The Ghiz government released it's Rural Action Plan on Tuesday...one hundred and eight pages of skulldrudgery. A biscuit recipe is more riveting, and at least with biscuits, once you've completed the process there's reward in the end. Not so with this Rural Action Plan. I've read this document several times in the last few days, and in spite of hoping to find some good news, all I've gotten from it is a reeling headache. This was an opportunity for the Ghiz government to get something right. It has failed once again.

Rural PEI has suffered through school closures, emergency room closures, abandonment of agriculture, failing tourism policy, a dismal fishery and forestry, and political interference and favoritism that pits rural communities against each other, and all at the hands of the Ghiz government. And now after systematically and deliberately creating a crisis of gargantuan proportions in rural Prince Edward Island, this same government wants rural Islanders to see it as their knight in shining armour riding to the rescue? Farcical.

This document is only a long-winded remake of previous announcements. And it reads as though it were hasty rather than 2 years in the making. It's a myriad of statistics and colorful charts, graphs and maps. If you cut out the chaffe, the same hollow message could be stated in a two page binder. Although it claims to have specific goals and actions to achieve them, it has no clear vision for the future.

Ultimately it is a plan for further discussions and more study with new government liasons who will go cap in hand to government with your concerns. The only tangible measure of this new plan will be yet another level of bureaucracy that will ultimately serve as a final dumping ground for those Lieberals still patiently waiting for the plum of patronage to ripen.

This report focuses virtually no attention on a major challenge facing rural PEI. It's a dragon that, if successfully slain, will go a long way toward fixing many of the other challenges. I'm talking about a shrinking population. It's a trend of 60+ years, passively allowed by many governments, but accelerated by the current one. Of 108 pages, only one third of one page addresses this issue under the title of, Action 28. But again, there appears to be no plan, just 'plans for a plan'. Sure it's preambled with page after page of statistics, historical and other data, copied from Stats Canada, but that doesn't hide the fact that this government has no idea what, if anything, it will actually do about it.

Having fewer people living in rural areas stresses major public resources like education and healthcare. If there are fewer people to utilize and support them, those services become increasingly difficult, if not impossible to maintain. Fewer people, fewer services...fewer services, fewer people. And there we have the double-edged sword. More people, more taxes, more services, more people, more taxes...you get the idea.

The Ghiz government's Rural Action Plan, is lacking a vigorous population strategy to retain young Islanders and to encourage newcomers to rural PEI.

The Provincial Nominee Program would have been a great tool to move this goal forward, but as we all know, the Ghiz government has destroyed that too.