The Our Town - Clarenville Blog by Paul Tilley

The greatest opportunity for Clarenville is that thousands of cars drive by every single day. The biggest challenge for Clarenville is that thousands of cars drive by every single day.                                                                                 Noel O'Dea (Target Marketing) (Speaking to the Clarenville Chamber of Commerce about tourism development)  One of the things that I often tell my students is that hope is not a strategy.  Business and community success depends on their ability to recognize and capitalize on opportunities as they arise.    If you ask someone like successful Clarenville businessman, Philip Mercer, who has guided and grown Mercer's Marine for decades through some of the most difficult times in the inshore fishery, the key to success is working hard to follow the market while providing a product offering that customers want while at the same time providing outstanding customer service.  (Be sure to listen to Jane Adey's excellent inte

In principle, most everybody would agree that working together to support one another is a good idea.  Could this same approach work for our region's towns and communities? One of the biggest challenges for political leaders in Newfoundland and Labrador - particularly rural Newfoundland and Labrador - is figuring out how to sustain the hundreds of little settlements that dot our coastline.  The vast majority of these settlements depended on the fishery, many of them are remote, and few of them have any form of local government to provide basic community services.   Today, the continued closure of the inshore cod fishery has meant that the next generation simply does not exist in these settlements, leaving an aging and shrinking population.  This is occurring against a backdrop of rising expectations for the continuance of services - most of which have been traditionally provided, at no additional charge to residents, by the provincial and federal governments.  In the face of increa