Susan EngArkan Zakharov
In her eight years as head of advocacy for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, Susan Eng was arguably Canada's most visible aging baby boomer. The Toronto lawyer waged a bitter – but successful – fight with Stephen Harper over pension reform, an issue he had refused to touch. Eng has had plenty of experience dealing with hard cases. She scrapped with Toronto's insular police establishment in the early 1990s as chair of the city's police services board, and worked for years at the pleasure of the mercurial media titan Moses Znaimer. It was Znaimer who, as head of the CARP/Zoomer empire, fired Eng in February over what Eng claims was her insistence on taking a neutral stance on assisted suicide. (CARP and Znaimer, for their part, deny Eng's characterization of the termination and contend it was for other reasons.) Like the rest of her generation, Eng is not going to fade away.
You've worked around difficult people throughout your career. What's your advice on how to handle interference?
You have to protect what you're trying to achieve. At CARP, I pushed back against people trying to substitute their own opinions for our policy, which we based on research and member feedback. I guess I pushed back one too many times.
How do you cut through the media clutter when there are so many people advocating so many issues?
What I've found is that there's very little depth. If you pick one good issue and go deep, you can move ahead of the pack. What was important was that the policy-makers could see that people got the message. They couldn't dictate policy.
CARP is unusual in that it is basically a company. Did you see yourself as advocating on behalf of the organization or were you advocating on behalf of all these people in our society who are older?
CARP had to be different than all the other commercial enterprises out there and all the other non-profits. It was legitimate for the company to continue to make money from the membership fees and benefits. But my advocacy was always done regardless of what the commercial interests were. We had 300,000 members. That's not all of the people in this generation, but it's an important political force. And a market force.
When people run into you in public, what are they most likely to tell you?
That they like the fact that we were trying to address the quiet angst they have: "Am I going to outlive my money? Am I going to get the help I need for my mother when she gets ill? What's happening with this health-care system?" Some of our parents and grandparents were prepared to say, "Okay, I've had my run, it's your turn, it's okay if I get the crumbs of a seniors discount." We have a different generation, though, who say, "I paid a whack of taxes and didn't take advantage of the health-care system, so now when I need it, I want it to be there."
We're on the cusp of seeing major pension reforms in Canada, and that hasn't happened since 2001.
My advocacy team counts this as its major achievement – to help put pension reform in motion in Canada's largest province and extract a promise in the federal Throne Speech to improve the Canada Pension Plan. Our members could see in their own lives that retirement is hard, and they've got good pensions. They see their kids have precarious employment or contract work, and no hint of a pension plan.
What's next?
Well, I don't think I'll be quiet. The paradigm shift around dealing with us as an aging population is a big issue. Baby boomers are being eyed by marketers, and they've got it all wrong, still. Nine million – oh, it's a big, rich group. But if you don't address their essential fears and needs, you're just being manipulative. There's an opportunity for politicians to speak to those important issues and give people a sense that they have a right to demand this stuff.
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Editor's note: Moses Znaimer and CARP claim that Susan Eng was fired for reasons other than her neutral stance on assisted suicide. An earlier version of this story did not include Znaimer's and CARP's assertion.