David Evans | Contributed
“There is an enormous inertia - a tyranny of the staus quo. Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change.”
– Milton Friedman
•••
My Dad’s 92. He came to Canada in 1954, and for the first decade of my life, I was raised on a tug boat and pulp mill paycheques. My parents built a good life for our family.
But now, Dad tells me with regret that he believes his generation was responsible for much of the struggle facing our planet today.
We are not fans of Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire economics, but we recognize that a big part of our struggle is about the tyranny of the status quo. Too many of us have put self-interest first and downplayed the climate crisis. Too many rail against solving the problems we had a hand in creating, preferring to offload urgently needed solutions to our grandchildren.
Many of us have picked the low-hanging fruit of Canada’s resource economy and built an unsustainable utopia fast becoming a dystopia for anyone under 40.
It is time for those who had a hand in generating our problems to step back and make way for those with skin in this game, struggling with the disarray of their thread-bare inheritance. To believe that status quo politicians, business leaders, industry, lobbyists, regulations and ideas can solve the problems they created is not just naive; it’s dangerous. The status quo would be to see today’s problems as costly externalities to be outsourced to future balance sheets while we go back to the couch and put our feet up.
Ask a Gen Z or a Millennial - or even me, a flannel-wearing Gen X’er - how to build a better future and Not One Of Us will say, “more of the same, please.”
Let’s talk about the climate crisis, implementing new ideas like wind and solar, and how to remediate the environment using less oil. Let’s talk about higher standards for stewardship of the common lands of Canada - ceded and not - by those who extract profits from them. Let’s talk about cooperation, community ownership and what we have in common to reinvigorate a caring culture instead of protecting personal interests and doubling down on the status quo.
I was born on Vancouver Island and have lived most of my life there. I remember skating on lakes, bumper-hitching on icy side streets, and Mt Arrowsmith closing due to too much snow!
But I wrote this a few days back on a sunny, 10C day in January following the warmest year on record. As we face today’s crises of climate, health care, housing and deep, profound inequality, how did we let this happen?
For the sake of our kids and their children to come, shed the status quo, and if we leave them anything, leave them with new ideas because they deserve a better future than the status quo.
•••
David Evans is a Sooke resident.