to attract capital because of their place and the biases around the place,” Bennett said.

The problem, she suggests, lies in the space between where the less glamorous parts of investability reside, in issues such as regulatory predictability and social license.

Canada’s high regulatory standards, particularly around the environment, are often cast as a burden. Investors, Bennett says, frequently see them differently.

“Canada has some of the highest standards in the world when it comes to regulatory expectations, particularly around environment, etcetera,” she said. “And I think we lose sight of how valuable that is when we think about investability, because global money coming to Canada is coming for a reason.”

Social License Questions

The real threat to investability isn’t the standards we set, rather it’s in how we enforce and interpret them.

“When we have inconsistencies, that’s where we actually lose the interest of investors,” Bennett said. “Inconsistencies could come from political cycles. It could come from different governments changing. It could come from different interpretations of how community wants regulations reflected in their community.”

Another layer of investability is social license, which Bennett sees as a hard precondition for major projects, not a soft, last‑minute add‑on. Large institutional investors are examining Atlantic Canada through that lens as closely as they study financials.

“Large scale institutional investors, who may not know the region, are also doing their homework about the region as to whether or not the social license to operate is actually in place at the level that they need,” she said, “and how much work will companies need to do to make sure that they have the social license from Indigenous communities, from friends and neighbours, and where a project might be proposed.”

In that context, Indigenous participation and equity are becoming structural, not symbolic. Asked whether Indigenous equity, or at least participation that leads to equity, should be seen as a baseline for projects, Bennett was unequivocal.

“One thousand percent, absolutely,” she said.

She argues that part of the panel’s work is surfacing how much the ground has already shifted, and how slowly perceptions have caught up.

“What is being revealed through the work that we’ve been doing is the evolution of what may have been historical biases towards what had happened in community over [time],” she said.

For instance, legislative constraints, including aspects of the Indian Act, meant that the ambition for Indigenous equity and the ability to finance that equity were out of alignment.

“There was a period of time… where ambition to have equity and the ability to finance that equity weren’t aligned,” Bennett said. “The [Indian] Act, certainly in some provinces in Atlantic Canada where it’s applicable, the Maritimes in particular, prevents Indigenous communities from actually having full economic participation from an equity perspective.”

That is changing, she said, pointing to new partnership models across the country.

“It’s clear that there have been a lot of changes at the federal and national level,” she said. “We’re seeing projects in Ontario with large-scale energy producers in partnership with Indigenous communities. You’re seeing it from coast to coast to coast in Canada. That’s the norm now, not the abstract.”

For Bennett, the ultimate test of whether the region has become more investable isn’t just how much money flows in, but whether that money changes people’s lives. That’s why she is focused on GDP per capita, not just GDP.

“Lots of people around the panel are talking about GDP,” she said. “Our internal work and how I position it is, we need to talk about GDP per capita, because at the end of the day, if you want more productivity, inevitably you’re going to see wage growth.”

The Atlantic Economic Panel will issue its final report in September 2026.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI Summary: Atlantic Canada’s ability to attract investment is under renewed scrutiny as the Atlantic Economic Panel examines whether the region is truly “investable.” Business leader and panel member Cathy Bennett explains that, despite strong entrepreneurs and high Canadian regulatory standards, investors still encounter inconsistent rules, political swings, and outdated perceptions that undermine confidence. Bennett argues that regulatory predictability, social license, and Indigenous equity participation are now essential conditions for large‑scale capital, not optional add‑ons. As new partnership models emerge across Canada, she says Atlantic Canada must catch up – because the real measure of progress isn’t total GDP, but GDP per capita and whether investment improves people’s lives.

When the Head of the UK Government’s Economic Service, Nicholas Stern, published The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006, I felt vindicated.

Stern’s report treated climate change as a macroeconomic risk and attempted to estimate the economic cost of rising temperatures. At last, someone with real institutional authority had attached a price to environmental loss.

I was enrolled in an MSc in Environmental Management at the time. At my job in communications and risk management for a global container shipping company, my assertion that environmental harm carried a financial cost was often met with polite disbelief. Stern changed the terms of that argument. Once environmental damage had a calculable price, it could no longer be dismissed as sentiment.

Twenty years on, Atlantic Canada’s need for investment capital and infrastructure is within reach. The money exists. The obstacles are bureaucratic: siloed policies, misaligned regulations and governance structures that leave money on the table.

In the first article in this series, I argued that Atlantic Canada sits on environmental assets that global investors want. The absence of capital is not a verdict on the value of those assets. It is a verdict on the architecture, the missing market infrastructure.

Hari Balasubramanian, founder of EcoAdvisors and EcoInvestors Capital in Halifax, has advised on more than $6 billion in sustainability financing across 60 countries. Meaghan Seagrave of Bioindustrial Innovation Canada works at the intersection of Atlantic Canada’s resource economy and the capital that could transform it. Neither is reticent to explain what stands in the way.

Investment-ready natural systems

Balasubramanian describes his work as reconciling “our relationship with the planet.” He argues that nature underpins the global economy, yet markets largely reward extracting it rather than protecting it. His work builds market and investment structures that allow ecosystems to generate returns without only large-scale extraction, and with additional income from carbon, water, and biodiversity, extending the logic of the Stern Review: once nature has value, protecting it can become competitively profitable.

The problem, he argues, is the missing financial architecture between ecosystems and investors, what he calls the ‘broken middle.’

Individual projects, like a forest carbon programme or a watershed restoration, are usually too small for institutional capital. His approach is to bundle such assets, stacking revenue streams from tourism, renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, carbon, water, biodiversity, and other nature-aligned activities into diversified portfolios large enough for pension funds.

Why Atlantic Canada’s natural capital isn’t counted

Atlantic Canada has forests sequestering carbon, certified fisheries and tidal resources studied for decades. None of this automatically translates into investable value.

“The main reason that natural capital is valued today is based on its extractive value. If you take a forest and convert it to timber value, you can monetise the boards,” says Balasubramanian.

Keep the forest standing, and scientists can measure its value in carbon or water filtration. But no one is paying for those benefits. A standing forest becomes an investable asset only when market infrastructure exists to convert that value into tradeable financial instruments, and bundle enough assets together to interest institutional investors.

The $400 million that had no takers

The broken middle is not only a market failure. Meaghan Seagrave tells a story that shows it also determines whether Atlantic Canada’s governments can even recognize an investment opportunity.

When PotashCorp (now Nutrien) closed its flooded potash mine at Cassidy Lake near Penobsquis, NB in 2016, roughly 400 workers lost their jobs. Community leaders commissioned a feasibility study. Nutrien provided site access, data and funding. The results suggested a viable geothermal project with a payback period of less than 10 years.

Two multinational greenhouse operators, one British, one Dutch, looked at the combination of geothermal power and agricultural land and saw a business investment.

“The first build would have been for a $400 million investment to build one greenhouse, and then they were looking at doing land-based windmills, because of the location,” Seagrave explains.

But nothing happened. Opportunities New Brunswick did not know where to place the proposal. New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture said it did not do greenhouses. The Energy Department did not talk to farmers. No one in government would take a meeting. So the investors left.

The broken middle, the missing translation layer between asset and capital market, is one problem. Cassidy Lake reveals another: Even when capital appears, the institutional machinery to receive it does not exist.

Two projects, one lesson still being learned

EverWind Fuels offers a different outcome. Earlier this week the company announced it has secured $240 million (US$175 million) from Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit to advance 650 megawatts of onshore wind across Nova Scotia – the power source for the Point Tupper Green Fuels Project in Cape Breton, what EverWind describes as North America's first large-scale green hydrogen and ammonia facility. What made the project financeable was structure. Membertou First Nation’s majority ownership gave the project governance credibility. Years of permitting and engineering converted a concept into something investors could evaluate through standard due diligence.

