Photo: Ashley Morgan moving from Quispamsis to North Carolina in 2000
I moved away because the opportunity was somewhere else. I was far from the only one.
By Ashley Morgan
This is Part Two of a three-part response to Barry Ogden’s “Third Place Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Saint John.”
Read Part One: “Saint John Didn’t Have to Fall This Far Behind.“
I left the Saint John area in 2000 when I was 23.
There was no dramatic moment. I didn’t leave New Brunswick declaring I would never return.
The opportunity was simply somewhere else.
I moved to North Carolina, built a career, got married, bought a house, and had a daughter.
And I wasn’t unusual.
A lot of the people I grew up with did some version of the same thing.
We didn’t disappear. We became accountants, developers, executives, teachers, engineers, healthcare workers, tradespeople, entrepreneurs and business owners. We bought houses, raised kids, paid taxes and spent the most economically productive decades of our lives somewhere else.
That may be one of Saint John’s biggest losses, and it’s much harder to see than an empty shipyard.
When a large employer closes, everyone notices.
When a 23-year-old moves to Toronto, Calgary, Halifax, Boston or North Carolina, nothing visibly changes.
Then another leaves.
And another.
Do that for 30 years.
Every city loses young people, and that isn’t necessarily bad. People should leave home, experience other places, and figure out what they want.
I’d still tell a 23-year-old from Quispamsis to go see some of the world.
The problem starts when leaving feels less like an adventure and more like the obvious thing you need to do if you want a broader range of opportunities.
UNB Saint John is part of this story for me because I went there.
I’m grateful for it. This isn’t criticism of the people teaching, studying, or working there. It’s a question of scale.
In fall 2025, UNB had 2,383 students in Saint John and 8,250 in Fredericton.
UNBSJ actually had more than 3,000 students back in 2002.
Then add St. Thomas University and the rest of Fredericton’s post-secondary population.
That difference changes a city.
Thousands of students need apartments, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, part-time jobs and things to do.
They make friends. They meet spouses. They get internships. They discover employers they had never heard of before moving there. Some graduate and leave. Some don’t. But every September the city gets another chance.
That is what a large university population does. It continually brings young people into town who otherwise might never have considered living there.
Saint John has spent decades worrying about young people leaving while operating with a much smaller post-secondary population than Fredericton.
That seems like something worth fixing.
A nice waterfront and a festival won’t convince somebody to build a life in Saint John if the career they want doesn’t exist there.
But I also think we sometimes pretend the job is the entire decision.
It isn’t.
Young people care whether their friends are around. They care about restaurants, nightlife, recreation, events, travel and whether the place feels like it is moving forward.
That’s why I keep coming back to things like Loyalist Days, the Flames and the Exhibition.
They weren’t economic-development programs. They were simply things people did together. They created memories.
The point is that when cities lose what brings people together, they need to create new things.
AREA 506 is a good example. Eleven years in, it has become something people actually plan around, and thousands of people come downtown for it.
That’s how new traditions start.
I’d love to see more of those.
Connectivity is part of this too.
When my family travels to Saint John now, we frequently fly into Bangor and drive across the border because the fares, schedules and options have often been dramatically better.
Think about how ridiculous that is.
We are specifically travelling to Saint John, yet sometimes the easiest way to get there is to fly into Maine, rent a car and then drive into Canada.
That isn’t me picking on Saint John Airport. Smaller airports have a very difficult job, and its new leadership is trying to improve service.
It’s simply an example of how little inconveniences add up.
If you live somewhere, can build the career you want there, enjoy your life and get where you need to go reasonably easily, staying becomes pretty attractive.
If enough of those things become difficult, you start looking around.
Then the cycle feeds itself:
Fewer students → fewer young adults → less nightlife and retail → less attraction for young professionals → slower housing and tax-base growth → more people choosing to live elsewhere → weaker city finances → fewer amenities → repeat.
That’s the cycle I’d love to see Saint John interrupt.
And maybe one of the easiest places to start is to ask the people who have already left.
Why did you leave? What would have made you stay? Would you ever come back? What would have to be different?
Former Saint Johners may actually be some of the easiest people to attract back.
We already know the place. We already know there’s no apostrophe and no “s” on the end. We still care about what happens there, and many of us still have family there too.
My life in North Carolina has been good. I don’t regret leaving.
I do wish the decision had been harder.
Saint John doesn’t need to keep every 23-year-old home forever.
It needs enough opportunity, energy, and confidence to stay a real choice.
And if people do leave, Saint John should become the kind of place they look at again 10 or 20 years later and think:
Maybe it’s time to return home.
Previous: “Saint John Didn’t Have to Fall This Far Behind.“
