Two random thoughts
Two random thoughts, since I haven’t posted here in so long:
I read the Globe and Mail’s multi-part series on retirement planning – or the lack of same – and found it fascinating. I was startled to realize that I am in better shape than most Canadians my age when it comes to retiring – and I have nowhere near enough money to retire on. A significant percentage of Canadians in their forties and fifties have no retirement savings at all.
Many people my age (I’m 49) or younger have pretty much assumed that there won’t be any Canada Pension Plan left by the time we reach retirement age. All the money will be gone, in this view: deficit financing and the baby boom will swallow all of the available pension money, leaving the rest of us with nothing.
I also believe that, by the time people my age are eligible to retire, there will be tremendous societal pressure to keep working to be less of a burden on the smaller percentage of the population that is still below retirement age. And there may very well be generational resentment: younger people today have had to endure higher tuition fees and fewer job opportunities, in part because people my age are unwilling to pay taxes. You can’t predict the future, but I can’t help but think that what goes around, comes around.
My other thought for the day: I know a number of people who are planning not to get the H1N1 vaccine when it becomes available to the general public. For the most part, this is because they don’t trust the government to have tested the vaccine adequately enough. I wonder whether this is the fallout of having had three-plus years of a government that works hard to try to spin the news to portray itself in the best possible light. If you’re used to your government being less than totally honest with you, you’re not going to believe their pronouncements on public health either, no?
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Grit versus fun
Recently, I read an article on the Boston Globe’s web site that fascinated me. Entitled “The Truth About Grit“, the article made the claim that success is not possible without the willingness to overcome obstacles instead of giving up: in other words, that success is not possible without grit.
I’m not so sure about this. I agree that success does require putting in the hours: Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote that it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert at something. But the most successful people seem to be those who put in all this time because they were enjoying themselves. Success came almost as a by-product.
For example: in Wayne Gretzky’s autobiography, he mentions that his father built a backyard rink for him not because he was ambitious for his son but because he wanted to see him every now and again. Wayne loved hockey so much that he was spending all his time at the rink.
There are some successful people who got there through grim effort, of course. Many 19th century financiers fit into that mould (such as John D. Rockefeller). But I’m not sure it counts as “successful” when you’re rich but not happy.
(This might be why I’m not particularly successful, of course.)
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It’s okay – they’re not like us
Recently, some Toronto residents complained about a Coors Light beer ad that was appearing on billboards across British Columbia. The ad slogan was “Colder Than Most People From Toronto”. Coors eventually pulled the ads in response to the complaints.
The problem with ads such as this is that they reinforce the notion that Torontonians aren’t “real Canadians” or aren’t “people like us”. They’re different, so it’s okay to make fun of them. We need a new name for this, similar to racism or sexism – let’s call it “cityism”.
If cityism stops at the cultural level, everything’s fine, more or less. Torontonians can take it (mostly because, if truth be told, we kind of don’t really care what goes on in the rest of the country). But if the notion that Torontonians aren’t “real Canadians” begins to spread, it will be easier for federal and provincial governments to leave Toronto out of their long-term plans or ensure that Toronto is forced to endure more than its share of spending cuts. After all, if Torontonians are strange people who aren’t like us, it doesn’t really matter what happens to them, does it? It’s the first step down a dangerous slippery slope.
And I suspect that the fine citizens of Calgary and Vancouver would be somewhat unhappy if we Torontonians called them (to pick regional stereotypes at random) ignorant cowboys or navel-gazing potheads. It’s probably healthier for the country to leave that sort of thing alone.
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Stalemate
As you probably know, Toronto municipal workers have been on strike for several weeks now, and the dispute shows no sign of ending any time soon. The problem, unfortunately, is that both sides are painted into a corner.
The city can’t afford to offer the workers any more money, as the city doesn’t have any more money. And the city can’t afford to ask the province to step in and end the strike, as the dispute would go into arbitration. Because the city’s current offer is less generous than the settlements reached by other unions, the arbitrator would likely use these other settlements as a guideline, and would give the unions more money than the city’s current offer.
The striking workers, obviously, don’t want to accept less money than other unions have gotten, and don’t want to make any other concessions. If union leadership were to make concessions at the bargaining table, the membership at large might decide to vote down the settlement (as happened in the TTC strike). And the striking unions don’t want to set a precedent for future negotiations. So the stalemate continues.
I have no idea how this will end. I suppose that the city accountants have calculated how much money is saved by not having to pay striking workers. At some point, the amount saved will enable the city to sweeten their offer. Either that, or the striking unions will be pressured by their members to accept a settlement to relieve the financial hardship caused by the strike. But it might be quite a while before either of these things happen. I’m just grateful that I live in a high-rise, so I get my garbage picked up even during the strike.
(By the way: there’s been a lot of talk about the number of sick days that workers get. It does seem like a lot, but I don’t see why there is so much fuss about the sick days being bankable. Sick days have to be bankable: otherwise, human nature being what it is, you’d get a lot of people calling in “sick” during December, since they’d just lose the days off if they didn’t use them.)
