The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1968, Page 17

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
15
An address delivered by NORMAN S. BERGMAN, President of the Manitoba Chamber of
Commerce, at the annual Concert of The Icelandic Canadian Club, held on February 27, 1968,
in the Parish Hall of the First Lutheran Church, Winnipeg.
There are some days when every-
thing seems to go wrong. One does not
feel well, or one is tired or irritable—
and evyone you meet seems to react
to you the same way you act towards
them. If you happen to be in a grouchy
mood, everyone else seems to be a
grouch that day.
There are other days when things
just seem to go well. That usually hap-
pens on a day when you feel very good.
These statements simply point out
that our own attitudes have a lot to do
with the way people react to us, and
with the way the day has gone. We
are the same person, neither brighter,
stronger, nor richer. Yet the way we
act makes one day a nightmare, an-
other day a pleasant and successful
one.
This sometimes applies not only to
individuals, it applies collectively as
well. Take our province for example.
Manitoba, back in 1870 when it
became part of Canada was called the
“postage stamp” province because it
took in such a small area, (1/6 our
present size today). If the people in
Manitoba at that time had been pes-
simists, they could have said:—
“Look at the small area we have
here. Our main industry—the fur
trade—is not going to be of the
same importance. We only have a
few settlers. Our main town is so
small it will never amount to any-
thing. We are hemmed in by the
rocky wastelands of our East, by
a barren, useless, frozen, North,
and by all those empty grasslands
to the West. Even the buffalo are
dying off.”
It is a wonder that our first citizens
of this province did not pack it up
and leave then and there.
Well, we all know they stayed and
in two years, this province will cele-
brate its 100th birthday.
Those early settlers did not come
here to bemoan their cruel fate. They
had tough times—as difficult as it was
for many of our people who lived
through the 1930’s. But they looked,
not inward to what they did not have,
but outward to the opportunities that
challenged them.
They saw the empty grasslands to
the West, not as obstacles, but as op-
portunities—golden opportunities for
golden fields of wheat. They looked
on their new province—not as a lonely
outpost of the East, but as a jumping-
off point to the West. They saw the
new railways, not as money sunk into
servicing an empty prairie, but as
life lines to fill and build the Prairie
market—a growing Western market
that Manitoba was to service and sup-
ply.
They looked outward not inwards.
They felt they had growing opportun-
ities, and they built to meet them. The
West, the Canadian West, I suggest,
was won by optimists.
But something happened to our
Western outlook and our spirit in the
1930’s. Those horrible depression years
affected the whole world. But they