A Campa Vista home with a view to the ocean. Photo by Dawn Paley.

I’m sitting with the cab driver who has brought me to the end of a long gravel road, near the edge of Trujillo, a small town on the north coast of Honduras. He’s flipping through a newspaper, telling me in halting English that he’s saving up to buy an excavator. Anyone with an excavator has work, he says. I hear the sound of four-wheeled all-terrain-vehicles in the distance, humming as they near. In a cloud of dust, Cathy Bernier appears at the top of the hill, followed on another ATV by her two daughters. All of them are here for a vacation from a freezing Alberta December. Bernier, who works as a client-relations manager with the development, has agreed to take me on a tour of Campa Vista, a housing project for retired Canadians perched above the Caribbean Sea.

With a wave from a security guard tuning his radio in a tiny booth, we pass under the front gate, a cement arch built over a dusty gravel road. From the back of Bernier’s speeding ATV, her blonde hair blowing in my face, I can see that the route we’re on is cut through what was quite recently a thick jungle. Along one side, a high wall of earth shades the road, and on the other, a steep ditch drops away toward the ocean. Peeling around a corner, the road forks. We hang right, and Bernier slows to a stop in front of an imposing house with a pool set in the front patio. Within a few months, this house will be occupied by a 70-year-old rugby player from Edmonton—one of this gated village’s first residents. Below us, dense jungle sprawls down the mountain toward the water, interrupted only by the newly built roads, faint outlines of staked-out lots, and high power lines.

Once completed, as promised in the promotional materials, Campa Vista (“Country View” in English) will afford a sunny, secure perch for Canadian snowbirds. The development’s website boasts of a “Euro-Mediterranean-style private gated community, with each property possessing its own unique and outstanding view.”

North American baby boomers have proven to have a boundless appetite for vacation or retirement homes in sunny, cheap places that aren’t too wracked by crime or war. It’s been a global windfall for many other countries, and now the people who run Honduras want a cut. Canadian entrepreneur Randy Jorgensen, developer of the Campa Vista complex, is happy to oblige. Jorgensen sells this tropical dream over the internet and in hotel conference-room seminars held in grey-skied Canadian locales: Regina; Etobicoke, Ontario; Duncan, B.C. His basic pitch: Honduras is the latest, best bargain available to Canadians wanting to own their own piece of a developing country.

But—as you might have guessed—this sunny picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Just off the beach in Trujillo, six men sit around a peeling wooden picnic table. They’ve agreed to meet me here to discuss their concerns about the Canadians they say are squatting on their ancestral lands.

“Canadians have a strong sense of private property,” said Evaristo Perez Ambular, a native of Trujillo and member of Honduras’s major organization representing the Garífuna indigenous population. “We don’t have any access to that land anymore, including to some of our traditional pathways.”

Ambular speaks fluent Spanish, but switches back to the Garífuna language at times to discuss with the other men. The Garífuna language and its people are unique in a way that is recognized worldwide: the language, dance, and music of the Garífuna peoples were added to the United Nations’ list of rare cultural traditions in need of safeguarding.

Popular lore has it that Garífuna peoples descend from a slave ship that washed up on St. Vincent Island, whose passengers escaped slavery and instead intermarried with local indigenous people. The Garífuna were once called “Black Caribs” by the British, who forced them off St. Vincent and onto Roatán Island and the Central American mainland in 1797.

A fishing people, the Garífuna developed a rich collective lifestyle dependent on the ocean, the forests and the beaches. Expert seafarers, many Garífuna became deckhands for cargo ships travelling up and down the coast of Latin America. Today, there is a significant Garífuna diaspora in the United States.

The latest threat to Garífuna people, says Ambular, is the wave of Canadian settlers who are cutting them off from their land base.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the Garífuna who live in Trujillo were given collective titles for a fraction of their territories. But community members allege that in 2007 a former leader misrepresented himself as the owner of the land and wrongfully sold off parcels of real estate—land that eventually ended up in Randy Jorgensen’s hands.

“There are many Canadians in our communities on the coast, and we haven’t seen a positive presence from them,” says Ambular. “They use our bridges and our roads, and they don’t leave us a thing.”

Evaristo Perez Ambular (far right) together with members of the Garifuna community in Trujillo. Photo by Dawn Paley.

José Velasquez, the current president of the two Garífuna communities in Trujillo, hands me a photocopy titled “Pronunciamiento No. 3.” It outlines the Garífuna peoples’ desire to reclaim their ancestral territories, and demands that the Honduran government nullify all land sales to Jorgensen.

