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Happiness Catch-22: Wanting More Makes Us Unhappy by Nick Kossovan

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From 2001 to 2004, I worked/lived in India. I saw firsthand heartbreaking poverty. My takeaway from my experience in India is that North Americans have no real problems, just 1st world problems. Our financial stress, feeling unsuccessful, and constantly seeking fulfillment are caused by marketing propaganda’s influences and overabundance. It’s no secret that marketers and advertisers keep us wanting more and more. This manufactured insatiable appetite to consume has eroded our ability to have any gratitude for all we have compared to most of the world. Canadians’ lack of gratitude for living a 1st world lifestyle is truly appalling!

In 2018 almost half the world lived on less than $5.50 a day. According to the World Bank, 3.4 billion people struggle to meet basic needs.

Western society, especially North America, measures happiness and success by comparing oneself with others. For the most part, how we feel about our income, car, and house are moulded by our family, friends, colleagues, neighbors’ income, car, and house. It’s a national pass time to worry about relative status, which is why much of our consumerism revolves around trying to “look rich.”.

Marketing propaganda has made us believe we’re entitled to a certain lifestyle. If you’re not living the lifestyle you’re supposedly entitled to, we’re a failure. Not long ago, when I’d see somebody wearing a $5,000 watch, for example, I’d look at my $200 watch and think, “Maybe I’m doing something wrong.”

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Buying a Breitling® watch, an Audi S6 Sedan, or a Lardini single-breasted blazer may make you feel happier. Like with my aforementioned watch example, it has a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses status effect. However, the happiness doesn’t last long, since eventually “the Jones” will either buy what you bought or something regarded as “better.” This makes us want to buy more stuff to one-up “the Jones.” Let’s be honest; we all want to be “the Jones.”

When the latest iPhone comes out, the lineup at Apple stores are people who have a functioning iPhone in their pocket, wanting to be “the Jones.” (FYI, we’re on iPhone13, the first iPhone came out on June 29, 2007.)

Moreover, we tend to compare ourselves to those who appear wealthier than us, an illusion easy to create, given the ease with which credit can be acquired today, coupled with social media. Thorstein Veblen, the 20th-century economist who coined “conspicuous consumption” and “invidious comparisons,” highlighted how people use luxury goods to display their social status, which in 2022 social media amplifies. As early as 1899, Veblen observed that people lived on treadmills of wealth accumulation, incessantly competing with others but not increasing their own well-being. Sounds familiar?

Wanting, and therefore constantly seeking, recognition (READ: validation) is the biggest driver of human behavior, which explains social media’s addictive quality. (Social Media = “Look at me!”) You giving a $2,000 cheque to your favorite charity receives no social applause. However, post a selfie of yourself wearing a $1,500 COBB leather jacket on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—you’ll receive likes, comments, and ego-stroking. You’ll temporarily be happy, but once the euphoria wears off, you’ll want to buy more recognition. When it comes to ever-changing fashion, marketing propaganda tells you that your clothes will give you the recognition you crave more than your character or actions.

Unfortunately, our society has gotten to the point where we feel recognition, respect, and love are more likely to come from owning a 65-inch flat-screen TV or driving a Tesla Model S than from doing good deeds or just being a good person.

As social animals, status is naturally important to us. We’re anxious to stand out from the crowd—to tower over our peers, gain their respect, and “hopefully” their love, which we believe will make us happy and fulfilled.

For hundreds of years, we’ve inherently known that consumption doesn’t lead to happiness. Every religion and philosophical tradition evangelizes this concept. Karl Marx’s most important insight was his theory of alienation, which he defined as the sense of estrangement from the self that comes from being part of a materialistic society, in which we are cogs in a vast market-based machine.

You don’t need to be religious (or a Marxist) to see how absurd some of the claims our hyper-consumerist society makes. We’re promised happiness with the next pay raise, the next new gadget—even the next sip of soda. In his book The Happiness Fantasy, Carl Cederström, a Swedish business professor, argues that companies and advertisers have promised satisfaction. Instead, they have led people into a joyless production and consumption rat race. As a result, though the material comforts of life have undeniably increased for Canadians, these “things” don’t give our life meaning.

 

We give our life meaning when we:

  • give more than we take
  • help someone in distress
  • share
  • empathize
  • develop meaningful relationships we can count on
  • are a good son, daughter, or friend
  • serve others

 

You could easily interpret this article as a lamentation against modern life and capitalism. For the record, I’m a very public proponent of democratic capitalism with a modern welfare state. My attempt here is to appeal to everyone to remember that material prosperity has both benefits and costs. The costs come when we allow our hunger for the trappings of prosperity to blind us from the timeless sources of true human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work in which we earn our respective definitions of success and serving others. These have always been, and will always be, the things that deliver the happiness I see so many trying to obtain through their consumerism.

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Nick Kossovan, a self-described connoisseur of human psychology, writes about what’s on his mind from Toronto. You can follow Nick on Twitter and Instagram @NKossovan

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Child care in Canada: Trudeau unveils new help for providers – CTV News

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The federal government is launching a new loan program to help child-care providers in Canada expand their spaces, and will be extending further student loan forgiveness and training options for early childhood educators, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.

