I believe I can tell Dickie (Alexander) and Dottie (Keating) why Tommie (Osborne) was willing to give Jerry (Earle) and NAPE a no-layoffs clause.
It’s because if Tommie creates an atmosphere of impending and possibly continuing layoffs, he would see the province’s credit rating drop and the amount we pay in interest on our loans escalate. The province must maintain a reasonable climate of employment and income or else we will be seen by the credit rating agencies as a basket case like Puerto Rico, which announced it will be not be paying on its debts for the next five years.
In effect, I believe Tommie gave NAPE only a promise to do what he had no choice but to do in any case.
While Dickie and Dottie have their short-term view of how to run the province, that short-term view — with its low wages and dismal benefits and no security over the last bunch of decades — is what has driven away our youth. Canada was glad originally to temporarily borrow our clever, hard-working and innovative workers and then see them go home every winter. Now, however, we are losing our youth permanently at graduation because our sister provinces recognize them as a no-cost resource, educated by the Newfoundland and Labrador population and necessary for the continued wealth of Central Canada.
Meanwhile back home, Dickie and Dottie think employees can be secured with low wages, no benefits and no job security. They have failed to recognize that they are now in an international work world, where young employees will go where they can to pay off their student loans and build their futures while they are still young.
What else did Tommie give NAPE? He gave them an earnings cut. With a four-year wage freeze and inflation going up around 1.6 per cent a year (1.6 x 4 = 6.4 per cent), the result for NAPE workers is a reduction of purchasing power to 93.6 per cent of what they earn now. Danny (Williams) had a wage freeze, but he gave four years of five per cent per year. I suspect he had he figured out what the wage freeze meant for the business community, for N.L. economics and for employee retention in the government.
Further, I find it puzzling that Dickie fights loudly for his right to recommend that the government lay off people to fight our provincial debt, in his letter to The Telegram (“Why did Tom Osborne give away his right?” Jan. 25), while he strongly challenges the right of NAPE employees to choose whether the stores of Dickie’s members might be the better ones to avoid when spending their diminishing dollars.
While Dottie and Dickie often portray themselves as the saviours of our economy and the only hope of our country, every day we see entrepreneurs go out of business only to be replaced by other entrepreneurs if a sufficient need exists for that product. From my perspective, I see the consumers, like the NAPE employees, as the actual most important part of the economic cycle. Without consumers, all the entrepreneurs in the world would never make a cent and would be bankrupt as soon as they started. In fact, Jerry has now started an experiment which may prove me correct in my opinion of who is more important and what is best for Dottie’s and Dickie’s own members.
I would further suggest that the best answer to our debt problem is to raise taxes for those who can reasonably afford it.
In a recent article in The Telegram about the Canadian equalization program, it was stated that we (yes us, N.L.!) had among the highest incomes per capita in Canada after Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2016. When we are supposedly in such a world-shattering crisis, shouldn’t the people that have more be putting their shoulders to the wheel and not being continually after tax cuts and tax loopholes that only serve to increase our debt?
Paul Murphy
St. John’s
