The Bruce Report

But today, I couldn’t shake the golden, if unfamiliar, mood of serenity. The sun was out, the weather was warm enough for shirtsleeves, my kids were happy, my wife was laughing, business was good, and, for once, I wasn’t waiting for the studded jack boot of misfortune to firmly plant itself in my nether region. I was (gasp!) happy.

Apparently, I’m not the only New Brunswicker who is these days. According to something called the “Relative Happiness Index”, most of us are downright delirious with our lot. The survey of roughly 2,400 Canadians, by Montreal-based L’Observateur, reports that residents here recently gave themselves a score of 78.6 out of 100 on the organization’s chuckle meter. That’s better than the national average of 75.6 and those of every other province in the country.

Ironically, oil-rich Alberta came in eighth and, incongruously, “Canada’s Ocean Playground”, neighbourly Nova Scotia, posted dead last. But what accounts for New Brunswick’s high-on-life sentimentality? Pierre Cote, the Index’s copyright holder, seems to think it has to do with intangibles. “There is something in the attitude that allows them to access their own happiness,” he says. “If a women would be a province, the province would be New Brunswick.”

How’s that again?

“We cannot make the same parallel with any other province. Women and New Brunswick are more spiritual, more oriented on human aspects. Women are more oriented than men on the human aspects. So it is very interesting to see how women think is so close to how New Brunswickers think.”

Other than its exquisitely patronizing sexism, the research strongly indicates that the customary link between monetary success and personal happiness is virtually nonexistent in this neck of the woods. That would have to be true, given the temper of the economic news that routinely assaults our senses in this, our home, sweet home.

Since the beginning of the decade, economic growth in New Brunswick has lagged behind the nation as a whole. Productivity gaps, relative to the rest of the world, are now wider here than in any other province of Canada. Overall employment and wage levels continue to plummet. And outmigration, particularly among young, highly skilled tradesworkers and professionals, remains a constant threat to the integrity of our dwindling labour market.                           

But, hey, don’t worry, be happy.

Be happy about the fact that Export Development Canada now predicts that province’s international trade performance will take a drubbing in 2007, losing three per cent in value and costing a one per cent drop in real GDP. Be ecstatic about the fact that tourism revenues – moribund for three straight years – will likely fall next season to the lowest level since the recessionary years of the early 1990s. Be optimistic in the face of crumbling municipal infrastructure in all but our largest communities, falling literacy and educational attainment rates in the Anglophone school system, escalating wait times for emergency health care, woefully underfunded catastrophic drug plans, and bone-grazing cutbacks to crucial social assistance programs.

Be all of these things and then wish the 160 office, union and casual workers at Weyerhauser’s Miramichi mill, who are being laid off next month with no real guarantee that they will be asked to return in the new year, a very Merry Christmas.

Still happy? I know I am. I’m never really more content than when I get a chance to point out the painfully obvious. In a wise economy, joy is like luck: You make your own, or you die trying. Your welcome.

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