James McLeod has a great piece in the Telegram today. It comes complete with a great headline derived from a quote the Premier provides, all of which, in its own subtle way speaks volumes about the Newfoundland and Labrador Government’s unchanged half century-long view of how things ought to work in the fishing industry.
First, the headline:
‘Can’t constantly turn to government’: premier
And the relevant bits (with emphasis added)…
“Everybody in this province can’t constantly turn to government and say, ‘you fix it. You subsidize it.’ We can’t pay people to work. We can’t pay people to in communities in this province,” she said.
In Marystown – the part of the province Dunderdale is originally from – she laid a lot of the blame at the feet of the union, which rejected a plan to keep the plant open earlier this year.
Union members voted against a plan to keep the plant open for 18 weeks per year for the next three years.
“Eighteen weeks’ work opposed to no weeks work – that’s what people have got to ask themselves now,” Dunderdale said.
(The St. John’s Telegram, December 3, 2011)
The missing adjective in the Premier’s comments is that everybody can’t constantly turn to the provincial government.
In other words – what the Premier is saying is precisely what provincial governments for decades have cited as the guiding principle for the processing sector in Newfoundland and Labrador. That is, the provincial government can’t “pay people to live in communities in this province” but if only those uncooperative bastards in community x and y would’ve take eighteen weeks work (for EI purposes) we could have put Ottawa on the hook and “constantly turned” to that government to “pay people to live in communities in this province” instead.
As long as this mentality drives fishery policy in our province, absolutely nothing will change.
