The cult of home ownership

Canadians may be on the verge of witnessing a central banker acknowledge both the possibility of a speculative bubble and his institution’s role in creating it, an event so rare that it makes events like solar eclipses and New Democratic governments look downright commonplace. Despite a global economic recession and a market meltdown to the south, the Canadian real estate market enjoyed one of its best years on record in 2009, with the national average price climbing 5 per cent in 2009 to a record $320,333 and year-over-year figures for December showing a more striking 19 per cent increase. Although Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, isn’t prepared to take full responsibility for the role that his decision to drop interest rates to their lowest levels in fifty years played in real estate’s winning year, he has signaled that Canadians may have overindulged themselves on the buffet of low-interest credit that was laid out for them in the hopes of stimulating consumer spending and staving off the worst effects of the recession.

Carney’s sudden call for fiscal prudence has the ring of a drug dealer telling his clients not to get too stoned, which might explain why those clients aren’t listening. For all the secular sermons that Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty have delivered recently to Canadian homeowners about the importance of fiscal prudence and the impact of impending increases in interest rates on mortgage payments, they continue to double down on real estate and assume what were only a generation ago regarded as suicide-inducing levels of personal debt in the pursuit of the virtues of home ownership.

But if the Bank of Canada’s low-interest lending policy may be the crack-cocaine that is fueling the real-estate market’s recent highs, the gateway drug that facilitated its consumption is the reverential attitude that Canadians have towards home ownership and the corresponding disdain for renting. In an article in the Calgary Herald appropriately titled “Desire to own homes overcame tough times,” Michael Polzler, the executive vice-president of Re/Max operations in Ontario and Atlantic Canada noted that “while low interest rates were a principal factor driving home-buying activity, no one can discount the value that Canadians place in owning a home.”

Polzler’s quote underscores the fact that the mania associated with home ownership has distorted the choice between renting and owning from a rational economic decision to a moral one, potentially blinding thousands of Canadians to both the virtues of renting their homes and the risks attached to owning it. That attitude has been actively fostered by the government programs that incentivize and subsidize home ownership and amplified by the noisy crowd of real-estate agents, mortgage brokers, and HGTV executives who exaggerate its pleasures.

This narrative, one that associates values like stability, cohesion, and prosperity with ownership and shiftless transiency and economic illiteracy with renting, has taken root in the minds of most Canadians. With governments creating various incentives and programs that encourage ownership, the banks providing the easy credit, and the industry spokespeople relentlessly spinning the facts and figures—ones that they usually create themselves—they have managed to transform a rational choice into a universal aspiration, and in so doing make home ownership look like a leap that only a self-destructive idiot wouldn’t take. In our ownership-addled culture, those who rent by choice are regarded in the same way as a self-identified communist might have been 25 years ago: an eccentric figure whose views would be subject to ridicule if they weren’t so obviously ridiculous.

Unlike communism, though, there is a credible case for renting as a rational form of economic behaviour. The notion that renting amounts to a waste of money only slightly less egregious than simply lighting it on fire is a widely held one in North American society, and it’s actively fuelled by bankers, real-estate agents, and other professionals with a vested interest in promoting home ownership. Only a fool, aspiring home owners and the real-estate agents and mortgage brokers enabling them say, would choose to pay down their landlord’s mortgage when they could be paying down their own.

But like most pieces of conventional wisdom, this particular chestnut is a monumental oversimplification of what should be a complicated decision. When the costs of renting and owning are roughly equivalent, renting might well be a wasteful economic decision, but it’s been a long time since that was the case in Canada’s major markets. In places like Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto, where the price of the average home is anywhere from five to a remarkable ten times the median income of the average home buyer (the definition of “extremely unaffordable” is 5.1 and above, according to market research firm Demographia) renting compares very favourably to owning.

Ironically, in these kinds of overheated markets, many new homeowners remain de-facto renters, as the combination of low down payments and rising prices create degrees of financial leverage that negate the vaunted forced savings effect of home ownership that real-estate agents and mortgage brokers love talking up as a benefit of buying. Instead of wasting their money by paying their landlord’s mortgage as renters, they’re now wasting it on interest-heavy mortgage payments, and subsidizing the big bonuses of their executives in the process.

When the hidden costs of ownership are factored in, from property taxes and common fees to mortgage insurance, real-estate agent commissions, and provincial taxes, home ownership starts to look downright reckless. As David Crook wrote in a 2007 piece for the Wall Street Journal, home ownership isn’t nearly the bargain that most of us think it is. “Boom market or bust,” he observed, “home buying has so many extra costs — from upfront “points” paid to a lender to title insurance and appraisal fees — that over the first five to seven years, a renter who invests the equivalent of a down payment in stocks could easily do better overall than a house buyer. Compounding that problem: Most homeowners move within seven years.”

What about price appreciation, you wonder? Over the last fifteen years, home prices in Canada and the United States have marched determinedly upward in one of the longest real-estate bull markets in history, one whose pitch has been so steep at times that it spawned an entire industry of parasitical speculators who made easy money buying up properties and flipping them months later for a healthy profit. The proliferation of these flippers, and the ease with which they appeared to make their money, became so striking that it encouraged many people to think of real-estate as an asset that “always goes up.”

A longer view of the situation reveals a less predictable pricing environment, though. Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who correctly predicted both the dot-com and American housing bubbles, has a century’s worth of data that demonstrates that over the length of the average mortgage the price of a home in the United States barely outpaces the rate of inflation. Canada’s real-estate has beaten the rate of inflation like a red-headed stepson for over a decade now, which, along with the unprecedented levels of un-affordability and a guaranteed increase – more likely, a series of them – in interest rates over the next few years suggest that a correction of some sort may be in store. That’s certainly how David Rosenberg, the chief economist at the money manager Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, sees the market. He examined home prices in relation to personal incomes and residential rents and concluded that prices are between 15% and 35% above levels that are consistent with fundamentals.

Yet even in the face of what looked like the beginning of a real-estate correction last spring, Canadians remained resolute in the preference they expressed for owning rather than renting their homes. In June of 2009, a national survey commissioned by Genworth Financial Canada and conducted by the Environics Research Group revealed that of the 2,521 people surveyed, 88 per cent say they would feel more financially secure owning their own home. This survey offers an under-appreciated window of insight into the mind of the average Canadian homeowner, and demonstrates just how little rational economic self-interest really has to do with the widespread pursuit of home ownership. After all, a clear-headed and honest assessment of the relative merits and drawbacks of owning and renting should be an effective buffer against the kind of cult-like mania that has gripped the real estate markets over the last decade, but still the mania persists, as anybody with a grade twelve education who’s paid even the slightest degree of attention to the real estate pages in Vancouver, Calgary, or Toronto ought to understand.

This mania’s endurance has a lot less to do with the forces of supply and demand than its industry advocates might like to argue. Instead, it is the result of decades of cultural brainwashing on the part of the real-estate industry and its various accomplices in the worlds of government and finance that have made an unemotional evaluation of the financial merits of home ownership next to impossible for the average home buyer. Together, they have convinced millions of North Americans that owning real-estate is more an existential transaction rather than a financial one.

