By Barry Stagg
January 1994
CORRUPTION
I read a report recently that calculated sixty-three per cent of the Newfoundland workforce is unemployed. I will let the statisticians duel about the accuracy of these statistics, but the point made is inescapable. Where Newfoundlanders do not work for the government or do not work in some aspect of the public service such as teaching or the hospital industries, they are extremely likely to be out of work.
The loathsome aspect of this is that even the employed sector is for the most part living off government money. The class structure of the province is tied in directly to the level that a particular citizen has on the civil service pay scale. This makes for a workforce that is becoming devoid of any initiative to take chances and to create industry.
Forty-five years of Confederation has transformed a society from peasant independence to welfare ghetto dependence. The welfare ghetto is founded on the transfer of government money from Ottawa to St. John's.
There is no better way to corrupt and destroy the initiative of young people than to tell them that their future and their prosperity lie not in education and intelligence and daring, but rather in posterior puckering on the way to filling that job opening in the nearest crevice of the civil service. What a way to teach your children as they grow up. "Please do not worry too much about doing well in school or finding the best career." "Worry instead about whether you will get a chance to take daddy's and mommy's place in the local high school or down at the local employment office". The oxymoronic "employment office" might as well be renamed the welfare office since its main task these days is to dispense tiny driblets of government money in ten week doses.
Ten years ago Brian Peckford was fighting like the devil to get the off-shore oil developed while the private oil companies were still interested in spending their own money. I wondered aloud then why many of my friends in Newfoundland who worked for government were strangely opposed to the Peckford plan. I heard time and time again from young government workers, all of whom were under thirty, who were convinced that Newfoundland did not have the moral right to control and harvest the off-shore bounty for its own use. I was amazed to hear Trudeau-like philosophizing from these tenured children. They were willing to sell Newfoundland into decades of poverty rather than have the rest of Canada classify the province as greedy for wanting to reap the bounty of its own resources.
I knew then why they acted this way and now I hope they realize the greedy folly of their ways. My friends had no interest in seeing private industry develop in the province if it meant any controversy with the federal government that might lower the torrent of transfer dollars that was funding their rapidly escalating civil service salaries. Teachers and counsellors of every variety were certainly not interested in seeing their public positions put at risk for the sake of mere prosperity for the unwashed private sector.
The sad fact is that they won. These people consistently oppose any effort to make Newfoundland into the Alberta of the East. Now as the provincial government is forced to attack pension funds, many of them are checking their bank books and coming to realize that their greedy gravy train of the 1980's maybe scrunching to the end of the track.
One of the reforms that Newfoundland needs is a reform that is being cried out for all across Canada. Deep in the gut of Canadian politics, voters are calling out for a massive layoff of government workers. Predictable moans and howls come from the public service unions All are equipped to shriek out references to the lack of a social conscience in those who would lay off such necessary instruments of government. Where were these moralists when the great industries of Canada were being trampled so that obscene amounts of tax dollars could be extracted to fund outrageous and downright piggish government employment?
The last federal election threw out the Tories in a resounding way. The Liberals were thrown into office by the voters mainly because they were not the Tories and the electorate was prepared to give one last chance to the run of the mill politicians that scurry around Ottawa. However a day of reckoning is going to come regarding government in Canada. The Liberals know this and they are making brave noises about changing the way government relates to the ordinary citizen. However I fear that the convenient noises being made by the likes of Lloyd Axworthy and Paul Martin are just to disguise the Liberals intention to govern as usual. I can really see little difference between the Liberal attitudes of 1994 and the attitudes that the Liberals brought back to Ottawa in 1980 when Trudeau rose from ruin.
There may be a tinge of fundamentalist dogma to the Reform Party, but it remains the best bet for true grass roots reformation of the Canadian political system. The Reformers, whether they like it or not, are representative of a movement of ordinary voters who simply do not want to be scrunched under the jackboot of government anymore. If the Reformers are able to stick to an agenda of cleaning up government and making government simple, then they will succeed. If Reform stumbles and becomes just a 90's version of the Social Credit movement of the 1940's and 50's, then it will find itself edged to the fringes of politics once again.
Unless the Tories are able to re-invent themselves during the next four years, the Reform Party will be in a position to sweep eastward from Ontario through to the Atlantic provinces using the same simple message of making government simple and responsive to people.
People are simply fed up with government paycheques that make some of their government employed neighbours rich, fat and snobbish. They are not going to tolerate endless decades of this nonsense which finds the ordinary tax payer kneeling down and paying homage to the overpaid civil servant who lives in the mansion on the hill.