Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball.

At a St. John’s rally on April 6, the day the provincial government released its 2017 budget, Michelle Keep addressed a crowd of about 40 protesters. “We need ideas outside the box,” she told them. “We need them now, we need them fast.”

Keep, a best-selling romance novelist based in St. John’s, has built her living on creativity and risk—and her experiences could hold one of the keys to the future of work for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

In 2016, the government of Dwight Ball made many cuts, including to education spending, libraries, and the civil service, and introduced a tax on books. The economy had been deeply reliant on royalties from offshore drilling, making $2.8 billion in 2011-12. In 2015-16, royalty revenues only reached $551 million.

As the government struggled to deal with a drop in resource extraction revenues and rising unemployment, it turned to austerity. Though revenues in 2017 had been higher than forecasted, activists rallying in St. John’s had expected the year’s budget to impose more cuts. The budget didn’t offer much relief for people struggling, with higher education hit the hardest.

Now, the province is banking on industry for its financial salvation: oil, gas, seafood, hydro, mining, lumber and agri-food. “In order to return to fiscal balance we must think and act in a way that is long term,” Minister of Finance Cathy Bennett said in her budget speech. “We can no longer afford to be bound by short-term reactionary thinking.”

But it’s hard to not see short-term reactionary thinking in Bennett’s budget. They’re short-term fixes in various resource industries designed to tide the province over until commodity prices pick back up. Bennett claims that with infrastructure spending, some jobs will be created. But it’s not nearly enough.

Unifor Atlantic regional director Lana Payne and economist Jim Stanford call the province’s economy a “helicopter economy,” in which natural resource companies generate a lot of profit, but not enough of it makes it to average people. As a resource-dependent province, Newfoundland and Labrador should be able to buoy public finances with revenues from extraction. But Payne says that the proportion of the province’s GDP that went to corporate profits when revenues were at a high of 37 percent. Nationally, the percentage is 15.

The solution to improve the province’s economy isn’t hard to see, but it requires political will and more control over industry by average people. “[The] emerging struggle is the same struggle we have always had here: keeping more of our wealth, using that wealth to diversify and share prosperity, and invest more in our creative industries, green jobs, etc.,” Payne writes in an email. The province, she adds, needs to entice more youth and more immigrants to live there. Choosing to make cuts in higher education suggests that the government is forging a different path.

If the government isn’t interested in creating or protecting new, good jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador, Keep’s vision for her province should inspire people to do the work themselves. “[O]nce you no longer have to guarantee a profit for the owners or investors, a business of any sort can often securely operate for the good of the workers, for the good of the customers, for the good of the whole community without worry,” she told the budget-day protesters. “All it requires… is a change in how we as a society, and the government, view things.”

Perhaps that’s the key: Start with society, and maybe government will follow.

Illustration by Dave Donald.

Of all the arts, dance is arguably the most physically and emotionally exhausting, and with an average annual income of a professional dancer sitting at $18,000, the real-life Natalie Portmans live way under Canada’s poverty line. And the crippling anxiety that might overtake an almost-30 dancer who fears his or her career is ending is very real, because more than likely it is. Dance is such a physical art that while some can go on for decades, many work injured until they’re forced to stop.

“The thing about dance is that for most people, it’s not a job; it’s who they are,” says Amanda Hancox, executive director of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre. “And when the job ends, by choice or by necessity, there’s a lot of emotional trauma that comes along with that loss.”

The DTRC was started in 1983 by Joysanne Sidimus, who had recently returned to Canada from travelling throughout the U.S. with the National Ballet of Canada. She looked up some of her old dance colleagues and, according to Hancox, found them “just looking at blank walls” with no support, no money, and no idea what to do next. She partnered with the Dance in Canada Association and the Canadian Association of Professional Dance Organizations to research and understand the issues facing dancers in Canada, and the DTRC officially opened its doors in September 1985.

Since then, the DTRC has helped more than 10,000 dancers at all stages of their careers, and offers professional counselling, mentoring, workshops, and conferences. The DTRC has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal and regional representatives in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Atlantic Canada.

One of the main functions of the DTRC is to offer scholarships and career counseling for current and former dancers trying to figure out what their next moves should be and assistance in training for a “parallel career,” as Hancox calls it. This often comes in the form of a part-time job to pay the bills, since there are few full-time jobs in the industry. Dancers, like actors, need more flexible schedules to allow for classes and rehearsals, which means they often end up in minimum-wage service jobs (while it’s not uncommon for writers, visual artists, or musicians to hold down nine-to-five jobs, and practise their craft outside of business hours).

