Here we are, a broken people. The bills keep piling up and our politicians and decision-makers keep telling us it’s all because of past mistakes. “It was them, not us. We inherited the problem,” they say.
Well excuse me, but I seem to remember you, Mr. Ball (and caucus), also being there. What I don’t remember is any stand being taken by you and your team while you were in opposition—barely a whimper as the government pushed Muskrat Falls down our throats. Not a peep as they spent a half billion dollars on the project before it was even sanctioned. Nothing about the methyl mercury, methane gas or the polluting of our country foods, the slaughtered forest piled and left to rot as they cut an 1,100 km transmission line across hundreds of rivers and streams and spraying pesticides in an effort to make sure nothing grows there again.
You kept quiet through the lies and money wasted on the sick advertisements, telling us how “clean and green”, how needed, and how “least cost option” the corrupt project is.
And now you, our new premier, come begging the citizens for answers, crying that you did not know we were in such a mess when you came campaigning for our votes and how you were going to make it such a beautiful world once elected. You did not know? Where have you been?!
“Everything is on the table” is the message today: health care, transportation, social services and everything else we so desperately depend on. And we are getting to the point where we cannot pay our bills (or even the interest on our bills).
Everything is on the table — everything except Muskrat Falls, the very thing that will put the final nail in our coffin. I find it so amazing that no one, not one politician, has the ability to face the Monster called Muskrat and speak truthfully about how the project came to be, and how absurd it is to continue to bet the future of our province on it.
We need to gather in mass numbers and demand that justice be served. But our hands are tied; we are stuck in the same system of taking from the poor to pay the elite. We are just puppets, slaves to the political and corporate elite, who are happy to pay us a pittance to destroy our own environment — the environment our ancestors passed on to us and which we must pass on to our children and grandchildren.
We know that Muskrat is the biggest farce ever pulled on a population, and we know it will never be anything but a liability to the province — and yes, that it will bankrupt us.
Still, we cannot seem to stop it. It seems some feel they have to take those jobs assisting with the destruction of the environment, even though deep down I’m sure they don’t want to.
And the rest of us just aren’t strong enough to face the corruption alone.
So please, people, we desperately need to revolt against this sick system and stand in solidarity against those that would pit us against each other, and against our own environment.
Dennis Burden (Port Hope Simpson, Labrador)
