CARP president, Anthony Quinn wrote to the Editor in Chief and senior staffers at the Globe and Mail last week.
It has long been a weekly fixture in their newspaper to have ‘opinion’ pieces blaming older Canadians for getting old, for living longer, using health care and worst of all, continuing to be a large cohort of senior-boomers, just as they were when they were baby-boomers. Now that there are 8 million seniors in Canada – you are the problem!
Please read, share and contact him directly with your personal message. dwalmsley@globeandmail.com
Mr. David Walmsley
Editor in Chief, Globe and Mail
Dear Mr. Walmsley,
I am writing to ask why The Globe and Mail has become so determined to frame the retirement security and health care needs of older Canadians as a threat to younger Canadians?
Rather than entering into serious debate about public finances, your paper is repeatedly stoking intergenerational resentment.
Increasingly, your pages seem to present the aging of Canada as a conflict between generations rather than a shared national challenge.
Older Canadians are cast as a burden, while younger Canadians are encouraged to see their parents and grandparents as competitors for scarce public resources. The dignity and security of seniors are treated as negotiable, while the anxiety of younger Canadians is channelled toward the wrong target.
It is especially troubling to see Paul Kershaw given so much space to advance this kind of argument. His work may be presented as concern for younger Canadians, but the effect is to pit Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z against seniors, as though their futures can only be secured by weakening the retirement supports and healthcare needs of those who came before them. It is divisive, un-Canadian and, frankly, gross.
Canada should be having a serious conversation about housing affordability, stagnant wages, healthcare capacity, taxation, pensions, immigration and the cost of aging.
If we want to have a conversation about OAS program loopholes, and TRULY wealthy seniors arranging their affairs to avoid OAS claw-backs, or people with substantial assets using public benefits to put gas in their boats, then let’s have that conversation. Canadians can understand the difference between closing genuine loopholes and attacking the basic retirement security of older people who rely on these programs.
But that is not the conversation your pages are encouraging.
The debate should not be built on the premise that seniors are taking too much, living too long, or standing in the way of younger Canadians. Undermining Old Age Security, weakening public retirement benefits, or treating seniors’ modest income supports as the source of Canada’s affordability crisis will not build a secure future for the next generation – it will simply make insecurity permanent and hurt them in the long run.
If we normalize the idea that aging citizens are a fiscal problem to be managed down, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z and everyone following will inherit a poorer and less secure retirement system themselves.
The Globe has an enormous influence in shaping national debate. Your editorial choices are dividing Canadians across generational lines, amplifying disingenuous rhetoric and hardening resentment.
I would ask you to consider whether the paper is serving Canadians well by giving so much oxygen to arguments that turn generations against one another. A serious national newspaper should challenge governments to build a fairer, stronger system for all Canadians, not give repeated space to misleading narratives that make older Canadians the villain in their own country.
Please see our latest national TV spot in our effort to counter your attack on those who built this country and I imagine, make up a significant part of your readership.
Sincerely,
Anthony Quinn
President
The Canadian Association of Retired Persons, CARP
70 Jefferson Ave.
Toronto ON | M6K1Y4
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