Randy Jorgensen has lived in Honduras for 20 years, on and off. It’s been a getaway of sorts from his bustling life in Canada, where he conceived and oversaw the creation of Adults Only Video, the country’s first national chain of pornography stores.

Originally a muffler salesman in small-town Saskatchewan, Jorgensen was nicknamed Canada’s “porn king” in a 1993 Maclean’s profile. His specialty, as the article put it, was to “bring dirty movies into the clean streets of middle-class Canada,” and by the early ’90s, Adults Only Video was bringing in $25 million a year. Faced with lawsuits and police raids because of the content of his videos, Jorgensen maintained that everything he did was within the boundaries of the law.

Later, when I called Jorgensen to get his response to the claims of the Garífuna on the land where he’s building Campa Vista, he laughed, chalking the claims up to a form of “extortion.”

“For Canadians, the easiest way to compare it is to compare it to our own native Indians in Canada,” he says. “Depending on what’s going on, they may or may not decide that they have a land claim going on.” He says all of the paperwork for the land that he’s purchased is legitimate, and there’s no conflict. “As soon as there is any development going on generally, the Garífuna start checking around and seeing if there isn’t some way that they can extort some funds or something out of whoever is doing that development,” said Jorgensen.

Today, Jorgensen lives full-time in his home near the Campa Vista development in Honduras. He runs AOV Online, the internet broadcasting version of what his porno chain once was. But his first career is downplayed in his most recent venture into real estate, where he instead positions himself as a lifestyle expert. However, it’s clear that he’s learned something from his years in the porn business: sex sells.

The marketing videos for a partner project sold in Costa Rica include close-ups of various young, attractive women in tight, white T-shirts. After I watched these videos with a crowd of prospective buyers, the first comment from a man sitting nearby was “I wonder if she’s single.” Should he choose to move down to Honduras, he wouldn’t be the first to discover that sex tourism abounds.

In the tropical coastal town of La Ceiba, a few hundred kilometres from Trujillo, I meet Rick Mowers. I find him, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer from Hamilton, sitting at the computer beside the bar at Expatriates, a restaurant that he now co-owns.

“I just quit, moved here, went to instant retirement, did nothing for one year,” he says. The boredom eventually got to him, though. “It costs money to do nothing all day long. We find that too many of us drink too much alcohol or beer if you have nothing to do all day long.” Buying the restaurant has given the young-looking 53-year-old something to do with his time. He tells me he moved to Honduras with his wife, but they split after he had an affair. A warm breeze moved through the restaurant, stirring up the air under the high, thatched roof.

“It’s too cold, it’s too expensive, and I’m not going to live there for the free health care,” says Mowers of Canada. He rattles off how much cheaper things are in Honduras, from rent and food to crack cocaine and sex.

“Here sex is, in the whole country, sex is $10. So if you go downtown, and you stop and the girl gets in your car, it’s $10, 200 lempiras, for you to go have intercourse,” he says. Mowers didn’t mention the AIDS epidemic in the north-coast region, where over 60,000 people have HIV/AIDS, the highest infection rate in Central America.

Later, I Google Mowers. It turns out he was a bad cop. He had at least six disciplinary sanctions on his record when he left the Ontario Provincial Police, including neglect of duty when responding to a domestic violence complaint. On his partial police pension, he now lives like minor royalty in Honduras, a country where more than half the population lives below the official poverty line, and at least two million people live on less than $2 a day.

Sitting in the central park of San Pedro Sula one hot afternoon, I get a text message from a friend who says that the Honduras National Tourism Federation is having its annual meeting in the city tonight. After stopping at my hotel to change from shorts and a T-shirt into my most stiflingly hot, but fanciest, dress, I catch a cab over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The downstairs lobby, in from the heat, noise, and chaos of the outside, might as well be in Winnipeg, Los Angeles, or Shanghai. Air conditioning blasts the air, and well-dressed Hondurans sip fancy drinks and drag on cigarettes. San Pedro Sula has long been home to the country’s richest families, and today is the hub of Honduras’s sweatshop industry. I finagle my way into the upstairs ballroom and mingle with the upper crust of the tourism business in Honduras. They’re happy to talk about Canadian tourists. “Canadians are super-important to us,” says John Dupuis, the top representative for tourism in La Ceiba. In some hotels in the region, 70 to 80 percent of the guests are Canadian.

“Tourism from Canada, especially in winter, represents the largest source of income in the tourism sector in the Bay Islands and the north coast of the country,” said Piero Dibattista, who owns and manages several hotels in Roatán.

