Our MP, Alistair MacGregor, recently held a town hall meeting at which he had 12 people guide discussions on topics of concern to our community.
I had not voted for Alistair to be my MP, so I was very impressed by the well-organized and well-managed meeting. But I was disappointed by the people’s generally anti-corporate suggestions for federal funding and regulations to resolve their concerns. There were very few suggestions about what action we, the people, could take.
Most of my career has been with large national and international corporations, each employing tens of thousands of people worldwide. I have been proud of the work I have done for the design, development and application of high-quality, leading edge technologies created and manufactured by my employers.
As a retiree, my wife and I are enjoying generous pension incomes and extra health benefits from my previous employers. These are the types of corporations which have a strong influence with our national, provincial and municipal politicians. I am disappointed that so many people treat these corporations as “the enemy”.
The real “enemies” are people who still insist on owning and using devices that are made from, or which consume, fossil fuels, buying clothing and gadgets from companies who use some form of slave labour, eating fish from polluting fish-farms, and eating food from distant countries instead of from local suppliers. Large corporations are not stupid; they do not produce goods and services that people don’t want to buy. Instead of advocating rules and financing activist groups against producers of undesirable goods and services, let’s advocate rules and finance activist groups against consumers who choose to buy such undesirable goods and services. Every person is responsible for the choices they make; nobody else can make those choices for them.
Robert Radford
Duncan