Moncton 50 Years Back, 50 Years Forward – Making the Difference This Weekend

Unfortunately, I recall Moncton in 1956.

True it is a hazy recollection , and there are many with better recollections, and they perhaps should also be attending the Visioning Moncton Downtown process going on today at the Capitol Theatre and finishing tomorrow evening with a wrap up.

Downtown Moncton Inc., is on a success roll and is undertaking an important next step.

The planning process is important and it is mean to capture the ideas and aspirations of those who are here in the now, and attempting to influence the future.

The next 50 years for Moncton can be as significant as the last 50, if the right decisions are made at the right time. Building communities is earily similar to building successful companies and personal lives. It is about making the right call.

It means making the right choices and repairing the damage when the wrong ones are made.

Decisions like the strangulation of the Petitcodiac River by building a causeway across the marsh flood plane that will take another 5 years to get remedied, perhaps a change in government in Fredericton and hundreds of millions of dollars and several generations to undo. Bad decision, good politics at the time.

A sidebar note on Riverkeeper Daniel LeBlanc stepping down is that he knows that human energy, commitment and political courage as well as negotiating strength have to be renewed and broadened, and wisely he is stepping down to encourage the organization to be more than about one person. A person who because of their leadership visibility can also become an icon and a future stumbling block as a result of aroused political passions against him, as much as a positive force for change as well. The community and the River thank you, Daniel. Next.

But back to Downtown Moncton’s immediate and short term, 50 year future forward.

By 1956, the streetcar tracks from the turn of the century were well buried under pavement and Moncton’s love affair with the car was well in bloom. Moncton is a car town in the same way it used to be a cow town with Hub Meat Packers and Swifts before it, and now it is about to become an Active Transportation centre, which is a code name for what Jay Leno mockingly says is America’s obsession for putting fat asses on bikes to get slimmer.

I understand the passion against converting the old Shediac Road to bike lane enabled, but Europe’s sensible street and byway design is driven by their unsustainable gas prices and philosophy in putting humans first, and it will be our reality to have bikelanes everywhere in Moncton in 10 years.

We will, in 50 years, need an alternative to cars on our streets downtown, and instead of more parking, which is a temporary use of land until we move on to a new technology reality, Moncton will need a new mass transit vision.

That vision means that Moncton Transit, which has evolved from the 1956 private business lines serving the City as an entrepreneurial venture- from Gray’s Bus Lines to Gus Pettipas and family, to the municipal service of today.

Our buses may be modern looking, but they are 1950 technology motive power and need to be switched as soon as possible to diesel electric hybrids and flex-fuels while we sort out the issue of storing enough energy in small, light batteries to power buses. The concept of onboard production of hydrogen is coming, probably will be common by 2056, but Downtown Moncton and in fact all of Moncton is barely serviced by modern, mass transit thinking for the future.

Think this is crazy, the wonderful visionary who helped bring Cable TV to New Brunswick, William Stanley is taking some of his children’s considerable inheritance of millions and funding the production of hydrogen powered fuel cells as stationary power platforms in Fredericton at UNB Labs.

Bless him and move him to Moncton and give him the keys to the City. Today.

It is not that cars are polluters, nor even that they are hopelessly inefficient movers of people, which they unfortunately are. It is more that owning one is moving beyond the budget of most families. Within the next 50 years, the family of four- in what ever combinations of sexual union that will be called marriage-a-go-go is then; will have to make a choice, have a car, or have a pension plan for when the children move out and old age settles in.

Only the very wealthy will be able to own a car and retire comfortably.

There will be no other choices. Those with the income to afford a car, meaning the top 2 percent of the population will be mobile at will and the rest will be mobile at a tremendous personal cost. This will occur in spite the advent of the disposable Chinese cars that will cost slightly more than a leather coach at Lounsbury’s, not withstanding, in the immediate future.