Canada has always been an excellent ally of the tourism industry, says Juan Antonio Bendeck, the chair of the Honduran Chamber of Tourism. Honduras’ tourism industry is small by comparison with its neighbours: the country welcomed 247,082 visitors in 2001, compared to nearby Costa Rica’s 823,575.

But following the June 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the already struggling tourism sector took a substantial hit. “I’d like to tell everyone to come to Honduras and that it’s a tranquil place and everything is beautiful, but you think I’d be successful with that message?” asked deposed tourism minister Ricardo Martínez, after showing footage of riots and repression in Tegucigalpa during a presentation to the Central American Travel Market.

“Well, Central America is Central America,” says Jorgensen, when asked about the safety of travelling and living in Honduras. He says Trujillo is a small town, and the “really bad guys” tend to stay away from the area.

Jorgensen’s Campa Vista development in Trujillo is being marketed by Tropical Freedom Properties Ltd., who promise just that for only $85 per square foot. Tropical Freedom is a subsidiary of Fast Track to Cash Flow, a St. Albert, Alberta-based company. The local Better Business Bureau gives the company a D on a scale of A+ to F, expressing “concerns with the industry in which this business operates.”

On this sunny morning in June, I’m attending a meet-up hosted by Tropical Freedom Ltd. in the basement of a Travelodge hotel on the freeway beside the sleepy retirement town of Duncan, B.C. Cindy Storme, a petite blond woman in a gold-accented brown pantsuit, wowed the three dozen or so mostly retirement-age people attending the event with stories about waking up to the sound of howler monkeys, banana boating, barbecues, and life beside the water. As her audience chewed on white-bread sandwiches cut into little triangles, Storme talked about Costa Rica, a much more stable country, which she says is “exactly like the movie Avatar.” At the tail end of Storme’s talk, she spends about 10 minutes talking about Honduras, a country that she says “every Canadian” can afford to buy property in. Not only will investing in Honduras give Canadians a place to get away, says Storme, but there’s no credit check involved. Jorgensen is even offering a travel allowance for anyone to go visit the properties, and there are income-tax breaks to boot. At least a few people in the room signed up for a $500 gold membership with Tropical Freedom, which gives them the right to buy property with Jorgensen’s Honduran project. Jorgensen is making sales. But the global market in pleasant tropical experiences is a highly competitive business, and members of the North American middle class have certain expectations when they purchase their own little slice of a Third World paradise.

Québécois tourists in La Ceiba, with a Garifuna boy. Photo by Dawn Paley.

My mind went to a conversation I’d had with two tourists from Gatineau, Quebec on a beach near La Ceiba. They told me that they found their hotel boring. They were too scared to go into town. The two of them were the closest thing I can imagine to professional beach-goers: deeply tanned, lathered up in oil, laid out on folding lounge chairs with most of their middle-aged skin exposed to the scorching sun. For the money, they said, Cuba is a better deal.

Honduras isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach, as anyone who strays from their supervised beach resort or walled-in retirement complex to a larger city will soon learn. There were 4,473 murders in Honduras in 2008, giving the country the chilling designation of having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world.Canadians who ignore the country’s security situation do so at their peril.

But Canadians who choose to ignore the long-standing conflicts over rural land do so at the expense of all who have lived there before, and put themselves at risk as well. Consider the advice of the U.S. State Department: “U.S. citizens should exercise extreme caution before entering into any form of commitment to invest in real estate, particularly in coastal areas and the Bay Islands.” Instead of buying into a smooth sales pitch, Canadians would do well to ask themselves why they expect to land in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, which is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and be treated like gods.

At least, that was the message that emerged from December’s “pension summit” in Whitehorse, where finance ministers and senior government officials from across Canada met to formulate a response to the failure of Canada’s baby boomers to adequately prepare for their own retirement. A turbulent decade in the equity markets, a marked decline in the number of private-sector pension plans, and an unwillingness or inability on boomers’ part to save enough means many members of Canada’s biggest generation face retirement years that may not exactly be golden. But while there are ideological and political differences of opinion on how this apparent crisis ought to be addressed, one thing was clear: the en masse retirement of the boomers presents a huge challenge that is still going untended.

Right now, Canada has one of the more generous government benefit plans in the world, with the combined income from the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement totalling as much as $36,000 per couple, or $19,000 per person as of 2009. Improving the lot of Canada’s retirees is a worthy goal, and the question of retirement income deserves closer study given the virtual disappearance of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector and the sorry fact that bankrupt companies’ pension recipients are among the last to be paid when creditors come to collect—as ex-employees of Nortel recently learned.

