Thursday, August 01, 2019

Understanding -- And Empathy


Everyone knows that Justin Trudeau is a child of privilege. Andrew Scheer plans to drive that message home by presenting himself in stark contrast to Trudeau. He claims that he "knows what it’s like when families feel anxious that they won’t make it to the end of the month. Someone who’s never had to worry about that can’t possibly relate to it on a personal level.”

Except, Paul Willcocks writes:

Scheer is paid $264,400 a year. He lives rent-free in a taxpayer-funded 34-room mansion with a chef, chauffeur and household manager.
He might remember his parents feeling anxious about making it to the end of the month when he was a child. They were solidly middle class — his mother a nurse, his father a unionized librarian and proofreader at the Ottawa Citizen. But they had three children, so money was likely tight at times.
But as a career politician, Scheer surely hasn’t worried about paying the bills for a long time. He had a history degree and limited work experience when he was elected as an MP in 2005. He’s done political staff jobs, part-time work as a server and briefly sold insurance in a friend’s agency.
Then at 25, Scheer hit the jackpot. He was elected MP for Regina-Qu’Appelle, and started collecting about $140,000 a year — about $195,000 in current dollars.
Less than two years later, Scheer was appointed assistant deputy chairman of committees of the whole and a deputy Speaker. The title has a vaguely Dwight Schrute quality, but the job brought a 10-per-cent pay increase over the base pay for an MP.
And after the Harper government was re-elected in 2011, Scheer was elected Speaker. That took his pay to $236,600 and gave him an apartment on Parliament Hill and taxpayer-paid housing in The Farm, a 5,000-square-foot residence on four acres.
Since he was elected as an MP at 25 in 2005, Scheer has collected about $3 million in salary. For the last eight years, he’s lived in housing paid for by taxpayers.
He isn’t doing anything wrong. Parliament approved the pay plan.
But it’s ridiculous for him to claim that “I know what it’s like when families feel anxious that they won’t make it to the end of the month.”

Franklin Roosevelt was also a child of privilege. That didn't preclude him from understanding what it was like to be poor and unemployed. However, he never claimed that he and his family had trouble paying the bills at the end of the month.

The issue is about understanding -- and empathy. One's background does not make either inevitable.

Image: The Tyee

8 comments:

rumleyfips said...

Father , union librarian; mother; nurse; lived in Ottawa. That's a far cry from Tobacco Road.

The Mound of Sound said...


In this, the era in which all conservatives take their lead from Trump, honesty and decency have no currency. You say whatever you imagine will energize your base knowing, with some confidence, you are unlikely to be punished for exaggeration or outright lie. Lie, rinse, repeat often enough and the lie becomes truth. It has worked for everyone for decades - Bush Jr., Dick Cheney and the neo-cons, the entire Republican Congress as far back as 2001, Trump certainly, Boris Johnson and our very own Harper and his heirs, successors and assigns. It wouldn't be a stretch to add the Liberals also.

Owen Gray said...

It's another case, rumley, where the manufactured image doesn't jive with reality.

Owen Gray said...

Lies have a lot of currency these days, Mound. They are the keys which open the doors to the kingdom.

Anonymous said...

This link in the column is also interesting reading https://globalnews.ca/news/392961/justin-trudeau-reveals-details-of-his-1-2-million-inheritance/ .

UU

Owen Gray said...

At least Trudeau is providing some real numbers, UU. If Scheer provided real numbers, it would blow his whole campaign strategy.

ffd said...

Oh, these faux poor. That's a game that's been going on for centuries, if not millennia.
Martin Luther claimed he came from modest beginnings but they turned out to be solidly middle class by the standards of his time. Archeologists dug up the garbage pit of his childhood home and found a lot of roasted animal bones, especially goose. Also a child sized crossbow and clay marbles. To live like this at that time you had to be pretty well off though not necessarily at the very top of society.
A lot of well off people define poverty as having less money than someone else. I met a lot of dentists who would describe themselves as "not rich, you know" in those exact words and with suitably pathetic looks. They couldn't say they were poor, because obviously they weren't, so they were "not rich", presumably because some other dentist or doctor had more money.
I think the faux poor claims are supposed to let the poorer people know it's their own fault since the speaker overcame his allegedly humble origins.
I love archeology.

Owen Gray said...

It's remarkable, ffd, how many people -- who were given a hand up -- claim that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.