Governments have encouraged this confusion by using the owned home as a proxy for a wide variety of causes, from anti-communist nationalism in the 1950s to middle-class family values in the 1990s. As Elizabeth Eaves wrote in Forbes Magazine in a July 2007 article, “homeownership has been touted as civic responsibility, “moral muscle” and a bulwark against communism. A 1922 pamphlet from the National Association of Real Estate Boards even promised that it would put the “MAN back in MANHOOD.” Over the years, it has been claimed that homeowners vote more, join more voluntary associations, take better care of their residences and have better-educated kids.” As Thomas Sugrue observes in a piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2009, “to own a home is to be American. To rent is to be something less.”

These governments didn’t just talk about the importance of home ownership, either. On both sides of the border and both sides of the political spectrum, elected officials have used their legislative and financial clout to create substantial incentives to home ownership. In the United States, Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae were created, while in Canada the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation was created by the Government of Canada after World War II to fulfill a similar purpose. Those measures reached an absurd zenith in the United States in the late 1990s and first years of the new century, as the invention of creative financing measures allowed people who had no business owning homes – most infamously, those without either incomes or jobs, who received the so-called NINJA loans from particularly adventurous banks – to participate in the orgy of home ownership. When the lights finally came on in 2007, millions of Americans were caught with their pants around their ankles.

Yet even this cautionary tale, one that has forced millions of Americans into foreclosures and millions more with negative equity in their homes, hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm that Canadians feel about the semi-spiritual virtues of home ownership. When asked by those same Environics researchers if “owning a home provides a greater sense of emotional well-being and security,” eighty-four per cent said that it does. Even those who understand the financial and personal sacrifices associated with home ownership, from higher monthly payments and the risks associated with a depreciating market to more mundane inconveniences like cleaning the eaves troughs and replacing the hot water heater, still believe that they made the right decision. When asked if they’d rather own than rent “even though home ownership may mean more work and effort,” 85 per cent of respondents agreed.

In America, where almost one in four home owners are now underwater, the prejudices towards renting and those who engage in it that so many people held have softened considerably. But in Canada, where the real-estate bubble has managed to survive a deep global recession, renting is still looked down upon, an economic choice that sits somewhere between collecting bottles and trading junk bonds in our collective cultural hierarchy. Whether we’re doomed to follow in the footsteps of our cousins to the south remains to be seen, but it seems clear that until we do our love affair with the owned home will continue unabated, evidence to the contrary be damned.

Olympic journalism fail

Excellence, respect, and friendship are the three defining values of the International Olympic movement, but it might be time to add immoderacy to that list. After all, from the overbearing corporate influence to the overwhelming security presence and even the overwrought enthusiasm of its friendly militia of uniformed volunteers, the Olympic games are more than anything else an exercise in overreaction.

If the early results are any indication, the hundreds of journalists that will be covering the 2010 Winter Olympics are no exception to this culture of excess. The best evidence of that so far is the piece written by freelance journalist Douglas Haddow, published in the January 31st online edition of the Guardian, one that reads like the intellectual equivalent of a severe allergic reaction to the institutional optimism being pumped out by VANOC and its brigade of blue-jacketed volunteers.

Haddow’s piece isn’t without merit, and it isn’t necessarily wrong, either. He rightly highlights the discrepancy between the initial estimate of the costs attached to the games and their predicted economic return with the more sobering figures that are now being attached to each, as well as the fraudulent neoliberal vision that was used to sell the games to Vancouverites. But where the widely read and talked about Sports Illustrated piece on the same subject written by Dave Zirin relies on the usual journalistic techniques of reportage and analysis – and, you know, talking to people – Haddow instead indulges in the kind of rhetorically bombastic propagandizing that would make those working in the communications offices of VANOC and its corporate sponsors a little jealous.

Of the onerous security presence in Vancouver he notes, for example, that “with a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland.” This is a colourful image, but it’s also a completely inaccurate one. There aren’t cops on every street corner, and the ones that are out in force are about as threatening as a crowd of fourteen year-old girls. Their job, apparently, is to stand around in groups of three or four and give directions to tourists and confused locals, and so far I’ve seen nothing that suggests that they’re doing anything else. I happen to live just a few minutes from the locked-down Olympic Village, and while there are a few thousand things I would rather have seen the approximately $1 billion security budget spent on than the Olympic security preparations that have been made, I don’t find it nearly as ominous as Haddow appears to. So great is the degree of overkill, from the hundreds of idle beat cops to the giant rubber wall that has been planted underneath the Cambie Street Bridge in False Creek, presumably to protect the Olympic Village and the athletes within in from an amphibian Al-Qaeda attack, that the overall effect becomes one of black comedy rather than conspiracy.

Later, Haddow writes that “whole sections of the city are off-limits, scores of roads have been shut down, small businesses have been told to close shop and citizens have been instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors to make way for the projected influx of 300,000 visitors.” This is neither hyperbole nor a lie but instead some awful hybrid of the two, and it’s a place that a journalist should never go voluntarily. The only sections of the city that are off-limits are those that contain event venues, and even then the actual area to which access will be restricted is proportionate in size to the scale of the situation. Meanwhile, as anybody who has ever heard the Gettysburg Address remembers, the term score means twenty in the context in which Haddow uses it, and his decision to pluralize it means that there are, at a bare minimum, forty streets that he believes have been closed in conjunction with the Olympics. Yet a cursory glance at the City of Vancouver’s Olympic information site reveals that just over thirty streets will be affected at some point over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the notion that small businesses have been instructed to “close shop” and citizens have been “instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors” is completely estranged from the truth, as anybody who actually lives in Vancouver like Haddow ought to know.

I’m as sympathetic to the imperatives of the polemical form as you’ll find, and I’m as receptive to a well
thought out critique of the Olympic games as anybody, but Haddow’s piece is too much even for me. Good journalists work with facts, not impressions, and on an issue as important as the Olympics and its impact on the people burdened with hosting them a close working relationship with those facts is even more important. Our job is to avoid taking a side, whether it’s that of the conspicuously earnest red-mittened supporters who believe that the Olympic games will bring a bounty of economic, social, and cultural benefits to the city, or the loose coalition of anarchists, environmentalists, and terminal sceptics who believe that the games point inflict an unjustifiable amount of social, cultural, and economic damage on the lives of the people who have to host them. The truth about the Olympics and their impact on the City of Vancouver and the people who live here lies somewhere between these two positions, and it’s our job to describe and discuss just where that is and what it looks like. Instead, Haddow has crafted a neo-Orwellian image of the Olympic effect on Vancouver that’s more a caricature than a credible piece of reporting, and as such it’s scarcely any more helpful to the cause of the truth than the overblown descriptions of Olympic virtue that are being pumped out by VANOC on a daily basis.

Worse still, Haddow’s piece ignores the real abuses that are taking place as a result of or in conjunction with the Olympics. There’s the owner of Mario’s Gelati who was promised that his business, located next to the Olympic village on Quebec Street, would not be adversely affected by games-related security arrangements, only to see it walled inside the fenced perimeter. The film industry, already reeling from both the global economic slowdown and Ontario’s aggressive new tax incentives, is being effectively shut down as a result of the Olympic presence. Why not talk to a few people in that important industry, and put their stories on the record? Or, if nothing else, why not talk to one of the thousands of people who have to use transit to get to work and will have to watch as their routes fill up with thousands of tourists, turning 45 minute commutes into three hour journeys?