But there is something wrong if improving today’s pensions means saddling tomorrow’s workers with the bill—a very real possibility when it comes to pension reform. One of the most popular solutions floated in Whitehorse was a significant increase in contributions to the Canada Pension Plan in order to pay for the imminent bulge of retirees. One scenario would see employee contributions rise from 4.95 percent to eight percent, a 60 percent increase (and a 300 percent increase from the rates the boomers themselves paid for much of their working lives).

Harry Satanove, an actuary and pension advisor, worries that placing the burden of pension reform on young Canadians, many of whom are saddled with monstrous levels of student debt and all of whom suffer disproportionately from the consequences of a stiffening job market, is unfair. “We shouldn’t be relying on our kids and grandkids to pay for our pensions,” he said in a December 11, 2009, article on pension reform published in the Tyee. “There’s not enough of them to support all of us.” Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the plan, and not just when it comes to pension reform, either. The federal and provincial governments failed to anticipate the crunch, and the shortfall will have to be covered by the next generation of taxpayers. Thanks to a declining birth rate, the number of elderly Canadians has been on the rise for some time and that figure will peak in the next 30 years as the “dependency ratio”—the number of workers for every non-working adult—falls from five-to-one today to twoto-one by 2040. One study from early 2009 estimated that pension, health care, and other senior-related programs will cost $1.5 trillion over the next 50 years. Rising costs and falling revenues—partly owing to new debt from 2009’s stimulus spending—are a toxic combination. Yet there has been no national conversation of any significance, no meeting of provincial and federal ministers, and no sense of urgency about how Canada will fund this massive liability.

In view of these facts, the recent panic over the state of Canada’s retirement infrastructure establishes a worrying precedent. Those speaking on behalf of Canada’s baby boomers prefer to frame the retirement issue as an effort to improve the post-work prospects for all future generations, but the timing of its arrival on the national stage betrays that elegant smokescreen: It is no coincidence that retirement-related issues suddenly became a pressing national concern as the first baby boomers began to collect retirement benefits—just as it won’t be when health care, assisted suicide, and other senior-related issues become pressing concerns in their own time.

That’s not to attribute malicious motives to the boomers, but instead to acknowledge their demographic dominance simply overwhelms the agendas of other constituencies. Federal and provincial politicians have reacted to the concerns of Canada’s largest generation with a degree of responsiveness unheard of on files like student debt or the environment. And it isn’t surprising that the boomers have the ear of policy-makers, given both their numbers and their relative enthusiasm for voting. But privileging the interests of one demographic over those of another is a recipe for conflict. Younger Canadians can only hope that the politics of the next 40 years isn’t defined by it.

Cover of the March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine. Click to enlarge.

The March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine will be landing in subscribers’ mailboxes this week and is now on most newsstands coast to coast. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, this is a great time to do it, locking in a great price before the HST comes along. Just sayin’!) As always, the stories will all appear here on the website over the next few weeks. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet interwebby goodness.

On the cover this issue is John Duncan‘s investigation into the Canadian Forces’ future plans in Afghanistan. As the clock ticks down to the 2011 date for pulling out, Duncan finds, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that deadline will be met, and that Canada’s military is quietly prepping for alternate scenarios — including the possibility of Canadian CF-18s supplementing the Nato air campaign. And Aaron Broverman finds that militarization is creeping into other aspects of our lives as well, in the form of a global geopolitical struggle to control the ebb and flow of information on the internet. As repressive regimes abroad—not to mention law-enforcement agencies here at home—look for ever more intrusive ways to monitor civilians online, a small clutch of Canadian hackers are fighting back and working to keep the lines of communication open. And while the Communist Party of Canada has long been in the political wilderness, finds Eric Rail, its leader, Miguel Figeuroa, has been busy anyway, serving as party leader for 17 years and changing Canadian electoral law in some pretty substantial ways in the process.

There’s plenty more: Ashley Holly McEachern sends a postcard from Honduras reporting on the coup that has thrown the country into turmoil; Nav Purewal uncovers the unlikely origins of a Canadian movement to ban the burka; Alison Garwood-Jones reports from January’s Interior Design Show on the designers who are planning for our post-petroleum future; Paul McLaughlin interviews Globe and Mail former Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith; Max Fawcett warns that Canada’s looming pension crisis is a demographic time bomb; and Susan Peters profiles the authors of a new graphic novel telling the story of Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree girl abducted and killed 30 years ago, and whose story has largely gone untold until now.

