Author: johnastapleton

Every day, our news tells us how people die. Not statistically but dramatically. A shooting in the burbs or downtown at night.A house fire in Oshawa.A collision on the 401.A stabbing in a subway station.A plane crash.An explosion.A war. Modern news culture is saturated with death, but almost always death as rupture: sudden, violent, improbable, and visually compelling. Most of us do not believe we will die this way yet the constant repetition of sudden death subtly shapes how we think about our own futures. It encourages us to imagine death as interruption rather than as a certainty. And that matters more than we realize when we make financial decisions about aging. Nowhere is this more visible than in decisions around CPP and OAS. Better off waiting If we are…

Some writers claim that advanced democracies are drifting into gerontocracy, where older citizens—by virtue of their numbers, turnout, and institutional hold—shape outcomes in their own interest, to the detriment of younger generations? This is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. Or more precisely: it mistakes visibility for causality and substitutes demographic theory for evidence of a gerontocracy. The arithmetic of voting is not the mechanics of power Yes, older Canadians vote at higher rates. In federal elections, turnout among those 65+ is typically 20–25 percentage points higher than among those under 35. That is a fact. But the conclusion drawn—that older adults have captured political power —is a leap. Elections are not a closed system. Younger Canadians are not excluded. They are not structurally disenfranchised from voting.   To…

Why cutting OAS thresholds misses the point—and why wealth matters Take two couples in their mid-70s. They look identical on paper. Each report $190,000 in annual income—$95,000 per spouse after pension splitting. Each is subject to a modest Old Age Security clawback. Both couples appear - in the arithmetic of public debate - to be reasonable candidates for “modernization” where OAS clawbacks would start sooner. But each pay about $45,000 in income taxes and experience marginal effective tax rates of about 31.5%. And the clawback on their OAS at 15% increases the marginal effective tax rate on their OAS to 46.5% and decreases their after-tax OAS takeout to 53.5%.  On each marginal dollar of OAS, each takes home just 53 and half cents. But just for a moment, let’s step…

One of the most important and least understood tools in social policy is not a benefit. It is a technique - a political technology. It is called grandfathering. And it allows governments to dramatically reduce benefits without appearing to hurt any particular person. The example of low-income women, age 60-64 I encountered the full force of this technique while tracing what happened to low-income women aged 60–64 in Ontario. As I showed in earlier work, these women experienced one of the greatest collapses in benefit levels in modern Ontario history. In 1993, a low-income woman in that category could receive about $930 a month ($1,829 today) through a combination of provincial supports. Today, the comparable Ontario Works rate is more than half that amount in real terms ($733.). Yet here…

How to miss alternative frames for the same program in three columns Three Saturday May 2, 2026 Globe and Mail pieces, read together, tell us something important about why Old Age Security (OAS) is so often placed on the chopping block. Robyn Urback frames cutting OAS as political boldness. In his column,  Paul Kershaw tends to treat OAS for higher income seniors as a fiscal piñata that can be easily punctured by government to provide a painless $9 billion bankroll to fund a host of valuable and progressive changes. The Financial Facelift tells the story a wealthy couple (65 and 57) with more than $5 million in net worth who will still receive some OAS if financial planning is done correctly. Together, the three columns – two in the Business…

There is a line that keeps returning, though it seems to be going through an update. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge asks: "Are there no prisons? ... And the Union workhouses? ... Are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?"  They are lines meant to expose moral failure—a refusal to see poverty as anything other than an administrative problem already solved by existing institutions. Today, the lines have changed. They now may  sound something like this: “Are there no food banks? And  the city shelters – are they not still in place? The tax clinics – are they still operating each year? School lunches?” This is rarely spoken with Scrooge’s bluntness. They are spoken gently. Often progressively – with concern. And…

Gregg Redner’s letter is careful—almost to a fault. It goes out of its way to emphasize that his decision not to attend Boston 2026 is personal, not organizational; principled, not coercive; reluctant, not punitive. He resigns his presidency to avoid collateral damage. He wishes the exhibit well. He invites disagreement. And still, it is treated as something else. That reaction is instructive. It reveals how uncomfortable we have become with the idea that a personal decision, grounded in principle, can also function as a public signal. Redner understands something that his critics—many of them well-meaning—appear to prefer not to confront: that the conditions under which cross-border participation once felt neutral have changed. Not everywhere, not uniformly, and not for everyone. But materially enough that the decision to attend is no…

I watched the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup four times in the 1960s. I delivered the 'Pink Tely' proudly 4 times to 56 newspaper customers on the day after the big wins as I traversed my teen years. Those sentences now read less like memory and more like archival material. By 1980, I had already begun to suspect something had gone wrong—something deeper than bad trades or weak drafts or the usual catalogue of hockey explanations. I gave up my seasons’ tickets that year. They were snapped up in a nanosecond. That same year, I made a bet that the Leafs would not win another Stanley Cup before the new millennium. It did not feel like a bold prediction at the time. It felt like an observation. The…

There are certain scenes that appear so reliably in television commercials that one begins to suspect they are not creative choices at all, but regulatory requirements. Mud and the auto commercial Take the automobile commercial. No matter the vehicle—compact sedan, suburban SUV, or something marketed as “urban-adventure capable”—it must, at some point, be shown careening through mud. Not driving. Not commuting. Careening. The camera lingers on the tires as they hurl great arcs of wet earth into the air, as though the vehicle has been liberated from the burden of pavement and returned to its natural habitat. One is left to wonder: who is this for? Who does it attract? Is there a large, underserved population of Canadians who, on a Tuesday morning, find themselves navigating bogs on the way…

There is a tendency in Canadian social policy to explain outcomes as if they were overtly designed. They rarely are. What we call “policy” is often the residue of something else: overlapping jurisdictions, legal constraints, fiscal shocks, political instincts, and administrative convenience—each pulling in different directions. Nowhere is this more visible than in the 50-year history of income supports for low-income Canadians aged 60 to 64 from 1975 to 2025. What looks today like a simple gap—deep provincial poverty followed by relative federal adequacy at age 65—is not a design. It is what happens when people lose out in the policy cauldron. The federal move: Age and marital status as architecture When Ottawa introduced the Spouse's Allowance in 1975, it did something subtle but profound. It defined entitlement based on…