Robichaud – A Partisan’s Goodbye – Part V

Who’s Your Daddy? Determines Who Gets Social Assistance.

My first personal perception of my Province in general and my County in particular, was that of a hateful, narrow and cruel place.

A Province that rewarded the few and would capture the aspirations of the many, in the pursuit of a few remaining wealthy, but always at the expense of the many. Political allegiances determined who profited and who failed.

So, it was no surprise that Robichaud created a revolution.

A revolution of change in potential as to who would be rich and who would be not and more importantly, a change in those whom would get to control over whom got rewarded and whom got penalized. The change would be a hinge from 1750 to the new century of 2000.

Being an architect of new order is more than buildings or legislation; it is the changing of a shared and common behavior.

Most people today do not understand, because we have this patina of correctness and accommodation in New Brunswick that better masks the dark side of New Brunswick politics and power structures; how brutal a place 1950’s New Brunswick was.

In the pre-Robichaud days, people of either language knew their place and their place was as supplicants or overlords.

You see the message of discrimination and lack of human rights is that it is language agnostic. Robichaud, somehow came to understand that. To change his people’s future, he had to change everyone’s potential equally utting that into workable legislation that has stood the test of time over 35 years now is the miracle and is the accomplishment.

As a child, I watched my hopelessly religious Protestant and diligent mother acting as a Children’s Aid Agent in Albert County, literally begging for the green paper Chits that would allow an abandoned and starving mother young with children and no method of gaining a job with children to feed - to get enough groceries to survive.

Not once, but many times over her career. It was always the same. Who you were, and who you were related to, determined the level of what you got.

Not once but many times I witnessed her performance of bowing and scraping to old men ( they would be old gray men, like I am becoming today, but their inherent sense of self right to rule was like a Dickens novel), asking for the basics for someone in need. Always there were children involved.

Always, with that quiet deadly disdainful voice pitch, asking who were their kin? Transported once to a Westmorland County case, by a woman fleeing abuse, and ending up in Dorchester, the question and the tone delivered to my mother as the Children's Aid Agent, were the same.

Distain and disapproval. Frequently, voiced by those who held the power by dint of some political ass kissing to be the one that everyone became a supplicant too.

This was the real New Brunswick that Robichaud inherited. He should not have had a chance. The deck was stacked everywhere in every country, but the poorest and most French; against him.

The questions were always the same.

Who were their people?

What part of the county did they come from? Who were their parents on the mother’s side and on the father’s side? Much humming and knowing shakes of the head - they knew their political affiliations as if they had been branded with cattle prods.

Ah, the McCl-----ies, not much there to work with is there. They always seem to be on the wrong side of everything. Too bad about the daughter. No good ever came from that family. My mother, an otherwise powerful and commanding presence in my young life would come out of these meetings with the grimmest and saddest of looks.

I know welfare system workers today and they are quietly effective. The system may be flawed in this generation, but the dignity of an individual and a family is not sacrificed before helped is assented.

This is the Robichaud’s New Brunswick that I am most proud of. Human dignity is not for vote barter.

Did you approach her parents? They should have known better than to let their daughter lay with the likes of him, or variations on the theme of destitute and poor bringing it on themselves.

This was the New Brunswick that Robichaud would pull the ancient teeth out of their County Council mouths. He then rendered it into a system that had as a base a sense of decency and human rights as a citizen.

Much is being written about how Robichaud changed the fate of Kent, Gloucester- the Peninsula, Restigouche and Madawaska to name a few counties of New Brunswick, but the sword of change cut through the smug and stolid of Carleton, Albert, York and Charlotte with equal impact.

Today, in Woodstock where the gentry were never more gentrified than when I first arrived there in 1969, in pursuit of a story, is also transformed. A young 10 year old man, the great grandson of a landed gentry type of farming family, today speaks easily passable French, when he visits from Woodstock Middle School, his largely unilingual grandmother, now of Moncton.

That is the true revenge of the cradle.

In what passes for irony in New Brunswick, the current crop of school teachers all, young technocrats with the fashionable short hair look of today’s 20-something’s, will tell you that the new discrimination in New Brunswick, is that the best students with the most promise are enrolled in the French based curriculum.

