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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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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