Stephen Vance, Editor
Several species in the animal kingdom cope with winter by going into hibernation, and no doubt many of us human types wish we could hibernate through the cold, snowy winter months as well.
While some of us might prefer the opportunity to tuck ourselves in at the beginning of January and not return until the snow begins to melt, Meaford the community would never consider wasting those valuable winter days.
February has been buzzing with activity in this municipality. The Family Day activities at the community centre drew crowds of moms and dads and their troops of children, both the libraries that serve our community have been hopping with a wide range of activities and programs, and even the scarecrow folks are busy behind the scenes gearing up for their next family festival.
Meaford’s quilters have been busy making quilts for each of the six members of the Syrian refugee family that will become part of our municipal family in the very near future. Those quilts will have been presented to the Meaford Refugee Welcome Group by the time this paper is on newsstands.
Our local churches too are busy during the winter. The Christ Anglican church, for example, kicked off a four-part sustainable agriculture discussion series this week. That discussion series is being presented during the weeks of Lent, and its focus is certainly of interest and importance to this agricultural community.
The curling club and the arena are busy places as one might expect in the heart of winter, and so too are our local trails with hikers and cross country skiers taking advantage of our natural assets.
Just about the only building in this municipality that hasn’t been very busy this winter is on the 7th Line, where Meaford’s council chamber is located. With just two meetings held thus far in 2016 – one in mid-January, and a second on the first day of this month – some might wonder if our councillors have indeed gone into hibernation, or are lounging on a beach somewhere far away from concerns like snow plows and frozen pipes, however I can assure you that they too have been a busy bunch this winter, meetings or not.
The one guarantee about a thankless job like that of a municipal councillor is that you will always be kept busy, and though the council meetings themselves are a public display of councillors at work, meetings constitute just a fraction of the workload a member of council takes on once elected. Our councillors have been buried in reports and their day-to-day councillor responsibilities, and have also quite likely fielded many phone calls and email messages related to winter road maintenance.
Meaford is certainly a vibrant, busy community with a lot of great things happening.
Sadly, not all ‘busy-ness’ is a good thing. The regional United Way has also been busy this winter, fielding requests for assistance with ever-skyrocketing utility bills in an era when wages and pensions aren’t even attempting to keep pace with those sorts of increases. I often go on ad nauseam about the looming infrastructure crisis that too few in my opinion are taking seriously, but I think we’ve also quite likely got an even bigger social crisis in the making as wealth disparity continues to increase and real wages continue to fall.
Just this week we learned that fewer than 20 percent of Canadians aged 55 to 64 who won’t have an employer pension when their working days come to an end have enough saved for retirement to last them for five years. Only 20 percent have banked enough cash for them to get by for just five years. Let that sink in. That means that 80 percent of Canadians in that age group, whose employers don’t provide a pension plan, essentially have nothing, literally nothing, to support them post-retirement aside from an inadequate Canada pension.
That, my friends, is terrifying – but unions are bad, employee benefits are bad, people should fend for themselves, right? I don’t have to tell you that that 80 percent are our parents and grandparents. I guess that 80 percent should have done a better job of retirement planning, right? Folks, if 80 percent of any group of people are in the very same situation, and it is a bad situation, I can assure you it is a system failure, not an individual person failure.
How busy and vibrant will this community be in the winter months once the coming reality of that huge baby-boom generation and its continued drive toward (an ‘un-financed’) retirement, combined with ever-skyrocketing costs for everything from food to utilities, and an infrastructure catastrophe that I suspect will be far more challenging than we are currently led to believe, slaps us harshly across our collective faces?
Let’s hope there’s some sort of economic revolution before we have to know the answer to that question.