The Enhanced French classes of the schools attract the best and brightest on both sides of the school-room desk. This is the New Brunswick of Robichaud, Hatfield, and McKenna, and someday perhaps Lord. The jury is out on Lord and it is early days to see if he measures up to the standard set by these successive Premiers- started by Robichaud.

The new day that Robichaud created with Equal Opportunity took away the rights of the old landed gentry that had been subverting the rights and aspirations of their young English, as well as young French Acadians, and turned these purveyors of positioning-by-birth, on their heads.

That is why the political battles are recalled with such wonder at their ferocity then, by those commentators now. No one caught the moment in any Robichaud coverage to date.

Under the Robichaud government, every one’s ox was being gored to quote an old Biblical canard about the fact that people reacted when their lifestyle and finances are threatened.

Next: Elections That Were Fought With Vicious Hated Almost Violent Affairs.

Robichaud- A Partisan's Goodbye- Part IV

The Old, New Brunswick That
Robichaud Inherited As The New Premier

The New Brunswick Government that defeated Premier Hugh John Fleming passed on to Premier-elect Robichaud was a “steady as she goes” kind of Province.

The new Trans-Canada pavement was snaking its way down the St. John River Valley, an upgraded two lane meandering blacktop that would eventually connect to Nova Scotia. All was well for those who were doing well, and that was the natural order of things at the time.

In the 1950’s, education and your ability to get accepted in Provincial sponsored universities was often a lottery of family location. Where you were born, north or south, largely determined where and how you would win at the lottery of life draw, in terms of income and employment potential.

There were exceptions, but as I travelled the Province as a journalist in the late 60’s and early 70’s, I began to realize that my Albert County experience of .................a very few at financial advantage over the many, was shared among others in every other County in some variation.

Since the better High Schools were favoured by richer taxpayer totals, or by larger numbers of residents to share the financial burden, those School Boards could afford to pay a little more for a teacher that had credentials with Provincial universities, by dint of the fact that they were Alumni. Students of those teachers were introduced to the right subjects, and contacts to make the leap to University acceptance.

Prior to Robichaud, students with the right family connections had a better chance of getting an acceptance letter to UNB or MT A than some student with better marks, but poorer social standing, or worse bad political connections at the time.

It was to this reality that Louis Robichaud stepped into a political ring. Try to change one thing and the whole thing caved in on you politically, so the only way was to change the whole thing at once.

What I see in most of the coverage that I have consumed this past weekend as I meandered down the pathways of my mind and my recollection of a New Brunswick that was not nearly the vibrant growth oriented- modern community of today; was a recollection and realization of how big the hurdles actually were.

Remember, that since 1755, the English language insiders controlled the Province in ways that were ever so subtle. Acadians in politics as in society were tolerated and paid lip service to with some courtesy in public, but behind the scenes where the money was counted, the reality was brutal.

I was shocked some years ago to have what is now one of the most powerful Acadians in Canada suggest that as long as there was an English only deputy minister of Finance in Fredericton, that he could never be entirely sure and certain that he would not wake up to a punishing tax on him. A tax that he imagined would be levied uniquely on Acadians, because they were a minority. He among the most highly educated of his generation and accomplished beyond compare.

He meant it and I never see him in power on the nation’s stage, but that I think of it. It stunned a group of English businesspersons having a familiar business supper meal together. The purpose was to promote unity in a strained Moncton among the language leaders in trying to shake itself out of a morass, but the naked and honest fear that only a compatriot in charge of Finance in Fredericton, could be his assurance of security, was a perception that I have never forgotten.

Imagine what Premier Robichaud, in facing every commercial family in New Brunswick, felt on month one of his Premiership. The powerful merchant families of the North, the Harquails, the Kents, and of course the Irvings and McCains, as well as the Colpitts of Albert, and the Barry’s of Saint John, with the McLeans of Charlotte to name but a few. Old money that insured that the survivors and heirs did well.

Every country had a commercial merchant family that wielded immense financial as well as political clout.

Few if any could recite true Acadian merchant class families in largely French population counties. This was because the reality was that as in Bathurst, where merchants were English and consumers were largely Acadian and unilingual English immigrants; New Brunswick was a tolerant English culture.

