Nova Scotians naturally tend support their local communities. Yet so much of what life necessitates comes from away: appliances, energy, technology, vehicles, much of the food we eat and so on. We can be enjoying prosperous employment and yet if money is leaving the province faster than it is coming in, we will always feel impoverished. We end up forever looking for economic salvation from away, be it from big business or big government and this never really works.
Doing business as usual is no longer working.
On the other hand if we all take a disciplined approach to supporting local producers with even a small fraction of our income, the economic stimulus, can far exceed even that of mega projects. We can build self-reliance and take control of our environment and energy future.
The numbers are here at the CUPE NS sponsored 10% Shift website. If we were to each spend just $50 a week on local products and services it would amount to over a billion dollars a year injected directly into the provincial economy. Double or triple that, you do the math!
The science on this was published over a decade ago by the New Economics Foundation (economics as if people and planet mattered) in London. The free NEF booklet Plugging the Leaks details the how and why.
The theory in a nutshell? “Rebuild local economies by plugging the leaks that are draining local money away. How money circulates in an area is just as important as the amount of money flowing into it.”
We know this intuitively and yet the temptation to save a penny at a big box store will no doubt always loom as a diversion. One simply has to ask “savings at what cost?”