6 - Sunday, December 17, 1989 - North Shore News INSIGHTS Life for ‘boomers’ gets tough from 2010 onward 1 HATE to dampen your Christmas spirit, baby-boomers, when you’re still 20 years or more from retirement, but it’s none teo early to warn you about the looming threat of ‘‘Age Wars.”’ This is among the more recent threats discovered by the “futurists”? —- a growth industry run by social scientists, actuaries, psychologists and other profes- sional doom-mongers skilled at finding unpleasant pictures in their IBM-compatible crystal balls. What they now see, not too many years ahead, is more and more grandpas and grandmas liv- ing longer and longer and getting better and better heeled. Which is all very well, except that they'll be doing it on the bowed backs of fewer and fewer offspring working harder and harder and getting GENERATION BRIDGE...some 70 West Van seniors being entertained at a Christmas lunch by the acclaimed Cotlingwood Schoo! choir. The event — hosted by the new Rotary Club of West Vancouver/ Sunrise — took poorer and poorer. So sooner or later, goes the theory, the latter will inevitably rebel. Then they’ll slash pensions, abolish old age tax credits and Pharmacare, ban seniors’ dis- counts and tell Gramp and Gran they’re lucky still to be breathing and able to afford toast for dinner. As always, the doom-mongers have the numbers to support their gloom. Every year a quarter of a million Canadians celebrate their 65th birthday, with a further life expectancy of 14 years for men and 18 years for women. The over-65s now make up !1 place in the Hugo Ray Park pavilion. Cut hospital waste | IONS GATE Hospital administrators should not only be concerned with where they are going to dispose of the hospital’s bio-medical waste, they should be thinking of ways to reduce it. LGH currently produces 17,000 pounds of waste per day. Much of this garbarge is made up of plustic and disposable products that at one time were made of ma- terials that could be sterilized and re-used. Lions Gate can be appiauded for being the only hospital in B.C. to use cloth, rather than disposable, - diapers in its maternity ward, but consider just some of the other items that are thrown away in vast quantity each day: plastic procedure trays and dressing trays, cheaply-made metal scissors and forceps, plastic forceps, incontinent pads, plastic draw sheets, plastic needles and syringes and plastic intravenous bottles and tubing. For reasons of safety, not all hospital supplies can be re-used. But many items, such as trays and I.V. bottles, perhaps, could and should be made of materi- als that allow them to be washed, sterilized and re-used over and over again. And plastic products such as pill bottles from the pharmacy could be collected from each ward, washed, and sent back for re-filling. Given the spiralling cost of garbage disposal — which is up 660 per cent over the past three years — any additional funds spent on reducing waste would be money well spent. And it’s appropriate that our hospitals be the leaders in helping cut down on the unhealthy pollution in our environment. per cent of the population and the working (20-64) age group 60 per cent. In the next 20 years the latter will edge up to 62 per cent while the seniors jump to 16 per cent. After that it’s downhill all the way for the toilers. By 2030 they'll be reduced to 57 per cent and the Geritol generation will jump to 24 per cent. Meanwhile, from 1971 to 1985 the average income of seniors rose 450 per cent, compared to a na- tional average increase of only 330 per cent. Nearly two-thirds of all seniors own their own home (most- ly paid-up) or enjoy invested pro- ceeds from it. The pattern seems likely to continue. One of the biggest worries for the working taxpayers is the Canada Pension Plan which has Me NEWS photo Neil Lucente Publisher Managing Editor. Associate Editor envelope tong since ceased to be any such thing. Underfunded by some $300 billion, due to premiums being on- ly half the needed level, it is now simply another form of taxation, generating no money for future retirees. Even though premiums will almost double by 2011, they still won’t be nearly sufficient. When you add all the other tax- funded programs and services for seniors — Old Age Security, GIS, high medicare usage, government discounts and subsidies — the ever-growing tax burden will even- tually become so crushing that youth, for its own survival, will be FORCED to revolt against age, say the doom-mongers. What to do about it? The only advice I can think of is to be very nice indeed to your kids. By 2010 you'll need them a lot more than they’ll need you! aa TAILPIECES: Pulling teeth from a hen’can be a cinch compared to extracting information from the feds on how they spend our fax dollars — the job of West Van’s Kenneth Dye, Auditor General of Canada. He discusses it tomorrow, Dec. 18, at a free 5:30 p.m. lecture at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus, 515 West Hastings ... Female uni- versity grads from around the world are welcome Monday, Dec. 18, at the monthly meeting of West Van's Canadian University Women in the Presbyterics Church, 2893 Marine — call 922- 2770 for info ... Well worth a peek while you’re Christmas shopping on Lonsdale is this month’s art Sea KENNETH Dye ...pulling teeth from a hen. show of work by talented North Van school students at City Hall, 14th and Lonsdale, open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays ... Serenading Tiddlycove tonight, the Carol Ships cruise past Ambleside and Dundarave to Point Atkinson — watch for them from 7:30 p.m. onward ... And this Monday and Tuesday, Dec. 18-19, is the time to deliver your Christmas ‘‘gift of life’’ at the Red Cross blood donor clinics, 2 to 8 p.m. each day at Lions Gate Hos- pital. nz? WRIGHT OR WRONG — Advice from a wise old carpenter: Measure twice, saw once. Peter Speck . .Barrett Fisher . ._Noel Wright Advertising Director . Linda Stewart North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and qualitied under Schedule 111, Parag‘aph Hl of the Excise Tax Act. ts published each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Ltd and disinbuted to evety door on the North Shore. Second Class Marl Registration Number 3885 Subscriptions North and West Vancouver, $25 per year Maning rates available on request Submissions are welcome but we Cannot accept responsibinty lor unsolicited maternal including manuscnpts and pictures which should be accompanied by 4 Slamped, addressed s THE VOICE OF MONTH AND WAST VANCOUVER Display Advertising 920-0511 Classified Advertising Newsroom Distribution Subscriptions SUNDAY + WEDNESDAY FieDaAy 1139 Lonsd-‘e Avenue North Vancouver, B.C. V7M 2H4 59,170 (average, Wednesd: Friday & Sunday) *Y 985-3227 MEMBER SDA DIVISION