Repeal of Mandatory Retirement Bill Passes Second Reading

[Raymond Hall]

The House of Commons this morning unanimously passed Second Reading of Bill C-481, the bill that will repeal the mandatory retirement exemption under Section 15(1)(c) of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Bill was supported by all parties, including the government. The Parliamentary Secretary for the Minister of Justice, in debate, stated that the government, with two qualifications, unequivocally supports passage of the Bill. The qualifications are to be dealt with in Committee, via amendment.

From here the Bill goes to a Parliamentary Committee for review and amendment. The two amendments contemplated are as follows. The first one is a transition provision that will allow a short time period, likely six months, from the date of the enactment of the legislation until the date that the legislation comes into force. The second one has to do with the Canadian military.

When the law takes effect, likely in the summer of 2011, the repeal of the mandatory retirement provision will affect approximately 12,000 organizations in the federal sector that employ over 840,000 employees in the transportation, telecommunications and finance industries.

Parliamentary Committee hearings are being scheduled for mid-January.

[Mechanic787]

This is a real game-changer. Can't say that it was unanticipated, given the repeal of the equivalent legislation in virtually all of the provincial jurisdictions. With the unanimous passage in the House on second reading, and especially with the government speaking in favour of the Bill, there does not appear to be much chance that it will fail in third reading. And if the legislation gets out of the House of Commons and into the Senate in early February, before an election is possibly called in the spring, it will be a done deal.

It should render moot a great deal of the heated discussion on this Forum about the purported motivation of the protagonists, and lead to more neutral discussions about how everyone, including the employer, the union and all of the pilots, both pro and con, will adapt to the new reality.

[morefun]

This is a game changer.....I don't know a lot about the British Parliamentary system but the little I do know is after a unanimous positive vote on the second reading the third reading is a rubber stamp! I don't think ACPA has an alternate plan but we'll see soon enough.

[rudder]

Parliamentary Committee hearings are being scheduled for mid-January.

Perhaps the Committee will be treated to a comprehensive briefing on "Actuarially Based Deferred Compensation"

[flyinhigh]

I will still ask, WTF would you wanna work in your 60's. You should be enjoying your life not worrying about your next flight/or whatever or if you will be around for the holidays with family.

Unless you got 3 ex-wives I just don't see the point.

ENJOY YOUR RETIREMENT!, thats what its all about

[flyinhigh]

I will still ask, WTF would you wanna work in your 60's. You should be enjoying your life not worrying about your next flight/or whatever or if you will be around for the holidays with family.

Unless you got 3 ex-wives I just don't see the point.

ENJOY YOUR RETIREMENT!, thats what its all about

[vic777]

You should be enjoying your life not worrying about your next flight

Obviously, those who want to keep working aren't "worrying", about their next flight.

Unless you got 3 ex-wives I just don't see the point.

Lots of people need more money, for various reasons, four kids in University, could do it.

ENJOY YOUR RETIREMENT!, thats what its all about

How old do we have to get before we realize that not all people have the same outlook, goals or aspirations.
This is a possible win for those who want to retire ... AC might offer a package for those who want to go early, question is ... would ACPA get hosed on such a deal?

[morefun]

AC might offer a package for those who want to go early, question is ... would ACPA get hosed on such a deal?

One would only hope they do (AC Package)! ACPA always gets hosed, it is their single minded, blinders on approach in dealing with problems. There is never a back up plan if things go south. If I was ACPA (which I'm not) I would be actively looking at how to deal with this new reality.

[Raymond Hall]

The video recording of the 45 minute debate on Parliament's Second Reading of Bill C-481 is online at:

http://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/ParlVu/Content ... ityId=7028

The recording title shows 6 Hours, 48 Minutes, but it is the first 45 minutes that contains the debate and vote.

The Minister of Labour is the first Member to speak, and her words in support of the Bill put the proposed amendment in context.