Like all powerful acts of cruelty and social injustice, the cuts of social, financial as well as political power went deep prior to 1960 and were hidden from public view.

However, those that were in the cutting line of hurt or were blocked from changing their life’s destiny by the power of the disinterred never forgot and never had a chance. That was largely the case until Robichaud established the new World Rural Order.

As I grew in understanding, and listened to my father’s conversations with other’s who would arrive in the long black cars with the cigar smoke wafting from the open windows ( as I listened from an open screen, after being banished to bed ), heard of the acts that were commissioned, or sanctioned, as the prevalent English crust of society tried valiantly to keep the boiling cauldron of Acadian hopes from bubbling through; I was awed.

This was better than anything I was allowed to see on television, even without colour and instant replay.

My father George would report to me that feelings were running high, because the English had so much to lose in their minds that they could not see that the changes proposed would make it better for everyone.

Listening to his accounts of the coming fight for equality among the French and the English speaking poor, I got to respect my father, as few sons do when they become adults and understand the compromises that all men and women often make to survive.

There were no saints in the seats in the 60’s in or out of the Legislature, local churches and meeting halls, but there was a growing cadre of like minded individuals even within the English communities that began to realize that the things that denied them decency and human dignity were language agnostic.

It would be the secret of Robichaud’s genius that Equal Opportunity was not a made in Fredericton program for liberating the Acadian Pennisula and Kent County from English language privilege alone, it wisely would be a program for all New Brunswickers. It worked for the herring weir producer in Charlotte, as it did for the poorest of the poor in any country.

Looking back, I wonder at what books he must have read, the history or thesis that he must have read in his formative education years to understand that lack of civility and human decency was as much a problem to be relieved in New Brunswick’s English enclaves, as it was in Grand Danse.

My perspective is that Robichaud convinced a generation of English and French speaking men and women to reach outside of themselves and to accomplish more than they though possible on their own. Many heroes emerged and not just Acadians.

His majority governments were the political fights of legend and every one of them was draining beyond what is experienced today. Political enemies threw everything at him that they had and some how he kept bobbing and weaving his way along.

Discrimination and genealogy favouritism was done in so many ways.

Blocked from University by all but the most deserving of political connected of parents, Acadians were suppose to play their role, which in my experience as a young person; was limited to being low cost labour.

When I got to UNB myself and discovered the events of deep South and the limitations of segregation, I immediately understood it’s all encompassing cruelty. Why?

Because I had head the words and was aware of deeds that went deep into the fabric of the County from which I was raised.

Ironically, on the weekend that I am recalling with warmth the achievements of Premier Robichaud and pausing over my recall of my own Father’s death in 1977, I contrast their lives with some poor misguided 79 year old that is being brought to justice for the killing of three Freedom workers in the deep south- as this is being written.

On the same weekend in January, the juxtaposition is instructive and is the lesson of history's power and democracy as a tool of humna decency for all New Brunswickers. Lousi Robichaud taught us that lesson.

The contrast in the accomplishments of the two 79 year old men from distinctly different geography, but reacting in such different ways could not be more poignant and timely. ( Over the weekend, that Robichaud laid in State awaiting his funeral, FBI arrested a suspect – at 79 – for the killing of three black Freedom Fighters from the North of the US attempting to win the right to vote in the deep South).

Robichaud used a ballot box to run a revolution and managed a team of Cabinet Ministers who agreed to take years of abuse and invective as part of a legislative process. He did this before he was 40. Often to men who were years his senior and from some comfort themselves.

The New Brunswick that no one talks about much is the New Brunswick of rural folklore. None of the polite textbook histories that I have been aware of, ever really talks about the strains that bubbled under the surface of the “Picture Province”- Dalton Camp’s famous tourism message for New Brunswick's Come Hither advertising promoted under Fleming and Hatfield.

My father told me of cross burnings and even a secret chapter of the Klu Klux Klan that existed during the worst of the depression in poverty stricken New Brunswick, and more actively in Albert County in the hard luck 20’s and 30’s.

