legislative A-ombly

boy. You know, like many other young people, when young we dream a lot and we wonder what the future holds for us. When I was a boy, I was not unlike this when I was following behind a team of horses, trying to eke out a livelihood under the adverse conditions that the economy was then in, and still is, in this Province. where today we sell twenty-three bags of potatoes to buy one bag of flour. The dream I had, I think, was a good one. I saw the future of this Island might be, as many of us hoped it would, and I believe it still could be. I say my classmates go out of this Province and build for themselves a future, most of them that really tried built a wonderful future for themselves. No better opportunity than I had, but I still wanted this Island to be my future and the future of other peoples, and as time

went on and I was growing up and I saw many young men, I saw men in two world wars, I’m not old, go out and give of themselves that this future, this ideal and this dream that many of us had might survive. They came back and took up their place in society again and it has been a reasonably good life that we have led, though not as easy as some have had. I grew to manhood as many other young people did in this country of ours, and I was able to start and build a family of my own, my dreams were never greater, that their future would be better than mine. This was my hope, this is the hope of many young people. I encouraged any young people that I think would have ability and wanted a free life, and not willing to sell a shirt over a counter, to go into the field of agriculture. What has it brought us? But then, a few short years ago, that dream seemed to become a greater reality, when we had one man in this Province who had, over a long lot of years, gained a great deal of experience and a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of support and became the Premier of the Province in 1959. (Applause) He gathered about him men of caliber, and he built it across this land, under the direction of the then Minister of Education, something that had been denied to people in my generation, an oppor- tunity that my sons and my daughters could have educational opportunities that were given to others in more favoured portions of the Province and in more favoured por-

tions of the country.

We heard just a few days ago, and many availed themselves of that opportun- ity, that we are sending out today some of the finest people this Province has ever produced, and our hope was to retain a great many more of them than we are going to be able to under the system that we are now in, going back rather than going ahead. I was not too surprised when the Minister of Health, in his address the other evening, said, “I wonder what is going to become of all those schools that were built and what is going to become of the people of this Province” and I wonder that my- self. If we can’t expand, we must go back, and back we are going, apparently. I wonder if, rather than expanding society and expanding economy that we had such good evidence was being done in this country prior to last year, if it will not be too many years before we have about 75,000 people on this Island, no industry, and most of them old. I am afraid that is what our future is and I have not nearly as good a picture in my mind of the future of this Province as I did, and don’t say that from any political standpoint at all but from actual evidence of what is happening in this

province today.

. That same man picked another Minister, a business man, a good business man, a man that was established in a business of his own, a man that I had known from the time I was a boy and who had often heard say that what we need in this Province is somebody to go out and tell the people of the possibilities we have here and bring people in to this Province, to help us develop this Province. When he got into the position where he could do that, he did. But what happened? And again I say, as my title would indicate, “at what cost was this man badgered, and denied, ridiculed, and called almost anything but a gentleman". I saw him walk out this door the other day with his head an awful lot higher than those on the Gov- ernment benches. (Applause) And there is one man on that side of the House in respect to that fiasco that I was more disappointed with than any other. He was a man who presented himself here in this House in an excellent manner in his cover- age of his Department, although he indicated to the House that he was only in the position of a caretaker in respect to the fine establishment of education that had been built up for him to be the caretaker of. He is a man that has had care and control of young people, no doubt he is a family man himself, and when an occas- ion like this, if a family quarrel arises, I think the punishment should be equally meted out to those that occasion the row, as well as those that defend it them-

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