Other Members refer to George Vilven and Neil Kelly being reinstated by order of the Tribunal, at full salary, as a result of the Tribunal finding that the mandatory retirement exemption violates the Charter. They also offer comments regarding how the labour market and social context of restrictions on human rights in 2010 differs substantially from the same subjects in 1990 when the Supreme Court decided the McKinney case that found that although mandatory retirement violated Section 15 of the Charter, it was justified under Section 1 of the Charter.

The words of these Members of Parliament at this stage of the debate are extremely signficant, because not only are the comments admissible in Court as evidence of the social context of the mandatory retirement provision of the statute in 2010, they go directly to the Section 1 issue that must be decided by the courts to assess whether the existing mandatory retirement provisions meet the required steps of that analysis, including the step of assessing whether the need for mandatory retirement is "pressing and substantial."

Should the Bill be enacted and come into force, the Charter argument, of course, will not be required for pilots who turn 60 after the date of the legislation coming into force, but it will still be significant in the existing litigation for all employees who have complaints before the Commission and the Tribunal as a result of their employment being terminated prior to the ban on mandatory retirement coming into force.

[rudder]

Ray, the 'flat earth society' are in denial and some believe that if the government proceeds, that they can nullify the effect through modifications to the collective agreement. With every equipment bid that is issued, they progress and take comfort in the belief that the right to progress on status quo terms is irrevocable.

Once the dust settles, and the legislation comes into effect, for commercial airline pilots this will be a BFOR debate pure and simple. Both in Canada, and in the global jurisdictions where Canadian carriers operate, the standard circa 2010 is clear.

[the original tony]

All this while Canada posts the worse jobs data in 2 years, this buffered slightly by younger folks just not bothering to look for work. Could have been worse, but why employ young people?
I love it, protect the overpriveleged and screw the rest, but you will appreciate it in 50years. Great.
What should go along with this pile of shit is a mandatory closure of roughly 50% of all post secondary institutions. Why train new peolpe if the others arent leaving? What are they going to do? Only so many McD and Timmies positions open to college grads. Maybe become a lawyer and start your own farce, seems lucrative in the right type of economy.
Oh well, i'll just go back to this news paper I was reading, 91 year old man dies in car accident. He DROVE into the parking lot set the brake and died, found 2 days later.
Cant wait to hear how this one turns out in an aircraft.............Parking checklist please, oh crap he's dead.
I love this country.

[yycflyguy]

Cant wait to hear how this one turns out in an aircraft.............Parking checklist please, oh crap he's dead.

^Most Politically Incorrect post of the year!

... parking checklist to be replaced by "crewmember unresponsive checklist, I have ATC".

[Raymond Hall]

I love it, protect the overpriveleged and screw the rest, but you will appreciate it in 50years. Great. What should go along with this pile of shit is a mandatory closure of roughly 50% of all post secondary institutions. Why train new peolpe if the others arent leaving? What are they going to do? Only so many McD and Timmies positions open to college grads. Maybe become a lawyer and start your own farce, seems lucrative in the right type of economy.

In case you did not notice the context change yesterday, this issue is now one that is before Parliament as well as the Tribunal and the court. You should take your rant to your Member of Parliament so that he or she can hear what you have to say.

The issue that Air Canada pilots should turn their minds to now, as I have been suggesting consistently from 2006 onward, is the issue of working within the legislative contraints, including the legislative constraint prohibiting discrimination on the basis of age, to move forward, instead of attempting to preserve the past by ignoring or denying the changes that are upon us.

Following upon the recent reinstatement order by the Tribunal, the legislative repeal of mandatory retirement should be a clear message to everyone that has viewed the end of mandatory retirement as a We-They issue, rather than as a systemic issue, that any further effort to exist as an island in the sea of cultural and professional change can serve only to undermine our collective interests.

