A Winter Stroll

It's a beautiful early winter night out there, just got in from a nice walk around the neighbourhood. I live in the Beaches/Beach area of Toronto, it's a great place for walking and sight seeing, (if you are into looking in peoples houses). Many already are fully decorated for the Holidays, and with the light covering of snow it is quite picturesque, and if I knew how to get pictures on this stupid blog, you'd see what I mean. This area of the city has always been really quite well-to-do, but there are some sections and streets that were always inhabited by people of fairly modest means. I was struck tonight by how even these streets have been gentrified, how there doesn't appear to be any low income housing in this area any more. Then it occurred to me that the other day a report came out stating that Toronto has one of the lowest mean incomes in Ontario, where are these people living? Cabbage town, an historic working class neighbourhood is very upscale now, the west end around 'little Italy' now very popular and expensive, are we driving the low wage earners out to Alberta? We can't be because apparently most low wage earners are living in Toronto. Strange. And a little frightening. In a society which insists on seeing upward mobility as a clear goal, with industry saying it can't pay decent wages (apparently a $10.00/hr minimum wage would close many) in a city where real estate is the hottest commodity, and a paucity of affordable housing is a fact of life, doesn't it seem obvious that this is a spiral to ghettoization of our poor working class?
How does it come about that in a country as blessed as this, with an economy performing as well as ours, that we have a huge percent of our workers living in poverty? 'splain that to me Lucy?
The number of children in this city living in poverty is staggering, and with Christmas just around the corner, this must be the hardest time of the year to be broke, cause everyone sees the ads for all the really neat stuff that's available if only you got the dough. No wonder people play the lotteries. Dare I say it, no wonder people sell drugs, knock off convenience stores, or try to cheat their way to a little extra moola. Solutions?

Well Canada was a co-sponsor of a U.N. anti child poverty initiative a number of years ago, why don't we revisit what we were supposed to accomplish. Stephen Lewis was instrumental in drafting it, I am sure if we asked him he'd remind us of how we were going to achieve this worthy goal of eradicating child poverty. A national housing policy? How does a nation as wealthy as ours, with a climate as inhospitable as ours not guarantee a safe and secure roof over every childs head? How in a country as food rich is it possible for children to attend school hungry? The National, Wheat, Egg, and Dairy boards continue to limit the full utilization of crops in order to inflate the pricing, couldn't we be feeding our kids? For that matter couldn't we be feeding kids all over the world? We can't afford it? The amount of wealth being generated daily in the real estate markets around this country is staggering. I'm sure that we can all point to houses that are worth (or at least being sold for) thirty times their price of thirty years ago. These gains are making the gap between rich and poor look like the grand canyon.
The wild surge in real estate in this country is nuts, number one the land was stolen from the Natives, (even that crook Brian Mulroney acknowledges that), and as we all know one of the only methods of making restitution for theft, is returning the stolen property, we all know that this isn't going to happen. But what of limiting the gains that can be made? Since true clear title can not ever be given, why not set a value and in the event a property goes for more- the excess is turned over to the original (native) owners. Of course I am speaking of turnng this over to the bands who would have signed the first treaties pertaining to that land, in the Mohawks case (who never signed over any land) we'd need to arrive at a different formula. It always struck me as absurd that in a land as large as Canada, where the only thing that existed was miles and miles of miles', that one of the first imports was British Common Law, which speaks almost exclusively to land ownership rights. Imported from a small little island, where lands intrinsic value could be understood, to a country of almost limitless land, where one would expect it to be valueless. Too radical? How much more radical will our thinking need to get once we have ghettoized ourselves based not on race but on economic station?