Generation Squeeze's Hard Truths

We talk to ⁠Dr. Elaine MacDonald⁠ about a major update to Canada's most important environmental law and why it’s a big win for generational fairness.

The House of Commons recently passed landmark legislation overhauling the Canadian Environmental Protection Act for the first time in decades and recognizing the right of every individual in Canada to a healthy environment. Not only that, Bill S-5 tasked the federal government with upholding the principle of intergenerational equity in the bill’s implementation.

Dr. MacDonald was one of the bill's champions and is Ecojustice’s Healthy Communities Program Director. She’s an environmental engineer who applies her expertise to work related to air quality, water pollution, and toxic substances. 

Highlights

“We need to be protecting the environment for all generations, including future generations. So it really instills a kind of long-term thinking into government decision making,” Dr. MacDonald says. “Even within existing generations…when they're assessing substances for regulation under CEPA, they need to be thinking about all the generations that are currently here, from children to elderly people.”

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Dr. Paul Kershaw and Angie Chan chat with federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh about tackling the massive inequalities faced by younger Canadians. This far-ranging, in-depth interview also touches on:

Our website has a full transcript of this episode. A video with the complete interview is also on our YouTube channel, where you'll get to admire Mr. Singh's impressive bookshelf.

PS: If you're interested in the discussion about how long it takes a young person to save a down payment across Canada, check out our ⁠Straddling the Gap 2022⁠ report, in which we crunch the numbers for housing affordability in all provinces and many cities. 

Join our network⁠ to grow our power to tackle generational unfairness!

Highlights:

"We have to take care of our seniors, but we also need to make sure that young people have a fair shot, young families have a fair shot ,and that there isn't this inequality that exists right now," he says. "The way we do it is we are responsible with where we spend our resources, and we also need to look at increasing revenue in a responsible way as well."

While working on our Voters Guide for the Alberta election this month, we've found the province's political parties have been worrisomely quiet about climate change, even in the midst of unprecedented wildfires. That left us wondering: why's it so dang hard to talk about climate change? So for this episode, we invited Amber Bennett, a Calgary-based communications strategist, to reflect on her experience discussing climate change with Albertans. She offers some surprising insights and guidance for all Canadians wanting to have more meaningful, productive conversations about complex, controversial problems like climate change (and generational unfairness). These conversations can sometimes be painfully hard to have, but simply talking about climate is a critical way to tackle the climate crisis.

Has talking about climate change ever made you run screaming for the hills? Or maybe you've found your own ways to cross conversational divides? We'd love to hear about it! Share your experiences and tactics with us at ⁠⁠https://www.gensqueeze.ca/contact⁠⁠. And as we start our second season of Hard Truths, we'd also welcome any feedback you have about our show. 

Explore more:

Highlights

Anything we care about can become a climate conversation

"Climate's super polarized here still. There are very well-funded groups who have worked very hard to make it toxic. But that's not to say that climate doesn't connect to everything we care about. So we can have a conversation about anything really and it can be a climate change conversation. So whether that's about affordability, or if that's about future job opportunities or health or inflation or protection of nature. There's lots of different kind of entry points into those conversations." -- Amber Bennett

Restoring trust through stories

"I believe that if we can tell stories where things worked and where they are working and then draw connections to people's lives, that that helps to address the kind of defensiveness that we are all collectively holding around, 'We are going to hell in a hand basket. Governments are not stepping up and acting quickly enough to protect us and have our best interests in mind.' So that's where you kind of get apathy. If it doesn't feel like it's gonna make a difference, then why bother? But if we can tell stories where it has made a difference, this has been effective. I think that those nuggets help to break through the defensiveness that we have and help us open up with a sense of trust." -- Amber Bennett

Get real about climate and connect it to what we love

"I think as moms and grandmothers and as parents, we need to get real about the fact that we are never, ever going back. Not in our generation or our children or their children. We are locked in for centuries of this. And so I think that that will help when we're faced with decisions -- be it on costs or investment or priorities -- that will help us make choices that are more reflective of where we're really at. And I believe that women and parents and mothers have a very big capacity to have that kind of conversation... We need to get real, and connect it to the things that we love. And that kind of love is what is gonna pull us through the hard conversation and into the motivation to do things differently." -- Amber Bennett

Economist Kevin Milligan joins us to dig into the Hard Truth about medical budgets. Older Canadians didn’t pay enough in taxes during their working lives to cover the medical care they now use. That means a smaller pool of younger taxpayers are footing the bill for boomers’ ballooning medical needs. Our aging population's medical and long-term-care needs are expected to grow another 50% over the next seven years. All Canadians benefit from a robust medical system, so how can we pay for medical care in a way that's more fair to all generations?

