Who's Making YOUR Bed?

 "Oh Canada we stand on guard for thee." If you are Canadian and our country commands true patriot love in you, then you should stand on guard. That's the basic point of the anthem of our country. It's a good anthem. The people of any country need to be on guard to make sure the bad people don't overcome the good. When one says, "En garde" in fencing, one is taking the ready position preparing to stab or be stabbed with a sword. By extension, and without, I think, taking too much license, standing on guard for Canada is meant to be both an offensive and defensive position. My purpose today is to investigate and expand upon a personal sentiment that the only thing offensive in the average Canadian in regards to our patriotic duty of standing on guard, which we have all sung or heard sung about thousands of times, sometimes with hats off and hands on hearts, is how derelict we've been in its performance.

I've done this many times in many ways in many posts, but with the specter of moving back to Canada looming larger every day, I'm trying to collect my thoughts and prepare myself for the financial beating that entails. Let's look at some stats and see why the prospect of returning to my home and native land is so daunting, shall we? If I manage to hit the ground running and land a job at 15 bucks an hour, which is the minimum wage in the provinces I'm most interested in living, I'll be making $28,800 a year. It sounds like a lot, but when you look at expenses, which are out of control lately, it's not enough to get by. I used movingwaldo.com, admittedly not the most scientific of sources, and I found they vastly underestimated things like tax rates and the price of groceries ($53.50 a month? If I smoke a pack of cigs a week that puts me over budget ffs!), but it'll give you a rough idea. Rent for a 1 bedroom apt. between $1095 in Calgary and $1925 in Vancouver; utilities between $283 a month in Ontario and $362.50 a month in Alberta; Car insurance (cuz in Canada a guy needs a car) $1179 in AB to $1458 a year in Ont; gas for the car was left out but I calculated 2 tanks a month at 100 bucks a tank; Groceries for me I'm VERY lucky to keep it under $300 a month; internet/cell 75/50 a month; and this is not including entertainment or purchases of clothes, furniture, electronics, vehicle maintenance, etc. I averaged out some things and improvised a little and it works out to $30,640 a year. That's what I need just to get by.

The average income of a full time employee in Canada is a little more than $54,630 according to this page. The average is not really the average because it includes the super rich, who, like many "developed" nations nowadays, are the only people getting richer in Canada. The biggest lie repeatedly told to and accepted by vigilantly "on guard" Canadians is that of the 15% tax rate. Read my previous blog post called "A Taxing Endeavor" and you'll see that in the real world Canadians pay closer to 100% tax than 15%. But only the middle class and poor Canadians. The rich pay nothing. 

That said, if you calculate that ludicrous statistic into the salary I will most likely be getting when I return to Canada, it works out to $24,480. So I'll be working 40 hours a week all year long with no vacation and making -$6,160 a year. If I land the job of my dreams - the "average" job in Canada, don't buy anything, don't drink or smoke, live essentially as a hermit, I can look forward to $15,796 a year. According to this site, the average person needs $800,000 to retire in Canada. So that means I'll need to find the best job I've ever had, do absolutely nothing but work, and do that work for a little over 50 years. Then when I'm 105 I'll have enough to retire. 

I can't even dream of a 54 thousand a year job in the field of ESL even with my masters degree, even though the field of education may be the best example of inflation there is. Little to none of that windfall profit has gone into increasing teachers' salaries. 

So if I use my savings from working outside of Canada, cash in all my valuable hockey cards, and invest in a house, which has been the surest way of making a profit in Canada in its history, I still might be in trouble. Even though experts are calling for a(n) historic correction in the major housing markets of Canada, that correction will not make up for the fairly recent skyrocketing of real estate prices virtually across the board in the areas I'm considering settling in. I once actually had enough money to make a down payment on a house in Calgary. I was looking at duplex prices. Now a oneplex is too expensive for me. In order to counter the huge price hikes in real estate, the central bank of Canada has raised interest rates.  According to this website, we've had two historic interest rate hikes in two months and are due for more. The Bank of Canada rate went from practically nothing to 2.5% and is projected not to stop until it hits 5% or so. Add that to the price explosions that have recently happened in all the places I'm looking to settle and it is the absolute worst time in history to buy a house in Canada.

Same exact shit going on in Korea.

