Elder Advice

Thinking Inside The Box - 159

Elder Advice promised himself to stop listening to the news these past few days. Because it has been tariffying. And seemed to be nothing but endless, illiterate ramblings of the President of the United States on economic matters. Which deserve no response other than to quote the late Professor William Kelley who, for 31 years taught at the Wharton School of Business and Finance, and who observed: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.”

Then the Pope passed on the present. And passed on. Can’t blame him really. The devil seems to be everywhere these days, not just in the details. And Francis was plainly pooped, as well as Pope. But, while he took the easy way out, like most Protestants, Elder Advice confesses Francis was the only Pope who made him want to be Catholic - well, a lapsed Catholic.

Anyway, today is Election Day in Canada and Elder Advice has never felt more despondent about Canadian democracy.

On the one hand, it appears the country is once again full of gullible, mostly older voters who the Liberals have convinced to ignore the real issues and their government’s extraordinary record of scandals, incompetence and broken promises,¹ and who are satisfied, on no evidence, that an unelected Prime Minister with no political experience, surrounded by all the same people responsible for the disastrous social engineering of the past lost decade while actively overseeing the economic and political decline of the nation, will magically manage the unhinged, malevolent troll in the White House. Clearly, that old adage needs an addition: “Fool me four times …” One thing is certain - if the Liberals pull this off (and it appears they have) voters in Ontario, in particular, will have confirmed they need not be treated like adults, ever again.

On the other hand, the Conservative Party has demonstrated astonishing incompetence throughout their four weeks of sloganeering. They allowed the Liberals to give the electorate a false choice between two individuals instead of two teams. As if we are electing a president. They muzzled their local candidates. They frittered away weeks of time and effort with events in the West where their vote is secure, instead of the critical Ontario battlegrounds where it is not. And, in a final, self-defeating act, they released a platform after the closing of advance polls that was as bereft of mathematical integrity as the Liberals’, and devoid of any material difference from it. So much for “Change”.

That no political party seeking to govern this country has evinced the principles and the spine to tell voters the truth and to lay out a credible plan to effect the fundamental economic and political changes that Canada needs and the serious sacrifices Canadians must make to meet this pivotal moment in our history - and that we have not all demanded they do so - is unforgivable. Our parents and grandparents would be ashamed and our children and grandchildren will be understandably infuriated.

Children and grandchildren. Elder Advice has been thinking about them more than usual. Last month I learned both that I will be a grandfather in the fall and, on a less euphoric note, that I am another year older. It seems I blinked and my own offspring were grown and shades of grey were suddenly my new colours - of most of my clothes, the increasing pallor of my skin, the majority of my hair and the position I am scolded to take on every issue.

Now Elder Advice has never looked forward to being old, distinct from being older. To the terrors of feeling irrelevant. And unproductive. To eventual, inevitable loss of the camaraderie of the workplace. To filling days with letters of complaint to Tim Hortons about their refusal to offer poppy seed bagels, and wandering aimlessly in Canadian Tire stores. To not caring about how I look in public anymore; to the point baristas start warning me that the washrooms are for customers only. And when the only good news my children get is when the police tell them I have been located. And that I still have my pants on. For once.

But one thing I have looked forward to, until the past decade, was the comfort of knowing that in exchange for the 20% of the nation’s annual budget taken up by “entitlements” for the elderly, we have ensured our children and grandchildren have at the very least the same opportunities and the same choices we have had.

Policy Horizons Canada, a department of the federal government mandated to advise it on future risks, published its 2025 report during the election. Elder Advice was unsurprised by the plausible future it envisages: the failure of the Canadian Project as a consequence of rising wealth inequality, crushing public debt and downward social mobility. With higher education, social status and home ownership only for the wealthy and social, economic and political strife for everyone. And all by 2040.

I do not want that future, or anything remotely like it, for my children and grandchildren. And it threatens unless Canadians insist that only serious people stand for election. People who, in office, take seriously the task of solving the real problems - affordability of housing and food, national security, economic diversification and productivity, availability of health care and unjustifiable wealth disparity. This election - touted by those who seek our votes as the most important of our lives - has been treated frivolously by those same people.

Elder Advice will return as soon as his blood pressure drops below 180/120. And he finds his pants.

1. see, for example, Elder Advice 74