New Brunswick's motto is "Spem Reduxit," or "Hope Restored." If one could be so bold as to suggest an updated motto, my suggestion would be "United we stand, divided we fall."

Or, as anglo-American political philosopher Thomas Paine put it back in the days of his country's biggest transformational change: "If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately."

I was one of those fortunate enough to see financial journalist Andrea Mandel-Campbell speak in front of a small audience in Fredericton 10 days ago. However, anyone who follows the news in New Brunswick didn't need to be present that evening to know that we as a province are too often falling divided on crucial issues.

Mandel-Campbell's book, Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson, could just as easily been titled Why Canadians Drink Corona. She spent 10 years as a financial journalist in Latin America, much of it as the Mexican bureau chief for the London Financial Times, and saw firsthand the expansion of foreign investment into that part of the world as well as the continued expansion of Mexican corporations into the global market. What she didn't see was a lot of Canadian involvement.

The title refers to the fact that Mexican beer, such as Corona (which is made with barley imported from Canada) has become popular in 150 countries while Molson not only failed to expand with globalization but succumbed to an American buyout. And let's face it, we pride ourselves on our beer much more than Mexico.

We in New Brunswick spend a lot of our time debating French and English, seeing competition between the three major cities, and watching north-south and urban-rural tensions. At least we got past that Protestant-Catholic business a couple of generations ago.

Not many people outside New Brunswick care about our little internal squabbles, but being as we are a tiny, aging population in a big country (we're 2 per cent of Canada) in an even bigger planet (Canada is 0.5 per cent of the world), it might be time to look ahead with a little more solidarity.

That's hard to do, because our institutions reflect our diversity as much as they do our unity. MLAs, for instance, are first charged with the best interests of their individual constituencies, the people who keep them in power, and go along with a larger government agenda at their own peril. Saint John doesn't get its share of federal investment, northern New Brunswick is overlooked, the Acadian Peninsula gets no respect, Moncton doesn't play well with others - whatever it is, we'll always have reasons to point at the other person in the raft and yell "no fair" instead of paddling together to the shore. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's a knee jerk reaction; sometimes we just need to get over it.

Promoting the big picture of New Brunswick by bringing leaders from various sectors together is part of the mandate of 21inc, the organization that invited Mandel-Campbell to Fredericton that night as part of the launch of its 21 Leaders 2008 program. In a criticism that couldn't have underscored this theme more strongly if it had been intentionally designed to do so, l'Acadie Nouvelle ran an article the following Monday criticizing the composition of the newly selected 21 Leaders on the basis of their language and where in the province they originated from.

This is precisely the sort of bickering Mandel-Campbell discussed, and, frankly, the sort of bickering people across the province have become increasingly sceptical about over the years. 21inc's selection committee was charged with choosing the 21 best applicants from across New Brunswick, not based on regional or linguistic or any other quotas, categories, or arbitrary groupings.

This is not to fault a francophone New Brunswicker for paying attention to these things. The fact that Acadia isn't a quaint Louisiana North is because of the vigilance and militancy of people looking out for their rights and their place, and New Brunswick is better for it. If it hadn't been for some real transformational change in the 1960s - Trudeau's Official Languages Act, Robichaud's Official Languages Act, the founding of the Université de Moncton, even the Second Vatican Council's decision to have mass in the vernacular - we could be living in a very different province.

The l'Acadie Nouvelle article, however, illustrates how easy it is for us to fall back on unproductive regional and linguistic interpretations of events. I'm sure the 21 Leaders are already reflecting on how l'Acadie Nouvelle can help them better understand the province as a whole.

We know Mexicans don't drink Moosehead because it gets stolen en route, but Mandel-Cambpell's observations on the global economy should remind us that though we may see a big difference between anglophone, urban Saint John and francophone, rural Caraquet, to the rest of the world, it's all just New Brunswick.

Peter T. Smith teaches English and psychology at Kennebecasis Valley High School and lives in Hampton. He can be reached by e-mail at ptsmith_tj@hotmail.com. His column appears on Tuesday.