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| Path: Main Street : Resources & Library : Research Articles : Feature Article |
Canada turns a corner --- part two: grasping the new reality
by Doug JamiesonSeptember 16, 1996; CharityVillage NewsWeek
This is the second instalment of a three-part series about the major, and disruptive changes underway in Canadian society as we approach the millennium. Part One, The Road To Here, and Part Three, Looking Ahead, are available.
Canada Turns A Corner --- Part Two: Grasping the New Reality
This is different.
We middle class types have become used to booms and busts, recessions and recoveries, good years and bad years, and most of us have managed to muddle through, relatively unscathed. We tightened up a bit in recessions, kept the family car another year before trading it, postponed having the kitchen cabinets refinished, took a vacation trip within Canada rather than to some foreign destination.
Through it all, we were sustained by a confidence in the future --- our own and the country's. We had, after all, always bounced back from the rough patches, and rewards awaited those who were willing to work. Dual incomes meant most of us could even indulge ourselves in some small luxuries from time to time. We thought of ourselves as clever, resourceful contributors to our employer organizations and to the larger society.
And even if things did go seriously off-track, there was a social safety net that would catch us and support us until we regained our footing --- enough income to help us get re-situated after a job loss, a healthcare plan that kept us from being wiped out financially by serious illness or accident.
For most of us, all of this translated into confidence that our personal futures would be, at minimum, secure. In hindsight, this was a smug and naive view of reality, but not an unreasonable one given the repeated assurances of those who governed us, and our own observations of the way things worked in the second half of the twentieth century.
Very rapidly, things have indeed changed.
In 1991, 3.9 million Canadians collected unemployment insurance.This wasn't supposed to happen to all of us cosseted, smart, urban and suburban, middle class types. This kind of stuff is only supposed to happen to the low-skilled, beaten-up, dropped out folks at the bottom of the socio-economic food chain.Statistics Canada reported that, in 1993, 650,000 Canadians under 65 withdrew $3.5 billion from their Registered Retirement Savings Plans. That was a 31 per cent increase in the number of people making such withdrawals, and more than half of them were under the age of 45.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported that, in 1995, foreclosures on CMHC-insured mortgages increased by 17 per cent over the previous year. The total 7,391 foreclosures was a level not seen for a decade.
Wage increases in 1995 averaged 1.9 per cent in the private sector, representing an actual cut in pay after inflation, while most public sector workers received no increase.
In Ontario, the province's taxpayers paid social assistance to 1,197,388 people in July, 1996.
Since 1989, real consumer expenditures have increased by less than seven per cent and personal savings have declined by 25 per cent.
At mid-year, 1996, growth in consumer spending was a barely perceptible 0.1 per cent for the most recent quarter, disposable incomes showed no growth, and savings continued lower while personal debt levels continued to rise.
Now in the fall of 1996, we are completing the sixth successive year with unemployment rates in excess of nine per cent. The actual unemployment rate, including those who have given up looking for work and those who are grossly underemployed relative to their skills and education, is thought by many to be twice the official rate.
Hell, we're the people who give to charities, not the ones who need their help!
Our first reaction was anger --- we blamed the banks, the corporations, the unions, the politicians, the Japanese, the Americans, the Mexicans, IBM --- there was plenty of blame to go around, but finally we knew it was us. We let it happen, we thought the laws of economics had been repealed, we thought we could cruise on forever, and that no one would ask us to pay.
Now, six years into this period of adjustment, we're coming to terms with a more realistic view of the way the world is going to function for the next few decades. The picture is still hazy, but we have turned a corner and there is another road before us. We're learning the rules of this road, too. Some of us are off and running, some peer fearfully into the future, and some know that they can never adequately cope with change this radical.
There will be victims, and we must protect them. For the rest of us, the picture is coming into focus, and we're busy adjusting embarrassing lifestyles, inadequate workstyles, profligate spending patterns, encumbering risk thresholds, and unreasonable expectations all round.
Part One, The Road To Here, and Part Three, Looking Ahead, are available.
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