The structure echoes the 2020 acquisition of Clearwater Seafoods by a coalition of seven Mi’kmaw First Nations, financed through the First Nations Finance Authority. In both cases Indigenous equity ownership was not symbolic; it created governance stability, reduced regulatory risk and made unfamiliar projects legible to institutional capital. The First Nations Finance Authority has deployed more than $2.5 billion since 2014 without a single loan default, holding investment-grade ratings from three major agencies.

World Energy GH2 is the counterexample. Once considered a strong player in Atlantic Canada’s hydrogen ambitions, the project entered creditor protection after a dispute with the Newfoundland government over Crown land reserves. Court filings show the consortium carrying roughly $100 million in liabilities. The project assumed a hydrogen market would appear quickly and that political goodwill would hold. When neither did, there was no financial structure strong enough to absorb the risk.

Building the missing architecture

Atlantic Canada is not competing for capital on the strength of its resources. It is competing on the strength of the institutions that translate those resources into investments.

In December 2024, the federal government asked the Canadian Climate Institute to support the development of a Canadian sustainable investment taxonomy, building on earlier work by the Sustainable Finance Action Council. As that framework takes shape, the first priority sectors are expected to emerge by the end of 2026 — decisions that will influence which environmental assets investors can recognise and price.

Meanwhile, New Brunswick has 42,000 woodlot owners and no provincial mechanism to pool their carbon assets into something institutional capital can hold.

Someone has to be responsible for saying yes to the next Cassidy Lake. That means cross-departmental mandates, investment offices with real authority and governments that understand the difference between a resource waiting to be extracted and a financial asset that requires a different institutional response.

Balasubramanian is candid about why, despite his roots in Atlantic Canada, he is not concentrating his most ambitious work here. The conversations are harder. The institutional risk aversion is higher. Every year the architecture is not built is another year that capital finds somewhere else to go.

The assets are not going anywhere. The investors can and do.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

AI Summary: Atlantic Canada holds billions in untapped natural capital, but outdated, extraction‑focused institutions keep investors out. The failed Cassidy Lake geothermal project shows how siloed departments block viable proposals, while EverWind proves that clear governance and Indigenous ownership can attract major financing. Until the region builds the financial architecture to treat nature as an asset—carbon, water, biodiversity—global capital will keep moving elsewhere.

Hello everyone, and welcome to all our new subscribers! We’ve got a little chair for one of you, an armchair for two more to curl up in, and for someone who likes to rock, a rocking chair in the middle. Your interest in Gina’s story about Atlantic Canada’s environmental assets has got her chasing down some leads and interviewing regional experts, and we’ll have her next story ready to go on Thursday. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a major piece about Atlantic Canada for a really cool, new national publication, which means I’m diving into my archives to share an abridged version of an essay I co-wrote with my longtime collaborator Dr. John D. McLaughlin back in 2021 around his theory of deep change. Hope it gives you something to think about. Cheers - Lisa

There is a lot of anger and disagreement in the world right now, but on one point most of us can agree: it often feels like we are caught in the undertow of larger external forces.

We are struggling to steer through uncharted waters without really knowing where we are going or what we want to become in this new world that is beginning to emerge.

The search for answers has taken on greater urgency as a rapidly increasing number of people, jurisdictions, economic sectors, and communities are feeling the effects of these waves of change such as the rapid adoption of new technologies; gender and racial injustice; market volatility; changes to our climate and other earth systems; inequities in wealth creation; Indigenous/non-Indigenous reconciliation; unrest across the political spectrum; employment and career uncertainty; and the mass migration of people in search of peace and security.

The end result of all this upheaval is a litany of failed and oftentimes combative conversations rather than what we actually need: new policies, workflows, products, services, relationships, experiences, research, developments and investments that reflect our current realities and which will attract the people, ideas and capital we require to safely propel us into the new knowledge age.

Through the course of our respective careers, we have observed, analyzed and reported on these changes, both big and small.

We and others recognize the world is in the throes of an era- defining transition, leaving behind the last vestiges of the Late Modern Era, which, powered by mass industrialization and the rise of a prosperous middle class, saw the emergence of the U.S. as a global power and Canada as a politically independent nation.

In its place is rising a new era that is powered by information and knowledge; engines fueled by data rather than steam.

We call it deep change. It’s a term first used by John at the turn of this century to label and begin to define what he and others were observing and experiencing first-hand through their academic research and international experience as they laid the groundwork for the North American geomatics industry.

This early work brought John into a global conversation at the intersection of land rights, geospatial technologies and community values. I soon joined him, applying my perspective and experience as a journalist covering the underlying resentment and growing distrust of citizens towards distant governments, corporate players and members of the professional class.

We both recognized we were experiencing a new and unfamiliar level of change, so we began to explore how we and others were developing and implementing methods to navigate a way through all this uncertainty and upheaval.

To begin, John developed a hierarchy of change informed by his original research, fieldwork and executive leadership experiences working in over 40 countries on the development of property systems and land information policy. Along the way, he co-founded an American-based technology consultancy, created a Peruvian international development company with economist Hernando de Soto, and served as President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of New Brunswick.

The first level of his hierarchy is superficial change, which is political rhetoric that appears to address change but does little more than respond to the immediate demands of voters, lobbyists, and party members.

The second level is regular and predictable change, which improves organizational efficiencies and performance, exemplified by Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Total Quality Management (TQM) and other continuous process improvement methodologies.

The third level is disruptive change, which destroys or forces the re-invention of established industries in the wake of new technologies, best exemplified by the rise of digital and mobile technologies, which are radically changing a wide range of industries such as education, transportation, health, retail, media, energy and manufacturing.

The fourth level is deep change, which brings fundamental cultural and institutional change, forcing us to re-examine our core values and priorities. These shifting values cause great uncertainty and anxiety in our communities, resulting in a growing cultural divide. That divide is accelerated by digital media, which makes it easier for people to seek out information and opinions that reinforce their world view.

The fifth and final level is apocalyptic change, which is catastrophic, global destruction at the level of a world war or extreme climate change.

As with any emerging field, progress will be achieved through the collective work of people across sectors and jurisdictions who bring a diversity of perspectives, experiences and ideas to our shared purpose: to help guide our society’s transition in a way that provides the greatest amount of good with the least amount of harm.

What follows are a few observations garnered from our research, experiences and conversations with fellow practitioners that we offer as a starting point for developing a definition of deep change, and methodologies for working within it.

Existing management processes, perspectives and toolkits are insufficient for dealing with the complexities and interconnectedness of problems rooted in deep change.

To survive and hopefully thrive in this new reality, we need strategies that develop organically, can shift to accommodate society’s changing needs, and in the end can provide us with long-term economic stability. Traditional management practises, which are both a product and an impetus for the accelerated growth of capitalization post-WWII, can’t get us there. The emerging knowledge age is forcing a significant rethink of how we define economic value, expanding beyond simply products and services to include relationships, ideas and experiences. This has revealed the limitations of 20^th century business processes.

First, most management practises are inherently self-interested. A common mistake is to believe the institutional or corporate perspective is also the wider community’s perspective. That doesn’t work within a deep change environment. Individual concerns must give way to a shared purpose to gain wide support from within the network. Failure to do this will leads to stalled conversations, protests and institutional inertia.

Second, traditional practises work best within narrowly defined problems. Most major management practises were developed to work within hierarchical institutional and corporate systems in order to manage and control change. While these processes have tried to adapt, each is challenged by the speed and fluidity of people, information and ideas that is the hallmark of deep change. The strongest solutions for issues of deep change tend to develop within multisectoral networks where leadership is both diverse and fluid in service to collaborative impact. We are moving from systems of control to networks of access and that requires a different type of roadmap.

Deep change problem-solving isn’t an either/or proposition; it’s and/and.

Issues of deep change share a common characteristic: an inability to develop a solution that serves two or more core principles that on the surface are in conflict with each other. We see this in fights that pit resource extraction against environmental concerns; public health care service delivery against rural communities; and public sector pensioners against central government. Each is a fight for fairness, and no side trumps the other. However, the self-interested nature of traditional management processes frames these issues as fights that only one side can win. Deep change requires the opposite; leaders who can work through competing demands to arrive at solutions that provide more help than harm to all involved.