[the original tony]

I have written to MP's, people of interest and not a real response by anyone, atleast not a standard bullshit form letter.
Either way, i hope people know what they're getting into, especially when getting into aircraft. The grandpa having a hard time programming the vcr is now at the controls. Kinda scary even to me.
Some jobs, not to knock any of the mentioned occupations, like a cashier, secretary, bank teller, don't strike me as jobs where if you went a year or two longer than 60 will hurt anybody.
Put a guy in a plane at any age by the way things are going, and I get a little more frightened. Some jobs should have a time to call it quits, this is opening a very dangerous stage for someone to get hurt or killed prior to anyone realizing that fly till you die isn't such a smart idea.
You want to make it 65, fine, follow the rest of the globe, great, whatever.
Having no time to retire and no real end in sight is just stupid.
How hard is it to fail a sim ride because you just failed and cry discrimination due to age, when do we call a spade a spade. He failed me because he has something against me, ok, lets do it again and again.
Now, any crack at a guy even being nudged towards retirement is bad? Then lets just pack it in and wait for them to do the same, then maybe we'll enjoy the same benefits they did.......I know, it's all for our own good.

[Raymond Hall]

i hope people know what they're getting into, especially when getting into aircraft.

The Bill to repeal mandatory retirement has nothing at all to do with airline pilot licensing. There has been no maximum age restriction on airline pilot licensing in Canada since the 1980’s. Consequently, the change in law will have no impact whatsoever on the concerns that you raise. Licensing is governed strictly by Transport Canada.

The legislative change will simply terminate the employers’ and the unions’ ability to specify, by contract, an age of retirement. It will eliminate the ability of an airline such as Air Canada to tell pilots at age 60, "You are too old to work for us, go work for someone a different airline that doesn’t doesn't discriminate on the basis of age."

The federal government has told ICAO that it objects to any maximum age of pilot licensing because, first, such a restriction is contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and second,the requirement in the Canadian Human Rights Act that limits licensing according to the requirements of a bona fide occupational requirement, namely recurrent testing of both medical and professional proficiency, is preferable to arbitrary blanket restrictions that are age-based.

[Jastapilot]

I think this Maclean's article is mostly relevant to this thread.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/01/what ... e-leaving/

[TyrellCorp]

I think this Maclean's article is mostly relevant to this thread.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/01/what ... e-leaving/

Excellent!

Here it is in all it's glory. Exactly the point I was alluding to on my post that was removed.



Macleans.ca
Canada's only national weekly current affairs magazine.
What the boomers are leaving their children
Dec 1, 2010 by Jonathon Gatehouse
What the boomers are leaving their children

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images; Andy Clark/Reuters

This January, the first baby boomers turn 65. The huge post-Second World War generation—which numbers 76 million in the United States, makes up almost a third of Canada’s population, and according to one estimate, controls 80 per cent of Britain’s wealth—will continue to enter their dotage at the rate of tens of thousands per day for the next 20 years. By 2050, there will be 30 million Americans aged 75 to 85, three in 10 Europeans will be 65-plus, and more than 40 per cent of Japan’s population will be elderly. In Canada, the ratio of workers to retirees—currently five to one—will have been halved by 2036. And despite the odd dissenter, the generation that still oddly finds Paul McCartney relevant has made clear its intention to take everything it feels it has coming. It will be up to all who trail in their wake to pay for their privilege.

Common sense, not to mention decency, wouldn’t call that just. But an outsized, over-entitled, and self-obsessed demographic is awfully hard for politicians to ignore. Take Britain’s example. In last spring’s general election, the most effective ad run by David Cameron’s Conservatives was also one of the simplest: a close-up of a newborn baby, wriggling in a bassinet as a music box tinkled in the background. “Born four weeks ago, eight pounds, three ounces. With his dad’s nose, mum’s eyes, and Gordon Brown’s debt,” intoned a female voice. “Thanks to Labour’s debt crisis, every child in Britain is born owing £17,000. They deserve better.” The point was impossible to miss: the time had come to stop mortgaging the country’s future.

