32 Comments
Jan 5, 2022Liked by Line Editor

I don't find your recent focus too negative -- it helps me to know there are others who see the alarming trends I see, and are worried about the same things I am worried about.

Entrenched inequality getting worse, unaffordable housing also getting worse, climate and environmental crises, growing authoritarianism (and growing misogyny), a decline in real community connections. A growing sense that our institutions are not really up to the challenges we face, and that they are barely coping with the operational demands of the pandemic.

These are all genuine concerns. We need to be talking about them. We need to start looking for societal levers to make a difference.

Over the holidays, I spoke to a few well-informed individuals who told me they were baffled by the continued health of the stock market, and could see no fundamental basis for it continuing based on general economic indicators. A major correction will only add to social unrest.

I was also advised - again by knowledgeable acquaintances - that we should expect continued inflation on food prices, driven by a wide variety of global forces. This will, of course, hurt those at the bottom the most.

To top it all off, our elephant sized neighbour next door is having some big challenges. We have ridden on their coat tails for so long, we have forgotten that we didn't achieve this security and prosperity all by ourselves. We need to start acting now to make better plans to look out for our own interests on the world stage. Yet this is just one other massive challenge that our governments don't seem to think worth discussion.

So are you being negative? No. You serve your readers well if you can enlighten us on these challenges, and help us be better informed. (I recognize that not all of this is in your wheelhouse!)

Thanks for the thoughtful essays.

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Kids. They're hysterical. No memory of the past.

The paragraph about precarious work, being turned into a utility-maximizing drone, could have been lifted from Coupland's Gen-X book. (30 years ago! A whole generation!) I could change a dozen words of the Internet concerns, and produce something that would pass as a critique of Television - which was going to turn my generation into passive, mindless, mouth-breathing drones by 1975, I was assured by TIME and Newsweek.

Speaking of illiberalism and conflict abroad, America finally ended 20 years of pointless war and murder. It was certainly embarrassing that the American officer class was SO stupid, they had to be taught twice about the Mao's "Sixteen Character Formula", but I think they understand now, how irrelevant war-technologies are against populations, as opposed to armies. They'll probably be good for a couple of generations.

As to economic dislocation, nobody even talks about the 2008 financial crisis any more, we're eager to be past it without more grumbling about how no rich people got jailed. The fact is, the economy recovered, except for the 10 million who took permanent financial damage. I dunno how bad even THAT is. When I was 24, (Calgary, 1982) 90% of my company were all fired, every engineer I knew was out of work, there were five pages of "dollar sales" for underwater houses in the Calgary Herald. I filled in 3 years of unemployment getting another degree, while living in sad basement suites through my late 20s. A review of my 40th reunion engineering class indicates we nonetheless all recovered, had successful lives, families, retirements. Across the whole of life, it looks like a speed bump.

If rebuilding our infrastructure around GHG-free technologies proves to be expensive, I assure you it will be relatively less-so than when our modern infrastructure was built for the first time, 1930-1960 for most of it: back then, there was no preexisting industrial base to start from.

Lack of American democracy? Ask Black people who were around for Jim Crow. They've still got a lot more democracy than they had for 90 years.

My grandmother's generation had the Worst War in History, and a global pandemic that killed a few percent of all humanity. They had 10 good years, then 10 years of 30% unemployment and soup kitchens, and their kids had to be fed nonetheless. Then there was ANOTHER greatest war in history, more than twice as bad as the first, and they were required to send their children into it.

So my parents grew up fighting that, then trying to raise their kids under a nuclear threat, and a polio pandemic, where thousands lost the race to get vaccines before they were killed or their limbs withered. (Oh, and a post-war housing shortage that saw them start their marriage in a "boarding house", a concept now so unacceptable that we haven't re-invented it, even to get rid of tent cities. I can show you a picture of 11 or 12 twenty-somethings, "the gang", posing in front of a rather ordinary-sized house with maybe four bedrooms. Mom noted that the one guy who saw a lot of combat did wake them all up when he screamed in his nightmares, but nobody ever mentioned it.)

Bottom line, it won't be remotely as bad as Jen fears, you'll look back at the 2020s and smile at your concerns, the way I smile back at wondering how I'd survive the Great Calgary Recession of 1982-1989.

And if it is, you'll still be fine: you're descended from generations of heroes who sucked up far worse, and got on with not just life, but enjoying life.

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Jan 5, 2022·edited Jan 6, 2022Liked by Line Editor

The experience for immigrants and especially immigrant children is completely different. I suspect Jen's perspective is one of who's family had been in Canada for generations. It isn't her fault of course, being raised by the boomer "Golden Generation" where as long as you didn't make epic life mistakes life got better from year to year, backstopped by debt for things like free health care and OAS, is a hard act to follow. For immigrants, they don't take anything for granted. Good job, home, family, all have to be worked for, it doesn't just happen.

It is interesting though how the US just seems to motor through storm winds on sheer optimism and the benefits of superpower status (Reserve currency machine just prints and prints). I have a hypothesis that I doubt will be proven soon but I think a lot of angst, political and economic issues would be relieved if Canadians could easily move to the US and vice versa. People would be happier living amongst their own "tribe." Let the Canadian gunnies who want cheaper homes live in Montana, let the US left coast sociologists move to Montreal. I think it would be a huge destress for both countries.

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Jan 5, 2022Liked by Line Editor

Good essay, by golly.

