Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
The hometown discount also works in your favour. Does the difference in a nurse's salary make up for the difference in housing costs between small town Newfoundland and the larger cities in Ontario or the West?
And if you move between the same province, salaries for the public and parapublic sector are the same province-wide. A nurse in Moncton makes the same as a nurse in Lamèque.
Going up a level, an RCMP officer in Shippagan NB makes the same salary (equivalent to rank) as an RCMP officer based in Lower Mainland BC.
Another thing is that "staying home" is a boon to many younger people who can live basically for free in their parents' or grandparents' old house. My parents each have siblings who have done this and they are the most financially well-off of their respective families in spite of having careers that were very average for their respective families.
My cousin (and spouse) who are nicely settled into "Depressed Acadia" are doing the exact same thing: they've settled into the old family home. The other siblings are gone to Moncton and Montreal and will never live in that town again.
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I should elaborate and say there's two lines of thought within Newfoundland: the younger people who don't mind living in rural places of the province, and those who wish to live in the cities.
For those who don't mind living in the middle of nowhere, it's a moot point. Cost of homes, property tax, etc. is low enough that your wage will never be an issue. Understaffing is still a problem, and maybe even a bigger problem in rural areas of the province. But those who wish or chose to live in a smaller place are a minority.
It's a bit different when we're talking St. John's. When you want to buy a $350,000 or $400,000 house and whatnot, that difference in salary plus the pain of being on call, getting called into work 12 hour shifts day after day, working hours of overtime, all of that becomes a bigger factor.
I'd love to stay here in St. John's, and I'm in an industry which the pay rate here in NL is actually on par with the rest of the country. Unfortunately, for a province of over 500,000 there are about 3-4 companies which hire chemists to work as chemists. In comparison, Charlottetown PEI has an entire bioscience alliance full of pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies (probably around 10 on the island, most of which in Ch'Town). Why can't we be like that?