Editor:
I enjoyed Rob Alexander’s personal essay (Rocky Mountain Outlook, July 24) and wish him good luck in Calgary. He’ll be back.
Mr. Alexander laments the bulldozing of the Canmore that he grew up in; I too have seen the same fields and forests razed to make room for infrastructure that in some cases did not and does not need to be here – or anywhere. It’s too bad the preservation bandwagon does not acknowledge the existence of other creatures, other lives, and other aspirations right across the street or a couple of blocks down.
Affordable housing, Mr. Alexander? Sign me up. But, really, does that mean government subsidies? To my mind, such a move might enable an employer to continue to pay low wages since the taxpayer in general would be paying the shortfall to his employee. In other words, affordable housing is, in essence, a business subsidy.
Consider the ancient system of unemployment insurance. There were many industries that cut costs by laying off workers seasonally. They knew they could rely on the same workers returning at a later date because the Canadian taxpayer paid those workers to stay home and not seek an alternative career. This was a fine arrangement for big business and was the custom for decades. It is my understanding that, due to reforms, this scenario is not as common as it once was.
I was born in a rich republican town in California (Santa Barbara). Many employers there are reluctant to pay a living wage; Mexicans do almost all of the manual labour. The result? Those working families rely on food stamps and food banks to make ends meet, so there is no incentive to pay higher wages.
Once again, businesses are subsidized by the taxpayer and, in this case, by charitable giving.
By the way, I have read in a Santa Barbara newspaper (if you can believe the papers) that the number of food stamp recipients in the United States is 40 million individuals. Even if the real number is half of that, I think one can see that the flow of money from government coffers is sometimes excessive – especially when all it does is maintain social policies and conditions that are unfair and ultimately unsupportable.
Karl Thorson,
Canmore
