The new Farmers’ Almanac says that this is going to be a bitter winter across the Prairies and around the Great Lakes. I imagine that it will be even worse farther north, where many of our snowbirds happily reside in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. at’s the bad news! I know, I forgot Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces. Does anyone actually live in northern Saskatchewan during the winter? If so, please send me a picture or two. I used to live in Nova Scotia, many years ago, and I know what winters are like there. ey are all bitter, with a biting wind o the ocean that will chill your bones! I do not want to be too negative here, because the Atlantic Provinces are probably the best place in the world to visit, or even live, during their wonderful spring, summer and fall seasons. e good news, of course, is that most of us are going to escape to much warmer places such as California, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Mexico, Spain, Italy and other parts around the Mediterranean and even farther south. Some of us will even migrate to the Southern Hemisphere where it is actually summer, in the middle of winter here in Canada. Panama, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and other locales can be wonderful destinations to explore or to just relax in the warm sunshine. Many news sources are saying that outbound travel will be down this year, but I don’t believe a word of it. As most of you know, we have just completed our Early Bird travel insurance sales season. Are sales down? No, they are up! Several hundrednewclients purchased our Early Bird package over last year. Sure, some of them were kicked o of their credit card coverage when they turned 65 and several came to us from other companies that cut them o at age 70, 75 or 80. But that is all fairly normal; this year, there are just more of them. It is too bad that these snowbirds did not start buying fromMedipac eight years ago; then, they would have enjoyed an additional 8% o of their rates now. at is on top of our 10% claim-free discount (if you qualify, of course). We have kept our excellent rates unchanged for the Early Bird season, but were forced to increase themmarginally for the upcoming season. A small (but large to some) increase of 2-3%will apply to all new policies. All of the governments are putting the boots to we retired people because there are just so many of us, and we are growing in number every year. We are easy pickings for their disgusting policies. It is the of our medical bene ts, the of our pension bene ts and the of our social bene ts − all of which we have paid for many times over. eir abuse, and breach, of the Canada Health Act is just a small thing, but it will a ect us all in the long run. An even worse government policy is to debase our dollar. When we gave the government our one dollar in 1965 to invest and save for us, for our retirement, it would buy ve loaves of bread or four quarts of milk. Do you remember? Instead they, of course, spent all of the money. When they nally, and reluctantly, give that one dollar back to us in 2019, it will not even buy one-half a loaf of bread…and milk? It will only buy one cup of milk. at is 16 times less (approximately) than what we gave them. ese are numbers straight out of the Canadian Bureau of Statistics. “ e Horror,” as they said in the movie Apocalypse Now. J. Ross Quigley CEO Medipac International Inc. Insurance 14 | www.snowbirds.org
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