Mallick: Fantino a poor figurehead for Canada’s elderly
Toronto Star
If Stephen Harper really wants to “promote positive images of aging,” as a dire government website called Seniors Canada claims, why did he just make Julian Fantino minister of state for seniors?
I can’t think of a worse figurehead.
I have many fine elderly readers, my mother is 83 and I am rapidly aging as I write this. I believe that older people — I refuse to call them seniors as this makes the rest of us “juniors” — should be allowed to grow into the best that they can be. Lifelong learning, brisk walks, time to read ferociously, indulging the grandchildren with the energy you used to put into pricey sensuality — the fact is that aging can be a good slice of life.
Or you can become a Fantino.
Fantino is not a distinguished politician with a background in medicine, social services, pension management or even promoting startling ideas for helping a huge greying generation. He has always been a cop, the kind who likes his cars black and white as in days of yore.
Wherever he has been a police chief or political candidate — London, York, Toronto, the OPP — he has left behind bitterness among colleagues, lawsuits, allegations of impropriety, an alleged taste for revenge and a long list of carefully blurted slurs. From his musings on Liberal tactics resembling Hitler’s to his rejoinder to Liberal MP Justin Trudeau, who he said was “promoting the hug-a-thug philosophy” as the two duelled over the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Fantino has always been his essential self, a blowhard.
His new job is political. It is to urge old men (less so women), who are more likely to be on the hard right, to vote for Harper. Fantino fans are the voters Harper is after (and has already got, surely.)
And this is where the sham — and the shame — begins, with the job itself.
In 2001, the nation’s median age was 37.6, up from 25.4 in 1966. The fastest-growing group is now people over 80. There are 1.3 million, up a stunning 43 per cent since 2001.
To sum up, Canada’s elderly need help now and an avalanche of help very soon. One of the main functions of national government is to organize and plan. That’s what the seniors minister should do. The previous minister, a former Harper rival named Diane Ablonczy, didn’t have time to change much in a jargon-clogged portfolio dotted with perky sententiousness and tons of exclamation marks. She invented National Seniors Day. On Oct. 1 we will be told to “show our appreciation.” With what? Thicker socks?
Here’s how. Let’s fatten the Canada Pension Plan. If we don’t, our “appreciated” elders will be farming rabbits for food in their hutches (I mean human hutches.) Harper said no. Let’s finally create a national building code, with each province signing on, that will do something shockingly good like mandating that all new homes have main-floor bathrooms, a huge boon to elderly people who want to stay in their own homes but can’t cope with stairs. Hasn’t happened. Let’s have a mandatory long-form census . . . never mind.
What happens to nations unprepared for a future that gerontologists and scientists have already mapped out? A recent example of future blindness: last month during the big freeze, Northern Ireland ran out of water. Infested with political hatred (very Harper-ish) and lacking any vision of the future, it had spent a yearly zero in the past 25 years on water infrastructure. England and Wales, spending about 4 billion pounds yearly, still drank from the tap. Meanwhile, kindly Scotland began shipping bottled water to the Irish. Astounding.
Good governments plan ahead. What does Canada do as a tide of emergency hip replacements and crumbling spines approaches? It puts an angry clown in charge. Happy Seniors Day!
WFDS
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