Rich thinking keeps people on the street
Let’s not forget: poverty includes more than the homeless
You get what you pay for, or, in Toronto’s case, what you don’t. The shelter crisis of recent weeks — or is it years? — has been a clear indication that whatever demands our political masters are prepared to make of us, helping the homeless survive a deep freeze isn’t among them.
What this says about us is up for debate. But as the old adage has it: we get the leadership we deserve. This is a crucial point in any discussion about how we treat the poor in Toronto. As Councillor Gord Perks has said of the current shelter crisis, on Twitter, “This was predictable. It was predicted and not prevented. It was CHOSEN in order to keep taxes low. Low taxes mean threadbare services with no spare capacity.”
If nothing else, this month’s extreme cold has revealed just how little spare capacity there is in Toronto’s ability to respond to such a crisis. How cold has it been? Well, according to Councillor John Campbell, cold enough to keep people off the streets. As he told the CBC, “When it’s -15 C, people don’t want to walk a block-and-a-half to get to a restaurant; they want to park within 100 metres.”
Campbell was explaining why restaurateurs on King St. W. are complaining about how bad business has been lately. According to the councillor, the loss of 180-odd street parking spots for the transit pilot project has turned King St. into a “dead zone.”
Even though there are thousands of parking spots within a few minutes’ walk and despite the ease with which the King streetcar now travels, Torontonians hate to be outdoors for a minute longer than necessary when temperatures are so low. Makes one wonder how the homeless manage to make their way to the aptly named Better Living Centre, where Toronto has cleverly opened a homeless shelter. Far from transit, but surrounded by parking, the shelter on the grounds of Exhibition Place has beds for 20 and plans for 100 by the middle of the month. Too bad the homeless don’t own cars.
Despite reports to the contrary, however, Councillor Joe Mihevc assured the press last month that, “These are spots that are real and that will bring people in from the winter cold.”
Let’s not forget: poverty includes more than the homeless. Although a job is enough to keep many off the streets, more people than ever rely on food banks to eat. So when Ontario’s new $14 minimum wage came into effect on Jan. 1, business owners took immediate action. The most emblematic response came when certain Tim Horton’s franchisees sent word to staff, or in Tim Horton’s parlance, “team members,” that, henceforth, they would not be paid for breaks and would also be required to contribute a whole lot more to their benefit programs. What choice did the owners have? By the time the team heard the news, Daniel Schwartz, CEO of Tim’s parent company Restaurant Brands International, who took home a modest $6.2 million in 2016, might already have made the yearly earnings of some of them.
Workers and executives have nothing in common, Carleton University business professor Ian Lee told the press. Of CEOs, he said, “Comparing them to an ordinary person is like comparing apples to kumquats; it’s a false comparison.”
That might account for the scarcity of kumquats.
But not even kumquats cost 200 times as much as apples, which is the rate the country’s top CEOs make compared to the average worker’s salary.
What we have here is an unabashed attempt to legitimize inequality; the rich are rich because they deserve to be, because they’re superior. “Ordinary people,” by contrast, are inferior, and, therefore, deserving of poverty. Their very ordinariness condemns them to minimum wages and unpaid breaks.
The homeless, at the bottom of the barrel, are wholly undeserving.
Taxes or Timmies, the dominant values of a society devoted to the acquisition of wealth are those of the rich. This is already apparent in the U.S. under Donald Trump. And where America goes, Canada isn’t far behind.
The notion that taxes could be a means of redistributing wealth is now considered a socialist heresy.
The idea that poverty, the main cause of human suffering, affects everyone, including the rich, has become apostasy.
Either you’re rich or you’re poor; there’s no room for anything in between.