I have been a Christopher Nolan fan ever since I read how he fell in love with film: as a teenager watching science and space documentaries in the Omnimax theatre at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Me too.

Summers for me, growing up in the Toronto area in the 1970s and 80s, always meant Ontario Place and Cinesphere, the park’s signature geodesic dome that is the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre.

Whether it was with my parents, class trips, or friends, I think I saw every IMAX film in those years, which screened multiple times a day, summer after summer. Films such as North of Superior (1971), Snow Job (1974), and one of my early favourites Catch The Sun (1973), which includes a single shot riding in the front seat of a roller coaster as it crests the first hill and plunges down.

It was my first roller coaster experience and that image and feeling of speeding along the rattling track has stayed with me with greater clarity than all the real roller coasters I have enjoyed since.

Catch The Sun was the first IMAX film created by David and Patricia Keighley, two Toronto kids who had fallen in love with the Canadian-invented large format film while on a date at Cinesphere to see North of Superior.

The Keighleys would go on to build their shared careers with IMAX, officially as the Chief Quality Officers but unofficially known through the film world as the guardians of the IMAX experience.

It was David who first put an IMAX film camera in Nolan’s hands in 2006, and the Keighleys worked alongside Nolan and his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas, as Nolan sought to integrate IMAX more and more into his filmmaking.

A 20-year professional and personal relationship culminating with The Odyssey, the first Hollywood movie created entirely in IMAX film, and which is dedicated to David Keighley, who died of cancer last September, days after approving every frame of the 2 million feet of film shot by Nolan and his team.

As the Keighleys’ son Geoff wrote on Instagram following the film’s world premiere on July 7: “Like Odysseus, my Dad made it home.”

To reach more about the Keighleys, the new IMAX camera named in their honour and Christopher Nolan’s career-defining relationship with the made-in-Canada film technology, please click below for my latest story for Be Giant.

Why Christopher Nolan dedicated The Odyssey to this Canadian man

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

When I wrote recently about New Brunswick’s growing investment in wind power, the most common response from readers was simple: “What about batteries?”

It’s a fair question.

In the past few years, NB Power has locked in several hundred more megawatts (MW) of wind power, due online by 2027-28, to help meet federal rules that phase out coal by 2030 and cut fossil-fuel emissions sharply by 2035. As more electricity comes from wind, which, like solar, is a form of intermittent power, there will be more moments when generation doesn’t line up perfectly with demand. Sometimes there’s too much. Sometimes there isn’t enough. That’s the problem with intermittent power: unless you can find a way to contain it, it may not be available when you need it.

Which is why NB Power is now exploring battery energy storage systems (BESS). In late January, the utility issued a Request for Expressions of Interest, inviting proposals from private developers for battery systems totalling roughly 200 to 400 megawatt hours (MWh), of short-duration flexibility to manage wind and solar output, under a 15-year contract. A megawatt-hour measures energy delivered over time, which is not the same thing as raw capacity.

“We are committed to delivering cleaner energy without placing undue upward pressure on customer rates,” said Lori Clark, NB Power’s president and CEO. The utility intends to procure battery storage through long-term contracts with private developers, much as it does with wind farms.

So what does 200 MWh get you?

Unless you’re in the industry, or you really like reading about power generation, it is difficult to make sense of what 200 MWh really amounts to. So here is a thought exercise: Picture the entire NB Power grid shrunk down to the scale of a single-family home in New Brunswick.

In this imaginary version, the province becomes one house, and NB Power becomes the collection of things that keep that house powered. The point is not to make the provincial grid seem small. It is to keep the proportions the same while turning very large numbers into an understandable comparison.

Here’s how the scaling works. We take the ‘mega’ out of megawatts and megawatt-hours. A megawatt is one million watts, so scaling everything down by a factor of one million turns provincial-sized numbers into household-sized numbers. The relationship stays the same; only the scale changes.

On that scale, our imaginary home draws about 3 kilowatts at its peak (a bitter January night, with the heaters, oven and dryer all running) and uses about 13,557 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.

In the single-home version, Point Lepreau becomes the house’s wood furnace, lit once and kept burning steadily. Mactaquac and the other hydro dams become a creek that slows in a dry summer. Belledune, the coal plant that must retire by 2030, becomes a generator out back. And the wind farms become a turbine in the yard.

