“When I went to the first Ottawa CARP meeting, a guy behind me stood up to complain that he didn’t like the magazine, ‘and don’t call me a zoomer,’” says Murray. “I think that is some people’s attitude, for sure.
“But I think he’s found a wonderful niche that no one else is targeting in that particular way, by acknowledging that we are still alive and interested in what’s going on in the world. I like that he’s doing it in such a positive way.”
Znaimer hand-picked glamorous editor-in-chief Suzanne Boyd, 47, to remake the old CARP magazine and if there’s one overriding complaint, it’s that the glossy Zoomer speaks to a much younger demographic. Its icons of aging, Canadian celebrities who are photographed for its covers by 50-year-old rocker Bryan Adams, have been overwhelmingly white and wealthy (Christopher Plummer, Anne Murray, Wayne Gretzky. . .), with the exception of, strangely enough, the Dalai Lama.
And sex? There’s lots of it, from November’s colourful list of sex-toy suggestions from “sexpert” Sue Johanson to Znaimer’s two-page column, which makes a feeble defence of May-December romances.
What can you say about a guy who clearly knows a lot about style yet still wears his thinning hair pulled back in a tucked-up ponytail and counts Hugh Hefner as his hero — an 84-year-old playboy who, Znaimer notes almost wistfully, “has spent his ‘retirement’ squiring and bedding a succession of beautiful, often blonde young women up to 60 years his junior.”
As one 61-year-old occasional reader puts it: Zoomer is “just working too hard to keep us all young. I want to ease into old age gracefully. I don’t want to climb a mountain.”
But Znaimer has a big fan in Ottawa investment adviser Janet Gray, 52, who’s been a member of CARP for five years. She grew up on MuchMusic and was so excited by Znaimer’s takeover of CARP that she founded the first Ottawa group, helping CARP grow from just 14 to 41 chapters in two years.
She dismisses complaints that the revitalized CARP is abandoning the 80-plus crowd with their pressing health and long-term care concerns that has always been its roots.
“We’re absolutely not forgetting them. The reason we’re doing all this (political lobbying) is to draw more attention to them,” says Gray. “How are you going to be successful by having a magazine that’s only subscribed to by 80 year olds?
“We need to expand CARP’s reach to 45 year olds and say, ‘Do you know what your mother is going through? Do you know what your grandmother is going through? Do you know what you’re going to be going through down the road?”
Znaimer’s crowning touch was seeking out high-profile tax lawyer and activist Susan Eng to become CARP’s vice-president of advocacy.
For the last two years she has been criss-crossing the country on CARP’s behalf — often with a cameraman and videographer to record events so members can see their annual fees at work. She’s been meeting with provincial and federal politicians to lobby for caregiver-support programs and pension reform so that fewer seniors will be forced into poverty as they age. She’s also been pushing CARP’s agenda for a pharmacare program that provides free drugs to seniors.
