I’ve only been a senior for a few months and already I know what elder abuse feels like. It’s coming at the hands of our prime minister. Stephen Harper wants to stick his hands into the Old Age Security pot and pull out the cash he needs to finance his corporate tax cuts.
We already have a problem with youth unemployment. If Harper forces older workers to keep their jobs another two years, younger ones will wait that much longer before doors start opening.
Early last year, I submitted the paperwork needed to start my CPP and OAS benefits. I soon received a suggestion from Revenue Canada: why not wait a few years before pulling in my pension cheques? Like most sensible people, I said thanks, but no thanks.
Now Harper wants to force the issue. Forty years of corporate tax cutting limited his options. He could do the decent thing and reverse the cuts. Or he could stop wasting billions of dollars on things we neither need nor want.
The G-8 spending spree in Huntsville was bad enough. So are fighter jets we don’t need and can’t afford. Now the latest boondoggle: over $1 million a year on a Public Appointments Commission with nothing to do.
Harper would have you believe he is fiscally responsible, yet he finds strange new ways to waste your money. He dismisses pensions as “entitlements” ­– the Conservatives’ new dirty word. You can see their lips curl and hear their voices growl whenever they mention it.
Pensioners are not thieves in the night, mugging Revenue Canada for whatever we can get. We put in our time, paid our premiums and expect to receive what we thought we’d bought.
Nothing more, nothing less.
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Most Saturday mornings at around nine o’clock you’ll find me shopping at the farmers’ market. That’s where we get our weekly supply of eggs, meat and vegetables. Apples too, every other week.
The meat is always local, fresh and free of preservatives.
Our pork is from New Hamburg. The eggs are from Armando Carere’s chickens. The apples come up from Brantford. The vegetables, when in season, come from area farms.
The thing is that if we eat locally, we eat healthily.
I was as shocked and puzzled as anyone to read that Galen Weston thinks that one of these days food from a local farmers’ market will kill someone.
As head of the Loblaw’s empire, he’s in charge of a family dynasty that owns a huge portion of Canada’s food chain. Food retailing and financial services have made the Weston family the second wealthiest in Canada and 133rd in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
I suppose it is possible that someone so deep in the upper reaches of the infamous one per cent might have a clue about the lives of those of us who shop in his stores or at the market. I doubt it, though. I still give him some of my money every Friday.
Groceries are bought at the Eramosa Zehrs, where the friendly workers are all union members. The fish, deli and fresh meat counters are fine.
I will never buy processed meats from him or anyone else. That is the food that kills. When you look at the outbreaks of contaminated food, they nearly all come from processed meat sold by Weston and his colleagues.
It has never originated at any of the meat counters in the farmers’ market.
Food from there won’t start killing people until after the Westons of the world buy up all the markets and stock them with chemically preserved produce.