Every Canadian should sit back a bit and enjoy the Olympics. It seems by the television ratings that’s exactly what’s happening. Ratings are very high. And so they should be. The Winter Olympics only come around every four years and we have excellent athletes.
Canadians shouldn’t get too upset about the medal count as many countries have a much larger population and a much larger budget for training than we in Canada have. It may seem strange to have Canadian skaters beaten out by Chinese or Koreans but look at how many people they have to draw their talent from. Korea has 69 million, twice our population almost. China has 20-30 times our population.
So we should sit back, relax and enjoy the show. We paid for it after all.
Paying for the Olympics is akin to buying a Christmas gift for your parents or your kids. You usually overextend, you reach beyond what you can afford. So that’s what we do as a country every 20 years  or so, we may over reach a bit. Better to do so for the Olympics than to over reach in many other ways. The point of that comment is two-fold. First, the Olympics are an inspiration, or should be an inspiration, to all of us. Second, it’s better to spend money on the Olympics than some of the dumb stuff we spend tax payers dollars on now. Large car companies come to mind actually, followed by bloated salaries for bureaucrats in our senior governments.
On that point it’s hard not to sound old-fashioned, to sound like an old person longing for some “good old days”. But get over the fact that older people take a strong interest in where the tax dollars are being spent and think about it for a bit. Yes, just think for a few minutes.
Our governments have gotten far too large and expensive. In Manitoba we pay the premier about $150,000 per year. He or she is the head honcho, the one in charge. The person who takes the glory when things go well and takes the fall when things go bad. There’s not much job security and there’s not much pension plan. Premiers rarely last more than 10 years and  if anyone has worked out an average but it’s likely less than five years. So given the risk and level of responsibility, why are there dozens, if not hundreds of bureaucrats paid twice and three times that which we pay that premier.
There is a high level of accountability at the premier level. If the premier’s party or the people in general get tired of them, they vote premier out of office. Its a fairly simple system. However, if  a bureaucrat gets a cushy job, they may well be there for life and and at two to three times the salary of the boss. We have let the bureaucracy get away with theft of the highest degree.
The problem is, how do you change it? Can you imagine if we all of a sudden told every bureaucrat above that level that they were getting a salary cut to the level of the premier or less? That’s what should happen but it’s not going to. The high level bureaucrats would scream bloody murder if that had to get along with “only” $150,000 per year. 
The logical question that should be asked is how about the civil servants and front line health care workers? Why should some person who runs the Winnipeg RHA get $3-400,000 per year and a full time nurse say only $50-70,000. If I get sick and am laying deathly ill in a hospital, I want to see an RN looking over me, not an overpaid bureaucrat.
The world has gone mad. We pay the least valuable jobs the most money. I’m sure that many bureaucrats are well intentioned and honourable people but, sad to say, their jobs are not worth what we pay them.
If we actually got our priorities straight in Canada, we would pay people according to their importance to society. You know, the priority of needs thing. First of all, we would pay high wages to water treatment plant operators as, assuming we have air to breathe, we need good water next on the priority list. Then we would pay our farmers and food workers because, after air and water, we need good food. Then we would pay our carpenters to build us good homes. Somewhere down the line after water plant workers, farmers, carpenters, doctors, nurses, teachers and a few other ranking needs, we might get around to needing bureaucrats. 
The list would get awfully long before we would add the bureaucrats. Perhaps somewhere just ahead of government lawyers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Ken Waddell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.