The lazy, hazy days of summer are almost over for me. I’ve “been on vacation” for two weeks, or as close to a vacation as one can get on the farm.
We started out with a short jaunt to B.C., spoiled at the outset when one of our precious days was spent in the Calgary airport waiting 11 hours for a plane to be fixed that, in the end, never did fly that day.
One we got to Kelowna, it was great, but this was one of the times when getting there wasn’t half the fun.
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However, sitting on a deck overlooking Lake Okanagan, going to sleep to the sound of waves gently breaking on the shore, enjoying a leisurely lunch at a winery, do much to soothe ruffled feathers.
I confess to being a newspaper junkie and over the past couple of nights have been reading some of the selection of papers I brought home with me from B.C.
On the front page of the Sunday Vancouver Province the headline reads “Why more B.C. families are fleeing to Alberta.”
The story said Alberta offers jobs, cheaper homes, lower taxes, easier commuting.
In Kelowna, where we attended the wedding of my husband’s cousin, who is originally from Saskatchewan, we met his boss, the publisher of an area newspaper. Comparing notes on our two provinces, the publisher told us the B.C. economy is sinking partly because of problems in the logging industry and the demise of the Pacific salmon.
His worries about the economy were echoed in the Province article which said that the province’s economy “has been pushed to the lip of a recession.”
The province’s business community, the article says, cites the “Asian crisis” as one reason for B.C.’s economic woes along with “high taxes and what they claim are the anti-business, pro-labor policies of Premier Glen Clark’s NDP government.”
There were about 40 of us visiting from Saskatchewan, and there wasn’t a lot of compassion for the “sunshine province” and its plight.
One visitor suggested that, instead of a recession, the economy is simply coming down somewhat after years of riding an economic high.
They don’t know what a recession is, another Saskatchewan visitor suggested.
Having in the past two months been in Ontario, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, I confess that my sympathies for the economy rest more with the east coast than the west.