Now imagine adding more turbines. Most of the time, more turbines are good: they provide cheaper power and create lower emissions. But wind doesn’t produce on command. Sometimes it’s calm. Sometimes it’s blowing too hard and turbines shut down. Sometimes the grid has more than it can absorb and generation gets curtailed. Solar has the same problem: it works beautifully at 2 p.m. but produces nothing at 6 p.m. on that cold January evening, when power demand peaks.

This is where the usefulness and limits of batteries becomes easier to understand. A battery can help when the house needs extra power for a short period, or when wind power arrives a few hours before it is needed, but if the house is short of supply for days, the battery has to be big enough to run nearly everything for those same days. These are very different problems.

Smoothing out short-term gaps

Batteries are useful for moving electricity through time, but they are not automatically a reasonable substitute for generation when supply is scarce.

Their first job of battery storage is called smoothing. When the wind produces more than the house needs, a battery stores the excess and releases it a few hours later, after sunset, when demand rises. This is the job NB Power’s proposed battery would actually do on the provincial grid: store excess electricity for a few hours so the system has more flexibility at the times demand is highest.

Scaled back down to our family home, that’s 200 to 400 watt-hours: roughly the size of a camping power pack sold at Canadian Tire for a few hundred dollars. If the power goes out, that little battery could keep your phone charged, the lights on and your refrigerator running for a few hours to smooth over a short outage. It is useful, but it is not the thing you would rely on to run the whole house through a major shortage.

That may not sound impressive at the household level, but on a modern electricity grid, shifting power by even a few hours has real value. It allows wind farms to keep generating when demand temporarily falls, reduces the need to start expensive backup generators, and helps maintain the power balance the grid requires. Utilities don’t buy batteries because they solve the problem of having too little generation for days at a time; they buy them because they solve the short-term balancing problem exceptionally well.

Storage for days is expensive

The second job is backup supply during a real shortage. That is a much bigger task. Let’s stay with the house analogy. Suppose the wind barely blows for four to five consecutive days, and the house still needs heat, lights, appliances and hot water. The question is no longer whether a battery can help through the evening peak; the question is whether it can replace the missing supply for days.

On this scale, a house would require roughly 154,000 to 192,000 watt-hours of storage, which is roughly the equivalent of 11-14 Tesla Powerwalls mounted floor to ceiling across a garage wall, at an installed cost of roughly $212,000 to $265,000.

Most homeowners wouldn’t spend that kind of money on batteries for an occasional multi-day shortage. They would almost certainly look for a less expensive form of backup power, such as a gas-fuelled generator, which retail for around $600-$1,300. The same logic applies at utility scale: batteries can help meet peak demand for a short period, but they are not a reasonable main source of supply when the system is short of power for days.

Nova Scotia Power’s recent battery project consists of three 50-megawatt, four-hour battery installations – 150 MW of power capacity and 600 MWh of energy storage – at a total cost of $237 million. That works out to about $395,000 per installed megawatt-hour of storage. Applying the same comparison to the New Brunswick’s provincial grid, the battery system it’s reviewing could cost $79 to $158 million: the utility-scale equivalent of the homeowner buying the modest Canadian Tire camping battery.

However, if NB Power tried to provide enough battery storage to carry all the province’s energy needs through four to five consecutive days of very low wind, it would require approximately 154,000 to 192,000 MWh of storage. At Nova Scotia’s benchmark cost, that would amount to roughly $61 billion to $76 billion. That’s about 10 to 13 times NB Power’s entire current debt.

Battery technology continues to evolve

To be clear: this is not what NB Power is proposing. The comparison simply shows the enormous difference between using batteries to help manage peak demand for a few hours and using batteries as the main source of electricity through a multi-day shortage.

That price tag is why nobody is proposing to solve the region’s multi-day electricity needs with lithium-ion batteries.

That’s not because batteries are a bad idea; it’s because they are not designed for continuous multi-day power supply.

Utilities buy them because they respond almost instantly to swings in wind or solar output, stabilize voltage and frequency, and catch electricity that would otherwise go to waste.

That’s why New Brunswick is doing several things at once: adding wind to cut emissions, adding lithium batteries to make that wind more flexible, and still relying on Point Lepreau, hydro and fossil generation for the days when neither the sun nor the wind cooperates.

