labradore

"We can't allow things that are inaccurate to stand." — The Word of Our Dan, February 19, 2008.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Jerome! (II)

More Jeromey goodness, this time from the proceedings of the Bow-Wow Parliament on Tuesday:

MR. KENNEDY: Does it make any sense that we have a Department of Fisheries in this country with its headquarters in Ottawa? That, to me, just defies common sense. If it was in Victoria, B.C., if it was in Halifax. It should be in St. John’s, but this is an example of how a central government has failed us.
The Word of Jerome. DFO should be in the province of St. John’s.

Let us contemplate his Jeromey wisdom, and apply it to other situations. According to his colleague’s own statistics over at the Department of Natural Resources, iron ore, nickel, and cobalt, all of which are mined in Labrador, along with copper, most of which is mined in Labrador, make up, well, almost the entire value of the province’s mineral shipments. Depending on the year, the Labrador share of the provincial mining industry is between 90% and 98%, trending, since Voisey’s Bay began production, towards the latter.

Meanwhile, there are 560 employees listed under the Department of Natural Resources in the provincial government telephone directory.

Just so you know where this is going, gentle reader: minerals are natural resources.

Of those 560, as of last night, 33 of them have telephone numbers in Labrador telephone exchanges.

On the other side of the ledger, 246 of them have telephone numbers in the 729 exchange, including almost all of the Mines Branch, all but a handful of whose employees, according to the phone book, are located in that world-famous mining centre associated with 729- phone numbers... St. John’s.

Does that, to you, Jerome!, just defy common sense?

Is this is an example of how a central government has failed us?

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2 Comments:

At 12:21 PM, April 02, 2009 , Blogger Mark said...

The other two problems with this tired old argument, are:

(a) Every time someone in Newfoundland is upset with a fisheries decision made by Newfoundlanders working in Newfoundland offices for the management of Newfoundland fisheries zones for DFO, they want to be able to appeal it to Ottawa. Decision-making ends up in Ottawa because the locals (and it's the same in NB or BC) generally find a reason to overturn whatever makes them unhappy. That's the same in any national department with competing regional interests.

(b) If the feds annouced tomorrow that DFO was moving its HQ to Victoria, or to Halifax, Newfoundland stakeholders would lobby immediately to have it moved back to Ottawa.

What is it about the presence of a micropohne and an audience that makes really smart people suddenly act like elementary school children?

 
At 1:42 PM, April 02, 2009 , Blogger Edward Hollett said...

We heard the same tired crap last night at the disunion forum but thankfully only from Jim Feehan. he's the guy who did the two part photocopy job for the Harris centre whereby he documented there had been a decline in federal jobs in NL but never did explain why it had occured.

He then launched into a call, as he repeated last night, for more senuior federal decision makers here, like say Dms and ADMs.

For good measure he railed against the regional office trend since here in NL we are so very different from that crowd in NS or NB (my words).

Wally hit on the inherent hypocrisy of this whole position (Andy Wells was a great such hypocrite not surprisingly, for exmaple.)

At the same time, though, no one bothered to ask about how these things actually work. When it comes to handling the paperwork for EI or taxes, it really doesn't matter where the stuff is done.

Having the DM of Vets Affairs in Summerside hasn't changed in one teensy way the number of PEi veterans receiving benefits or the range of benefits etc available to them merely because he lived in Charlottetown instead of Hunt Club.

 

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