The Strange Political Psychology of Canadians

If The Toronto Star’s Sarah Barmak is to believed, the Ontario government—usually considered teacher-friendly—has just declared ‘all-out war’ on the province’s teachers. It is a strange move, and one wonders what the McGuinty government hopes to gain from it or, indeed, how Mr. McGuinty sold the idea at home. His wife Terri is, after all, a teacher.

Equally strange is how—in my experience at least—Canadians so often react to confrontations of this sort. These reactions bring to mind two observations.

How we value our children

First, we are usually willing to pay more to someone to clean our house than to look after our children. We pay $15-$20 for a housecleaner without blinking, but balk at paying the neighbour’s kid $10 to baby-sit. I am not suggesting that housecleaners are overpaid. What I am trying to do is point out a rather strange order of values.

Our children are supposed to be our first priority, and yet we pay less to someone we trust with their lives than we do to someone who vacuums up. Now it is possible that, as a friend quipped, a well-looked after child might die of cholera in dirty house, but this is unlikely.

So, why is it we skimp and safe and run ourselves ragged to ensure that our children get the best we can provide, and yet we place so little value on the work of those who look after them, not mention those who teach them?

The rich will always be with us

Second is our attitude to other people who work for a living, and to those we don’t. Perhaps I frequent the wrong people, but I rarely hear anyone complaining about millionaires and billionaires. I hear little about them from our politicians, unlike, for instance, France’s newly-minted president, François Hollande, who proposes to (whisper this) increase their taxes.

We ignore the wealthy, we (wilfully it seems to me) forget how much power they have over our lives, and we do not begrudge them anything. The rich are rich in much the same way that the sky is blue and the grass is green. It’s the way the world is made. The old proverb has been turned on its head: the rich will always be with us.

And yet, when someone who works for a living very much as we do appears to have better working conditions, say, more sick days, longer holidays, some sort of job security, a bit of respect at work, we are resentful. Whenever there is a confrontation between employer and employees the resentment, not against the employer but against the employees rises to the surface.

Never mind that the employer might be a millionaire. Never mind that as now with Ontario’s teachers the employees do exhausting and often thankless work (if you don’t believe me, try standing in front of a Grade 6 class for half a day) without which our society would fall apart.

We begrudge the luck of those who are like us

We resent the employees, blaming them for the disruptions and inconveniences, however minor, the labour dispute brings to our lives. When negotiations fall apart because, say, the employer wants to cut cost of living increases, effectively handing employees a wage cut every year, we are indignant. Not with employer, but with the employees for wanting too much: “I don’t get a cost of living increase. Why should you?”

Instead of saying, “Right, I don’t want to get paid less every year. How do I get a cost of living increase in my job?” we begrudge those who have just a little something we don’t.

Running water

Imagine that we live in a village with 100 households. Twenty households in the village have running water. The rest of us must go to the village well, draw our water there, and carry it home. Should we, who must go to the well for our water, curse the good fortune of these other households, or should we try to get running water into our homes as well?