The kind of scene that terrifies Lawrence Martin. Photo: Shaun Best/Reuters

Of the various conspiratorial-driven hyperbole-prone Canadian political writers, people like Murray Dobbin or Heather Mallick spring to mind. Which is why I was surprised it wasn’t either writer who penned this ridiculous piece about “rightwing nationalism”, but long-time author and journalist Lawrence Martin.

It takes quite a bit to rile me up these days enough to get me to sit down and put my own thoughts foward, but Martin’s diatribe could not stand. I suppose what bothers me most about the piece is that it seems to ignore all of the evidence pointing to the contrary of his position, which is that far from becoming a more rightwing country, Canada has probably never been more staunchly socialist. I’ll address each of Martin’s points in kind:

Message Control. It’s not central to rightwing nationalism, so much as it is central to modern public relations. You don’t just see it at a federal level either. Increasingly these days you see provinces and municipalities vetting the comments of their public servants, hiring communications officers or spokespeople, in order to deliver a consistent message to the public.

And why is that of primary importance? Well, without disparaging every journalist, which is my occupation, the answer is that the media play a lot of “gotcha” politics with the stories of the day. It’s often safer and prudent to ensure that communications be filtered through a central command, less because anybody has anything to hide, but more because the appearance of deviation from one consistent message is often distorted by the media into something malign.

As a person in the media I find this frustrating. I didn’t like the fact I had to have my interview with a biologist in the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources approved by the bigwigs in the B.C. Liberal government. But, by stepping outside of my job as a journalist I can see the necessity.

Flag-Waving Populism. This one confused me. If anything, the most avid flag-wavers are the newly-minted South Asian and African citizens who want very badly to be Canadian. You see the same thing with the Punjabi and Mandarin penetration of the foreign language broadcasting for NHL games, as immigrants want to feel Canadian by joining in our traditions. Unless Lawrence Martin thinks that a largely multicultural country in which almost everybody is a dual-citizen will somehow start a multicultural fascist party that suddenly becomes xenophobically opposed to sponsoring their own relatives, I don’t quite understand his point.

Less Tolerance. Indeed? Admission targets for 2012 are 259,900 people, not including foreign temporary workers and students. This is consistent with previous years under Conservative rule, although if you include foreign temporary workers and students, the Conservatives set a record for allowing foreigners into Canada in 2007 with 429,649 people. Pretty intolerant, eh?

Having said that, Martin makes a point about the oddly selective decision to uphold who is a Canadian citizen and who isn’t, as evidenced by the Abousfian Abdelrazik fiasco. Either Canada upholds citizenship as a paramount right, or else enshrines in law naturalized and dual citizens as a secondary class.

Anti-Intellectualism. In some respects he’s right. The government’s battle against Vancouver’s legal heroin injection site is baffling, mainly because they’re not fighting it on moral grounds but on medical grounds. But by the same token, many of the Conservative decisions to buck the scientific consensus have been vindicated, particularly by opting out of the Kyoto Protocol, which would have devastated Canada’s economy even more than the financial meltdown has already. Although support for spending money to fight climate change is still strong, it’s clearly declining year over year.

The Smearing of Opponents. And this is a rightwing tactic? It’s true the attack ads on Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion were unethical, relying mainly on misquotes and half truths, but it isn’t as though the Conservatives are the only ones playing that dirty game. Having said that, the Conservatives do play the dirtiest, probably because they have a fundraising machine that outearns all other political parties combined.

Anti-Labour Bent. I think the anti-labour movement has been prevalent for more than a decade, long before the Conservatives took power. And the reason for that is obvious. A perfect example is in the recent job action by the B.C. Teacher’s Federation, which has caused teachers to refuse to do their jobs properly, opt out of any non-essential work duties, and pretty much make demands that are unaffordable and unreachable for any government in the current economic climate.

Another example is the greedy Canada Post union, which for whatever reason wanted to keep salaries at $23 an hour to start, which is probably about 120 per cent higher than the free market starting wage for unskilled labour. There is very little sympathy among those of us in the private sector, many of whom have more education and responsibilities, for public sector workers earning inflated salaries that simply don’t compare to the real world. In fact, union collective bargaining agreements are one of the largest source of local government inflation in Canada.

Cult of the Leader. Yes, the cult of leader issue with Harper has been strong, and borderline disturbing. But is it any more disturbing than the orange crush love affair on Jack Layton? What about federal Liberal-supporter and current B.C. premier Christy Clark putting her name in the logo of the B.C. Liberals? Talk about megalomaniacal.

