Food Banks? Third World Countries

Wealthy countries like Canada send food staples, equipment, medical advisers and funds abroad to assist developing countries. This is, after all, an obligation, a moral necessity. Canada is by any and all criteria a country of great resources, in itsvast geography, its people, its booming economy, its common culture of social responsibility.

We owe some generosity of spirit it to all those other countries struggling to fulfil their national mandates to provide for their populations. So we, like most developed countries, provide foreign aid where and when required on an ongoing basis.

How to explain, how to fathom that a country as well endowed in natural resources such as ours has our own dirty little secrets? Not only are there large populations of Canadians living in want of potable water, adequate food and medical care, decent housing within our aboriginal communities - a long-standing open sore that has never been solved - but we also have our share of homeless people?

It's breath-taking and hard to come to terms with. Most Canadians work hard to ensure their families are cared for. We have successive governments which acknowledge that there continues to be much that needs to be done to make certain that the population at large is well schooled, decently housed, medically cared for and yet there remains among us those whose lives run counter to what is considered the norm.

People whose luck has run out; their employment has ended, with no new opportunities in sight; those who suffer from mental illness; young people whose decision to leave abusive home situations leave them vulnerable and uncared for. These are our street populations of homeless and destitute people. In a country that tut-tuts about the poor governance and impoverished situations common in many developing economies elsewhere.

Then there are the working poor whose salaries are quite simply insufficient to allow them to adequately look after their family commitments. And immigrants, new to the country, helped by government agencies, but still struggling to find their niche in a new country of elusive opportunities. Those on welfare, those people who live on disability pensions, all of whom find their stipends insufficient to allow them to live comfortably, let alone adequately.

Well, we've got an entirely different kind of solution for these growing social problems in this wealthy country of ours. A new kind of business has slowly emerged; tentatively at first, but now decades in the perfecting of its place in this privileged society. This is a kind of business that relies on volunteers and donations and acts of charity. Every municipality has many such depots which collect foodstuffs to be doled out to people in need.

Canada's food banks. Area institutions whose reason for existence is to collect imperishable foods for the purpose of allowing people in need to stretch their inadequate incomes just a little further. People in Canada living with the spectre of hunger. A shameful proportion of Canada's children living in poverty and in the shadow of insufficient nutrition.

This is a national tragedy, a national shame.