The nation? Sorry, but it’s not just you

Opinion

I wonder sometimes what people are thinking when they argue this country is broken.

And sometimes I wonder if what they mean has more to do with the fact they, personally, don’t have all the things they feel they deserve.

Canada has coasted along well enough for a long time on low interest rates and conspicuous consumption. The ability to borrow beyond your means has meant a huge increase in what people possess, and a corresponding increase in what they think they’re owed. Two cars. Vacations in the south. Cruises.

It’s hard to take a guy seriously when he says he’s being unfairly financially crushed in Canada when he’s fuelling up a $70,000 truck that’s never seen a load in the back larger than a spring-cleaning trip to the Brady landfill.

It’s also worth remembering that, just a generation ago, interest rates on mortgages hit 17 per cent, and there was no chance of anyone successfully carrying such large debts.

In my family, those were the hamburger years.

Why the hamburger years? Because when my parents were offered a mortgage at 17 per cent, they opted to take out a personal loan guaranteed by the equity they’d managed to build in their house, and pumped every cent they could into paying that loan off as fast as possible.

That meant no vacations that weren’t camping trips. No purchases of new vehicles. No extravagances. Mom reupholstered furniture that had been thrown out from a university faculty lounge for our living room. She made her own wine — not always good — long before it was a popular pastime.

We picked fruit and vegetables at u-picks, and froze them for the winter in repurposed milk cartons. Mom made deals with Nova Scotian farmers, and could be found in the kitchen with her knives, breaking down a half a hog or a beef quarter for the freezer. She even made her own lard. Nothing went to waste.

And we ate hamburger — the cheapest possible regular ground beef — at every meal, and in every form, that we possibly could. Hamburgers, of course. Fried meatballs with a core of utility cheddar cheese. Spaghetti sauce with ground meat. Roasted green peppers, filled with rice and hamburger. (There were other food-budgeting near misses, but I won’t go into the horrors of sliced beef heart stir-fry, but it happened. More than once.)

Eventually, the house was paid off, and hamburger made fewer appearances.

All of this is to point out that I think hard times are clearly coming again. It’s been a long time, and, as Canadians, I believe we’re singularly unprepared for the coming version of the hamburger years.

Whatever happens with U.S. tariffs and the mad “economist” to the south, the one thing that’s been injected into our current world is uncertainty.

What will Donald Trump do next? What will he decree three months from now? Even if the tariffs were to magically disappear, why would we believe they couldn’t reappear just as quickly?

With that uncertainty, businesses are likely to retrench: it’s hard to invest money into expansion or new plants if the apple cart is going to be overturned on a regular basis. It’s probably fair to say a good number of companies are suggesting they’ll do certain things just to placate Trump, but in reality will drag their feet on any actual investment for long enough to see if the risk level will diminish. I know I would.

The increased costs of tariffs will cost jobs here and in the U.S., and the legitimate needs of the less fortunate will increase. Meanwhile, a block of Canadians will continue to clamour for lower taxes, arguing that the responsibility to pay for the government services and benefits we receive should somehow not fall to those who are actually able to pay.

My parents did have some advantages.

My father made a good living. House prices were far lower, for certain, but wages were far lower, too.

Other things were a little more tangible. My mother’s Kenmore washer was remarkably straightforward and ran for more than 25 years, needing only a replacement water pump at one point. The part was easy to find, and the repair was quick and inexpensive. My parents’ large chest freezer was purchased when I was a kid, and moved to Victoria with them when they retired. It continued running — located outdoors under the deck in B.C. — until after both their deaths.

Now, it’s back to the store for new appliances that seem destined to fail before they reach their fifth anniversary. Don’t get me started on the streaming service that suddenly declined to stream anything to our television, because the poor old TV wasn’t up to the streaming service’s picture-quality standard.

The thing is, many of us have been living in a privileged world, made possible by cheap offshore-made products, low tariffs and most of all, easy and inexpensive debt. Common sense says that’s not going to be the way things are for the next four years — or more.

Oh, and back to the hamburger years for a sec.

Things were hard, we didn’t always get what we wanted, but we weren’t unhappy. We simply didn’t miss the things we didn’t know about.

And now, if we work together, buying Canadian, being careful about what things are needs and what things are luxuries, and most of all doing something that has become fleeting — becoming involved and sharing members of a Canadian community, rather than a loosely-connected group of small universes crying out “me and my needs first” — I know we can move mountains.

Broken things, after all, used to get fixed with ingenuity and care — not simply thrown away.