Questioned on whether tax changes in the federal budget would result in long-term revenue problems for the government by shielding too many investments, Finance Minister Joe Oliver had a troubling response.
“Why don’t we leave that to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s granddaughter to solve?” he said in a CBC interview, adding later: “If you have to go to 2080 to say there’s a problem with the program, I think you’ve got a pretty good program.”
The Prime Minister’s yet-to-be-born granddaughter, however, might disagree.
So might millions of younger Canadians who will be living with the long-term consequences of decisions made today.
The same deliberately myopic thinking is evident in our government’s approach to climate change. Only kooks question whether climate change is real yet Canada is becoming a global pariah thanks to our inaction in addressing its multi-generational impacts.
As cohorts go, retirement-age Canadians have had things pretty good, but they take up a disproportionate amount of the discourse in politics.
Both the sheer numbers of older Canadians and their propensity to vote translates into policies tailored to their needs — to the detriment of younger generations.
It shows in statements like Oliver’s. Do young people fail to vote because there are no politicians who are interested in creating policies to address their needs? Or do politicians fail to create policies that will benefit future generations because they know there are no votes there? We suspect the latter.
Perhaps it’s time we started worrying less about our retirement and more about our legacy.
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