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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-03-21, Page 5Other Views Must be using a different dictionary Borrow, borrow, borrow – and worry Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Earlier this month, the Blyth Business Improvement Area (BIA) finally passed its budget after a month of meeting cancellations mostly due to weather. Included in the budget was something that puzzled me: honorariums to be paid to volunteers involved with the BIA. Among the lines of expenditures and revenue were two $500 honorariums to be paid to individuals responsible for the BIA’s website and social media presence, respectively, as well as a $1,200 honorarium to be paid to whoever runs the outdoor market throughout the spring, summer and early fall. This puzzled me on a number of levels, the first of which was my bread and butter: the printed word. The first definition of “volunteer”, according to the Oxford Living Dictionaries, is “a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task” while its second definition more clearly states, someone “who works for an organization without being paid.” Now, before I dig myself a deep, deep hole here, I think that we need to look at how the word volunteer applies to various situations. Volunteer firefighters, for example, are the backbone of a major part of the protective services in Huron County and beyond. They do not work for free (though they don’t get paid near enough for what they do, in this reporter’s humble opinion). For firefighters, the first definition of volunteer is definitely the more fitting of the two. But for something like the BIA, if you’re a business owner, volunteering should mean one thing and one thing only: doing the job without pay. Why? Well, because the BIA is funded through taxation. Its levy is gathered from every commercial property and business in Blyth and it isn’t collected to directly line the pocket of business owners. It’s collected to line the pockets of business owners indirectly through driving commercial development and, thereby, increasing patronage of the stores. The BIA has a proud tradition of business owners and employees volunteering their time to make projects happen. Last year’s Hometown Holiday Weekend and parade, the former annual Streetfest event and even the outdoor market were all made possible by volunteer efforts. (It should be noted that the BIA, through its RTO4 partnership, did pay an employee to start the outdoor market, however there was always at least one BIA member there, volunteering their time.) While I’m not happy about any of the honorariums, the social media one particularly grinds my gears because social media is just a part of our modern lives anymore. We use it to communicate with each other, we use it to spread and find news. It’s not something people have to “try” to do, it’s something that’s as much a part of their life as watching television or reading the newspaper. Just look at The Citizen. Shawn and I have found ways to fit social media into our already busy schedule and, in the past several years, we’ve developed a thriving online presence with a new website on the way. It may not be fair to compare my paid job to a volunteer’s, however, so let’s just look at this from a simpler standpoint: the BIA doesn’t raise money to pay volunteers, it raises money to try and raise the tide of the community (and, as the saying goes, that rising tide raises all boats). While comparing to a paid position may not be fair, let’s compare it to another volunteer organization: the Blyth Lions. The Blyth Lions Club has more likes and more followers than the BIA’s Facebook presence (which is called Blyth Now, in case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen a Blyth BIA social media presence) and you can bet that whoever is taking care of it isn’t getting paid. The issue here, as far I can see, is drive. If a volunteer is looking to get paid for what they’re doing, they’re no longer a volunteer. Maybe it’s time to teach someone else to do it who still has the drive to make their community better for the sake of making the community better. Between rising taxes, increased costs brought on by higher minimum wages and the difficulty of trying to run small businesses in rural Ontario, our local businesses have it tough enough making ends meet. Other expenses don’t need to be piled on to the local business owners. It may be important to note that, as part of the BIA’s budget, it does say that a volunteer requested two of the three honorariums discussed above. If the BIA came together and decided to honour these volunteers for their hard work, that would be one thing. Someone requesting it, however, changes the entire discussion. Finally, if you can’t find a volunteer to do the job without paying them, then you don’t have the kind of buy-in needed to run a volunteer organization and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to shutter the group. That’s just how I view it here in the den. Denny Scott Denny’s Den THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 2019. PAGE 5. Age-old storytelling Currently, we find ourselves in the age of outrage. When people see something online they don’t like – by God, they will tell you they disagree and then probably call you an idiot somewhere along the way. Everyone has an opinion; that’s not new. But now, with social media, you can take that opinion right to the top for everyone to see. If you don’t like U.S. President Donald Trump, you can Tweet at him. If you disagree with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, you can go to his Facebook page and tell him he sucks. With this in mind, think of how things have changed for those of us who tell stories. Whether it’s the merry band of social justice warriors or just your standard Facebook followers, many seem perpetually on the cusp of being outraged and if they’re outraged, you better believe you’re going to hear about it. Years ago, Rolling Stone received a massive amount of backlash for its cover story on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. While the cover was tasteless and tone-deaf (Tsarnaev was pictured like a teen heartthrob), the story, written by Janet Reitman, was well-researched and insightful. Many on Facebook were upset by the cover, but went a step further, suggesting that writing about Tsarnaev at all was a misstep and that Rolling Stone should be ashamed. Detractors suggested the magazine write about the bombing survivors instead of Tsarnaev. There is a story to be written about the survivors – a great story – but to suggest a journalist should ignore the perpetrator is simply naive. For the longest time, the suggested solution to