What has happened to Canada? And who are these liars that keep telling me before hockey games that they are standing on guard for Canada? I can think of two entire political parties every member of which should have been symbolically or literally stabbed with swords since long ago for selling out to big business and bringing about the mugging of the middle and lower classes of Canada. Who was "on guard" while this was happening? And what has caused the drastic price hikes in real estate? Largely people from other countries (mostly China) creating feeding frenzies on newly built, or yet to be built properties that artificially increase the prices enabling buyers to "flip" the properties at huge profit for the real estate speculator and huge expense to the person (usually Canadian) who eventually buys the property to live in, not just play money games. It's how a lot of the rich Chinese people became rich. It's also how a lot of Chinese people are now losing money because corrupt Chinese real estate companies (which is redundant) like Evergrande have started building lots of speculation properties and don't have enough money to complete them. People are stuck with just the frames of condos/apartments that they can't live in or flip. Ask me if I feel sorry for them. You can read about it here. 

But forget about the house, what can I do for work in Canada? I've tried going back a few times and it's like starting in the work force fresh out of high school. I have the advantage of many years in the workforce, but if I can't get a good ESL job (and they're not easy to find) I'll have the disadvantages of age like physical problems, general disenchantment with all workplaces, and an all but defeated optimism in humankind. Who wants to hire a grumpy old man like me? 

My one saving grace might turn out to be online ESL teaching and ironically, the largest and most lucrative spots are mostly Chinese based. I could make a decent wage teaching online while finishing my masters. Then with the masters, I could have an expanded job market to search that includes non-teaching positions in education. That's the dream, but even if that all falls into place, Canada is the worst place to do that from because it's the most expensive. I'd be much better off finding an apartment in the Philippines. I'm going there at the end of the month to look around. I spent a few days in Seoul visiting with friends who were enjoying the end of their vacations. For one night (Saturday) it would have cost me 150,000 Korean won to stay in a hotel with just bed and bathroom. I've priced out some bigger rooms in Manila where I have bed, bathroom and kitchen for the same price. Oh yeah, and it's for a MONTH, not just a day. I would imagine rates in Canada are even worse than the Seoul prices for most cities. The clear choice here is to get my arse out of Korea and not to go back to Canada, but try to find something in the Philippines that I can do while finishing my masters degree without paying such huge monthly expenses.

So that's what I'm going to try to do. The Korean system of paying out pension has contributed to this decision somewhat. I can't collect my pension, or at least they cannot deposit it into any bank account, including my Korean back account, while I'm in Korea. It is about a thousand times easier, but that's not the way they do it. So I'll have to go to the Philippines and hang out there while my pension is "processed" and keep checking my Korean bank account until I see that it's been deposited. Then I return to Korea and either stay, or with a little luck I will have found a job that I can do from the Philippines and I will move there. I already have contacted some schools and offered to interview in person while visiting the Philippines. If I don't have to interview in person, I can always do so online. The places I've looked at all have free wifi and if it's not fast enough, I can go to a cafe.

Waiting for my pension money to drop is also something more enjoyably done in the Philippines. I don't want to spend too much money while I'm there, but I've always wanted to go to Palawan, particularly El Nido where a guy can kayak like 5 km. into a mountain cave. Even around Manila there are lots of fun things to do. Plus I have some friends there I haven't seen for a while. Manila will be a fun place to wait for my pension money. El Nido - even more fun!

Doesn't that look cool?

But back to Canada and the reason I'm trying to avoid a return there. The French word for goalie is "gardien de but." It means guardian of the goal. Here's a goalie who reminds me of how well we Canadians stand on guard of our country:

Is it the fault of the average Canadian? I don't think that would be fair to say. In fact if the Canadian people have exhibited one tragic flaw in all of this inflation and greed run amok, it's their kindness, and I just hate to think of that as a flaw. Adam Smith (yes the "father of capitalism who has been built into something he clearly was NOT) said that when people of trade meet together, their conversation ends in conspiracy against the public(k), or in some contrivance to raise prices. We have been more than accommodating to these contrivances and conspiracies as a nation. In fact, we have developed clichés and aphorisms that contain what our bosses want us to believe are general truths the worst of which is undoubtedly, "It's just business." I can't tell you what I hate worse, that saying or the person who has been socialized to believe that business (meaning cheating) is something we have to accept and not complain about because it's nothing personal. Taking a person's money is personal. Taking too much of it, i.e. cheating or charging too much, which is 99% of business in Canada, is intensely personal, it's not "just business," it's people fucking over other people. 