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Jan 5, 2022Liked by Line Editor

Minor point about WWII, we joined forces with a very totalitarian force to defeat the other totalitarian forces. Still, I am on your side of the long bet.

Interesting sounding book.

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founding

Okay, the grumpy old man in me has been provoked.

A widely used measure of human wellbeing is the United Nations Human Development Index. It has three dimensions: income, health, and education. While there are many measures to quantify each, the most important ones are

(1) For income, average household income, proportion living in poverty

(2) For health, life expectancy, infant mortality

(3) For education, years of schooling, literacy rates

On all of these measures, Canadians today are much better off than they were fifty or seventy years ago.

I know, I know, things may be good now, but they will get much worse soon. Of course, that's what we were being told fifty years ago.

Indeed, sixty years ago, many experts thought that a nuclear war was imminent. We drilled at school by crouching under our desks while simulating a nuclear attack. Even a 10-year-old realized the uselessness of this, and the despair of the adults recommending it.

Very weak safety net. A spell of unemployment or a major health problem could bankrupt a family.

Work week was 5.5 days or 44 hours, but many jobs required unpaid overtime. In my family, the adults regularly worked 60 hours a week. I helped out with part-time jobs, starting at age 11.

Gasoline had lead additives until the early 1970s. As a result, many baby boomers and early GenX'ers have brain damage. Perhaps that explains us?

Anyway, every generation has its anxieties. It's your turn.

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I suspect the sense of decline seems a lot more pronounced when you're a relatively young member of a news industry that's in its death throes, much like auto workers adjusting to the decline of the Big 3 in the 1980s or blue collar oil workers in the past half decade. An early or mid-career engineering or science grad is faced with the same challenges regarding housing costs, but at least doesn't have to contend with a likely prospect of their livelihood fading out of existence.

One other point I'd like to note is regarding the ability to cook, garden, or repair things. In a lot of ways, these are more of an artifact of a brief period of post-war suburbanism and our recent past as settlers. Urban dwellers of the past rarely had the opportunity to do these things. They relied on bakeshops and other businessmen to do their cooking in places like 19th and early 20th century London. Reading about the early settlement of Australia with convicts drawn from urban populations, one is struck by the fact that they almost completely lacked the skills in farming, fishing, construction, and craftsmanship. Urban dwellers have almost always been nearly hopeless when challenged to live without all of the specialized services found in cities.

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Wow!! What a beautiful essay Jen! Thank you. It was sad, frustrating, disagreeable and yet beautiful and inspiring.

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My thoughts have always been that if most of the people, most of the time have enough (and a little more) or at least what all of those around them have, society remains stable which I think is what you are indicating more eloquently.

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For anyone who'd like to read "The True Believer" (highly recommended), a scan is available from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/1951-hoffer-the-true-believer/mode/1up

Personally I think of history in terms of Toynbee's theory of challenge and response in "A Study of History." Growth comes from responding to a challenge; a society which faces no challenges will stagnate. After responding successfully to a challenge, a society will then find itself facing a new challenge, often a direct result of its earlier response; and so on. (In contrast, a society which fails to respond will find itself facing the same challenge over and over again.)

An obvious example is the economic response to Covid. In Canada, like other Western countries, spending plunged, as people didn't have much to spend money on, while average household income actually increased, thanks to a wide range of income-support programs (like CERB, an emergency version of EI). As a direct result, household savings soared, and money flooded into housing (and other assets, as Mike Moffatt noted in his interview with Matt Gurney: everything from meme stocks to bitcoin to old hockey cards). This is a huge problem for younger first-time homebuyers, who find themselves locked out of the housing market, or borrowing ever-larger amounts of money to get in. Now the challenge is figuring out how to build more housing in places like the GTA and Vancouver (and restrict speculative demand), so it's not so scarce and expensive. https://morehousing.ca/pandemic-savings

A larger-scale challenge is the increasing instability of the international status quo. The US is stepping back to deal with internal issues. Relative power is shifting from those backing the status quo (the US and its allies, including Canada) towards those opposed to it (China, Russia, and a host of smaller powers). This is a novel and disconcerting situation for Canadians - we're not accustomed to getting into diplomatic fights with China, Saudi Arabia, or other powers without the backing of the US. We're going to have to build up our hard and soft power. In a more dangerous world, we need sharper teeth. https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/02/09/canada-in-the-global-jungle

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Great post, great reminder that those before us have already called us out on what's in store for us. Interestingly I just had finished Tara Henley's new podcast before your column appeared in my inbox https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/bad-news?r=ilfha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. Rather timely that these issues are starting to make a bit of a dent. Hoping to see some collaborative efforts in the future. All the best.

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"We are in a state of cultural and bureaucratic stagnation in which mediocrity, complacency and lack of leadership have to be baked into all of our assumptions regarding the performance of our government, in times of crisis or even “peacetime.”

I think that statement best defines what we can all look forward to, barring the emergence of a new, brave leader willing to fight all of these wrongs. I'm not holding my breath. I'm too old to put on the cape.

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I feel the same way, and appreciate as always your clarity. I do take some hope in the idea that the things that really don't work now might be more repairable if they just fall apart, from better fundamentals - especially because it really seems to me that the generations after mine seem way, way better. Crossed fingers in one hand, a drink in the other.

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Hmm. On reading your last paragraph, it occurred to me that we seem to do better when not being told what to do.

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What has amazed me about Hoffer is how accurately he psychoanalyzes so-called progressives. He was dead-on with the Sixties people and he is again now with their woke grandchildren.

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