About Wolastoq

My choice of a name for my company was made purely for reasons of nostalgia … for my home country of Canada, and particularly for the region of Saint John, New Brunswick. With a surface area of over 70,000 km2, New Brunswick is home to a mere 750,000 people. It is the only bilingual province in Canada, with inhabitants primarily of French, English, Irish, Scottish, German, Acadian, Dutch, Welsh and Italian origins, as well as First Nations.

With so few people in the province and so much land, what I remember most about Saint John is nature – the colour of the leaves in fall, the enormous lakes, the rivers and the ocean, which I barely noticed when I lived in New Brunswick, and the wide-open spaces. In winter, these spaces are covered in so much snow that the landscape is a pure white as far as the eye can see.

After more than 20 years in France,  I can still at times hear the sound of a Canadian wind blowing across a frozen lake in the middle of a wood, and I can smell the ocean air from afar. Isabel Allende says “roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.” Choosing Wolastoq (the original, indigenous name of the Saint John River) as the name of my company is simply a way of extolling the virtues of this beautiful and bountiful place that I once called home.

For more information about Saint John, New Brunswick, and other towns along the bay, see the links below.