Missing life's milestones

The wisdom of Paul Kershaw is worth some thought

A recent episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin dealt with the issue “What happens when people miss life’s big milestones” with Professor Paul Kershaw one of the panelists. Kershaw is the founder of Generation Squeeze which publishes his research that concludes older Canadians left a legacy that makes it harder for younger Canadians to meet traditional goal of graduation, getting a good job, getting married, buying a home and having children.

Kershaw has previously argued that home ownership has caused a transfer of wealth to older Canadian at the expense of younger Canadians as home prices rose and left youth with a challenging environment in which to buy a home. I countered that older people that own homes that appreciated in price didn’t get more wealthy, instead the value of money had decreased and the home they had owned for decades was worth no more as a home than when they bought it. But that outcome did result from older generations choices in government and the resulting policies.

In today’s episode, Kershaw made some important points (in my opinion) on the difficulties facing younger Canadians that have resulted from failures of the older generation to influence policies of Canadian governments. Here he is on solid ground. He asked:

• How on our watch did we tolerate public policies that allowed home prices to leave behind earnings?

• How on our watch did we tolerate our kids having to pay more for post-secondary and start with more student debt and then get creamed with really expensive child care?

• How on our watch did we allow climate change to create so much disruption to young people’s lives where they can’t count on the jobs of the past where they have to eat differently, work differently, holiday differently to fend off the worst climate change has to offer?

Two out of three is not bad. I will explain.

Public Policies

We elect political leaders who buy votes with our money and the Liberal government policies since Trudeau was elected in 2015 included quantitative easing (QE) to bring down interest rates to near zero, driving up housing prices. The Trudeau government that more than doubled the national debt and run massive deficits, driving up inflation and the costs of almost everything.

Not all of the older generation are to blame, just those who voted Liberal.

Post-Secondary Education

We are all to blame for our failure to restrain academia from hiring thousands of administrators to implement diversity, equity and inclusion policies and promote hundreds of programs like gender studies and diversity training that add nothing to a graduate’s ability to find high paying jobs but drive up the costs of university. RAther than reduce bloated staff levels, universities encouraged international students to come to Canada and charged them much higher tuition and fees to cover some of the higher costs, but still increased tuition for domestic students far in excess of the rate of inflation. Letting socialists and Marxists run our universities and ignoring the risks to educational standards can be laid at the feet of the generation that fought wars to prevent the spread of Communism but were impotent to prevent its infiltration of teachers’s unions and academia. In Canada, universities were ripe for infiltration since they are accountable to no one.

Climate Change

Professor Kershaw is on the wrong track here. On our watch we elected leftist leaders who promote the idea that carbon dioxide (CO2) causes climate change, an aphysical concept inconsistent with laws of physics but powerful as political capital to create an alarm that becomes the centrepiece of socialist platforms to obtain and keep power. This destructive failure is again one that lies at the feet of left leaning voters. It is easy to demonstrate that CO2 is incapable of materially increasing the temperature of the atmosphere by applying nothing more complex than grade 11 physics.

Professor Kershaw is part of the problem since he embraces the climate change rhetoric rather than applying his considerable research skills to confronting it. Independent thinkers threaten governments, so eloquently stated by the late H.L. Mencken who wrote:

Professor Kershaw could have chosen to be such a man but did not.

Even the political leaders who foment climate fears didn’t believe the climate change rhetoric, but didn’t care. The late Christine Stewart, former Liberal Minister of Environment, stated in a Calgary Herald interview:

There is no doubt the problems faced by younger Canadians today result from policy decisions enacted by people older Canadians elected. But reality is that those policies primarily resulted from election of Liberal governments and their current NDP supporters and will deepen and get worse until we change governments and return common sense to Ottawa.