Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

On Sunday I attended the live broadcast of Cross Country Checkup at the CBC Galleria in Regina where Rex Murphy was interviewing Murray Mandryk of the Leader-Post and a sociology professor [haven't confirmed the link has the professor from the broadcast] from the UofR. It was a very interesting 2+ hours, and isn’t the first time I’ve seen live radio firsthand, but is the first national radio show I can remember attending.

I was asked if I wanted to speak on the program, so I said I might have a comment about poverty and how the budget should (but probably won’t) address the income gap between Canadians. I talked with some politically active students in the crowd, who were there like I was because of an email sent by the University of Regina Student’s Union president Mike Burton.

Sunday, February 24, 2008
On Cross Country Checkup …live from Regina

The Harper government presents its budget Tuesday and several provinces have been angling to make sure it meets their needs. Ontario wants money for manufacturers. Saskatchewan wants more infrastructure …and BC’s lumber industry needs help.

What about you? What are you looking for in the upcoming budget?

Join host Rex Murphy live from Regina, Sunday on Cross Country Checkup

A couple who were in town coincidentally to take someone to the airport, ended up sitting beside me and we talked for a few minutes about the downsides of owning a Vista computer. One of the students I was speaking with had actually encouraged their non-profit organization they worked for to use Linux, but I digress!

You can listen to the entire program (including me near the end of the show) here in podcast MP3 or streaming format. The CBC is great for having podcasts for most of their radio programs, which is great! Here’s what people, including me and the callers, talked about:

Curt from Regina talked about B.C.’s new carbon tax in their budget, and how the rest of the country should get on board as well. The Green Party has been calling for this kind of punitive action on polluters in order to gently modify peoples behaviour when buying vehicles, housing, and luxury travel. It is the only proven government policy known so far that reduces carbon output. Canada has been moving in the wrong direction while other countries (pardon the pun) leave us in the dust.

A Green Party caller from Saskatchewan highlighted the importance of prevention to simplify our expenses in all aspects of life, from crime to health. A 3 time cancer survivor in the audience would probably agree that preventing the daily use of carcinogens is a better method of managing cancer in the population than spending ever more money on cancer medications. He estimated that in short years we will no longer be able to afford patient’s drugs, and that if he hadn’t had his drugs paid for by whatever private plan he was covered by, he’d be dead today.

Mike Burton spoke very well regarding the plight of post secondary students in the province and the country. They leave school with a “mortgage on their future”, and in Saskatchewan he doesn’t feel he can find the employment right away to pay off the huge debt in the tens of thousands of dollars. He wants to stay, but the immediacy of jobs he’ll need after May are calling to him and students like him.

Even more troubling were the concerns brought forward by Joanne, an English professor at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina. She spoke of raising children on welfare, and pulling herself out of state assistance and into a life of greater comfort through SIFC and FNUC post secondary education, which has given her the job she has today. The funding for Aboriginal students has been frozen for decades while the population of First Nations has practically exploded. 1/3 of the province of Saskatchewan will be of Aboriginal descent within the next couple decades. She said either we spend the money on training them for jobs to be “tax payers, now” or we spend that money on jails and welfare later.

Premier Wall made a short call, where he cited “infrastructure”, “resources”, and “aboriginal economic integration” as key issues for the province. He’s certainly sided with Stephen Harper on the equalization battle, however. He’s not going to pursue holding the Conservatives to their word on removing the constitutionally guaranteed resource revenues from the equalization calculation. That move costs the province close to $0.8 Billion a year. We may be able to survive that slight (thanks to booming resource prices), but the lingering sting from that betrayal ought to cost a few seats in the coming election.

I would have brought up a lot more in my talk with Rex, if I had had more time. I never touched on my experience at a minimum wage job, and how much more physically demanding it can be than my regular job which pays nearly 3 times as much. I talked with a lawyer from Estevan a few minutes after the show, and he understood what I meant about educated people making more money than working people who can end up with more demanding jobs. I wanted to talk on air about the importance of investing in pollution reducing technology such as wind generation (and not just so called “clean coal carbon capture”), and making it a valued resource so it provides jobs when the oil patches in Alberta and Saskatchewan are inevitably exhausted or wound down.

Another caller from B.C. cited the importance of a national housing program to deal with mentally ill people, and the homeless. Housing is of great concern to me, even though I’m currently on the right side of a quickly rising curve of people who either don’t have, or have a permanent home. I was barely able to afford the mortgage for my condo, even though if you recall, I have an income 3 times that of a single person with a full time minimum wage job. Since we don’t allow polygamy in Canada, how is a couple on minimum wage going to afford a house for their children in Regina? Simply put, without government assistance, illegal funny business, or substandard housing they AREN’T going to have a home. That leaves them and their children vulnerable to the whim of landlords like Boardwalk who will milk their monopoly on rental properties.

This kind of country, this province, the wealthiest in (nearly) the world, should not have trouble providing homes to people. It should not tell a family of two full-time working parents that they can work 24 hours a day (collectively) and still not have the earning power to pay a bank for 25 years in order to buy developed property. It should not deny Aboriginal people the funding to attend post secondary education, especially given the disaster of the Residential School system, and the treaty promises of state funded education.

Canada is the best country in the world for me. I’m male, I’m white, I’m a tax payer with a career and some savings. I just don’t want to enjoy it alone, and think the federal government shouldn’t forget that even though they were elected by a tiny minority of Canadians, they are in charge of looking out for every last one of us. So far, they have been terrible stewards of the environment, and everything else vulnerable in these uncertain yet prosperous times.