Frankly, most of Martin’s argument don’t wash. What he fails to mention in his column is that social spending by the Conservatives is the highest level Canada has ever seen. He’s expanded social programs like Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan, created regional development agencies, bloated the public sector, and overseen a 22 per cent rise in spending since taking power in 2006. The Harper party governs by a Big Government style that eschews fiscal responsibility for political expediency.

And any of the socially conservative fears of the Harper government have failed to come to pass. No move to restrict abortion, no repealing of the rights and benefits for homosexual marriage, and no infringement of the secular state with religion. All of the fearmongering simply has not come to pass. Even the axing of the gun registry has had moderate support from rural NDP MPs.

Finally, the pro-military shift has been a collective change in Canada, not a rightwing one. After decades of relative pacifism, Kandahar finally thrust Canada into a war where we the public were confronted with casualties on a regular basis. The reaction to that was universal across partisan lines. The loss of life was mourned and the recognition of what our military represents and who they serve was finally brought to the forefront of public consciousness. Though people differed in opinion as to the political reasons for being in Afghanistan, Canadians uniformly supported our men and women in uniform.

I interviewed an Afghan veteran for Remembrance Day, and his thoughts were expressed at the end of this newspaper article:

“Before [the mission] there were times I was afraid to walk down the street in uniform. Now, I walk down the street in uniform, no matter what city in Canada, and someone stops me and thanks me or wants to shake the hand of a soldier.”

No matter what side of the debate you fall on in Afghanistan, says Midan, it has made Canadians realize we have an army and that it’s important.

I posted up a poll from Harris Decima a few days ago which indicated a majority of Canadians support the funding levels of the CBC, or want them increased. I shared the poll purely as a curiosity, although I struck a nerve among many people who felt the very acknowledgement of its existence was a mistake. These people attacked the reliability of its data, the importance of whether respondents were apprised of the value of the federal subsidy before being asked the question, and from the more conspiratorial who roam the internet, suggested Canadian Press and Harris Decima were trying to make the CBC look good by distorting the real results.

The latter suggestion is, to put it mildly, absurd. And more than that, I think it really overlooks the more important question here, which is why Canadians feel that the CBC provides good value for the cost? I have my own answer to that question, but in order to ask it we must first accept the reliability of the poll results. Let’s face it. Most Canadians are satisfied with the CBC.

The main reason I think the CBC is supported is that Canadians have latched onto it as a part of our “heritage.” It is in the heritage department of the government, after all, and represents $1.1 billion of the $3.8 billion spent on cultural programs annually. Millions of people have grown up watching the CBC, many of whom remember when it was the only channel on television in remote areas of Canada. This aspect of our attachment to the CBC cannot be overstated. It connected us with the rest of the country before the Internet and wireless technology made it commonplace.

Because we’ve come to identify the CBC with our cultural identify, as much codified within the laws of Canada as multiculturalism, it’s no surprise the CBC has become iconic and people defend it with vigour. But that’s only because Canadians have a fleeting and transient understanding of Canadian heritage.

When my family immigrated to Canada in 1853, there was no such as the CBC, but nor was there universal health care, multiculturalism, or ice hockey. Were Canadian families in the 1800s, who knew nothing of our national sport, unfettered access to health care, or the joys of Sushi, any less Canadian than we are today because they didn’t have these things? Of course not, and yet we hold these infant traditions as a core part of our national identity.

So, once we separate the emotional value of the CBC from Canadians, all we’re left with is the financial value. According to government figures, the CBC has operating expenditures of $1.54 billion, capital expenditures of $106.3 million, with revenues of $570.7 million, leaving a federal subsidy of $1.07 billion a year. It’s a ridiculous way to run a business, running expenses at 2.7 times the total revenue.

That’s not to say Canadians don’t get some value for the government service. CBC operates a variety of radio and television stations that have some good programming competitive with any free market media out there. Having said that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to continue subsidizing one media company when there is such a plethora of choice in today’s world.

I don’t even like to watch cable television anymore, since the commercial advertising makes it unpalatable to watch. All of my viewing needs are now satisfied through NetFlix or internet downloads. I have complete freedom over what I want to watch, making the concept of programmed TV an archaic one. Andrew Coyne has expanded on this idea substantially, particularly when it comes to our other archaic federal media company, the CRTC. He foresees a future where Canadians pay for programming on a pay-per-view basis, which would render the attempt to force-feed people Canadian content programming as obsolete as force-feeding people the CBC.

