Land Rich, Cash Poor: The Settler-Colonial Beginnings of the University of New Brunswick, 1785-1829

The following is an excerpt from Richard Yeomans’ article that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.

RICHARD YEOMANS

IN FEBRUARY 1844 NEW BRUNSWICK’S HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY first read Lemuel Allen Wilmot’s bill for the amendment of the charter of King’s College Fredericton, a collegiate school that had been in operation since 1829 but conceived during the late 18th century. Though debate was short, Wilmot bluntly remarked that since the school was first incorporated in 1800 by provincial articles of incorporation “forty five thousand pounds had been paid for its support – a sum which would have educated every one of its students at Cambridge or Oxford.”^[1] Wilmot was convinced that the school was anything but a going concern, and proposed changes including the removal of the colony’s lieutenant governor and members of the provincial Executive Council from being allowed to assume positions on the College Council as either chancellor or president of the institution, respectively.^[2] These measures were a direct response to years of woeful mismanagement by the colony’s political elite of the college’s provincial and royal monetary endowments, and the roughly 6,000 acres of land granted in support of the school at the start of the century. Wilmot’s actions and words were also indicative of a long and drawn-out struggle over control over collegiate education in New Brunswick between the appointed and elected houses. Challenges to the school’s land ownership, program of settlement, and the desire of politically elite white settlers to exploit and leverage unceded Wolastoqiyik lands and waters for the maintenance of a collegiate institution in New Brunswick exacerbated this struggle. In an effort to build “the most gentleman like society on earth,” the fraught formation of what was to become the present-day Fredericton campus of the University of New Brunswick became central to the development of the settler state in Britain’s most lucrative timber colony.^[3]

Members of New Brunswick’s political elite first proposed using land as foundational capital for a collegiate institution in 1785, while also designing their college to benefit only the children of the most affluent. For the political refugees of the American Revolution, the expense of sending the children of Loyalists away to England to complete their education cost more than most land was worth in New Brunswick in the late 18th century. Moreover, colonial leaders expressed concern that individuals who attended college or university in the newly independent United States might return corrupted by dissenting republican ideals.^[4] Ward Chipman, born in Massachusetts and trained at Harvard College before becoming New Brunswick’s first Solicitor General, feared that his own son, in “looking beyond some of these Provinces for his future, . . . will never be contended to starve, as I have done, in this part of the Country.”^[5] New Brunswick offered little in the way of upward mobility or educational prospects for children, regardless of their parentage, and colonial administrators sought to “localize the universal culture taught in British Universities” as a means of preserving the social order to which they had become accustomed and which they sought to reproduce in New Brunswick.^[6] For more middling refugees, the potential leveling influences of British-style higher education did not supersede their immediate concerns with the lack of rudimentary education, such as reading and writing, mathematics and geometry, which was compounded by the serious backlog in petitions for land grants. The colony had too few surveyors with the necessary math skills to survey land for distribution amongst perspective settlers, and this deficit exacerbated problems with restive settlers such as squatting and conflicts with the Wolastoqiyik, Peskotomuhkatiyik, and Miꞌkmaq.

Loyalist refugees of all ranks were in close agreement about the need for an established system of education in new settlements, albeit for different purposes, and rested their hopes in education as a harbinger of peace, as a disseminator of liberal British values through Christian institutions, and as a generator of future industry.^[7] Benjamin Marston, another Harvard-educated refugee and chief surveyor in Nova Scotia, was particularly frank about the need for unanimity between education and religion in one report he sent off to London at the height of his efforts to settle refugees in Shelburne in 1783. Marston observed that such combination required “particular care” by restricting who would be allowed to shape “Colleges & such like Public Seminaries of Education so far as Clergymen were concerned,” and that they “should be committed only to the care of those who were [Church] of England men.”^[8] Marston, however, was also quite critical of the lack of any “sufficient portion of men of practical education & abilities” among the refugees expected to occupy and permanently settle in the post-revolutionary northwest Atlantic.^[9] Despite there being numerous college-educated refugees in Nova Scotia, in Marston’s view far too few had the practical education necessary for cultivating land for resettlement. Practical education, at least according to Marston’s interpretation while he attempted to survey plots of land along peninsular Nova Scotia, was “useful knowledge” – knowledge thoroughly independent of any kind of theoretical or abstract thought that did not also improve upon the use of a quadrant. In Britain, the link between science and practical education had been well established since the 17th century and proved fertile when put into the service of empire.^[10] In Nova Scotia, the link between expanding commerce and practical education was not lost on Marston, who, at the end of 18th century, believed the region needed practitioners and not philosophers. The system of education, once implemented, needed to produce competent settlers and loyal subjects who would quicken the occupation and opening of the land and not question either the actions or authority of the Crown’s representatives in Nova Scotia or, after 1784, in New Brunswick.

