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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2017-03-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2017. PAGE 5. Other Views Where are kids on the priority list? Last month a number of articles came out about how young couples are deciding it's just too expensive to have children. They might have been saved this problem if their parents had made the same decision, because they might not have been born in the first place. I don't want to seem unsympathetic to people starting out today but deciding if you can afford to have a child is a relatively new luxury. Until 50 years ago married couples knew that creation was a definite possibility if they indulged into a little bedtime recreation. Birth control options were very limited and often not all that effective. Lots of families got started long before couples had any of the creature comforts felt to be essential today. You could say it was the cost of loving. My generation was the first to experience the revolution brought on by the contraceptive pill. Even then, we didn't seem to be very rational about choosing to start a family. I was in my first steady job, we were living in rented accommodation with used furniture and appliances when we had our first daughter. If anything, we were even less able to afford our second child, having recently left that secure job and gone way out on a financial limb to purchase the old Blyth Standard in a sweetheart deal from Doug and Lorna Whitmore. After that, along came numbers three and four, each arriving under circumstances that modern couples would probably say weren't fit to bring a child into. It's a wonder child welfare authorities didn't step in! We were finished having our family of four by the age many couples today think they're ready to have their first. We didn't seem to be that unusual. Most other couples were having children at what would be considered a scandalously young age today. Now I know things are different. I came Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk from a generation that's seen as incredibly privileged these days and we were — compared to our parents who were children of the Great Depression and survivors of World War II. Compared to today, the price we paid for our first house seems ridiculous — but of course so was our annual income. Housing and childcare are the biggest changes. The cost of buying a house is way out of whack compared to the increase in the price of other living costs like food. I can't help wondering if it has something to do with the fact our families transitioned from one -income in the 1950s and early 1960s to having two good incomes in later years, and developers grabbed more than their share of this bonanza, leaving people as badly off, or worse, than when one person brought home the bacon. Childcare has also become a daunting expense. When we were having kids many young mothers, recalling being raised by full- time moms themselves, chose to stay home at least until their kids went off to school. For those who didn't, a neighbourly babysitter was an accepted alternative. Today, the high cost of housing means that two incomes are needed just to support the mortgage. Leaving your child with a babysitter is considered to be nearly child abuse so more people turn to licensed daycare facilities where the rates are rising faster than the cost of living. Many young people are also burdened with a ridiculous amount of student debt. Governments seeking to avoid the wrath of taxpayers have shirked on providing universities and colleges with adequate funding increases, unfairly putting the burden instead on students through soaring tuition fees. But part of the problem also is perception and, frankly, scare tactics. Recently, south of the border, the U.S. Department of Agriculture put the cost of raising a child born in 2015 until his/her 18th birthday at $250,000. It's one of those scary figures that reminds me of all the experts who say I need to have $1 million in savings before I can retire. I guess I'll be working until I'm 150. Luckily, nobody helpfully provided my generation with that sort of figure when we were young. We wanted kids. We had them. We didn't, as one professional double -income Alberta couple quoted in a Globe and Mail article said, worry that our kids would "starve to death". Maybe because we were too young and naive to know better. I do know we had to say "no" a lot when our kids wanted things, which is maybe why succeeding generations didn't want to have to say "no" to their kids, since each generation seems to feel required to make their kids' lives better than they had it. In the long run, which matters more though: that a kid never gets to go to Disney World or that she/he was never born because parents thought missing out was worse than not living? If middle class parents think they can't afford to have children we're going to need to depend even more on immigration of people who either couldn't, or didn't, delay having kids until they thought they could afford them. In the long run, what's the priority? If kids come before the perfect house, the February cruise and the 60" television, you'll find a way to make it work — just as your grandparents did. Don't overthink what came naturally to them. One of the best parts of a Huron winter 0 ver the past two weeks, I've had the pleasure of visiting a few different maple syrup producers in Huron County. I won't divulge which ones (aside from Blyth Creek Maple Farm as the photos from my visit are in this edition of The Citizen), but you can check out our upcoming Salute to Agricultural special section for more information. Huron County has a great number of maple syrup producers which is a very good thing for someone like me who loves pancakes. It used to be that some mornings I would wake up early and make pancakes for myself and Ashleigh. I would throw whatever sweet seasonings or additions I could find to make them memorable. Since then, I've started a family tradition of breakfast. Every Saturday and Sunday morning at the Scott household (unless I'm out taking pictures at a breakfast) the sweet smell of pancakes with a touch of vanilla will waft out of the house, accompanied by the smell of hash browns, bacon, fresh -ground coffee and cooking eggs. That smell is accompanied by the image of me running around with bedhead, cursing at my poor planning and several different things being done at the same time. Like I said, it hasn't always been that way — I would always try and make pancakes on the weekend with a dash of Huron County syrup, but when my