(Editor’s note: This email was sent to Parry Sound-Muskoka MP Tony Clement and copied to this newspaper.)
Dear Mr. Clement:
I assume you have read George Orwell’s classic 1984 with its twisted “war is peace” logic. Although it was intended as an indictment of authoritarian government, I suspect that you and your fellow Reform-Conservatives regard it as a handbook.
It boggles the mind that you and your colleagues seriously suggest that by cutting Old Age Security you are protecting Canadian seniors.
You conveniently ignore several inconvenient facts.
The proposed cuts in OAS will strike only the neediest pensioners. Middle and upper income seniors don’t receive OAS. It is, to use that ghastly term, “clawed back.” The two-year postponement is actually a per capita penalty/tax grab of $12,000 ($6,000 x 2 years).
As an aside, how much money is wasted with the bureaucratic lunacy of, in effect, loaning me several thousand dollars interest-free for twelve months each year and then reclaiming it each April. But I digress…
You also ignore the fact that the anticipated demands on the system are a temporary blip. True, the baby boomers will impose pressures on social programs as they retire. But they too will die off and in the long term the system will balance itself. Valid long-range planning, which you claim to be doing, would take that into account.
You and your terminally chirpy colleague Diane Finley argue speciously that there will not be enough taxpaying workers to fund the pensions of retired boomers. Gosh! You keep telling us that corporate tax cuts will create a job bonanza. So which is it to be?
It’s been said that the current generation is the first that has not done as well as its parents. Yet your grubby policies on this and other social issues ensure that the next generation of seniors will fall short of even the modest circumstances of today’s seniors.
One other point. You suggest that people now must work to age 67. How many of those people have jobs now? How often do you see anyone over 60 at work in an office, operating a machine, serving behind a counter (unless it’s flipping hamburgers part-time to make ends meet)?
We retired two years early by our own choice and never regretted it. Your values tend to shift and your passion to lag after age 60. I enjoyed my broadcasting career immensely, but the last year or two just weren’t fun anymore.
I suspect it’s even worse for someone who hates their job and resents their 30-year-old boss.
We enjoy a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in retirement and, in doing so, contribute to the economy. Yet you now decree that people like us must retire two years later rather than two years sooner!
How much more damage will your damnable Orwellian oligarchy wreak? The hidden agenda of the minority years, which you used to lull and deceive Canadians, is now revealed in all its chicanery and deceit. I do not understand how you instantly find great wads of money for unneeded fighter jets, expanded prisons and unseemly military adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, yet predict the end of Canadian civilization if we continue to spend on medicine, education, the arts and social programs.
Against all odds, we have built a remarkable, compassionate and cultured parliamentary democracy. You and your pseudo Tories (Sir John A must spin in his grave nightly) want to exchange that for the brash and greedy cowboy culture of the declining republic to the south.
By the way, I must have missed your tough talking reaction to the shameful way you, the prime minister and your dystopian government were double-crossed by Caterpillar Corporation. Perhaps you could send me the text of your denunciation. I would love to read it.
Dick Smyth, Bracebridge