Go West, Young, Poorly Educated Man!

This makes me smile in a way I would never tell my Albertan friends if I had any Albertan friends, which I don't think I do.

The Globe and Mail reported on July 29th that because of the obscene amounts of money flying around the province due to tar sand development, which is seeing wage increases in everything from jobs actually related to oil extraction to working at Wendy's, that the percentage of students staying in High School to get their diploma has dropped to a near-record low of 67.9% of those who enter High School.

Is this a record low? Try 63.9 % in 1999. Close...

So now those same people helping to destory the environment - and the Country, depending on your views - with often reckless disregard for what the rest of the Country thinks, is now also the province with the highest amount of students not even bothering themselves to acquire a secondary education! Has no one told Alberta that money is not everything? Are they ever going to have to answer and make retributions for the environmental destruction they're responsible for?

Simplistic though it is, one of the first things the Rest of Canada can do is stop going west to Alberta in search of high-paying labour that merely exacerbates the problem. Non-stop flights between St. John's, Newfoundland, and Fort McMurray, Alberta, denote a torubling relationship between one of the poorest provinces in the Confederation and its richest: the one-way flow of men and women seeking jobs heading west, and the one-way eastern flow of wages back to struggling families. Ends have to be met, and families have to be fed, but in the larger scheme of things, supporting the beast that is tar sands oil extraction for personal gain only serves to make the damage being done that much more irrepairable.

Did I say I was smiling, earlier? If only to mask my terror...