He works for Purolator Courier of Canada, the nation's largest overnight courier service, which came to Moncton two years ago, attracted by the area's bilingual workers, a state-of-the-art phone system and lower wage rates than in the company's home province of Ontario. In addition, New Brunswick lifted its provincial sales tax on toll-free 800 numbers.

"We chose Moncton as one of the most cost-effective locations for telemarketing and corporate support offices in all of North America," says Fred Manske, Purolator's chief executive officer. (Canada's Purolator was once a subsidiary of the American company of the same name, but a group of investors bought the Canadian courier unit in 1987. American Purolator, a producer of oil filters, is no longer in the courier business.)

Mr. Melanson is among those hired to take calls about pickups and package-tracing from Quebec and other provinces seven days a week. He and his co-workers in neighboring cubicles field nearly 20,000 calls a day.

Others do data entry and billing operations. Altogether, Purolator accounts for 400 new Moncton jobs. It and other companies with similar operations have added nearly 2,000 jobs to the local economy, almost making up for those lost when the rail yard shut down in 1988.

Frank McKenna, New Brunswick's two-term premier is one of the policy architects of the economic rehabilitation that he likes to call the "Moncton Miracle." Bilingualism and the adaptation of new computer and communications technologies, he says, represent "our ticket on the uptown bus."