There are plenty of other cases like these, real and specific moments of interference and even injustice related to the Olympic games, but Haddow appears to ignore them completely. For someone who clearly wants to see the Olympics exposed to the rest of the world, that’s a pretty big mistake. If, as he writes, Vancouver “will be the best chance yet for the Olympics to be derailed and exposed as what they are: a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors,” it will be because of efforts to document specific events, infractions, and abuses. Thankfully, there will be hundreds of journalists on the ground, as well as thousands of bloggers, twitterers, and other observers with an interest in documenting the games. Together, they may just tell the kind of story about the Olympics that reveals its uglier side and dissuades other communities from actively campaigning for the right to host them in the future. But rhetorical invective like Haddow’s, regardless of however well-intentioned or well-crafted it might be, does little to advance that cause.

Oh, Canada

For over half a century now one of the fringe benefits that came with being a Canadian citizen was a sparkling international reputation, one that was largely the product of Lester B. Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. The perception that resulted from it was that Canada was a nation of earnest peace keepers, and our reputation as a kind, decent, and caring people benefited enormously from the inevitable comparisons to that of our aggressive and obnoxious cousins to the south. So stark has the contrast between the countries been, in fact, that savvy Americans began to stitch Canadian flags onto their backpacks and suitcases when traveling abroad in order to avoid being associated with their country’s politics and policies and pelted with expired produce by those with a less-than-enthusiastic view of them.

Those days, though, are just about over, and it will soon be the Canadian tourists ducking the flying potatoes tossed by disgruntled locals because of our government’s shameful response to the threat of climate change. Despite the myriad forms of political cowardice on display in Copenhagen in December, climate change remains the defining issue of our time, and it’s one that’s only going to get more important as the glaciers continue to melt, the seas continue to rise, and the weather patterns around the world grow ever wilder and wackier. When it comes to doing something meaningful to fight those changes, the Harper government is doing its absolute best to keep Canada at the very back of the class.

Last week, Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced that Canada’s goal was to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. These targets might be defensible in, say, Martinique, or any other small and under-industrialized nation with an inconsequential carbon footprint. Canada, though, is almost the exact opposite, a country whose economy depends increasingly on burning fossil fuels and whose harsh climate makes substantial heating and cooling costs an inescapable part of any household budget.

In fact, even calling the Harper government’s plan a goal is an act of generosity, in the same way that referring to someone’s decision to cut down from three quarter pounders with cheese a day to one as a diet would be. And even this minuscule reduction in emissions, which makes the old progress-related cliché of a drop in the bucket sound downright optimistic, might be too much to ask of our government. After all, when it comes to climate change and the environment, just like our so-called dieter Canada doesn’t have a great reputation of meeting its self-imposed goals.

Even if Canada realizes its targets we will still be a global laggard, a member of the Axis of Enmity when it comes to climate change. That the United States is also part of this coalition of the unwilling makes it unlikely that we’ll face any significant pressure to move towards a more progressive position. But following in the footsteps of the United States on climate change is a little like trying to pass a test by cheating off the dumbest kid in the class. Worse still is the fact that our government appears to take pride in that strategy.

The idiot kid whose test results we’re frantically copying down and passing off as our own is getting dumber by the minute, too, as a Gallup poll taken in December of 2009 revealed. Despite replacing a President who had almost as much difficulty with the idea of climate change as he did with proper grammar with one who clearly appreciates the challenges climate change presents and the action that is required to meet them, the views of many Americans actually moved in the direction of the former.

From 2008 to 2009, the number of Americans who said that they were “somewhat” or “very” worried about global warming decreased by 13 points to 50 per cent, while the percentage of Americans who believe that it is caused by human activities dropped 10 points to 47 per cent.

This isn’t entirely surprising given the suspicion with which Americans so often greet science and its achievements. But regardless of whether American public opinion on climate change is shifting because of the uniquely American antipathy towards science, last year’s email scandal at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or the well-funded lobbying efforts of the oil and gas industries, the fact remains that despite having a President who appears genuinely interested in moving forward on climate change Americans are instead moving backwards. Unless we’re trying to become global pariahs on the question of climate change, the United States is the very last country whose policy we ought to be imitating.

The good news here is that even as our government takes deliberate steps to put itself on the wrong side of the fight against climate change, Canadians are moving in the other direction. A survey commissioned by the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute and conducted by the Innovative Research Group Inc., found that nearly half of the respondents called climate change a “critical threat,” while a January 2010 Ipsos poll revealed that two-thirds of Canadians do not believe that their country is taking the right steps, at the right pace, to fight climate change.

The bad news is that there doesn’t appear to be a credible alternative to the Harper government’s retrograde approach to climate change. While Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff talks a predictably smooth game on climate change, he has expressed his unwillingness to follow the ambitious path on environmental issues beaten by his predecessor, Stephane Dion. His decision to express support for the continued exploration for the Albertan oil sands, presumably in the quixotic pursuit of a seat or two in Alberta, shows that on questions of substance he isn’t much different on the question of climate change than the man whose job he covets. The only political leaders in this country with any interest in committing to serious climate change measures are the ones who will never get close enough to power to see them through.

That’s a missed opportunity for those Liberals, both because climate change remains an important issue to Canadians and it is on which they could quite easily articulate a clear and concise contrast between the Harper Tories and themselves. Ignatieff, for example, could do a lot worse than to remind Canadians of Pierre Trudeau’s famous observation about the nature of the relationship between Canada and the United States and its bearing on the Harper government’s decision to move in lockstep with the Americans on climate change. After all, by snuggling up next to the American elephant on the question of climate change, Canada may well avoid getting bruised by the inevitable tossing and turning. But that elephant’s approach to climate change amounts a toxic greenhouse gas emission of its own, so to speak, and in the end we may end up smelling just as bad.

The Baby Boomer delusion – Part II

Crawford Kilian certainly picked an odd time to embrace the virtues of the market. In his latest piece for the Tyee, Kilian, a longtime voice on and of the left, defends his prescription for a policy of health care-at-any-cost by using language more familiar to his ideological opponents. Writing about the health care costs that will be driven inexorably upwards by the aging Baby Boomers, Kilian writes that “maybe we ought to think of such spending as the voice of the market, demanding better medical technology, better drugs, even better palliative care. The demand won’t go away if we cut health spending; we’ll simply pass the costs back to the aged and ill, who will pay with their lives.”

That’s not accurate though. The notion that an unwillingness to give the health care system a blank cheque sounds strangely like the warning about so-called “death-panels” that was a popular response on the right in the United States to Obama’s health care initiative. But blank cheque or not, it will be my generation that will be asked to cover the costs attached to any expansion of our health care commitments in the future. To his credit, Kilian doesn’t duck this implied obligation, even if he fails to mention it explicitly. “Yes, the industries and workers would pay high taxes. But those taxes would be an investment in individual Canadians’ lifetime wellbeing, a guarantee that when they needed care — at any age — it would be there for them.”

That’s going to be one hell of a tax bill, though. The Conference Board of Canada’s report on health care, titled “The Future Cost of Health Care in Canada, 2000 to 2020,” notes that provincial and territorial health care expenditures in Canada are projected to rise from $55.9 billion in 2000 to $102.5 billion in 2020, an increase of 83 per cent. As a share of total revenues, health expenditures are projected to grow from 31.1 per cent in 2000 to 42.0 per cent in 2020. Unless explorers discover an eleventh Canadian province made entirely out of barrels of crude oil, we won’t be able to pay this skyrocketing health care bill.

