The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The problem is not that the present Manitoba government does nothing for Flin Flon. Clearly our community has benefitted from important investments courtesy of the Doer and Selinger regimes. No, the problem is that, in relation to Northern Manitoba's two other major centres in The Pas and Thompson, Flin Flon is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. If Flin Flon gets a Pinto, you can rest assured our northern neighbours will soon be driving Cadillacs. The bias is so utterly blatant that attempts to deny its existence are rendered laughable. The latest in a long line of examples stems from provincial efforts to upgrade University College of the North. Kudos to Premier Greg Selinger for chipping in roughly half of the approximately $3-million price tag for the new UCN Regional Centre and Mining Academy set to open near the HBMS Main Gate next year. This will be a valuable addition to our city and a boon to our economic future. Naturally the investment amounts to pennies in comparison to the dollars headed you know where. A little over three years ago, the province pledged $17 million for several new capital projects at UCN in The Pas. It also announced $27 million for a new UCN campus in Thompson. Earlier this month, out of nowhere, the province more than tripled the budget for the Thompson project to about $82 million. Evidently Mr. Selinger felt that a mere $27 million just wasn't enough for the fine people of Thompson. For those of you keeping score, that's about $102 million for post-secondary institute upgrades in the North's three large centres. Flin Flon's share? Less than three per cent. And about half of what we're getting is coming from Ottawa, not Winnipeg. It's not like our population does not warrant us a bigger piece of the pie. When you combine the populace of the three communities, Flin Flon has just under a quarter of the people without even including Creighton, Denare Beach and the cottage areas. Flin Flon proper still has more people than The Pas proper. Yet, in addition to the huge UCN discrepancy, the province's insurance monopoly, MPI, opted last month to curtail driver testing services in Flin Flon. And wouldn't you know it, The Pas Ð considered a "major centre" by MPI standards Ð escaped the cuts unscathed. The list goes on. Thompson and, until the 2008 death of Oscar Lathlin, The Pas have watched their MLAs elevated to the cabinet level. Flin Flon MLA Gerard Jennissen, meanwhile, has been relegated to the backbenches his entire career despite strong qualifications and plenty of experience. When Tolko Industries threatened to shutter its operations in The Pas in 2006, the province rushed in with millions of taxpayer dollars. When HBMS announced it was closing its smelter, then-mines minister Jim Rondeau inexplicably told the Winnipeg Free Press that the province would work with the company to help it meet its pollution targets Ð even as HB officials openly declared this would not be possible and, in any event, the targets were not the main concern. It's not like Flin Flon hasn't been faithful to the NDP. We haven't so much as flirted with another political party in more than four decades, making this one of the purest orange ridings in all of Canada. Yet here we are, sharing in less than three per cent of post-secondary education investments. Here we are losing services while The Pas keeps all of theirs. Here we are getting the short end of the stick, year after year after year. It's not that the province does nothing for Flin Flon. It's just that their opulent efforts in The Pas and Thompson demonstrate how much more they could and should be doing for us. Local Angle runs Fridays.
