The threat from Muskrat Falls can only be removed by concerted action that addresses the project’s financial burden, restores integrity to the system of electricity regulation, and that breaks, once and for all time, the fundamentally corrupt relationship between the provincial hydro-electric corporation and the provincial government. This is the only way to restore power to the province’s people so that they may control their own future.
And there shall be plans, and planning for plans...
This weekend, there’s a story at CBC about a
recent study done by a provincial government department into
why people from this province leave and what it would take to get them back.
Don’t be bothered by that sense you’d heard the story before because you had.
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| Danny Williams and an unidentified aide unveil the New Approach, 2003 (not exactly as shown). Some things are best left buried. |
The new CBC story came out of a recent two-parter in The
Independent. That came out of questions raised in the House
of Assembly in June about the bits the government had cut out of the report it
commissioned in 2018.
Everyone fixated on the bits the government cut-out in
the recent story but there’s something in the conclusions. The people surveyed were all under age 35,
had higher education, and marketable skills.
They left either to find work or find better work and they would come
back to the province if they could find a job or a situation here comparable to
the one they already have.
This is something people in this province have known
for the better part of a century and it is certainly something the provincial
government has known for at least 30 years or more. Not even a hint of exaggeration in any of
that.
The study is part of the current administration’s
effort to develop a plan to replace the strategy developed by the crowd that
ran the place before now to attract what
Danny Williams used to call the homing
pigeons back to Newfoundland and Labrador.
And the key feature of the ex-pat report is the same
as the key feature of a study on immigration or young
people who were thinking about leaving the province. If there are jobs, they will either stay,
come back, or come here in the first place, depending on the current physical
location of the group you are studying.
