Don Dennison and New Brunswick’s great projet de société
Don Dennison spent most of his career in public service rising through the ranks of the civil service and retiring as a Deputy Minister. Don was passionate about public service and after retirement worked on a number of related projects including the organization of the New Brunswick Business Council. His Letter to New Brunswickers, penned before he passed on, is fantastic (as is the preamble about his career). A lot of my thinking about New Brunswick was shaped by my long and fruitful conversations with Don over the brief period I knew him.
Don introduced me to a term “projet de société” that he said didn’t have a great translation into English. You don’t have to understand French to get the meaning of the term.
I think population growth – through primarily immigration – is New Brunswick’s great projet de société for this generation. It’s hard to compare this to the big challenges and opportunities of previous generations but this one is a whopper. Likely old timers would make the case that equal opportunity was a similarly big scale idea in the 1960s.
Maybe. By my calculations we need to attract and retain at least 200,000 immigrants in the next 20 years and not just in the big cities. One of the main reasons why this is a projet de société is that it is impacting and will impact all regions of New Brunswick.
During the recent NB Multicultural Council virtual whistle stop tour of 15 communities around New Brunswick we presented the population growth needed in each region to a) sustain the workforce at the current size or b) grow the workforce. In most areas of the province, it will require population growth not seen in 30-40 years and in some cases even longer. Further, the population growth in an earlier era was internal – now we have to bring in 200,000 from outside the country and be the kind of communities that will encourage them to put down roots.
As I have said many times, New Brunswick does have a history with immigration, but it’s been a long, long time. The last time we attracted enough immigrants to meaningfully impact population growth was in the middle of the 19th Century.
Take the example of my roots. Both my parents are from the Miramichi (Blackville and Blissfield). Take a look at the following chart. Of the 1,890 people living in the Blackville Parish in 2016, 1,810 or almost all of them were at least third generation Canadian. Only 40 out of 1,890 were born outside of Canada.
And yet, most people still identify with their ancient heritage. Yes, by now over half consider themselves ethnically Canadian but there are still 675 who are ethnically Irish and 10 who are ethnically Danish. I’ve never met them.
My point is there was a time when Irish and French Catholics, Scottish Presbyterian and English Baptists all moved to the region and all worked in the same sawmills, cut pulp, worked the land. They didn’t worship in the same churches but they lived together in the same communities.
We need another 1850. In 2020.
Not a little challenge. A whopper.
BTW, there are 1,500 people across Canada who consider themselves ‘ethnically New Brunswicker’ (only a couple of hundred of them are actually in New Brunswick). I’m not sure what makes a person ethnically New Brunswick – maybe excessive eating of salmon, blueberries and maple syrup while reading David Adams Richards?
Are we pulling out all the stops for this projet de société?
BTW if you ever have witnessed someone actually pulling out all of the stoop knobs of a pipe organ it is an impressive thing.
I hope so. It’s not like we can twiddle our thumbs on this. Over 7,000 people are retiring each year and there are not enough young people from here coming into the workforce.