All of this tongue in cheek commentary is meant to highlight that Moncton’s Downtown pre-occupation with cars and street alignment is a temporary aberration in thinking in planning. It is in fact what 1956 thinking wrought us as their current legacy streetscape in positioning municipal thinking for the past 50 years that has been only car and street focused.

Moncton needs to build high density housing and more of it within a circular loop that is defined as to where the mass transit carrier of choice can reach and run on a 10-15 minute loop over overlapping routes. At low cost and on alternative fuel that is produced in the city. Full stop.

Importing fuel from terrorist hosting, oil producing countries imports poverty and sustains the rapid draining of a community’s economic resources to control it’s own future. Full stop. There is no other economic argument to this.

2056 will see Moncton as a modern commercial entertainment and shopping centre of the Maritimes and it’s future success as a community is going to be built on figuring out how to increase urban density.

It will also mean that those seeking refuge in the rural – now so called rural regions of Albert, Kent, and Westmorland counties , will need to be self employed and working online or on the land they occupy producing organic staples, with infrequent trips to the City’s core. The new rural economics. Those in the city core will make visits to the rural, but the high cost of insurance, vehicle purchase and technology, will make a dual class citizenry. Those who practice smart economics and those who pay their disposable income out for fossil fuel comfort. The new urban economics.

Those that live close to shopping and the two health care hospitals will afford themselves. Those who choose to spend a lot of their disposable income on living away and outside of the government’s designated support zone for services will either have to earn money at unprecedented levels in New Brunswick, or sacrifice the comfort of a retirement. Work to you drop is not that far fetched.

The loss of the forest and mining as well as fishing industry in New Brunswick will change New Brunswick into a core of population in the south connected to Halifax.

Think I am blowing smoke. Consider this in your exhaust pipe.

Drive on any rural, second class highway in New Brunswick that leads to a rural hamlet and guess, when the last time pavement was laid on an improved road bed in that area and see what I mean. Hell drive on Route 15 to Moncton, from Shediac and try to dodge a rippled, pot hole that is beyond deadly in a downpour. Acquaplaning kills.

I am not talking about the patchwork quilt of filling holes with cold fusion pavement that passes for roadway work and renewal today, but real road bed construction and repair. Fresh roadbed and pavement widened for bike lanes. Not going to happen in my remaining life time.

Only going to happen in very select and urban service areas. Old broken and forgotten highways are the new museums.

Not since 1976, and certainly not after 2006 have we seen or will we seen investment in rural paving. Going to Havelock, or Rogersville or St Louis de Kent is going to be brutal. Is brutal now, save when it is snow covered and packed as they say on the now gender neutral weather channels.

So, the demand for community life and focusing everything on the city community will depopulate rural New Brunswick to a level not seen since the early 1,800’s. This is not a bleak version of the future, rather it is simply what the world of global economics is creating in front of our eyes.

We have no resources that anyone in the World wants at a price that can pay workers a minimum of $30 per hour. When I went to Bathurst to start a business in 1971, the better union jobs were setting the stage for that pay scale then. They like the Connie Bathurst mill are gone. So gone.

Bathurst is struggling to retain City Status and the Miramichi is in full emergency free-fall for resource based industry.

There will be consequences to George Bush’s individual and horrenduously stupid decision taken to make oil a political commodity subject to pricing by terrorist imagination and potential threats to supply economics and the brutal economic impact is starting to be felt in New Brunswick now. His ill-fated, Skakesperian tragic proportion decision will make Viet Nam’s long term impact feel like a walk in the park in retrospect.

Canadian and New Brunswick tourism will be home grown and only the wealthy will continue to travel, but family vacations are going to be within a day’s safe, secure and affordable drive. Tourism is a new domestic industry. Domestic meaning less than 5oo kilometers, or a day's drive.

That means a different tourism reality for New Brunswick. Not the end as we know it, just a different kind of marketing required. It is the end of easy, accidental tourism, which has been New Brunswick’s stock in trade since 1956. Picture Province indeed.

