For East Coast Post.
Susanna Fuller begins the fourth environment, sustainability and society lecture at Dalhousie University by asking the students in the Ondaatje Hall auditorium a question.
“How many of you think you might leave Nova Scotia?”
The majority of young people in the room raise their hands.
“That’s the problem we have to deal with,” she says to what she later refers to as “probably the youngest crowd she’s ever talked to.”
Fuller is a member of the oneNS Coalition, a group of Nova Scotian professionals who come up with the action plans needed to implement the recommendations of the oneNS Commission’s report.
The Now or Never report, also referred to as the Ivany report after commission chair Ray Ivany, was published a year ago, on Feb. 12, 2014 by members of the Nova Scotia Commission on Building Our New Economy.
After 15 months of consulting with Nova Scotian residents all over the province about their issues with and hopes for the economy, the commissioners put together their report.
The report contains suggestions for stimulating growth in the economy, creating more opportunities in the job market, as well as strategies for attracting more young people to settle down and start their careers in Nova Scotia.
Now or Never was designed to be “an urgent call to action” for the provincial government, says Susanna Fuller, a member of the original oneNS Commission.
Yet Fuller says she is disappointed with how the government has responded to recommendations of the report, and finds that they haven’t been taken as seriously as they should be.
Fuller says the Liberal government needs to provide more incentives for young people to remain in the province.
“I really think we should be rolling out the red carpet for people who are not going back to Alberta and keeping them in our communities,” she says.
Fuller says she understands that young people choose to move out West to find work rather than stay home in Atlantic Canada, since the wages offered in the West are higher.
“We’re not going to win on that,” she says.
According to Statistics Canada, Nova Scotia’s average full-time hourly wage, $23.98, is roughly a few dollars less than the national average, $26.81. In Alberta, the current full-time hourly wage is $30.18.
Fuller wants to see the Province to allow more public input when it comes to economic policy creation and development.
She also thinks that more should be done to make Nova Scotians financially literate, so communities can be more involved with the Province’s future economic decisions.
“I’m afraid that a year from now, ‘Now or Never’ will be ‘Then and Didn’t,’” says Marty Janowitz, Chair of the Nova Scotia Roundtable on the Environment & Sustainable Prosperity. “Thinking about it is not sufficient.”
What’s needed is economic diversification, says Janowitz, citing the company CarbonCure Technologies as an example a new initiative that he believes will help steer the economy in the right direction.
CarbonCure Technologies takes carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cures it into concrete structures, such as sidewalks, helping solidify the structure as well as permanently storing the carbon.
The company says this helps lower production costs for concrete manufacturers while minimizing greenhouse gas emissions.
Janowitz says the report highlighted such green initiatives, calling them potential “game changers” to the province’s economy.
“Green economic activity can generate significant new investment in job creation,” he says.
The basic idea is to tax what we don’t want, and to invest in what we want more of in the province, Janowitz explains.
He also says that the province needs to introduce a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Doing so would hold corporate developers more accountable for their industry’s activities that have harmful effects on the environment and human health, as well as help reduce the province’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Janowitz stresses that Nova Scotia needs this tax now, “not five years from now.”
B.C. implemented this type of tax in 2008. By 2013, the total usage of B.C. fossil fuels dropped by more than 15 per cent, while the rest of the country’s fuel consumption went up three per cent over that same period, according to Statistics Canada.
“This is the time for us to be bold,” Janowitz declares.
Chief Sidney Peters of the Glooscap First Nation is also a member of the oneNS Coalition. Part of his job as chief is to discuss what happens during meetings in urban centres with the province’s 13 First Nations chiefs.
Peters said he’s glad there was a request for some First Nations representation in the oneNS Coalition, but adds that Nova Scotia’s First Nations communities have not forgotten that in the past, the government left them out of such processes.
“Where were you when we really needed you?” he asks the audience rhetorically.
Despite this, Peters says that he and the First Nations of Nova Scotia are focused on moving forward.
“We cannot continue to blame people,” he says.
Peters says that the most pressing barrier to progress in Nova Scotia is lack of communication, especially with young people.
“I think it’s sad when people say ‘I go to school to get educated and move away,’” he explains.
“We need to go out there and talk to the youth. We need to hear it from them.”