Career changes are not uncommon for young Canadians, but what makes an organization like the DTRC so crucial to Canadian dancers is the young age at which many start, says Hancox. They start training at the age of eight or nine, sometimes five days a week or more, become a hired performer by 19 or 20, and then by the time they retire at 35 or 40—often due to chronic injury—they have made so little money that they have to start all over from nothing, and many don’t even know what their interests and passions are outside the world of dance, says Hancox. “It’s not like they went to university and chose a career.”

Day 14 of the Occupy Wall Street protest. Photo by David Shankbone.

[Note: this editorial appears in the November-December 2011 edition of This Magazine, which will be on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes in early November.] 

Looking back on autumn 2011, it seems increasingly clear that the movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” will be viewed as a genuinely important historical moment for the West. The idea, first floated by the contemporary masters of agitprop Adbusters in July, quickly developed a life of its own, attracting thousands of people to a makeshift encampment in New York’s Liberty Square. They came for a variety of reasons, but their slogan was, and is, a simple and powerful fact: “We are the 99 percent.” As in: regardless of political affiliation, personal attributes, or occupation (or lack thereof), we are united by our opposition to the predatory economic behaviour of the top-earning one percent.

The “Occupy” meme spread quickly, with new demonstrations popping up across the United States and Canada. The language explicitly drew parallels with the Arab Spring revolutions still roiling the Middle East; the selection of Liberty Square, an echo of Egypt’s Tahrir, or Liberation Square, was no accident. (It should be noted that some fairly objected to the militarist and colonialist overtones of “occupying” anything.) This being the internet age, variants and jokes swarmed around the event too, with “Occupy Sesame Street” casting the Muppets as revolutionaries, and “Occupy Occupy Wall Street” satirically imagining hedge fund managers and investment bankers sitting in on the sit-in.

Many observers, particularly reporters from larger media outlets, were either openly scornful or simply missed the point. They got their footage of some “anarchists”—one of the laziest catchalls in contemporary journalism—looking angry or shouting slogans, and spoke in ominous tones about arrests and scuffles with the police, frequently omitting the fact that the police were the aggressors.

In fairness, Occupy Wall Street, for all its catchy slogans, actually is hard to summarize in a 60-second slot on the evening news, and thank goodness. People showed up for all kinds of reasons: jobs lost to globalization, homes lost to foreclosure, health lost to the U.S.’s senseless farce of a health care system (here in Canada, where unemployment is lower, banks more regulated, and health care still mostly public, the list of grievances was slightly different but still passionately felt). The point was never to hammer out a unified, focus-grouped electoral platform; it was to finally articulate a widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Reporters asked “Why are you here?” as if they expected a camera-ready soundbite. But many of us asked, “What took you so long?”

The latest economic crisis had its roots in the investment bank collapses of 2008, and the last three years or so have inflicted a series of indignities on millions of people around the world. Most of them bore their burdens in silence, working- and middle-class citizens feeling shame for suffering the effects of an economic calamity they didn’t cause. Crucially, they are the constituency who are now shrugging off that humiliation and focusing their anger on the ones who are truly to blame. Critiques of globalized capitalism are nothing new; thousands of previously unradicalized protesters in the street certainly is. They’re mad as hell—you know the rest. What will come of it, no one can say conclusively. But naming the problem is the first step, and the Occupy protests have done an admirable and necessary job.

Peter Victor. Photo by Molly Crealock.

Could you live on $14,000 a year? Could everyone in Canada? And could we live on $14,000 a year for the rest of history?

That’s the sort of uncomfortable, prickly question Peter Victor likes to ask. And the way you answer might say a lot about the future of the planet.

That’s because Victor is an economist at York University who is a leading pioneer in “no-growth” economics, a field that tries to figure out whether it’s possible to create an economy that stops growing—yet doesn’t collapse.

Environmentalists, of course, have long warned that humanity is chewing through the world’s natural resources— land, trees, minerals—at an unsustainable locust’s pace. But every country’s prosperity currently depends on constant growth: more people, more consumption, more stuff.

A few years ago, Victor wondered: Could an economy stop growing but still remain prosperous?

