New Brunswick Tour — Part One

Feb­ru­ary 9, 2012

I finally have some free time to tell you about my tour of New Brunswick: what a heavy agenda that was! This is the only province where I have vis­ited three cities: Fred­er­ic­ton, Saint John and Monc­ton. All in all, five pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tions, five small group meet­ings, and some 125 peo­ple heard the CCA mes­sage over those three days… not count­ing those who fol­lowed one pre­sen­ta­tion on Twit­ter (more about that in a moment)!

It all started in Fred­er­ic­ton where I arrived on Sun­day night and was joined on Mon­day morn­ing by my friend Tim Bor­lase, for­mer CCA Board mem­ber, cur­rently Pres­i­dent of the New Brunswick Arts Board, where we meet with Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Akoulina Con­nell and her team. I had the priv­i­lege of pre­view­ing the first three in a series of eight video spots aimed at rais­ing the pro­file of the arts and of New Brunswick artists within the pop­u­la­tion: three gems, pro­duced on a shoe-string bud­get. In the after­noon, a meet­ing with Car­olyne McKay, Deputy Min­is­ter for Well­ness, Cul­ture and Sport, and two of her col­leagues, all show­ing inter­est in the mis­sion and chal­lenges of the CCA, and par­tic­u­larly keen on hear­ing more about our 2013 National Pol­icy Con­fer­ence project. The Min­istry, one of our seven val­ued provin­cial and ter­ri­to­r­ial Affil­i­ate mem­bers, is launch­ing a thor­ough review of New Brunswick’s ten year old cul­tural policy.

In the evening, I hold a pub­lic forum at the Char­lotte Street Arts Cen­tre where 17 mem­bers of the cul­tural com­mu­nity have gath­ered. The Cen­tre occu­pies a repur­posed school of impres­sive archi­tec­tural design, tucked amidst enor­mous wooden gin­ger­bread Vic­to­rian man­sions in pas­tel colours. Inter­est­ing exchange with the audi­ence, par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing the need for the CCA to reach a younger audi­ence through social media. And as far as I know, it is the first of the CCA con­sul­ta­tions held so far where two of the par­tic­i­pants con­stantly tweeted my pre­sen­ta­tion, thus giv­ing it a broader audi­ence which, they assure me, includes the whole city council!

Next morn­ing, Tim, who intro­duces him­self every­where as my per­sonal chauf­feur, gets me up at six in the morn­ing to drive to Saint John (Allow me to take the oppor­tu­nity to thank him whole­heart­edly for his incred­i­ble gen­eros­ity: he has taken me all over the province before bring­ing me last night to Char­lot­te­town, end of this week’s tour!). We start with a very inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Min­is­ter Trevor Holder. We dis­cuss the impor­tance of arts and cul­ture in cre­at­ing vibrant com­mu­ni­ties. Here is a man who appears to under­stand that arts and sport are com­ple­men­tary in cre­at­ing cit­i­zens of tomor­row: this helps me bet­ter under­stand the name of his min­istry (Well­ness, Cul­ture and Sport) which I had at first found some­what bizarre.

Right after this, we run to meet Dr. Thomas Con­don, Vice Pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Uni­ver­sity of New Brunswick, for­mer CCA Board mem­ber and a staunch sup­porter of our orga­ni­za­tion. We talk about the chal­lenges the CCA is cur­rently fac­ing and I get use­ful tips on fundrais­ing, an activ­ity he has pur­sued dur­ing his long career as aca­d­e­mic and patron of the arts.

The three of us then walk over to the splen­did Saint John City Coun­cil Cham­ber for my next pub­lic meet­ing with some twenty peo­ple who have ded­i­cated their lunch hour to hear­ing about the CCA and what it pro­poses. For the first time, I have to change one of my usual lines, for in front of me is a group that is on the whole much younger than any other group encoun­tered on this tour. The dis­cus­sion is dom­i­nated by the theme of arts in edu­ca­tion as one of the cor­ner­stones to chang­ing pub­lic per­cep­tion that arts and cul­ture are a lux­ury. The Saint John cul­tural com­mu­nity has known renewed vital­ity over the past ten years but it is now fac­ing the back­lash of a declin­ing econ­omy. There is real fear about a decline in fed­eral sup­port after the cuts imposed by the city: munic­i­pal finances are bad and every­one feels the brunt. Faced with these dif­fi­cul­ties, will we wit­ness the usual knee jerk reac­tion of “every man for him­self” or will the arts com­mu­nity get together to work for a bet­ter tomorrow?

Before hit­ting the road to Monc­ton, Tim and I are invited to tour the Impe­r­ial The­atre by its Direc­tor, S.G. Lee. This his­toric build­ing was restored thanks in part to Cana­dian Heritage’s Cul­tural Spaces pro­gram. I must con­fess that this was well worth the 10 minute walk: grand hall, lux­u­ri­ous décor and remark­able acoustics where more than 200 cul­tural events are pre­sented each year. Per­for­mances range from clas­si­cal and pop­u­lar con­certs, plays, operas and tour­ing shows (that night, an Amer­i­can pro­duc­tion of Fid­dler on the Roof).

We reach Monc­ton in time for din­ner with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of two of my hosts, the Asso­ci­a­tion aca­di­enne des artistes professionnel.le.s du Nouveau-Brunswick and the NB Arts Board. Before din­ner, I man­age to squeeze in a quick tour of the Aberdeen Cul­tural Cen­tre, an impres­sive for­mer school turned into a cul­tural space decades ago and recently ren­o­vated from roof to base­ment to meet safety stan­dards. After a scrump­tious veg­e­tar­ian din­ner, I run to bed to be as fresh as pos­si­ble for the heavy day ahead, which I will report on in my next blog!

- Alain