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More on the attack ads
The things I like least about the Conservative attack ads:
- The Tories don’t really care whether Ignatieff spent 1, 10 or 50 years out of the country. This is all tactical. If Stephen Harper or one of his key cabinet ministers had been away from Canada for most of his or her adult life, the Conservatives would be praising his breadth of experience and his hard-won wisdom.
- If you look at the two parties from the point of view of a neutral voter, the attack ads don’t tell you anything about what sort of policies the Liberals would implement if elected, or what sort of policies the Tories would implement if they were given the chance to stay in power. How are we supposed to determine, rationally, whom to vote for?
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He’s not “one of us”
The Conservatives have recently decided to target Michael Ignatieff with a series of attack ads and a website. They point out that Ignatieff lived outside of the country for 34 years, implying that he is somehow not a real Canadian. One ad accuses Ignatieff of being “cosmopolitan” (which apparently is a bad thing), and wonders, “Is he interested in people like you?”
The next step, presumably, is to accuse him of eating foods with funny sauces, or watching films where the actors don’t speak English, or reading books with lots of complicated words in them. He probably doesn’t even eat Timbits or drink Molson Export! The horror, the horror!
This time around, it strikes me that the Conservatives are being a little desperate. As many commentators have pointed out, a large number of Canadians either were not born here or have lived and worked outside of the country for a number of years. Saying that these people are somehow less Canadian than someone who has lived their entire life in Medicine Hat or Bracebridge is insulting.
Moreover, it’s inaccurate. People who have immigrated to Canada – who have voluntarily chosen to settle here, put up with our winters, and become citizens of our country – are inevitably fiercely proud of their new home. And there are a number of prominent and less prominent Canadians who have chosen to settle elsewhere but still think of themselves as “one of us”. To give two examples:
- Neil Young has lived in California for a generation now, and calls the U.S. home. But he’s still Canadian, as anyone knows who listened to him sing “Four Strong Winds” at Live 8 in Barrie a few years ago.
- Wayne Gretzky is still (rightly) thought of as Canadian, despite playing and coaching hockey in the U.S. for most of his life.
Do the Conservatives think that either of them is somehow not really Canadian any more?
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Are they serious?
Are the federal Conservatives serious about wanting to provide funding for private broadcasters while the CBC is forced to endure significant staffing cuts?
And do they really have a Science Minister who doesn’t want to admit whether or not he believes in evolution?
I don’t want to sound too partisan here, but – what kind of government is this, anyway?
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Identity politics
What will the next federal election be about? I fear that I know the answer.
It won’t be fought over policies: the Conservatives have been borrowing ideas from the Liberals. It won’t be fought over leadership or personality: Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper are both tough-minded, smart and focused, so there isn’t enough difference between them for the Tories to use this as a selling point. And it certainly won’t be fought over the economy. So what’s left?
The only possibility I can think of is to fight the election on identity. The Conservatives will attempt to portray themselves as being in touch with the “real Canada”, and the Liberals as being the representatives of big-city elitist Eastern snobs: “us” versus “them”. The goal will be to win over swing voters in Ontario, now that Quebec is no longer a possibility. It will be like Mike Harris all over again, except at a federal level. I fear that there will be lots of Toronto bashing.
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The basic problem remains
From what I’ve read about the latest Canadian federal budget, the consensus seems to be that it’s unfocused. The Conservatives appear to be scattering money in various directions, but have no clear idea of what they intend to do.
At least one commenter suggested that this was because they don’t really believe that government can actually do anything, so they just spend money randomly in the hopes that it will keep them in power.
My impression is that the government means well – which is a refreshing change – but that they haven’t solved the underlying problem.
The reason the world economy is in trouble, in my opinion, is because the people who make things (such as China) can’t afford to buy them and the people who used to buy things (such as the United States) no longer have any money. For years, the world economy has depended on Americans spending beyond their means, and the United States government is still depending on being able to borrow money from foreigners. Neither of these is sustainable.
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Public funding revisited
A thought occurred to me the other day about public funding for political parties, and why it is a good idea.
Suppose that all political parties were required to be privately funded. Now suppose, a few years down the road, that the Extremely Vindictive Party (EVP) somehow obtained a majority of seats in Parliament. Job One for the EVP upon achieving office would be to reward their friends and smite their foes. Since party funding is a matter of public record, the EVP would have access to a list of the people who gave them money, and therefore a list of people who did not give them money. It would be easy for the EVP to do nice things for the people who supported them and less nice things to those who didn’t.
Worse still, because political donations are partially tax-deductible (more accurately, they’re a non-refundable tax credit, if what I’ve read is true), the list of political donors is already closely linked to the income tax system. When deciding which people should be audited at tax time, the EVP could ensure that the people who are audited are drawn from the list of people who did not donate to them.
It could degenerate into old-style ward heeling: everyone would soon learn that donating to the EVP was a necessity to keep miscellaneous bad things from happening to them.
As you can see, the potential for abuse of the system is frightening. It’s far better to stick with the existing system of public funding, no?
Oh, while I’m here: when Stephen Harper is plotting to do in the Liberal Party, he’s usurping a task that properly belongs to Canadian voters. If the general public doesn’t like the Liberals, they won’t vote for them. Attempting to eliminate them through other means is a violation of democratic principles.
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