How can Indigenous millennials move ahead into a future where the government is centralizing at the cost of the rural populations?
I see my friends' children graduating and leaving Fort Simpson for educational and employment training opportunities elsewhere simply because we are too small to hire them all. We are left with a capacity gap, wherein our young are forced to leave because their community has no opportunities for them, and then those jobs are taken over by imported talent.
Mind you, many of the young are happy to leave because the doldrums of still seas in our activities leave youthful exuberance unchallenged, or expectations and ambitions unsatisfied. That is, unless they are full-on bushmen, our village has limited options for sports, entertainment, or just fun, time-wasting pursuits. I see the Console Generation, as a result, and not to complain about that, as I am an avid gamer, but I think it is simply because we have little to offer them.
The sub-Arctic capital of Yellowknife seems to have a focused intent on suburban expansion of its services and infrastructure, and its bureaucrats of all levels continue to pursue this, at our expense. It even wanted to take the college operations from Fort Smith, and with that, the jobs, overhead and secondary economic accelerants that would accompany such an educational endeavour.
That leaves the millennials less opportunity than before, and as such, they will have to leave their hometowns for sunnier climes. Of course, that means long-distance commuting, competitive housing and job environments and (quite naturally) risky business that goes long into the night; being young and full of vim and vinaigrette, relishing frenetic weekends. The latter is part of growing up, but the lifestyle challenges of living in big cities do pose their own ulterior risks. However, I digress.
The point is that Fort Simpson lost out in the bureaucratic shuffle storm of the funding that was rightly ours, for the medical care of our under-served citizens. Instead of a new medical centre gracing our near future, we will have to increasingly patch up and maintain our 1970s-era facility, likely to the point of constant repair.
Central bureaucracy and oversight part of bigger problem
The fault lies with our central bureaucracy and its oversight, as well as the legislature's inability to fight for the rural.
The value-added savings are brought to Yellowknife, yes, but Fort Simpson will suffer as a result of robbing the replacement of our health facilities. In other words, some ivory-tower paper tiger has taken those potential jobs and economic impetus and brought it to the 'Knife to increase its own financial footprint and efficiency. We lost out on those jobs, and the secondary lifetime employment that the facility represented. I must only assume that if the government was a person, he hates us.
Undercutting our economic growth and opportunity in such a manner means that we will remain locked in our Level 2 status of a limited economy, which is government speak for financial underprivilege, lacking access to a self-sustaining economy. Yep, we'll stay on welfare, thanks a lot.
Because there is no public accountability to beholden these golden bean counters, we'll never see the silver, nor know whose nether regions they had to kiss to obtain it. But you can be sure, we are the ones swinging in the wind, hanging on a paper tree, coloured by an official shoveling of offal against the rotary oscillator. They may stand in line, late for work, as they are entitled to their designer coffee for breakfast, as we stoke the fire to bring our cowboy coffee to a boil.
Perhaps it is a curse of self-entitlement that afflicts those who are drawn from our everyday civilian ranks, and then become banana republic rulers of a pile of paper that represents our needs, jobs and people, then denies the pastoral citizens.
Be sure that costs for medical travel will rise with our aging populations, as our millenials are departing for more level playing grounds, and the convenience of its designer coffee. Pity upon those who now have no choice but to die alone in a southern institution or in Yellowknife, a modern travesty hearkening back to the old days of the tuberculosis sanitoria. The more things change, the more they stay the same, it has been said, and still continues to scream unjustly, without post-colonial remorse.
Is this then negligence of the village hicks and town rats that do not claim Yellowknife within their electoral boundaries? Or do the button down functionaries just continue to build the capital at our expense? Maybe we're the wrong colour, or maybe we just don't know enough paper pushers on the inside to get them to think outside the box that their doughnuts come in.