Technology has changed how we engage with issues, from passive observers to active personal and communal leadership.

Massive technological change, such as what we are currently living through, does more than simply change the economy, it changes us and we have yet to fully grasp the implications of this change. We now live and work within a distributed network model, which works like personal communications only on a massive scale. It is a two-way exchange that helps us establish relationships, express our values, acquire knowledge and build trust.

This is the hallmark of our new, knowledge age: the mobility of people and information.

Show, don’t tell’ is an old journalism adage that is a great way to think about working, living and leading within a network.

The upending of traditional hierarchies means it is no longer enough for anyone, private citizens, public figures or institutional representatives to say they will do good; we each must illustrate it in tangible ways – and we must have an established track record of positive action long before trouble hits.

Why? Because in an era of uncertainty and deep change when values and cultures are in flux, odds are we are all going to be on the wrong side of an issue at some point. We just don’t know when or what the issue will be.

In a network, no one and no organization stands alone. We are our networks, which means we all judge and are being judged by our perceived values based on others’ interpretations of our present and past actions, as well as the behaviour of other corporate, political and community players in our space.

To avoid the scorn of public judgment, we must move from passive observer to active participant on issues that matter to us personally, to our employees and to the communities we serve.

It’s not enough to be a good public servant, politician, corporate or private citizen; we must be role models too.

Resilient and scalable solutions are anchored to place.

Historically, in times of stress and uncertainty, success has come to those organizations and communities that have been able to develop local solutions and scale up innovations.

However, out of fear and anxiety, people have often looked to a larger force to dictate a big idea because they are desperate for a solution. But this rarely works because for community innovation to take hold, it must start on the ground and scale up, so people feel ownership of the solution and are responsible for its success.

People want and need to participate in conversations that recognize their unique challenges and opportunities, and that show them how they can directly participate in making their communities better.

Fear and risk aversion stifles innovation at our peril.

To be successful in the knowledge age, jurisdictions will need to mix and merge information to curate new products, services, processes, relationships, experiences, policies and workflows.

This is the realm of innovation, but not the vaguely uplifting version made popular via social media memes and start-up pitch decks.

The innovation of deep change is rooted in our genes and the science of evolutionary biology.

In all societies, imitators far outnumber innovators, each making incremental changes to our collective body of knowledge.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett famously opined in a 2008 Harvard Business Review article that there are three types of people in the world: innovators, imitators, and idiots.

If you’re lucky, you’ll meet the first, who see what others don’t; you can do business with those in the second group, who add to the work of the innovators; and you should avoid the third, because they are driven by greed, self-importance or both.

Traditional management and venture capital processes, which came to prominence in the final decades of the last century, are designed for the second group, the imitators who are best placed to capitalize on existing innovations.

This makes sense because the accelerated growth of mid to late-20^th century capitalism was built upon already established values, policies and infrastructure.

Venture capital, the engine that has fueled the world’s start-up and entrepreneurial culture, is naturally drawn to ideas, products and services that can quickly commercialize, scale, and deliver a healthy return on investment.

It’s a system inherently weighted in favour of incremental change produced by that large pool of imitators.

That won’t be enough if we hope to make the leap into the knowledge age.

We need innovations that are purpose-led, community-focused and rely on the collective knowledge of the community that backs it.

When we believe in something, we take ownership of the ideas and the accompanying responsibility to nurture and guide these new purpose-led ideas to fruition.

That’s the innovation we seek.

It’s time to consider how we might use our collective knowledge and experiences in service to this shared purpose: to help each other safely navigate our way into our new age with empathy, openness, curiosity, patience and good humour.

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AI Summary: We are entering a period of deep change—a global transition driven by rapid technological disruption, climate change, economic instability, cultural polarization, and declining trust in institutions. These forces are reshaping how we work, govern, and build community. Traditional management practices, public policy tools, and organizational systems, designed for the industrial and post‑war eras, can’t address the complex, interconnected challenges of the emerging knowledge economy. To navigate this shift, we need new approaches grounded in shared purpose, multisector collaboration, place‑based innovation, and network‑driven leadership. Resilient solutions must balance competing principles, demonstrate values through action, and draw on the collective intelligence of communities. Success in the knowledge age will depend on our ability to foster trust, adaptability, inclusive decision‑making, and purpose‑led innovation that provides the greatest good with the least harm.

Call me intellectually lazy or just poorly educated, but I’ve never really bothered to understand the bond market. Compared to equities, derivatives or alternative investments, bonds were never sexy enough to interest me.

This week, my bond market education took an unexpected leap, courtesy of what I will call an “AI moment.” My husband asked me to translate a banking article from simplified Chinese into traditional Chinese and English. This is less strange than it sounds: we spent two decades in Hong Kong publishing and editing business magazines, work we’ve continued from our desktops in Canada.

The article was about the explosion in China’s green financial bond market where, in 2025 alone, commercial banks issued ¥1.7 trillion RMB, or roughly $338 billion CAD, in green bonds. From a province facing a $1.3 billion deficit, and a country forecasting a deficit of roughly $78 billion, that scale of finance sounds like a fairy tale.

But this isn’t really a story about bonds. It’s a story about what that number made me want to know: is Canada building anything like the infrastructure that makes that kind of capital flow possible? And is there a pathway for Atlantic Canada to access the pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds that move capital at scale? What I found was more interesting, and more frustrating, than I expected.

What we have

Atlantic Canadians generally don’t appreciate that we are sitting on an extraordinary concentration of globally valuable environmental assets. These are not scenery. They are productive capital: things that can generate measurable, certifiable, recurring economic value if structured correctly.

The Bay of Fundy’s tides are the most obvious example. For over two decades, developers, governments, and research institutions have been trying to turn that potential into power, and the resource has never been in doubt. But the tidal story is not a story of failed technology or absent ambition. It is a 20-year illustration of what happens when a world-class asset lacks financial infrastructure. That gap runs across every major environmental asset Atlantic Canada possesses.

Clearwater Seafoods, now owned by the Mi’kmaw Nation and Premium Brands, operates one of the most sustainably certified shellfish businesses on the planet. That MSC certification is not just an environmental achievement; it is a market position. Certified sustainable food systems are increasingly treated as an investible asset class. Atlantic Canada has several.

New Brunswick is sitting on critical minerals, including tungsten and molybdenum with direct applications in clean energy technology, as well as significant offshore wind potential and coastal carbon assets. The province’s current strategy focuses on mining and port logistics, projects that conventional finance can already see and price. The environmental assets remain off the balance sheet, not because they are less valuable, but because the market infrastructure to bring them to scale doesn’t exist.

Nova Scotia has done the most visible regulatory work on offshore wind: a new joint federal-provincial regulator, a prequalification process for developers, and this week, Premier Tim Houston introduced the Powering the Economy Act, establishing a revenue framework for provincial fees on offshore wind projects. These are real steps but designing how to collect revenue is not the same as designing how to finance construction. Nova Scotia has built a tollbooth, financing the road remains under discussion.

What’s missing

Canada is not starting from zero. The Canada Infrastructure Bank and the federal Major Projects Office provide capital for specific projects, and they matter. But project-by-project government funding is not the same as a functioning market. Atlantic Canada already has a sympathetic federal ear. What we don’t have is the architecture that allows institutional investors to find, evaluate, and price our environmental assets without being walked through them one by one: a taxonomy, verified natural capital accounting, aggregation vehicles that bundle projects to investible scale. The difference is between a government that will sometimes write a cheque and a market that prices assets every day.

In December, Investment Executive, a Canadian publication for finance executives, reported that Canada’s sustainable finance taxonomy, described by those leading its development as “long-awaited,” had finally been commissioned, with the Canadian Climate Institute tapped to lead the work. Priority sectors are not expected to be finalised until late 2026 at the earliest, with three more to follow in fall 2027. For context: Australia began its taxonomy after Canada and published a final version in June 2025.

Scotland faced the same structural gap as Atlantic Canada with its own tidal resources and made a deliberate decision to close it. It created a marine leasing framework, guaranteed minimum prices that gave tidal developers bankable revenue projections, and publicly funded feasibility work to absorb early-stage risk. Institutional capital now flows to Scottish tidal projects, not because Scotland’s tides are better than Fundy’s, but because Scotland built the market.

Canadian pension funds alone, known colloquially as the Maple 8, are considered the gold standard in global institutional investment circles. The big four: CPP Investments, CDPQ (Quebec’s public pension fund), OMERS (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System), and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan collectively manage roughly $1.7 trillion (as of Dec 2025) and are committed to increasing green infrastructure allocations. Much of that capital is currently flowing to Scotland, to North Sea wind, to blue carbon projects in Belize and Indonesia. It is not flowing to Atlantic Canada. That absence is not a commentary on our assets. It is a commentary on our architecture.

What this series is about

Atlantic Canada has long treated its natural environment as compensation for economic disadvantage: the ocean sunsets, lakes, parks and forests held up as consolation prizes for lower wages and fewer opportunities. A Chinese banking article about green bonds helped confirm a suspicion I’ve had for a while: that framing our environment as a substitute for the quality of life we want has been costly, and the cost is concrete and cumulative.

In the instalments that follow, we will look at what we have, what infrastructure is missing, who would need to build it, and what we stand to gain. Our assets are not the problem. They should be our leading edge.

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AI generated summary: A translation exercise involving a Chinese banking article on green bonds leads to a larger question: is Canada building the financial infrastructure that allows institutional investors to find and price environmental assets at scale? Atlantic Canada, the piece argues, sits on an extraordinary concentration of productive natural capital — tidal energy, certified sustainable seafood, critical minerals, offshore wind — but lacks the market architecture to monetise it. The difference between Atlantic Canada and jurisdictions that have attracted major green investment, notably Scotland, is not the quality of the assets. It is the presence of a taxonomy, natural capital accounting, and aggregation vehicles that make those assets legible to global capital. Canada's sustainable finance taxonomy, described as "long-awaited" by those leading its development, was only commissioned in December 2025. This is the first in a series examining what Atlantic Canada has, what infrastructure is missing, and what the region stands to gain if it is built.

Facing a history‑making $1.3‑billion deficit the Government of New Brunswick is honing in on three major projects and a lean oversight structure in an attempt to do fewer things better as fiscal pressures tighten.

Driving that shift inside government is a virtual Major Projects Office that reports to Premier Susan Holt and is currently focused on three files: the Saint John Trade Corridor, the Port of Belledune expansion, and the Sisson Mine.

There is no new department with its own org chart and budget. Instead, a small group of senior civil servants have been asked to treat these three projects as their day job within their day jobs.

“We put an accountability system in place with the identification of priorities, with the measures that we set against them,” Holt told me in a recent interview following her late January State of the Province address. “That wasn’t a meaningless exercise. We have since used [it] to focus our efforts on where we put people and time and to then review the results, be informed by the results, and have that continue to influence government direction over the next year ahead.”

Internally, the emphasis is on coordination and follow‑through. The office exists to do a few simple things that governments in this province have historically struggled with: narrow the list of priorities, resolve inter‑departmental conflicts, and move chosen projects through the system at something closer to private‑sector speed.

Each of the three projects touches multiple departments. Sisson Mine alone involves seven departments.

On previous major projects, those relationships were largely informal. If a file stalled in one branch, it could quietly delay work in several others.

When departmental mandates clashed, such as the desire of economic development-focused departments to move fast bumping against environmental and regulatory offices demanding rigour, there was no clear, early mechanism to address these competing demands.

In truth, neither trumps the other. What is required, is a clear process and leadership that can shift through various demands and arrive a solution that provides more help than harm.

That’s what New Brunswick’s Major Projects Office is meant to do. Its job is to identify where policies or interpretations collide on a specific file and bring those conflicts to cabinet and to the Premier for a decision.

The Office reports directly to the Premier and to the lead cabinet ministers for each file. Natural Resource Minister and Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins MLA John Herron is lead on Sisson Mine and the Saint John Trade Corridor; Deputy Premier, Finance and Energy Minister, and Bathurst West-Beresford MLA René Legacy is the lead for the Port of Belledune.

This, in theory, should speed decision-making at a time when the provincial government is running out of fiscal room to paper over structural weaknesses.

The stakes are clear, says Holt. “We are not in the days we were in just a couple years ago, when population growth and general economic growth were fueling the kind of budgets that paid for our expenses,” she said in an interview following her State of the Province address. “We saw population growth stall and economic activity retrench, kind of overnight. So, while the fiscal picture is going to require some hard decisions, we see lots of opportunity.”

Those opportunities, as she describes them, are tightly linked to the kinds of projects now sitting with the Major Projects Office. “We see economic opportunity…in our mineral assets, in our infrastructure, in defense opportunities, in food, in fish, in things that we’re really good at. And we now see people all over the world wanting to build these trade relationships with New Brunswick, and we have a window to strike while the iron is hot.”

The Saint John Trade Corridor is the clearest example of how the new model is meant to work.

When Ottawa signalled it wanted “projects of national interest,” Saint John initially produced a long list of self‑declared priorities. The Major Projects Team worked with the City to rethink its priorities and define a single corridor project with four clear objectives: increase capacity, improve safety, protect critical infrastructure, and remove bottlenecks in and around Port Saint John and the City’s west side.

Within that, three concrete components emerged: a rail upgrade, a port project, and the long‑discussed overhaul of Simms Corner, the notorious junction that is now slated for a significant redesign.

By bundling those elements into a coherent, single project, the file is now viewed in Ottawa as a single, integrated project rather than a pile of disconnected asks.

That discipline around definition and selection is also a response to what New Brunswick officials saw in other jurisdictions.

The federal Major Projects Office has become a magnet for every big idea in the country, and now spends much of its time sorting through proposals rather than driving a manageable portfolio forward.

Provinces that created sector‑specific offices warned New Brunswick that the fastest way to fail is to promise too much and then drown in expectations. Holt’s team is trying to avoid that trap by keeping its formal list to three and defending that number fiercely.

Holt herself has framed a big part of her job as managing not just policies, but emotions and expectations. New Brunswickers, she says, “want to be seen and understood” and want their leaders to acknowledge when “things aren’t great, things are tough,” including on politically painful issues like the cost of living or power rates, before talking about solutions.

On major economic files, she is equally blunt that “fast” is still measured in years, not months. “I’m really impatient,” she said. “And unfortunately, a realistic...rapid timescale in any of these things would be a five‑year period.”

By that standard, if New Brunswick can get approvals in place and early investments the province can optimistically hope to begin to see benefits in 2028.

None of this guarantees the three flagship projects will land on time, or at all. The province is still working with finite staff, finite political capital, and a complex set of federal rules.

The test over the next five years will be whether New Brunswickers see more than talk: whether the Saint John Trade Corridor, Belledune Port expansion and Sisson Mine move from charters and check‑ins into cranes, crews, and contracts – and whether that, in turn, helps pull the province’s finances back from the brink.

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AI Search Summary: New Brunswick is confronting a record $1.3‑billion deficit by narrowing its economic growth strategy to three priority projects: the Saint John Trade Corridor, the Port of Belledune expansion, and the Sisson Mine. To manage this reduced portfolio, the provincial government has created a virtual Major Projects Office that coordinates work across departments, resolves policy conflicts early, and aims to move approvals faster than traditional processes allow. Premier Susan Holt has linked her government’s accountability to measurable progress on these files, positioning them as central to the province’s plan to strengthen economic performance and stabilize long‑term finances. The approach replaces years of dispersed priorities with a focused system intended to improve execution, though timelines remain long and success will depend on staff capacity, federal cooperation, and sustained political attention.

