Are the jobs worth it?

Students in local high schools will be spending the next couple weeks in airless rooms, answering questions that on the surface appear trivial and without relevance to their daily lives.

However these questions, and even more importantly the answers the young people give, will have a great effect on the future of the young people concerned.

The question might read y(x) = (x + 2)3, but in essence the students are being asked what kind of future they will have.

It’s crunch time. Lay it on the line time. Time to show who you are and what you have got.

A similar drama is playing itself out over across the Racquette. Adults in an airless room are answering questions that on the surface appear trivial and without relevance to our daily lives.

The people in the hearings chamber are in essence being asked what kind of future they see for Digby Neck.

The panel is hearing two distinctly different sorts of answers. One side describes Digby Neck and its people as a dieing community – a community that needs to blow itself up in order to feed its people.

Contrast that with the explosion of whale watching jobs and tourism venues that service the whale watchers. Lavena’s Catch for example is a relatively new business employing up to 14 people through the summer.

When Rollie Swift gets going with this lobster/ vegetable banding machine, he could be employing ten people.

Both these employers fit with the economy and the way of life on Digby Neck and the Islands. They are proof it is possible to create jobs without destroying the natural beauty of the area, without giving away for free the natural resources, without endangering the fishery – the very lifeblood of the area.

The quarry project manager Paul Buxton said during the first day of hearings that “it would be a very difficult if not impossible situation to get a permit for a quarry in New Jersey.”

Just why should Nova Scotians allow here what they won’t allow in New Jersey? Because, says Bilcon, Digby County needs the jobs.

But the cost and risk associated with these 34 jobs may be simply too high. The Convergys call centre in Cornwallis employs 600 people and no one protests their desire to expand.

The Digby Pines employs 160 people every year and there is no fear that it will ruin the environment or the fishery.

The Wharf Rat Rally is predicting they will attract 40,000 visitors to Digby this September and it is safe to say that altogether they won’t take away one ton of rock.

To accept Bilcon’s view of Digby County as a dieing and withering community, a community so poor that we need to blow up our coastline, is to despair completely.

During the first few days of the hearings, many people from the local area and around the province have stood up to say that they have a different view of Digby Neck’s future.

Their contribution to the hearings is proof that there is a will to look for other answers, better answers. And as long as there is a will, there will be surely be a way.