Bringing the Commune to Canada: A Technocrat's Swedish Study Tour and the New Brunswick Program of Equal Opportunity

Abstract

DURING THE 1960s THE PROVINCE OF NEW BRUNSWICK embarked upon a reform agenda that made the rest of Canada take notice. To combat a stark disparity in public services between Englishand French-speaking New Brunswickers, Acadian premier Louis Robichaud brought in wide-reaching changes to health, education, and social welfare. To extend equitable social services to the small province’s rural residents, especially New Brunswick’s Acadian population in the province’s north and southeast, the Program of Equal Opportunity (EO) was devised by politicians and implemented by bureaucrats and technocrats.1 Unlike traditional bureaucrats, technocrats at mid-century drew on their training in the physical and social sciences such as public administration and economics for the development of public policy regimes. Many observers in the 1960s noted that Louis Robichaud “revolutionized” New Brunswick’s government and sociopolitical order.2 Equal Opportunity established government centralization to standardize the quality of public services; accessibility to social welfare programs was a key concern for government officials. Reaction to EO among the province’s anglophone elite was rank. Newspaperman Michael Wardell wrote that EO was “frankly based on Swedish socialism.” Later in the same editorial, he opined that the reforms posed were “disastrous to human liberties.”3 Wardell, the editor of Fredericton’s major daily and a regional magazine, the Atlantic Advocate, was contemptuous of