Longer-duration technologies, such as iron-air batteries, flow batteries, compressed air, or pumped hydro may eventually close that gap - but that’s not what NB Power is shopping for today.

Today’s batteries move electricity through time by a few hours. That’s enough to smooth wind and solar and steady the grid. What they can’t yet do affordably is keep New Brunswick warm through the coldest week of a January winter.

Batteries are another link in the generation-transmission chain. They strengthen the electricity system, but they cannot replace the chain itself.

Join Us On Side Walks For More Stories

On Monday Prime Minister Mark Carney stood on the deck of one of Canada’s new Arctic patrol ships and announced German shipbuilder TKMS had won the contract to build up to 12 new submarines for the Royal Canadian Navy.

Canadian and TKMS officials will now negotiate the detailed contract over the next six to eighteen months, which will see Canada enter into a joint procurement relationship with Germany and Norway to purchase TKMS’ new Class 212CD (common design) submarines.

My interest is in this story is what it will mean on the ground, specifically in Victoria and Halifax, home to the naval bases where the subs will dock and where over they will be sustained, the word the industry uses to describes the upgrades, retrofits, regular maintenance and repairs required to keep these subs running for 30 or 40 years.

My story for Be Giant, Canada’s new submarine deal is set to spur a new industry: From building a submarine shipyard in Halifax to beefing up supply chains, Canada’s new sub economy is taking shape dives into what this means and what businesses looking to tap into these new supply chains should do to prepare.

I hope you enjoy it.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

This past Tuesday evening, I ventured into an early summer downpour to attend a community meeting on a proposed windfarm in my neighbourhood. The Paqt’smawei Sipu Wind Project is proposed for Kings County, at the headwaters of the Kennebecasis River.

The meeting had been hastily arranged among interested neighbours. The details of the proposed windfarm had only recently been realised by nearby residents – but nobody understood what the real risk assessments were. What I expected was a room of people anxious about ecosystem destruction: the loss of birds, bats, other wildlife, and critically, the potential effects on the watershed.

What I found was a room prepared to believe the absolute worst of the project, and the worst of NB Power. “Was there nobody,” one meeting member asked, “who could provide an unbiased perspective?”

A utility that has lost the public’s trust

NB Power’s current debts, its battles to increase user rates, to push Smart Meter adoption, and its struggle to secure a Tantramar gas plant has seriously soured citizens and ratepayers. Lack of trust in the utility is the result.

NB Power warns that New Brunswick is facing power shortages in the next two years. What is poorly explained is how and why we face a shortage. After all, we sell power to the USA and other provinces – so why not stop? Wouldn’t that solve the shortage problem?

It wouldn’t, and public confusion over why NB Power buys and sells electricity is a communications failure on the part of the utility and the provincial government.

Understanding our electrical supply

Most people imagine electricity like water in a bathtub: generate power, it fills up the tub, but if we send some to neighbours, we have less. The grid does not work that way.

Instead it works like a perfectly balanced scale: the moment more power is generated than New Brunswickers are using, or more power is used than generated, the system goes out of balance. Unlike water in a pipe, electricity cannot be slowed down or held in reserve. Generation and use have to match constantly, at every moment of every day. Every unit generated has to go somewhere right now, or generators have to be slowed and the energy is wasted.

When NB Power generates more than New Brunswickers are using, that surplus must go somewhere. Selling it to neighbours earns money that helps offset costs for ratepayers.

Why NB buys electricity

Our transmission lines carry power in both directions. During peak winter demand, NB draws electricity from Quebec and the New England grid instead of firing up our oil-fuelled backup generators, which cost significantly more money to run. NB Power’s long-term contract with Hydro-Québec runs to 2040, because Quebec’s hydro system can deliver reliable electricity exactly when we need it most.

Why NB supplies PEI – and why that is not optional

Prince Edward Island has no large electricity generation of its own. NB Power has supplied it with roughly 70 per cent of its power through submarine cables since 1977 under a commercial arrangement with Maritime Electric. That arrangement is not one either province can walk away from: it is the foundation of the Island’s electricity supply.

