Opinion · New Brunswick

The Door Painted on the Wall

A teacher comes home to a province that swears it needs teachers — and finds the handle won't turn.

By Ross Cline ·June 19, 2026 ·5 min read

I'm leaving New Brunswick next week. Before I go, I want to set down plainly — and on the record — what happened when a qualified man came home and tried to work here.

I came home.

After fifteen years in Taiwan — where I landed with no family, no marriage, no visa handed to me through a wife, and built an English school in Taichung from nothing, hiring teachers and writing curriculum and making payroll — I came back to New Brunswick. The province I was born and raised in. I came back for reasons that are their own long story. But I came back the way you're supposed to be able to: believing that two decades of building something real would count for something in the place that made me.

It counted for nothing. And I want to walk you through exactly how, because the how is the part that should make people in Fredericton and Ottawa shift in their seats.

New Brunswick will tell you, loudly and constantly, that it is desperate for teachers. The postings are real — you can find them yourself. The multicultural centre in Saint George has advertised for full-time English teachers on Indeed.ca, the same boards the rest of the country uses. I brought one of those postings to my own constituency office in person. Nothing came of it. I drove to Fredericton more than once and shook the hand of the man who runs the newcomer and language-learning programs, résumé in hand, and asked whether there was something we could build together — or, failing that, anything at all I could teach for them. No callback. Not once.

Here is the record of a man trying. I have sent more than four hundred tailored résumés and cover letters. I have walked into the YMCA, the newcomer centre, WorkingNB. I cannot get hired to teach. I cannot get on as a substitute. I cannot volunteer in a public school. I can't drive the bus. Twenty years of doing the exact work this province claims it cannot find people to do, and not one door opens — not even the unpaid ones.

And when I finally sat across the desk at WorkingNB and laid it out plainly — that a man with my background had gone a year and a half without work — I was told that this is normal. An office with the word working in its name told me that my not working, eighteen months of it, was normal, and offered me nothing else. That single word is the whole story. A government body, funded to put people into jobs, looked at a qualified citizen being turned away for a year and a half and called it normal.

My not working — eighteen months of it — was “normal.”

I was also told that if I wanted to make myself more employable, the route was a four-year program — as though twenty years of running a business were a blank page to be filled in. So I retrained anyway, on my own dime and my own time: a six-month digital-marketing course, three evenings a week, three hours a night, over Zoom. I have never once sat still. While I waited, I taught English for free to newcomers settling here.

One of those students works full-time for the federal government, interviewing applicants day after day. In one of our lessons we rehearsed how she might raise an idea with her manager — a small, sensible fix. Instead of re-entering a single new hire's information five separate times, she'd worked out, you could keep the file in the cloud where the whole team could see it, and save the government around six thousand dollars a year. She only wanted help putting it into English. So there I sat, for free, coaching a tired public servant on how to pitch her own boss a way to save public money — the exact kind of office work I spent twenty years doing — while I can't get hired to do any of it myself. And when she finally raised the idea, she told me, her manager asked her to let it go. Wait until I retire, she said.

Wait until I retire.

That is the province in a single exchange. A worker doing the job, too worn down to push the improvement. A manager who'd rather the waste outlast her career than fix it on her watch. And a man with twenty years of exactly the right experience sitting at the same table — useful enough to coach her, and invisible to everyone who could actually hire him.

Let me be careful here, because this is where the lazy version of this story goes wrong. I do not resent the newcomers. I teach them, I like them, and they are doing nothing but what any of us would do. When a government subsidizes part of a person's wage to make hiring them attractive, the employer is being rational and the worker is being entirely fair. The worker is never the problem. The problem is a structure that will pay to place one able person in a seat and leave another, every bit as able, standing on the step with no door of his own — and then call his standing there normal.

While we're on the word unqualified: I was judged unqualified for a classroom by a system that finds room for people whose working lives were spent in trades with no connection to teaching at all. That is not a shot at tradespeople — they are the backbone of this province and I'd never look down on the work. It's a point about logic. “Unqualified” cannot mean anything honest if it disqualifies the man who spent twenty years teaching and ran his own school, while the door stays open elsewhere.

So here is New Brunswick, as I have lived it: a province with a door painted on a wall. The sign says we need you. The handle doesn't turn. And when you knock long enough to ask who answers for a door that doesn't open, the office whose entire job is that door tells you nothing is wrong. This is normal.

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I'm leaving. In a week I'll be on a plane to Southeast Asia — alone, in debt — heading back toward the part of the world that once let a man with nothing build something that mattered. I didn't want to go. I gave this place a fair shot, a fairer one than it gave me. I'm not writing this out of anger, though God knows I've earned a little. I'm writing it because I came home, and there was no home here for someone like me, and somebody in Fredericton and somebody in Ottawa ought to have to read that sentence and account for it.

A province can need teachers and still turn away the teacher standing right in front of it. Mine did. I'd like someone, finally, to explain why.