Your humble e-scribbler said it most recently just a few days ago:
The two opposition parties are less concerned about the financial costs. Instead they are making the most of sounding like they want to do something while at the same time advocating more and more spending to prop up this bit of the industry or that bit.
The province’s New Democrats unveiled their fisheries policy on Thursday. It calls for increased government intervention in the fishery and an essentially open-ended commitment to public spending to keep plants open that are no longer financially viable or that are having problems due to excessive government intervention in the fishery already.
Here are some choice bits from the very brief NDP news release:
[NDP leader Lorraine] Michael says government must immediately reopen the plant [at Marystown] while the audit is going on, giving workers more employment.
The NDP wants the federal government to help fund the scheme in a perversion of the Employment Insurance system that looks more like make work than not:
In addition to demanding the immediate reopening of the plant, today the NDP is calling for the redirection of traditional Job Creation Partnership-type programs into the plant to ensure long term employment for fish plant workers.
And if that wasn’t enough, the New Democrats want to increase the government role in the fishery even more:
Michael also noted that since the plant is currently closed, the redfish concession given to OCI, which was agreed to by plant workers in order keep the plant open, should be revoked until the plant is reopened.
Now everyone should know that this specific release is aimed at a seat the NDP thinks they can win. But the principle behind it is exactly what your humble e-scribbler predicted. The NDP want to continue the Frankenstein experiment in social engineering begun decades ago with a return to the worst of the policies that helped create the current mess in the first place.
You couldn’t write a better parody of an NDP fisheries policy if you tried.
- srbp -