More likely than a massive tax increase is the cannibalization of the funding for education, child care, and other social programs. But there isn’t, to my knowledge, a medical procedure capable of remedying a crappy education that a health care system can fund, and that’s all the more troubling in light of the fact that the Canadian economy will be driven, if it is to be driven at all, by gains in worker productivity. You can’t buy smarter workers, after all, and we’re still not doing a very good job of integrating the thousands of highly skilled immigrants who come to Canada with PhDs and MDs and end up driving taxi cabs or cleaning bathrooms. If we continue to neglect the education system in favour of cheaper hip-replacement operations we’re going to find ourselves in an awfully big hole in short order, deeper even that the one in which we’re currently standing.

Arthur Carty, Canada’s National Science Advisor, observes that “it took from year 1 AD to 1750 to double humankind’s scientific knowledge. But it also doubled between 1900 and 1950, and doubled again between 1950 and 1960. Knowledge quadrupled in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. It likely increased tenfold in the ‘90s. And it’s a good bet that the rate of growth will continue to accelerate in the first ten years of the new millennium.” Canada’s ability to compete will depend, in large part, on the economy’s ability to move away from traditional resource-based industries and towards knowledge-based ones in response to what philosopher Peter Drucker describes as no less than “a fundamental change in the human condition.”

But if we continue to fulfill the narrow interests of the Baby Boomers and focus our collective resources and attention on health care instead of education, Canadians may suffer a rapid and remarkable drop in their – our, I should say – standard of living. The tax base, already compromised by the looming retirement of millions of Boomers, will continue to shrink, and we will be less able to fund the priorities and programs that will ensure that the next generation of Canadians – my generation – will live as well as our parents.

Therein lies the heart of the matter, the possibility that my generation may enjoy a lower quality of life than our parents. Healthy societies serve the interests of the future, but the retirement of the Baby Boomers and the demands that they’ll place on the rest of us seems likely to alter our collective focus away from tomorrow and towards today. That’s why young Canadians aren’t terribly concerned about health care. Sure, we’d like the best system in the world and we’re certainly not prepared to go down the road that the United States is still on, with massive health premiums and millions of uninsured poor. But we have other concerns, like trying to find a job that will allow us to pay off our student debt. If, like the average Canadian undergraduate, you matriculate from university with $25,000 in student debt, are required by the banks to start paying it off in six months, and find that the only job your degree qualifies you for is an entry level barista at the local Starbucks you might prefer to take that long walk off a short ledge and take your chances in one of Canada’s supposedly under-funded hospitals.

Kilian concludes his piece by suggesting that we re-orient our economy around the health care needs of the Baby Boomers, essentially transforming Canada into a taxpayer funded rest home. “That would eliminate any generational conflict: young people would see their own grandparents enjoying longer and healthier lives,” he writes. “Similarly, the size of the health care market would inspire efforts to make medical technology cheaper and more versatile. Doing so would employ as many working-age Canadians as companies could find.” Stripped of its rhetorical packaging this appears to be a prescription for a future in which people my age labour in the service of the ever-expanding health care needs of our parents and grandparents, and do so with a smile on our face, presumably a side-effect of the anti-depression medication that we’ll all have to consume to endure our plight.

Despite the fact that his vision of the future amounts to transforming Canada into a national retirement home funded by the labour of the children and grandchildren of its residents, Kilian believes that it is one that all Canadians will support. “The Eubie Blake economy would probably require fewer resources, and might limit some kinds of consumption,” Kilian writes. “But the compensation would be worth it: longer, healthier lives, work for everyone who needs it, and the prospect of a great old age that does not burden our children and grandchildren.” But I happen to think that Martin Amis’s darker vision of future defined by conflict over the demands of the Baby Boomers is more likely. “I can imagine a sort of civil war,” Amis said, “between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”

For Baby Boomers, Kilian’s argument is surely an appealing one, and it isn’t without some merit. They are entitled, as Kilian writes, “to freedom, to personal security, to reasonable health care and a healthful environment. We are entitled to take political action and to vote for whom we please. Why should we not also be entitled to those benefits when we are old?” But what they’re not entitled to a share of this country’s social and economic assets that enhances their quality of life at the cost of that which their children and grandchildren might enjoy. In order to avoid Amis’s inter-generational civil war, we need to start having a more sophisticated discussion about what that share is, and whether the Baby Boomers will be willing to reciprocate in kind when it comes to the burdens associated with childcare, education, and other forward-looking programs. Closing our eyes and pretending that everything’s going to be alright, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, isn’t going to cut it any longer.

The Baby Boomer delusion – Part I

Young Canadians interested in a preview of what the next thirty years of their lives will look like ought to read “The Eubie Blake Economy,” Crawford Kilian’s most recent piece on the Tyee. Kilian’s piece, which is built around a brief review of social historian Theodore Roszak’s “The Making of an Elder Culture,” offers a vision of how the Baby Boomers see their own future that is downright terrifying for those of us unfortunate enough to have been born in their shadow.

Born in 1941, four years before the end of the war sparked the beginning of the Baby Boom generation, Kilian isn’t technically speaking on his own behalf. Yet the Boomers would be hard pressed to find a more eloquent spokesperson than Kilian, who manages to make the crushing demographic weight of the Baby Boomers and the costs (estimated by the CD Howe Institute to be as high as $1.5 trillion) that their transition into old age will exact on the rest of society sound like a gift for which we should all be thankful.

It’s no great secret among those that know me that I have a less optimistic view of the situation, but first let’s review the precise dimensions of the challenge that lays ahead. Mark Twain’s famous observation notwithstanding, the aging of the Baby Boomers is one case where the statistics are incapable of lying. “Looking ahead to 2025,” Kilian writes, “B.C. Stats sees a population of 5,458,100. Our median age will be 43.8 (that is, half of us will have been born in 1981 or earlier). Our median age at death will be 81.1 (that is, half of us born in 1944 or earlier will die after 2025). The number of British Columbians aged 65 or more will be 1,154,700, and 282,600 of us will be over 80. That is five times the senior population of 1975, and about six and a half times the octogenarian population.”

Optimists like Kilian and Theodore Roszak take the view that this unprecedented shift in the demographic profile of western societies like Canada, the United States, and most of Western Europe – that is, those countries that experienced the most post-war baby booms – represents a cultural challenge, a test of how we view old age and treat those who have managed to reach it. “Yes, workers in the next few decades will have to be highly skilled and intensely productive to support both seniors and their own children,” Kilian writes. “But it won’t be a cut-throat competition between a minority of kids and a majority of selfish seniors. Instead, it will be an alliance of youth and age, each caring for the other.”

Theodore Roszak encourages people to “think of those years as a resource – a cultural and
spiritual resource reclaimed from death in the same way the Dutch reclaim fertile land from the waste of the sea. During any of those years, somebody who no longer has to worry about raising a family, pleasing a boss, or earning more money will have the chance to join with others in building a compassionate society where people can think deep thoughts, create beauty, study nature, teach the young, worship what they hold sacred, and care for one another…Boomers will retire into responsibility, not out of it.”

