By Barry Stagg
August 1996
THE OFFICE BOYS NEAR RETIREMENT
DREE, FRED and ACOA are three of the more notorious cheque writing schemes that the Federal Government has used in Newfoundland in the name of regional development. These programs go back nearly thirty years but particularly to the start of the Trudeau era of federal politics in 1968.
These baleful substitutes for private capital and initiative have produced only one growth industry: careers for the office boys and girls who run these programs.
Since we have had close to thirty years of this type of fiscal shell game, we now have a boat full of treadmill operators getting ready to bail out of the system with that convenient pension lifejacket.
The bunch that are about to be pensioned off in one way or another are not just civil servants. They also include those in the various paper industries that have developed to serve the fetid sandbox cannibal that calls itself regional development. These worthies may be called consultants or they may be called analysts or they might go by the name of economist, facilitator, project manager or that old chestnut of a name, development officer. Into this pungent brew are mixed the unique spices that the "employment counsellor" brings to the Newfoundland market place.
On top, literally and figuratively, of these paragons of ambition are the politicians, federal and provincial, who have graduated out of the white collar public service industry into roles as the anointed political representatives of that particular class of public spirited martyrs.
Just get a list of the M.H.A.'s gracing the House of Assembly these days. Check out their career data and see how many of them are coming from careers where their paycheques came directly from the public purse. Teachers, nurses, political assistants and straight gut civil servants stand out in copious numbers among the current crop. A look at the political archives will show the same consistent pattern. The economic class that dominates Newfoundland is the public servant class. The public servant class elects its own to political power.
Now at the end of the nasty nineties, the boys and girls at the public trough are getting a little tired and many are looking to the gold ring or should it be called the golden handshake that comes with a paid up public pension.
So there we have it. The phenomenally unsuccessful and, in fact, outright economically destructive regional development programs of ACOA and its predecessors have not only produced a plague of unproductive civil servants. It is now going to produce a crop of pensioners to supplement the drain on the public treasury that the existing civil service continues to cause.
The essence of the whole civil service organization surrounding regional development is that of office boys shuffling papers and cutting cheques coming out of the general revenue of government. That is not a very complicated business structure. The complication comes with the contortions that the regional development industry resorts to in order to build bureaucratic structures that mask the pitiful reality that the whole industry revolves around a variation on social assistance payments. Maybe if we called the regional development funding "white collar welfare" then maybe more people would see the thing for the awful, destructive menace that it really is.
White collar welfare has made many a career. There are many who have spent their lives either running the treadmills or helping to put others on similar roads to nowhere. The latest cycle using this method has been the buying out of fishermen from their livelihoods. Leave it to the Federal Government to devise a make-work project for the shirt and tie crowd that consists of buying up the right of Newfoundlanders to work in private industry.
We can rest assured that this trend will continue since the master of the art of federal cheque writing now resides in the Newfoundland Premier's chair. We simply have a hierarchy politically and bureaucratically that believes absolutely in the role of Newfoundland government as office boys and girls slowly and conspicuously shunting federal money around the province.
Is history repeating itself? Commission of Government in the 1930's made the colonial paper shufflers kings of the castle. Now the paper shufflers and money manipulators have political authority but little else to distinguish themselves from the days of government without representation. Happy retirement everybody.