While standing in line one day, waiting to order my morning caffeine fix, I overheard a couple of older gentlemen talking. The price of gas had just taken another ridiculous hike and the two were loudly lamenting that fact, along with the sorry state of the New Brunswick economy in general.
Basically, they agreed, the province was going to hell in a hand basket.
Things were getting to the point, they said, where a person couldn’t even afford to drive to work anymore, if in fact one were lucky enough to have a job to drive to.
No wonder the kids were heading to Alberta in droves, they said. How else would they be able to afford to live, never mind pay back the mind boggling amount of money they all now owed for their educations.
Soon, they predicted, there wouldn’t be anyone left but a bunch of drooling old folk.
Sound familiar? No doubt it does, if you’ve spent any amount of time since 2008 anywhere in New Brunswick.
But here’s the surprising thing about that particular conversation – it took place in 1976 and the two “older gentlemen” were about the same age as I am now.
Now, before you get the idea that I am fed up because the province is still in the same shape it was more than 40 years ago, read on. That is not the point I am trying to make at all.
Yes, it is true that since that mid 1970s recession, there were at least two more severe recessions, both well before the new millennium. And, yes, the unemployment rate did actually peak at one point, according to Stats Canada, at a whopping 14 per cent in 1986.
But those hard economic times were felt across the entire country, albeit by relative and varying degrees, and even at one point significantly affected our almighty Canadian mecca of money – Alberta.
Granted, in New Brunswick, the 1970s certainly weren’t the best of times, especially given the fact that I was one of those “kids” then, as many are now, who faced the excruciating choice of either leaving my home and extended family or toughing out what I was constantly being told would be the bleakest of futures here in the Maritimes.
My husband and I chose to stay and I have no intention of launching into a litany of how hard things were when I was young, because the truth of it is, it could have been a whole lot worse, and the lesson I have ultimately learned is not that things are never going to change but that young people can and will make it here in the Maritimes if they really want to.
They’ll do what they need to do to make ends meet, same as we did, same as the generation before us did, and here’s the kicker – the same as they would have to do anywhere else in this country.
And, as it turns out, that whole process will certainly make them stronger, perhaps wiser and, in the end, they may come to know what’s truly important in life and what truly is not.
Jackie Muise is a fourth-year journalism student.
