Society

MAKING ENDS MEET: Pondering ageism in an era when the OAS is set to rise to 67

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie ponders ageism and job security in an era when old age security eligibility is set to rise to 67.

Politics Chatter is late this week because I’ve been struggling with this topic. It hits pretty close to home and sparks a bit of an existential crisis. In a couple of months, I turn 55.

I’m an author of 10 books, with another coming out this fall. I have a PhD — my thesis was published to great reviews in just about every newspaper in the country. Excerpts ran in Esprit de Corps, the Halifax Herald, the National Post, and the Ottawa Citizen. I’ve had academic articles published. I was invited, as a scholar of the media in the Second World War, to contribute to a collection of essays to commemorate the work of the renowned historian Terry Copp. My co-authors are among the best historians in Canada. I’ve won a whack of media awards, including a National Magazine Award. I’ve written for every big paper in Canada and most of the small ones as a freelancer.

And I’m unemployable.

As I said, I’m pushing 55. The very few jobs that open up in the news media are given to kids who work cheap and are completely pliant. In academia, young PhD grads are preferred, despite that they’re quite likely to become deadwood after they get tenure and spend 15 or 20 years teaching the same old courses.

I’m not alone. A recent survey found almost 28 percent of workers aged 45 or older felt they had been discriminated against on the basis of their age. I suspect the number of people over 50 would be even higher.

The first story I wrote for Ottawa Magazine was about Olive Dickason, a brilliant historian pushed out of her job because of her age. Dickason had been a journalist most of her career, but went back to school when she was middle-aged and earned her PhD. Her writing was fantastic. Her book, Canada’s First Nations, is probably used as a text at the University of Alberta, which fired her because she was old. It’s required reading in Native history courses everywhere else.

Dickason took her case to the Supreme Court of Canada. She spent her forced “retirement” writing and updating her books and advising students as a volunteer adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s History department, which had the good sense to make her feel welcome.

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WEB EXCLUSIVE: Q&A with Lindsay, a sex worker and Human Library participant

By Victoria Abraham

Lindsay is a sex worker who participated as a Book in the Human Library project put on by the Ottawa Public Library, the Canadian War Museum, and CBC Ottawa on Saturday, January 28. Lindsay is currently working on an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and holds an undergraduate degree in archeology and the classics from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Why did you choose to be part of the Human Library project?
I am big on breaking stereotypes. Anything that I can do to change people’s minds [about stereotypes] is moving in the right direction.

How did you get into sex work?
I had been living in Ottawa for a year after I graduated. I didn’t speak French and I didn’t want to do archeology anymore. So I was working lame retail jobs and I didn’t like it. At the time I was seeing this guy and I did not have much time for him, so he offered to pay me to stay with him. So I said, sure if you want to start paying me for what I was previously doing for free. It just seemed right once I started doing it. Sex work is one of those jobs where you work as much or as little as you want to. It has provided me with a means to go back to school without having to take out too many student loans.

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POLITICS CHATTER: How the story of one woman captures the disaster that is Canada’s First Nations

Rebecca Drake, who was interviewed by the CBC's Jody Porter, sees no way out of the situation at Eabametoong First Nation. Photo: Jody Porter

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie looks at how the story of one woman — Rebecca Drake of the Eabametoong First Nation — captures the disaster that is Canada’s First Nations.

This week, more than 400 chiefs came to Ottawa to talk to the Prime Minister and members of the cabinet about the disaster of the country’s First Nations. The talks got a lot of hype and plenty of ink, but, in the end, accomplished very little. There were promises of more money and greater accountability, unspecified improvement of core services like education and housing, and more talks in the future. Some guys in suits think the whole thing was a wild success.

But all that won’t help Rebecca Drake, and we won’t solve First Nations problems unless we can do something about the situation of Rebecca Drake and the thousands of people like her. Drake lives in Eabametoong First Nation, in the dead centre of Northwestern Ontario. About 1,200 people live in Eabametoong. The only way into this awful place is by air, yet the place has 1,200 people. That makes it one of the largest towns in the region — and one of the very few that’s growing.

About 80 percent of the adults in Eabametoong are addicted to prescription painkillers, paying about $400 apiece for Oxycotin, an economic fact that lies behind a string of drug store robberies in Ottawa and other cities.

Drake is a young woman with five kids. The father of the family isn’t in the picture. He’s hooked on pills. She lives with her parents in a two-bedroom house.

There’s a “detox centre” in the town. It’s a house. And it’s not going to solve the problem in Eabametoong. A small town with 500 people hooked on Oxycotin is a medical disaster that will take a massive intervention to fix — and that’s if the addicts want to get off these drugs. And even if the whole place successfully went cold turkey, they’d only solve one small problem.

