THE GREATEST 'LIBERAL' CITY IN THE EAST

My picks for 'pioneers of the year': the Cannabis Cafe and the gay
pride parade organizers.

A "liberal" current swept through Saint John last year that, from a
distance, would have eluded even the focused gaze of our new Pioneer
Man.

Imagine: It's last January, 2003 and you're asked to predict what will
happen in Saint John in the year to come. Who among us would
have said the following events would take place?

.The opening of the Cannabis Cafe in Saint John, the first one in
Canada outside Vancouver, with positive coverage from local media
outlets and little protest from the general public.

. A gay pride parade that would draw thousands of supporters and only
a handful of protestors.

There are many of us who believe that Saint John is more liberal than
most locals and outsiders think, but not that liberal.

It took some "pioneering" people to prove that our vision of a more
open-minded Saint John was more than wishful thinking.

For this reason, I have chosen the Cannabis Cafe and the organizers of
last year's gay pride parade to be my "pioneers of the year."

Granted, I'm taking liberties with Enterprise Saint John's concept of
pioneering. For the purposes of the growth strategy, pioneering is
meant primarily in the entrepreneurial sense. "Immigrants by choice or
circumstance, our founders and builders were entrepreneurs by nature
for generations...It is then our pioneer culture that we must endorse,
encourage and promote as it is essential to our growth-oriented
brand," the report states. Still, there is a cultural, as well as
economic, dimension to this report.

Pioneer Man is a symbol of the city's entrepreneurial spirit, but he
also represents a clear break from the Loyalist Man, who had come to
represent the city's conservative, close-minded image, at home and
across the country. The Pioneer Man is meant to project an inclusive,
dynamic image, one that speaks about the spirit of the entire
community, not just the spirit of its entrepreneurs.

The operators of the Cannabis Cafe - Jim and Lynn Wood - are cultural
and entrepreneurial pioneers, but the cafe is a success mainly because
it's at the forefront of the fight to legalize marijuana and make it
an accepted part of mainstream Canadian society.

A few people were arrested in the weeks after the cafe
opened.

One of them, Allen Merritt, made his fight against the charges a
public one and deserves "pioneer" status too for furthering the
community debate about this issue.

Despite these high-profile arrests, the Cannabis Cafe is still
operating, and has no fear of the police; in fact they relocated from
King St. to Canterbury St., across the street from the community
police station.

Gay pride organizers had a better than expected reaction from the
community, too. I'd been told that people in the gay community had
been reluctant in the past to stage a public event like a parade
because they feared the community at large shared MP Elsie Wayne's
disdain for them and would show up in droves to stage an angry protest.

Both gay rights and decriminalization of marijuana have been hotly
debated across the country in the last year. What makes Saint John a
pioneer is that it is a little city with big city attitudes about
these issues.

People assume liberal values about things like gay rights are rooted
mainly in large cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. Smaller
places - especially traditionally conservative ones like Saint John -
are thought to be immune to the value shifts taking place in large
urban centres.

This is why I thought it appropriate that Saint John became host to a
cannabis cafe before places like Montreal and Toronto. We showed the
country that liberal values were taking root in small-town Canada, as
well.