PLUS: Tara-Michelle Ziniuk on The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Darryl Whetter on e-books; Allison Martell on the global shipping industry; Joshua Hergesheimer on an innovative Ethiopian aid project withering for lack of funds; Herb Mathisen on cellphone tower radiation; Kelly-Anne Reiss on Craik, Saskatchewan’s new eco-village concept; Alixandra Gould on progressive religions; Bruce M. Hicks on public inquiries; Raina Delisle on the aftermath of the Olympics; Ava Baccari on a literary atlas of Toronto; Navneet Alang on the internet’s high-culture pirates; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s broken aid promises.

With new poetry by Jason Camlot; and new fiction by Jessica Westhead.

Illustration by Alexei Vella

Baby boomers: drop the watercolours, back away slowly

In last spring’s flimsy caper comedy Mad Money, an uneasy truth lingered beneath the slapstick thievery and rolling-in-greenbacks hijinks: the fabled baby boomers, now hitting their early 60s, have no idea how to deal with the diminishing returns of their impending senior citizenship. Pardon me if I gloat.

The film opens with Diane Keaton and Ted Danson, a greying upper-class couple with grown children, flitting around their vast, over-decorated home like panicked pelicans, wattles and all. Ted’s character has lost his job, and Diane’s has never worked. They contemplate getting jobs for which they are overqualified (or simply too self-important) to perform, but are so horrified by this prospect that when Diane finally does get a crappy job, her desperation and complete disbelief in her change of fortune leads her to go on a gluttonous crime spree.

Watching Mad Money, it occurred to me that, as a post-boomer, generation X-er, echo baby — choose your own term — I have performed many jobs “beneath” my education or class standing. And so has everybody I know.

In fact, I can’t think of one person from my generation who has not spent at least half of his or her adult life gainfully underemployed — typically by boomers with a third, or less, of our education and credentials. For clarification, I am, according to most demographic standards, a near-boomer. I prefer the term “post-boomer,” thank you, if the B-word must be used.

I was born in 1965, the year traditionally cited as the end of the post-WWII baby boom. But I have always considered this calendar system woefully imprecise. Boomers are a cultural phenomenon — as they like to tell us every single day — and not a demographic one.

A boomer is someone whose first “English Invasion” pop music crush was the Beatles. Mine was the Sex Pistols (and that’s one hell of a telling gulf). A boomer fondly remembers his or her first colour television. A post-boomer remembers the day the cable was hooked up. Boomers were taken to Expo ’67 to get their first taste of culture on a grand scale. Post-boomers were taken to … well, nothing.

One of the first bitter lessons we postboomers learned about the adult world is that once a boomer has all the cake he or she wants (practically free university tuition, full universal health care, bountiful entry-level jobs with minimal qualifications, CUSO), they don’t put the rest of the cake in the freezer for a future sweet tooth — they take a hammer to it and shove the mush down the garberator.

But now boomers are edging toward their golden years and you can see the fear steaming out of day spas and rumbling across golf courses like a charged purple haze.

Naturally, they’ve turned a timeless reality into a fresh business opportunity. Bookstores are packed with how-to-age books for boomers. The ever-resourceful Moses Znaimer has dubbed his own pre-walker days his “zoomer” years and created a magazine to sell the brand. Radio stations are converting to Age of Aquarius nap-time programming, and televisions are flooded with gardening and travel shows.

Sherry Cooper’s bestselling The New Retirement: How It Will Change Our Future (the hubris of the boomers demands that everything they do be declared “new” — what next, The New Death?) attempts to counter boomer mortality anxiety with recipes for “wellness” management and, most important, investment profit maximization (one suspects the two goals are mutually inclusive).

According to sherrycooper.com, “boomers will redefine retirement with great energy and creativity, working well beyond age 65 and mostly by choice…healthy goal-driven boomers will seek purposeful leisure…” Am I the only person who finds that paragraph terrifying?

Working “well beyond age 65”? Swell. That’s great news for the economy, transnational trade, all levels of government, the civil service, the CBC, academia, the arts (I could go on here, but it’s too depressing). Seasons 30 to 40 of The Vinyl Café ought to be a riot.

And what exactly is this futuristic-sounding “purposeful leisure”? I read that quote to a fellow post-boomer artist, and he stopped cold, gulped, and said, “Oh God, now they’re all going to be artists … watercolours are back.”

While I don’t condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don’t have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here’s how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you’re eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.

You’ve had a good run, flower children, longer than anybody else’s, but the bloom’s off, it’s last call at Alice’s Café, time to relocate. I hear P.E.I. is nice, and it has a convenient bridge. The kind that locks at night.