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FROM THE PRINT EDITION: Gérard Étienne acts as agent of change for Scheida and Shad Prince

Not a day goes by that Scheida Prince doesn’t give thanks for the new life she and her son, Shad, now enjoy in Canada. Photo by David Kawai.

In the wake of Haiti’s devastating January earthquake, Haitian-Canadian Gérard Étienne immediately stepped in to mobilize help for his homeland. But though he has helped hundreds, the plight of one particular little boy stands out
By Judy Trinh

Shad Benoit is a tall, thin boy with the sad, knowing eyes of a child who has already seen too much. At the time of the earthquake that devastated Haiti last year, five-year-old Shad was already well acquainted with violence. In October 2009, as a preschooler, he had been the target of a botched kidnapping by one of Port-au-Prince’s notorious street gangs. After that he lived in hiding, moving from house to house and forced to stay inside, out of sight of the preying eyes of potential abductors.

But last January 12, the sounds of happy laughter proved just too irresistible, and Shad ran outside to join the neighbourhood children in chasing the afternoon sun. The day’s playtime would come to an end with a deafening crash. Just before 5 p.m., the ground started to shake. Right in front of Shad’s eyes, the houses that lined the street collapsed within moments.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Taking bets on Stephen Harper’s “Margaret Thatcher moment”

The Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher was used to satirize both her personality and her policies

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie takes bets on what Stephen Harper has planned for his “legacy” move.

In 1985, Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners’ union in the U.K. For years, the National Union of Mineworkers had been the country’s most powerful trade union. It had toppled Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s government in 1974. Now was time for payback. Thatcher had already won the Falklands War. She had beaten a foreign enemy, she said, and now she would “destroy the enemy within”. Six strikers died in the 1984-1985 coal strike. Many more were tear-gassed and beaten with truncheons. Thatcher used mounted police, armed strike-breakers, and turned M15 against the union’s leaders.

When the coal miners’ union collapsed, the rest of Britain’s trade union movement fell apart. Breaking the strike was Thatcher’s greatest domestic success, one that has re-made the British workplace into the delightful place it is today.

My friends and I have a pool going about Stephen Harper’s coal mine strike moment. To get into the $5 pool, you have to come up with something batshit crazy that the Harper government will do this year. Corporate tax reductions aren’t crazy enough to meet that threshold, but prediction of a flat tax does. With the level of paranoia in Ottawa, some of the predictions have been, um, somewhat extreme.

Bring back the Red Ensign flag? That’s one bet, but it’s not mine.

I chose to predict the government will eliminate at least two out of three of these federal departments: Transport, Canadian Heritage, and the National Capital Commission.

One of my co-workers suggested the Harper regime will grab the Civic Holiday in August and rename it Freedom Day. (I’d make a side bet that they’d rename Labour Day.)

Then there’s the possibility of bringing back capital punishment. Or the return of the lash in prisons to maintain discipline. The latter would probably be knocked down by the courts, though there are supporters of the idea among the old Reformers.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Say no to Harper, Rae, public service cuts, and Romney. (And Yes to some real stories of intrigue and mayhem)

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie ponders the good old days, when skilled wordsmiths knew how to massage a good story — and a good scandal.

I was pawing through stuff at the Smith’s Falls flea market Sunday when I came across a copy of the Toronto tabloid Hush. Published in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hush was a scandal sheet in every sense of the word.

It sent reporters to what was then called “Morality Court” to hear the cases of hookers and men charged under the still-on-the-books sodomy charges. And it covered petty scams, happenings at nudist colonies, and gave racetrack odds. There were a few pages of ads for hookers unconvincingly disguised as “lonely hearts” messages.

I read every word of this 1960 paper, marveling at the sorrowful stories offered up by its skilled wordsmiths. No political spin in this stuff, just a lot of tragedy, plenty of seedy sex, some wide-eyed enthusiasm for a nudist colony beauty contest, and stern condemnation of a two-bit crook who fleeced a young woman out of $100.

I miss that kind of news. Here, on the Hill, reporters are grinding out “Whither Quebec” eye-splitters, covering the floor crossing of an NDP MP who might as well have been in the witness protection program, or pontificating on themes like “Stephen Harper, Friend or Fiend?”

Not me. Can’t do it. I am no political Rumpelstiltskin, able to turn stale political straw into punditry gold. Instead, here’s some news you can use around the water cooler or during those embarrassing pauses at dinner:

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POLITICS CHATTER: The Christmas story (as told by someone who has been on the Hill too long)

Contributing editor Mark Bourrie reimagines the telling of the Christmas story — in a Canadian poli kind of way.

