Failing our children
It’s hard not to feel as though many young Canadians have gotten the short end of the stick.
They’re inheriting a world with an ever-worsening environment. Our natural resources are being depleted, our waterways and air are laced with pollutants, climate change is constantly getting worse and our oceans are awash in plastic bottles and garbage.
Thanks to reckless borrowing and spending over the past decade, Canada’s youth are also inheriting a massive debt burden. Canada’s federal debt now stands at nearly $1.2 trillion — a mind-boggling sum. That works out to about $33,000 owed by each and every Canadian. Meanwhile, the debt continues to grow by $145 million per day.
Home ownership in Canada’s biggest cities is out of reach of most young couples. Many of them will never own a home. And for a large number of young people today, there is a growing sense of hopelessness — a feeling caused in large part by a lack of meaningful, good-paying careers.
To make matters worse, many of them are graduating at a time when the economy is sliding into a recession and inflation is eating up what little money they have to spend. And if all that weren’t bad enough, this will likely be the first generation in Canada to have a lower quality of life than their parents.
It’s hardly surprising that a recent survey undertaken on behalf of the Macdonald-laurier Institute found that Canadian youth were deeply pessimistic about their economic prospects. Can anyone blame them?
Perhaps the worst problem of all — the one that almost always gets overlooked — is the health and physical well-being of children and teenagers. A growing number of them are not healthy, with Type 2 diabetes and obesity at alarming levels. One of the reasons for that is a lack of physical activity. Another major cause is diet.
Consider this: our children spend more time at school than at any other place besides their homes. Schools are therefore hugely important when it comes to safeguarding our children’s health and helping them lead healthy lives by eating nutritious foods. But a lot of the meals served in school cafeterias — everything from pizza to hotdogs to french fries — contain high levels of sugar, salt, processed carbohydrates and unhealthy fats. At the end of the day, I can’t help but wonder: who’s watching out for our kids?
It doesn’t have to be this way. Many of our economic problems could be fixed if politicians had the backbone to enact the necessary reforms and introduce sound economic policies. The more complex issues — and the ones that will take much longer to solve — are those related to the environment and our health.
Parents want their children to grow up in a healthy world — a world with clean air, clean water and nutritious foods. But governments have been slow to bring about the sort of reforms we need. Some of these changes include annual reductions in carbon emissions, a more rapid shift to clean energy sources, the wider adoption of zero-emission vehicles and the elimination of pesticides and chemicals in our foods.
One of the easiest and most cost-effective solutions we can implement is to provide every Canadian school kid with healthy, organic meals. It would tackle the problem of food insecurity that some Canadian families face, while also addressing the issue of nutrition.
No child in Canada should ever have to go to school hungry, or should ever have to return home hungry. Schools should provide nutritious meals made with organic food, free of charge, to all students. Although organic school meals would cost a little more than what we currently spend, they would save billions of dollars in health-care costs over the long term.
It’s the least we can do to leave behind a better world for young Canadians who face a host of problems that we’ve dumped on their laps.