Success Stories
2009 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award
The winners of the 2009 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award were announced on June 24, 2009 at a ceremony in Moncton. The recipients of the annual honour were: Edouard Allain, Rollande Landry (conferred posthumously), James Lockyer and CBC Maritimes & Radio-Canada Acadie.
Speaking to guests at Moncton City Hall, the Honourable Herménégilde Chiasson, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, said: “These three individuals and two organisations are all role models who champion the principles of harmony and respect between our province’s Anglophone and Francophone communities. They exemplify, in their words and deeds, the best intentions of all residents of Canada’s only officially bilingual province.”
Established in 2003, the Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award is given out annually by Dialogue New Brunswick (DNB) – a provincial, non-profit organization that promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the province.
According to DNB’s executive director, Carole Fournier, recipients are selected by a four-member jury.
“There are many deserving people in this province – many who devote their time and energy to the cause of linguistic and cultural harmony and understanding. This year’s recipients follow in the tradition and lead in their commitment to these principles.”
Site: http://www.dialoguenb.org/
2008 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award Winners
The winners of the 2008 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award were announced on June 10, 2008 at a ceremony in Bathurst. The recipients of the annual honour were: Bathurst High School Student Council, Conseil des étudiants École secondaire Népisiguit, Brian Murphy, and the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra.
Speaking to guests at the Gowan Brae Golf and Country Club, the Honourable Herménégilde Chiasson, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, said: “These three organisations and Mr. Murphy are all role models who champion the principles of harmony and respect between our province’s Anglophone and Francophone communities. They exemplify, in their words and deeds, the best intentions of all residents of Canada’s only officially bilingual province.”
Established in 2003, the Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award is given out annually by Dialogue New Brunswick (DNB) – a provincial, non-profit organization that promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the province.
According to DNB’s executive director, Carole Fournier, recipients are selected by a five-member jury.
“There are many deserving people in this province – many who devote their time and energy to the cause of linguistic and cultural harmony and understanding. This year’s recipients follow in the tradition and lead in their commitment to these principles.”
Site: http://www.dialoguenb.org/
Two New Brunswick university students win prestigious prize for their bilingual ad campaign
Future ad execs drive off with the prize
Closing the gaps in marketing
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Mary Teresa Bitti, Financial Post
Matt Daigle and Elizabeth-Anne McCleave are, well, thrilled. The University of New Brunswick MBA students have just won two Volkswagen Golfs thanks to the ad campaign they created to promote Volkswagen’s new Routan. More important than the prize — perhaps the richest of any university competition in Canada — is the exposure it has given them.
Canada’s Next Top Ad Executive, a national competition for marketing and advertising university students, offers the opportunity to develop a real-world marketing campaign for a real-life company. It was designed to help bring participants, academia and industry together and places the top 10 teams front and centre with top ad agency CEOs and industry executives.
Now in its third year, Canada’s Next Top Ad Executive competition was conceived and is hosted by the DeGroote School of Business at Mc-Master University. Teams were initially required to develop both an elevator pitch and a strategy document. Mr. Daigle and Ms. McCleave, who were one of two groups who made it to the top 10 from the University of New Brunswick, learned of the competition just one week before the elevator pitch was due.
“The advertising world is new to me and the competition piqued my interest,” says Ms. McCleave, whose major is entrepreneurship. “The idea to build a campaign for Volkswagen was an awesome opportunity. What drew me to it was the creative aspect. We started brainstorming and came up with a great idea that we felt meshed well with Volkswagen’s current campaign. It was creative, out of the box, catchy, memorable… we really believed in our idea. That’s what pushed us to go further and further.”
Volkswagen and the 20-some industry judges agreed. And the winning pitch will be included in the company’s campaign to promote the Routan — although the details are hush-hush at this point.
“It’s surreal,” says Ms. McCleave, who would like to own her own company in the marketing and advertising field one day.
“I wanted to have that experience of working in advertising so this was the perfect opportunity. I’m a huge car buff and Volkswagen has always been my favourite car company. Since I was a kid I’ve always wanted a Golf, so when I saw this was for Volkswagen, I was so excited.”
Far more attractive than the prospect of winning a car, though, Ms. Mc-Cleave says, was the opportunity to meet industry leaders. And that, says Mandeep Malik, professor of marketing strategy and sales management at DeGroote School of Business, and the man behind the competition, is a key element of the program.
