How New Brunswick Can Use Global Tragedies To Help Drive Meaningful Action At Home
David Campbell is a Moncton-based economic development consultant and co-host of the Huddle podcast, Insights. The following piece was originally published on his blog, It’s the Economy, Stupid!, on Substack.
A common theme in my recent writing has been a concern that we are increasingly focusing on the macro (where we have almost no influence) and missing the micro (where we have considerable influence).
The media, both traditional and social, that many of us consume is filled with content about the world’s biggest stories (and Donald Trump’s machinations) even though we have almost no say about it. It’s the difference between being in the stands (or the TV audience) or being on the ice playing the game. We need more players and fewer observers.
What do we learn from something like the senseless, racially motivated shooting in Buffalo? How can we avoid getting to that level of racial animus in the first place? In other words, we should be learning the right lessons—the lessons that we can apply on our little patch of ground.
New Brunswick is at the front end of an exciting wave of immigration that will strengthen our society and ensure our communities have the population and workforce to thrive over the next 20-30 years. But we haven’t had a significant number of immigrants settling here (i.e. about one percent or more of the population annually) since the mid-19th Century.
There is no recent memory, no experience, with successfully integrating newcomer populations into communities. Yes, commiserate with those communities and places suffering around the world. Yes, donate to World Vision. Yes, say prayers for those communities. But also act in your backyard.
It’s the same on the economic front. We have been too quick to outsource important industrial activity with environmental concerns to countries that are all too willing to take it on.
In some alternate reality, New Brunswick could have been a natural gas powerhouse, to serve our needs but also to export to Europe. Who knows? We never even got the chance to see if the gas was extractable at a commercial scale.
Some of the most unsavory countries in the world are producing oil and gas, and places like New Brunswick—which is not likely to invade Ukraine or suppress democracy or implement lax environmental regulations—are not.
In an alternate reality, we could have been a fertilizer powerhouse instead of allowing that capacity to be concentrated in countries with despotic regimes. New Brunswick has ample supplies of lime and potash and a major oil refinery, which is required to produce the most common fertilizers, such as ammonium nitrate, superphosphate, and potassium sulfate. Yet, we export almost no lime, no potash, and we have no capacity to produce hydrocarbon-based fertilizer.
I know many of you readers will have well-thought-out reasons why we are not a fertilizer powerhouse but have we really done all we could to pursue this opportunity? Did we create a tax and royalty environment favorable to the opportunity? Did we scour the world for companies to invest in these opportunities?
These are just examples. There are many more. After grieving with those directly impacted by the craziness in the world and doing what we can from afar to help, let’s turn our attention to the lessons we can learn in our backyard.
Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].