My guided sea-kayaking business is under threat from AI.

Bet you didn’t see that coming. Neither did I, frankly.

I am one business owner in a growing list of people who are beginning to feel AI’s power to compress small, human-shaped businesses into something an algorithm can overlook – or quietly erase.

The company I keep is surprisingly large. Consider this most recent development: On February 2nd, AI company Anthropic released new tools designed to handle specialised legal, finance and compliance workflows. While some industry leaders, such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, say most jobs will be replaced by “people using AI,” Anthropic’s own CEO, Dario Amodei, predicted 50 per cent job losses to AI within the next five years.

I’ve been watching these kinds of developments closely. While recently covering AI’s impact on journalism, two Reuters Institute reports stopped me cold.

The reports showed scary trends in AI’s rise as a replacement for news searches. If you ask an AI platform for top news, a stack of interacting algorithms will provide what it deems to be top news, whether or not any journalist was involved. If a media group’s digital team hasn’t figured out how that actually works, they’re likely in trouble.

This may smell like new-technology hysteria, but AI search creep is real. The Reuters paper “Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends 2026” reported that search engine traffic has already fallen 33 per cent and publishers expect traffic from search engines to fall as much as 75 per cent in the next three years.

If you want your “Winning Pie at the Fair” article read today, you will need either a meaningful understanding of interacting algorithms and probabilistic modelling, or a very clued-in tech department.

I am not a clued-in tech department; I own and run a kayak tourism business. For years, I relied on what I thought were sound instincts: strong word-of-mouth, repeat guests, careful safety protocols, local knowledge, and a certain quiet confidence in the work.

I avoided pressing for reviews (so presumptuous). I did not aggressively pursue media mentions (awkward). I did not obsess over SEO updates or theme patches or schema markup (trends will pass).

Partly this was time. Partly it was temperament. Partly it was an aversion born of too many years watching marketing language slide into cliché.

Unfortunately, aversion is bad business strategy, and as I read those Reuters reports I arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: my digital complacency was threatening my business’s survival. So I went to work.

In the past couple of weeks alone, I have spent at least 80 hours wrestling with old WordPress themes, broken widgets, outdated PHP, schema tags, French language parity, image compression, and structured FAQs.

Old tourism information and marketing was heavy on brochure-language and light on detail. “Breathtaking views, hidden gem, charming fishing village” was the quaint language of another era.

More recently, a well-regarded marketing expert worked hard to convince me to embrace the word “gyre” in my advertising. I think he was talking about the Bay of Fundy, specifically the circular current at the mouth of the Bay, and not a poem by WB Yeats. Either way, the impulse to use pseudo-scientific language didn’t appeal to me then, and such phrases are even less effective now.

That kind of language is now generated at scale by AI systems, commonly referred to as ‘AI slop.’ Today, the goal has shifted from simple discoverability to generative engine optimisation (GEO). That means a business’s content must be structured so it is intelligible, attributable, and retrievable by the AI systems that generate answers.

AI will disregard my “charming fishing village”, but it will note my inclusion of water temperatures in May and August, exact tidal range, terrain hazards, staff certification, risk management policies, insurance coverage, and bilingual capacity.

The same concerns that guide media executives in the Reuters papers – the shift toward distinctiveness, human reporting, explanation, and expertise – equally apply to tourism, any business, or any region trying to attract visitors and investment.

If I offer “a kayak tour” on the Bay of Fundy, I am replaceable, and AI has no reason to identify or cite me.

If I am “the only guided tidal estuary paddle in the Upper Bay of Fundy, operating within the world’s highest tides, led by certified wilderness-trained guides,” then I am defensible – and find myself easily identified through GEO.

AI does not eliminate mediocre business information; it compresses it into an undifferentiated mass. AI rewards clarity, structured authority and demonstrated expertise. AI will never threaten the work I do on the water, but it is now demanding that I take responsibility for that work’s representation on land.

There is a certain indignity in all this. Many of us who built businesses in Atlantic Canada did so with a certain humility. We did not want to boast. We did not want to seem self-promoting. We trusted that quality would speak for itself.

Quality no longer speaks for itself. In an AI world, it must be machine-readable. Visibility is no longer earned; it is structured.

If only AI systems could do all the digital grunt work on my behalf today. Please, AI, take away the part of my job that you’ve created. I’d rather be on the water.

Just to hammer it all home, scroll to the bottom and there’s a GEO-focused, AI-created summary of today’s column. Yes: machines love this stuff.

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AI Search Optimized Summary: This column, “If AI Is Taking Everyone’s Job, Why Won’t It Take Mine?” explores how generative AI search is reshaping small, place-based businesses in Atlantic Canada. Drawing on Reuters Institute research showing sharp declines in traditional search traffic, it argues that AI does not replace skilled human work – such as guided sea-kayaking on the Upper Bay of Fundy – but it can erase businesses that fail to make their expertise structured, specific, and machine-readable. Using detailed operational realities, such as certified Wilderness First Aid and Paddle Canada training, Transport Canada-approved safety equipment, tidal ranges exceeding 10 metres, seasonal water temperatures, bilingual capacity, and formal risk-management protocols, the piece makes the case for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO): clarity, verifiable credentials, and geographic precision now determine whether a business is cited by AI systems or is compressed into digital invisibility.

Happy day after our February long weekend everyone! I hope you enjoyed it by going to see Canadian film ‘Nirvanna The Band, The Show, The Movie’ with a friend, cheering on Canadian athletes at the Olympics, and baking a really awesome focaccia. Okay, that’s what I did. It was a much-needed brain break and so today I’m diving into my archives and pulling out an abridged version of the opening essay from ‘Who Gets to Lead When We Don’t Know Where We are Going or What We are to Become?’ an e-book I co-authored with Dr. John D. McLaughlin in 2014. Cheers ~ Lisa

You can be forgiven if you have an uneasy feeling that New Brunswick is being passed over. But passed over by what, and how is it happening?

The answers to these questions remain vexingly just out of our reach.

While the headlines might imply our greatest challenges lie with the economy and shifting political interests, our problem lies much deeper, and the solutions are complicated.

We are entering unknown territory, brought here by two powerful forces: rapid and profound global change banging up against the demographic and fiscal reality of New Brunswick.

The theories developed by traditional business and public administration schools over the past 50 years will be of little use in dealing with what lies ahead. To survive, and hopefully thrive, in this new reality, we need strategies that develop organically, can shift to accommodate society’s changing needs and which, in the end, can provide us with long-term economic stability.

Checking our ID

We begin by asking ourselves if New Brunswickers had a clear view of who and what we were. The blunt answer is...sort of.

There is an obvious pride of place, very specifically defined by our deep attachment to New Brunswick’s physical and social geography. However, the province has long been riven with internal divisions.

The question is no longer where you live; rather, it is how.

Our inability to understand our shared culture has compounded the failure of our public institutions – government, media and universities – to explore and analyze New Brunswick’s contemporary culture in any great depth, or develop policies that reflect its reality.

New Brunswick is used to being disappointed. Do we have any success stories upon which to build a strong society?

To find them, New Brunswickers must let go of their tribal-like connections to individual communities and their resentments of powerful outsiders in favour of embracing a singular sense of who we are.

What is our common purpose? How do we balance shared risk with shared value in the face of changing social, demographic, technological and economic forces? We simply don’t know.

Here in New Brunswick, issues such as French immersion, homelessness, and industrial development are simply the latest in a decades-long list of failed conversations between our public and corporate institutions and us. They fail because municipal and provincial governments, and corporate players, assumed their view of development and change is citizens’ view too.

This assumption is an absolutist viewpoint destined to fail in a pluralistic society, particularly when we are forced to confront difficult issues. It’s what we call a wicked problem – an issue that is difficult to define, dominated by multiple viewpoints and linked to other wicked problems.

