And the Richer Get Richer

This morning, CBC's headline on its online news site was "Canada's top CEOs earn 200 times an average worker's salary" (CBC). It is so easy to, with some righteous anger, vent at the absurdity of someone getting paid 200 times as much as someone else. To attempt to imagine that anyone, working for any company, anywhere deserves that kind of income is to risk some immediate gagging. There will be, amongst some academics and those who write from the perspective of the far left, an immediate warning of doom and gloom, of how the economy cannot support such salaries and of how the working public will rise up and demand a fairer allocation of corporate resources. Such warnings happen every year when some media outlet announce these type of statistics. All too quickly however, the majority of people who bother to read the newspapers will move on to equally important news items such as who the blond hair tweeter from down south has decided to malign next or perhaps equally as important, who is going to win the Super Bowl.

 

On the other side of the discussion, there are those, such as the Fraser Institute who argue that such pronouncements are biased and generally speaking not completely accurate; that it is unfair to compare the salary structure of a few top paid CEOs with ordinary workers; that the majority of CEO and upper management types get paid reasonable salaries and in fact less than some government funded employees such as judges. There is also the argument in true capitalist fashion that people get paid what the market will bear, that there are numerous professionals such as actors and musicians who get paid exorbitant salaries because their services are in demand. So why shouldn't highly skilled, in demand executives get paid not just what they are worth, but what the market with bear?

 

To be clear, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative (the authors of the report discussed by the CBC), is a left leaning think tank that is known to be critical of much of the capitalist system and the Fraser Institute speaks from the right side of any discussion. Neither group could be assumed to be completely neutral. Each has a specific hobby horse that they ride at every opportunity. None-the-less when one considers both salary and stock options, there are some bosses who get paid a lot of money. Not only do they receive a healthy (by anyone's standards) annual wage, they also in many cases receive company stock which can be worth far more than the salary. The value of such stock options may increase or decrease depending upon the performance of the company. Some CEOs also are awarded bonuses depending upon how well the company does.

 

There is also, of course, the issue of income tax  and how much the richest people pay. It has been long argued by those critical of the system, that CEOs do not pay their fair share in income tax. It is possible, for example to avoid paying some income tax because of various tax loopholes including the one that taxes stock options at a lower percentage. However, some CEOs do pay tax. According to the Globe and Mail " The chief executive officers of Canada's 60 largest companies paid about $2.5-million each in income tax in 2010 on average total compensation of $6.2-million, according to a new study by compensation consulting firm McDowall Associates." On the other hand, stock options (an important part of the CEOs salary) - get taxed at a lower percentage. They may also have other strategies to avoid paying their full share of income tax such as banking off shore.

 

While I think it is important that society examines how we pay people and for what, I am even more interested in what the CEOs do with their money. The average salary on the top 100 CEO in 2017 was $10.4 million dollars (CBC). Even if they paid the full 44% income tax, that leaves them with over five million dollars a year to spend!! What does one do with that much money? Really - I want to understand what anyone does with five million dollars annually coming into their bank accounts - that is $96,000 dollars every week. I understand that houses are expensive as are private schools for the kids but five million, after taxes seems to me to be more than enough to buy food and pay for hydro. I suppose that flying first class (certainly from a Canadian Airport) is expensive and I would guess that those trips to some exclusive island get-a-way are costly. Minimum wages for the gardeners and the maids (to clean that big house that has more bathrooms than any family needs) would add up a bit as would all of those donations to charity but what else would you do with that money?

 Someone please tell me.

 

Good News about City Buses

I have been fortunate enough to ride on city buses in a number of Canadian cities. I grew up using buses and street cars in a small town outside of Montreal. I can remember how exciting it was as a child getting on the street car with my mother - feeling very grown up, or as a young adult learning to master the brand new subway system in Montreal.  More recently, as I have travelled back and forth between Sudbury, Ontario and Duncan, British Columbia, I have used city buses to either visit different places within those towns or cities, or as a means to get through some city as I hitchhiked across the country. Generally, I like city buses (and C trains/Sky trains/subways). They are all relatively affordable, once one masters how the system is organized - they are efficient and as few buses go in a straight line, one gets to see a fair amount of a city on the way to your destination.  On a good day I get to chat with the bus driver or some of the passengers.

I think I am a fairly experienced and well practiced bus rider. I have, to name a few, used the bus system in such places as Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria and on Salt Spring Island. I remember going through Calgary just after the Stampede Parade ended and seeing the hundreds of people crowding on to the C train. It seems as if they were all bubbling with excitement - especially the little kids, from all imaginable ethnic groups, dressed up in their finest cowboy outfits. I can remember the bus driver in Winnipeg who was envious of my journey. He might just have left his bus on the side of the road and come with me if I had asked him to; or the bus driver from the Sault who liked to talk about the number of hitchhikers he had driven to the edge of town - never to know but always curious if they got rides. I have had a number of drivers call up their supervisors and ask someone which bus I needed to get on next if they were not sure. I have seen bus drivers maintain their composure in busy rush hour traffic as they get cut off again and again by inconsiderate drivers and I have seen bus drivers in almost every town let someone on the bus who did not quite have enough money to pay the fare. I like riding on buses.