Some 2015 years ago, after Caesar Augustus assumed power in a heavily contested leadership contest that left about 7,500 bloated corpses floating off the city of Actium, Greece, officials of the new regime decided to count all the people in the Roman world and to levy a tax on them.

Presumably, this was a sort of short form census and tax-form filing involving a guy with some papyrus and a jar. Even so, due to the lack of basic government services, including a postal system, this seemingly simple process involved several days of uncompensated travel, at some inconvenience to the taxpayers. (In those days, small business owners like Joseph of Nazareth, a self-employed tradesman, had to live with a certain amount of red tape and bureaucratic interference, especially when the papyrus-pushers were backed by legions of civil servants packing swords and wearing armour.)

So Joseph set out from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Apparently Joseph was eager to have his wife along, even though she was due to give birth at any time. Whatever pre-natal health support Mary had in Nazareth was left behind. And, because of a chronic shortage of public transport, Mary rode a donkey while Joseph walked.

Now, I’ve never been pregnant but I have ridden a donkey bare-back, and I suspect that donkey-riding in the third trimester must be somewhat painful. And once the young couple arrived in Bethlehem, they found the hospitality industry ill-prepared for the influx of visitors. An innkeeper was, however, able to adapt his food and transport storage facility into challenging, if not entirely wholesome, accommodations. Not only was Bethlehem short of short-term rental accommodation, the town also appears to have had no medical infrastructure. Even alternative care, such as midwifery, seems to have been out-of-reach of the working poor.

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CRIME RETHINK: Our bad habit when it comes to pot laws

In a political blog post written for Torontoist, Ottawa Magazine contributing editor Mark Bourrie notes that the Tory crime bill now before the Senate includes harsher penalties for marijuana possession. And though, he argues, that won’t reduce interest in pot, it could saddle even casual smokers with permanent legal records. Read Bourrie’s analysis here.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Is Attawapiskat worth saving? Time to look for creative solutions

He wrote about the plight of Attawapiskat during the last federal election campaign. Now, in the wake of the current crisis, contributing editor Mark Bourrie tackles the topic again. Is this place worth saving?

All of a sudden, people care about Attawapiskat. It’s the news story of the month.

Suddenly, because of the housing shortage in the town and an embarrassing intervention of the Red Cross, everyone has opinions on a place they’ve been able to ignore for years. I wrote about Attawapiskat on this blog during the last election, but it never became an issue. Maybe now people will take a look at this disaster – and others like it – and try to come up with a real solution.

There’s no real reason for Attawapiskat to exist. Every other town has a reason for being: some industry, perhaps as a market town for a hinterland, maybe as an administrative or financial centre. But Attawapiskat is just there.

The Cree were trappers and hunters who lived in family groups and travelled across their territory taking game and fishing. In the summer, they congregated at some of the better fishing spots or at points where canoe routes converged to trade and visit for a few weeks every summer.

Fur traders plunked down forts at these spots and used these annual gatherings to exchange pelts for trade goods. There was nothing particularly sinister about it. They just went where the market was.

But some of these communities, like Attawapiskat, lost their reason for existence with the end of the fur trade. The 1,800 or so people who live there can’t make a living by hunting. Furs aren’t worth much. Nor, in that subarctic corner of the world, is there a fishery that can sustain the community. If there was, there would be fur and fish processing, people building and maintaining boats and nets, others with jobs packing and shipping. In short, there would be something resembling an economy.

There’s a diamond mine about 100 kilometres away, and DeBeers, which owns it, has hired several dozen people from the reserve. But the community is hardly within commuting range, especially since there’s no road between the mine and the town.

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POLITICS CHATTER: Mocking the pepper-spraying cop (and surveying his place in protest history)

In which contributing editor Mark Bourrie looks at how a classic YouTube moment has shaped the way we will remember the ‘Occupy’ movement.

The “Occupy _____” movement has run its course, at least in Canada.

It was never very effective here. Protesters in Toronto were too polite or too weak to try to occupy Bay Street. Instead, they settled in a park co-owned by the Anglican Church and the City of Toronto. The church supported their protest, as did a large bloc of city councillors. Here in Ottawa, demonstrators politely took over a park, rather than risk the wrath of the riot squads by camping on Parliament Hill. They kept to the margins of Confederation Park, kept it clean, and even looked after the homeless people who normally live there.

In the end, though, Toronto’s city administration got a court ruling telling the occupiers to sleep elsewhere. The St. James Park protesters have put up token resistance, but most of them started packing Tuesday, as did the vast majority of the Occupy Ottawa crowd in Confederation Park.

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