Ryan Reynolds bought a Tier 4 football club in the United Kingdom for about US$2.5 million.
If there was such great value to promote immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador by buying anything to do with a low-ranked British soccer team, buying the whole team would make way more sense than spending $171,000 to put a logo on the front of the team’s jersey that no one in the stands will be able to see.
Forget all the rest of the stuff in the news release about this latest government brain fart because it’s just there to make this look way bigger a deal than it actually is. The Rule of Opposites applies here in spades. The more quotes there are in a news release from different people the less important it is. If this thing made sense, it would sell itself. The logic would be obvious. In fact, we’d all be slapping our foreheads in amazement at what a brilliant idea it is and yet no one had thought of it before.
As it is, the release is full of useless information, except for maybe “yak milk is pink.” No, that’s not in there but’s the only trivia that isn’t. Like the fact that a shipyard in Barrow - where the team plays - built a ship once called the Newfoundland. No one mentioned the ship sank in 1943, the victim of a Nazi torpedo.
We also learn that the United Kingdom has “long been a premier source for newcomer recruitment.” Shudder at the jargon, another clue this is all fluff and nonsense. More important, be amazed at the hollowness of such a statement since about 96% of the “newcomer recruitment” to Newfoundland and Labrador originated in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Their descendants make up that share of the current population.
But more recent immigration? International immigration boosted the population by almost 1,700 people in the first quarter of 2024 but that was actually 20% lower than the same period in 2023. Ands these days - aside from Ukraine - most people are not coming from the UK and the rest of Europe. The UK is the seventh largest source of immigrants - the government chart below is for 2015 - but here’s the thing: these folks are coming for jobs in health care, they are coming as students, and they work in the offshore. They’re transients, in other words. Few of them stick around.
Notice that 70% of them come to Sin Jawns. That’s a dead give-away. And of the other roughly 30%, they go to major centres, which is where there the hospitals are. Corner Brook also has the Grenfell campus and its fine arts program. Hospitals would explain the blip in Clarenville, for example with a few more working in what would have been Hebron construction at the time that chart appeared.
To make this announcement look bigger than it is, the government also dragged in the provincial soccer association and the Association for New Canadians, neither of which really get anything worthwhile out of logos on jerseys. Either group could have used the money that’s going into this venture to expand what they are already doing for people actually here.
If this soccer logo thing was part of a larger campaign - which is really the only way it would make sense - we’d have seen the announcement of the whole thing including the website. The whole thing would cost way more than $171,000. The Barrow boys - population 55,000 - would be a blip, a footnote, a sideshow, which is what this is. It’s like trying to recruit in the United States by buying ads in the Toledo Mudhens’ stadium. Most people looking at the thing - if they can see it at all - would wonder where the frig that place is, way fewer of them would click the link, and then it would only be out of idle curiosity.
Speaking of website, homeawaits.ca is pretty. Pretty generic. The copy is cliche, as are the photos. And the links to the most important space for immigrants - jobs - takes you to anything but actual job listings. There’s no link to housing prices for houses currently selling either. This whole show, website and all, looks like something slapped together. Even though tourism minister Steve Crocker’s name is on one of the quotes this does *not* look like something from the company that’s delivered the province’s highly creative tourism campaigns for the past 20 years.
A raft of people emailed and texted me starting Friday. They all wondered what this was about and if I had any information that would make sense out of it for them. They were all puzzled and if that many people with tons of experience in government handling these sorts of issues could make neither heads nor tails of it, then you know what they all suspected was indeed true.
It’s like the Premier who announced a lawsuit against the federal government but who said last week that he’s not serious about it. He doesn’t want to go to court. He’d settle for a debate with someone. Blowing even this weak amount on a farce doesn’t exactly bolster the case for more Equalization because we are desperately broke so perhaps it’s just as well Andrew Furey’s transformed his wannabe crusade into nothing. But if he wants to debate, book a hall and sell tickets. I’ll debate him about Equalization or anything else. It’ll be fun and entertaining. Promise. We can give the proceeds to charity.
Putting a logo on a Tier 4 football club in England to boost immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador is like the publishing company that started out a half century ago with the mandate to promote work by Newfoundlanders and Labradorians about Newfoundland and Labrador that last week released a fairy story by an American with absolutely no connection to the place telling a story that, truthfully, could easily have been about anywhere in the world except here and still made sense.
They are all lunacy.