Canada is so rich, and yet, so poor - Keith Roulston editorial

Every time I turn on the news on TV these days, particularly as we approach winter, there seems to be stories about the number of homeless people and the need to find them warmer accommodation than tents for the coming winter.

Municipalities are doing more for the homeless these days than ever before. Yet, no matter if they have warm accommodations for as many homeless people as there were last year, this year there are always more, and our municipalities are always faulted for not doing a better job. Some of this is due to higher interest rates charged by banks and other financial organizations these days after the Bank of Canada raised interest rates to try to kill off inflation. It means people who own rental apartments and houses may face higher costs, and then they, in turn, may seek higher rents - or maybe they simply see an opportunity to increase their profits.

At the same time that some people can’t pay their rent, others are living exceedingly well. We have relatives (retired) who are on the go full time, whether heading down south for the winter (leaving an empty home) or travelling here and there during the warmer months. Literally thousands of people in Ontario keep houses in the city and cottages in resort areas – while people live in tents in parks or on the streets.

Meanwhile many of us who may not have two homes, still waste the world’s resources. It’s the time of the year when our trees drop their leaves. I was recently reading that someone using a gas-powered leaf-blower for one  hour, causes as much pollution as driving a car 1,800 kilometres. We have invented so many labour-saving devices like leaf-blowers in recent years that we’ve changed our climate (something I must admit has some pleasant aspects as I prepare for a winter in the 2020s compared to the ferocious winter storms of the 1970s).

We’re all guilty. I cut an acre or more of grass during the summer, burning precious gas and causing pollution. This offsets the good done by dozens of trees I’ve planted in nearly 50 years living on our five acres.

When you get to be my age, you have the ability to see just how much more wealth we have today than in, for instance, the 1950s. On one hand, our car makers, with tougher regulations from our governments, have cut the amount of emissions each car creates, yet we now have so many more cars (often two per family) than after World War II. We have built a network of super-highways and the people who can afford to, live farther and farther from work. The provincial government plans to build a new highway north of Toronto, using up prime farmland.

New housing is needed because the federal government is opening up immigration to nearly a half-million people a year who flock to prime areas like Toronto and London, driving these big cities to expand. Canada’s population has doubled since my childhood.

And these people expect more. I get a chuckle when I think of my wife’s parents’ dream house they built in the new suburb of Scarborough after the war. It was a little, 1,100-square-foot, storey-and-a-half house. Their children moved to 2,500 square-foot, two-storey monsters.

Of course, part of that change came because, while mothers of people my age stayed home and concentrated on their children and homes, wives of people my age often worked, increasing family income. With that, our expectations changed.

What also changed was how often women had the ability to pick up and leave if their husbands didn’t treat them well. Often people who can’t afford today’s rent increases are those who live on a single income.

And so we have the contrast where many people live better than ever, with southern vacations, summer cottages and plenty of labour-saving devices, while a smaller percentage of us can’t afford both rent and food and so live on the street.

It reminds me of the grim lives many of our great-grandparents faced in England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-1800s when they were willing to risk their lives travelling for weeks on sailing ships for what they hoped would be a better life in Canada than the grim survival they faced in the old country. They found that better life, and it became better and better with each generation. Now we’re in a similar situation with some people who have no “new” (for Europeans, not Native Canadians) continent to move to.

It’s such a strange situation: most of us live better than our grandparents ever dreamed of, while some desperate people live in tents and makeshift shelters in parks and streets. Is this really a Canada most of us lucky ones want to call our own?