“The nature of business education is changing; there is a need for it to change,” Mr. Malik says. “I started teaching here in 2000 and very quickly realized business schools don’t have labs. Their students can’t experiment and see the results of their experiments and build their confidence in terms of trust in what they are taught in the classroom — that it actually works in practice.”
There was another, more pressing issue: the gaps in the marketing curriculum Canada-wide. “If you were to do a snapshot of what the marketing industry is and what the different functions are and you try and overlay what business students are taught, you find there is a huge mismatch,” Prof. Malik says. “The curriculum is severely lacking.”
In 2006, Mr. Malik surveyed some 50 business schools across the country and found only seven offered an introductory course in advertising and marketing communication.
“With the lack of familiarity with this critical marketing function people are not exposed to the career opportunities in this particular field,” he says.
So he set himself the task of designing a way to bring the major stakeholders together; namely, industry and students. “Ad agencies are working in hyper competitive environment. They recruit from universities. They want well-educated, highly qualified candidates who can represent them credibly. It seemed like a great opportunity to seize upon for students, universities and industry,” Prof. Malik says.
And they have done just that. This year, the competition received 143 qualified submissions from 37 business schools across the country. That’s up from 41 submissions in its first year.
“The response from students is completely beyond our expectations,” Prof. Malik says. “The key issue in marketing is talent acquisition and retention. Where do we get the best talent? This program is helping with that.”
Financial Post
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1493075
Promotional Program in the Schools (winter/spring 2007)
In June 2007, the Commissioner traveled all over the province presenting prizes to Anglophone and Francophone students who had participated in a program aimed at promoting the site www.2tongues.ca. The Office of the Commissioner distributed rubber branded bracelets, similar to the wristbands supporting various causes that have been all the rage with young people for a few years now. The two-tone bracelets are imprinted with the address www.2tantmieux.ca/ www.2tongues.ca. They were distributed through student councils and their teacher advisers in order to offer them a promotional kit. The number of requests exceeded all expectations, to the point where the Office of the Commissioner had to hold a draw among the schools having shown interest. Of those 76 schools, the names of 52 were drawn at random. Besides bracelets, the schools received posters and bookmarks.
The Office of the Commissioner later contacted the schools to obtain their feedback and ask for the name of a student at their school who, in their opinion, had stood out in connection with this promotion. A draw was held among the names gathered for the awarding of prizes such as MP3 players, iPods, and digital cameras.
At Apohaqui Elementary School, Mr. Carrier presented Grade 4 student Cody Smith with an MP3 player. At Hampton Middle School, Mr. Carrier presented a digital camera to a group of students who called themselves the Peer Helpers / Super 7 Girls. Finally, the Commissioner visited l’École Régionale-de-Saint-André to present an MP3 player tograde four student Stéphanie Michaud.
2007 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award Winners
The winners of the 2007 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award were announced at a ceremony on June 21 in Saint John. The recipients of the annual honour were: Arthur Irving, Janice LeBlanc, Richard Rice, and the New Brunswick Heart Centre.
Speaking to guests at Centre scolaire-communautaire Samuel-de-Champlain in Saint John, the Honourable Herménégilde Chiasson, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, said: “These three individuals and the staff of the New Brunswick Heart Centre are all role models who champion the principles of harmony and respect between our province’s Anglophone and Francophone communities. They exemplify, in their words and deeds, the best intentions of all residents of Canada’s only officially bilingual province.”
Established in 2003, the Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award is given out annually by Dialogue New Brunswick (DNB) – a provincial, non-profit organization that promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the province.
According to DNB’s executive director, Carole Fournier, recipients are selected by a five-member jury.
“It’s never easy for the jury to choose one individual or institution over another,” she said. “There are so many deserving people in this province – so many who devote their time and energy to the cause of linguistic and cultural harmony and understanding. This year’s recipients follow in the tradition and lead in their commitment to these principles.”
Site: http://www.dialoguenb.org/
Ambassadors from greater Saint John Area Complete Outreach Program in Acadian Peninsula
In June, 2007, Dialogue New Brunswick announced that residents of the Greater Saint John area had wrapped up a three-day outreach and information sharing program through the Acadian Peninsula in Caraquet tomorrow.
The group is part of a new initiative created and organized by Dialogue NB, a provincial, non-profit organization that promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the province.
