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Ideology and Choices

Ottawa Citizen, Cape Breton Post, Victoria Standard: Feburary 4, 2011

The nation’s attention is temporarily focused on Old Age Security (OAS) issues and while we are offered complex actuarial reasoning for inevitable benefit reductions; the real issue is one of ideology and choices. I direct the reader’s attention to the fact that in October, 2011 Royal Dutch Shell announced that the governments of Alberta and Canada had agreed to contribute $865 million toward the cost of a carbon capture and storage facility…” This notice presents a number of questions, such as:

- If the government can easily spend public funds on subsidizing business and the MP pension plan, is their failure to properly manage the OAS not simply a matter of ideological choice?
- Why does this government (and past governments) subsidize highly-profitable corporations that routinely downsize and/or ship jobs overseas?
- What type of relationships exist between the corporate activist organizations like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and government elite?

Since the Royal Dutch Shell gift represents only a fraction of the regular public subsidies delivered to Canadian business; could not the government divert some of this money to properly finance the OAS? Let corporate Canada borrow money at interest and live by the rules of the so-called free market; as veterans and seniors are expected to live.