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Dear Sir,

I am a resident of Nova Scotia and previously lived for three years in Bermuda. I was dismayed to read a press release published by the Government of Nova Scotia outlining a memorandum of understanding signed recently by NS Premier Rodney MacDonald and your Premier, Dr. Ewart Brown.

According to this press release, the five-year agreement will strengthen Nova Scotia's ties with Bermuda and enhance service export opportunities, tourism, transportation and health links in both places.

It all sounds great, doesn't it? However, what's missing from this press release is an analysis of who benefits the most from such agreements. And added to that is the omission of some of the shameful linkages shared by Bermuda and Nova Scotia.

Let's see what else my province and your country share:

• A social system arranged by skin colour, economic class and gender;

• A misplaced allegiance to a colonial history that benefitted the few;

• An appalling history of enslavement of African peoples - although N.S. was an 'underground railway' terminus when humanity began treating African peoples as humans; n A lingering legacy of racism - and although it's debatable whether or not Bermuda was inhabited by indigenous peoples before Europeans arrived, there is a long history of Micmac peoples here - and they can be included in the 'legacy of racism' category. I do believe that if indigenous people existed in Bermuda the Europeans would have wiped them out anyway;

• An indifference to the issues of poverty and the substantive roots of crime.

Before the people of Bermuda applaud Dr. Brown for signing this agreement with Nova Scotia, they should be aware of some startling statistics, such as:

• African Nova Scotian university graduates earn an average of $12,000 less than those in the general population;

• African Nova Scotian children are more likely than other children to be living in low-income households - 44 per cent for blacks in Canada, compared to 19 per cent for the general population;

• According to 2001 statistics there are 19,670 African Nova Scotians and the provincial government, with which your government just signed a new economic agreement, employs about 160 African Nova Scotians;

• Two African Canadian cultural centres have been targets of arson in the past three years. The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre was burned to the ground, and the six Molotov cocktails were thrown into the Black Cultural Centre.

I wish the similarities between Nova Scotia and Bermuda were based on more positive grounds - but they are not.

Fiona Traynor

Halifax, Nova Scotia[[In-content Ad]]

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