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

Abstract

Bringing the Commune to Canada:A Technocrat's Swedish Study Tour and the New Brunswick Program of Equal Opportunity Bliss White (bio) 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 English- and 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 [End Page 185] the architect of EO, Premier Robichaud, whom he called "a little man with a violently expressive mouth which grimaces as he articulates a torrent of words on any subject in French or English."4 The British-born Wardell's ad hominem attack was informed by his partisanship and anti-French sentiments; however, his mischaracterization of New Brunswick's EO as the adoption of Swedish socialism was curiously rooted in a half-truth. To modernize New Brunswick the province's bureaucrats and elected officials looked to other governments and jurisdictions for policy inspiration throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including Sweden. The wide-reaching Royal Commission on Finance and Municipal Taxation (Byrne Commission) laid out the challenges and possible solutions for New Brunswick's sociopolitical woes in 1963. The commission was composed of the chairman Edward Byrne (a Bathurst lawyer), Arthur Andrews of St. Stephen, Ulderic Nadeau of Baker Brook in Madawaska County in the province's northwest, Charles N. Wilson (the former owner of Saint John Ship Building Ltd), and Alexandre Boudreau (a university administrator and director of extension services at the newly formed Université de Moncton).5 In an effort to find best practices for government reform in the 1960s, Edward Byrne suggested that the commission undertake a study tour outside of New Brunswick.6 In the summer of 1963, Alexandre Boudreau was directed by Byrne to travel to Sweden to compile a report on Sweden's approach to social welfare. Boudreau's six-week tour of Sweden was completed toward the end of the Byrne Commission's major drafting period in 1963. In his memoirs, Edward Byrne suggested that the study tour of Sweden was an attempt to undermine Boudreau's contributions during the drafting of the overall report document. Boudreau's recommendations arising from his time in Sweden didn't make the final report that was submitted to the New Brunswick cabinet. His study tour document was simply included as an appendix of the Royal Commission [End Page 186] on Finance and Municipal Taxation. Nevertheless, this document sheds light on alternative approaches to social change at mid-century. Unlike the top-down change that the Byrne Commission and EO brought to New Brunswick, Boudreau's Swedish study tour highlights an approach to government reform that was more citizenfocused – even if the provincial government did not pursue such an agenda. New Brunswick did not borrow any of the suggested administrative practices or government policies of Sweden's social democracy that arose from Boudreau's study tour. The provincial government of Louis Robichaud, however, articulated his vision for New Brunswick in roughly the same language. The Program of Equal Opportunity was as much an effort to improve the economic well-being of...