The initiative, called the Dialogue Ambassador Program, enables leading members of one linguistic community to experience the lives, amenities, and workplaces of the other in a positive, encouraging way.
“We believe that when people visit each other’s homes, it results in greater comprehension, increased respect, and new appreciation for New Brunswick’s linguistic diversity,” said Carole Fournier, Dialogue New Brunswick’s executive director. “If we can provide the opportunity, people can and will collaborate on issues of common interest. We want New Brunswickers to discover all that our beautiful province offers.”
The ambassadors spent their time in the Acadien Peninsula touring a wide variety of communities and attractions, including Tracadie-Sheila, Miscou Island, Shippagan, Grande-Anse, and Caraquet. “It’s been a real eye-opening experience” said Ron Maloney, Mayor of Quispamsis. “This kind of information is invaluable. It’s the only way to truly understand how other communities live and work.”
Indeed, said Fournier, “We have opportunities here that do not exist anywhere else. We are all responsible for fostering the type of province that attracts new residents and retains the ones we have. Everyone has a role to play.”
Ambassadors from Acadian Peninsula Complete Outreach Program in Saint John Area
In June, 2007, Dialogue New Brunswick announced that residents of the Acadian coast of New Brunswick had wrapped up a three-day outreach and information sharing program in the Greater Saint John area today.
The group is part of a new initiative created and organized by Dialogue New Brunswick, a provincial, non-profit organization that promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking citizens of the province.
The initiative, called the Dialogue Ambassador Program, enables leading members of one linguistic community to experience the lives, amenities, and workplaces of the other in a positive, encouraging way.
“We believe that when people visit each other’s homes, it results in greater comprehension, increased respect, and new appreciation for New Brunswick’s linguistic diversity,” said Carole Fournier, Dialogue New Brunswick’s executive director. “If we can provide the opportunity, people can and will collaborate on issues of common interest. We want New Brunswickers to discover all that our beautiful province offers.”
Added Saint John Mayor Norm McFarlane: “It’s been a privilege to host these ambassadors over the past few days. A program like this only serves to build bridges between our respective communities. It cements the idea that our diversity is one of our great strengths in New Brunswick, and that by understanding our rich cultural distinctiveness, we are forging a stronger province for everyone.”
The ambassadors spent their time touring the downtown and selected businesses, visiting the New Brunswick Museum and the Fundy Trail at St. Martins, and dining at some of the city’s finest establishments. “It’s been a great opportunity” said Jean-Eudes Savoie, Mayor of Tracadie-Sheila. “It’s important to experience how other communities actually live and work, and to bring this knowledge back to our own homes.”
Indeed, said Fournier, “We have opportunities here that do not exist anywhere else. We are all responsible for fostering the type of province that attracts new residents and retains the ones we have. Everyone has a role to play.”
2003 Bathurst-Campbellton Canada Winter Games, a model of linguistic cooperation
It was one of the most successful sporting events in the history of northern New Brunswick. But the 2003 Canada Winter Games was more than a logistical triumph; it was a model of linguistic, ethnic and cultural cooperation.
Today, Lyne Raymond, an attorney with the Campbellton-based law firm Humphrey Matchin & Raymond, who served as the Games’ vice-president for official languages, looks back on that period as if it were a kind of golden age. “I really believe we set a new standard of understanding,” she says.
Years before the commencement of the Bathurst-Campbellton extravaganza, the Host Society – which included 18 management board members from all walks of life – decided that its games would be entirely bilingual in every sense of the word. Says Raymond: “It was a very deliberate act on our part, and from the earliest stages. We had only three members of the board who were unilingual English, yet they were the most supportive of complete language parity.”
And when she says “complete parity”, she means it. “The Host Society was unique in that it functioned in both official languages internally,” she explains. “We weren’t just ‘officially” bilingual, we were ‘working’ bilingual in all of our planning meetings, strategy sessions, casual conversations. We never had a translator or interpreter in the room with us at any point.”
That determination led to policies that applied to all 100 employees and 6,000 volunteers who manned the daily operations of the Games, from hospitality workers to parking lot attendants. “In fact,” Raymond recalls, “we assigned jobs to volunteers very strategically. I mean, those who dealt with the public all the time, like parking attendants, really needed to be able to communicate perfectly in both French and English.”