To find out, he began working on a computer model that replicated the Canadian economy. Once he’d built a model approximating reality, he began tweaking some of the major variables to cut growth: He lowered consumption, tweaked productivity, and halted the increase of population. He imposed a slew of government policies aimed at increasing taxes for the wealthy and reducing the use of fossil fuels. Then he extrapolated forward to see what would happen.

The upshot? Victor’s virtual Canada slowly stopped growing after 2010, and after a few turbulent decades, unemployment dwindled to just four percent. Greenhouse gases went down to Kyoto levels. And then…things just stayed the same. Ecological catastrophe was averted. In 2008, he published Managing Without Growth, and became the first economist to prove—virtually, anyway—that a steady-state economy is possible.

“I’m trying to the plant the seeds of this idea,” he tells me. “The climate is changing things rapidly, and people think, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ They need ideas.” In the wake of his book, Victor has become something of a rock star amongst environmental economists, travelling the world to explain his ideas at conferences, and even meeting with the curious finance minister of Finland. People, he tells me, are fascinated by the details: What would it be like to live in a non-growing world? Could we handle it?

Could you? Well, there’d be one big upside: We would all work less—a lot less. That’s because technology naturally reduces workforces: say it takes 100 people to make one airplane this year. Next year, technological improvements will mean it only takes 90. Soon after, just 80; in a decade, perhaps as few as 50.

Currently, such rising productivity—the amount of work one person can do—creates unemployment, so governments push policies that grow the economy and create jobs for those 50 people who are no longer building airplanes.

Victor’s plan works differently. Instead of firing workers as we become more productive, we just share an ever-decreasing pile of work. Keep employed, but work fewer hours. In Victor’s computer model, Canadians gradually work their way down to a four-day workweek, perhaps even less. (“When I mention this to people,” Victor says, “you can hear their sigh of relief.”)

Working less would transform society in many ways: Imagine the spectacular upsides for health care and education if Canadians had more time to spend caring for themselves and teaching their children.

Sounds great—but it wouldn’t be easy. To achieve zero growth, Canadians would need to seriously curtail their consumption. In a recent paper, Victor plotted out a global nongrowing economy—the whole planet this time—then ran the numbers and found Canadians would need to decrease their average income to around $14,000—roughly our prosperity from the ’70s. Granted, the rest the world would see its income rise dramatically from hundreds of dollars to thousands: We go down, but Bangladesh shoots up. (Victor’s no-growth vision is decidedly in favor of more economic equality.) And since technology increases productivity, that $14,000 buys a lot more quality of life than it did in the ’70s. But it would still be a hard sell on most Canadians.

Even bleaker, though, is the challenge of stabilizing population. Victor’s model requires a flat population curve, and it’s hard to figure out how to achieve that without some pretty authoritarian family-planning policies (à la China’s one-child rule). Victor is well aware of how crazily difficult it would be to craft a no-growth world. For a guy with some of the most radical ideas around, he’s an unassuming, avuncular sort — more tweedy professor than ideological bomb-thrower.

“I know that these ideas are almost impossible for politicians to embrace now,” he says matter-of-factly. But as resources dwindle, Victor is starting a difficult and crucial conversation—one that we may soon have no choice but to join.

The article goes in depth, examining jury absence rates and penalties by province. Only three of the provinces and territories track jury attendance, but those who do have relatively low penalties.

There are many reasons to avoid jury duty: it’s long, often unpleasant, and “sucks so bad.” The internet is abound with suggestions on how to get out of jury duty, with everything from feigning racism to being gay. Even if you do serve on a jury, you could cause a mistrial by being “dumb”.

In Canada, it is a civic duty to respond to a jury summons, either by showing up for the jury selection panel or providing a sufficient reason not to partake as a juror.

While some of the commentators on the Star article gladly participated in a lawyer hate-on, many spoke out about the very real barriers to participating as a juror.

Employers are legally obligated to grant employees leave for jury duty. Although jury duty remuneration vary by country and jurisdiction — in Phoenix you get free wi-fi, in L.A., free art gallery admission — it’s almost universal that employers have no requirement to pay salaries while you do your civic duty.

If approved at a jury panel, jurors in Ontario aren’t compensated until after 10 days of service (day 11 to 49: $40.00 per day, day 50 onwards: $100.00). This scheme is replicated across the country. In our (maybe post-)recession economy, many have less job security. With little to no stipend for lost work days, especially for the rising number of self-employed and those in precarious work, it’s no wonder many opt out.