Although I think the addition of Sun Network was a good one for media diversity, the constant attacks on the CBC have become tiresome, particularly since Quebecor glosses over the absolute wasteful spending in government. All Sun Media chooses to do is cherrypick the CBC and the arts. Well, honestly, $1.1 billion is a drop in the bucket considering the annual spending increases of the Conservative government, and their reckless and erroneous deficit projections (don’t think I didn’t notice Harper and Co. revised their deficit projections again last week).

If you go through the list of government programs in the above link, I’m sure you can find more than enough wasteful programs and departments to match or equal the outrage of tossing away $1.1 billion on one media company every years. After all, we spend $117.3 billion on combined social programs a year. The overarching issue here isn’t about one media company or one program, but a matter of choice. Should Canadians have the right to buy their television programming, health care and education? Or should we continue to force-feed Canadians what we think they want?

It’s pathetic that Anonymous is trying to present the squatters across Canada as being anything other than the drain on taxpayers that they are, but their continued threats against corporate and government websites is tantamount to admission of cyber terrorism. Comply with our demands, it says, or else we’ll wreak havoc on your online institutions. Though it isn’t murder, it’s certainly a malevolent act meant to harm the city of Toronto.

The squatters have no right to permanently occupy public grounds which are paid for and enjoyed by all of our citizens, not the 1% who have decided not to get jobs or be productive, useful members of society. It’s time to evict these deadbeats and restore the social order.

I’m a proponent of getting a good education, mainly because I think the more you invest in yourself the more reward you can expect. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a good rate of return on your investment. But not all investments are made purely for money. One also has to consider the enjoyment of pursuing the sort of career you want.

But what is the cost of that investment in your education? Well, I think the logical place to start is to look at Statistics Canada. We know that, unarguably, the investment in education is worthwhile in the end analysis. The average high school dropout in Canada earned about $20,833 in 2005 dollars. Just getting a diploma raises that income to $28,038. From there, a tradesperson can expect to earn a median income of $34,670.

Certainly, many tradespeople earn twice or three times that number. In fact, I was making about $20,000 more in the trades than I am right now as a rookie journalist. That doesn’t mean all trades pay well or that median wage is necessarily very high, particularly since the trades attract some of the less educated, less motivated members of society who have little intention of climbing the ladder to become a certified professional.

A person with a college degree makes marginally more than a tradesperson at $36,785. And a person with a university degree makes significantly more than a college certificate or diploma, with $57,495. Note that these are all median incomes for the whole of Canada. Incomes vary by age, sex and geographical location, as well as personal skills. For instance, a 24-year-old university graduate makes $27,000 less than the median 50-year-old carpenter.

So, what’s the value of your higher education then? Let’s assume you finished high school and decided to get into a trade. At 24 you’re earning $20,371 a year as compared to your university-trained counterpart at $15,037. We’ll make 24 our starting point, assuming 20-23 was spent learning the trade or going to university. Now let’s move into the next age demographic.

From 25 to 29 the income spikes up dramatically for the university grad at $32,974 to $28,728 for the tradesman. Again, I realize that these are only averages, and I’d fully expect a red seal certified journeyman to earn much more than this. But, let’s stay with the fantasy for a little while.

Over the past six years, the university grad has earned $179,907 and the tradesperson has earned $161,011. Already there is an $18,000 discrepancy. Let’s continue five more years into the 30 to 34 demographic. The university grad is now 34 and has earned $416,787 while the tradesperson has earned $326,496. It’s a vast gulf now. Or is it?

We have to take into account one more thing. The value of the education. Let’s assume that the university graduate had to take out a student loan to pay his tuition, and since he’s a generic university grad, we’re going to need the median tuition levels. Because I’ve been using 2005 dollars for the example, I’ll use 2005 tuition numbers, which is $4,214, even though it’s now $5,366, up 27 per cent in six years.

The tuition of $4,214 over four years is a $16,856. That number will be amortized at 114 months at an interest rate of Prime plus 2.5 per cent (about 5.5 per cent). That’s $195.40 in monthly repayments over the next nine and a half years. There’s also a capitalized interest payment of $463.54. I welcome any math geniuses to correct me (and I’m sure you will).

