The following is a letter I wrote to the Inverness Oran many years ago (I think – that or it was just a facebook note, or something). 

 

Tea Time in Cape Breton

 

We often hear politicians talking about the things they are doing to help spur the economy and create jobs, but do we ever take the time to ask what that really means? Do we ever take the time to reflect on what our local economy looks like and whether there might be other things we can do besides leaving it up to the politicians? In order to answer these questions let’s first imagine what our economy looks like. This works whether we are talking about the economy of one community, like Mabou or Whycocomagh, or if we talked about the whole of Inverness County as one economy, or of Cape Breton Island, or of Canada. For this example, just imagine we are talking about your own community wherever that may be.

 

Let’s pretend your community’s economy is a teacup. The tea itself is the money in the economy. Where does the tea come from? The tea comes from a variety of teapots, some big and some small. When people who live in your community go somewhere else to work, they are bringing tea back home with them in the form of their paychecks, like if I lived in Judique but worked in Port Hawkesbury. When people in your community make something for, or provide a service to, someone else from outside of your community, more tea gets poured in, like in the tourism industry. One of the biggest teapots out there though, is the government’s teapot. This big teapot pours in tea for Employment Insurance and Social Assistance, government jobs, and a variety of programs and services. It can even create jobs sometimes too. This is one of the things we hear politicians talking about all the time. They hold the teapot in front of us and promise to pour. But after years and years of pouring from all these teapots, it seems like there’s still not much tea in our teacup, and we’re thirsty! Where does it all go?

 

Once the tea is in the teacup it swirls around a little bit when people buy things from one another inside the community – but there are a bunch of holes in the bottom of the teacup and all that tea is leaking out and we haven’t had a chance to enjoy it! Why does the tea leak out? When we go outside of our community to buy something we are taking our tea with us and we’re spending it somewhere else – in effect, we are acting as the teapot for another community! If we are going back and forth between small communities like Margaree and Inverness and we’re exchanging tea with one another – well, in Cape Breton that’s the proper thing to do – but if we’re taking all our tea and handing it over to someone we don’t even know in another country – that tea is gone and I promise you they will not be coming to your community to give any tea to you! I hate to pick on companies like Wal-Mart but it’s the one best example of how tea leaks out of our teacups.

 

So the politicians are hearing about how little tea is left in the teacups and what is their solution almost every time? That’s right, we’ll pour more tea into the teacup – and for a little while the tea is swirling around almost to the brim – but inevitably, by the time we go to take a sip, it has receded back down – it’s leaked out again. We can’t buy everything we need or want from inside our communities. As far as I know there’s nobody in Port Hastings manufacturing televisions and nobody in Cheticamp building automobiles – but when there is something we can get locally and we buy it locally, we are plugging one of those holes in the bottom of the teacup. So how do we fix the problem – by pouring more tea or plugging some of the holes? Seems like a no-brainer doesn’t it? [Insert your own politician joke here]

 

Let’s imagine for a minute that we made an effort, as much as possible, to plug some more holes in the teacup. What if we bought the groceries we could get at the local store instead of the big chain store in another town? What if we bought our gas from the local service centre rather than a company-owned station someplace else? What if we gave someone we love a locally, handmade gift as a birthday present they will cherish for years instead of something made in China that will last a couple months? The more and more holes we can plug in the teacup, slowly but surely, the level of tea will rise until finally it is overflowing. Then and only then can we enjoy it. Then and only then will our economy grow (our teacup will, by necessity, get bigger).

 

If we want to do what’s best for ourselves and for the future of our communities we will start now, for those who haven’t already, to begin actively seeking out locally made items and to turn the car around and go back to the local shops instead of heading out for shopping. Nothing will change overnight but it is not only possible – it is the only way. We just witnessed the federal government pour a pile of tea on Halifax in the form of the shipbuilding contract. Good for them. But to sit idly by and hope for something similar, for a politician to wave a teapot in our face, is thinking big in a very small way, when what we really must do to create the kind of local economy we need to give young people a choice for their futures, is to start thinking small in a really big way. And truth-be-told, I don’t mean to pick on the politicians. They’ve just been in the business of pouring tea for so long they’ve forgotten how to fix a teacup.

We’re Cape Bretoners. It’s time we started acting like it by sharing our tea with one another instead of giving it all away to people somewhere else we are never even going to meet who will never even thank us for it. Share your tea with a neighbour: buy local!

 

Dwayne MacEachern

Judique

Adapted from “The Leaky Bucket Economic Analysis Tool” developed by Gord Cunningham at the Coady International Institute

Well this idea was a massive failure! OK, well no not really, but I don’t have time to sit down and type out my thoughts on a regular basis – certainly not often enough to keep an interested audience.

But have no fear, I’m not giving up! And I will likely, from time to time, keep posting written blog posts.

The big news, however, is that instead I’ve decided to concentrate on creating a podcast. As I will explain in the first episode, I have a lot of potentially productive time every day as I drive back and forth to my job. I’m in my car for 1.5-2 hours every day (at least 4, if not 5, days per week). That’s a lot of time that can be put to good use.

So I’m happy to announce the Community From Within Economic Development Podcast!

I’ll post a link to every ep on this site once uploaded (once I figure out a platform and the audio editing and all that jazz). I recorded the first episode yesterday, actually, as I drove home from work, and hope to upload it by the first of next week, if not sooner.

Thanks for checking this out, and hope you will check out the podcast! (Once I upload it)

Slainte!