True, not with the violent drama of the deep US South, but the theology of hate mongering was the same chalice of drink.

A generation later in the 60’s New Brunswick, a short Frenchman stood in position to be the Premier and this man with his fiery rhetoric that brought crowds to their feet- enraged and equally engaged in change- was no Uncle Tom Acadian representative, as were previously favoured by both parties.

Before Robichaud, Acadian politicians were visible, but without true power bases or brokerage to make a substantive change. They could influence an outcome, but not create the options.

My perception of New Brunswick from my father’s eyes- his already in their late 50’s at the time, as I am now, was all knowing and he – thankfully for my liberal and Liberal soul – was a keen supporter of the change that would render the former fabric of life that was New Brunswick before Robichaud, torn apart.

Election nights in my childhood- were tense mathematical tortures of plurality seat calculations, followed by quiet elation.

Robichaud’s rhetoric thankfully was valued in my home during my formative years and it helped to define, along with the exposure of the anti-war movement in UNB of the late 60’s, the person that I have become.

Part V - Whose Your Daddy ? Determines Who Gets Social Assistance.

Robichaud-A Partisan's Goodbye-Part III

Power, Patronage & Pathos - How New Brunswick Was Governed Before Robichaud

My first brutal memory of the adult world of power worked in the pre-Robichaud New Brunswick was gleaned from listening from an open screen of a second floor window, on a mid-summer’s night, to the father of two friends of mine talking quietly in the yard.

Their voices were in quiet conversation and I had been attracted to the sound of tires on gravel. George always went outside to speak with those mysterious cars that arrived after supper and chores were done. Most times I had no idea what went on, except that the cars were long, black limo cars, usually with two or three men in them- often smoking cigars- who wanted to speak with George later into the night.

This time it was one man. He was distraught, fighting for control, pleading with my father to do something. He was a part-time farmer, WW II veteran, and father of two boys slightly older than me.

He made his living at the Public Works Garage in the community. Or at least he had until the local Conservative Party officials determined by counting votes of Party Patriots of the time that he and his wife must have voted Liberal in the last election. He would have to give up his job for a more deserving patriot.

He was fired. He had no resources and no appeal process. He had been told not to show up and to keep his mouth shut. If the Government were to change in the upcoming election- this the run up to the 1960 campaign – he could always get his job back from his “Liberal friends”.

The dignified man, who today in his 80’s continues to farm with his sons and is one of those gentle Jimmy Stewart characters that were popular in the 50’s and 60’s movies about men of character, was bent with pain.

I had never seen or heard an adult cry. Weep uncontrollably like a child. It scared me as a child, myself. As I listened, a childish anger building in my being at the injustice of it all, my father calmly explained that there was nothing he could do. He tried to say that the man would be okay, that prospects were good for the next election.

How the man asked, would he feed and cloth his children?. It was the first time that I became aware that there were real life victims that I knew who were my playmates at community functions.

Later, I saw him quietly working in a local saw mill owned by the only other Liberal that I knew existed in the area and on some level I made the connection. Even in the woods, decisions were made on whose truck to haul logs to a mill based on which team they promoted in the local elections. Sometimes it was a joke, often it was used to reward those who owned a truck.

Owning a truck and getting it on to haul gravel was another great source of control for local party power brokers. Many would lose their truck as work dried up, waiting for the change in Government to get back in the business.

By today's standards, it was incredible.

Ironically, over ten years later, as then Premier Robichaud was preparing to leave office as Premier, in one of his last acts of administrative power, the Liberal Government made protection of Public Works employees- long the spoils for local power brokers of rewarding those who were loyal with a local job and good money for the time - a Provincial Statute of employee protection.

When the Robichaud Liberals departed, the Public Works Garages were not wracked by vengeful firings and dismissals. The spoils of political warefare, like the County Councils and School Boards were stripped of their firepower.

Working for the Governmnet Garage was at least a warm place to go during the winter between storms. Now these snowplow drivers and culvert repair employees would not automatically be fired by the local ward healers, once the Government in Fredericton changed.

The irony was that as a fledgling reporter I was sent to Charlotte County, where rebelling local Tories were in full protest against the new Hatfield Government for refusing "to fire those sons of B's Liberal snowplow drivers and workers out of the Government Garage in St. George".