If life were a Disney movie, Roszak’s generation-wide happy ending might be possible. As it is, however, it’s little more than a fanciful bit of fiction, and reality doesn’t countenance such fictions. In The New Yorker, American author Malcolm Gladwell describes a future built around demographic realities rather than good intentions, and it’s the one we’re going to have to deal with. In fact, even if every senior citizen committed themselves to Roszak’s vision, it still wouldn’t be enough. Gladwell uses the example of Ireland’s economic renaissance over the past two decades to illustrate the influence of demographics on a given population’s economic fortunes and, by extension, its social and cultural possibilities.

According to Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning’s study of the “Celtic Tiger”, Ireland’s rapid transformation from backwards rural economy to prosperous 21st century nation was powered almost entirely by demography. In 1979, the Catholic restrictions of contraception were lifted and Ireland’s birth rate immediately began to fall. By the mid 1990s the birth rate had fallen under two per couple, compared with the 1970 figure of 3.9. The result, Gladwell notes, is that “Ireland was suddenly free of the enormous social cost of supporting and educating and caring for a large dependent population.

It was like a family of four in which, all of a sudden, the elder child is old enough to take care of her little brother and the mother can rejoin the workforce. Overnight, that family doubles its number of breadwinners and becomes much better off.” Unfortunately for North American societies beset by a large Baby Boom cohort, “the logic of dependency rations, of course, works equally well in reverse. If your economy benefits by having a big bulge of working-age people, then your economy will have a harder time of it when that bulge generation retires, and there are relatively few workers to take their place.”

We’ve been here before, mind you, and so have the Boomers. In 1965, they and their grandparents combined to create the highest dependency ratio in Canadian history, a fact that analysts like McMaster University Economics professor Byron Spencer highlight in their discussions of the social footprint of aging Boomers. According to Spencer, who is the director of the Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population program, “it’s at least possible to support the demographic transition that we’re going through.” According to Spencer, the increases in costs associated with an aging population are offset by a decrease in costs associated with a young population such as childcare, education, and employment insurance. Gloria Gutman, the director of the Gerontology Research Centre at Simon Fraser University, observes simply that “as long as you’ve got fewer young people that you have to pay for, you’ve got more money for old people.”

There are, however, two fundamental flaws in this argument. The first is the ease with which it equates the economic conditions of the 1960s and the predicted fiscal landscape of the 2020s and 2030s. In the 1960s, Canada could afford to support a massive cohort of non-workers, the majority of which were children, because the economy was in the midst of an historically unprecedented and unparalleled boom. Economic growth was steady and predictable, and the contours of the welfare state were still being defined. The tax base grew at what Pierre Fortin, a professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal and an associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, describes as a “breathtaking rate” that allowed governments to make modest social commitments to post-secondary education, health care, and welfare. The 21st century, in contrast, has already been defined by the emergence of new economic superpowers in China and India, a decline in the health of the American economy, and a rough and casualty-laden transition from a resource based economy to one driven by high technology and skilled workers. To assume, then, that the Canadian economy will support a demographic shift in 2026 because it supported one some sixty years ago is a particularly dangerous form of wishful thinking.

The second flaw is the notion that there is parity between the costs of youth-oriented social spending and the costs of supporting an aging population. This belief is represented in Spencer’s assertion that “there appears, approximately, a complete offset to the increases associated with population aging.” While it’s true that child-care allowances, education funding, and other child-oriented forms of social spending will decrease as the number of children declines, it won’t decline nearly as much as Spencer seems to think. According to Statistics Canada’s projections, the relative weight of people under 19 years of age will drop by 13 percent between 2006 and 2020, permitting a proportionate decrease in child-oriented tax breaks accorded to parents by the federal government and education and daycare spending made by provincial governments. These expenditures totaled $79 billion in 2006, and a 13% reduction – assuming no new spending commitments are made – would amount to $10 billion.

Fortin contrasts these relatively modest cost savings with the growing bill for federal payments to seniors, which will self-evidently increase as the percentage of the population collecting those payments grows. With the expected five percent increase in the over-65 population in 2020 compared with 2006, the costs of senior-income programs – which do not include Canada Pension Plan payouts – will rise by $12 billion. More alarming still is the findings of the 2000 actuarial report of the Old Age Security program, which predicts that these payments will skyrocket in the years 2020 to 2030 and leave the federal government of the day with a $109 billion tab, a staggering 436% increase from 2006 levels. Unless the federal government sells the naming rights for schools and universities to big corporations – The TD Canada Trust University of Toronto or Concordia University sponsored by Fed-Ex Kinko’s, for example – it’s unlikely that the savings associated with fewer children will cover the costs of our rapidly aging population.

The implications of this demographic shift are obvious. Our governments will subjected to the budgetary equivalent of a pincer movement, confronted on one side by rising social costs and on the other by a dwindling tax base. Throw in the massive structural budgetary deficits that resulted from 2009’s stimulus-o-rama spending spree that sought to shock our moribund economy back to life (it’s not certain yet if that effort worked, either) and it’s clear that the biggest political battles of the next ten years will be about the bottom line. Serious compromises, either in the form of tax increases or spending cuts, will have to be made, and as Gary Mason wrote in last Wednesday’s Globe and Mail, the notion that those savings can be achieved at the margins isn’t a realistic one. As Canadian comedian Russell Peters’s father so famously warned him, somebody’s gonna get hurt real bad, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it won’t be the Baby Boomers. Given their enormous demographic clout and their relative propensity for voting compared to younger Canadians, it’s unlikely that the Baby Boomers will ever want for attention from their political representatives.

I like Crawford Kilian’s work, and I nearly always enjoy reading what he has to write. His willingness to see the good in things makes me feel like even more of a grumpy curmudgeon than I already am, which is saying something. I’m 30, after all, yet I’m already twice as cynical as a man who’s more than twice my age. The contrast is so stark, in fact, that I’m sort of surprised – and hurt, really, if you must know – that we haven’t gotten a call yet from some enterprising television news producer looking to set up a political panel that plays on the inter-generational angle.

My efforts at self-aggrandizing solicitation aside, there is a good reason why I’m taking shots at the work of an author who I respect, rather than, say, the editorial board of the National Post. While Kilian’s argument offers an optimistic interpretation of the influence that the Baby Boomers will exert on Canadian society, it does so at the expense of the truth. On Wednesday, I’ll talk about the most dangerous and dishonest element of Kilian’s vision, the notion that my generation won’t just pay the Boomers’ bloated bill but smile enthusiastically while we’re working three jobs in order to do it.

Crazy like the Post

Unless the lenders managing Canwest’s bankruptcy proceedings have found a side market in selling samples of bad writing for publication in first year journalism textbooks, the editorial that ran on Tuesday in the National Post ought to make those still working on its editorial board ashamed of themselves. That is, of course, if they have any shame left.

The editorial, which discusses the recent report that Women’s Studies departments are disappearing at universities across Canada – although it discusses it in the same way that anti-abortion rallies discuss the notion of choice – is nothing more than an attack on women more appropriate to the angry forums of one father’s rights website than a national newspaper. “The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women,” it begins. “Women’s Studies courses have taught that all women–or nearly all– are victims and nearly all men are victimizers. Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity — hiring quotas based on one’s gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.”

