Bring Out Your Dead: The Black Death and Demographic Decline. Louis Shalako.

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.

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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.