Louis Robichaud

Louis Joseph Robichaud

With the Equal Opportunity program, the language rights act of 1969 establishing New Brunswick as an officially bilingual province, and for his role in the creation of the Université de Moncton, Robichaud is credited with ushering in major social reform in New Brunswick.

Life and achievements

At the age of 14, Robichaud left home to enter the Juvénat Saint-Jean-Eudes in

He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick in 1952 as the youngest ever Acadian member of the assembly to that date.^[2]

He became provincial Liberal leader in 1958 and led his party to victory in 1960, 1963 and 1967 before being defeated by Richard Hatfield's Conservatives in the 1970 election.

Robichaud was the first

Robichaud also restructured the municipal tax regime, ending the ability of business to play one municipality against another in order to extract the lowest tax rates. He introduced in 1963 the Municipal Capital Borrowing Act and Board,^[4] which is designed to act as a brake for spendthrift municipalities.^[5] He also expanded the government and sought to ensure that the quality of health care, education and social services was the same across the province—a programme he called Equal Opportunity, which is still a political buzz phrase in New Brunswick. "When I first realized that there was absolutely no equal opportunity, no equality, in New Brunswick," he recalled in the 1980s, "well, I had to come to the conclusion that something had to be done immediately."

A desk made for Robichaud by the Saint John Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company and given to him in 1966, which he used during his last years as premier and which was used by his successor Richard Hatfield was returned to the Premier's Office by Shawn Graham in 2006.^[6]

He was instrumental in the creation of the Université de Moncton in 1963, while in 1969, a high school was named in his honour in Shediac, New Brunswick.

In 1971, upon resigning from the legislature, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and Canadian chairman of the International Joint Commission, a post he held until being called to the Senate of Canada on December 21, 1973. He sat in the Senate until his mandatory retirement from the upper house on October 21, 2000 upon reaching his seventy-fifth birthday.

He was a resident of New Brunswick at the time of his death from cancer at the Stella-Maris-De-Kent Hospital in Sainte-Anne-de-Kent, near his birthplace of Saint-Antoine, New Brunswick. The cancer had been discovered only a few weeks before his death. He died on January 6, 2005.^[7]

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