In her 2003 annual, the federal Commissioner of Officials Languages had only good things to say about these efforts: “The organizing committee used effective and sometimes ingenious measures to ensure that our two official languages received equal treatment during the event: Care was taken to use both languages early in the planning stages for the games; a large number of bilingual volunteers were recruited (70 per cent); and a ‘language patrol’ was organized to visit competition sites daily and ensure that athletes and spectators were offered services in English and French.”\
As the Commissioner noted, “All of this was a major challenge since more than 100 kilometres separated the two host cities. Nevertheless, the few problems which did arise were corrected by the time the competitions got underway. Bilingualism had one of the best showings in the history of Canada during these 10th Winter Games.”
For Raymond and her colleagues – including Dr. Dennis Furlong, MLA for Dalhousie/Restigouche-East at the time, and the mayors of Campbellton and Bathurst, Mark Ramsay and Stephen Brunet, respectively – the task was tough, but also rewarding.
“For some time, we wondered whether we actually needed an official designation of bilingualism,” Raymond says. “Coming from this part of the world, it all seemed second nature to us. We spoke to each other in each language. Everyone was comfortable. In a sense, we were already in the place that everyone else talks about when they speak of French-English relations.”
All of which is to say that models of linguistic harmony don’t have to be brash or proud or politically motivated. They just have to work, as they did, magnificently, for the 2003 Bathurst-Campbellton Canada Winter Games Host Society.
This feature is a copyright (2007) of Dialogue New/Nouveau-Brunswick, which promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking New Brunswickers.
Avantage Saint John Advantage, a model of linguistic and economic cooperation
At a time when New Brunswick’s economic self-sufficiency has risen to the top of the political agenda, Beth Kelly Hatt takes some comfort in knowing that she’s helping to improve the business climate for both Anglophones and Francophones in the province.
“You realize that people are just people, and they really do want to work together,” says the founding president of Avantage Saint John Advantage (ASJA). “There is a tremendous economic advantage to bilingualism, and the business community in Saint John has really embraced this. When you get this sort of commitment, it really helps.”
The commitment Hatt speaks of is a partnership among the Saint John Board of Trade, Enterprise Saint John, and the Association Regionale de la Communaute francophone Saint-Jean dedicated to improving the metropolitan area’s business, education, health, and community development sectors.
Established in 2002, Avantage Saint John Advantage’s guiding principle has been to promote and support the financial and cultural benefits of bilingualism and to serve as a model of linguistic and economic cooperation. Over the past five years, the organization has developed a weekly French-language lunch program that is open to the entire public; bilingualism workshops targeted at the business community; and an initiative called “connections” that encourages public school students to continue their studies in French. As well, ASJA pioneered “Lebottin.org”, an online directory of all products and services available in French in Saint John.
According to the Hatt, the results have been, to say the least, rewarding. “People have become more courageous and confident,” she says. “They’ve become more open.”
Courageous, confident and open are words that might just as easily apply to Hatt. Born and raised in Charlo, N.B., she caught a bad case of the entrepreneurial bug at an early age, and she’s never been able to shake it. “When I was 11, I opened a small canteen in my home town for the summer,” she says. “It was successful enough that Mom and Dad continued it through the winter, and it eventually became the village grocery and meat store.”
In 1982, she arrived in Saint John. Struggling in vain to find a tour that would properly introduce her to the city, she started her own, which mostly offered city excursions to summer visitors. Within five years, Aquila Tours Inc. grew so rapidly that it required full-time management. Today, the company organizes services for groups of travellers from across Atlantic Canada. It also hosts outbound tours to destinations around the world.
Hatt brought her infectious energy and enthusiasm to ASJA. “During my term as president there, between 2002 and 2005, we were really working hard to introduce a wide variety of new programs designed to build bridges between the Anglophone and Francophone business communities.”
It worked. Today, the city’s Francophone population is active and growing, and the links to the Anglophone commercial sector are stronger than they’ve ever been. In 2006, ASJA received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award for its successful efforts. And Hatt, who is now serving out her term as the organization’s past-president, couldn’t be happier. “Business,” she says, “is all about building relationships.”
This feature is a copyright (2007) of Dialogue New/Nouveau-Brunswick, which promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking New Brunswickers.
Alex Fancy’s “Tintamarre” dramatizes linguistic harmony in New Brunswick
Alex Fancy has spent more than half of his adult life teaching French to Anglophones, a fact that, among other things, appeals to his rich sense of irony. “I grew up speaking English in Nova Scotia,” says the former Head of Romance Languages at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
“I had only high school French when I came to college, and I had every intention of studying chemistry. But after six weeks, I realized that it wasn’t for me. So, one day, I sat in on a French class. I fell in love with the sound of it, the rhythm of it. That was the moment I knew there was no going back for me.”
