Hungry, and hungry for action
We tend not to think of the poor in small towns because Toronto is a big town; oh, hell, we don’t think much about the poor here, either.
But at least in Toronto we have shelters, such as they are; services, such as they are. Hospitals, food banks, meal programs, and the clothing banks here are so good that you cannot tell income or status by looking at the way a person dresses.
We also have buses, streetcars and subways to get from one service to another, even if transit is pricey.
All of which is to say I was in Newmarket the other day for a nifty little public policy event when, on the way into the hall, I noticed a car in the parking lot, jammed to the roof with stuff; clothing, food, sleeping bags; just stuff. Somebody moving?
The woman I was with said she knew the driver, and the driver was homeless and lived in her car. The point? The poor are everywhere. Also, you need a car if you want to get around in a small town, because small towns may have a shelter here and a food bank there, but small towns also have lousy transit. That’s another story. And you will meet the woman who lives in her car in a future column. Back to the event: I was there to witness an Internet hook-up between Olivier De Schutter in Geneva, and a bunch of anti-poverty workers and volunteers gathered not just in Newmarket but in various cities across the country.
De Schutter? He is a lawyer and a rights worker for the United Nations; his area of specialty is the right to food. He upset the Canadian apple cart last year — oh, if only they were real apples — when he toured the country and suggested that many of us are going hungry. He also said, with that delicate United Nations phrasing, that access to decent food was a human right. He’s right. And on the day he was to file the results of his recent work at the UN, he took some time to answer questions from Canadians. I was there at the invitation of Freedom 90, a union of food bank workers and volunteers, mostly from the small towns outside Toronto. They do the real work of feeding people efficiently, tirelessly, and selflessly. That name, by the way, is ironic: the men and women of Freedom 90 would like to be retired from the work of feeding the hungry when they are, say, 90 instead of the mythic 55. I don’t know how long that sort of irony holds up. I do know that, in York Region, there is a food reclamation program that collects some 2,500 banana boxes full of food from supermarkets in the region and distributes it to food banks and meal programs in Vaughan, Markham, Simcoe, Keswick, East Gwillimbury, and you get the point. Pauline Apperly volunteers in Tottenham. Prior to the hookup, she told me about her work. “People come because they don’t have enough to eat. The program I set up, it was an emergency.” That was years ago; it’s part of daily life now. She said, “Food shouldn’t be charity.” She also said, “I’ve been called a Communist.” She, and me. And then the links were made, and De Schutter appeared onscreen. He said that Canada lags behind other countries in our approach to economic and social rights, and that we ought to have a national debate about food as a human right. He’s right.
I won’t quote him directly because he speaks like a UN bureaucrat, mildly and with an emphasis on process, but he worries that our food policy is focused on export. He’s right. He says our Mexican and Caribbean temporary workers have lousy health care and lousy wages. He’s right. He said that roughly a tenth of Canadians are poor. He’s right. He said we are failing these people. He’s painfully right. We have widespread and growing hunger in Canada, and we have tackled it with invention and charity, but it seems to me we have been doing this so long that we have forgotten to ask why some people are starving. And it’s embarrassing to be told by an outsider that we are failing. We need to talk? He’s not right about that. We need to act. I merely note: very few crumbs in the latest federal budget for those who are going hungry.