Some small towns are quiet and peaceful, shy and retiring, placid and unassuming. Some small towns are not Shediac
If you go to Shediac, New Brunswick, you will come to a place on the side of the road where a steel-reinforced concrete sculpture, measuring 10.7 metres long and five meters tall, stares back at you through big, beady eyes, and you will say to yourself, man, that’s one big lobster.
And you will be wrong, boyo, because it’s not just one big lobster; it’s the “World’s Largest Lobster.” It weighs 50 metric tons and rests on a 32 metric-ton pedestal. It took three years to complete at a cost of $170,000 in 1990. It annually attracts 500,000 visitors just like you, because it’s a “masterpiece”, according to everyone who lives around here and up and down the southeastern Acadian shore.
Here, in dear Shediac, where the Northumberland Strait kisses the coast, the beaches are allegedly longer and whiter and the water is putatively bluer and warmer than any place on Earth. Here, in stunning, superlative, avant-garde Shediac, the Beach Boys once played to a roaring crowd of 20,000 and that Hollywood guy—you know, the one who played Magnum PI on TV—once bought a home… or maybe he built one…
“Oh yeah, Tom Selleck was seen and, I think, was living at a cottage on the beach,” says Jacques LeBlanc, a former two-time mayor of the town and the current MLA for the area, with just a hint of “no-big-thang” in his voice. His point is why wouldn’t a guy like that want to come here? Why wouldn’t any sane person want to stay? Especially now.
A growing concern
After 10 years of positioning Shediac as something more than a resort community—a summer getaway for nearby Moncton—town mothers and fathers are beginning to reap the rewards of their promotional efforts. Statistics Canada says the resident population has grown 13 per cent to 7,500 since 2016.
There’s also been a wholesale transformation in the durable features that make any place functionally liveable. In 2015, the town’s council adopted its first cultural policy and established a committee to develop an action plan. In 2020, they spent money to repair Main Street and install solar panels on the multipurpose centre. Says LeBlanc: “We’ve established ourselves. We have great schools and amenities. The tax base is growing at an exponential pace.”
The Shediac Lobster Shop includes a display of unique statuary representing times past.
Roger Cassie, the current mayor, concurs. “We have had more growth recently than we’ve ever seen,” he says. “In 2020, building permits hit $25 million. In 2021, we obliterated that record by hitting $55 million. I’ve got one particular developer who owns a lot of land and has several different subdivisions, and he tells me that he’s never seen this before. He’s presently building at nine different locations in town, and he can’t build fast enough to keep up with the demand.”
They chalk some of this up to the COVID-19 emergency, which has famously driven weary, battered—yet still-deep-pocketed—urbanites from parts west to the East Coast for rescue and respite. And, certainly, Shediac is not the only small place in Atlantic Canada to benefit from the pandemic’s refugees. But the actual “come-from-aways” say the attraction is more resonant than that.
“When the town councillors say they are going to do something, they really mean it,” says Ange Ojeda Diaz, a baker who immigrated from France just as the global health crisis descended. Although he says that restrictions on social gathering and on-premises dining over the past couple of years have not been easy on his Main Street bistro—despite the influx of new residents—he’s sticking with it for as long as he can, because he thinks the future here seems brighter than the present anywhere else.
Toward the heights, together
In fact, says Shediac’s director of community living Denis LeBlanc, people like Diaz are not imagining things. In December, he notes, the New Brunswick government modernized how municipalities in the province are governed, reducing their numbers from 340 to 78 and 12 rural districts. That means that Shediac’s boundaries are suddenly expanding to include the nearby communities of Shediac Cape, Scoudouc, Pointe de Chêne (home to the area’s most famous seaside hangout, Parlee Beach). “We’ll be about 10,000 people in 2023,” LeBlanc says. “Those are people that we already serve in serve in terms of services—whether recreation, retail, whatever. With the population growing, the demand for new infrastructure and services will be getting a lot more permanent. We’ll be getting many more requests for these things.”
In other words, whatever Shediac had to offer before, it will soon have it in spades—bigger, better, more bountifully than ever—to offer all over again. For any other small town, that might be cause for pause. But, of course, this isn’t any other small town. Never has been.
If you read the community’s official history even lightly, you can’t help notice the through-line perfectly encapsulated by the motto, Together Toward the Heights. “If Shediac is considered as one of the most important Acadian regions, it is in large part, thanks to the many builders who truly believed in the area,” the narrative tells readers. “At the beginning of the 19th century, paths trampled on for thousands of years became the first truly organized means of public transportation in the Maritimes.”