Governments and DEVCO

This is the third of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.

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Though DEVCO was a crown corporation wholly owned by the federal government, the company was tightly bound to the Nova Scotia government. DEVCO mined coal which was owned by the province and paid the province a royalty for so doing. Another circumstance colouring the relationship was that the company’s main customer was the provincially owned Nova Scotia Power Commission (NSPC), which generated 65% of its power in coal-fired plants. The NSPC held most of the cards. In particular, it possessed the flexibility to become more reliant on oil, depending on the price. At the same time, it was under pressure to bring down industrial power rates in the province. Renegotiation of its contract in 1989 had reduced DEVCO’s revenue by $20 million but that did not stop critics from contending that unjustifiably high rates, accountable to the NSPC’s support of Cape Breton’s coal industry, hampered the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector.[1]

For reasons that transcended, and certainly conflicted with, our strategy, the high command in Ottawa deferred to Premier Buchanan. The Cape Breton Development Corporation Act, for example, stipulated that two of the company’s seven directors be provincially appointed and that the province be consulted on the appointment of the chairman and president. In practice, the Mulroney government cleared even its own nominations with the Premier. He vetoed a federal government nomination at least once.

Moreover, Nova Scotia governments used DEVCO as a means of systematically milking the federal government. Leave aside the constitutional division of responsibilities and tortuously developed fiscal arrangements. My experience uncovered subterranean rivulets of federal subsidy never publicly acknowledged. One was a hospital tax that could be raised at the will of the province. Another was a decree of the Nova Scotia legislature that any loss of lung function by a long-working miner, regardless of how that might have been caused (for example, by heavy smoking), was DEVCO’s problem, requiring it to pay out substantial sums in workers’ compensation benefits. In the end, the federal government footed the bill.

Gerald Wright, Senior Policy Advisor to Tom Hockin with Joe Burke, President of District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, July 19, 1990.

John Buchanan himself supplied the first stumbling block we encountered. A Cape Breton native with a capacity to charm, he was highly sensitive to voter sentiment in the region and bent on rescuing his, at that time stuttering, career. Buchanan did not demonstrate the slightest understanding of what we were trying to do. In fact, when the miners went on an illegal strike in the summer of 1990, he publicly endorsed their action!

Dealings with the premier were seldom by the book. His views were normally conveyed to us not through official channels but by Michael Cochrane, a Toronto businessman, DEVCO director and later chairman of the DEVCO board. With the approach of a crucial provincial by-election in Cape Breton Centre, a riding populated by Lingan miners and their families, we began to see and hear more of Buchanan himself. Tom Hockin and I met with him in a Montreal airport hotel room. A consummate constituency politician, he took us up and down the streets of Cape Breton Centre, recounting how each householder had voted at the previous election, not forgetting the name of one resident who had been unable to cast her ballot because she was visiting a friend in Boston. We were being softened up.

A New Direction

This is the second of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.  

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The Mulroney government took office in 1984 promising to build a strong, competitive national economy and re-order government’s place within the economy. Ministers were tasked with piloting major initiatives, such as sales tax reform, financial institutions reform, free trade with the United States, deregulation and the privatization of pubic corporations, together with a hoped-for measure of deficit reduction. The policy environment did not favour propping up struggling companies.

