By Barry Stagg
July 1996
TORONTO: THE NEWFOUNDLAND OUTPOST
There is a nostalgia for the Old Country in Newfoundlanders in Ontario this year. Many of the baby-boomers are reaching that certain age and a lot of people are looking to Canada's version of the Emerald Isle as their idyllic final port of call.
I have some disturbing news for all of you jolly old-timers. You owe Newfoundland a lot more than just the deposit of your fanny and your pension cheque on Newfoundland's soil. If you move back to Newfoundland to retire then be prepared to be part of the rebuilding of the province. Do not expect Newfoundland to turn itself into a cozy retirement home complete with deferential servants, all glad for the opportunity to have dribs and drabs of your pension cheque. Newfoundland does not need to become a big seaside retirement village for the pension brigades both from within and from without.
Our province is on the brink. It may be on the brink of absolute prosperity based on the extreme mineral wealth being discovered almost daily in Labrador and underneath our coastal waters. However it may also be on the brink of the most awful descent into bankrupt oblivion. It needs leaders and it needs citizens with courage and particularly the courage to risk their capital (ie.: their bank accounts) on the risky business of getting the people and thus the province into a state of prosperous self-reliance and independence. That is not going to happen if pensioners are going to have their hands out to government looking for tidy, quiet communities in which to vegetate in their leisure years.
The only way for Newfoundland to become prosperous is by a robust, vigorous and perhaps a brutal economy. We need the economy and the attitude and the atmosphere that goes with the mad scramble to exploit natural resources in the boom-towns of Canada be they Fort McMurray, Alberta, Labrador City or Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. This is the kind of economy and the kind of attitude and the kind of turmoil that will give Newfoundland a chance at prosperity. A retirement community is what Newfoundland must not be.
Prosperity and prosperity without government assistance, that meaning the success of private industry, is a must in Newfoundland in order to avoid what could be a very nasty class conflict over the next couple of decades. That class conflict will rear its ugly head in the form of inevitable animosity and conflict between the rest of the population and the pensioned hordes of baby-boomer government employees who are rapidly reaching retirement age in Newfoundland. Quite simply the pensioners of the year 2000 are going to be a tremendous drain on the Newfoundland treasury. We all may rest assured that the pension benefits negotiated between government and unions over the past twenty-five years are generous to a fault particularly where white-collar workers are concerned. What a contrast it will be when the "Freedom 55 bunch" are looking to make the province into a comfortable and cheap retirement home while the rest of us are struggling along to make a living from the land and to pay the taxes that are going to fund these pension cheques. This is the unhappy inevitability for a province that fails to develop its assets and to give its citizens an opportunity to be independent and self-supporting.
This is a cautionary tale for all of your good people who are planning that move "Eastbound 401" with a destination in Canada's happy province. The province needs you to be part of its economy, to be one of its risk-takers and its investors. It does not need you to create a self-absorbed community of mailbox watchers. We have had too much of that in the past and whether the cheque in the mailbox is a pension cheque, a U.I.C. cheque or some sort of convoluted subsidy payment, it is nevertheless money that is unearned in the present. You people from Newfoundland's largest outpost in Toronto owe a debt to Newfoundland as a province that raised you and fostered you and gave you the values and the strength to make a living in a bustling, tough economy on the mainland. Now you must repay that debt by reinvesting your money, your ideas and your vigour in Newfoundland. Do not let us down.