Québec Students, Eat Your Broccoli!

Apr 17, 2012

Québec Students, Eat Your Broccoli!

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Everybody in Canada agrees: Québec students are whiny selfish complainers. How can they have the gall to protest a mere $1625 tuition increase when they have the lowest fees in the country? If there’s one thing that’s made this country great, it’s the principle that you don’t have a right to complain if others are worse off than you. I like to call it the “eat-your-broccoli” principle.

 

Billy has to eat his broccoli without complaining because, as Mom and Dad tell him, there are children starving in Ethiopia.

 

Since private sector pensions have been gutted, public sector workers don’t have a right to complain when their pensions suffer the same fate.

 

Since non-union wages have been falling, unionized workers don’t have a right to complain when they are forced to accept concessions.

 

Since Chinese are making peanuts working 14-hour days under a Communist dictatorship, Canadians don’t have a right to complain about minimum wage being too low.

 

Everybody–students, public servants, unionized and non-unionized, employed and unemployed–must eat their broccoli! It’s the Canadian way.

 

Now the whiners like to point out that things are not getting worse for everybody. The 1%, they say, has seen its income and wealth increase dramatically over the past few decades. “Why not tax the rich?” they ask. The complaining class claim the funds could be used to finance their free-education, high-wage, full-pension socialist utopia.

 

And they say the 1% shouldn’t complain because there are others (some 99%) who are worse off. They claim the 1% should eat its broccoli.

 

What the utopian socialists fail to understand, however, is that there is another principle of our great Canadian nation that counterbalances the eat-your-broccoli principle: it’s the “don’t-bite-the-hand” principle.

 

Your parents work hard to provide you that broccoli. A little respect is in order. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!

 

Why has the income of Canada’s richest 1% almost doubled over the past three decades? The answer is obvious: hard work and smart investing. Don’t let anybody tell you that the 1% has gotten richer because of lower tax rates on higher income individuals, corporations and investment income. That’s just a bunch of socialist poppycock.

 

It’s just smart policy for government to reduce the tax burden of the rich and corporations because that’s where investment comes from, don’t you know. If you bite the hand that feeds you, you’ll go hungry. No tax breaks, no jobs.

 

The rich have a legitimate exemption from the eat-your-broccoli principle. We’re all better off when the rich eat caviar. To afford their caviar, the rich have to work hard and invest wisely, which is of great benefit to the country as a whole. But the eat-your-broccoli principle still applies to everybody else.

 

So those Québec students will have to suck it up and pay those higher fees. Then we can focus on the spoiled Newfoundland students whose fees will be the lowest in Canada. That means they will lose their right to complain, and so on…

 

By 2020, I forsee the former students of Ontario having to give up the tents they live in to help pay off their debts, but they won't have the right to complain because the cardboard boxes they will be living in will be better quality than those of BC's former students.

 

David Bernans is a Québec-based writer and translator. Follow him on twitter @dbernans.

Author's note: Although the logic of this article is consistent with much of what appears in mainstream media opinion pieces, it is satire. Those who know the author are well aware that he would never use the word "poppycock" in a serious piece of journalism.