How electricity prices are set across the grid

Electricity across the northeastern grid – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and the six New England states – is bought and sold on a shared market. The price is determined by an Energy Management System (EMS), software that runs continuously across the network, matching available generation against real-time demand every few minutes. The price rises and falls based on how much power is available and how much is needed.

NB Power watches that price and acts on it. When prices are low, other suppliers have plenty and there is little point selling. When prices spike, the region needs power and NB will sell if it has a surplus. The logic works in reverse too: when NB needs power and the Quebec price is lower than firing our own backup generators, we buy. The price moves automatically and informs every utility on the network when it should sell and when it should buy.

When buying and selling face problems

The system works well most of the time but has two stress points.

The first: surplus with no buyers. On mild nights in spring or fall, every province and state may have more generation than it needs simultaneously. The price drops sharply. NB Power may sell at minimal return or slow generators down. It is not giving power away: it is selling a surplus. Recovering a little money from a neighbour at least generates some money.

The second issue is a regional shortage. During a severe cold snap stretching from New Brunswick to Boston, every utility tries to buy at once. Prices spike and idle oil-fired plants get called into service to fulfill demand. NB Power’s Hydro-Québec contract reduces this risk: Quebec’s reservoirs are the closest thing the northeastern grid has to a large battery.

Both problems come down to timing. NB Power has no large-scale electricity storage. Until it does, the grid relies on the two-way flow of power across provincial and international lines to balance supply and demand.

The threat of power shortages

New Brunswick is not running out of power. Our grid is built to handle normal everyday usage. But with more than 75 per cent of New Brunswickers relying on electricity to heat their homes, power demand spikes during winter cold snaps. The utility is forecasting that by 2028, it will lack the capacity to supply everyone simultaneously during these peak hours in addition to rising industrial demand.

When we hear ‘power shortage’ today, it does not mean the lights are about to go out. It means that on the coldest days of the year, the cost of keeping up with demand increases significantly. We rely on buying from neighbours, or running expensive backup generators, or both. The shortage is a cost problem first and a supply problem second. The risk is higher bills, and a growing gap between what New Brunswick’s infrastructure can deliver affordably.

What that future looks like, and what it will cost, is a conversation we have barely begun.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

I’ve had a busy and invigorating couple of weeks diving deep into Canada-U.S. relations, space sovereignty (a new favourite beat for me), the energy mix in Atlantic Canada, and the impact of advanced computing – let’s call it what it is, rather than simply ‘AI’ because it’s way more than that.

It culminated with me flying up to Toronto to join the Be Giant team, led by founder Alison Uncles and managing editor Mark Stevenson, to cover the US-Canada Summit co-hosted by RBC and the Eurasia Group.

It had quite a line-up, kicking off with US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra offering surprisingly conciliatory words, followed by the newish (100 days) Canadian ambassador to the United States, Mark Wiseman, who said everyone in Washington has been super nice to him.

They were followed by federal cabinet ministers Evan Solomon (AI), Dominic LeBlanc (Canada-US Trade) and Mélanie Joly (Foreign Affairs), and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia.

We heard from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer; and institutional investors Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton; Annesley Wallace, president and CEO of the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan; and Jo Taylor, president and CEO of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP).

The private sector was there too, including Mike Greenley, CEO of MDA Space, whom I interviewed before the summit while waiting for my plane at the Moncton airport.

Be Giant was a media sponsor of the event, and I helped create a strong package that hopefully gives you a bit more in-depth reporting than the initial coverage, which focused on Hoekstra’s change of tone.

Here are the links to the four stories produced.

Read my interview with Mike Greenley about..

How Canada’s leading space company plans to build and protect: MDA Space CEO Mike Greenley on space sovereignty, co-operating with the U.S. and protecting Canada from above.

Read my joint coverage with Tim Harper and Srivindhya Kolluru…

Inside 7 of Canada’s biggest challenges – and how we can meet them: At the US-Canada Summit hosted by the Eurasia Group and RBC, experts chart paths forward through the current polycrises.

You can read Tim’s story about the Arctic…

Canada’s fight against a global free-for-all in the Arctic: Why experts say Canada’s Arctic sovereignty is already a myth, and what needs to be done.

Finally, you can check out the Be Giant team’s candids with some of the attendees…

The one thing Canada needs to do right now: We took a camera and a stack of Polaroid film to the U.S.-Canada Summit and asked the country’s sharpest minds a single question.