Today, despite a 40-year career and recent retirement from active teaching, Fancy remains as passionate as ever about the power and beauty of his adopted language. These days, he channels most of his energy through Tintamarre, a bilingual theatre company he formed in 1982 and is still going strong with unique, home-spun performances for audiences throughout New Brunswick.
“I started this troupe, after some experimentations with drama in the 1970s, because I recognized that strict classroom circumstances are not the best for learning a second language,” he explains. “Language is word, tone and gesture. It’s not just one, or the other. It’s expression as much as it is strict communication. You could say that Tintamarre is a bit of a trail-blazer.”
In fact, Fancy has made a habit of blazing trails over the years. As a young man, he learned his lessons well and, after matriculating from Mount A, he travelled to Paris on a scholarship. Upon returning to Canada, he did graduate work at the University of Western Ontario, and then more at his beloved Sackville-based alma mater where he stayed on to become a much-admired figure in the academic community.
In the years that followed, he accumulated a remarkable record of accomplishment: Professor of French and Drama at Mount A; Dean of both Arts and Faculty at that institution; member of the faculty at Middlebury College French Summer School in Vermont, where he still teaches; first recipient of the Herbert and Leota Tucker Teaching Award in 1984; recipient of a 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 1988; first recipient of the Association of Atlantic Universities Distinguished Teacher Award in 1991; Founding Chairman of the National Council of 3M Teaching Fellows in 2003, a position he continues to hold; and recipient of the Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award in 2005.
But Tintamarre is still his proudest achievement. Over the years, the company – which involves, at any given time, 20 or more amateur actors from all walks of life and with all levels of linguistic attainment – has toured the province, Canada and the United States. What began as a teaching tool has become a cause célèbre. Fancy, himself, has delivered workshops on its activities and linguistic approaches in six countries.
“We write our own plays together, and we operate in both French and English, regardless of the skill level,” he says. “This encourages people to be courageous, to start communicating in a language with which they are uncomfortable or unfamiliar. Very quickly, they become more courageous and more comfortable. And that’s what it’s all about. It reminds people that French, and English, are languages people actually use, and not just read in books.”
Though formally retired, he has no intention of slowing down. Tintamarre’s show must go on, and several new productions are on the drawing board. Beyond this, he’s not finished learning languages. “I’m studying German,” he laughs. “It’s something I’ve always been interested in. Did you know that the jokes in this language are really quite funny? Now, how’s that for irony?”
This feature is a copyright (2007) of Dialogue New/Nouveau-Brunswick, which promotes understanding, respect and appreciation between English-speaking and French-speaking New Brunswickers.
Merit award for the website design of www.2tongues.ca
September 22, 2006
Part of the mandate of the Commissioner of Official Languages is to promote the advancement of both official languages in the Province. In that regard, a number of initiatives have been developed over the past three years. One such initiative was the creation of an animated website (www.2tongues.ca) with the following objectives:
– Get kids (9-14) to feel good about their language and the other official language.
– To help communicate that as a New Brunswick youth you can choose to speak English, speak French or speak both.
– Encourage francophone youth to be proud of their language and to speak it well.
– To convey the importance of official language rights in New Brunswick.
The www.2tongues.ca website was developed by Razor Creative, an advertising and design firm, based in Moncton. The site was launched on August 1st, 2005 without the usual fanfare. It was felt that the promotion of this site be done in a way to have the students discover and enjoy the site by themselves instead of being directed to the site by their parents and/or teachers. Our promotional efforts did bring some positive results and it received a significant number of “hits”. To that end, we intend to enhance it in the near future in order to further increase the interest already expressed.
We were very pleased to learn that Razor Creative received, on June 8th, 2006, a Merit award for the website design of www.2tongues.ca at the 5th Annual Ice Awards in Halifax. It was with much pride that Stephen Brander and Rich Gould, of Razor Creative, accepted this prestigious award. The Ice Awards were founded at the turn of the millennium by two like-minded Halifax entrepreneurs in order to annually showcase the brilliant talent of the thriving Atlantic Canadian marketing communications industry.
To visit this site, click on www.2tongues.ca.