MAKING YOUR MILES COUNT Robert D. Scheper
This Too Shall Pass A while back I read a biography of John D. Rockefeller (Titan). The author mentioned a time frame of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and referred to it as one of the most corrupt time frames in US history. Politicians hardly moved a pen without a bag of money. It was a very dark time. However, just ten years later a move of ethics swept the country and the volume of scandals dropped significantly. Through history, society has endured “movements” from one spectrum to the other, especially in free-democratic societies. We as Canadians, are experiencing political corruption, scandals, and extremism. In my opinion, we are very close to the end of one swing. Society seems to be house cleaning political dogma and power. It’s a little like World War One where one side advanced way too far for their supply system to maintain. The troops at the front become isolated and thin; then the counterattack finds them easy pickings to be pushed back... way back... often to behind their original lines. Let me explain.
COVID gave politicians and bureaucracies an opportunity to grab huge spheres of power. Adding new priorities and procedures to an already fragile medical system, the new “overreach” caused many highly qualified and seasoned medical professionals to quit/retire or even be laid off. So, understaffed and with more complex priorities and “mandates”, the fragile medical system began to collapse. 10 • OVER THE ROAD
Backlogs became “write-offs” and faith in the Canadian Health Care system began to drop alongside the faith in government to keep us safe, secure, healthy, and appropriately informed. The problem spread to more government agencies than just Health Care. CRA (with whom I have much history) has a near 18-month backlog of audits. Many staff were taken off “normal” issues to help manage new programs like the: CERB, CTWS, CEWS, CEBA just to name the popular four and the new hiring of staff has not taken a whole lot of issues off the table. New staff are simply too green and too few. The problem is not just the Federal Government as provincial programs, education and other issues add to the near exhaustion of highly demanding systems. The bureaucratic infrastructure of our country is simply not able to handle the demands inflicted by COVID. It barely held together before 2020. While some are clamoring to push even more power through the systems, it will all be in vain. It will only cause it to collapse further. A logical assumption should be a re-engineering of the Canadian government… but that would assume the government has a “logical” approach.
Canada is a very “socialistic” country, arguably more so than even Britain, our mother. We have seven chartered banks... the next country with the lowest number of chartered banks is France which AUGUST 2022