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Of My Stories For Be Giant

There’s a phrase that’s been rattling around in my head since I got back from my tour of UPEI’s new medical school.

The idea that for our public health care system to progress, we need all medical professionals working ‘at the top of their practice.’ I first heard that phrase a few years ago from my friend Jim Danahy, who says that of pharmacists. I heard it again when I was working with another friend, Aimée Foreman, who is passionate about caregiving, and I think a lot about it as I follow the rollout of collaborative care clinics here in New Brunswick.

It’s one of the simple-to-understand concepts that is difficult to implement.

Looking around UPEI’s new Clinical Learning and Simulation Centre and listening to manager and registered nurse Tammie Muise explain how she designed the spaces to encourage collaboration and conversation amongst team members, I could see the path from idea to execution begin to unfurl.

One of my ‘a-ha!’ moments was when Tammie walked over to the nurses’ station desk in the simulated hospital ward and declared it was her favourite thing in the Centre. That’s saying something, considering the Centre is perhaps the most advanced simulation centre in Canada, complete with a 4D simulation room that can pipe in scents and breezes, and mannequins that can cry, talk and give birth.

All very cool learning tools, but for Muise, who spent the first half of her career working in hospitals in Canada and the U.S., the nurses’ station is key.

“This is where a lot of action happens between the disciplines,” she told me. “This is where all kinds of crucial conversations happen, the collaboration.”

Amidst all our advances in medical technology - and thank god for that – and improvements to how we train medical professionals, in the end, it will be how we work together, humans with humans, that will make the difference.

It’s a good thing to remember, as we work to improve our public health care system.

You can read my full feature story at Be Giant (link below), the fabulous new national non-profit news organization telling stories about Canadian ambition.

Click here to read How to build a better medical school

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

Hi everyone,

Gina and I are back from our travels, and we’ve got some exciting news to share. Thanks to your early support and interest in our newsletter, we’ve been having some interesting conversations about what comes next.

Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring how to build a new, regional news and information organization to serve Atlantic Canada, and now we need your help.

We want to know what kinds of information you need to know about Atlantic Canada, and its place within a larger world.

I’ve created a shortish multiple-choice survey to get a better sense of what you worry most about for yourself and your family, the kind of information you need to help alleviate those worries or at least point you towards some potential solutions, and how you currently get and find information.

I’m very purposefully asking you about information, not simply news.

Like you, Gina and I want to build for the future, which means creating a company centred around the service that journalism and its core task of information gathering and analysis can provide.

We’ve got some ideas of what that might be, but first, we’d like to hear from you. I’ve put together a short survey. It’s 10 questions that will take maybe five minutes, maybe less, to complete.

It asks about where you turn for information, what you’re worried about, and what you wish you had access to that you currently don’t.

If you’re willing to take it, I’ll tell you what I find out and what Gina and I are planning next.

Help us understand what you need to know about Atlantic Canada – Please click here to go to our survey.

Thank you - we appreciate your support!

We’re sending you down to our own Port City today to read about Saint John’s spotlight news in my latest story with Be Giant, the national non-profit newsroom telling stories of the people, places and ideas doing the work to move Canada forward.

Today’s story follows the remarkable resurrection of Port Saint John: a $247-million modernisation, the return of CPKC rail after a 25-year absence, commitments from global shipping giants Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd, and a 153 per cent surge in Ontario trade traffic as the Golden Horseshoe begins rerouting east. All of it unfolding against the backdrop of American tariffs that are simultaneously battering New Brunswick’s economy and redirecting the world’s attention toward Saint John’s deep-water advantages.

It’s a story about infrastructure, but also about a city that never stopped believing its port was its future.

Here’s the opening. Follow the link at the end to read the full piece on Be Giant.

The South African visitor has come ashore on this blustery morning in Saint John, N.B., to replenish supplies. “It’s OK, we sometimes get snow where I live,” he says with a smile and a shrug as he sets off down Water Street, hands stuffed in the pockets of his red puffer jacket, headed toward the city’s Uptown district to shop for snacks and other necessities.