So, the tradesperson has earned $161,011 over his first six years, or $13.76 per hour. The university grad earned $179,907 over his first six years, or $15.38 per hour, but we have to adjust for loan repayments, making it $14.08 an hour. It also drops the six-year average to $165,838. At the age of 29, the university grad is barely ahead of his tradesperson counterpart.

It’s over the next five years that things really begin making a difference. The tradesperson earns $326,496 over his 11 years of work, while the grad makes $416,787, less the $22,275.29 which is now fully paid off, bringing him to $394,512 over the same time period. The effective hourly rate comparison over this time period is now $19.92 for the grad and $16.49 for the tradesperson. But again, these figures are low and used only for comparison’s sake based on statistical averages spanning the entire country.

Although it’s clear that grads are better off over the longer term, that gap should change with time. If we apply the new tuition rates to the equation, the grad’s hourly salary over the 11 year time period drops to $19.62 an hour. That’s assuming that a four-year degree will only incur $28,364 in student loans. As we know, people are garnering larger and larger loans. In 2005, Stats Canada calculated the average graduating student debt was $18,800, while the proportion of borrowers who graduated with debt loads of at least $25,000 increased to 27 per cent in 2005 from 17 per cent in 1995.

The debt levels are increasing. As this continues, we should see a shrinking advantage between the median income of the university graduate versus the high school (free) educated tradesperson who doesn’t need to invest the same amount of money. One also has to consider that the tradesperson is earning his apprenticeship wages for the four years that the university student is earning very little working part-time jobs, while accruing other personal debt sources such as credit cards or a line of credit. Although higher education is still the path to a better, more lucrative existence, that gap appears to be narrowing.

[Note — Yes, I have student loans. And yes, it's one of the reasons I wrote this. And yes, I have calculated how long it will take me before I catch up to my trade earnings, surpass them, and then surpass the student loan offset. It isn't pretty.]

It is a week before Remembrance Day, but I’ve been thinking on the annual sombre event lately, partly because in my duties as a reporter I’ve interviewed and written a story about a Canadian soldier who served in Afghanistan. Serving on the counter-IED unit, he personally knew 30 Canadians who have fallen in the sands of Kandahar.

There is a new generation of soldiers returning from war, something that has not been seen in Canada in about 50 years, or two generations. That’s not to trivialize Rwanda or Bosnia, but our country hasn’t had to deal with the reality of war dead in a half century and we have not handled their sacrifices very well.

In fact, it would be fair to say we have broken faith with the dead, choosing not to carry on their torch and honour their sacrifices by seeing through the mission to success. It was a political decision made to pacify the pacifists created by two generations of peace. Today’s young people know nothing of war, and so their only reaction to it is revulsion.

I wonder what the young people of my grandfather’s generation would think of the country they fought for? When news broke that Canada had declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 10, 1939, young men left their farms and their mothers and wives and children and rushed off to do their duty. Some towns lost an entire generation of men to that sacrifice.

Although Canada has lost 158 soldiers in its nearly decade-long commitment to Afghanistan, we lost nearly five times that number over three years in Korea. In the Second World War there were 46,998 men who fell for Canada, averaging over 20 soldiers each day. But this all pales in comparison to the 66,665 who died fighting in the trenches in the Great War, more than all other conflicts combined. Can anyone conceive of the human loss this country faced in its infancy, and the numbers of widows, fatherless children and devastated families?

With all respect to each of the 158 men and women who died in service of country in Afghanistan, our sacrifice has been relatively limited in comparison to the blood we’ve spilled in defence of our country in the past. And lest we forget, Canada fought the Great War with nearly 9 million citizens in her homeland, losing nearly one percent of our population. Assuming there were 3 million male Canadians of fighting age between 15 and 64 years of age, we lost over two percent of our entire male population.

Nobody is questioning the hardiness of our modern soldier, but I wonder if even they can imagine the horrors experienced by our great war veterans? Today’s soldiers are well-fed and cared for, with good pay and benefits, internet access and frequent access to their loved ones. These are all pleasures we are happy to provide to our soldiers, but imagine what the men in the trenches in 1944 or 1918 faced? Imagine the human suffering they endured for their children, who have become our parents or grandparents.

On this Remembrance Day we should honour not only those men and women who have sacrificed, but remember why we live in privilege and luxury and peace. We should be grateful it is not we who grew up during a time when we would have to go to war, knowing we’d either die or see our best friends die in our arms. We should be grateful we don’t have to return from a years overseas to our towns and see them bereft of the men who would have become the elders of that community.