As his first act, the new prime minister, a 44-year-old Gen Xer, cut his and his ministers’ pay by five per cent, and froze all their salaries for five years. Tackling the U.K.’s $177.5-billion budget deficit and $1.6-trillion-plus national debt—annual interest payments alone stand at $70 billion—would require everyone to sacrifice, he told Britons. But there were also expectations that the burden wouldn’t be equally shared. After all, one of Cameron’s leading wonks, David “Two Brains” Willetts, now the minister for universities and science, had published a rather pointed manifesto, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future—and How They Can Give It Back, just before the election. After their victory, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, applauded the coming reckoning for a generation—his own—that had “eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.” And even as the new government’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, stood before Parliament in mid-October to announce $131 billion in spending cuts over the next four years—and the elimination of as many as 500,000 public sector jobs—the protect-the-youth rhetoric continued. “Today’s the day when Britain steps back from the brink,” he said, ensuring “that we do not saddle our children with the interest on the interest on the interest of the debts we were not ourselves prepared to pay.”

The reality, however, proved to be somewhat different. The age when U.K. citizens can start drawing old-age pension would gradually increase from 65 to 66, but other entitlements like free eye tests and prescriptions for the elderly would remain untouched, as well as winter fuel allowances, and free local transit for anyone over 60. Among the biggest budget losers was the department for education, facing an overall reduction of 10.8 per cent, which according to one economic think tank will translate to funding cuts for 60 per cent of primary schools, and 87 per cent of secondary schools. And the legacy of “Two Brains” for Britain’s shafted youth? A 40 per cent cut to post-secondary teaching grants, and a doubling—or in some cases, tripling—of tuition, to as much as $14,500 a year.

On Nov. 10, more than 50,000 angry students gathered in London to rally against the cuts. A video of Nick Clegg, the Liberal-Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, promising to do away with university fees during the election campaign, was greeted with choruses of “wanker, wanker.” “They’re proposing barbaric cuts that would brutalize our colleges and universities,” said Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students. “We’re in the fight of our lives. We face an unprecedented attack on our future before it has even begun.” Later on, a crowd of several thousand descended on the Conservative Party headquarters, trading punches with police, smashing windows, lighting fires, and for a time, occupying the building.

“The situation for young people is not terribly good,” Ed Howker, a 29-year-old London journalist and author, says in a classic bit of British understatement. “And there’s no sense from the government that they have the interests of the next 30 or 40 years of Britons in mind.” Of the country’s 2.45 million unemployed, close to 60 per cent are under the age of 30.The new budget has not only frozen civil service hires, it scrapped two youth jobs funds, slashed rent subsidies, and cut the money for new housing by half. Howker, who along with Shiv Malik wrote the just-released Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted its Youth, says the sense of despair is becoming overwhelming. “Our generation just seems to be a lot worse off. In terms of key things like getting stable housing, or a well-paid job, or a successful career, we just don’t have it.” The boomers’ aren’t evil, he says, but they nonetheless bear much of the responsibility. The generation that relentlessly mythologizes its “peace and love” heyday became ardent consumers as they aged, and ended up moulding politics in their “me-first” image. “It’s a consumer version of democracy, where politicians realized that if they merely satisfied the short-term desires of their electorate, rather than think in the long term and make good decisions on behalf of the future of the country, they would win elections,” Howker argues. The bills become somebody else’s problem.

Want a scary number? How about $1.5 trillion, the amount the C.D. Howe Institute estimates Canada’s rapidly aging boomers are going to cost Ottawa and the provinces in extra health and pension expenses over the next 50 years. Or perhaps 2,500, the number of new long-term care facilities the Canadian Medical Association says will be needed to accommodate the doubling of Canada’s 65-plus population in two decades. Sixty thousand is how many RNs the Canadian Nurses Association predicts we will be short by 2022. Or maybe just one per cent, the expected annual amount of real per-capita GDP growth in Canada over the next 30 years as boomers leave the work force—less than half of what we’ve experienced over the past four decades.

Combine a demographic bulge with a falling birth rate and ever-increasing life expectancy (now 80.7 years at birth in Canada), and pretty much all the figures start looking ugly. “We have a significant challenge ahead of us,” says Chris Ragan, a professor of macroeconomics and economic policy at McGill. “The tax base will slow down, and spending will speed up. We can’t just do nothing.”

