I'm off. This afternoon I leave on a 11 day backcountry hiking vacation. I'll be back on these pages July 14th. Keep sending me interesting stories that you want blogged about and I'll do a digest upon my return.

The TJ is running an interesting story about Kelowna's attempts to attract data centres. The core element of the value proposition? Cheap hydroelectric power.

It's hard to beat.

I went to the open house on the proposed changes to the French Immersion program in New Brunswick on Saturday and ran into Harold Jarche. If you don't know Harold, he is a important thinker in the area of education and learning. I ran into him a few years ago when e-Learning was the buzz in New Brunswick.

Anyway, I went thinking I would be talking about French Immersion. What I got was a dissertation on the industrial model of education - how it was set up to facilitate easy integration into factory work (the type of cirriculum, 8-4 hours, bells going off, Taylorism in the classroom). Harold is calling for a radical new approach to learning and teaching altogether far better aligned to the realities of the world today.

He lost me after the references to Pavlov and Taylorism (which all B-students should have studied in depth).

But it sounded interesting.

No, I am not a particularly big fan of David Cronenburg.

It's just that I like communities that have gone through tough times and came out the other end even stronger. There is kind of a grittiness and toughness that you would never see in a community that has never felt any real collective stress.

Consider Pittsburgh.

I am now reading a biography of Andrew Mellon - one of the original robber barons - and one of the wealthiest men in the world - then (and even compared to current times when you look at wealth as a percentage of the national economy).

PS - I had to stop reading the Richard Florida book. I felt my brains melting and dribbling out my ear. It felt like reading a hybrid of a David Foot, Tony Robbins and David Lee Roth. Some people think he's a genius but, if so, he's over my head.

But I digress.

Mellon's grandfather actually came to Pennsylvania via Saint John, New Brunswick. It would be interesting to see what might have happened if all the people that started in Saint John actually stayed in Saint John.

Anyway back to Pittsburgh. It was the epicentre for industrial America for close to a hundred years from the early 19th to the early 20th century. It spawned many of the country's wealthiest men and had serious environmental challenges long before Al Gore. But times changed and it slowly fell from influence and prosperity.

In the words of the great philospher Def Leppard - It's better to burn out than to fade away. True for them, at least, but maybe true for communities as well. A few years ago I visited a town in Quebec on the road to Labrador that had literally razed. The mill or mine that was there was taken out of production and the whole town taken down piece by piece. All that remains is the foundations of the buildings and the grown over streets. But there is a certain elegance to that. Sink or swim, I guess.

But Pittsburgh is making a comeback. Richard Florida seem to like picking on the city in his books but I like what I am seeing there. I'll have to get down and visit one of these days.

Saint John has a little Pittsburgh in her and maybe that is why I have always had a soft spot for the Port City. She was never as large but in her heyday around the time of Confederation, Saint John was as big as Halifax, Detroit and Baltimore (population). She was a major port and a key stop on the shipping routes. She was also the hub of trade between the Maritimes and New England. But along came Confederation and reoriented trade east-west in Canada. The national railway was put in as was the St. Lawrence Seaway and that marginalized SJ even more over time. Again, the slow burn - not the flashy exit. Even in the early 20th century, Saint John was easily the most dominant urban area in New Brunswick and still a fairly major player.

So it was quite sad for me to see Saint John actually slip into population decline in the last couple of Census periods. At the county level, the Saint John population today is about the same as in the 1950s.

And, of course, from an economic development perspective, as goes your most dominant urban centre, so goes your province. In order for New Brunswick to get back on the economic rails, we need a strong and prosperous Saint John.

Like Pittsburgh, I think that Saint John will make a strong comeback. These things take time - decades - generations sometime. But we are starting to rethink historical trade routes again. We are starting to rethink our industrial development policies. We are starting to understand the importance of our urban areas. People are actually thinking about roads, rail and ports and the long term impact of these assets to a province's economic development.

I have never figured out why New Brunswick doesn't do more to leverage its language skills for economic development. Take the translation industry. A fairly good paying industry. We have a good translation program at UdeM. You would think that a few people would see that as an interesting career opportunity and you would further think there would be economic development opportunities.



It is true that every few years some level of government throws a few bucks at the sector. But really, this is an industry that has had pitiful success in New Brunswick. We are supposed to be the only officially bilingual province in Canada.

From the 2001 to 2006 Census, we had a decline in the number of persons employed as Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters.

Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters