BREAKINGBLOGNEWS: Saskatoon Mayor Responds To Jobs Today

Absolutely and totally unbelievable. Another of the planks of the Mayor's Jobs Today program may be falling apart and so quickly too!

Atchison Responds To Windsor-Saskatoon Commute
Tuesday, 18 March 2008

The Mayor of Windsor says a long distance commuting program between his Ontario city and the Cities of Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon is truly a win-win situation.

The plan would apparently allow long distance commuters to travel weekly, back and forth, between western Canada and Windsor - which is suffering from high unemployment.

Mayor Don Atchison says Windsor Mayor Eddie Francis and the community would first have to be on board along with various businesses from Saskatoon to make it work.

Atchison says our city's housing shortage is a problem, so something would have to change in order to allow people to live here from out of province.

http://www.saskatoonhomepage.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10889&Itemid=374

The Mayor also said in a newspaper article:

• "Quite frankly, for cities to go into other cities to start asking people to leave their communities to come to other ones, I don't know if that's really the right thing to be doing, but Mayor Francis is certainly anxious to be able to do something for his citizens," Atchison said.
  
  With Saskatchewan's most populous city in the middle of a housing shortage, finding accommodations for new workers may be the most difficult part of the plan. Atchison said it would be up to employers to provide adequate housing for employees coming to Saskatoon through the commuting program.
  
  "We certainly don't want to end up with a situation that they've had in Calgary in the past where people have had to live in trucks," he said. "I think that you want to make sure that everyone has a place to live that would come out here."
  
  Atchison, who said Saskatoon won't be aggressively participating in the plan at the moment..."

Here is another comment that is made in a Regina newspaper that tells me that this could turn into a horrible deal for Windsor but potentially a great deal for the Western Provinces:

• "RREDA president and CEO Larry Hiles said there is definitely a need for skilled tradespeople, both temporary and permanent, in the near future due to a number of big projects that have been announced in the city. While on the surface it looks positive, Hiles also noted housing, transportation and Windsor's possible talent pool are things to consider.
  
  "(We'd) certainly be more interested in workers who would permanently move here than people who would come here for five days a week ... because all their investment and spending goes somewhere else," said Hiles, adding this is just one of several avenues being looked at for bringing skilled workers to the city."

In other words, all Eddie is doing is creating a nice recruitment program for Western employers to convince our best workers to move out of here and become permanent residents of the Western Provinces. And we don't even get a recruiting fee for doing that!