Old Age Security, currently costing $33 billion a year, is already the No. 1 item in the federal budget, and Ottawa and the provinces collectively spent $183 billion on health care in 2009. By Ragan’s estimate, health and benefit costs will be inflating federal and provincial budgets by a further $56 billion a year by 2040. (Last spring, a TD Bank report predicted health care expenditures in Ontario will rise from the current 46 per cent to 80 per cent of all program spending by 2030.) The options are stark. We can go the route of the U.K. and cut spending, or we can raise taxes. Stand pat, says the professor, and 30 years from now Canada will be back facing the same fiscal wall as it did in 1995, when the debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 68.4 per cent.

More frightening still is the fact that the U.K.’s debt already stands at 73.1 per cent of GDP. In the tax-phobic United States, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the debt-to-GDP ratio, currently at 62 per cent, will rise to 87 per cent by 2020. Five years later, it will stand at 109 per cent. And by 2035 it will be 185 per cent. Later this month, a bipartisan commission set up by President Barack Obama will flesh out proposals to cut the US$14-trillion national debt by $3.8 trillion. Everything, including cuts to Social Security, Medicare and tax hikes, is reportedly on the table. “I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts,” Obama told reporters. “If people are, in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country, then they’re going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved.” Some of the trial balloons being floated—like raising the retirement age to 69 by 2075—suggest the real burden will be again borne by the post-boomer generations.

In October, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, debuted its Global Aging Preparedness Index, ranking both the fiscal sustainability and the adequacy of government benefits for the elderly. Canada was in the middle of the pack in both categories, ninth and 11th respectively. France, Spain and Italy were judged to be in an even deeper hole than the U.K., Japan or the U.S.: facing not just debt problems, but spiralling pension and health care costs, as well as some of the lowest birth rates in the developed world. India, with a relatively young population, meagre benefits, and close to 83 per cent of its elderly citizens already living with their children, looks best prepared for the coming storm.

But surely, the best-educated generation in history, not to mention the trailing Gen X, Y and the millennials, must understand all of this: how precarious the global situation already is, and the dangers facing Canada. How we all must prepare. Seemingly not. Household debt in this country reached $1.41 trillion last December, according to a study by the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada, about 2.5 times greater than the 1989 amount. The personal debt-to-income ratio reached a new record high of 144.4 per cent at the end of 2009. And 43 per cent of Canadians admitted to being concerned about their retirement, yet 32 per cent were committing nothing to savings or RRSPs. (Not surprisingly, young people, trailing school loans and other debts, save the least, with only 19 per cent putting 10 per cent or more of their earnings away, according to a different 2009 survey.)

And many of us are either too scared, or stupid, to even risk reading the tea leaves. Close to half of respondents to a new national retirement survey by Bensimon Byrne, a Toronto ad agency, said they had not yet calculated how much income they will receive when they stop working. But 86 per cent said they expected CPP, and 83 per cent Old Age Pension, to be crucial pieces of their financial puzzle. And 77 per cent are counting on eventually selling their house or condo to finance their golden years.

A capital idea. But what happens when millions of boomers all start selling off their homes to the far smaller and less wealthy generations working their way up the food chain? The baby boom generation who “have driven up housing demand and prices for three decades” could have the opposite effect once their mass sell-off commences, Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California demographer, wrote in a 2008 examination of the “generational housing bubble.” Crunching the numbers state by state, he concluded that the current subprime-inspired meltdown may well pale in comparison to what lies ahead: lots and lots of sellers, far fewer buyers, and a two-decade long slump. “Whereas the major housing problem was once affordability, it could now be homeowners’ dashed expectations after lifelong investment in home equity.” The study won a prize from the American Planning Association.

Experts in Canada tend to be more optimistic about the fate of the domestic real estate market, but in a country where close to 40 per cent of personal wealth is now tied up in home ownership, even a small price drop could have drastic consequences. Boomers may have big dreams about retirement in sunny climes, or riding their Harley Davidsons into the sunset (the average age of U.S. motorcycle riders is now 47, up seven years since 2000), but they certainly haven’t figured out how to pay for it all. A recent TD Bank survey found that just 44 per cent of Canadian boomers have actually paid off their mortgages. And among those who haven’t, a quarter still had 75 per cent or more of the debt left to pay down.

