by
Robert LaFrance
After recently listening to some of
the pronouncements coming out of Fredericton and Ottawa, I am wondering if the
late Chairman Mao (the old murderer) of China didn’t have a good idea when he
ordered civil servants and others to leave the big cities for a certain period
of time every year and go live in the country.
That way, he reasoned, there wouldn’t be this steady
stream of idiotic laws passed and suggestions offered up like the product of a
retching badger.
Anyone who doesn’t think there’s an
anti-rural bias in just about everything that governments do must be dreaming.
How could it be otherwise? An MLA or MP who grew up in the country is a rare
bird indeed, and the rest have no idea of living outside the Urban Dream.
A good example of this was the
ill-fated and extremely expensive federal gun registry, now history. I sat on
my porch one evening and tried to imagine the gaggles and flocks of drug
dealers, strong-arm criminals, motorcycle gangs and others outside the law as
they trooped to federal offices to register their firearms. I was unsuccessful
in imagining this, but I didn’t have any trouble seeing myself registering my
.22 single-shot rifle, paying the fees year after year, and being oh so
law-abiding. I knew one guy, whose worst crime ever was probably failing to
stop at a stop sign in 1985 in Minto, who had a wonderful collection of
historical firearms and who gave them away rather than go through all that
rigmarole.
As we know, the provincial
government has wanted to get rid of Hotel Dieu Hospital in Perth-Andover for
many years. They’re in Fredericton and living in the shadow of Everett Chalmers
Hospital, home of c. difficile bacteria and home of the annual budget deficit,
so why should they care? And look what governments have done to Tobique Valley
Hospital in Plaster Rock. Whenever the bureaucrats and the city newspapers
start talking about the health care system being ‘unsustainable’, that’s a code
word for ‘close the rural hospitals’; they did that before they changed the
Plaster Rock hospital into a ‘health centre’.
Back to Chairman Mao and one of the
few good ideas he ever had, other than overthrowing that gang of thugs that ran
the country prior to 1948, I wonder if we are going to have to have some
‘barefoot doctors’ as Mao called them? If you live in Riley Brook or Nictau and
you half cut off half your foot with a chainsaw, will you make it by ambulance
to Grand Falls? Or Waterville?
The Chinese ‘barefoot doctors’ were
people brought in to the cities from rural areas to receive medical training.
Within a few years 150,000 doctors and 350,000 paramedics had been trained
after which they went back to the country and saved lives. Here in New
Brunswick, that process seems to be reversed. The idea is to make sure the city
folks are covered and as far as the rural people are concerned, the government
is not that concerned. Just saying.
When we moved to our present rural estate
in 1984, we got Saturday mail delivery and our daily newspaper was also
delivered six days a week by a carrier. Now our mail is delivered five days a
week and the daily newspaper comes in the mail. Saturday’s news is a little old
by the time we get it.
Over those 28 years we have seen
services reduced everywhere, businesses close and move elsewhere because people
shop over in Maine or somewhere other than here, we have seen the cost of
everything rise 400% even while the government insists that the rate of
inflation is only one or two percent. Know why that government-calculated rate
is only one or two percent? It’s because while the cost of food, gas, houses,
fuel to heat them, vehicle repairs, carpenter work and such necessities is
going through the roof, the price of technology is going down amazingly. So
while a cord of stovewood cost $90 in 1990 and costs $190 today, that computer
that cost $4000 in 1990 costs $350 today. Take my word on this.
We rural folk are lucky though,
because while the government doesn’t think we deserve a hospital and city people
do, we have ready access to wind energy and solar energy. For a mere $30,000 I
can put up a windmill to supply all my electrical needs that now cost me over a
hundred dollars a month. With the cost of maintenance on that windmill factored
in, it could be all paid for (at $250 a month) by the year 2036, just in time to buy a new one.
Oh, well. We’ve had it easy too long
anyway.
-end-
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