[ARTICLE] PEI's Only Hope?

From today's The Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson's article "PEI's 'brilliantly strategic' challenge":

CHARLOTTETOWN -- 'We have a half-generation to get it right." The urgency behind Wade MacLauchlan's warning is obvious. So is his determination to do something about "it."

The "it" is Prince Edward Island's future as a more prosperous place, with the path to that prosperity running through knowledge, innovation and the clustering of resources.

Tourism, agriculture, fisheries, a few scattered industries and, of course, employment insurance, regional development grants and equalization payments won't produce that "it." There's got to be something more to define the island as a much more innovative place.

Otherwise, warns Mr. MacLauchlan, who is the president of the University of Prince Edward Island, "we are at serious risk of losing the demographic race, seeing our own talented people leave, and failing to attract much-needed new people and investments."

Perhaps you would expect as much from a university president. This breed preaches the gospel of knowledge and innovation as the way to a better future. The question is whether governments are listening.

( Read more. )

Wade MacLauchlan is running the only institution that offers PEI a better future. Can PEI take up his challenge to be "brilliantly strategic"? The culture and politics of the place suggest no, but it's worth a sustained try.

[BRIEF NOTE] Sinéad O'Connor and the Opposite of Celtic Twee

I brought my CDs over from my office yesterday. For the first time in months, I've been listening to them instead of my mp3 collection. I was struck by Sinéad O'Connor's song "Jackie," from her 1987 album The Lion and the Cobra.

( Jackie's lyrics )

It's a classic sea ballad: woman has man she loves; woman loses man she loves to the sea; woman waits for the man's return. If, instead of being written and performed by Sinéad O'Connor, "Jackie" was written and composed by an Atlantic musical artist, I can sadly predict that it would be a slow song, sung with an excess of emotion, backed by a busy melancholic fiddle track, and ending fairly quietly. Sinéad doesn't do that, bless her. She takes the sea ballad and modernizes it superbly, taking the well-constructed lyrics (they are well-constructed, right, talktooloose?) making it urgent and energetic and something that can be appreciated on its own terms, not as an artifact from a scenic/ally marginal culture that you spend a week visiting on your vacation from your day ob in Toronto or New York City or London.

One thing that I hate particularly about what's happening to so much of the North Atlantic Celtic fringe--yes, this includes Prince Edward Island--is the way in which unique and important cultural traditions are willingly degraded by their practitioners into purely commercial forms, meeting the lowest common denominator of the audience, becoming nothing more than background music. While her musical career was active, Sinéad O'Connor's willingness to transform and assimilate Irish traditional culture made her a shining star.

I wish more people like her would appear.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] France as a Demographic Pioneer

I'd like to thank jackwalker, by his reply to my previous post on Third World population shrinkage, for making me realize in my reply a very interesting parallel. To wit:

In the 1930s, the France of the Third Republic was on the verge of a sharp population decline despite heavy immigration and a population that only recently became mostly urban. Other Western countries had birth rates which were below long-term replacement levels. I suspect that demographers made three mistakes:

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As I'm not a professional demographer, I've no idea if people examining population aging and declining are examining the experience of Third Republic France. They should, though.