Not all bus drivers are created equally. While the majority of them are polite and generally try to help me get to where I need to go, in some cities I had some difficulties in making it clear as to my needs. Calgary has been the worse. For a number of years I got bad advice from almost every driver. It was as if they could never understand why anyone would ever want to leave their fair city and therefore didn't want to help me to do so. The bus drivers in that city always seemed to be more grumpy than any others. But in the last four or five years that seems to have changed and not only are the bus drivers friendlier but they understand what I need and get me to the right spot.

The bus drivers in Sudbury, especially in the winter have a right to be grumpy sometimes. There are high snow banks that ensure that their stops are less than accessible, people with heavy coats have to fumble longer looking for the correct change or their passes - meaning that icy cold blows longer into the bus, the roads are icy and slushy and certainly in that city, many of the other drivers seem to ignore buses' right of way entirely. But this past month - without exception, all of the bus drivers were bright, friendly and welcoming. That was not always the case but something seems to have changed. So why are the bus drivers in Calgary and Sudbury now so nice?

I think it is because more and more people as they get off the bus, from the front or back door - shout out "thank you". Just a few years ago in Sudbury, it felt as if I was the only person who ever said thank you - now lots of people do it. I do not know why but it is wonderful. It is the same in Calgary - more people seem to be saying thank you - and saying it was some enthusiasm. In every city where I travel on the bus system and where the riders say "thank you" - the bus drivers are nice. I am not sure which happens first - do buses drivers become nicer and then people respond - or do people use their manners and the bus drivers respond? It does not matter - I think there is a connection.  

So as we start another year - be nice to those who serve us or help us. Say thank you to the store and bank clerks; wave a thank you to those car drivers who let us edge in ahead of them in some merge lane or stop so we can cross the street; say thank you to the crossing guards, those who hold doors open for us  or the receptionist at your doctor's office. Maybe - just maybe if we all say thank you and mean it - perhaps the upcoming year will be a kinder place and a safer place. It can't hurt.

Who Will Take My Garbage?

It is difficult to find anything wrong with the concept of recycling. It makes so much sense....you put all of your unwanted glass, metal, paper and plastic - stuff that use to go to the local landfill site - into a blue bin. Someone then comes and takes it away. Nothing could be simpler. The landfill site does not get filled up as quickly as it use to, you get to feel good about doing your bit to save the planet and the glass, metal, paper and plastic all gets used to make something else. What a perfect system! It no longer matters how much paper, plastic, metal or glass we use - it can be recycled. Right? 

Well, there is a bit of a glitch to that wonderful system. It turns out that much as 60% of our unwanted and used glass, metal, paper and plastic ends up in China for processing.  All of that garbage is what fills up those empty container ships steaming west across the Pacific Ocean. However, China in the summer of 2017 (Reuters, CNN, Independent , CBC),  announced that effective January 2018, it would no longer allow the importing of some of those materials. All of a sudden the perfect plan is not looking so perfect anymore.

I seem to have somehow missed the fact that a significant portion of my household waste ends up in China. I, like I suspect most people, just assumed that once my recyclables were picked up that I had done my job and that I didn't need to worry about it again. It never entered my mind that it was being shipped to China. Even if I had known where it all ended up, I would not have ever considered that China might not want it anymore. And I should have known.

I am a fairly active news reader. There are days when I may peruse the headlines of four or five online news sources.  If I missed this news, I am fairly certain that a large number of Canadians also missed it. I don't understand why this story has not been deemed to be important enough to discuss again and again until a solution is found. While I understand why we are attracted to the analysis of Mr. Trump's daily experiment in how to be an idiot, it would seem me that discussing what to do with our garbage is at least as important as what silliness the president has just tweeted. In terms of our children and grandchildren's lives it is far more important.

One has to ask why there is not more discussion as to what is going to happen to our used glass, metal, paper and plastic starting next week. The announcement appears to have taken people by surprise. In my quick scan of the news - I saw no mention of any country's alternative plan to deal with the waste. Bundled recycled material is already starting to fill up warehouses; municipalities that once shipped recyclable waste (and made money from it -Halifax use to ship 80% (CBC) of its recycled material) to China now have nowhere to put that material. The situation will only get worse and people will start to dispose of the material in our already over used land fill sites.

I suspect that too many people will find this discussion far too difficult and perhaps even uncomfortable. The solution to the problem is not to find some other country that needs money so badly that they will allow their land and water to be polluted with our garbage. The answer is not even to develop better and better ways of using recyclable material locally. The only reasonable answer as to what to do with our unused glass, metal, paper and plastic is to stop producing so much waste. As long as someone else will dispose of our garbage - we can use as much plastic or paper as we want - because we never have to deal with it afterwards. We, the developed countries, need to accept responsibility for our waste. We need to make a collective agreement to stop using so much plastic, paper etc. We need to pressure companies to stop enclosing items in large plastic packages, we need to ban the selling of water in "recyclable" bottles. We need to start to learn how to stop using plastic and to learn how to reuse the glass containers we now throw away.

It is time we started to deal with our own garbage - perhaps if we did - we would stop producing so much of it.