"Whatever problems we have now, they're just growing tremendously...Economists, social scientists, academics, regular folks out there -- they kind of know that the population is aging, but I don't think they know how much that's going to matter over the next 10 years." -- Kevin Milligan

Explore more:

This episode features a discussion about our government relations work ⁠— specifically about the week we spent in Ottawa directed towards winning a 2023 federal budget that works for all generations.

Have thoughts about our discussion that you'd like to share with us?   Send us a voice message:  https://www.speakpipe.com/GenSqueeze

Yesterday (February 20) was Family Day, so we thought we'd bring you a family-themed discussion. 

This episode of Gen Squeeze's Hard Truths podcast features an interview with freelance labour journalist Emma Arkell. We chat about the staffing crisis that plagues the child care sector. Low wages, poor working conditions, lack of opportunities for career advancement, feeling disrespected — these are among the issues that are leading child care workers to leave the sector in high numbers. This, in turn, is putting the promise of $10-a-day child care in jeopardy.

Emma's recent piece on child care staffing crisis: https://www.chatelaine.com/longforms/child-care-staffing-crisis/

Follow Emma on Twitter: @EmmaArkell7

Have thoughts about our discussion that you'd like to share with us?  Send us a voice message:  https://www.speakpipe.com/GenSqueeze

Canadians are rightfully proud of our publicly-funded medical care system. Our national self-image is closely associated with the idea that treatment of illness is a social responsibility. In this podcast episode, we make the case that prevention of illness should also be regarded as a social responsibility. Unless we can prioritize illness prevention, it's very likely that our medical care system will continue to be plagued by large patient loads, long wait times, and demoralized doctors and nurses.

The evidence makes clear that social determinants are more important for health and wellbeing than spending on medical care. In other words, without access to decent homes, adequate child care, good incomes, and a clean environment our medical care system will never be able to prevent people from dying early.

That's why, along with a number of partners, Gen Squeeze has launched the Get Well Canada initiative. Our health care system will "get well" — and we along with it — when we start investing where health begins: the places we live, work, and grow. Find out more about GWC at https://www.getwellcanada.ca/.

Have thoughts about our discussion that you'd like to share with us? You can send us a voice message here: https://www.speakpipe.com/GenSqueeze

This episode features a discussion about hope — about why we think it's worth it to struggle to change things for the better (even though it can sometimes seem otherwise).

About our guest: Kareem Kudus is a member of Generation Squeeze's board of directors and a contributor to our research.

The article mentioned at the beginning of the episode: https://www.gensqueeze.ca/kareem_kudus_first_year.

You can find Kareem's other writings here: https://kareemk.substack.com/

Have thoughts about our discussion that you'd like to share with us?  Send us a voicemail:  https://www.speakpipe.com/GenSqueeze

In this episode, we chat about the social media influencer Andrew Tate and make the case that his popularity is partly a symptom of our broken intergenerational system. People like Tate are able to highlight the very real challenges that young men face and channel their frustrations in a toxic, anti-social direction. 

We start by asking why Tate attracts an audience much larger than organizations like Gen Squeeze — and we explore a range of other themes, including misogyny,  intergenerational technological divides, and populism.

Have thoughts about our discussion that you'd like to share with us? You can send us a voice message here: https://www.speakpipe.com/GenSqueeze

A listener recently sent us a message: "Time to take the gloves off. Stop the kumbaya and love B.S. Time for boomers to pay." So in this episode, Angie Chan and Paul Kershaw explore what we should be asking older Canadians to do in our fight for generational fairness, and how we can have hard conversations about generational injustice with older family members and friends, without just making them feel guilty or defensive. They also tackle a deeper question that many changemakers wrestle with: will love or anger throw the knock-out punch?