Podcast: Herb Emery On Why It’s ‘Sunrise’ Not ‘Sunset’ On N.B.’s Manufacturing Industries
UNB economics professor Herb Emery accepted his job to come here from Alberta just as Maclean’s was publishing its much-loathed article, Can anything save New Brunswick?, about whether the province’s economy was in permanent decline.
In this week’s episode of the Huddle “Home Office” podcast, the program chair of the JDI Roundtable on Manufacturing Competitiveness tells host Mark Leger he arrived here to find that all was not lost. We just need to understand that the foundations of our manufacturing economy are strong and that traditional businesses need to be appreciated and nurtured, not cast off as “sunset” industries in favour of other sectors like tech.
“[There is a] narrative that the province was done because its old industries like manufacturing just weren’t what we needed going forward. We needed it to be ICT, we need it to be tech. It was kind of like the spirit of youth wants to do something different. They don’t want dad and granddad’s industries anymore,” says Herb.
“The longer I’ve lived here the more I’ve come to realize that’s wrong. Instead what we’ve been doing is being ashamed of where our strength has been and we haven’t taken care of the opportunities that we actually have out there. That’s been an ongoing battle since because there’s a lot of political interest in the ‘New Brunswick is a basketcase story’ because it justifies a hard pivot to something that we don’t know if it’s going to work or not, away from something that is actually fairly predictable.
The Huddle “Home Office” podcast – available on Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher and Apple podcast platforms – features conversations with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia community leaders, entrepreneurs, analysts and Huddle reporters about the issues and events that accelerate and enrich the growth of the region’s economy and culture.
Check out the Huddle podcast archive for more conversations about the Atlantic Canadian economy, which include feature interviews with regional leaders like Frank McKenna, Blaine Higgs, and tech entrepreneurs Marcel LeBrun and David Alston, our very first podcast guests.
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