The cover of the October edition of The Atlantic features a cartoon of Doonesbury’s Zonker—a blissed-out hippie for 40 years and counting—rolling up his sleeves as the sun sets in the background. “The boomers’ last chance,” promises the sell for the story by Michael Kinsley. Part generational apology “for ruining everything,” and part call to arms, the piece suggests he and his contemporaries have just “19 years to redeem themselves.” Kinsley’s big idea—offering the next generation a fresh start by reducing the national debt, massively investing in education, and repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure—sounds nice. Although in true boomer fashion the “extraordinary historic” fix he proposes—flat taxing the inheritances they are about to receive from their parents, and might reasonably have been expected to one day pass on to their own kids—somehow misses the point. Net cost to his “self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing” generation? $14 trillion of somebody else’s money.

A truer indication of the kind of battles that boomers are girding to fight can be found in the news pages: a growing movement to enrich, or even double, Canada Pension Plan benefits, via substantially higher premiums for businesses and the ever-shrinking work force. Or last week’s decision by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal reinstating two Air Canada pilots who were forced, under company rules, to retire from flying at age 60. “This will be welcome news for all Canadians that one more element of age discrimination has been undone,” proclaimed Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP). “The decision is especially important for those people who must stay in the labour force for economic reasons or simply for the dignity of work.”

Boomers seeking to extend their careers—by any means necessary—is a growing trend. Substitute teaching, once a way for young education grads to get into the profession, is now dominated by retired “double-dippers” collecting both a teacher’s pension and a paycheque. Law firms in the U.S. are redrawing policies that forced older partners out in the aftermath of two high-profile age discrimination lawsuits, and greying Bay Street hotshots are now quietly pushing to remain at the top of their profit pyramids for longer. Whatever the reasons—debt, divorce, pride—baby boomers are serving notice that they don’t want the gold watch and farewell parties they foisted on their elders. The Bensimon Byrne survey found that 62 per cent of Canadians between 50 and 64 expect they’ll continue to work full or part time after hitting “retirement” age.

Recent graduates already at a disadvantage from the recession (a study by Canadian economists found it can take up to 10 years for those who enter the workforce during bust times to catch up on wages) could face even more challenges. That’s an already well-established pattern in Europe where the youth employment rates and standards of living are significantly lower now than just a generation ago. French sociologist Louis Chauvel has even coined a term for such unfortunates: “babylosers.”

The defining characteristics of the baby boomers have been their sense of self-importance and limitless entitlement. And Kinsley’s plea aside, there is little reason to expect that will change any time soon. If anything, it’s getting worse as they age. “The yuppies have become the grumpies,” says Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research. “They’re reluctant to give anything up. It’s like Charlton Heston: ‘From my cold, dead hands!’ ”

In the recent U.S. mid-term elections, boomer angst and anger fuelled the rise of the Tea Party and right-wing Republicans. And in Canada, suburban boomers—generally less educated and less well off than their downtown compatriots—form the base for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, and every-schlub Rob Ford’s hostile takeover of Toronto City Hall. As perhaps their final legacy, boomers are dominating politics the same way they have transformed every other aspect of our society. To be sure, politicians share the blame for cynically playing to them. But it can’t last forever. At least, not unless somebody rediscovers Ponce de Léon’s fountain of youth.

“In five to 10 years we’re going to start seeing a different Canada emerging,” predicts Graves. Younger Canadians who don’t vote now will start turning out in numbers as they age—but without the traditional party allegiances. (Ekos’s surveys consistently suggest under-25s would elect a Green party majority.) Gen Y, who according to a study by a University of New Hampshire management professor score even higher for entitlement and narcissism than their parents, will slowly take over. And the concerns of boomers will start becoming less and less important, just like their position in the consumer markets they once dominated. “Unless they’re buying Viagra or upright bathtubs, nobody cares anymore,” says Graves.