There’s also the issue of transportation. When called to jury, citizens in most provinces have to get to the trial — or a jury panel, where they might be declined — on their own dime. A daily travel expense is issued to those approved for jury service living outside the city where the courthouse is.

As the Ontario government says, “parking facilities vary from courthouse to courthouse, and public transportation is strongly recommended if available. If you attend the courthouse as a member of the jury panel, you will be responsible for paying your own parking fees.” Nice.

While justice systems make allowances for certain hardships — medical conditions, school, vacations — being among the working poor isn’t one of them. In Ontario, there is no allowance issued for childcare expenses, so if you have to take time off from your minimum-wage hourly-paid job to attend jury duty, you’re left holding the bag for daycare or babysitting costs, without any income to offset it. The increasing number of people in that situation literally cannot afford to serve on a jury.

What results is a socially unrepresentative pool of potential jurors who are likely to be more economically privileged than the defendants they sit in judgment on. Much research has been published on jury biases based on economic background.

It’s reasonable to hypothesize that socio-economic status shapes verdicts. A jury’s perspective is shaped by the jurors themselves. If only those of a certain class or salary are able to afford the luxury of jury duty, they will deliberate on a very specific set of principles—especially in cases where poverty or race is involved.

Justice is costly. Fair trials require time, professionals, and lots of documentation. But just as underpaying prosecutors threatens the pursuit of justice, perpetuating barriers to jury duty compromises the integrity of a fair trial.

That wild bolshevik magazine Time has had the gall to question the notion that America is the best country in the world. The March 14th cover story, by Fareed Zakaria displays a red foam finger the reads “We’re #1” pointing downwards. “Yes, America is in decline,” reads the caption.

Some could argue that the U.S really hasn’t been in the best shape for a while now. In Canada, we have this crazy notion that Americans—occasionally—look at things from a different angle. Speaking of backwards, turn that Time cover upside down and there is a caption that reads “Yes, America is still No. 1.”

Of course the statistics say that over a year ago the unemployment rate was the worst it has been since 1983, with 15.7 million Americans out of work. Also, the U.S. is starting to fall behind other nations in terms of life expectancy, infrastructure, and is now only the 4th strongest economy in the world.

CNN specials airing this past weekend tried to advise the discouraged and unemployed with strategies on how pull themselves up by their boot straps and get back to work.

Of course this might require learning some Mandarin and having your evening news read by—gasp—a Muslim. Shockingly, some Americans aren’t too happy about this, because while millions have been out of work they have also been living under a rock. The comments on the CNN web page describing Fareed Zakaria’s feature story and his TV special “Restoring the American Dream: Getting Back to #1″ show how truly excited and open American audiences are to inform themselves and discuss change. The comment section is a swamp of racist horror that you do not need to read in full. But a few choice excerpts illustrates the point.

One commenter asks “Why is CNN/Time giving this MUSLIM a platform to trash America?” Then he/she proceeds to tell Zakaria (degrees from Yale and Harvard in hand, presumably) that he should go back to where he came from: his “shit-hole birth place INDIA.” Another asks: “Is he even American? It seems he would more likely be worried about where he is from. We don’t need some Indian telling us what we should be doing.”

Yes, America, though your economy is teetering, your political system dysfunctional, and your populace increasingly unhealthy, when it comes to weird xenophobic internet trolls, you truly are a city on a hill.

Gigi Ibrahim waves the egyptian flag in Tahrir Square, February 3, 2011. Creative Commons photo by Al Jazeera English

In the search for underlying causes of the Middle-Eastern revolts, food, technology, Twitter, and social media have been identified as possible suspects. Last week, Dylan Robertson argued here that these are in fact food revolutions—that drastically increasing food prices had worn away at citizens (commenter Jen Hassum said that “bread determinism” wasn’t entirely true either; I think we can agree that people act for all kinds of individual reasons). Recently scholars and journalists have focused instead on a specific demographic that is determined to initiate change. Recent Time Magazine and BusinessWeek cover stories refer to the “ticking time bomb” of youth unemployment in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran.

There is a large part of the Middle East and North Africa, about 16 countries, were more the half the population is under 30 years of age. That’s six out of every ten people. This is what has been dubbed the “youth bulge.” Millions of young people throughout the Middle East have been too frustrated for too long with the constraints of their government and lack of future job prospects. The sense of hopelessness, stemming from over education and limited employment opportunities has reached a breaking point.

