Saturday, May 16, 2009

The line is forming up, is the North Coast part of the crowd?

Struggling communities in BC will soon be applying for close to 125 million dollars in funding from the Federal governmentt, part of the Conservative governments economic initiative to help out those communities most impacted by the recession.

Forestry communities seem to be the main target of this most recent funding announcement, with civic officials in Mackenzie, Prince George and Quesnel to name a few, eager to get their communities on the list and start to see the funding roll in.

Some of the criteria for the government’s Community Adjustment Fund project include recent job loss in the forestry sector, communities which feature little alternative employment available for those out of work.

Some of the possible uses for the money could be reforestation projects, or the purchase of machinery and other infrastructure needs to help industry rebuild.

Prince Rupert has been suffering the ravages of the recession for long before it became the topic of conversation across the nation, our troubled past in the forestry sector came along a number of years ago, since then there have been dozens of communities suffering similar shut downs and closures in the forestry sector.

It’s an economic turn that is making for a much larger pool of communities looking for help.

Podunkians will be watching to see if the elected officials from our corner of the province can navigate those tricky waters in the funding process, and bring some of that 125 million to the north coast.

Perhaps soon we'll see the political class gathering for one of those Public relations spectacles, outlining how the Federal resources are set to come to the rescue of the embattled North Coast.

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