In case you missed it a massive tidal wave of change has recently been acknowledged by the Federal Government of Canada.
On Thursday March 29, 2012 the Conservative Federal Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty introduced his budget in the House of Commons. Whatever one thinks about the solutions this budget proposes to the challenges currently confronting by our nation, Mr. Flaherty has to be given credit for facing the fact that the world has changed and those changes must be addressed.
I do not often agree with Margaret Wente, but in today’s “Globe and Mail” she describes with painful honesty and uncomfortable clarity, the challenge Mr. Flaherty is beginning to attempt to address in his budget.
Wente’s article should be read in its entirety here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/boomers-generation-had-everything-it-wanted-and-it-still-does/article2387987/
She presents her sobering thesis at the end of the article.
We boomers have been the biggest winners from the social-welfare state. Today that state is stacked against the young. In Canada, we spend twice as much of our national income on health care as we do on education – but health care mainly benefits the old. According to a recent C.D. Howe report, annual health-care costs for a person over 65 are three to four times greater than for someone under 44. For a person over 85, they’re 12 times greater. As the boomers age, the math gets ugly. By the 2020s, nearly 17 per cent of Canada’s GDP will be spent on health care – up from 12 per cent today.
You know where this is going, don’t you? The welfare state as we know it can’t last. The rollbacks to the OAS are just the start of broader changes. Some time in the next few years everybody will have to start paying more for health care, through higher taxes, private insurance, means testing, user fees or some mix of those things. This will affect future generations a lot more than it will us. The boomers’ kids, and grandkids, will never get a deal as good as we have.
Should we boomers feel guilty about this? I think so. We like to say we earned it, and I guess, in part, we did. But we also won the birth-year lottery. Perhaps we shouldn’t cling so stubbornly to our entitlements. Perhaps we owe something to the future. Perhaps it’s time to pay it forward.
There is no doubt, my generation has been blessed. And there is no question, we have often failed to be good stewards of those blessings entrusted to us. It is entirely appropriate for us to bear some sense of guilt for the misuse to which we have put the abundance entrusted to us.
There is a sad irony to the reality that, we boomers are not primarily the ones who are going to pay for the selfishness and greed that have characterized much of our generation. We have not been quick to practice the same measure of self-sacrifice that enabled the wealth we inherited to accumulate. So Wente’s suggestion that we might begin to “pay it forward”, has considerable merit.
A little generosity from those of us who have gobbled up so much of the earth’s bounty, might begin to redeem some of the mess we are leaving to future generations.
In A Spacious Place 
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 31, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Marnie
Yes, as individuals we must be willing to pay for our social safety net and the quality of life we enjoy. I suggest checking Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives website for their analysis of this budget..
March 31, 2012 at 1:59 pm
kimgye
A nice idea, but unlikely to happen. We have not yet plumbed the depths of our self centered or selfish lives. Our children have been programmed to want the same materialistic things.
When our system finally collapses and our false sense of individual control fades away, we will have to count on each other to make it by and begin to live a life worth living.
March 31, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Harry Eerkes
I have been the recipient of incredibly costly health care over the past year and have had some feelings of guilt over that – how many of the working poor, single mothers, homeless could have been helped if I’d not been given all the benefits of our health care system?
But that implies a system where there is a conscious sharing of our common wealth at the provincial and national level – and that’s not happening.
And so, I’m quite uncomfortable with the “guilt trip” here. The problem, it seems to me, is not that the elderly or children or post secondary students (take your pick …) eat up too much of our tax dollars but that the vision of universal education and health care, etc. was the vision of people who assumed everyone would pay their fair share of taxes. With our present governments’ policies of tax cutting for the rich, huge subsidies for large corporations, things like low cost or free universal education, health care and a responsible social housing policies just don’t have a place.
And this ideal of responsible sharing of resources is not a selfish notion, but one that comes from a real concern for the welfare of all groups, including the sick, the poor, the homeless, the disabled and all those less fortunate than ourselves.
March 31, 2012 at 3:47 pm
kimgye
I get that for sure. Thanks Harry.
April 3, 2012 at 8:56 am
jaqueline
Thanks Harry,
you say it so clearly, it’s not about wanting unrealistic benefits, it is about wanting to act on a universal value that helps everyone.
Someone said the other day …well how do we do that? But I think we have forgotten that we have already got the pattern and the know -how and we were using it between the war and 1980. In those decades the gap between rich and poor was steadily decreasing, ’til the checks and balances put in place after the Depression were removed in the early 80’s Ever since then there has been an increase in the gap until we have what we have today.
What we need is to return to the wisdom of those who have been through it and worse and restore the provision they had put in place so that their children and grand children ( us ) and beyond would not suffer…. their legacy has been insulted and squandered. Millions did not die in WW2 either, to have the world be in the state it is today .
March 31, 2012 at 8:01 pm
jaqueline
I saw Samuel Jackson praise the Occupy movement saying ” I am a child of the 60’s.That’s what we did when we did not like something, we got out on the streets.” But..where were the children of the 60’s today? Imagine if they were out there addressing Corporate injustice, the numbers, the middle class, the wealthy, those who were safe in their comfort, what if they were out on the streets NOW, supporting those who have not been so lucky, wouldn’t we have a different world today instead of one that just keeps rolling out the cuts and the greed, even when we now know what they have been up to?
Would the Corporations have noted the silence and absence of the “well -off” generation as permission to keep doing what they like? Did Social Justice, passion, love, and the common good stop in 1979 along with the death of disco? We need you now, more than ever, but where were you last year?
Could you imagine? Then the Occupy movement would have a different face, not a socially naive kid, but maybe even Samuel Jackson himself, a face that is up there, not because they have lost out, but because they have benefited from a world and time that still had the checks and balances in place that ensured wealth for many.
March 31, 2012 at 8:20 pm
jaqueline
sorry a paragraph above should read :
But..where were the children of the 60′s today? Imagine if they were out there addressing Corporate injustice. Imagine they, with their numbers, the middle class, the wealthy, those who were safe in their comfort; what if they were out on the streets NOW, supporting those…