He and his fellow passengers aboard Virgin Voyages’ 17-deck Valiant Lady aren’t supposed to be experiencing the brisk winds and drizzle that mark early spring on the Bay of Fundy. They’re supposed to be sunning themselves in Bermuda, but gale-force winds and six-metre ocean swells have diverted the 2,000 passengers northward to Saint John, where shopkeepers, wait staff and locals are accustomed to providing directions, lunch recommendations and local history tidbits to visitors “off the boats.”

For much of the 21st century, this has been life in Canada’s historic “Port City” – a cruise ship or two anchored at wharves abutting the city’s Uptown and tourists buying dried Grand Manan dulse and lighthouse magnets in Canada’s oldest city market (established in 1785), and going on walking tours of the city’s ornate 19th-century buildings, which once housed transatlantic merchants and adventurers and are now home to law offices, design studios and loft apartments. In pre-Confederation Canada, Saint John was the place to be, the largest shipbuilding centre in British North America.

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

---

Stay in the Know.

If this story piqued your interest, please share it. Every share helps spread knowledge about the ins and outs of local affairs and keeps independent reporting strong on Canada’s East Coast.

Share

Michelle Robichaud is the president of the Atlantica Centre for Energy.

Europe’s most diverse industrial port is lined with wind turbines towering over automated cranes alongside transmission lines and power generation facilities. This is what an economy deeply reliant on energy looks like.

The Belgian economy needs all the clean energy it can get, and the Port of Antwerp-Bruges left no wasted space in sight of the country’s economic goals.

I was invited to participate in the New Brunswick trade mission to provide an energy perspective on the discussion and to bring home insights from those discussions. Energy was one of the first topics raised in nearly every conversation. I anticipated discussions about shipping, logistics, or container efficiency, seeing that the mission was focused on ports. Instead, European partners immediately focused on how to secure reliable energy supplies for the next several decades and how reliable jurisdictions, like Canada, can help.

There was urgency in the discussions to create partnerships, especially around energy. Europe is not talking about energy transition as a distant aspiration. It is happening now. Their industrial growth and their economy depend on it.

Energy strategy is industrial strategy

One comment during a roundtable discussion captured the tone perfectly: energy policy is industrial policy. In my role at the Atlantica Centre for Energy, I see firsthand the impact of decisions on how energy is produced, transported and used shape which industries grow, where investment flows, and how economies compete globally.

European partners were clear that decarbonization is underway across sectors, but this transition is also being driven by energy security and affordability concerns. The geopolitical landscape, including the war in Ukraine and, more recently, U.S. tariffs, has made reliance on traditional suppliers far less certain. That reality is accelerating innovation, from hydrogen infrastructure to electrified port equipment, and forcing long-term planning.

Governments and companies investing in energy infrastructure that has a lifespan of 20 to 100 years are making decisions now that will shape their economies for generations.

Perhaps the most striking takeaway was the level of pragmatism. Energy plans were rooted in physics and economics, with very little aspirational rhetoric. European partners have strong climate goals and care deeply about the environment, but also spoke about the role natural gas plays and will continue to play in maintaining reliability while new technologies scale over a minimum 20-year horizon. And yes, hydrogen is still being considered as part of the energy future through practical pilot projects such as ammonia cracking technologies and infrastructure development. There were no theoretical discussions.

Ports are becoming energy hubs

The Port of Antwerp-Bruges demonstrates how integrated modern ports have become. Beyond shipping containers, the Port is a major petrochemical cluster with energy infrastructure such as pipelines, refineries and power plants, including a nuclear generation facility sitting in the middle of it all.

The trade mission started with a bird’s-eye view of the port standing on a giant map. The Chair of the Board walked us through the port’s past and future plans for growth. How they’ve moved from coal to natural gas and renewables, how CO₂ from industrial facilities is captured, stored or used at industrial facilities, but also how growth is limited by access to energy.

I heard in several conversations how ports are evolving into hubs that connect logistics, energy systems and industrial activity. The concept of “green corridor” trade routes designed to reduce emissions is gaining traction, but success will depend on practical infrastructure decisions on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as commercial viability.

Atlantic Canada’s opportunity

Atlantic Canada is only beginning to articulate the role it can play in the global energy sector, including helping to decarbonize markets. The fundamentals are strong. We have deep-water ports, proximity to Europe, natural resources, and strong trade relationships.

