Scheduling the Death of our Province
Our Finance Minister - Loyola Sullivan - was on CBC' s Cross-Talk as a special guest. The first thing he pointed out was that pre-budget consultations scheduled for Labrador City - Happy Valley-Goose Bay - St. Anthony - Corner Brook and Stephenville have been postponed. Apparently the schedule does not work right now and the government has a heavy Cabinet agenda during this time. Do you think he might have known that prior to making the schedule - or is government not willing to face the people since the fibre optic fiasco reared its patronage head?
Next the Minister announced the postponement of an interim finance statement because Terra Nova is not back onstream yet. The Minister says he does not want to have to restate numbers when the re-start of the oil field might be just days away.
The statement looks to be lined up for release during the polling period - and they do not want to project the lower numbers that would be evident without Terra Nova.
Loyola Sullivan also painted a pretty grim picture for our province, read this quote:
"For the first time now - in this year - our death rate has exceeded the birth rate - so we're starting to see that high birth rate in our province - from the one of the highest in the country now to the lowest in the country. So that's caused a problem - we've had a tremendous outmigration - particularly in the nineties - it slowed down significantly in the last few years - but this year it's been about 5300 people and that's been reasonably significant in that it impacts on our budget overall - transfer payments for health and education are done on and social services - on a per-capita basis. So obviously less people - less money and transfers too under equalization come under that." He says some 10 million worth - so far.
That's the first tidbit of the "positive" outlook for the Province's economy our Finance Minister sees. With the outmigration patterns - we can determine that economic policies over the past three years have contributed to the loss of people. In 2002 - the Province had turned the corner and actually reversed the pattern by producing a small net-migration. The other problem the Minister points out is the historic (first time in Canada) that a province had a higher death rate than birth rate. This points to massive losses in young adults staying in the province and starting families.
On the issue of our future and our most valuable resource - our youth - Sullivan predicts a fatal loss - indicating that this government will be the architect of our biggest giveaway yet. Here's the quote he gave while answering a person concerned about teacher allocations in rural areas.
"Over the period of 1973 by 2013 it's estimated that we will have only 35% of students we have in the system over that period - so we're looking at a significant drop down to to about 58,000 from 163,000."
Currently the provincial numbers show 76,763 - that means Loyola expects a loss of 21,000 - 27% - more kids from our schools and communities over the next 7 years. That is the economic recovery plan! There was no comment by the Minister saying how this might be stopped or slowed - it just is!
Just by way of note - a partial cost of the fisheries moratorium was a great portion of almost 50,000 children from our schools and from our province.
If we open our eyes and look at the real numbers - what is the Doug House/Danny Williams economic recovery plan? Get as much revenue from the non-renewable resources as you can to pay for healthcare and social services for seniors because we will have no tax-base left.
The plan is nothing more than scheduling the death of our Province.
3 comments:
Good luck waiting for the opposition to put up afight against danny boy. If their not afraid of their own shadow their afraid danny's gonna bring out their pork barreling. There a bunch of tired old liberals hanging on to get the last cent. Don't you know their entitled to their entitlements.
If majority rules in the Liberal caucus every vote is the same "I don't give a shit I'm not running again. That group needs to be guted like the fed party. our premier is a real problem but theres no other choices.
Our Opposition does need to make some changes - the Party has work to do also.
"Our Opposition does need to make some changes - the Party has work to do also."
What does this mean?
You should write something about the changes.
Post a Comment