DEVCO was clearly struggling, beset by continual deficits, a low level of coal production, declining international prices, acrimonious relations with unions, an apathetic workforce prone to absenteeism (out of a workforce of 3,000 approximately 400 were off the job every production day), a large unfunded pension liability, some of which dated back to the days of private ownership, and uncertainty over the fate of the aged Lingan Mine, which then employed 1,350 men. Politicians and union leaders battled for the continuance of Lingan, though it had been so extensively mined that miners spent a good part of their day just travelling to and from the coalface.

Group of DEVCO employees with the Hon. Tom Hockin on the right. Tom was Minister of State (Small Businesses and Tourism) and was responsible for DEVCO, July 19, 1990.

DEVCO’s operations were conducted under the sea, which raised its costs and made it impossible to meet and compete with world prices that were trending lower. A surplus was forecast for the Company’s 1988-1989 fiscal year, but flooding in the Phalen mine and a twelve-week strike on the part of the railway employees, forcing the company to lay off the entire workforce, turned that into a deficit of $29.7 million. By 1989 DEVCO had absorbed nearly $1.4 billion in federal government funds, to finance operating losses and new capital expenditures.

DEVCO’s difficulties were by no means unique. In early 1991 The Economist reported that since 1984-1985, the year of a strike led by Arthur Scargill to oppose colliery closures, 102 out of 170 collieries had shut down in the United Kingdom. The workforce had been cut by two-thirds. Having to sell coal at prices that were low in relation to costs, British Coal was a constant drain on the public purse.[1]     

Battling for DEVCO

This is the first of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO. [1]

I’ve Been Down Under Ground

Cabinet shuffles engender anticipation mixed with apprehension. In the aftermath of the 1989 shuffle, Tom Hockin, the federal minister for whom I had been working since March 1987, acquired new responsibilities. I scanned the list, my eye fastening on the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO).

DEVCO had been established in 1967 by an Act of Parliament, both to manage Cape Breton’s coal mines and to pursue industrial development for the region. Shortly before we came on the scene the Industrial Development Division was transferred to Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, a regional development agency. In the late eighties the corporation was operating three mines: Lingan, the oldest and least cost-efficient, near New Waterford; Phalen, 400 feet underneath Lingan, a “gold-plated mine”, replete with the latest advances in mining technology; and the Prince Colliery, located approximately sixty kilometers distant at the northeastern tip of Boularderie Island.

Certificate of an Honorary Coal Miner, having spent a day underground, 19 July 1990

DEVCO produced metallurgical-grade and thermal-grade coal for both domestic and export markets. The corporation’s competitive disadvantage was the high percentage of sulphur in its coal but the coal retained customer appeal on account of its high calorific value and low ash content.    

Coal had been mined in Nova Scotia as early as the 1720s. The French fortress of Louisbourg was heated by coal. In the not-too-distant past as many as twelve thousand men had been employed in the mines. The coal mining culture was deeply rooted, infectious, and tinged with tragedy. No one could remain unmoved attending a Davis Day event every June 11, commemorating those who had lost their lives to coal mining, or hearing old timers tell of the explosion in Glace Bay’s No. 26 Colliery in 1979, in which twelve men were killed. Nor could anyone be immune to the appeal of The Men of the Deeps, the coal miners’ chorus, as they sang about what was in their blood. At the same time, the purchase that coal mining exerted on the emotions was partly responsible for the unreality of much public discourse about the industry.

The Disappearance of the Brunswick News Archive

By Ronald Rudin

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book exploring the 1959 Escuminac Disaster, which saw the death of 35 men when a hurricane struck the salmon fishing fleet just outside Miramichi Bay, which empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in northeastern New Brunswick. In developing this project, in pulling together a research grant application, and in the early stages of writing, I became heavily dependent on (really addicted to) the amazing Brunswick News online archive, a searchable database that made it possible to dig into the content, sometimes stretching back over a century, of English-language newspapers across the province that formed part of the Brunswick News empire. With one click, I was able to find references in several newspapers to people and subjects connected with the Escuminac Disaster.