We should look upon Afghanistan with a little more perspective, and realize that the price we have paid there has been a small one in comparison to the freedom we earned in two world conflicts. We should remember that Canadians haven’t been captured by the enemy in Afghanistan, and rounded into internment or concentration camps, beaten and starved, or executed outright on the battlefield. We should feel heartened that our men and women in uniform were able to sleep in comfortable beds, not muddy trenches with rats and disease and all manner of misery.

But while there are significant difference between the soldiers who fight for Canada today and the ones who fought years ago, they share the same sense of duty and purpose. They share the same desire to serve Canada unhesitatingly, regardless of the politics that surround the war. And ultimately they share the same willingness to lay down their lives for a cause bigger than themselves. They believed deeply in that cause.

It’s why we take up the quarrel on behalf of our brothers, to carry the torch, and not break faith with the dead.

The CBC’s Brian Stewart has an introspective piece about Canada’s role in Afghanistan, and although we haven’t officially left the country yet, it’s a post-mortem of sorts. I don’t have a problem with much of his article, including his commentary about the lack of communication about the real war in Afghanistan, the problems within the government and the bureaucracy, and the lack of real understanding about the culture and history of the country.

I’m also inclined to be more lenient on Stewart than I would a lot of CBC journalists, since he made the same media familiarization tour I did, directly before me, which means a great deal more than simply writing about it from Ottawa. Stewart is also fair in his dispersal of the blame of mission failure on both the Harper and Martin governments, particularly the latter, who made decisions about Afghanistan quietly and before the Canadian public’s attention was really on the mission.

Indeed, Martin carries much of the failure for Canada’s miscommunication on the mission, including but not limited to the dreadful handling of the detainee agreement with the Afghan government. Originally drafted by Martin’s government with General Rick Hillier, it was the lack of oversight within the arrangement that led to the catastrophic media coverage, which in turn sapped all vim and vigour for the mission. The Harper government hurriedly overhauled the agreement in 2007, but also did so quietly and in secret, leading to the false appearance of torture complicity and cover-up.

And yet, what Stewart’s article is really missing is a fair appraisal of his own employer’s role in destroying the country’s morale, when from 2008 through to 2010 it wrote innumerable articles hinting at, digging for, and alleging the Canadian military was playing a complicit or even direct role in torturing Afghans. The tenacity with which the CBC attacked this issue was unparalleled by any other media source, releasing documents like it was some kind of publicly funded WikiLeaks, heedless to the implications of its allegations.

The media assault on the Canadian Forces and the Harper government led to a fairly predictable and blatant blackout on the issue, which Stewart refers to as “cabinet secrecy.” This is surely unsurprising. When the CBC diverted attention from reporting on the war itself and invested the tremendous weight of its resources into broadcasting the great torture scandal, it closed any door it might have had on open and transparent leadership.

And the more the media attacked the Harper government on the issue, the less inclined it seemed to want to fight the political battle that the predatory and purely hypocritical Liberals and NDP were happily exploiting. It could be argued that the CBC’s wanton sabotage of the moral integrity of the Afghan mission led to the opposition being forced to cast itself as the official voice for the “torture-rendition-war crimes” movement, which led to the capitulation of the Harper government on this political issue.

The odious hypocrisy of the NDP in the Afghanistan mission could not be more apparent or more collusive with the CBC either. The same people who called for the open release of all and any information related to the mission in Afghanistan in the hopes it could politically destroy the Harper government, have protected the CBC in its refusal to release documents to other media who have made freedom of information requests. I do not go as far as Sun Media in referring to it as a state broadcaster, but it’s certainly a public company that has no right, no excuse not to release any and all documents to us, the taxpaying shareholders.

The NDP never had a dog in the Afghan fight anyway. Jack Layton suggested we simply make peace with the Taliban from the first day and after successfully helping to self-sabotage Canada’s effectiveness in its mission, took credit when the NATO leadership began murmuring about a potential peace deal with the terrorist organization. This is surely like Brutus casting the last, lazy stab wound into a dying Caesar.

It’s preposterous for Stewart to say that Harper fed the Canadian public as little information for “reasons still unknown.” The obvious answer is that the media vultures, led by the CBC itself, was less interested in the war itself and more sniffing for any blood in the water at all that might lead to a political feeding frenzy. This led to the PMO clamming up on the mission, which saddened both opponents and proponents of the mission there, but the PMO can hardly be blamed for not wanting to aid and abet its own destruction.

