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CURRENT ISSUE VOLUME 19 NO. 4 JULY/AUGUST 2008
 Devils Advocate
Community...what sense do we have of it?
By John Risley
It is with a bit of a sense of despair that I write this note. I have just read about a demand from a coastal town in Newfoundland that the Government should buy a fish quota for their shuttered fish plant so as to create jobs. Read, to take jobs from some other community and give them to us, presumably because "we" deserve them more. In a similar vein, Premier Williams has demanded the federal government give his province another $10 billion in satisfaction of his, the Premier's, interpretation of the Atlantic Accord. Read, to take money away from the rest of the country and give it to us, again presumably because we deserve it more.
One minute we choose to identify ourselves as being members of a town, next as members of a province, often as Canadians and almost never as members of the global community. Resident in these representations is a huge amount of self-interest, hypocrisy and beggar-thy-neighbor attitudes. We almost never stop to think about how these various memberships reconcile one with the other. There was a time during which this was tolerable. No more.
The above excerpt was taken from the most recent issue of Atlantic Business Magazine. Our complete editorial content is available in print form only. To receive a free subscription to Atlantic Business Magazine,
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