AND SO IT IS CONFIRMED
The End for Rural NB? Revisited….
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote an article entitled “The End for Rural New Brunswick?”. Honestly folks, I had no idea at the time that the barbarians would be at the gate so quickly! The June 26th headline in the Telegraph Journal reads “Create Jobs In Cities: Pollster” and goes on to report on the musings of a well known pollster, Don Mills, CEO of Corporate Research Associates. Well, it’s pretty clear what Mr. Mills thinks of us rural folks – we are a bunch of non-worthy hillbillies, expensive to maintain, and undeserving of any government services and jobs. In his world, proper economic strategy would be to essentially forget about “trying to find jobs for people in really rural places” and that we need to “change the expectation that you are going to be able to deliver jobs to the small rural areas”. And by small rural areas he means any community with a population of less than 5,000 souls. Unfortunately, 80% of NB communities have less than 2,000 inhabitants which means that he’s talking about you and your community!
Mr. Mills, and unfortunately the Alward government, seem to believe that we country folk suffer from a sense of entitlement and that if we would just move to urban areas, government could operate so much more efficiently and all our fiscal woes would be solved. He refers to us as a “problem”. Think our government isn’t on board with this? Consider the response of Health Minister Ted Flemming when asked about cut backs to health care delivery in Perth-Andover – “well, you chose to live there”. Nice.
Mr. Mills suggests that job creation efforts should be concentrated around “eight or nine centres” throughout the province and that essential government services be centralized there. This means no rural health care for certain and presumably no other essential services as well. Is Mr. Mills suggesting we have no policing in rural NB? No road maintenance? What about education? Can we not please have schools? Pretty please? We promise to be good.
Mr. Mills has obviously written off rural New Brunswick (and the rest of rural Atlantic Canada) and the article suggests, and I agree, that the Alward government is moving in the same direction. Susan Holt, CEO of the NB Business Council is quoted “I think what he is recommending aligns quite closely with the model that the government put in place roughly a year ago”. So the stars are aligned. Well, they might have given up on rural New Brunswick but we rubes haven’t! We know that the heart and soul of New Brunswick lies with its rural people. We are a rural province and we should be celebrating our rural roots and championing the people who can scratch out a living there. Government should be promoting our rural way of life and not looking at us as nothing more than an expensive annoyance that should just go away quietly. Believe me, we’re not!!
Al McPhail
Perth-Andover