There are many lessons to be learned about the Afghan mission, but we would be remiss to ignore the media’s role in distorting the importance of events there. And though torture has surely taken place in Afghanistan just as ubiquitously as it happens elsewhere in the region, Canada did not go to Kandahar to rid the country of torture. We went there to provide security to the people that they would otherwise not be able to receive on their own.

I was having an argument on Twitter last night with a few American conservatives about the reasons for the apathetic 20-something generation who have swarmed the ranks of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although I think we generally agreed that the main reason for the movement is that these self-entitled people are having, for perhaps the first time in several generations, to actually compete with other people for scarce jobs, we got hung up on why that is.

The Americans argued that success or failure in life determined solely by the individual, and that factors such as raw talent, education, or competition don’t really play a part. It’s difficult to argue the nuances of these points in 140 character updates, so I’m not surprised I was unable to sway their point of view. And besides, I understand that American conservatives have shifted toward a more individualist philosophy, and I don’t begrudge that point of view one bit.

Having said all that, I can speak from personal experience, and I believe that the reason the 35-and-under crowd are attracted to the Occupy Wall Street movement is that they’ve seen the level of competition out there, the job scarcity, the steepness of the ladder, and decided to cop out instead. Because, let’s face it, life is harder now than it’s ever been.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes, we have a socialist welfare state that enables dependence, and it’s certainly part of the apathy problem. In terms of the quality of life that our system offers, even the very poor have a relatively easy time of it as compared to their social equals in the developing world. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that life is harder now for the young working generation of Canadians and Americans than it was for our boomer parents.

I can see many boomers shaking their heads, but there’s no point in denying it. The kids who grew up in the sixties had less educational requirements, a lower standard of literacy, a shorter trip in school, a larger job market to choose from, and more access to assets than today. A man could leave high school, find a stable and permanent job for 30 years, while supporting his wife and three or four children, two cars, vacations at the cottage, an affordable home, and a little bit of savings to sock away for retirement.

My stepmother is a perfect example. After finishing high school, she found a job as a school teacher at 19, and continued in this career until the age of 55, retiring comfortably on a teacher’s pension. I’m not saying her life was easy, by any stretch of the imagination, but becoming a school teacher at 19 really isn’t an option for today’s youth.

In fact, a single degree isn’t even really a guarantee of success these days. Children have to go to school longer and go deeper into their field of expertise to stand out from the crowd. On this issue I found strong opposition from the Americans, but I don’t understand why. Education is the single most effective means of lifting a person from poverty, and I’m actually a perfect example of that argument. Certainly I’m not saying all people require degrees, and there are always exceptional examples of that person you know who earned a million dollars before he was 25 after dropping out of school, but in general I’m right.

I’m not just asserting this fact either. All one needs to do is access any Statistics Canada or U.S. Census statistics, and you find that income is proportional to education in every single demographic. There are no exceptions to these statistics. For every buddy who dropped out of high school to become rich, the other 90 percent are living in poverty.

But getting more education isn’t the only problem. There’s now more competition out there, thanks to highly skilled immigrants. That means you need to stand out from the crowd somehow. It’s not good enough to show up to a job and be competent. Now you have to actually exceed expectations in a way your parents probably never experienced. For a lot of Canadians, this is a relatively new phenomenon. We’re used to small cities, ample space, burgeoning jobs markets and suddenly we’re finding urban sprawl, dense populations and increasingly impossible job markets to penetrate. Today’s young worker better expect to relocate from his or her birth city, if not the province.

Europeans, Americans and Canadians might be surprised by this brave new world, but the Asians have been doing it for generations. They’re not surprised by the level of competition because they’ve been trying to stand out from a talent pool of several billion people for decades now. There’s a reason Asian parents are particularly hard on their children and demand so much from them. And before anybody thinks I’m making the Macleans Magazine “Too Asian” argument, I’m simply stating the fact that this is a culture that has developed a survival instinct. We haven’t.

The self-entitled slackers who have found themselves up against a whole new level of competition, not just from hard-working Asian immigrants but also their domestic counterparts, aren’t ready to deal with it. They don’t feel like they should have to put in the very hard work necessary to succeed, so they find a convenient scapegoat. The one percent. It’s not my problem, it’s the corporations. It’s not my failure, it’s the greedy capitalists.

