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