Some smart bunny or bunnies is buying advertising in the Grand Falls-Windsor weekly to remind locals how much money is being made from hydro assets the provincial government seized last December.
Run bi-weekly in the local Grand Falls-Windsor Advertiser under a banner that reads "Expropriation by the Numbers," the sparsely worded ads suggest the province has so far earned $28 million from the hydro facilities.
The ads say that's $1,100 for every citizen in the Exploits Valley, and question why more of that money isn't being spent in the region.
There’s a move afoot in central Newfoundland to get the money from the hydro assets to offset the loss of the Abitibi paper mill.
Thus far, the requests have fallen on deaf ears.
But the expropriation story just won’t stop bleeding all over the political landscape. Not only are the crowd in central looking for cash but there’s a good chance the provincial government will wind up paying big time for the expropriation itself.
This central story has got to be causing some hard political damage to the careers of people like Susan Sullivan, one of the local members of the provincial legislature. Even a quickie elevation to cabinet hasn’t silenced the cries for government cash.
Then again, it’s not like the provincial government doesn’t have bags and bags of cash it doesn’t want to talk about, either.
Odd then that they are resisting any kind of substantive move in central Newfoundland to deal with the ongoing political damage done by the hasty and evidently ill considered seizure back in December. The way this whole mess is unfolding, you’d almost think the whole expropriation was done at the spur of the moment without even a hint of a plan, let alone a second thought for any of the consequences.
N’ah. Couldn’t be.
-srbp-