There are choices, and then there are options. Consult a dictionary and you won’t find much of a difference in definitions, but consult your gut and you just might.
Choice is a grand word, a one-ton syllable hauled from the French middle ages and delivered to modern English complete with connotations of unlimited variety, vast diversity and infinite selection. It’s a sexy word. Everyone wants it.
But option? Option is cold and clinical, two dumpy syllables brought to us from Latin and reliant on choice to explain themselves. The word’s tertiary definitions busy themselves with connotations related to stocks and additional car features. It’s not sexy. Options are limited. You settle for options when choice has gone home with someone else.
In the marketplace, as anywhere else, we like to think we have choice. We wake up in our beds, open our eyes, and the light of our choices shines into our lives. Spouses, furniture, linen, movie collections, food, clothes, books . Everywhere we look, we are gloriously extended by the hard angles of our choices.
Or are we?
We don’t really have choice, not in the way we like to think of it. What we do have is options, and, hey, it could be worse. But let’s call it what it is.
Every day, all over the world, choices are restricted by subsidy. Choices become options. When the government gives a particular industry financial assistance, the products of that industry become more readily available, this at the expense of their competitors. The food industry is rife with this kind of favouritism.
Another candidate for subsidy is the fossil fuel industry. Globally, the dirty giant enjoys about $500 billion in subsidies a year. The lion’s share of that goes to consumers in developing countries.
In Canada, experts figure the government forgoes hundreds of millions of tax dollars every year so that the oil and gas industry can be more productive. The Pembina Institute says the number is $2 billion.
Now, as the country prepares to host the G8 and G20 conferences, with their billion dollar security costs, Canada is saying it might lead the charge in cancelling those subsidies. One imagines Jack Layton’s policy vein throbbing with pleasure.
The people who track these developments are doubtful that Canada will go through with it. Stephen Harper’s Canada is not prone to this type of thing. We now live in a country of free-falling global repute, whether in the realm of foreign policy, environmental contributions or foreign aid.
Still, discussions do sometimes precipitate actions. Fewer subsidies for the oil and gas industry could well translate into more for the alternative fuel industry.
Email your MPS. Write letters to your editors. Tell them you want choice when it comes to the vehicles you buy and the ways you decide to heat your homes. Right now, options are limited and choices are a luxury.
- Paul Carlucci, Editor