This is nonsense. While the odd Women’s Studies course might be guilty of creating an environment of misandric judgment, the vast majority are explorations of the struggles that women have faced and the system prejudices that they still are too often forced to overcome. The idea that Women’s Studies programs have successfully managed to influence the way men and women see each also wildly overstates the influence that university professors have, as though the field of identity politics was some plot devised in their offices over glasses of sherry and scotch.

Meanwhile, the attack on employment equity is nothing more than poorly disguised bigotry, the mark of a writer who either hasn’t bothered to walk that proverbial mile in a non white male’s shoes or did so with their eyes closed. I’m no great fan of quotas in the workplace and I believe that ultimately the goal of any society ought to be a pure and unmediated meritocracy, but I also understand that in order to get there we need programs like employment equity that provide traditionally disadvantaged groups like women, the disabled, and visible minorities with the opportunities that they might not enjoy otherwise. The author of this piece, though, clearly doesn’t, as demonstrated by the observation later in the piece that “the equality protection before and under the law, granted to all Canadians regardless of race, sex, creed or origin, has been eroded because feminist legal scholars convinced the Supreme Court to permit preferential treatment for “traditionally disadvantaged groups,” chief among whom, they contend, are women.”

There is nothing to contend when it comes to the fact that women have been, and in many cases continue to be, discriminated against. It wasn’t much more than a generation ago that women couldn’t even get credit cards without the approval of their husband, and were actively discouraged from seeking positions of executive power and privilege in both the public and private sectors. There are still battles to fight, too, much to this author’s evident chagrin. Despite his contention that the push for universal daycare and mandatory government-run kindergarten amount to “vast new social entitlements,” recent research shows that it is precisely the issue of childcare and the costs attached to it that have prevented women from earning as much as their male counterparts. And while women now outnumber and outperform men in post-secondary education, the boardrooms and executive offices in both the public and private sectors are still dominated by men.

The piece reaches a misogynistic crescendo in its discussion of divorce law, and in so doing reveals the probable source of the piece’s venomous tone. “Divorcing men find they lose their homes and access to their children,” the nameless writer argues, “and must pay much of their income to their former spouses (then pay tax on the income they no longer have) largely because Women’s Studies activists convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. So now a man entering court against a woman finds the deck stacked against him, thanks mostly to the radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women’s Studies.

This is a paranoid fantasy, of course, likely the work of a male writer stung by a bad break-up, messy divorce, or some other negative experience involving a woman . It’s also factually incorrect, as any spousal support income paid by a man to a woman is actually tax neutral for both the payer the payee. That pales in comparison to the fictional notion that “Women’s Studies activists,” whatever that means, convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. This betrays a fundamental ignorance of how the legal system functions that is embarrassing – or, at least, one that ought to be for the author of this paranoid monstrosity and the editors who approved its publication. The law isn’t determined by the directives of politicians but by the judges who interpret it and the cases that come before them.

The last significant change to the law concerning the principles of spousal support was the 1992 Moge decision, which dictated that the financial costs associated with a marital breakdown ought to be shared equally by both partners. Nowhere in the Divorce Act, which was created in 1968 by then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau, nor in any of the judicial decisions that have since interpreted it, state any preference for either party, male or female. This is particularly true with regard to the custody of children, where the sole test is the best interests of the child and not the gender of the parent applying for custody.

The National Post’s editorial board enjoys taking provocative positions on social issues, and they have every right to do so. The purpose of a paper’s comment section is to generate debate on issues of cultural, political, or social importance, and the publication of a polemic is often an effective means of making that happen. But there’s a line between principled contrarianism and pointless provocation, and this editorial is one of the clearest examples I’ve ever seen of the latter. It’s also yet another datum in support of the theory, one most famously articulated by Carol Gilligan, that women bring different perspectives and ways of approaching problems than men do, and that the presence of these differences improve the quality of the decisions that are taken. It’s pretty obvious that there weren’t any women in the room when this piece was approved by the Post’s editorial board. It’s even more obvious that there should have been.

Why I don’t like the Olympic Line

There’s something very familiar about the new Olympic Line, a two stop light-rail line that connects the Olympic Village and Granville Island. After all, it was twenty five years ago at Expo ’86, the last time that the so-called international community descended on Vancouver en masse, that the City of Vancouver unveiled another shiny new addition to its public transit infrastructure that also began as a two-stop demonstration project. Despite the near-desperate pleas of city officials arguing in favour of a more extensive network of light rail, city and transit officials of the day exercised their preference for form over function, and the SkyTrain was born.

Greater Vancouver taxpayers have paid for that decision ever since, as city and transit authorities have struggled to turn an overpriced and undersized light rapid transit system that burned through cash like Gary Busey on a Las Vegas bender into a viable part of the city’s transit infrastructure. The city’s commitment of $8 million to an experimental light-rail track connecting Granville Island and the Olympic Village won’t have the same long-term consequences as the construction of the Expo Line, but it is driven by the same preference for form over function. That preference may well succeed in impressing international guests who will be in Vancouver during the Olympics, just as it did twenty five years ago during Expo. But like the hideously expensive Expo line, the Olympic Line is more likely to be an albatross than an asset for local residents.

This is heresy in urbanist circles, where the virtues of light rail are widely understood and appreciated. There’s little doubt that light rail offers environmental benefits and cost savings over rapid transit systems like the SkyTrain. There’s equally little doubt, given the early response by riders to the Olympic Line, that streetcars are more popular than buses. Whether sitting on the luxurious leather seats or standing in the wood-paneled cars, there’s a distinctly European feel to the borrowed Bombardier streetcars that are servicing the Olympic line that the more utilitarian fleet of TransLink buses do not possess. In a vacuum, it’s pretty difficult to be opposed to light rail infrastructure like the Olympic Line.

The Olympic Line, though, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The City of Vancouver decided to spend over $8 million to reconstruct the track that the borrowed trains run on, a line that will go dead after the Olympic dignitaries and visitors are gone. Local residents won’t miss it, though, given that the Olympic Line duplicates an existing bus route, the venerable number 50, that already capably serves the community of False Creek. City officials have said that the pilot project is an effort to reignite Vancouver’s passion for the streetcar, a relationship that might eventually lead to the construction of a more comprehensive streetcar line running from Granville Island through the downtown east side and Gastown. But that would cost an additional $50 to $60 million that TransLink doesn’t have, and while it’s easy to see the appeal of that investment for condo developers, land speculators, and others interested in gentrifying the downtown east side, it’s difficult to see why the taxpayers who fund TransLink’s budget would be interested in it.

The other possible long-term legacy of the Olympic Line is its application to the inevitable investment in an extension of the rapid transit system out to UBC. TransLink and its partners in government are currently engaged in a consultation process that is trying to determine what that extension will look like, and there are those who believe that light rail is a better option than a buried light-rapid transit line whose price tag would be in the billions of dollars. The shape of that consultation and the role that a light-rail option plays in it is still to be determined, but there are those who are skeptical about the ability of light rail to adequately service such a high-volume route.

City and TransLink officials are understandably wary about committing to any extension of the LRT system out to UBC, given both the enormous costs attached to it and the potential political fallout that might follow. Ripping up an important commercial and cultural corridor like Broadway, not to mention subjecting the businesses along it to the carnage that those on Cambie Street experienced during the construction of the Canada Line, would require enormous amounts of political will and capital, and it’s not clear that either TransLink or the City of Vancouver have enough of either to get it done. But as anybody who watched the battle between business owners, local politicians, and the City of Toronto over the construction of a dedicated streetcar line on St. Clair Street in 2006, there’s no guarantee that the political costs attached to the construction of a light rail line out to UBC would be any less onerous.

