CANADIAN Wheat Board minister Ralph Goodale must be getting a bit nervous these days about the allies coming to his defence.
Canada’s business media once again are hailing the Regina Liberal as a right-wing poster boy, praised for his resolve to kill yet another Canadian subsidy tradition whose demise throws the future of thousands of Canadian families into uncertainty.
In his guise as natural resources minister, Goodale last week traveled to Cape Breton, N.S., to announce Ottawa no longer will subsidize the island’s coal industry.
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One mine will be closed. Another will be sold, probably to an American firm. No jobs are safe.
Between 1,000 and 1,700 miners will be affected. They have held the best paying jobs in an economically depressed region.
Ottawa will send a $200 million buyout and retraining deal to the area.
The miners and their families looked numb. Police guards stood with the minister when he made his announcement but most miners were too stunned and defeated to tell him what they thought of him.
They saved their venom for the Nova Scotia premier who visited a day later.
Toronto’s Globe and Mail loved the decision. The voice of Bay Street opined that at long last, Cape Bretoners will have to understand the reality that most of the Globe’s affluent corporate readers, undoubtedly enriched by write-offs and tax shelters that would make Cape Breton coal miners drool, already have learned.
There is no free lunch.
“Instead of being given a clear signal that it, like other communities in this country, would be expected to pay its own way in the world, Ottawa’s subsidies made it possible for some residents of industrial Cape Breton to believe that they were owed a living…”
Goodale ended that misconception. Thank God!
The last time Goodale received such favorable business press reviews was in 1995 when he became the enthusiastic salesman for his friend Paul Martin’s decision to end the 99-year-old Crow subsidy to prairie grain farmers. Another “the government owes us a living” myth destroyed.
Goodale ended that. Thank God.
Mind you, the Globe was far less enthusiastic when Goodale did not take its advice last year to simply get rid of the wheat board monopoly and let “progressive” farmers compete in the market.
But two out of three isn’t bad.
For a brief moment again last week, as weathered worker faces filled television screens lamenting Ottawa’s decision to abandon them, Goodale became the darling of the Bay Street press.
Maybe a membership application from the National Citizens’ Coalition is in the mail. The enemy on the wheat board issue surely is a friend on subsidy cutting.
There is a Maritime joke that Ottawa’s idea of an Atlantic economic policy is to have a hot Ontario economy, able to absorb the eastern economic migrants.
Of course, as they did in the West, government types assured Cape Breton miners that if they simply retrain and think positive, prosperity will come.
Maybe those who don’t create computer companies can invest in hogs.
