Pete McMartin
Sun
I have some good news!
Amid all the talk of slowdowns, meltdowns and — in the case of a news story Thursday that drug abuse is rampant among aging baby boomers — just plain downers, this heartening information comes to us about improved employment figures.
Well, figure, anyway. It’s in the low ones. It seems the non-profit Credit Counselling Society of B.C. is doing such gangbuster business these days that it’s hired three more staff to keep up with the sudden demand of hundreds of people who are now calling up every day begging the society to teach them how to unburden themselves of their crushing debt load. This sudden influx means that clients must now wait a week for an interview, when before they could get in to see a counsellor the same day. But three new jobs! And readers complain there’s nothing positive to read in the paper anymore.
On the other hand, there is a bit of bad news.
According to a Statistics Canada report released in June of this year — three months before the dominoes started to fall on Wall Street — Canadians were incurring more and larger mortgages, bigger lines of credit and more credit-card debt than ever before, and spending it, largely, on renovations and big-ticket items like cars, flat-screen TVs and appliances. The news story in The Sun described Canadians as “spending like drunken sailors.” Yo ho ho and a bottle of your finest Bordeaux, waiter!
Or this:
An Ipsos-Reid poll in May found that 78 per cent of all respondents did not have enough money saved to cover three months worth of expenses.
“With most Canadians not having enough savings to get them through an emergency of up to three months,” the poll report wondered, “the question arises as to how Canadians will cope with an unexpected emergency should it arise, such as a sudden illness or loss of a job. The answer for most appears to be to enter in debt, with two-thirds (65 per cent) of Canadians agreeing … that they consider their line of credit to be their emergency funds.”
In other words, to cover unexpected debt, most Canadians have put away — oy vey — debt. It’s funny, in a terrifying sort of way.
Funnier still? Another Ipsos-Reid survey found that seven in 10 Canadians were planning on some type of home renovation in the next two years, with the primary reason being they wanted to make their home more attractive, presumably to show it off to best effect when the bank officers come by to repossess it.
Exactly why we’ve become a society of spendthrifts is a thesis I haven’t room here to explore, but one good explanation comes from SFU Prof. Lindsay Meredith, whose disciplines include marketing and economics. Basically — and I hope I’m getting Meredith correct on this — he suggests we have let our greed get the better of us, and that marketers and financial institutions have cultivated and capitalized on that greed. Or, as I might put it, we’re saps.
Meredith’s prescription for fiscal responsibility?
“Ultimately, it comes down to your and my ability to look that marketer in the eye and say, ‘B—– off!'”
But that would take self-denial and discipline, which Americans and, to a slightly lesser degree as to be negligible, we Canadians, have shown a willingness to do.
In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder when I hear comments about the greed of Wall Street and its responsibility for bringing the economy to the brink of ruin.
Wall Street and all its permutations may have financed our glass houses — with their granite kitchen countertops and flat-screen TVs and new cars in the garage — but we willingly lived in them.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