stopping terrorists groups like ISIS and Al- Qaeda was to stop covering the attacks. So, if Trump stops talking about his wall.... If journalists stop covering “bad” news, they’re irresponsibly presenting an incomplete view of the world. If news channels only broadcast good news, it presents a false narrative, like state-run news in Russia or North Korea (or Doug Ford’s Ontario). The Blyth Festival ran into this when a local media outlet ran a piece on the Festival’s In the Wake of Wettlaufer production, slated for this season. People, who hadn’t watched the piece or read anything about the show, were outraged to know the Festival was telling the story of a mass murderer. How dare they? These people – the eternally outraged – were no doubt up in arms when Wettlaufer’s crimes were exposed. How could this happen? Very often news coverage results in policy changes, increased awareness or criminal charges. Ignoring Wettlaufer’s story paves the way for someone to follow in her footsteps. (What if the Boston Globe didn’t report on pedophile priests because it might upset some people?) That’s not even considering the Festival’s stated method of writing the play, which is focused on families after many conversations with the families of Wettlaufer’s victims. We’ve had it here at The Citizen. As a local news organization, it’s our job to report the news. After posting a picture of a car accident, we were inundated with comments asking how we could post such a picture. There were no people in our picture and no one was hurt (we knew that before posting the picture) and one of Blyth’s main roads was blocked – sounds like something people should know. But no, as responsible journalists, according to some people, we should have turned our backs. I’m not even sure how people see these stories with their heads so far in the sand. Of course, sensitivity is always part of the equation when storytelling, but turning a blind eye benefits no one in an informed society. Aletter arrived from my friendly credit card company the other day telling me I’m such a valued customer they wanted to increase my credit limit. All I had to do was give them a call. I didn’t. The letter seems to be part of a trend these days to get people to borrow more money, even as more and more people worry that they can’t make ends meet. On television there are ads for companies that will happily loan you money even if you’ve been turned down multiple times by banks. Of course if these companies are willing to take a greater risk, they’ll also want the greater reward of higher interest rates. You might also have seen the ads for companies offering to show you your credit score and how a higher score means you can borrow more to buy a nicer car or home – which would then likely sink your credit score. The dangled temptation of having more by going farther into debt reminds me of how tobacco companies tried to persuade young people in the 1950s and 1960s that smoking was cool, knowing if they got us started young, they had a good chance of having customers for life. Meanwhile, despite a record-low unemployment rate and generally strong economy, more people are losing sleep, worried about how to make ends meet. The Canadian Payroll Association recently conducted a survey asking people to rank common life stresses such as personal health, work/career worries and financial stress. Worry about finances outdistanced everything else – 38 per cent compared to the next highest, personal health at nine per cent. The roots of today’s concerns of over- extended families were planted in 2008-2009 when the Bank of Canada (BOC) tried to keep Canada from falling into the Great Recession that had the U.S. and Europe in its grasp after the failure of several mammoth financial institutions. To stimulate the economy the BOC reduced its key lending rate to unheard lows. That, in turn, made it cheaper for people to borrow. Not only did this move tempt people to go deeper into debt, but it also drove up the costs of the biggest purchase most people ever make: houses. An old rule of personal finance states a house should cost no more than three times your household income. Fueled by low interest rates and soaring demand because cities are growing, competition has driven the average house price to nine times the median family income in Toronto. In Vancouver it’s 13 times. What makes this even worse than long-ago days is that generally the family income today includes both spouses contributing, which then requires those with children to shoulder child- care costs which, in the case of one couple quoted recently in The Globe and Mail, amounted to $1,600 a month for two kids. So there are realities that younger people deal with today that their parents and grandparents didn’t face. At the same time, part of the problem is brought on by young peoples’ higher expectation for how life should be lived. David Soberman, professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says social media contributes to this. Your friends on Facebook post photos about the great things they’re doing, such as exotic trips or new purchases. You see all this and realize you’re not doing that and feel something’s wrong with your life, he said. As well, thanks to the internet, people are exposed to many more ads these days. When he started teaching in 1999, the average person was exposed to fewer than 200 ads a day, Professor Soberman said. Today various studies estimate the total is 1,500 to 2,000 a day. An example of the increased expectation of today is the sort of vehicle you drive. In 2014, 43 per cent of those buying a vehicle chose a car. By last year that had dropped to 27 per cent as people preferred more expensive SUVs. To finance the higher cost, repayment periods are getting longer – more than half of car loans are for 84 months. Many people won’t have their car paid off before they need a new one. The problem with all this debt is that low interest rates can’t last forever. Since mid- 2017 the BOC has been slowly edging up rates. Although still a long way from “normal” rates, the prospect of having to renew loans at higher interest when they’re already struggling to pay the bills is stressing many people out. Me, I’m of an age that I don’t need to borrow money. I seldom approached the old limit on my credit card, let alone the one they want to give me. In fact, I really doubt that I’m quite the valued customer the company says I am because we pay our balance off each month so we don’t pay those double-digit interest rates that really make credit card companies money. Still, if they send out enough letters to enough “valued customers” they might lure some people into going into debt. Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk