New Brunswickers Not Welcome in New Brunswick

I was born here. I came home after fifteen years. This is what was waiting.

When I came home to Charlotte County, my grandmother was still alive. She drove me to St. George, to the association that Ottawa and Fredericton pay to teach English to newcomers. I walked in with my résumé, the brochure from the school I ran in Taiwan for fifteen years, and a handful of posters. They looked at me as if I had three heads.

In August 2025 I found a listing online for a full-time Language Instructor at that same association. I applied again, in writing, on 18 August, and copied my MLA. The listing, as I found it that day, is below. I am still waiting for the call.

That is one door. I knocked on more than four hundred.

More than four hundred applications in about a year and a half, each with its own cover letter. Teaching. Tutoring. Settlement work. Office work. Security. I asked about driving a school bus when I heard the district was short of drivers. I shook hands in St. George, in Saint John, in Fredericton, at the YMCA. I put up notices for English classes more than once. They did not stay up.

What came back was one offer, construction labour at minimum wage, and one sentence from the provincial employment service: a year and a half without work is normal.

I will say the awkward part myself. I do not have a finished degree. I am finishing one now at the University of New Brunswick. The certificates for a funded English classroom want the degree first, so on paper I am screened out before anyone reads what I did for fifteen years. Fine. That is a rule. Now watch what the province does when a rule like that gets in the way of someone it wants.

The programme

In 2022 New Brunswick built a programme called GNB Mosaïk. I asked for its records under the Right to Information Act and received 59 pages. The programme's own report lists what keeps qualified people out of work here: being screened out for “lack of Canadian experience or references”, credentials that are not recognised, no local network. That is my year and a half, in the government's handwriting.

To get people past those barriers the province spent about $1.87 million of federal and provincial money on a route into its own public service: hiring “regardless of the level of their language skills”, paid language classes, translators at interviews, mentors, and an “emphasis on transferable skills and potential, rather than specific job experience.”

It is a good programme. Then comes the sentence that says who it is for:

“anyone who was not born in New Brunswick.”

I was born in New Brunswick. Nobody refused me. There was simply no door with my name on it.

Where it stings

These days I teach English to a newcomer in Fredericton. I do it for free. She has a funded class, and she told me she struggles to follow her instructor's English. So the province pays for a class that is not working for her, and the teacher she comes to instead cannot be hired to teach her. I can only do it for nothing.

I am glad she is here. I am glad they are all here. I spent fifteen years as the foreigner in someone else's country, and I know exactly what it is to need a patient teacher. When Rebel News went after Tim Hortons over its foreign workers, it aimed at the wrong people. The person handing you a coffee did not write the policy. Governments did. Point the camera there.

And follow the money while you are at it. The records I received show about $660,000 of provincial settlement money in three years to that one association in my county, on top of a federal settlement agreement worth about $900,000 for 2020 to 2025. Every provincial funding letter carries the same condition: hirings must be “transparent, fair, equitable”. In the copy the province sent me, every staffing line is blacked out. I have asked, in writing, whether that instructor's job was funded and whether it was ever filled. The province has extended its deadline for that answer to late November.

I also asked a simpler question in August: is there any programme, policy or record that deals with New Brunswickers who come home? The province's deadline for that answer was 12 November 2026.

For a year and a half I felt like a turd in the punch bowl. In my own province. There were mornings at the coffee counter when the whole shop went quiet at the sound of me, and I knew what the look meant.

So I left again. I can do better for myself in Cambodia than I ever could in New Brunswick. My father is getting older on Deer Island, and I am not there.

Three things

I am not asking for anything to be taken from anyone.

Count us. Nobody seems to know how many New Brunswickers come home each year, or what becomes of them.

Open the door that already exists. Fifteen years abroad leaves the same gaps on paper as arriving last month: no Canadian experience, no references, no network. If “transferable skills and potential” is the test, apply it to us.

Let experience be assessed. Fifteen years of running a school should be something a person can put in front of an assessor.

New Brunswick spends a great deal to bring people here, and it should. It would cost almost nothing to notice the ones trying to come back.

This is one piece of a larger record

• The Door Painted on the Wall
• Screened Out at Home
• 551 Pages: What Canada Did, and Did Not Do
• Two Visits, No Answer: Documenting an Eighteen-Month Silence
• The Day a Judge Picked Up the Phone
• The interview: “When Justice Doesn’t Speak Your Language” (The Translation Podcast, with Apple Podcasts, Spotify and video links)
• At the Round Table: my case told out loud
• Press page and documents

Sources for the figures in this post: New Brunswick Right to Information releases 2627-FTB-20 (Finance and Treasury Board, GNB Mosaïk, 59 pages, November 2026) and Opportunities NB (funding agreements, September 2026); Government of Canada grants and contributions records. Pictures made with AI. Written with AI assistance from my own documents; I check every fact myself.