The Trouble with Normal

What do dog shit and junk mail have in common? Besides the fact that they’re both super irritating they’re both excellent examples of cost externalization. If you’re not familiar with the term, Cost Externalization is a socioeconomic term used to describe how a business can maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs thus, forcing negative effects and costs on to a third party. In both cases dear taxpayer, the third party is you. Your ire should be piqued by the fact that the “government” (Local Provincial and Federal) are the enablers of this behaviour.

 

Recent letters to the editor and some fine local reporting provide the backdrop for both. First is the case of Canada Post (and to a larger extent their political masters- the federal liberals) they’ve had to cut their costs despite the fact that in the most recent Canada Post segment report shows that direct marketing contributed almost $1.2 billion in revenue. Direct Marketing volumes rose by 0.2 per cent or 10 million pieces compared to 2014 while revenue fell by $11 million or 0.9 per cent. Canada Post however is way off side of its pension plan liabilities, the solvency deficit is estimated at $6.2 Billion. The result: no more on site recycling, you have to take the junk mail home with you to recycle it.

 

Second is the constant irritant of dog feces as a coach, nothing makes my blood boil more than having one of my athletes leaving the field crying because he’s covered in dog shit! I was shocked to hear from one of the managers of our playing fields that he had removed over 100 Kilos of dog waste from the Spruce Grove Fields alone! In this case however it’s not a business (or even a crown corporation) that’s externalizing its costs- it’s our fellow citizens, and the externalization is in reverse proportion, it’s a very small cost in time effort and supplies to clean up after a dog, versus the cost to Municipal Taxpayers for the added time and energy of removing dog feces from our parks and trails– imagine how long it takes to clear 100 Kilos of dog waste from a single park, now multiply that by 12 parks.

 

In both cases, picking up after your dog, and doing your own direct mail recycling aren’t such onerous tasks, but the nanny state has made people feel that they shouldn’t have to be responsible for these tasks. You’ve become conditioned to think the government should do it for you. When the government steps into the domain of what should by all rights be the purview of the common citizenry community mindedness atrophies. The result is that leaving dog waste and recycling for others to clean up is anti-social behavior, that has become normal. And as Bruce Cockburn sang “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse”.

 

Not that I’m nostalgic for a more libertarian past, but back in the day, my grandfather had a not so elegant but very effective solution to the problem of dogs shitting on his lawn… He would shoot them. There was very little dog shit in grandpa’s neighbourhood, he didn’t call his MP, MLA or his city councillor about the problem of dog excrement. He took care of things himself. Now I’m not advocating vigilantism, but in the absence of any kind of policy from local government it may be a last resort. Because this type of transgression individually is relatively small, conventional wisdom suggests that it warrants neither serious bylaw enforcement nor punishment, as result, nothing is done about it. I would suggest adopting a zero tolerance policy towards any littering and hiring more bylaw officers to enforce it. The problem with instituting a policy like this in Whistler is that it would be political suicide, let’s face it Whistler is likely the most dog crazy place in the world. This issue -which has been around for years, and drove me crazy when I was on council- will continue as normal, with the players involved hoping to provoke change without ever having to take responsibility for it.

 

 

Ralph Forsyth is an entrepreneur and ski instructor, he served as a Whistler Councillor from 2005 to 2011 He always dances as if everyone is watching.