Our two solitudes

Meet Edith Usiobaifo.

If you live in Toronto and think — like most well-off local residents — that it’s among the most wonderful of cities, it’s time you met Edith.

She lives in the Kingston Rd. and Galloway area of Scarborough. To make ends meet, she maintains a razor-sharp schedule.

She wakes at 4 a.m., is out the door at 6 and drops her 8-year-old son at daycare. She walks 20 minutes to the nearest GO station, takes the train to Ajax, then a bus to her workplace. On a good day, her commute time is three hours each way. Edith’s story was told as just one of the “voices” of lived experience in the Toronto Foundation’s annual Vital Signs report this week.

The report compiles the latest statistics and studies in 10 areas, including health, income, housing and learning. This year, it had the advantage of the latest Statistics Canada census data.

What it found was a tale of two solitudes — the one small and affluent, the other large and struggling. The income chasm long noted in Toronto, as elsewhere, is large and growing. One per cent of the population makes more than $250,000 a year. Thirty-five per cent make less than $20,000.

The experience of life between postal codes on either side of that troubling divide could hardly be more different.

As the Star’s Laurie Monsebraaten reported, one statistic tells the story in utter starkness. The mortality rate is 16 per cent higher for low-income Toronto residents than for the wealthy.

In the past, the Vital Signs report (published since 2001) usually cited the numbers, the bad and the good of Toronto life. This time, it has included voices like Edith’s, the better to give hardship a human face, the better to stir the well-off — the policy-makers and the philanthropists — to doing what it takes to ensure the gap is closed.

The report notes that Toronto — with a growing population, thriving economy and crane-filled skyline — has a great deal to celebrate in wealth and opportunity. The problem is that too few get to share it.

For Edith, the grind takes a toll. On her health. Her quality of life. Her ability to tend to her son. Some days, all she wants to do is go to bed early. “Why? Because I need to wake up at 4:30 a.m. again.” What the Vital Signs report says this year is that if you don’t know Edith, or someone who knows the same challenges she does, someone who faces the day-in, day-out exhaustion of poverty, you don’t know Toronto.