I was asked to venture down and see if a story could be unearthed. Little did anyone know just how much background understanding I had of the issue.

Once there, I found a cantankerous group of revenge-demanding Conservative Party Supporters holed up like a group of mis-guided bank robbers in an old Fina Service Station in St. George, on a winter Sunday afternoon.

I was still a student at UNB working freelance. I dressed like an adult, drove a innocuous family sedan, and simply stood around while the 10-15 milling and constantly swearing men worked themselves into a frenczy of anger at the “pricks in Frederericton” as they referred to the just elected Hatfield and the late Leland McGraw, their MLA.

Their complaint and the basis of their threat, was to occupy the local Government Garage, blockade the entrance, throw the Liberal bums out on their ears, and take back control of the snow shed.

It was winter, a few months into Hatfield’s first term and news was beginning to register that the first thing the new Premier was not going to do was free the snow sheds from Liberal partisans.

The regulation protecting the temporary workers at Public Works locations would stay in place. In its place was something called individual accreditation and job performance, which would be used to determine who worked and who got hired. Local power brokers would have to find something else to manage.

The day of local power brokers randomly rewarding the loyal and punishing those that lost their vote and thereby lost their job as a result was permanently over. It was the beginning of the resentment of Hatfield as a Premier and Party leader that would follow him like a badge of honour throughout his term as Premier. It would ultimately separate him from the party despite his election wins.

It was Premier Robichaud who set the mold of social change in place. It remained to Hatfield, who picked up the battle flag standard of change and made permanent the revolution started by the Acadian standard bearer. As a result of the one two punch of Robichaud and Hatfield, now both deceased, New Brunswick politics once a brutal blood, lifestyle sport spilled in out of the way county parish garages and regional offices; was permanently terminated.

Not yet 20 at the time, I got my first front page by-line in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal the next day with an exclusive above the fold story quoting at length the former British military (Ret.) officer and local Tory partisan leader who was plotting the take over and seizure of the St. George Snow shed.

His rhetoric and the open threat of revolt of his angered followers, as well as the advocacy of force to use violent means to take back the Party’s local control of the patronage dispensing power at the local Government Garage embarrassed the Government of the day.

The decree came down a short time later across the Province, those with jobs got to keep them. Eventually, standard hiring practices came into play and the County parties became restive, resentful participants in finding new ways to exert their connections to power in New Brunswick.

By the time Premier McKenna came in, patronage, power was more sophisticated and more deeply buried into transactions and the pathos of people losing their vote over how their family was perceived to have voted was lost forever.

The old Conservative Party members never forgot and never forgave Hatfield for that and a number of other transgressions.

To be fair, patronage did not disappear over night and well into McKenna’s time, there were still men and a few women, who if you asked quietly could put you in touch with someone that had the ear of a person with their hand on the levers of power at some level.

Once it even worked for me.

Graduating from University, blessed with a new sporty car and a new publishing venture I had somehow amassed a total of 16 demerit points on my driver’s licence, when it was technically only possible to lose 10 points in total.

This, in a day before computers and instant tally, the ticket totals were finally calculated and the Mounties dispatched to my then North Shore home.

The local Mounties of the day came in person to seize my license and to get a mental picture in case they were called to testify at some future date. They wanted me off the road.

As luck would have it, my father who was then approaching 80 and in failing health back in Albert County was consulted about my plight. He was dismayed. With the Hatfield Tories in charge of New Brunswick, he had- as he said, no juice left. I would have to go to a local super Tory.

He suggested a name and a suggested approach. If anyone could solve such a vexing problem in the new Regime, this old competitor and power broker was currently a bagman for the Westmorland and Moncton Conservatives.
Such a person, now since passed on, lived quietly, influentially, and operated politically favoured businesses in Moncton. He was by all accounts, well regarded in Hatfield’s Fredericton. He agreed to see me and hear my story.

He was sympathethic to a tee. He invited me in for tea. He asked of my father. hrought highly of him despite his errant political persuasion. It was cordial, conducted in his furnished porch on a quiet Moncton residential street.