Much, of course, has been written about the consequences of having all the province’s English-language dailies as well some weekly publications in the hands of the Irving family. See, for instance, Julian Walker’s Wires Crossed: Memoir of a Citizen and Reporter in the Irving Press (Victoria: Friesen Press, 2021). Nevertheless, the existence of Brunswick News as an independent corporation with the financial wherewithal and the interest in providing (as part of a monthly subscription) an online database, was no small matter for researchers. Unfortunately, those same researchers, including me, are now going through withdrawal following the removal of the archive from the internet in November 2023, a direct consequence of the acquisition of Brunswick News by Postmedia eighteen months earlier.

As is the norm in such cases of newspaper consolidation, the acquiring company looked for ways to rationalize operations, reducing or eliminating print publications, and transforming the Brunswick News online presence. While previously there had been links that led to the various local newspapers, such as the Miramichi Leader which was important to my research, now there is only a single newspaper referenced online, the (Saint John) Telegraph-Journal, which offers coverage to subscribers pertinent to the various regions of the province, but without any indication that there are (or once had been) local newspapers.

Love, Art and History: A Review of With Love, cur. Emily Falvey, Owens Art Gallery (22 July 2023 to 15 May 2024)

What role does love play in art? What role does it play in the creative process? With Love, a modest exhibition of works by Mary Pratt and Alex Colville addresses precisely these questions.  The pairing of two canonical figures in modern Atlantic Canadian art history should, alone, draw attention to it, but in really important ways this exhibition is not what one might think. It does not, for example, take a celebratory approach to either Pratt’s or Colville’s work. That alone sets it off from the general tenor of commentary that has surrounded the canonization of Colville at the forefront of Canadian – and Maritime – art history. What is more, Pratt’s and Colville’s artistic projects are dramatically different. Drawing them into conversation with each other provides an opportunity to consider the development and writing of Atlantic regional art history in new and informative ways.

With Love opened at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University on 22 July 2023 and runs until May 15^, 2024.  It was curated by Owens Director, Dr. Emily Falvey.  Its aim was to think through the ways in which love animates creative practice in art on more than one level. This is clear from the works on display. For Colville, love is manifest in two ways. His wife, Rhoda, appears frequently as a model and his art, in significant ways, represents his devotion to her. As the With Love exhibition notes remark “Colville gave a copy of each serigraph he made to his wife.” They end up in this exhibition because of a 2013 donation Colville made to the Owens in honour of Rhoda. Colville’s Stove from 1988 is an immediately recognizable example. It shows Rhoda foregrounded to the right along with their family pet dog in front of a blue and silver stove, which occupies most of the painting. Both are peering into the oven through an open door. It is an almost typical Colville kind of work that is already widely celebrated with its focus on a specific and particular scene.

The works by Pratt are from her Transitions series (1993 to 2002), that were part of a “creative collaboration with Japanese Master Printer, Masato Arikushi.” They work differently than Colville’s art. Like the best-known body of Pratt’s work, these works focus on domestic space and how it does not come into being accidentally. Romancing the Casserole, for instance, shows a well-designed casserole in a microwave oven. We could speculate on the intention behind this image, but its visuality captures a sedate, elegant moment that feels both warm and inviting. Other works are still lifes that show the artistic aspects of domestic space made by women.

The New Brunswick Scholarly Book Award, 2024 / Le prix du livre académique du Nouveau-Brunswick, 2024

jnbs-nb-scholarly-book-award-2024Download

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Bill Parenteau (1959-2023)

By Daniel Samson

I met Bill Parenteau thirty-seven years ago. He’d arrived from America, a seemingly unnatural blend of Rhode Island, NYC, and Maine. He seemed very American. Intellectually exotic and pugnacious, he told tales of then young hotshot historians, Greer and Judd, New York delis, the Red Sox, real punks and historical materialism.

