Poverty in a land of great wealth - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

One of the advantages of being my age is that you come to appreciate many of the improvements life offers today.

 

On the weekend, for instance, we had a meteorological setback with winter weather returning for a day. But modern weather forecasting is so good that we knew in advance that this was coming, and that it would only be short, and then we’d be back to spring-like weather, and the spring snowdrops already blooming in our garden, would soon reappear from under the snow.
But one thing we never imagined when I was a youngster were the camps of tents that are present in many urban areas these days, housing people who can’t afford rent and those who use their rent money instead to buy drugs.  

 

The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario calculates that on any given night, 35,000 Canadians are homeless (about the population of the City of Stratford) and that at least 235,000 are homeless in a year. Of these, 27 per cent are women, 19 per cent are youths and 24 per cent are people 55 years of age or older.

 

I’m not sure how old these figures are. If they’re based on last year, things are already probably worse this year. The number of people who are homeless just appears to keep growing.

 

The saddest part of this is how many of these people seem to be drug addicts. As a kid, even as a young adult, this extreme amount of drug addiction wouldn’t have seemed possible - this, despite the fact that many people of my generation were the first to smoke marijuana regularly. Some of the addicts are people who have progressed from one level of drugs to another, seeking a bigger “high”. But others were hooked by using some drugs originally provided on doctors’ advice to recover from pain and becoming addicted.
   

I feel sorry for political leaders and municipal staff who are blamed for not doing more to help the homeless. There are free clinics set up to ensure those addicted get clean in the hopes of saving their lives. Often neighbours complain of the chaos created in their community by the patients attracted and the dangerous effect on neighbourhood children.

 

When it comes to housing, civic politicians and staff have provided some drop-in centres where people can seek a warm bed for the night, but even if they had enough of these to house all the homeless people they had in their city last year, there always seem to be more this year - more than the shelter spaces available.

 

The situation seems to be made worse by many landlords who claim they must renovate buildings and so they evict long-term tenants who don’t pay as much rent. Unable to meet the soaring rent these days, (high rents someone my age finds unbelieveable) they often become homeless. What kind of greedy-gus landlord can enjoy his higher income while watching these people suffer?

 

All this in a country that has so much! Meanwhile, the population of the country seemed to drop by a third, or even a half in some areas, this past week because so many took their families to southern vacation spots - all while we had people living in tents.

 

Things have changed so much since I was young. Going to a town school in Lucknow, I can remember only a couple of families who went south in winter. Most of us in my community (and I suspect most others) found something else to do on our “Easter” holiday, as it was back then. We didn’t have the money for a vacation in my youth. Airports were much smaller because few people flew. The only people I knew who had been to Europe were my father, who had been a soldier, and our neighbours, a Dutch family who had come to Canada to escape the poverty of post-World War II. 

 

We have lived such a blessed life since then in Canada. Millions and millions of people have come to Canada (our population has more than doubled since my childhood) and nearly all of them have prospered. And still they come, and still they improve their lifestyles.

 

And yet, while all these people do well, more than 200,000 people across the country can’t afford to rent an apartment, let alone a house. Since my childhood we’ve adopted a government-sponsored medical system that pays for most medical costs. Our governments help us get college and university education, with grants to schools and subsidies to students. We have more people today with a post-secondary education than ever before. (I was the first person in my extended family with a post-secondary degree, thanks to student loans and grants.)

 

And yet, we also have people living in tents in parks and along river banks, something we never saw in my youth. We have wealth we couldn’t even imagine when I was young, and yet we have people living in tents.

 

Take a few moments this mid-winter break, to think about that contrast.