And the truth is, the brewing war between generations will feature more clashes around conference tables than riots in the streets. Hallmark programs like old-age pensions and health care are too important to young and old alike to let wither and die, so fixes will eventually be found. American journalist Ted Fishman, the author of the new book Shock of Gray, says an aging society presents a lot of other changes that we should be worried about, like soaring rates of road accidents, depopulating suburbs and denser downtowns as seniors cluster closer together, and the stresses for young people who will be balancing careers, families and the care of their elders.

Greying populations aren’t just a European or North American problem, they are now a global phenomenon. “You can’t escape from it anywhere in the world,” says Fishman. As boomers have gotten older, and more expensive to employ, our search for cheaper labour and goods has created a “feedback loop” in the developing world. China, with its “21st-century urban industrial wonderlands filled with young people siphoned out of the countryside,” is now aging faster than any place on the planet, he notes. The combination of rapidly growing cities, better wages and higher educational aspirations are shrinking families worldwide.

The real paradigm shift might be in learning to view this inexorable greying of the globe as a good thing, rather than a problem. “On balance it’s all overwhelmingly positive,” says Fishman. “An aging world happens because people live longer, and because women can achieve their aspirations and don’t have time for big families. We’ll be investing much more in the well-being of the kids we do have, their feeding and education. They’re the pillars for future economic development and prosperity.”

Now all we have to do is convince the boomers that it’s finally no longer all about them.

Tags: baby boomers, Canada, Canada Pension Plan, economy, Europe, generation war, healthcare, life expectancy, pension, population, post-secondary, retirement, Second World War generation, taxes, United kingdom, United States
Posted in Top05, World | 136 Comments

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http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/01/what ... e-leaving/ printed on Dec 8, 2010

[vic777]

... where politicians realized that if they merely satisfied the short-term desires of their electorate, rather than think in the long term and make good decisions on behalf of the future of the country, they would win elections ...

... Gen Y, who according to a study by a University of New Hampshire management professor score even higher for entitlement and narcissism than their parents, will slowly take over...

An article everyone should read ... good fuel for thought/debate. "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war."

Here it is in all it's glory. Exactly the point I was alluding to on my post that was removed.

We all got your point TyrellCorp. Basically you are saying that, I should give my money to you.

[yycflyguy]

Nop, just that we should be given the same opportunity for advancement that the flypast60 generation had. The same opportunity to benefit from a lopsided, back-ended seniority system that has always been in place. The same opportunities without moving the goal posts in the middle of the game.

You never did answer my question to you on another thread.

Sure sounds like a money grab under the guise of "human rights" or "human dignity" (whatever the flypast60's are calling it this week) while sticking the junior membership with the bill.

cdnpilot77 wrote:
... Vic777, and any other person fighting this battle from the flypast60 crowd, if your battles are lost, regardless of the basis in which they are lost, will you be going away quietly and accepting the judgements rendered?

vic777 wrote:
As of today, I have not as yet joined this battle, I comment only as an interested observer. If I choose to join the "flypast60 crowd" and the battle is lost, of course I would go away quietly, I am not an idiot, I know which way the wind is blowing.

yycflyguy wrote:
At the risk of inciting you, I noticed you said "as of today...". Can I take that to mean that if you were scheduled to retire within the next couple of months you would add your name to the list of ~150 litigants in search of an easy payout to the detriment of those left behind to pay the bill, meanwhile upholding your dignity while working with those very same colleagues for your last few flights?

I sure hope I read too much into that.

Standing by for an explanation.

[vic777]

yycflyguy wrote:
standing by for explanation

yycflyguy wrote:
At the risk of inciting you, I noticed you said "as of today...". Can I take that to mean that if you were scheduled to retire within the next couple of months you would add your name to the list of ~150 litigants in search of an easy payout to the detriment of those left behind to pay the bill, meanwhile upholding your dignity while working with those very same colleagues for your last few flights?

I sure hope I read too much into that.

Is this the question, "You never did answer my question to you on another thread"? Come on yycflyguy, we can't go round and round in circles like little children, other people have to read through this drivel.