Glory Days

Here in New Brunswick, as in the rest of North America, the 1960s and early 1970s are remembered as a period of great optimism and change, with the province’s stories dominated by grand gestures and charismatic figures such as premiers Louis Robichaud and Richard Hatfield. Then along came Frank McKenna, New Brunswick’s most famous political export.

He was premier for 10 years, overseeing the development of e-government at Service New Brunswick, the building of New Brunswick’s call centre sector and successive balanced budgets. Looking back, it feels like McKenna was the end of an era, the golden age of New Brunswick political personalities.

In fact, viewed through the larger lens of economic and social change, McKenna marks the beginning of New Brunswick’s great transition. But transition into what?

Twenty-nine years have passed since McKenna left the premier’s office, and we still don’t know what we are going to become in this era of deep change.

We are stuck, following well-trod policy and corporate paths that continually loop us back to where we started. The end result is a succession of failed conversations around the issues New Brunswickers care most about – K-12 schools, post-secondary education, health care, water quality, forestry management, urban development, rural living, seniors care and resource development.

To begin to tackle New Brunswick’s wicked problems, we need to consider what we know and don’t know about the rhythm of contemporary New Brunswick life, including:

• our culture, which represents our shared values;

• our institutions, which should embody our shared purpose;

• our infrastructure, which supports the exchange of ideas, people, goods and services; and,

• our economy, which produces individual and community wealth.
  

These four elements flow and blend together in our societal sea, and most of the time we are content to float atop its surface. But you can’t do that when the waves hit. They bear down on us and wash over us when we are caught unprepared.

Here’s the interesting science of a wave: its power is not found in the water; it’s in the energy that flows through it.

The energy to push a society forward comes from the imagination and knowledge that flows through its citizens.

If we in New Brunswick, and indeed the rest of Canada, are to chart a new course, our traditional business and political leadership must cede its natural inclination to control the agenda, in exchange for gaining access to the collaborative power of the Commons.

The power we once ascribed to our public and private institutions is migrating to the crowd, and we must follow – or risk being lost in its wake.

Download the full ebook here: Who Gets to Lead When We Don’t Know Where We are Going or What We are to Become?

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Haligonian writer/director/actor Taylor Olson likes his men undercooked.

In his new feature film, What We Dreamed Of Then, Olsen introduces us to Gideon, a part-time swim coach and seemingly attentive father who appears well done on the surface but raw inside.

The film, which begins its tour of the Maritimes tonight at Saint John’s Imperial Theatre, tells us how this seemingly ‘normal’ guy ended up living in his van, separated from his wife and daughter.

His fall isn’t precipitated by drug addiction or mental health issues, the usual assumptions of those living with homelessness.

Olson says that tension is the point.

“I’m really drawn to characters who are people who have good values at the core of them, like in their spirit, but are very flawed,” he said. “I’m interested in characters who sort of work against their own self‑interest, because so many people do.”

Much of Gideon, Olson says, comes from watching the men around him.

“This is sort of drawn from watching men in my life make decisions that are fuelled by...that insecurity of needing to provide or to make their kid’s life fun.”

A Family in Parallel Orbits

One of the strengths of What We Dreamed of Then is that it doesn’t isolate Gideon in his own drama. The film is equally attentive to the people around him, especially Gideon’s estranged partner, Kya, played by Christie Burke (Maid, The Ark), with the weary broken-heartedness of a woman doing the daily, unglamourous work of parenting while still tethered to someone she can no longer reach.

Her heartbreak is matched by apartment landlord Jon, who is infused with boundary-setting empathy by veteran Canadian stage, film and TV actor Hugh Thompson (Reacher, Sullivan’s Crossing).

Like a surrogate father, Jon’s not mad at Gideon for failing to pay the rent; he’s just disappointed.

For New Brunswick viewers, there’s a quiet pleasure in recognizing the places that have been repurposed to build Gideon’s world, which was filmed in Saint John in 2024.

The raucous opening at the pool is shot at the Canada Games Aquatic Centre in Uptown Saint John, but when the kids spill out the doors, they’re suddenly at the Irving Oil Field House on the east side, chosen for its wide lobby and generous light.

One of the starkest images comes not from a big emotional confrontation, but from a bathroom emergency.

As the story enters the first weeks of the COVID‑19 lockdown, Gideon realizes he urgently needs a washroom and finds the mall doors locked.

He ends up pushing himself along on a scooter down an utterly deserted Prince William Street, past the very building where co-producer Hemmings Films (Revival) is based, under a giant billboard that reads “COVID‑19: Help Stop the Spread.”

It’s a perfect blue‑sky day, and there is no one else on the street. The scene is anxious and quietly devastating: a man with nowhere to go, in a city that has simply emptied out and forgotten him.

Van Life, Wide Frames and Lonely Landscapes

Although the film operates on a modest budget – around $1.2 million – it looks and feels significantly bigger. That’s partly because so much of it unfolds in and around a van, a cramped setting that doubles as both sanctuary and trap.

Cinematographer Kevin Fraser and Olson move between expansive and claustrophobic frames to underline Gideon’s isolation. In one moment, the van sits under a lonely streetlight in an otherwise empty mall parking lot, recalling Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and its portraits of people living at the edge of the economy.

In the next scene, we are pressed up against the curtains and clutter inside the van, the camera so close we feel Gideon’s shame. Both the endless asphalt and the cramped interior serve the same purpose: they show us a man who is profoundly alone, whether he has too much space or not nearly enough.

One of the subtler threads in the film is Gideon’s queerness. It’s never underlined in dialogue, but it’s there in the performance and in small details.

Originally, there was a more explicit romantic storyline, but the film was getting long, and the team faced a choice: strip the queerness out or leave it there without explanation. Olson turned to queer friends and peers for guidance.

“The consensus was like, ‘No, no, he’s queer. Just let him be queer,’” he said. “That will be a thing that audiences need to contend with. This person who’s fighting for their family also just happens to be queer.”

Films That Tell Atlantic Stories

What We Dreamed of Then is part of a vibrant, often overlooked stratum of Canadian cinema: the Telefilm‑supported, regionally rooted feature films that play small theatrical runs and festivals before quietly landing on streaming.

In Atlantic Canada, Telefilm backs a handful of projects each year, many of them strong, distinctive works that rarely get multiplex billing.

For What We Dreamed of Then, the immediate plan is a tour of regional theatres – Saint John, Moncton, Miramichi, Fredericton, Halifax – before moving on to Toronto and Vancouver, and eventually to streaming.

It would be easy to read What We Dreamed of Then as a simple social‑issue drama about homelessness and leave it there.

Olson offers something more intimate. He takes the headlines about affordability, precarious work, and families ‘just trying to get by,’ and filters them through one ordinary household.

A few bad breaks, a few unresolved wounds, a man who can’t quite regulate his emotions or take responsibility for their fallout – and what looked like a happy, working‑class family begins to buckle under a weight it cannot hold.

In its wide frames and cramped interiors, its emptied‑out streets and crowded memories, What We Dreamed of Then asks us to see not just a man in a van, but everything he has lost on the way there.

What We Dreamed of Then is an official interprovincial coproduction between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Produced by Hemmings Films, Cazador and Brass Door Productions. The distributor is Vortex Media, and it is licensed by Crave. Funded by the Canada Media Fund, Telefilm, the Government of New Brunswick and Screen Nova Scotia.

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AI Search-Optimized Summary: Atlantic Canadian film What We Dreamed of Then, shot in Saint John, New Brunswick, follows a father living in his van during early COVID‑19. Directed by Halifax filmmaker Taylor Olson, the locally produced drama explores homelessness, masculinity, family breakdown, and queer representation. A Maritime‑made feature touring theatres across Atlantic Canada.

The federal government’s Atlantic Economic Panel is zeroing in on a single number: one per cent.