Yes, life is harder. Having children today just isn’t an affordable option, which helps to fuel the problem. Housing is quickly being priced out of the range of the middle class, and you certainly can’t buy it on Daddy’s salary anymore. Mommy has to work as well, which means there’s even less chance she’s having kids. You can forget about assets, investments, savings and vacations.

The scary thing is that while the Occupy Wall Street kids are out there protesting about how bad life sucks, the hard-working immigrants and their children who have come from countries with real problems are busy taking their place in the job market. And I don’t mean that it’s scary in a bad way. I just feel bad for these kids who don’t realize they’re putting themselves behind the rat race needlessly, which will only lead to greater difficulties in their thirties. Again, I know this from experience.

So, what’s to be done? Well, the wealth disparity and shrinking middle class is a topic too lengthy for this blog entry, but I do know that the western world had better start picking up the pieces quickly before it starts falling apart. Rome certainly wasn’t built in a day, but once it began crumbling it didn’t take long. There are always new countries and new empires ready to rise from the shadows.

Photo ©: Jeff McIntosh, Canadian Press

The worldwide protests over socialism’s favourite nebulous enemy, “corporate greed”, are well underway today from Rome to Vancouver. And the goals of the protesters seem to be as disorganized and discombobulated as the social media tools driving #occupywallstreet from New York City to cities around the world. What do the protesters want? Not even they seem to know.

The protests in Vancouver seem to have attracted a broad array of the usual suspects of complainers, from “free Iran” or “free Palestine”, to 9-11 truthers and “stop the tar sands.” Every leftwing movement has found a home in the big tent movement, since it revolves around the big business bogeyman.

What is perhaps most ironic, amidst ironies too numerous to list here, is that people who choose to live in Vancouver do so knowing it’s a high-priced and decadent sort of city, priced beyond the affordability for most people who earn the median income of a Canadian. Vancouver’s housing prices are highest in Canada, and one of the most expensive in proportion to income on the planet. But that has more to do with investors from the developing world than it does Bay Street.

But while Vancouver might be one of the priciest locales, it has also consistently ranked among the top three cities in the world for quality of life and standard of living. In fact, Vancouver usually ranks up there with cities like Geneva and Vienna for the kind of comfort, safety, security and enjoyment of wealth one can expect. Which is why the protests against corporate greed seem a little self-defeating.

It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the disparity between the so-called one per cent of the richest people and the 99 per cent of the rest of us. But, as with most things, context is key. Certainly, the top one per cent own 99 per cent of the wealth, but then again that disparity is hardly absolute. The same disparity exists between the iPhone-carrying Vancouver protesters and the vast majority of the population of rest of the world who live in abject poverty.

Compared with people living in most parts of Africa, large portions of Asia, and parts of South America, we here in Vancouver represent the top one per cent. There are people in the world living on $100 USD a year, and much of that income is earned making things that we use and throw out over here. If protesters want to talk about disparity and greed, they could begin by looking in the mirror.

Having been to Afghanistan, albeit a whirlwind tour that didn’t give me a definitive impression of the country, I’ve seen the conditions of how people live in one of the poorest countries in the world. If anybody has a reason to complain about wealth disparity, it is the bare-footed, dusty-faced youths on the streets of Kandahar, gazing up in wonder at the million-dollar steel-plated vehicles rumbling by their tin and clay shanties.

That’s not to say that things are perfect here. Far from it. But this idea that corporations are the reason for the world’s misery is the fallacious wisdom of failed socialism. In fact, one could make a stronger argument that high taxes owing to the public’s insatiable appetite for social services is one of the greatest impoverishing agents in an otherwise high quality of life in Canada.

What’s worse is that we as Canadians are conflating our problems with America’s. We don’t have the same economy or attendant problems that the Americans do, since we enjoy a much stronger banking system and less predatory lending. But the same problems that afflict that country are avoidable by taking precautions against depending on corporations and living within our means.

If you can’t afford a home, don’t attempt to buy one when you know an interest point change will result in forfeiture. Don’t use credit cards to maintain a lifestyle you don’t make enough money to sustain. Don’t consume products and services you cannot pay back in a reasonable time period. Create a household budget and run your finances with a surplus and not a deficit. Take responsibility for your own success or failure, and don’t blame it on capitalism.

My household income is in the bottom one-fifth of Canadians, but I still feel as though I enjoy a high quality of life. Things could be better, but that’s part of what makes capitalism work properly: aspiring for better.

