20 January 2013

General Ignorance #nlpoli

CBC’s Heather Barrett had a solid commentary this weekend on the recent revelations about how much young people in the province’s university don’t know about stuff.

Lack of inquisitiveness.

Well, young people aren’t the only ones who don’t know basic stuff.

Remember this cabinet minister?  As we told you in 2009,

According to Oram, the cod moratorium took place in the “early to mid-1980s”.

If you think that was a slip of the tongue consider that according to Oram, once the moratorium started,  we then turned to diversifying the economy with mining for things like iron ore and uranium.  Iron ore mining dates back to the 1890s, not the 1980s and as for uranium, there isn’t a functioning uranium in the province at the moment.  There never has been one. There are prospects but no actual mine.

The Lower Churchill will start up within the coming year (i.e. 2009) according to Oram, even though the thing had not even started the environmental review process when he did the interview.  It won’t complete the process until 2010-2011.

Oram wasn’t the only politician at the time who suffered from this problem, nor has it gone away.  Plenty of politicians today are afflicted with general ignorance.

Fortunately lack of information is a correctable problem. It just might not be correctable before the pols do massive damage.

-srbp-