The prime minister unveiled a trio of child-care-centric commitments that will be included in the upcoming federal budget, with the aim of opening up more $10-a-day child-care spaces across the country, as the Liberals continue to work towards creating 250,000 new spaces by March 2026.

Specifically, the Liberals are vowing to offer $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants to public and not-for-profit child-care providers, so they can build or renovate their care centres. 

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This funding will be administered through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMCH), which Trudeau called “a common sense approach that will help child care be developed alongside housing.”

An additional $48 million is being earmarked for the next four years to extend student loan forgiveness — similar to the program offered to rural doctors and nurses — to early childhood educators, in an effort to incentivize more teachers to work in smaller communities. 

The federal government is also promising $10 million over the next two years to train more early childhood educators.

The prime minister, speaking in Surrey, B.C., alongside the minister currently leading the file, Jenna Sudds, touted the bilateral child-care agreements in effect across the country for seeing thousands of children placed in affordable spaces.

However, in recent months Canadian parents and care providers have sounded alarms about increasingly long daycare waitlists. And, operators in some provinces have threatened to withdraw from the lower-cost program because they’re struggling to make ends meet. 

Trudeau said while the government has funded 100,000 spaces so far and is aware of the challenges in rolling out this new national program, not enough families have access and not all provinces are moving as fast as they should. 

“I want to take a moment to talk to young moms, many of you millennials. You’ve grown up with so many pressures in this economy, the 2008 recession, COVID, climate change … and we want to make sure that everyone — especially moms raising kids — has the best chance to succeed and thrive,” Trudeau said.

“As Canada grows, as families grow, we want to make sure more kids can access high-quality child care… That’s what fairness for every generation is all about.”

The prime minister also got political, accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of opposing the program, despite the Official Opposition voting in support of a recently passed Liberal piece of legislation meant to enshrine in law a commitment to the Canada-wide early learning and child-care system, and the long-term funding needed to maintain it. 

Reacting to the news, NDP MP and critic for children, families, and social development Leah Gazan said the announcement was a “direct result of advocacy” by her party, care workers, unions, and women’s organizations.

She also pointed the finger at the Conservatives, accusing them of trying to stall the program and push for a “for-profit private system that parents can’t afford.” 

Liberal pre-budget strategy

Similar to how Wednesday’s rollout of renter-fairness-focused pre-budget news went, cabinet ministers are making echo announcements of the new child-care affordability measures across the country Thursday afternoon. 

This is all part of a new communications strategy the Liberals are employing in the lead up to the release of the April 16 federal budget.

Practically every day between now and when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland releases the massive economic document, the Liberals are expected to tease out bits and pieces of the budget.

In an effort to stretch out their ability to market the measures within it, Trudeau as well as members of his cabinet will unveil new initiatives over the next two weeks, to the point that the vast majority of the budget will be public prior to budget day.

Traditionally, governments have held budget news — save for some pre-tabling leaks — for the day the document is tabled in the House of Commons post-daylong reporter and stakeholder lockup.

Kicking off this strategy on Wednesday, Trudeau issued a video across social media platforms indicating the overall theme for the 2024 budget will be “generational fairness,” a message meant to speak to millennials and Generation Z.

“When I first decided to run for office, one of my biggest motivations was working to create a Canada that young people saw themselves… As prime minister, I’ve never lost sight of that,” Trudeau said in the clip.

“You as a young Canadian are the heartbeat of our economy. You power our growth and you deserve an economy that gives you a fair shot at success. But, this moment we’re all living in is throwing big challenges your way… So we’re going to roll up our sleeves and work like hell. And we’re going to tell you about what we’re doing to fix it, over the next two weeks.”

While Trudeau’s 2015 election victory was credited in part to a historic surge in young people turning up at the polls, Poilievre has been chipping away at that Liberal voting bloc of those aged 43 and under, seeking to appeal to their current struggles to get ahead with his “powerful paycheques” and housing affordability arguments.

In November 2023, Trudeau tapped Max Valiquette, a marketing guru with self-described expertise in understanding younger generations, as his new executive director of communications.

“We’re witnessing a different communication strategy from the government. They’re implementing something they’ve not tried before. We’re not going to have a budget day on April 16. We’re going to have budget days between now and April 16,” said political commentator Scott Reid in an interview on CTV News Channel.

“Frankly, this government knows that it needs to break through, it knows that it needs to connect with Canadians… Is it going to turn around the polls overnight? No. Might they get a little bit more of a hearing than they otherwise would have been? Probably.” 

With files from CTV News’ Vassy Kapelos and Annie Bergeron-Oliver

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Ontario releases 2023 Sunshine List, top earner made $1.9M – CBC.ca

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Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are in the top 10 earners on the province’s so-called sunshine list for 2023, with the province’s highest salary nearing $2 million.

The annual sunshine list documents public sector employees with salaries over $100,000. In this year’s edition, there are 300,570 names, more than 30,000 higher than last year.

Kenneth Hartwick, CEO of the electricity Crown corporation, is in the top spot again with a salary of $1.93 million.

