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According to the Canadian Labour Congress, among others, the proposed federal legislation known as Bill C-27 would permit just this, beginning with pension plans in the federal private sector and Crown corporations. This has already happened in the province of New Brunswick. Now, imagine replacing the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security with privately administered individual retirement accounts. Most of us would feel very threatened by this idea. A pension plan is stronger and better when it minimizes risk and is held in common over the long-term.

The corporate desire to offload risk and to privatize pensions is often dressed up as a great individual freedom, a common-sense revolution. Obedient to market-based logics, we are meant to emulate the spirit of entrepreneurial individualism. Ignore the social costs, we are told, for there is no such thing as society, only individuals. And yet, no man is an island, as a poet once wrote, and this is especially true in old age.

The language of a collective agreement is contractual and legally binding – until it isn’t and we discover that past agreements made in good faith can be retroactively undone in the speculative futures of capital. Its time is not our time: we, flesh and blood, are destined to grow old and to die.

We are vulnerable and interdependent beings. Many of us find this difficult to talk about. But I suspect that no small contempt for old age and vulnerability lurks in this “labour dispute.” Exactly what kind of future are we working for? An African proverb offers some wisdom here: If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. We are Carleton, we are a community, and we are by far better together.

Stuart J. Murray is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics, Carleton University.