The Globe and Mail

As a 17-year-old with an adventurous spirit, Ann-Marie Cheeseman spent part of last summer driving 40-ton trucks in the Alberta oil sands. She made big money for a Newfoundland teenager, clearing close to $3,000 a week.

But she doesn't want to return to the oil sands, leaving her family and friends in the harbour village of Rushoon on the wild, beautiful Burin Peninsula. “I'd go back to Alberta only if I had to,” she says firmly.

So this summer, she is on a mission – to stay in Newfoundland and Labrador and build a career in what she believes will become a booming province over the next 20 years. She is learning the electrician's trade at a college down the highway from Rushoon.

If everything falls into place, she would thus reverse the century-long exodus of Cheeseman family members who have left the remote Burin, a three-hour drive west of St. John's, in search of work in other parts of the world.

Ms. Cheeseman's choice is a barometer of the new spirit in the province – that this is its moment, with the economic balance tilting eastward in a tectonic shift as Central Canada declines, Alberta passes its peak, and Newfoundland and Labrador strikes pay dirt in oil, mining and electrical power.

That means the chance to turn the tables on Canada's condescension. “What I'd like to say to the rest of the country is: ‘Come on down, we've got a job to offer you,'” says Ms. Cheeseman's father, Jim Cheeseman, 59, who has worked half his life outside the province – in Ontario, Alberta, wherever the jobs are.

The Rock can still be a hard place if you're in the savaged forestry industry or the depleted cod fishery. Unemployment, chronically double digit, rose above 17 per cent last month, a level that partly reflects the persistent culture of seasonal employment, rural hardship and government handouts.

Yet the optimism seems almost to defy gravity as the province emerges from 60 years of dashed dreams since the former British colony joined Confederation. It is buoyed by a combative Premier and new energy deals, including the recent Pembina South agreement with major oil companies that will net $10-billion for the province – which also becomes a 7.8 per cent partner in the field.

Ms. Cheeseman intends to be part of the surge. “I want to work at Long Harbour,” she says with determination, referring to Vale Inco's planned facility for processing nickel from its Voisey's Bay mine.

The vision outlined by Premier Danny Williams is to see a constant rotation of megaprojects – Long Harbour, Hebron, White Rose, Hibernia South and others – rolling out at staggered intervals to 2041, when the lopsided deal enjoyed by Quebec for power from Labrador's Upper Churchill project finally ends.

“We are about 30 years away from 2041, which is the magic date for people in this province,” Mr. Williams says. “That's the date we get back 5,000 megawatts with the Upper Churchill.”

Part of the mood shift also reflects the depth of anxiety elsewhere – in Ontario, Quebec, even Alberta, which traditionally employs an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 current or former Newfoundlanders, but is now sending many home for long layoffs.

This creates a paradox of declining provincial GDP because of lower energy prices, but also soaring house prices in St. John's and other centres. Even in the Burin, which has been hit by instability in the fishery and shipbuilding trades, housing has held up.

This year, Toronto-Dominion Bank economist Pascal Gauthier writes, Newfoundland and Labrador should generate a nation-leading 16.5-per-cent surge in house prices.

It comes largely “from net in-migration into St. John's and elsewhere on the Rock as fortunes in Alberta's oil patch have turned and workers hope to use their skills towards upcoming energy projects in the province.”

A long wait for prosperity

Newfoundlanders know there is a severe global recession, and many are hurting. But they see it as a blip in a long history of rise, fall and rise again.