Continuing the debate
Last week Prof Robert Washburn and me commented on the political fact that we continue to study stuff that goes nowhere. Here is another good example of that problem. Loo (Rinaldi), the local MPP, is trumpeting a funding exercise with the sucker upper of all government funds, the local CFDC, that will study the possibility of local agricultural processing. With so much food coming from offshore, one of the flunkeys at the presser quoted the mantra, "Do you know 35% of our peas come from China", we now have to investigate the possibility of local processing.
I would suggest that the first thing that the highly paid consultant selected by the CFDC does to earn their $45,000 would be to investigate what happened to the last attempt to process locally in Northumberland. There was at one time a very expensive processing plant that sucked up oodles of government dough trying to process local crops locally. I can't remember the name of the place but it was located on Masthead Rd. in Hope Township. Went bellyup in a huge flameout of government money.
Just a suggestion look to history before treading into the future!
I would suggest that the first thing that the highly paid consultant selected by the CFDC does to earn their $45,000 would be to investigate what happened to the last attempt to process locally in Northumberland. There was at one time a very expensive processing plant that sucked up oodles of government dough trying to process local crops locally. I can't remember the name of the place but it was located on Masthead Rd. in Hope Township. Went bellyup in a huge flameout of government money.
Just a suggestion look to history before treading into the future!
1 comments:
Was it Norcom? It came and went pretty quickly.
What's interesting to me is that when my father was young, pre WW II, he worked at a canning factory in Colborne, and there were a few of them around providing employment for lots of people.
Now, 65 years later, we have this current movement to eat only what is grown within 100 miles of us, and it seems strange to think we had all that years ago, but modernization and globalization took it all away.
Now we are realizing we have to get it all back again. How about re-opening all those wonderful cheese factories that were scattered all over our area before the big companies took them over and closed them all?
But are all these efforts doomed? Somehow whenever "consultants" and "community developers" are involved, nothing seems to go right, and they are the only ones who profit at all.
It's hard not to get the feeling that's all that was ever intended and the projects are just excuses to pay themselves.
Or am I being overly cynical again?
DJO
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