Chair Don Mills says the region needs to add roughly one percentage point to its annual GDP growth to stop falling behind the rest of Canada.

With a combined economy of about $118 billion, the four Atlantic provinces have underperformed the national growth rate for decades.

According to Mills, the Panel has a specific definition of ‘transformational’ economic growth: lifting Atlantic Canada’s annual GDP growth by about one point above its recent baseline and then sustaining it for the long-term.

To put it plainly, the panel wants to know: Where does that extra one per cent come from, and what has to change to unlock it?

That’s what they’ll be asking when they meet with business leaders and policy makers in Charlottetown, PEI, on February 12th and 13th, and in St. John’s, NL, on February 18th and 19th, following its January meetings in Halifax, NS and Fredericton, NB.

Joining Mills on the Panel are: entrepreneur, former Newfoundland finance minister, and co-founder of Sandpiper Ventures, Cathy Bennett; Joyce Carter, Halifax International Airport Authority President and CEO Joyce Carter; Cassidy Group (Coach Atlantic; Maritime Bus) CEO Mike Cassidy; McCain Foods chairman, former Maple Leaf Foods senior executive and investor, J. Scott McCain; former Canadian Armed Forces member and Pabineau First Nations Chief Terry Richardson; and Bank of Canada lead director and CEO and principal shareholder of Seafair Capital, Anne Whelan.

GDP is the total value of goods and services produced in an economy. Governments track it because when GDP increases, it is a sign that the economy is producing and earning more, largely via consumer spending, business investment, government spending, and exports.

Compared to the rest of Canada, Atlantic Canada has less people, less large industries, lower levels of private sector investment, and higher levels of government spending, most notably through public sector employment.

The result is GDP rises more slowly.

“For the last 60 years, we, on average, have performed by about 1 per cent less than everywhere else in Canada,” said Mills. “We’ve grown smaller as an economy, smaller as a population, because we couldn’t keep up with average growth for the country.”

That long-term underperformance, Mills argues, is structural rather than cyclical. It’s why the panel is narrowly focused on the kinds of changes that can boost growth and productivity, not on solving all of the problems facing the region.

In addition to its invitation-only, in-person conversations, the Panel has a survey and questionnaire for citizens to complete and offer perspectives on a way forward for the region. Both can be found on the Panel’s website. The panel will submit its final report by September 2026.

A Narrow Mandate

“Our mandate is pretty clear,” he says. “Transformational economic growth and improving productivity. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Mills says if ideas can’t illustrate how to move the growth and productivity dial, it’s not the panel’s priority.

For each sector, the core question is: What would it take for this sector to generate a meaningful share of that extra 1 per cent growth?

This approach, says Mills, deliberately avoids vague recommendations.

“We’re not going to say, ‘oh, we should have more energy,’” Mills says. Instead, the panel aims to recommend roadmaps that define what has to change, which rules or processes must be reformed, what infrastructure is needed, and who has to move first.

“If you discover gold in Nova Scotia,” Mills says, “it could take you up to 17 years to get approval to actually develop the mine.” New Brunswick, he notes, faces similar timelines. Few investors can wait a generation to see a return.

Setting the Table for Greater Integration

For a panel tasked with lifting GDP growth, regulatory reform and predictability are central levers to driving change.

Core to this for Mills is regional integration.

Mills wants Atlantic Canada to act like a common market within the federation: shared incentives for investment, streamlined and reciprocal regulations, and seamless movement of goods, services, and people.

“What if we, in Atlantic Canada, created an economic free trade zone,” he said, explaining this would mean credential recognition, regulations, and investment incentives are effectively the same across the four provinces.

He argues the region is culturally and socially better positioned for this than anywhere else in the country. Families, businesses, and institutions are already highly interconnected across provincial lines. The missing piece is political and regulatory alignment, too often blocked by electoral cycles and personality clashes.

Nowhere is the cost of fragmentation more visible than in energy.

Atlantic Canada, Mills points out, has almost every form of energy resource within a relatively compact geography: hydro, tidal, wind, and more. He believes the region could be a major contributor to Canada’s green energy ambitions, moving from a net importer to energy independent, then to a net exporter.

But that requires what he calls integrated energy planning.

• Long‑term (25–50 year) forecasts of demand;

• Clear decisions about which sources of energy will meet that demand most efficiently and sustainably;

• And, critically, a regional transmission and infrastructure plan to move energy where it’s needed.

Today, Mills says, governments tend to advance isolated projects—a wind farm here, a nuclear proposal there, a tidal project somewhere else—without a regional systems operator or coherent architecture tying them together.

Recent near‑failures of the grid in Newfoundland, which could have pulled down parts of the Maritime system, are, in his view, stark reminders of the cost of that disjointed approach.

If Atlantic Canada can’t coordinate on energy, he suggests, it will struggle to meet its own needs, let alone capture the opportunity to export clean power to the rest of Canada and beyond.

Mills believes there is more support today for big infrastructure and economic integration than there was a decade ago.

“I do think that this is a moment,” he says. “And it may not last very long.”

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AI Search Summary: This story reports on an interview with Don Mills, chair of the federal Atlantic Economic Panel, about the region’s long‑term GDP underperformance and the panel’s focus on identifying how Atlantic Canada could add an extra one per cent to annual economic growth. The piece outlines the panel’s mandate, its sector‑by‑sector consultations across the Atlantic provinces, and its exploration of regulatory reform, regional integration, and energy planning as potential drivers of higher productivity and sustained growth.

I am prepped and ready for the next couple of weeks.

I’ve bookmarked CBC Gem’s Olympics streaming schedule, actual real Canadian Olympians’ posts are starting to overtake my fake Heated Rivalry Olympians on socials, and I’m revisiting those moments that make me proud to have the Maple Leaf on my passport.

As I settle in to watch, I’ll also be thinking about legendary SNL and David Letterman band leader Paul Shaffer and something he said during the Toronto International Film Festival last September.

I was there with friends at the Royal Alexandra Theatre for the world premiere of the documentary You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way).

The show is legendary in North American comedy circles because it headlined a bunch of unknown Canadian kids and two notable Americans, some making their professional debuts and some starring for the first time in a major production.

Those kids – and they were kids in their late teens and early 20s – were Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Jane Eastwood, Dave Thomas, Avril Chown, and Gilda Radner.

The thing that sticks with me from that afternoon at the Royal Alex is something Paul Shaffer said.

He was the musical director for Godspell and after its 14-month run, he was the first of his friends to move down to New York, where fellow Canadian Lorne Michaels hired him to be the band leader for Michaels’ new late night comedy show, Saturday Night Live.

Shaffer said he called his friends back in Toronto, urging them to come to New York because, and I’m going to paraphrase him, ‘I think you’re as good, or actually better than anyone down here.’

And of course, as history has shown us, they were.

They are.

In the world of entertainment, we are accustomed to Canadians standing in the spotlight – and it is the same with the Winter Olympics.

We have no trouble believing Canadians can skate a little faster, jump a little higher, risk a little more.

We trust our athletes to push past the edge of what seems possible.

Culturally, we already know how to think big.

Economically? Not so much.

Projects take forever. Housing starts lag. Major investments stall or die by delay.

In the resource economy, proponents complain – not entirely without reason – that it is now next to impossible to get a project approved, let alone built.

Meanwhile, technology and tariffs gnaw at people’s sense of security. We talk about productivity, but what many workers hear is that their job may be automated or offshored.

It’s hard to spend, build, or bet on the future when you’re not sure you have one.

We are not short on values. We are short on confidence.

The confidence and self-belief that we can be big – punch above our weight, as former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna used to say – is evident in the Canada we show the world in our sports and on our screens.

But I hear a different story when I talk with business owners and corporate executives.

They describe a country where it is easier to say no than yes. Where, even when the fundamentals are solid, everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move.

That’s not the Canadian character Paul Shaffer displayed when he picked up the phone in the mid-1970s.

