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| Jan van Eyck. Detail from the Crucifixion Dyptich. |
Louis Shalako
In the Middle Ages, the Black Death swept the world.
Estimates are that thirty to sixty percent of the
population died in Europe, thirty percent or more in the Middle East, in waves,
large numbers at a time. Bring out your dead, all very funny in a Monty Python
sketch but real enough at the time.
There weren’t enough people left to bury the dead.
Rents fell, many demesnes languished empty. There weren’t enough people left to
farm the land. There weren’t enough people left to take up vacant lands, which
were soon overgrown with weeds and brambles.
Aristocrats and wealthier people had a better chance
of survival, better diet perhaps, but also the ability to withdraw to the
countryside and go into a kind of lockdown.
Landowners saw their incomes fall, yet many of their
own costs remained high, considering numbers of servants and retainers. Their
administrators had to be paid, legal affairs in a litigious age were costly.
We can’t really compare this with Covid-19, which might
have taken fifteen or twenty million in a global pandemic. This is partly due
to all the pandemic-era measures taken by governments around the world,
democratic or totalitarian, very strict in the case of New Zealand and fairly
loose in the case of Sweden. There are certain countries where the numbers are
probably not trustworthy, North Korea or Russia, China for example.
Yet we are in the middle of a labour shortage, here in
Canada and in pretty much all developed nations.
This is caused by the aging of the population, this is
caused by falling birthrates, again in pretty much all of the developed
nations.
Old people just don’t want to work anymore—
This is why the federal government pulled out the
stops and accepted a million new Canadians in a recent year. When I was a kid,
Canada had a population of about 20 million. Fifty years later, it has barely
doubled, and this with the benefit of fairly liberal immigration policies.
***
We simply aren’t making babies fast enough to replace
ourselves, let alone grow the population.
It’s not a big die-off, rather it is the result of
falling birthrates. At one time, eighty to ninety percent of Canadians lived on
the farm or in rural communities. Efficiencies of production now means that it takes
fewer hands to produce the same or larger crops. People moved to the cities
where the work was available, the wages were higher and opportunities abound.
Typically, Canadians don’t take those back-breaking
jobs, labouring in the hot sun and getting paid a few cents a basket for
cherries, or tomatoes or whatever, which means we must import even that kind of
unskilled labour. New Zealand has a big problem, with 130,000 people leaving last
year, mostly for Australia and beyond. Poverty is not the problem, but high
costs of housing, food, and all the usual suspects. People think they stand a
better chance of prosperity somewhere else.
So far, Canada is not really showing too many signs of
that, although the U.S. is a big draw for certain types of professionals.
Doctors and nurses come to mind, and then there are the artists, actors and
musicians, who might be able to afford living in Canada, but for an actor,
Hollywood is where the big money is.
People are living longer and longer, mostly due to
good health care, the envy of much of the world. This is one of the attractions
of Canadian life.
There are people who honestly believe in ‘replacement
theory’. They drive past the bus stop, perhaps the one near the intersection of
London and Murphy roads right here in Sarnia, and what do they see? All those
beautiful young people, many of them foreign students and people of colour. It
reinforces their beliefs, fueled by far-right conspiracy theorists and other
folks just trying to force the narrative to conform to their own bigoted views
and a kind of not-too-subtle racism.
There is little doubt that governments at the federal
and provincial dropped the ball when it came to housing, bearing in mind all
that increased demand due to immigration and international students. This is
not a statement of my own ideology. Between the federal and provincial and
territorial governments across Canada, we have Liberal, Conservative and NDP
governments to blame, if blame is our game. I’ve always found the blame game
kind of useless. Bearing in mind the lack of concrete and specific suggestions,
what good is it? Also, foreign students contribute cash money to our system of
higher education.
That little glass slipper will soon be pinching the
foot that wears it, and some of those educational programs, some of those
opportunities must dry up and blow away without serious increases in funding, perhaps
even at Lambton College here in Sarnia.
People think the government doesn’t listen. I think
they do listen, which is why I make a point of talking to them once in a while.
It’s never done any real harm, and it might have even done some good along the
way.
When it comes to foreign students, their money, their
very numbers were being exploited to subsidize a system that is chronically
underfunded otherwise. We will not escape the consequences.
Just for the record, we elect the governments we
deserve, and this holds true at all levels.
END
Louis Shalako, founder
of Long Cool One Books, is the author of twenty-four books, available from
major online retailers. Louis studied Radio, TV and Journalism at Lambton
College, later studying fine art. He began writing for community newspapers and
industrial magazines forty years ago. His work has appeared in seven languages.
Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.
Thank you for reading.
Background
and Facts.
New Zealand. (The Guardian)
France, Pension Reform. (Foreign Policy)
The Black Death. (Wikipedia)
Colleges Affected. (Ottawa Citizen)
Bring Out Your Dead, Monty Python.
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