European partners are actively seeking stable, democratic allies who can help supply the energy and materials needed to sustain industrial growth. Canada, and Atlantic Canada in particular, is well-positioned.

The importance of relationships

One of the most encouraging aspects of the mission was the strength of the relationships already in place. Memorandums of Understanding, company links across the Atlantic and existing trade routes between the Port of Saint John and the Port of Belledune with European partners provides a strong foundation for deeper collaboration.

A roundtable in Brussels brought together approximately 25 companies focused on how New Brunswick and Europe can work together across energy, innovation and supply chains. The shared values at the table were evident, as was the willingness to collaborate on long-term solutions.

Premier Susan Holt represented New Brunswick exceptionally well throughout the mission. Her business background was evident in discussions with industry leaders and diplomats alike, and her ability to engage in French strengthened connections later in Paris.

A moment that calls for clarity

The European delegates were clear in their mission: they are planning decades ahead, investing in infrastructure, and aligning policy with long-term economic goals.

Atlantic Canada can learn from this approach.

Our success will depend on articulating a strong vision for how our energy assets, ports and industrial capabilities fit into global supply chains.

There is no single solution to the challenges facing global energy systems. Every country is navigating similar questions around affordability, reliability, emissions reduction and economic competitiveness, but on different timelines and with regional differences.

We are fortunate that Atlantic Canada is not facing the same immediate energy pressures as Europe. We still have room to grow our energy sector through renewables, natural gas and even hydro facilities. But that advantage can also lead to complacency.

The opportunity is significant. So is the urgency.

Energy strategy is no longer a niche policy discussion. It is central to economic growth, trade relationships and long-term prosperity. We need the public, business community and government to get on the same page.

The path forward for Atlantic Canada is not about choosing a single energy solution. It is about making deliberate choices, grounded in our strengths, and committing to them over the long term. Positioning policy with infrastructure needs and investment opportunities. It also means working collaboratively with neighbouring jurisdictions and the federal government to align on a future strategy that ensures long-term certainty for those investments.

We should not just be planning to meet our own energy demands. We can and should aspire to play a critical role in the global energy system. The question is: Are we ready to step up to the challenge?

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

Hi Everyone,

I’m writing this as a steel gray morning sky greets me in Thunder Bay, ON, the start of Day 3 of my epic cross-Canada road trip.

My daughter Alex is working this summer in Vancouver, and so we opted to see the country on an eight-day road trip, rather than send her packing on a half-day plane ride. I’ll be back in the Maritimes just ahead of the Victoria Day weekend.

We started yesterday in Algoma country, Sault Ste. Marie, a city that owes much to Bathurst, NB-born James Dunn, founder of Algoma Steel. There’s a plaque commemorating him next to Wawa, ON.’s famous Canada Goose statue, which overlooks the TransCanada Highway, about five hours northwest of the Soo. We’re in mining country up here, where the air is crisp, and the water of Lake Superior is clear and cold.

Here in Thunder Bay, we’re not far from the old grain towers that line this port city’s waterfront.

Dinner near The Forks in Winnipeg tonight, with a short side trip into Kenora, ON, where I worked as a young journalist one summer back in the late 90s. Photo in front of Husky the Muskie at the shores of Lake of the Woods is on today’s to-do list.

Gina is on the other side of the world, in Hong Kong, on a working vacation. She’s the co-owner of the Lamma 500, a large dragon boat race, which was held on Sunday. I suspect she is deservedly taking it easy today. She’ll be back in about 10 days.

Our friend, Michelle Robichaud from the Atlantica Centre for Energy, has also been travelling, and tomorrow we’ll publish her reflections on participating in New Brunswick’s recent trade mission to Antwerp-Bruges, Belgium.

Then…we’ll see. I’ve been taking notes and thinking as Alex and I dipsey-doodle through northern Ontario, and Gina wrote me a few days ago with some thoughts from HK, so the ideas are bubbling away. Maybe I’ll write something while I have a few days in Vancouver and Gina relaxes on her beloved Lamma Island, or maybe it’ll all come together once we’re back in New Brunswick.

It’s that kind of vacation.

Enjoy spring, wherever you are, and we’ll see you soon.

Subscribe now

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!

Stroll Over to Side Walks For More Stories

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.