It can’t come as any surprise to anyone that one of the NDP’s newest neophyte MPs in Ottawa has suggested that the government should create a ministry devoted to LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bi-Sexual Transsexual) issues. The NDP’s primary function is to invent and create needless and ridiculous, inefficient bureaucracy dedicated to the pet projects of the progressive movement.

It is the 2011 version of the 1971 Status of Women ministry created by the Liberal Party to remove discriminatory and misogynistic attitudes and policies in the workforce. That ministry now commands $25 million a year to accomplish such things as creating “strategic policy advice and gender-based analysis support,” and promoting commemorative dates relating to things women have accomplished in Canada.

Doubtless the creation of a similar ministry based on sexual orientation would require a similar budget, requiring the allocation of precious resources from a government that is already struggling to find $4 billion in savings from the public sector. Not that the NDP has ever needed to dabble in the fiscal realities of the real world.

One is left to wonder how we came to a state in this country where individual rights are subordinate to special interest collective rights, requiring the creation of bureaus, committees, organizations and even ministries dedicated to their fulfilment. That the idea of an LGBT ministry is being proposed at all opens the door to every other powerful special interest lobby group looking to have their “rights” recognized as a federally funded concern.

With a women’s ministry and a sexual orientation ministry, why bother to stop there? We could have a Ministry of Muslim Relations, a Ministry of Israeli Apartheid, and a Ministry of the Economically Disadvantaged. I’m sure if you pored over the pages of Franz Kafka’s novellas you could find a few more preposterous examples.

I suppose what I find most interesting about a ministry devoted to representing anyone who isn’t a heterosexual is that there is no unified movement that can really claim to represent them. The definition of the nebulous group of people who aren’t heterosexual changes on a semi-regular basis. It was once thought that homosexual was broad enough, but that term has since become non-inclusive and derogatory, necessitating the addition of people who like both sexes, as well as people who say they were born the wrong sex.

But it didn’t stop there. There also transsexual, “two-spirit” for aboriginals, and “questioning” for those who really just haven’t figured out who or what it is they want to have sex with. At this rate the present LGBTTBQ acronym is on pace to grow by two letters annually, which would make the ministry out of date by the time the legislation went through to create it.

I only jest in part, and I assure you I’m not mocking homosexuals or the attendant spectrum of orientations. But I just really don’t see the point to creating a ministry to protect that which is already protected under the laws of Canada governing individual rights. I’ve spoken to people who aren’t heterosexual about this, and many feel embarrassed by being categorized in some special designated group, as though not being heterosexual is some kind of disability requiring special protection.

Do we face challenges in our society with regards to discrimination and bullying of people who aren’t heterosexual? Of course, and that’s never going to be completely eradicated. It’s a social condition whereby people are prejudiced against that which isn’t the normative condition. That means people can be bullied who are smarter, dumber, thinner, fatter, taller, red-haired, blonde, white-skinned, brown-skinned, thin-skinned, or just about a thousand other possibilities.

And since we can’t create legislation to protect each thin, fat, smart, dumb group in our society, the logical means of protecting people is to apply laws and rights universally and equally to individuals. Which is what has been the law in Canada for the entire lifetimes of most of the people reading this.

Tyler Anderson/National Post

Although I find it difficult to believe that revenues have dropped $65 million as a result of Canada Post staff walking off the job, the selfish, greedy and thuggish actions of CUPW is indicative that this is a company that needs to be privatized and deunionized.

What is the essential difference between a paperboy and a letter carrier? Well, the answer seems to be about $15 more per hour, plus benefits. But besides that, not much:

On salaries, the union has said the parties are “fairly close” on wages for regular employees, but Canada Post is pushing for a significant cut in the hourly rate for new hires, to as low as $18 from about $23.

As “low” as $18 to start an unskilled job? Construction jobs start as low as minimum wage for unskilled labour. I know because I’ve done them.

$18 an hour to start is a $38,880 job, or about $14,000 more than the median income for unattached individuals according to Stats Canada. Two people making this despicably low wage would pull in $9,000 more than the median family income in Canada. At present, $23 an hour is more than twice the median income for unattached individuals in Canada, to walk around and put letters into slots.

No sympathy. Canada Post could pay these workers $12 an hour and it would still be a generous salary. The unions have looked a gift horse in the mouth and are about to get kicked in the teeth. Canada Post is dying a slow and painful death, and the only logical conclusion to its largesse is salary cuts or extinction.