It’s not the character we see and hear when hockey superstars and proud Nova Scotians Blayre Turnbull and Sidney Crosby speak of playing for Canada at these Olympic Games.

Our artists and athletes aren’t just interested in making the hometown crowd proud; they want to shine on the international stage.

They want to go big – so they prepare, nurture their self-belief, and take great risks.

That is the Canadian character made real – a combination of pride and principles at play.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll cheer for Canadians who have spent years quietly doing the work, trusting that when the moment comes, they’ll be ready.

The question for the rest of us is whether we’re prepared to do the same – to emulate our artists and athletes and say to ourselves and to our changing, chaotic world: we’re really good at this.

Now stand back and watch us lead.

Before you go, we’ve got one more thing worth celebrating.

It’s Side Walks 1st anniversary today, and to mark it I’m resurfacing my first column.“We’ve Got to Play Our Game, Canada” is a rallying cry about confidence, collective strength, and refusing to let bigger, louder forces dictate how we show up.

If today’s column is about trusting in ourselves that we’re ready to go, this earlier piece is about lacing up and taking the ice regardless of the size or presumed strength of our opponent. It also includes a short video – and the same unapologetic belief that Canada does its best work when it plays its own game.

Revisit it here, and help Gina & I celebrate one year of Side Walks. Thanks for your early support. Let’s keep going big. 🇨🇦

Summary: As Canadians tune in to Olympic coverage on CBC, this column draws a line between the country’s cultural and athletic confidence and its more hesitant economic life. It recalls how figures such as Paul Shaffer and his Toronto Godspell castmates Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Gilda Radner left home, trusted their talent, and helped reshape North American comedy, while athletes like Blayre Turnbull and Sidney Crosby embody that same belief on the world stage. The argument is simple: Canada’s next chapter of growth will depend less on caution and delay, and more on the self-confidence, risk-taking, and readiness that already define its artists and Olympians.

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Premier Susan Holt’s second State of the Province address contained both a challenge and a warning to a packed room of political friends, foes and CEOs: “The cards ain’t worth a dime if you don’t lay them down.”

The full Grateful Dead lyric came at the end of Holt’s 80-minute presentation, but the late Bob Weir’s words were the frame through which Holt laid out her thesis to a sold-out crowd on a frigidly cold Thursday night at the end of January.

“We may have been dealt a tough hand. You may not like the cards that we’re holding at the moment, but this is New Brunswick, and I know we can turn these cards into a winning hand,” she said in her opening salvo as she talked and walked, microphone in hand, across the small stage.

“2025 for us was a year of building the foundation. You have to start at the bottom. You have to start with the roots, particularly when you want to make transformational change.”

Building that winning hand starts with the basic math of governing: a stronger economy is required to generate the tax revenues and resource royalties needed to fund the services New Brunswickers count on.

Elected in October 2024 on a platform that promised to address New Brunswick’s social challenges in housing, health, education and environmental protection, Holt and her government must now confront decades of political and business ennui in the face of global economic and political upheaval.

Last week’s address sought to stitch these two pieces together by first laying out the challenges on the social side, followed by the opportunities new economic activity holds.

It is the bargain those in the business-friendly room want her to now go out and sell to New Brunswick citizens: significantly increase economic activity so the Government of New Brunswick can afford the doctors, teachers, long‑term care beds and power bills citizens care about, without pretending the current hand is better than it is.

Holt opened her scorecard with housing, where the news was unambiguously good. New Brunswick recorded 7,587 new housing starts in 2025, the highest level ever.

On affordable housing, the province set a goal of 320 units and reached 343, with a more ambitious target of 430 units next year.

Chronic homelessness ticked slightly above the precise forecast: 996 people in December 2025, down from 1,050 in 2024, but Holt stressed the trajectory, tying early progress to policies like a rent cap and direct‑to‑tenant subsidies that slow people’s entry into homelessness.

On the environment and energy front, greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP came in well below expectations, which Holt attributed to businesses making investments that both reduce emissions and raise output.

The province also began systematically tracking indoor air quality in schools: by the time of her speech, 90 schools – about a third of all schools – were equipped with CO₂ monitoring, with a commitment to reach 100 per cent of schools by June 2026.

That was the good news.

Education results were mixed. There has been a decrease in chronic absenteeism across both Anglophone and Francophone systems. In the Anglophone sector, literacy rose to 55.3 per cent, ahead of the government’s own target of 53.8 per cent, which she credited to the shift to the “science of reading” principles, backed by more in‑class support teachers.

However, numeracy results fell in both systems, a signal, Holt said, that attention and resources now need to rebalance from reading to math.

Health contained the toughest numbers.

The number of New Brunswickers without a family doctor or nurse practitioner increased by 40,000 people in 2025 bringing the total number of New Brunswickers without access to primary care to 238,000 – about 27.5 per cent of the population.

While the first half of Holt’s speech was about naming how hard things feel, the second half was about how she intends to pay for the solutions people are demanding.

The upcoming provincial economic strategy is focused on three goals: close New Brunswick’s productivity gap, attract more investment and find new markets beyond the United States.

She identified five levers that provincial political and business classes must use to move New Brunswick out of its current precarious state.

Lever #1: Change How Capital is Deployed

The message to the room was clear: capital is limited, and choosing where it goes is now core to the political project.

“We do not have unlimited amounts of money. We do not have a GDP that is moving at the rate that it had been in the past,” said Holt. “We have to stop doing some other things, in order to fuel our health care system and our economy.”

She wants to steer public and private money toward activities that raise long‑term growth, such as a refined Small Business Investor Tax Credit, expected in early 2026, to nudge private investors toward companies that are trying to scale up rather than just survive.

At the same time, she previewed a coming debate over restraint: government will present options to the public on where to cut or slow spending, explicitly to free up money for health care and jobs that pay the bills.

Lever #2: Industrial Innovation & Productivity Tools

This is the unglamorous machinery, software and process improvements that help workers produce more value per hour and Holt was clear: New Brunswick’s private sector needs to invest heavily and quickly in these improvements.

She praised New Brunswick businesses already leading on industrial innovation and signalled the upcoming economic strategy would lean into them, not just subsidize low‑wage work.

Lever #3: Trade Infrastructure

If New Brunswick needs to reduce its dependence on American trade, it’s going to need ports, airports, rail lines and roads that connect it across the Atlantic region, to the rest of Canada and the world.

Holt named the ports of Belledune and Saint John, regional airports from Moncton to Bathurst, and high‑speed internet as essential conditions for growth in sectors like mining, forestry, agriculture, tourism and defence.

Lever #4: Energy Infrastructure

Holt was blunt about both risk and opportunity. Power prices are already straining households and business, she said, and yet New Brunswick is being asked to play a bigger role in regional energy security.

“We have to do some major things to get that cost of power to a more manageable place, but we can do it if we invest in our energy infrastructure,” she said, citing nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, and biomass.

“We need to...get the kind of generation going with modern and efficient infrastructure that helps bend the curve on rates and drive the cost of energy down.”

Lever #5: Larger, Younger Workforce

New Brunswick has one of the highest shares of 20‑ to 29‑year‑olds who are neither working nor in education or training, a concern for the premier.

The upcoming economic strategy will focus on pulling more of those young adults into post‑secondary programs, skilled trades and growth sectors like critical minerals, agriculture and food processing, advanced wood products and defence technologies.

At the other end of the labour market, new contracts for doctors and nurses, and the creation of collaborative care clinics, are meant to stabilize the health system and make New Brunswick a place high‑skilled professionals choose to work.

“In times like these, the riskiest thing that you can do is do nothing,” Holt told the room. “Our government is not going to do nothing. We are going to move, we are going to work.”

Then she widened the frame.

“This is not something that government does alone,” she said. “This is something that takes all of us rowing together on that boat that’s weathering the storm. We all have a role to play and to be part of the solution.”

The cards, in other words, are on the table now. The next stories will be about who in the crowd decides to play them.