With governments who neglect to invest in the younger generation, and weak economies and industries, (the largest Tunisian industries are agriculture, tourism, mining and textiles), possibilities for the future have seemed very bleak.

The highest youth unemployment rates are in north Africa and the Middle East, at 24 per cent each. In December 2010, 18 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were unemployed. 11 percent of young Canadian were unemployed in 2007, and the The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that globally this rate will steadily increase until the end of 2011.

Though miles away, young Canadian and American university grads know the sting of applying to dozens of jobs and hearing back from none. Many attribute this brick wall to the older generation of workers who are holding on to their jobs; some cite the faster pace of business today, which doesn’t have time or resources to train fresh workers.

So without any job prospects, the large population of unemployed youth are forced to work informal low paying jobs, create employment for themselves, or, of course, wait until the recession ends and their elders retire. There’s a sense of helplessness out there.

Young people therefore either end up living at home or heading back to school, with free time to grow increasingly frustrated and depressed. Former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak’s strategy to deal with youth unemployment was to increase college enrolments. But more education creates more people who aren’t OK with blind obedience to their government. Jack A. Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University School of Public Policy quoted in that BusinessWeek article, feels that democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.”

Yet another road block for this eager generation, is the fact that they are attempting to enter the job force in a recovering economy. A 2009 study called Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy, looks at the connection between macroeconomic experience and individual attitude constructed during the ‘formative’ years (18-24). Individuals that live through a recession during these years are more likely to “believe that luck rather than effort is the most important driver of individual success, support more government redistribution, and have less confidence in institutions.”

For now, thousands of Egyptian youth feel good about what they have accomplished the first steps towards change  on their own terms—and without the meddling of the West. The next question is how Egypt, Tunisia, and their neighbours will begin to address the acute need for adequate work for their revolutionary generation.

Remember the good old days when Canadians used to think the government was supposed to help everyone share in economic prosperity and prevent anyone from shouldering the brunt of economic adversity? We thought we’d learned the bitter lessons about the perils of the free market from the Great Depression. A welfare state was needed to moderate the harsh forces of the market, with government programs that entitle all citizens to certain social and economic rights.

Today, the welfare-state programs of the 1960s and 1970s seem like a distant memory. Free marketeers have attacked everything from employment insurance to welfare to education funding.

One response of progressives to the shredding of the social safety net is the impulse to go back to where we were before the bad stuff happened. Remember the good old days, when most unemployed people could actually qualify for unemployment insurance? When the discussion was about how to fix or improve public services, not what price the government could get for auctioning them off? After losing so many fights over the decades to protect social programs, you can appreciate this nostalgia for the way things used to be. Wouldn’t it be great to have adequate income support programs again instead of having to rely on the not-so-tender mercies of seedy payday loan joints?

But nostalgia for the past overstates the virtues of the welfare state. Carleton University sociologist Janet Siltanen’s research shows that—even on its best days—the welfare state paradigm was far from paradise. Even in the “golden age” of the Canadian welfare state, politicians were long on rhetoric and short on substance. Income security programs were modest, and social programs were often not extended to everyone. Plus, a weak commitment to full employment meant that the Canadian government fell far short of placing the rights of citizens above market forces.

Some might argue that—despite its flaws—the Canadian welfare state of a generation ago is still preferable to today’s neo-liberal nightmare. But Siltanen argues that viewing the welfare state with rose-coloured glasses is not a great starting point for a new vision for Canada.

The welfare state paradigm was predicated on an agenda of redistribution: the idea that the government should take from the affluent to help out those who are struggling.

Under such a redistribution scheme, socially marginalized groups must fight over whose agendas will be supported from a limited pot of tax revenues. Groups that battle racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination are badly disadvantaged when it comes to determining who are the deserving beneficiaries. For them, the welfare state is not a paradise lost.

Not that redistribution is a bad thing—far from it. And maybe we could sort out our oppressive prejudices enough to ensure that welfare state programs are not designed around the heterosexual male breadwinner household, and to ensure that many more groups (women and First Nations come to mind) receive the benefit of this redistributive vision.

But there are other problems with welfare-state-style income redistribution as a political agenda. Taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots occludes a bigger question: Why is it that the economy produces haves and have-nots?