The short-form conventional wisdom on Bill is that he was smart and funny. The slightly longer version is that he was that and that he was a truly decent guy who never lost sight of his New England, working-class sensibilities, an ethic rooted in fairness. His work centred on the simple premise that there were good ways and bad ways to treat people. The job of the historian was to document this and to advocate for the good; it was to shine a light into corners deliberately darkened by those who were enriched and empowered on the backs of the poor. He carried that ethic of right and wrong, of fairness, into everything he did: as a historian to Canada, a partner to Helen, a parent to Mia, and a friend to me and many others.

Bill Parenteau (right) and Daniel Samson (left, with finger) discussing matters historical at an Atlantic Canada Studies Conference. In the background, Herb Wyile looks on, quizzically.

In the Venn diagram of our lives and interests, Bill and I intersected solidly but nowhere near 50 per cent. Obviously both being historians of the rural poor, the Maritimes and the pernicious effects of capitalism on the region took up a lot of space. So too did our fondness for punk, but even there were limits. I like the Ramones, but lord there’s lots to take a pass on; he thought Sonic Youth had crossed a line into a baleful dissonance, which is what I thought made them great; we agreed the Pixies were sent by God (though we disagreed on the existence of God, but we’ll save that for another time). But art – that is, art-gallery art, not Black-Francis art – was not a world we shared.

Eulogy for Bill Parenteau

This eulogy was delivered by Bill’s sister, Kerry Pascetta.

I am Bill’s sister. Because I am Bill’s sister, I am apologizing in advance to the historians in the room. This eulogy will not be delivered in chronological order, some dates will be omitted, and there may be profound inaccuracies. And I am grateful that I will not be graded today.

Bill is the person our family could rely on to deliver a eulogy. Like everything, Bill did it well. Naturally, I am terrified to be up here. But I am reminded of Bill’s encouraging nature. I imagine him shrugging and saying, “You can do this.”

The first time I felt this way was after high school. I wanted to attend college at UMaine-Farmington (because that is where Bill went). I went to Bill with the application in hand. I remember telling him that I didn’t know if I was smart enough for college. He said, matter-of-factly, “I will help you with your application; it’s not really that hard. And you are going to realize how smart you are when you get to school.” So I went. And I did.

Bill Parenteau, 1959-2023

His friend Linda McNutt had a similar story when she was having trouble believing in herself to start her PhD. “You can do it,” he said. “Start by doing the easy parts first and then celebrate.” So she did. 

Bill was the first feminist I ever knew. Before I knew what that word meant. He helped women – his family, friends, students, colleagues. 

Erin Morton remembers Bill putting his foot down about the gender inequity in UNB’s History  department. Bill wanted to hire more women to balance things out. He pushed it through. It was the right thing to do, even if it was uncomfortable or inconvenient for some.

The late Elizabeth Mankee, after having a heated disagreement with another colleague, went for a walk with Bill to cool off. To her surprise, Bill told her, “Hold Steady. Don’t budge.” She later thanked him by saying, “I remember being struck that you uttered not the first word about how I might be nicer, or more feminine, more obliging. …I remain grateful that you did not revert to gendered suggestions.”

Bill helped women up. And every woman was Bill’s sister. 

Blaine Higgs and the snap election that wasn’t

By Donald Wright

It’s official: New Brunswick will not have a fall election.

But for much of September and October, the premier played a cynical game of cat and mouse, first hinting that he might call an early election, then hinting he might not, before letting the clock run down. After all, no one wants to campaign into December and the holiday season.

Because Blaine Higgs enjoys a clear majority, there was never a compelling reason to call an election. True, six caucus members – unhappy with the requirement that students under 16 must have parental consent before teachers can use their preferred pronouns – had voted with the opposition in the so-called June Rebellion. But by August, those same caucus members signaled their loyalty going forward.

Molly Lamb Bobak
Demonstration, c. 1966
Oil on Masonite
120 X 99.5 cm
UNB Permanent Collection

Even Higgs’ minister of health publicly urged him to respect New Brunswick’s legislation on fixed election dates and to complete his mandate.

But Higgs has never liked that piece of legislation, which, frankly, isn’t worth very much. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, he did the same thing when he called an election two years early, despite having a stable governing coalition.