I was humble, contrite and dubious. I had after all travelled from Bathurst by train. Bathurst Police and local RCMP waved to me as I walked the sidewalks of Bathurst.

He admitted to knowing my father as a worthy organizer in Albert County and understood my lineage as the poorly brought up, politically destitute son of a Liberal from Albert County. He knew that in 1971, this was an impossible position from which to start my young life from as a fledgling businessperson.

Especially a businessperson with no legal way to drive a car to make ad sales and keep my new business going. My task would in payment would be to consider life on the North Shore as a stalwart Conservative, but not a condition of his intervention.

My father’s well connected acquaintance agreed to take my case up with authorities, who upon his intervention realized that it must have been some other David Jonah that had amassed so many demerit points.

Removing me from the highway would threaten a new Conservative publication in the North Shore to offset the hopeless Liberal bias of the Northern Light of the time, or so went the sentiment.

The result was astounding.

My full ten points were restored and my new license arrived in the mail the next week. With this license renewal, I could get my plates back, because in a pique the Mounties had taken them off my car during their previous visit. I was back on the road. Not even a temporary license, Pas probation.

This was post-Robichaud, but it took nearly 20 years to get the old political favour system out of place.

Today’s modern New Brunswick state, with its flaws and failings is a responsive, compassionate place in which to live and work.

Power brokers still abound, but it is the business of business that is the battlefield now. No longer are the poor or dis-advantaged the pawns of old family power blocks, and that is Robichaud’s true accomplishment for which, he needs to be well remembered.

He changed what it meant to be young and to be a New Brunswicker who could aspire to anything and who your parents and grandparents were did not limit, or expand your potential.

As Premier and a politican, he paid a huge personal price for this effort,

Part IV: - The Old Ways New Brunswick That
Robichaud Inherited As A New Premier

Part I - Robichaud Architect of Modern New Brunswick

Robichaud- A Partisan's Goodbye-Part II

A Partisan's Goodbye: Part II. is a second installment of a memorial of Premier Louis Robichaud.

Part I - Upon the Passing of Louis Robichaud was published yesterday for readers wishing to read this memorial in order of publishing starting on January 10 th.

Premier Hugh John Fleming's 1950's era government was by definition laissez faire. No boat too rocky to be quieted with a gentle nudge of patronage and family peerage.

The thinking of the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1958, according to my father's account .............about then young Robichaud as a new leader was that he would keep the seat warm for someone else that was more acceptable to a English language and culture dominated Province.

A largely rural dominated legislature ( Statistically in 1952 , 75% of the MLA Party members were farmers with a sprinkling of lawyers, which is now reversed in favour of lawyers ), where ward bosses and patronage healers made the body politic work for those that were in current political favour within the powerful networks of municipal country governments.

Ah, those lovely municipal governments controlled in county seats where today these communities are drive through communities like the former county seats of Hopewell Cape in Albert County, and Dorchester, in Westmorland County among those for each County.

Prior to the mid 1960's, the real political power that impacted on the daily lives of New Brunswickers, beyond the fish, game and driving license renewals, was the local municipal government and school boards. These elected local Boards were the farm teams ( like today's hockey franchises), for the eventual development of provincial candidates who would go on to the Provincial Legislature, and perhaps eventually to run Federally.

As Premier Richard Hatfield was fond of saying, the further you got from those that elected you, the easier it was to govern.

In the 1950's a Federal MP was someone who was more like a distant Uncle from New England that infrequently showed up in a better suit, a bigger DeSoto limo than anyone else, and to whom no one listened.

At the County level, old men, often political hacks with some degree of inherited wealth or who were land poor with farm and forest land, would be the Country Poor Commissioners. It was these men- always men, who would deem who could have Stamps or Welfare Chits as they were called then, to exchange for food at the local grocery store.

Everything in 50's New Brunswick was political.

Even the groceries for the poor and destitute prior to Equal Opportunity, was a political favourtism process. Robichaud and his team's political juggernaut, which made welfare, health care, education and employment opportunity a universal right of citizenship destroyed cronynism - at least in the most basic of human decency interventions.