Youth and wealthy on motorcycles and ensconced in motor home RV’s will dominate tourism, the balance of families will be looking for public facilities that are safe and predictable and close.

The Greater Moncton Airport is going to be the crown jewel in tourism as a gateway, if we promote properly. International tourism will come from eastern seaboard of the US- maybe and by air and mostly young and wealthy. Family-free is the new normal.

Highway traffic is going to be trucking and those whose incomes allow for comfortable travel.

We finished and twinned the Trans Canada Highway, just in time to figure out that it is cheaper to load the family on CanJet and fly where we want to go in the Maritimes from Toronto , than it is to afford the vehicle that can get us there and back safely.

Now, this is what I will be thinking about as I walk to the Capitol from my Downtown Office, living as I do as a wealthy lifestyle in a seashore cottage that few will be able to purchase in another 10 years, let alone 35 years. I will recall that simpler time in Moncton where I learned to whistle – poorly for ever – out behind the rail tracks, where the employee lunch and smoke break patio of the Atlantic Lottery building, is now.

The end of the era of horse power as a two word description.

A wooden shanty smelling of horse manure and grease was still standing in 1956 as the rails were still laying a ribbon down to the central cold storage of Reid’s Cold Storage Building, where the new Blue Cross building extension is rising up anew now.

There in the dark, dank structure was Moncton’s last blacksmith and shodder of horse’s feet, who remained defiantly standing with his business. A self taught vet and horsemen, with an old forge and anvil left over from when Foundry Street meant that is was a street of foundries, was this old man who tried to make it possible for me to call the attention of horse in the short term, and attract a certain kind of woman in the long term.

That is what 50 years looks like in Moncton’s history.

On Albert Street, going home to a rural farm on the once a week to town schedule, we stopped and loaded a block of ice for the week to take home and place in the fridge. In winter we carried a leather bag of coal in the trunk of the car, which was rationed in usage because of the cost of gasoline in comparison to disposable income. Back to the future.

So, if I can see that what is being done today, for Downtown Moncton needs to look beyond trees and adding trees as a streetscape, which is a good thing and a 50 year prospect at best, as the morning’s press reports recount from yesterday’s proceedings; and we need to look at what will pay the tax burden in 50 years.

While I love seeing the development of Riverview punching back along the Pine Glen Road to challenge the Albert Country hillsides and close in on Hillsborough as a new bedroom community of Metro Moncton’s grandiose plan of rural subdivisions for everyone, I am challenged to match this organic and unplanned growth driven by trying to access cheaper land to hold single family dwellings; with the need to move everyone closer to where they can walk and hop a transit carrier to work for a reasonable fuel cost.

The old 1956 economics that we are using in Moncton today will not stand up to the demands of the 2056 society, no more than keeping a blacksmith downtown to teach me to whistle could be sustained beyond his natural life, which ended not long after he retired from being kicked in the groin by plough horses expressing objections to be shoed and hammered on.

So here’s my prescription and vision, if you have laboured through my 50 years back and forward.

Moncton needs to build and develop a municipal hydrogen plant in the Caledonia Industrial Park, sooner rather than later and tap into natural gas lines running past the Park to convert into an alternative fuel mix for a tramway, trolly/bus-monorail system that begins to build out now in time for 2056.

Downtown Moncton needs to focus on attracting more residential services to the core of the city which is Mountain Road south and recognize that Mountain Road north and west is self profiling itself by distance and will only be affordable by those who can afford the cost of ownership of a house and support a single vehicle economy.

Those with any kind of concern for medical services will need cluster housing around the two hospitals. Medical care and surviving the wait at the hospital will not include access to affordable ambulances, or the deadly wait for service in the waiting room. Live close, live longer. Live far away, take your chances.

The new Riverview bridge is a wonderful thing as will be the replacement of the causeway, but a reliable and cost effective mass transit connection over one of the those bridges or bus trains has to start being planned now, if Riverview is have a sustainable future beyond the businesses it can attract on its own.