Meanwhile, there are those like Jarrett Walker, a transit consultant and the author of the Human Transit blog, who remain unconvinced that light rail represents a big enough improvement over busses to justify the capital costs associated with their construction. “Streetcars that replace bus lines,” Walker writes, “are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before.” Instead, Walker argues, it is the infrastructure investments that generally accompany streetcar developments, from being placed to the left lane to avoid interference from the stop and start activity common to the curb lane to being placed inside exclusive median right-of-ways, that yields the mobility improvements. Meanwhile, buses are being improved in the direction of emulating rail, from enhanced passenger capacities to more environmentally friendly propulsion systems. It isn’t clear, Walker writes, that a massive investment in light rail would yield significantly better outcomes for riders than a similar commitment to next-generation buses and the routes that they service.

I’ve taken the Olympic Line a few times, and I’ve come away impressed, even if I did feel an unusual degree of antipathy towards minarets and the American definition of football. But while it’s a nice ride, I can’t help but conclude that the train, like so many other supposed Olympic legacies, does very little to improve the lives of the people who actually live in Vancouver. In fact, it’s a perfect metaphor for the Olympic experience as a whole: expensive, over-produced and promoted, but of little long-term benefit to the city itself.

Why quality still matters

I’ve compared newspaper publishers to the Allied generals in World War I, and it’s a comparison that’s more appropriate than ever given the recent embrace – re-embrace, really – of the pay-wall as a viable way to generate revenue. Like the generals who responded to the carnage on the French battlefields by reaffirming their commitment to the strategy that was causing it, newspaper publishers have apparently decided that the way to deal with the internet and its innate aversion to gate-keeping is by building a stronger gate.

One of the most outspoken opponents of this gate-building obsession and the thinking behind it is Alan Rusbridger, the Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian. In his Hugh Cudlipp lecture, titled “Does Journalism Exist?” Rusbridger delivers the most convincing and comprehensive refutation yet of the supposed possibilities of the pay-wall. In it, he draws attention to the changes that are transforming both journalism and the jobs of the people who practice it. “Depending on your point of view,” Rusbridger writes, “you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.”

It’s the last part of that quote that I’m most interested in here, because those questions – what journalism is and who can do it – drive plenty of journalists to try to create gates of their own. Whether it’s an added emphasis on the unique skill-set required to do the job properly or the important ethical considerations that come with it, journalists are too often guilty of wanting to believe that they do things that members of the pajama brigade and other online media enthusiasts can’t. I’m not immune to that impulse, either. Like most journalists, I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that I’ll become the 21st century’s answer to the professional elevator operator. The thought has crossed my mind on more than few occasions that the thousands of bloggers, social media twits, and other amateur producers of news and opinion are flooding the market with so much free content that my work becomes essentially worthless, if that point hasn’t already been reached.

But while that isn’t a good thing for those hoping to earn a living as journalists, it’s not necessarily as detrimental to those hopes as it might seem either. After all, the smartest way to respond to the flooding of your market with a free product isn’t to get into a price war but instead to improve the quality of the product you’re offering, a strategic principle that Alan Rusbridger and every other journalist in Great Britain understands only too well after years of destructive Fleet Street price wars. Journalists shouldn’t feel threatened by the competition that bloggers provide for them, but emboldened by the challenge and confident in their own ability to deliver a superior product. Can a blog, even a widely read one like TMZ, deliver the same celebrity news as the Globe and Mail at a fraction of a cost? Sure. But can they offer the kind of analysis that a writer like Lynn Crosbie is capable of bringing to bear on the subject? Not likely. Good journalists like Crosbie who are capable of telling compelling stories will always be able to find work, regardless of how many bloggers there are in the universe.

Therein lies the challenge going forward for journalists, it seems to me. We can waste our time trying to reinforce the pitifully porous professional gates in our industry, either by excluding bloggers or marginalizing the work that they do. But that would be a form of professional stupidity, given the complementary role that they play both in helping us build our stories and share them with a wider audience. We have a lot to learn from bloggers, online journalists, and other non-traditional colleagues, and they from us. More to the point, it’s increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate between so-called traditional journalists and the various iterations of journalistic amateurism, given the fact that most journalists with any sense of their own professional interests is fully engaged in blogging, twittering, and other forms of non-traditional expression of their own. In the end, the only thing that really matters is the calibre of journalism that we produce and the stories that we tell. Those who are good at their jobs will get to keep them, no matter how many striving amateurs with whom they might have to compete.

Lowered expectations

At this time last year you would have struggled to find anyone, outside of the most intransigent of partisan opponents, who didn’t think that Barack Obama had a chance to change the world, or at least the United States’s place in it. Judging from the torrent of blog posts, newspaper op-eds, and magazine features reviewing his first year in office, you’d have an equally difficult time today finding anyone who still believes that he can. Americans, if one is to believe the opinion poll numbers or the screeching proclamations of various political pundits, are already over Obama, an affect that could prove disastrous if it lingers through the midterm elections in November. After all, if the election of former Cosmo magazine skin model Scott Brown in the democratic fortress of Massachusetts is any indication, Obama’s Congressional colleagues could be in for a long night in November if things don’t improve for the President.

To those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the United States’s system of government and the culture that created it, it might well seem that Obama’s first year as President has been a disappointment. He managed to prevent the American economy from falling into a full-blown depression, but the ugly contrast between the waves of job losses that have crashed relentlessly onto the American public over the past year and the sight of bank executives already recovering their absurdly astronomical bonuses has made his performance on the economy look less successful than it probably should. His healthcare reform bill has run into formidable opposition in the form of a coalition between the usual right wing partisans who conflate any government activity with socialism and the representatives of the healthcare-industrial complex, who stand to lose billions if Obama is successful in extending medical care to the poor and making it less expensive for the middle class. Meanwhile, his decision to put more American troops into Afghanistan has somehow managed to upset both the doves within the Democratic Party, who think he’s doing too much, and the national security and safety crowd, who don’t think he’s doing enough.

This feeling of disappointment with Obama’s first year in office extends beyond the confines of the Fox News studios, with otherwise sympathetic publications also taking aim at Obama’s perceived failures as President. The unmistakeable sense of disappointment is most palpable in those writing from abroad, which makes sense, given the mixture of relief and enthusiasm with which they greeted his election. The Guardian’s Gary Younge writes that “Obama does not need the benefit of our doubt. He is the president of the most powerful country on the planet. He has enough benefits already.”

Only the writers at The Economist seem to appreciate the challenges that are unique to the Oval Office. “None of this should be surprising,” the piece observes. “Governing is hard, especially during an economic crisis. The American political system is fraught with checks and balances: a president cannot simply tell Congress what to do. Everything takes time and requires ugly promises.” Those promises are uglier still when that president is taking on entrenched interests, be they those of the health care and insurance systems, the banking industry, or those who would continue to deny the existence of global warming.