In Albert County alone, there were two grocery stores where the current Gunningsville- now the about to be replaced Riverview Bridge crosses the once mighty Petitcodiac River, to a boomlet Moncton.

On each side of the bridge entrance street of Route 112, until the late 70's, there were a few wooden buildings, perched literally on wooden stilts and hanging off the side of the Petitcodiac. Each store was a different political party supporter as an owner.

Eno's and I forgot the name of the other one now, but Eno's was Liberal - and when Liberals were dominate in the Country- you got your Welfare Chits exchanged there for food at Eno's. When the Government changed, depending on who was in control of the local political apparatus in Hopewell, for Albert County, for example, for your local parish, - then you would go to the other store.

It had been the same way since before Confederation.

Who you knew and who you or your family tree were thought to have voted for in New Brunswick, as a political party determined your potential fate, particularly when fate went against you. It was also important as to whom your parents and grandparents had voted.

In the light of our techno vibrant world of not knowing or caring about our neighbours, the fact that someone in your area knew you and your family tree well enough, did the numbers well enough to know, and could predict your electoral vote, is largely a lost art in New Brunswick politics.

I did hear that it still can be done in parts of the Acadian peninsula, but time is ravaging this particular demographic phenomena of Canadian history. The locals who could count votes before and after a election campaign and who were counted on to deliver their polls have largely passed on.

My own father could deliver a fairly accurate count for his area stretching some 25 miles along the Petitcodiac River. In a precursor to predictive polls, identifying the undecided vote, the new residents and the voting rebels who were defying their parents and voting outside their family tree, was a common skill of poll captains on both sides of political parties.

It was the control of education that was the real short hairs-control of New Brunswick rural politics in pre-Robichaud New Brunswick. Once he blasted the old established order out of control- everyone- English and French Acadian youth alike, were able to aspire and execute with an equality that was unparalleled in New Brunswick's history of family established privilege.

An education in New Brunswick prior to Robichaud was more a lottery of birth and parish wealth than a right.

There was a general understanding that if you could get to Moncton High School, or Harkins' High, or certain other select High Schools in Fredericton, and Bathurst that you could get access to better teachers who prepared you better for your university entrance exams. Better than the hapless rural impoverished schools, where meager budgets meant that the poorest school boards got the teachers with the lowest aptitude scores and Teacher's College marks.

Every new teacher dreamed of getting to somewhere else from where they landed as soon as their education fortunes improved. Students fell through cracks that were more like craters. Teacher salaries often did not surpass the national poverty average in pre-Robichaud New Brunswick.

I saw this first hand as my father, Chair of a Local School Board, negotiated with my grade school principal to find enough money- and subsidized local housing in a temporary rooming house, - so he could be comfortable enough working for the below standard wage as a teacher. Albert County- already well into decline as a County share of provincial gross product contributor, - had trouble finding money for teachers and teachers for the money available.

University acceptance was also skewered towards those with political connections. Not so much directly as one would think. It mattered who you teacher was and their connections and standing that later influenced how your application was received. Not that it was directly political, but more that they were known to the university registrars for their reputation as a teacher, which influenced which students were seen in a favourable light. Marks were only part of the equation.

Also President's of provincial universities in New Brunswick as well as Board of Regents had internal working relationships with current sitting Cabinet members that created a back door for acceptance of "deserving students". County politically connected hacks were expert in the definition of deserving students in their counties.

Pre-Robichaud era, it was the reputation of the High School and the assembled university degree level teachers on the staff that often influenced who got accepted to Maritime universities; particularity as to where and when. This in a pre-Universite of Moncton environment was part of the sutle racism that kept universal acceptance of French language students from competing equally again more powerful High School crony infrastructures.

Selection operated in an insidious manner that like all patronage and graft and illegality by today's standards, because it was largely unseen, but distinctly felt by those that it impacted.

Everything was based on who you knew and who your parents knew from their standing with the local political network of partisans and gatekeepers that impacted on everything from scholarships awarded to favourites, to whom got to keep their drivers licenses.

How the Real New Brunswick Worked in 50's , 60's and 70's New Brunswick and the impact of Premier Robichaud. - Part III- A Partisan's Goodbye.

