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Gentle the condition
A just society where co-operation is valued as much as competition and where compassion always triumphs over contempt
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Beryl Wajsman
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21 December 2007
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“This story shall the good man teach his son; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; This day shall gentle the condition;” — Henry V
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| “For all those of goodwill who still seek to build a just society where co-operation is valued as much as competition and where compassion always triumphs over contempt." |
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| At this time of year too many of us tend to think all’s right with the world. We believe the advertising, the gimmicks and the statistics.
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$">The reality is there is much wrong. There is much pain.
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$">And the fleeting moments in these weeks when we decide to become more generous and giving, not only with money but with our time, rarely carry over into the rest of the year.
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$">Thankfully there are many individuals who sacrifice time, talent and treasure to try and make things right.
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$">This issue is dedicated to them. And to the hope that we will all resolve that when we see suffering we will try and heal it; when we see injustice we will try to cure it and when we see want we will try and meet it.
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$">I can start with the numbers. They are important, but nobody lives on the averages as Mark Twain said. Behind the numbers are people. Real people with real hurt.
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$">Less than 10 percent of this country has a net worth of $5,000 or more. One-third of our urban households live below the federal poverty line of $34,000 for four down to $19,000 for one.
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$">One quarter of our working population is classified as working poor. Our seniors are our fastest growing part of our society, yet government pension plans cover less than one-third of minimum needs.
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$">Forty years ago they covered 50 percent. One reason that they have fallen behind is wrong-headed priorities.
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$">A refugee with a wife and two children will receive almost $2,800 a month from various levels of government.
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$">A pensioner, having working 40 years, has to make do on $700. Over 6 million Canadians get help from food banks with basic food staples every month.
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$">We have the highest number of able-bodied Canadians not being able to find work since the depression. Some 24 percent.
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$">Yes the UI numbers are low at 7 percent, but what they don’t tell you are the numbers for those whose UI benefits have run out and those who have fallen between the cracks.
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$">This number has been criticized by conservative commentators who say it does not take into account a 20 percent “generational” welfare component. Well, if we reduced the 24 percent by one-fifth to 19.20 percent it would still be outrageous. We are exporting Canadian jobs to slave markets like China in record numbers. Just two years ago Montreal lost 40,000 textile jobs in the space of several months when certain tariffs fell. To add insult to injury half the exported jobs are supported by our taxpayer dollars through federal Export Development Corporation guarantees.
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$">These are some of the reasons why many among us can’t afford proper housing, or nourishing food or have trouble finding any job. Governments occupy themselves with nanny-state laws and programs that are now sucking up to one-quarter of our budgets. They impose suffocating tax burdens to fund what no one demanded. And they abdicate responsibility for dealing with the tough stuff. The core responsibilities of governance.
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$">Well, while governments dawdle, individuals across the country are tackling some of our saddest and severest problems. Social activists are bursting out in record numbers. We wanted to show you what is happening in our own city. We’ve devoted this issue to some of the most important organizations, and extraordinary people, delivering front-line help to those in need. To our knowledge no publication in this city has ever devoted an entire issue to covering the social action horizon. This has been an ambitious undertaking. We hope it inspires you to get involved.
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$">The people and groups you’ll be reading about represent not only a revolution in self-reliance; not only signal the strength of the NGO movement, they are also the vanguard of what I believe is a newly emerging political plurality in Canadian public life. A plurality of conscience. A new alignment of concerned citizens who realize that this nation’s problems are not managerial and technical, as many bureaucratic and economic theorists argue, but political and distributive. It is a coalition of those who dare to care.
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$">The real division in this country is not between races or generations or language groups, but between the privileged who have power and those who have neither power nor property. The new reality is that the vulnerable, as disenfranchised as they may feel, are becoming the pre-eminent plurality to whom all domestic public agendas must be addressed. The response of those featured in these pages, and indeed of many others across this nation, represents a new grass-roots populism much different from traditional Canadian progressive political movements.
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$">From the assembly line worker who hates his job but has no alternative, to the small business owner whose taxes have soared out of all proportion to the services received, to the elderly eking out lives on social security, to the newly poor who have lost a lifetime of savings in a catastrophe, to the working poor fed up with working longer for the same pay, to women and the visible minorities tired of being the last hired and first fired, to the newly enfranchised young voters fed up with the calcified hypocrisy around them, to all those facing the groaning neglect of government bureaucracies that no longer work. This is the new Canadian mosaic. This is the tapestry of a new populism.
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$">This populism, this activism, mirrors a broad national frustration, not merely a yoke holding factions together into temporary political alliances. This new populism takes its strength from real work. Real help. Real results. It is pragmatic, knowing full well that politics is only half the story since so many promises have yet to be fulfilled and so much power rests beyond the reach of the electoral process. These new populists mistrust the technocrats who have failed so spectacularly so often. It is participatory, believing change is generated from below.
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$">Most importantly it realizes that traditional approaches have been compromised and calcified through a dependence on rhetoric instead of an involvement with, and engagement in, everyday reality. An everyday reality that prizes hard work, loyalty, and endurance, and rejects ingratitude, false piety and lack of courage. A populism that does not fear to ask why should anyone suffer.
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$">This new pragmatic populism recognizes that a certain degree of inequality is inevitable, but as the privileged become richer and the potent more powerful these populists have no hesitancy in making a call on the commonweal of this country for the sake of the humble who cannot secure like advantages for themselves. The new populists recognize and reject the old politics of division. Their work, and their words, command us to answer why the nature of the Canadian social contract has had its vision dimmed, its goals diminished, its philosophy undefended and its very spirit deadened.
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$">The work you will read about in this issue underscores that what is needed is engagement with an activist populist vision, not merely the continued parroting of an anti-plutocrat vocabulary. It is not about semantics. It is about the need to challenge interests, not merely balance them. It is about the capacity to see the world through the eyes of its victims. We must learn to understand intuitively that the less educated are not less intelligent and that the less affluent are not any less human.
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$">We should always remember that the just society which people of goodwill still seek to build is predicated on a recognition of an equitable claim on the stock of welfare of the land by all, and that this recognition has not yet found full expression in the social contract between the government and the people.
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$">That we are still grappling with the perplexing paradox of an economy of abundance producing only a thin veneer of affluence.
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$">In our land today there are too many of shrivelled spirit and hostile heart who fear the future, mistrust the present and invoke the security of a comfortable past, which, in fact, never existed.
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$">What the people in these pages represent are a faith. A faith in people and in their ability to be generous and noble and brave.
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$">A compassionate faith, tempered only by the experience of reason and judgment, that pledges to secure the justice and opportunity that all human beings deserve.
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$">They teach us that the work is its own reward, That though the day is long, the causes endure, the hopes still live and the dreams shall never die.
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