Great ideas

Don Mills has another one of his brilliant ideas:

A pollster thinks it's time for Newfoundland and Labrador to take a hard look at the feasibility of continuing to provide services to its rural communities, and to consider consolidating those services into regional hubs.

Don Mills, CEO of Corporate Research Associates says a lot of the province's recent financial challenges could be mitigated if people in rural communities would be more open to commuting to larger centres, a change in thinking that he says may be inconvenient but is long overdue right across Atlantic Canada. 

"We promise Atlantic Canadians they have the right to live anywhere and expect the same amount of public services and economic opportunities. or that to be subsidized in that choice," he told CBC's On The Go .
 

Um, done?

Fully 90 percent of the provincial civil service jobs are located in one of just eleven cities and towns. In descending order, they are St John's (nearly 2/3 of the provincial total), Corner Brook, Grand Falls-Windsor, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Gander, Clarenville, Stephenville, Carbonear, Whitbourne, Deer Lake, and Marystown.

With the exceptional case of Whitbourne, all of these communities, in the context of Newfoundland and Labrador's population distribution and structure, are "regional hubs" or "larger centres".