Part III: How New Brunswick Used To Work For The Few

Louis Robichaud-Architect of My New Brunswick

Upon the passing of Premier Louis Robichaud.

A Partisan's Goodbye: Part I.

These comments are personal and are made on the day that the nation of Acadie, and Anglophone New Brunswick, pays tribute to former Premier Louis Robichaud on the occasion of his passing, while lying in State for Tuesday's massive funeral in Moncton.

The passing of Louis Robichaud has sparked an outpouring of commentary and simple sadness at the finality of the end of such a human energy force that characterized his public life.

To hear him speak in his vibrant, almost nasal pitch as he took the English language to places few could follow him in pitch, reach, and frequency. While in French, he made love to the audience. and the most Acadian audience of the time loved him back.

For 30 years, I attended Liberal fests in all parts of the Province and always there is a memory of the ghost of a Robichaud speech when being a Liberal meant something. Bland does not come to mind.

Many of the politicians I have had the pleasure of knowing in my journalism and business career of 35 years were deeply influenced by Robichaud’s activism and commitment to social and economic change.

I largely volunteered to work on the candidacy of Bernard Richard as a Liberal leadership hopeful, when the outcome was all but guaranteed to go against him, as the outcome and vote was as fixed in place as a miter joint on a political drawer, because of the memory of what transforming a future could be like. I thought he might have Robichaud's mantle of change and perspective.

It was not meant to be and nothing would change the outcome that has lead to his being optimized by Premier Lord as the conscience of bureaucrats and power brokers in Government, who go astray, providing a counsel of last resort for the lowly taxpayer.

Bernard Richard did venture out of political purgatory as Ombudsman long enough to write one of the more evocative personal tributes and in memoriams that I read on the great man over the weekend.

Richard never knew that I joined up with him because I wanted to once again, one more time before I die myself , to experience the rush that comes from being on the right side of a movement to change the existing condition into the potential future. My father and others of his generation did get that feeling.

Robichaud's passing also impacted on me because of how closely my relationship with my own late father was coloured and made richer by his passionate defence and unbridled enthusiasm for Louis Robichaud, the politician.

My father’s commitment – he a not-so-simple-farmer and volunteer political activist - to Premier Robichaud, the man,…. was at the most basic of levels. His open admiration and constant support coloured my world as a child, teenager, and ultimately, my life as an adult.

Robichaud’s life…imperfect as it was coloured people’s lives and changed the outcome of them.

That is a most powerful epitaph.

My father was a ground zero Liberal.

He worked simply running polls- as they we called - as the agent for the Liberal Party, in Albert County, where being a Liberal was considered to be an active minority protected largely by seasonal game laws. Everyone else I knew, except for few of my father's most stalwart of friends was a Progessive Conservative. Even our relatives.

Family parties around a pending election were frought with more hazard than the possibility of rancid potato salad.

My first recollection was as a mere child of hearing the name Louis Robichaud.

I was sitting at the kitchen table in our rural Albert Country farm kitchen when my father George returned from the 1958 Liberal leadership convention that saw little Louie as they were calling him with some derision; he had surprisingly won the Convention.

George was estactic, but worried.

No one got to be be Premier without carrying Saint John and they had been cool to the idea of an Acadian leader, despite the placeholder position of running in place to hold the seat warm for an eventual attractive victor.

Reading as an adult the recall of those that covered the convention is at odds of my own recollection. George’s account, delivered late at night to my barely interested mother, was that the English delegates had left early from the convention, bent on returning home on a late Fall weekend. It got dark early then in the Fall.

Not so those dedicated Acadian supporters from the north - east and west of the Province, who were used to staying up all night ( as I was to find out first hand later living on the Nord Shore of NB) and finishing a party till dawn- if required.

They were – by George’s account, giddy with joy at their coup in electing Robichaud leader.

The consolation among the dominant English leadership of the Party represented by several English leadership hopefuls at the time, including the then Moncton MP, Henry Murphy, ……was that the Progressive Conservatives under Carleton Country scion Premier Hugh John Fleming, were well entrenched and not about to be defeated.

Part II - The Pre-Robichaud Years in New Brunswick