Not a community death sentence, but cost of fuel and insurance combined with service sector wage jobs and reductions in government level job pay scales will mean limited disposable incomes and all that entails. Live close to where you work and self direct your own pension.

Moncton needs not only a housing and planning strategy to contemplate the new terrorist threat economy of fear induced pricing for energy, but in fact a home made energy and heating production strategy. An energy strategy means reducing fossil fuel consumption over 75% over the next 25 years in order to offset the same increase in cost of consumption, let along global warming as an issue.

We need to recruit solar panel companies and invest in our domestic window companies to enhance window efficiency and incorporate energy production from roofing tiles that generate electricity from solar sun availability.

We need battery companies to build storage systems to harness energy savings and production from solar to locate here. We need our universities focusing on energy.

We need to declare a 25 year vision to start on the path of being a Green Zone Community for living and earning for the year 2031 and then we need to set another 25 year goal to be sustainable in energy for all residential and commercial buildings by 2056. Anything else and we will suffer the fate of a town that build's it's temporary future on natural resources like pulp and paper.

Good 50 year politcs. Bad long term economic development.

Moncton requires an incubator strategy for new business development to go with its housing, energy and mass transportation strategy development to provide for low cost residency of IT and digital companies trying to get started to sell to global production.

We have no old buildings left that are suitable for conversion to low cost business space
And while it may make sense to turn the old Number 05 Supply Depot buildings into rubble and to allow modern building standards to make them obsolete and below current code; this City desperately needs a subsidized location to allow start up companies to get through the first 3-5 years of start up before moving on to the Industrial Parks and or Downtown office space.

Successful municipalities will be required to seed start businesses that employ local graduates. If you think this is pie in the sky, take a look and the numbers and ask Enterprise Greater Moncton, where their job creation stats are coming from this past year. Home grown business still leads the way.

Moncton in 2056 will look and feel a lot like it does today, just as it still resembles and feels like it did in 1956. The difference will be that the seismic changes in the fossil based and terrorist enabled economies of the next 25 years are going to extract a toll on all of us.

The first municipality to make the changes necessary and change immediately how it does business as an energy sustainable community, and how it is spending it's tax money on energy and with whom it makes purchases; as well as how it supports home grown business enabling it to expand, are going to be the success business locations of the future.

If we want to be awarded Best Place to do Business in Canada is 2031 as in 2005, we need to get our Go Green Energy in place right now or we will miss the mark and the call.

Unfortunately, New Brunswick, like Colorado and other temporary resource based economies is going to see, if not ghost towns, former vibrant municipalities reduced to village status and retirement centers for those looking for cheap real estate values. Greater Moncton got a reprieve from the last change in national economics away from rail motive power service and now we need to place for the replacement of fossil fuel.

The announcement by Atlantic Waffles of retreating to a central Ontario production and laying off 80 Monctonians, despite the remarkable achievements of that Vancouver based food products plant, is a bellweather. The vacant building is a canary in the mine and when those lights go out on a 24 hour modern production plant, citing the high cost of product transportation to distant markets. then the ringing you hear better be our understanding.

The Bell is Tolling for Us, if we don't change our energy focus and take control of what it costs to produce goods in Moncton.

For Moncton to avoid another deluge of reverses like the ones that threatened it over the past 50 years, the changes have to be made today. The new solutions found and implemented.

It is not for anything that the symbol of Moncton’s Resurgo in the forlorn Bore Park celebrating the age of sail is a granite icon of three sails set in a base celebrating Moncton’s revival in the 1980’s, which is largely powering today’s mini real estate and commercial economic boomlet. What is powering tomorrow ?

The trick is to build a sustainable economic platform for the next 25-30 years by making the right choices and setting the right goals this weekend as part of DMI’s visioning process.

Bring your two cents worth to the Captiol and participate.

The future you own is the one you plan.