daughter Mary Jane was born I decided it was time for a change. One of my favourite memories of living at my father's house in Goderich was the weekend breakfasts. I would grab a plate full of more bacon and sausage than I had any right eating, pile a couple pieces of buttered toast on top and sit down to enjoy a great meal. At the time, I didn't think much of it — this was just how weekends were at my dad's house unless he was working out of town. When Mary Jane was born, however, I noticed something missing on Saturday and Sunday mornings: dad's big breakfast. It wasn't the sausage or the bacon, but rather the idea that we could sit down, talk about the past week and look forward to the week ahead. So I sat Ashleigh down and explained the problem — that we didn't have any similar traditions. I told her I wanted to create something similar, but something that was all my own. I felt it was important enough to make it work so I decided that Saturday and Sunday I'd wake up and take to the kitchen, making whatever classic breakfast foods I could. After months of experimentation we've got the basic recipe down. I start to cook the bacon (in the oven, if you haven't tried this, you are cooking bacon wrong) and then mix up the pancakes (or waffles if we're feeling fancy) and get them spread across the griddle. It's a small thing, but it's become something I look forward to all week. More so now that Mary Jane can sit in her high chair and take in the scents and sights of the meal if not the fantastic tastes in it. It's hard to mess up pancakes. Whether they are from scratch or from a package, they are a pretty simple thing to work with. What really makes or breaks them as a meal is the syrup. I used to be an Aunt Jemima butter - flavoured syrup shopper, but things changed when I started working for the media in Huron County. I started trying the syrup we have here and was more than happy to discover it was the best syrup I had ever tasted. I look forward to sharing that culinary experience with Mary Jane. Fortunately, as I stated, Huron County provides ample opportunities to have different grades and brands of syrup. What makes it special, however, and what I look forward to introducing Mary Jane to, is how many of these producers are willing to open up the secrets of making the syrup to you. You can visit them, ask them questions and even experience, in some cases, what it takes to make the best syrups around. I look forward to the days when Mary Jane and I can walk through a maple bush looking at the taps and knowing that we either can or have tasted the product coming out of those trees. Can you do that in other places? Sure. But something about the producers in Huron County seems to make them especially open to showing people exactly how the syrup goes from sap to the top of the flapjacks. Of course, you can't point at syrup as an isolated product. Most producers in Huron County I've run into are happy to talk about what goes into their labours, be it meat, crops, cheese, beer, cider or wine. It's a benefit of being in Huron County. Syrup will, however, be one of the best as far as I'm concerned. It's sweet, it's natural and, when it's fresh, it marks the end of winter. Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense Problemless solutions Last Monday night, Central Huron Deputy -Mayor Dave Jewitt, in speaking about council's consideration of abolishing its ward system, said it felt as though council was, and I'm paraphrasing, trying to find a solution in the absence of a problem. I thought that was an intelligent and profound way to sum up the conversation that night. More profound than, say, the classic, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but both serve essentially the same purpose. How many problemless solutions local municipal councils consider on a meeting -to - meeting basis is perhaps a topic for another day. But, take it from someone who sits in on a lot of these debates: some of these discussions are warranted, while many, many others are not. Jewitt's comments came at a time when it seemed as though another solution was being proposed that didn't quite identify with a corresponding problem, but, more specifically, a manufactured corresponding problem. With a provincial election right around the corner, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced that she would be slashing hydro bills by 25 per cent. Hydro costs have plagued the Wynne government based on an issue that started with her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty and his Green Energy Act and the cancellation of planned gas plant projects at an estimated cost of over $1 billion to Ontario ratepayers. Wynne's plan to buy votes with hydro cuts — SURPRISE! — comes with a catch. Apparently it will cost Ontarians more in the future, but will result in savings in the here and now. I won't, for a second, try to make the case that hydro costs aren't a problem. The title of this column, after all, is "Problemless Solutions" so this isn't exactly one of those. Many people across the province, especially in our communities, are being suffocated by the sharp rise in hydro costs. What I will say, though, is that this wasn't a problem just a few years ago. So... what we have here is a case of Kathleen Wynne creating a problem and then, once the people have finally had enough (or when she has an approval rating of 14 per cent), proposing to "fix" it and wanting the my -other - car -is -a -white -horse treatment. It takes a special kind of egomaniac to create a problem and then want the hero treatment for fixing it — remembering, of course, that if Wynne/McGuinty hadn't created the problem, it wouldn't need a solution. In fact, it wouldn't even exist. The topic of self-created importance and reliance has been hot at The Citizen offices as of late. As I have mentioned in a previous column, new computers and new programs for those computers have made for some stressful days. And, as Publisher Keith Roulston pointed out in one of his recent columns, the problems we're dealing with didn't exist on earlier computers and previous versions of software. It's a simple system: You create a problem that only you can fix to ensure repeat business. It's been done by car companies, technology companies and just about every industry under the sun. Politics should be different. You're playing with people's lives and their incomes. To play the games that are being played is just a shame. To see how low some Canadian politicians have sunk to try and earn four more years at a job is just a slap in the face to those simply trying to scrape out a living.