Obama may have failed to deliver on many of his promises during his first year in the Oval Office, but what most people either don’t understand or have already forgotten is that this is as much the fault of the office itself as the man who works in it. While it is commonplace to refer to the American president as the “most powerful man in the world,” he – and hopefully, one day soon, she – actually wields far less power than his/her contemporaries in Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, or any other major western democracy when it comes to the creation of domestic policy and legislation. Unlike the Canadian Prime Minister, for example, the President of the United States cannot initiate legislation, nor can he compel his partisan colleagues to vote in favour of it.

While the democratic majority in both houses of Congress are sympathetic to the President’s directive on a given issue, they’re equally concerned about how their vote on that issue will influence both their own prospects for re-election and the money they need to raise to fund them. Last week’s decision by the United States Supreme Court to remove the limit on corporate donations for political campaigns will only serve to further elevate the political priorities that are bound to the millions of dollars raised by members of Congress each year.

Ironically, given the recriminations that have been directed towards him after his first year in office, Obama has made great progress in those areas over which he does have control. His visits abroad, more robust participation in international affairs, and work on global issues like climate change have done wonders to repair America’s badly damaged international reputation. Likewise, his decision to withdraw American troops from Iraq and redeploy them in Afghanistan represents a renewal of America’s commitment to internationalism and the work of its constituent bodies that was totally absent during the Bush II years.

The root of Obama’s current problems have less to do with the economy, Afghanistan, or Scott Brown than they do with the expectations of transformative change that he set while campaigning for President. While his team did their best to manage those expectations downward, Obama’s fondness for soaring rhetoric and big gestures, to say nothing of an unwarranted (and likely unwanted) Nobel Peace Prize, has made that effort a difficult one. If Obama is to avoid a Clinton-eseque massacre in the midterm elections later this year, he’ll need to start delivering on some of his promises.

Obama might want to look to Canada for an example of how this can be accomplished. Nobody understood the danger associated with promising more than you can deliver better than former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and the comparison between the two men provides an interesting if dangerously cynical lesson for politicos, strategists, and others engaged in the pursuit of political power. Throughout his career, Chretien was guided by the belief that the formula for political success was to “undersell and over-deliver,” and he rarely made promises that he couldn’t keep, the elimination of the GST notwithstanding. Chretien was rewarded for his prudence and perspicacity by the Canadian electorate with three majority governments.

The lessons to be learned from his style of political leadership were only reinforced by the disastrous performance of his successor, Paul Martin, who promised the world to anyone who would listen and paid for it with his political career. The virtues of Chretien’s political strategy shouldn’t be a total secret to those in the White House, given the fact that David Axelrod, a Canadian and a one-time player within the Ontario Liberal Party, ran Obama’s 2008 campaign. If the Obama White House wants to avoid duplicating the fate of Bill Clinton in 1994, they need to line up and deliver a few easy, low-risk wins, and taking on the banking industry is a good step in this direction.

Meanwhile, the rest of us might want to cut Obama a break, given the structural constraints under which he has to work. If he enjoyed the same constitutional powers as the Prime Minister of Canada or Great Britain, he’d already have delivered on health care, the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and the reform of the financial system. Instead, he is the head of a state whose constitutional aversion to the centralization of power forces a President whose party enjoys an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress to bargain and barter with those in opposition. It might be the greatest democracy in the world, but it’s also one of the nuttiest, as Obama’s first year in office and the popular reaction to it has demonstrated.

Nice try, Leah

Picking on the work of Leah McLaren is such simple sport that I might be risking the wrath of the BC Human Rights Tribunal in doing so here. But it’s worth the risk, given the self-serving garbage that she subjected readers to in her Saturday Globe and Mail column this weekend. That McLaren wrote a bad piece isn’t comment-worthy on its own, given that McLaren’s column is bad on a basis so regular that it would do the good people at the National Fiber Council proud. What makes her Saturday column noteworthy is the subject matter on which she writes, and the unintended irony inherent in it.

After beginning the piece with the usual pitying, and pitiful, observations about the indignities and intrigues of life as a single woman that are so common to her work that they must be a contractual obligation, McLaren turns to the subject of her column, the latest developments in the fight to save the newspaper industry from itself. She describes the New York Times’s decision to implement a metred pay wall that will charge viewers of content in proportion to the amount of time they spend reading it. She observes that “in a funny way, it’s a system that mimics the oldest print-media pay model around: the newsstand. At old-fashioned newsstands, you’re welcome to pluck a magazine or newspaper from the shelf and read the headlines or, if the vendor is patient, maybe even skim an article or two. But read on and you’ll be expected to pony up or push off.”

Therein lies the very heart of the problem with the pay-wall concept, though. Newspaper publishers, be they Rupert Murdoch, Arthur Sulzberger, or the Globe’s own Philip Crawley, are still trying to fight a rearguard battle, fighting to preserve the business model with which they’re familiar rather than building a new one that addresses the fundamental changes in the industry have taken place in the last ten years. Pay walls, no matter how nuanced or carefully calibrated they might be, are an effort to build a fence around content in an environment that resists them on an organic level.

McLaren makes no pretence about the reason for her support, writing that “I find all of this heartening not just because it suggests that there might be a viable business model for newspapers in the future – and, by extension, a modicum of job security for columnists like me – but also because I think that the return of the pay model will make newspapers more enjoyable to read.” The latter, of course, is a transparent rationalization for the former, a pig of an argument that she tries to slap some metaphorical lipstick on later in the piece by professing her belief that milking a cow is more fulfilling than getting the milk for free.

Here’s where the irony kicks in, because it isn’t that news consumers aren’t interested in paying for milk once they’ve grown accustomed to getting it for free. Instead, it’s that they aren’t interested in paying for the infant formula that’s been getting substituted for their milk over the last decade or so, a product that has no real nutritional value. Unfortunately for McLaren and the other comfortably compensated, formula-hocking columnists at the Globe and other mainstream media outlets, it is also a product that they can get for free from a variety of other sources.

News consumers will pay for journalism, as the Tyee’s fundraising efforts have demonstrated here in British Columbia. But they will only support journalism and the institutions that deliver it if it satisfies their needs and meets their standards. That means real journalism, the work that’s done by reporters in the field working to uncover stories that might not otherwise get a proper and fair hearing. It doesn’t mean the kind of shallow, superficial, and self-referential style of journalism that the mainstream media has tended to prefer in recent years, a brand of which McLaren is one of the most experienced practitioners. Witness her January 15th column, a first-person letter to Canada reprimanding it for its “smugness” that would be more appropriate in a Grade 12 English class than the pages of Canada’s national newspaper of record. In an online environment, McLaren’s is the kind of work that readers will be the least interested in paying for, given the existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of free blogs that deliver the same calibre of writing and display the same degree of obsession with the goings on in and around their own navels.

This isn’t to say that the pay-wall that the New York Times is planning to implement will be a complete and utter failure, although the cultural imperatives of the internet will make any successes it enjoys limited in nature. But if it does work, that success will have far less to do with the act of charging for content and far more with the quality of the content that is being monetized. There’s considerable upside here, as a pay-wall environment will reward those journalists who still do the difficult work of asking comfortable people uncomfortable questions, and force those that don’t to learn how it’s done. It would be a welcome change from the current environment, in which too many journalists spend more of their time gently cupping the balls of those in power rather than squeezing them for answers. But however well they work, pay-walls won’t save the work of people like Leah McLaren, or, in time, their jobs.