This is a question about more than just income redistribution. Rather than relying solely on government to try to improve on an economic system that reinforces inequality, wouldn’t it be better if we had a more egalitarian economic system? If the economy weren’t creating such gulfs between rich and poor, there would be less damage for the government to fix.

This line of reasoning leads in a number of interesting directions—directions we don’t pursue if we are stuck in the past with the same redistribution mindset we had a generation ago. Siltanen poses her own provocative question: Who said markets are sacred? The market economy, with all of its imperfections, is not some force of nature; it is socially created. So for Siltanen and others, we should not just set our sights on a return to some imaginary, glorious past, but on creating a future where the economic system itself is up for debate.

Jacques Rogge's bank of Olympic televisions (artist's impression).

When Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, checks into his Vancouver hotel suite a few weeks from now, he will find (as he flops, exhausted, no doubt, from the strain of private jet travel) a “video wall,” paid for by the citizens of British Columbia. The bank of televisions are a requirement of IOC regulations, which state that the president must have enough screens to be able to watch every Olympic event underway at any given time—simultaneously.

The white-glove treatment being extended to Count Rogge of Belgium and the 111 other IOC members—the clutch of industrialists, backwater bureaucrats, tinpot generals, and dissipated royalty who preside over the Olympic “movement”—puts the economic reality of 2010 into sharp and sickening perspective.

Somehow in this country it became perversely more politically viable to spend $1.98 billion widening B.C.’s Sea to Sky Highway for a two-week international event than it is to implement a national housing strategy to aid Canada’s estimated 300,000 homeless (Canada is the only G8 country without such a plan). Today, more than 600,000 Canadian children live in poverty, a number that hasn’t budged since 1989’s doomed Campaign 2000 parliamentary pledge to eradicate child poverty by the turn of the millennium—yet $900 million will be spent on security costs, battle-hardening Vancouver against the Olympic crowds. The opening ceremonies of Vancouver 2010 are budgeted at $58 million, while the B.C. provincial government cut $20 million in arts funding just last summer.

It’s not possible to draw a direct line from the ledger that pays for renovating the Vancouver Convention Centre ($883 million) to the one that dictates that Canada pays among the lowest unemployment insurance rates in the industrialized world. But in a national sense, it is sad to contemplate the collective priorities expressed by these decisions: to choose the splashy over the prosaic; the grand, short-lived gesture over the incremental improvement; the rich and famous over the poor and marginalized. Or to furnish a Belgian count’s plush hotel room with more televisions than one man can watch, while thousands sleep in the street.

Can $20,000 payments to recent grads prevent Saskatchewan from becoming the "Land of the Living Old"?

It hasn’t been easy being Alberta’s neighbour these last few years. While Canada’s economic wunderkind enjoyed double-digit growth, next-door Saskatchewan saw the near-disappearance of the family farm and watched 35,000 residents in five years flee to other provinces. So when the Conservative Saskatchewan Party swept to power in 2007, promising a $20,000 tuition rebate for recent graduates who settle in the province, it looked like the final desperate act for a province one blogger dubbed “land of the living old.”

The generous rebate “signals to post-secondary graduates from across the country and beyond that Saskatchewan is the best place to establish their careers and pursue their goals,” Saskatchewan’s advanced education, employment and labour minister, John Norris, says. The program originally started up in January 2008, promising rebates to just grads of Saskatchewan universities, but it has since been extended to out-of-province graduates of post-secondary institutions, thanks to the province’s thriving economy. The rebates do have a few catches. The money is paid out gradually over seven years and graduates of shorter, cheaper technical programs actually receive around $3,000 to $6,000. But the biggest catch of all is that the full bonus is available only if students graduated in 2010 or later. Graduates from 2006 are only eligible for a mere $5,000.

For many, though, Saskatchewan offers something better than a generous rebate: jobs. As most provinces panic over rising unemployment, Saskatchewan jobsite saskjobs.ca shows more than 6,000 unfilled jobs. For the approximately 460 out-of-province arrivals from the graduating class of 2008, who received their first cheques this spring just as Canada’s youth unemployment rate hit an 11-year high, Saskatchewan may be just the perfect cure for the recession.

The province has yet to decide how long it will continue with the program and whether the bonus will keep people in the province, especially if Saskatchewan’s economy begins to suffer, is also an open question. But for now it looks like Saskatchewan—which lured many original residents with a bargain of 160 acres for $10—is once again the land where opportunity is as wide open as the prairie. That should at least make for a better slogan.