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Two other executives at the organization — chief strategy officer Dominique Miniere and chief projects officer Michael Martelli — made nearly $1.2 million and nearly $1 million, respectively.

You can find a list of the top 100 earners below.

The presidents and CEOs of the Hospital for Sick Children and the University Health Network are also in the top 10, earning around $850,000 each. So is Phil Verster, who is president and CEO of the provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, with a $838,097 salary.

Caroline Mulroney, president of the Treasury Board, highlighted other high growth areas in a release.

“The largest year-over-year increases were in the hospitals, municipalities and services, and post-secondary sectors, which together represented approximately 80 per cent of the growth of the list,” she said.

The list shows 17 professors or associate professors at the University of Toronto had earnings of $500,000 or more.

A statement from a University of Toronto spokesperson said the school competes with top universities and private-sector employers around the world for faculty members.

“This occasionally results in salaries above the usual range for a small number of faculty members.”

An Ontario Power Generation building.
Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are among the top 10 spots of the annual sunshine list for 2023. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press)

Premier Doug Ford earned $208,974 last year. His chief of staff, Patrick Sackville, earned $324,675.

Matthew Anderson, CEO of Ontario Health, a provincial agency the Ford government created in 2019, earned $821,000. Meanwhile the public servant leading the Ministry of Health, deputy minister Catherine Zahn, earned $477,360, and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, $165,851.

There are more than 25,000 registered nurses on the list, including seven who earned more than $300,000 last year.

Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas, who was appointed to the top post in the province’s judiciary last May, earned $388,960.

The police chiefs of Thunder Bay, Daniel Taddeo, ($376,428) and Hamilton, Francis Bergen, ($374,492) were paid more last year than OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique ($373,472). Taddeo retired in April 2023. 

Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw, who took over the post in late 2022, earned $353,411. 

Organizations that receive provincial government funding are also required to disclose salaries for the sunshine list, so it includes top earners at some registered charities.

The chief executive of the True Patriot Love Foundation, Nicholas Booth, earned $421,149. The foundation funds support programs for veterans and military families. 

The president and CEO of the Canadian Red Cross Society, Conrad Sauve, earned $412,970, while the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s chief executive, Medhat Mahdy, earned $394,057.

Salaries of other key Ontario public figures include:

  • $826,539 for Ontario Pension Board CEO Mark Fuller.
  • $709,581 for Ontario Lottery and Gaming Association president & CEO Alfred Hannay.
  • $601,376 for Registered Nurses Association of Ontario CEO Doris Grinspun.
  • $596,392 for Dean of Ivey Business School, Western University, Sharon Hodgson.
  • $563,291 for LCBO president & CEO George Soleas.
  • $546,053 for Dean of the Faculty of Health Science, Queen’s University, Jane Philpott.
  • $533,112 for Royal Ontario Museum president & CEO Joshua Basseches.
  • $486,192 for University of Toronto president Meric Gertler.
  • $464,148 for Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore.
  • $455,091 for Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer.
  • $404,003 Art Gallery of Ontario director and CEO Stephan Jost.
  • $395,974 for former auditor general Bonnie Lysyk.

Adjusting sunshine list threshold

The sunshine list has been around for almost 30 years, always set at six figures and up. 

At Queen’s Park on Thursday, some members of provincial Parliament faced questions on whether the $100,000 starting point should be adjusted.

Green Party of Ontario Leader Mike Schreiner said it should be pegged to the rate of inflation, but others disagreed.

“I think that people think that $100,000 is still a lot of money, especially in an affordability crisis,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife, who’s also the finance critic.

Government House Leader Paul Calandra said the government has no plans at this time to change the threshold on the sunshine list.

“I think it’s an important document that serves the people well in highlighting the salaries of our public employees.”

The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, enacted by former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1996, compels organizations that receive public funding from the province to report the names, positions and pay of people who make more than $100,000.

The interactive chart below shows the top 100 earners on the list, based on both salary and benefits.

Search the complete Sunshine List for yourself here.

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1 dead, 2 critically injured after car crash in Montreal

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Montreal

Three people are in hospital with critical injuries after their vehicle crashed into a tree. Police believe they might be connected to two drive-by shootings that took place early Thursday morning.

2 drive-by shootings also took place overnight

an SPVM car near a taped-off crime scene
Montreal police are investigating a car crash possibly linked to two drive-by shootings. (Mathieu Wagner/Radio-Canada)

Urgences-santé say one person died and two others were critically injured after their vehicle hit a tree in the Rosemont neighbourhood.

Montreal police believe the crash may be linked to two drive-by shootings early Thursday morning.

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The first happened around 5 a.m. on Pie-IX Boulevard. Police say a car was shot at repeatedly and the driver, a 41-year-old man, was injured in the upper body. He was transported to hospital, but his life is not in danger, say police.

Shortly afterward, shots were reported in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, near the intersection of Saint-Joseph Boulevard and Henri-Julien Avenue. No one was injured.

Police say they are investigating to determine if there is a connection between the collision and the shootings. Montreal police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant says it’s possible those in the vehicle were involved in the shootings.

The province’s independent police watchdog is now involved.

with files from Chloë Ranaldi

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