The New Suicide

I come from generations of ferocious volunteers – my father, who worked a full day running a textile business, would come home, eat, and gallop off to a committee meeting two or three times a week, a pattern which persisted for 40 years. In sharp contrast, I don’t like to leave the house except for shopping and parties, and these days I try to wriggle out of even those activities.

This, of course, is very wrong and I am going to change. Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who published that 90s classic on civic life, Bowling Alone, reports that even one community meeting a month can increase an individual’s happiness by 50 percent. 50 percent! Two hours in a meeting hall drinking bad coffee can make you twice as happy, imagine that. We thought it was art, or opera, or literary appreciation, yet it turns out to be attending a re-zoning meeting. Wonders simply never do cease.

I live on Salt Spring Island where there are more clubs than people. Volunteerism proliferates like the broom and deer that predate our gardens. Nearly everyone, across all the classes, can be busy every night doing one thing or another from the arts council to Rotary to knitting club to folk club. And that is a good thing; it makes the island – for those innocents who can afford it – warm, connected, gentle. Salt Spring, according to the last census, is one of the richest, most educated jurisdictions in Canada. Plus it’s the warmest part of Canada, and not only that, it is one of the top 10 visual arts towns in North America. House prices are nutty-high; nature is resplendent. They say in the States that as California goes, so goes the US. I’m going to venture that as progressive, wealthy, green, smart Salt Spring goes, so goes Canada. And that knife cuts deep. You don’t want to be us. We are committing a slow suicide.

We have abandoned our local government to the environmental left – this is, after all, where Elizabeth May has chosen to make her stand as head of the Green Party. I guess her thinking is that if she can’t get into Parliament from here, she won’t make it anywhere. For your sake, I hope she loses. Because on the evidence, what the Greens have in mind for us is nothing short of tyranny; a broke, exhausted, aging, and rapidly shrinking tyranny.

We watch our young people leave because they cannot afford property – despite 40,000 acres on Salt Spring alone lying fallow and neglected. And on the smaller islands in our jurisdiction, older citizens are forced to leave because there are no young people to provide the services they need. We have trouble housing our teachers or RCMP members because they can’t afford to live here, despite again, all those empty acres.

Our population is crashing, 4,000 have left out of 29,000 in only two years; remember, this in the warmest part of Canada, a short hop from three gleaming supra-modern cities. Nearly everyone still remaining has grey hair. Tourists day trip; there is a smattering of hotels and B&Bs, but families can’t come because we don’t allow vacation rentals. The principal marina, which brings in $30 million a year, has been viciously persecuted by our local government – the notorious Islands Trust – for more than 10 years. Last year, our keystone green business, the rightly famous Salt Spring Coffee Company, which produces over 40 jobs for young people, was put through a two-year rezoning process. After spending over one hundred thousand dollars complying to harsh green regulations, it was finally turned down based on a “bad feeling” by a trustee who not too long ago popped up here out of Montana.

I go to dinner parties where grown men and women, successful, having family, and connected are fit to be tied by the slow train wreck we are witnessing. But our political skills have atrophied and the other side is masterful, working the levers of power that they invented while we shopped. By assigning our civic life to experts – and green experts at that – who are all, every one of them, people who have no experience whatsoever of the private sector, we have risked the future.

It is now a truism to say the post-war generations went to sleep, politically speaking, and in Canada, from Trudeau on, we were happy to assign all our responsibilities to government and party on. Highly educated and informed consumers we all are, our snouts dug deep into the marrow of life, sucking up the vacations, the lovely fabrics of our clothing and upholstery, the make-up and I-Whatever.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s time-use surveys show that, compared with 2005, Americans spent less time shopping and more time taking part in “organizational, civic, and religious activities.”

Maybe we can take back our politics before we die children in the grip of tyrants.

Liz Nickson is Women's Post contributor and freelance journalist.

Photo Credit: MartinHoward courtesy Creative Commons.