-dw

My younger self would probably be very disappointed in me today. There I was with all that ambition and community spirit and I honestly could not believe how any individual, in the face of the economic challenges we faced, could not be involved, fully and completely.

I used to make posters for community meetings of our local development group, put them up around the village, and then sit there as the time for the meeting to begin approached and wonder how it was hardly anyone would show up other than those few of us on the board, and a handful of others. I would make posters painting a bleak picture of the future. I would make humorous posters trying to make jokes or puns related to economics. I was stupefied in trying to figure out why people did not seem to take any interest in their own community; in their own prosperity.

I remember seeing all the cars at the church for mass and thinking to myself ‘here are all these people more concerned with their afterlife than their current one!’

I was angry. I was frustrated. I was giving everything of myself, and for what?

I studied economic development at university. I took courses in Asset Based Community Development. I read books on the cooperative movement and community social enterprises. I didn’t know what exactly had to be done but goddamnit I knew I couldn’t do it alone!

I’m no longer involved directly with any community groups. I haven’t been for a few years now. I don’t think I would have the time right now even if I wanted to.

Back then,  around 2002/2003 when I first got involved, I was in university, and later, after graduating, I was severely underemployed. It would also help to mention I was out of high school for six years before I made the decision to go to university, and I didn’t make any fortunes then either.

I was young and idealistic, certainly, but more importantly, I was single (no family obligations) and either living with my parents, or later, at my grandparents’ old trailer (no rent). The fact was that I had a LOT of free time on my hands that enabled me to be involved. I made a huge mistake in thinking that a lack of involvement in our community development organization meant a lack of caring in some way. I need to explain this further:

Of course, in my community there were several community groups of which all had many volunteers who cared passionately for what they did. We had the Community Centre, Volunteer Fire Dept, and Recreation Association, to name just a few. The group I was part of, however, was meant to be an overarching umbrella group for the whole community – a sort of village council, if you will, not to decide on bylaws or anything, but to work on improvements that would benefit everyone, and hence, all the other organizations.

I also did not understand the importance of family life until it hit me. I might not have anything on my calendar every second Tuesday evening when a certain group decides to meet, but my daughter wants me to read books, so I’m reading her books. Got it?

I get it. I do. Now.

I didn’t back then. So my younger self might not like who I am today, but that’s ok, he was wrong. He was wrong to assume so many things. C’est la vie!

OK so I feel I’m a busy guy. Great. Where do I go from here? Well as mentioned before this blog is an attempt to rehash some of my past experiences, and I will continue to do that, of course, but I also want it to be a way forward. My wife and I have been working on some ideas and we hope to make a push to turn some of these ideas into reality in the very near future. I also feel compelled to begin something entirely different and directly focused on economic development in Cape Breton. I’ve been tossing some ideas around in my head the last few weeks and they seem to have rekindled a long-dead spark I felt back when I was about twelve years old.

It was 1991 and I went to a week-long summer camp program called Monkey Business at what was then called the University College of Cape Breton (now CBU). It was a program based on Business, Science & Technology and there were about thirty of us kids along with several ‘camp counselors’. The program was sponsored in part by Enterprise Cape Breton, a now defunct wing of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA).

We were put into teams and the main project for the week was to invent a new product, build a prototype, create a business plan, and then we were to present the ideas to a panel of judges (local businesspeople). It was Dragon’s Den meets Mr. Dressup.

I am still proud to this day that our team won with our “invented” product which was a new type of ice cube tray that had rounded bottoms (made from cut-in-half ping pong balls) so you could push down one side and the other popped out. It also had a special ‘Nytrex’ coating (silver spray paint) to make the surface non-stick, a lid (piece of matching white plastic) to prevent spilling, and a freeze indicator to tell when ice was ready (piece of a neon green straw).

The whole week was basically about entrepreneurship and I remember leaving the camp excited for the future. “We can do it!” was the message we received. Just because we were in Cape Breton did not mean we were not capable of doing and achieving great things in our lives.

I know there are/were similar programs out there like Junior Achievers and Shad Valley, but seriously why isn’t this sort of thing a class in school – maybe not mandatory – but if nothing else we need to bring back Monkey Business!

I wanted to try to set something up a few years ago and contacted Enterprise Cape Breton (I wanted the documentation to have some foundation to build upon to create a new proposal) and I was told that since it was greater than seven years old all documentation would have been destroyed.

Shortly thereafter, (but not because of this reason), I was no longer involved in community development and my idea died out.

Every school should have a program like Monkey Business, except instead of inventing fake products and doing mock-ups of prototypes, they come up with real ideas and build prototypes that work.

I got sidetracked there. I didn’t mean to go off about Monkey Business like that, but that’s where the spark came from all those many years ago, and I feel like now, almost thirty years later, I’ve not really put it to any good use. I feel that if I die without turning that spark into a giant fireball of something positive, it’ll be one of my life’s biggest regrets.

So there’s this spark, just hanging out in my brain… and it collided with another idea or two I’ve been chewing on the last few weeks, and I’m thinking I may have something here to work with. I need to do a little more chewing, but I’m getting close to something.

You see the thing for me today is that I no longer think going to government (any level) for money is the way to go unless absolutely necessary – and I believe for non-profit groups it may be entirely necessary… but then again, I am not certain I fully believe community economic development is best done by a non-profit group. Maybe it is. But I want desperately to explore what a person is capable of in a private enterprise capacity, with a social responsibility aspect.

I’ll keep chewing on this idea and get back to you real soon!