Indeed, “New Brunswick’s first public road was constructed between Shediac and Moncton in 1816.” On this road, the first public transit service for the East Coast began. “It is therefore not surprising that the first railroad in the Maritime Provinces was established in Shediac. The first passengers were transported from Shediac to Moncton in August of 1857 on the European and North American Railway.”
If that’s still not enough blatant self-regard to convince you of the town’s determination, don’t forget that “Shediac was one of the most important railway centres in the country before the operations were moved to Moncton following [a] fire [in] 1872” or that “because of its ideal geographic location and vast reserves of timber, Shediac was the perfect site to construct sailing ships.”
When that fizzled out, Shediac survived because it became “instrumental in the development of air transport…. The first transatlantic airmail sent to Lancashire, England, was stamped at the Shediac Post Office on June 24, 1939…. The first commercial flights from North America to Europe departed from the Shediac terminal of Pan American Airways beginning on July 19, 1937.”
And just in case we missed the point, the history lesson concludes: “Shediac is recognized for its avant-gardism: as the site of the first shipbuilding yard; the first steam sawmills in New Brunswick; not to mention, the first passenger railway line in the Maritimes.”
Not to mention? Perish the thought.
Meal tickets
But it is precisely this litany of past “firsts” and “most importants” that keeps people like Jacques LeBlanc, Roger Cassie, and Denis LeBlanc focussed on the future. Tourism and seasonal industries have been and always will be Shediac’s main meal ticket, but history shows the community has more than one arrow in its economic development quiver. “I am a person who thinks that the status quo is not an option,” Jacques LeBlanc says. “The intricacies of all this are how we move forward. It’s now going to be important for the town of Shediac and the other [amalgamating] communities to come together and be open to working together for the greater good.”
Adds Cassie: “Either a community grows, or it’s gradually going to die. I know several that have gone through that; some used to be bigger than Shediac is now, and today they’re less than half the size. And we all know what the demographics of Atlantic Canada are: We have an aging population, and the baby boomer generation is retiring. So we still need to still attract more citizens.”
Chamber of Commerce President Sophie Belliveau—who owns and operates Ocean Surf RV Park at Pointe-du-Chêne—agrees, but she’s not especially worried. The key to Shediac’s success, she insists, is its attitude. Industrial and commercial opportunities have come and gone but the town’s state of mind—its cheerful habit of thinking big or, at least, about what’s possible—puts it in the way of opportunities.
“People are realizing they can have the best of both worlds, work and play,” she says. “We’re getting a more full-bodied experience when we go to Shediac, especially as we have more services. We’re moving to more of a year-round town. There’s a feeling that when you come here, you are kind of on vacation even though you need to work. Even people that have been gone for a while: ‘Yeah, you know what? It’s time to come back to my roots and come back to the place I know.’ You know?”
Warm beaches and remote work
Certainly, Jon Manship knows. Born and raised in Moncton, he’d been coming to Shediac for years. In 2007, the founder and former owner of Spielo International—one of the world’s leading manufacturers of gaming machines and software—finally bought a place on Parlee Beach. “I always wanted to live in Shediac,” he says. “There was a piece of property here that I’d admired for a long time…. It’s interesting to see how the demographics have changed. With immigration from Ontario and other provinces and from other countries, you can see the growth happening here.
“Right now there are several huge apartment complexes being built. People are actually moving here. The traffic, alone, has increased. And that’s regular traffic in the winter.”
Manship now focusses on philanthropic projects. He and his wife Leslie are founding partners, for example, in Excellence NB Association, which encourages businesses in the province to buy goods and services from one another. He’s also part-owner of the Moncton Miracles NBL Canada professional basketball team. Leslie owns the Neptune Drive-In in Pointe-du-Chêne, which she rents out to a local operator. “Parlee Beach is one of the nicest beaches in Canada—maybe even the best beach in Canada—because the water is so warm in the summer,” he says. “I’ve been all over the world, and this is one great beach.”
Living by the sea certainly hasn’t cramped their style. Working remotely, they’re still connected, in tune, plugged in. “When we started Spielo in Moncton, it really could have been in Shediac,” he says. “I think New Brunswickers often underappreciate the value of their own know-how, knowledge, persistence, work ethic, and smarts.
“You can say that for Atlantic Canada, in general… We’re here because we wanted to live by the ocean.” Because they could. And they do.
After all, Tom Selleck does… doesn’t he?
Manship laughs gently. “Yeah…okay…that’s all urban myth.”
Turns out, he says, that the women who owned the property before him had a son who liked to walk along the beach.
“So?”
“So,” he says, “he looked a little bit like Tom Selleck.”
What? The next thing he’ll be telling me is that isn’t the “World’s Largest Lobster” staring me down at the side of the road next to a town that doesn’t seem to know, or care to discover, its limits.