John Demont’s article (“Turning the Tide,” March/April) provided but one aspect of the problems facing the economies of the Atlantic Provinces. Rose-tinted spectacles come to mind.

It may be your policy to promote the notions of the Fraser Institute and its Atlantic equivalent AIMs, but if we think past the superficial, we find that the ideas promoted by these and like organizations are themselves the very things that have failed our people, and failed miserably. They have tilted the playing field in favour of the rich and wealthy elites.

Their support for the notions of privatization, deregulation, P3 programs, globalization and the plethora of free trade edicts have worked to undermine viable and sustainable local industries. At the same time no answers are provided for the imbalances in the playing fields, which allow foreign interests to enter our now-freed markets and dump massively subsidized exports. Even our own provinces are prone to this. NAFTA, to offer but one example, promised seven categories of positive effects, none of which have materialized. Those institutes, which lobbied long and hard to bring NAFTA to life, are all funded by the financial sector—now our greatest contributor to the GNP. So bankers, debt holders, insurance companies, stockbrokers and the like all benefit. In other words the rich become wealthier.

That group, which amounts to less than five per cent of our people, form the tail that wags the dog. They do this through their influence in the think tank institutes and through the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Both have an inordinate influence on governments of any stripe—red, orange or blue.

Who speaks for those who can’t raise funds for entrepreneurship; who speaks for the poor; and who speaks for those who can’t fend for themselves?

Mr. DeMont offered no panacea for the mismanagement of the once-sustainable fishery, the once-viable family farming business, the rapidly depleting forests, small business drying up, tourism going belly up, and families being ripped apart because of wrong-headed government action. Had these categories of local livelihood been supported by positive government regulation, public rather than private control, de-globalization, and an abrogation of free trade (which is only free to the wealthy), we would not be in our present bind.

Decades of failed government policies have left the Atlantic Provinces ignored and abandoned (except in election campaigns), and so our youth are telling politicians, “We gave you more than one chance and you blew it.” Now they are blowing out of the Atlantic region, and who can blame them?

Calum MacKenzie
Middleton, NS
 

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