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Stackhouse Soapbox - Income not keeping pace with costs

I saw a story last week about first time home buyers in Toronto and how a price of $45,000 over 35 years ago has ballooned to $690,000 today. It’s over-simplifying, but that’s the problem with the Canadian economy in a nutshell.
Stackhouse

I saw a story last week about first time home buyers in Toronto and how a price of $45,000 over 35 years ago has ballooned to $690,000 today.  It’s over-simplifying, but that’s the problem with the Canadian economy in a nutshell. Expenses have exploded at a rate far beyond that of the average wage. Minimum wage 30 years ago in New Brunswick (where I grew up) was $5.50. Today, the minimum wage is in the neighborhood of $12 per hour so you can see the income hasn’t kept pace with expenses at all and then when you factor in the percentage of money paid in taxes today compared to 35 years ago and it’s a wonder any of us can make ends meet at all.  What are we doing about it? Nothing from what I can tell, but a tax revolt would be one of the healthier things we could do for Canada going forward.

An internal federal memo says CBC’s annual revenue dropped by $175-million after they allowed the rights to Hockey Night In Canada, which had a weekly audience of a million people, to go bye bye. It was CBC’s highest rated program and their boss at the time said it was just the loss of a few dollars and would be an insignificant hit to the bottom line. Uh huh, okay sure. Add to that loss, the fact that CBC is reporting a further 37% drop in revenue from last year and brought in only $112.5-million in revenue. Their biggest chunk of income is in the form of a $1.2-billion (yes, with a B) parliamentary grant courtesy of my tax dollars and yours and then we get to listen to them lie and promote the Liberal government and then they also use some of that money to sue the Conservatives for running an ad and using video footage that is funded by the general public. Ezra Levant always refers to them as Trudeau’s state broadcaster. He’s not wrong. Now, what was that about a tax revolt?

I saw a bit of a social media experiment on Twitter last week that showed a video of a lady on an airplane. She reclines her seat and the man sitting behind her (who’s seat doesn’t recline because he’s at the very back) punches the back of her seat repeatedly to express his annoyance at a supposed loss of personal space.  It appeared as though he was trying to watch a movie on his phone with it laying flat on the tray from the seat back. I was quite shocked to see the replies in support of the man, who in my opinion, would not have done that at all if the person sitting in front of him was another man his size.  Get a cell phone holder! My feeling is this - you pay enough money to fly and if you want to recline your seat, do it. If you are sitting behind someone and are upset by this act, then you recline your seat too and no personal space is lost at all. If you happen to be at the very back and can’t recline, well them’s the breaks.

There’s something incredibly wrong with our system when hospitals shut down their ERs.  In New Brunswick, the provincial government is bleeding money and the citizens are taxed to the hilt so the Conservatives are closing some of them down to save money. One of them is in my birthplace, Sussex. When I was 4-years-old, I developed a bad case of Croup and my mom took me to the ER and I was, quickly, admitted and lived under an oxygen tent with tubes in my throat for days. A very kind man, Dr. Sullivan, took excellent care of me and upon eventually swallowing the tubes, I was able to speak again and I’ve been an overall nuisance to human beings ever since.

I’m told I almost died and I now wonder if I would have for sure if there was no ER in Sussex. My family had no vehicle. There would have been no transporting me to the nearest centre.

I don’t have much to say about Omar Khadr giving a talk at Dalhousie University in Halifax last week other than to say I was appalled at the standing ovation he received from those in attendance and the love affair people from the east seem to have with this guy. I’m, frankly, embarrassed to have been born and raised in that part of the country when I see the mentality of folks from there now. I don’t get it at all. There should be nothing to applaud and there should be no reason to listen to anything he has to say outside of an apology and an announcement that he’s giving the tax dollars we gave him to the family of the soldier he killed.