What are some others? "Fair market value." If there is anything patently unfair in Canada, it is market value. All the data I can find shows that for many years the increase in inflation has outpaced the increase in average wage about 2-1. And let's not forget that inflation IS an average that is believable, but wage increases include the rich and very rich, who are responsible for a huge majority of wage increase in Canada (not to say all of it) so wage increase is a very misleading stat. Still a country that knowingly allows prices to aggressively outpace wages brings us to another word we like to use that may not be as accurate as we think: "civilized." Am I really saying Canada is not a civilized country? Well, you tell me. Is pricing people out of an increasing number of things, including necessities like housing and food, year after year the behaviour of a civilized country?

"If you can't find a job, yer not lookin' hard enough." This one is true. There are jobs. The ones that make you negative 6 grand a year minus lots of tax. Sorry for not falling all over myself to line up for those jobs! Older people tend to believe this, especially older people who haven't looked for a job lately. Those who last looked when there WERE good jobs out there. Along the same lines we have the old and pithy "You made your bed, now you have to lie in it." Do you want to make a capitalist orgasm? Just blame his greed on the victims like you are doing when you say this. We've watched those greed-addled industrialists make our beds and we've wanted to intervene as we saw them putting the pillow cases on inside-out and putting the sheet on before the fitted sheet - in other words, we watched as they fucked our beds up but we felt helpless to stop them most likely because of these sayings of ours and other effective and efficient brain washing that made us feel like that asshole was the guy who should be making our beds and not us. 

It was this "bed making" that drew me to overseas work in the first place and since Canada has been so lousy at stopping the makers of its beds, it's what is keeping me here. I think one concept I've learned to be more prevalent over here applies. In business and in life a lot of folks equate kindness with stupidity. I think Canadians have been too kind and allowed our nation to develop the massive gap between Have-too-muches and Have-too-littles and I don't see it slowing down any. So before - WHOOPS - all our pension money disappears and the whole country says, "Oh well, that's business I guess...," I will collect mine and hopefully not have to use it while living, studying and working in either Korea or the Philippines. Canada is still not out, but it's highly doubtful. That's my new plan anyway. Wish me luck.

At the Quarter Pole

 I finished my third course recently. I started two courses this semester, but half way through I realized I had to drop one of them. The teacher of my Creating a Positive Classroom Environment was inventing her own ways to take marks off my assignments and it was probably partly to do with the fact that the course was all about selling what I call crowd control in a lot of different, but similar, packages. It's all hogwash. Kids should not be at school even the 7 hours a day they go for in N. America let alone the 10-14-hour days they put in over here in Asia. All the professionally titled, philosophically explained theories on classroom management, each with their own lists, acronyms or other mnemonic devices won't get you more quality, high-value time in the Zone of Proximal Development than a reasonable school day. But that's a simple solution we're not supposed to talk about or the industrial powers that control education might get upset. Expressing this as I did, may have belittled her class and most likely her opinions no matter how true it was. So I was glad to be rid of her and that class. I have signed up to take it next semester in hopes it will be taught by a different teacher. If not, I'll drop it again.

At any rate, the bigger reason for dropping the course was that I started a 40-day adventure we've been calling KD Camp. KD is for Kelly and Dave and we've spent every waking hour together for the past 38 days. We're almost done and I think it will be a welcome break for both of us. Like every kid camp I do, it starts out with high spirits and positivity and ends with overfamiliarity and exhaustion. We're both burnt out. The longest camp I've done previous to this was 3 weeks too so we're really spent. We've been exercising every day walking the dogs or riding the stationary bike, but Kelly told me today he's done with that. I didn't argue. I like walking the dogs, but it's a battle every time. I won't miss it. 

You may wonder how I did on my other class - the one I didn't drop. Well, I could not have done much better. I got 99.33%. That's a perfect CGPA for the semester. I'll be on the Dean's list. So now I've finished 3/12 of my courses (and half finished one other) and my grades are 90, 94, and 99. Not too shabby. 

As I said, I've signed up for two more. I may end up just taking the one. I am hoping to get some online work for the next little while. Once I can establish that, I will probably make a move to either a country that is much cheaper like Thailand, Philippines, or the like, or if I can find a way to pay the bills in Canada, I might go home. It sure would be nice to end my days in my home country teaching online. I'd even teach in person if I could find the right place. 

Eventually, I'm hoping that my M. Ed. will get me a position in education that might pay better, like maybe in administration or curriculum development, but we'll see what happens. Gotta get the thing first. I am now 1/4 finished the courses and already have a clear idea and plenty of resources and writing for my thesis. That'll be a snap.

Well Kelly is stirring up the dogs making them bark, howl, cry, hoot, and holler. Just one of the pleasures of KD Camp. I better go. Just wanted to brag a little about my grades.