What matters and how to get it

I'm back from the north for a few days, and able to blog again this weekend, then there will be another gap till late July.  

What matters to me is a fair society. Getting one is difficult, it seems. People have been at it for a long time, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, and we're not there yet. 

No mistake, there is much fairness in Ontario and Canada already. But many people are falling behind, and vulnerable people are called that for a reason. In fact the gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing. I was talking yesterday with some people who get by without much day to day food security. Kind of humbling what they consider enough certainty about where their next meal is coming from. They are also volunteers who process reclaimed food each week. They sort and process non-perishables from area food stores taken off the shelves because they are just past their best before date. Then collections of this still-nutritious food are distributed to various groups--area community meals, the food bank, low income seniors and so on. One of the men has a medical condition requiring a special diet. He gets an extra $1/day to purchase it. The man with diabetes copes without any extra money for his diet. He gets his insulin at no cost luckily, but he has costs every month for some of his insulin equipment out of his $598/month. He saves rent by sleeping in his truck. The group was passionate, informed, articulate, and willing to work for change. They inspire me.

The food reclamation project, an initiative of the York Region Food Network, is good stewardship of unsaleable food, unless you count the extra trips it makes, and the large number of unpaid hours put into handling it several extra times compared to groceries purchased at the front of the store. Then it begins to look like an expensive way to distribute leftovers. What seems more fair than handouts is enough income that people didn't have to rely on them. If people received a living income and didn't need charity, we would quickly find something else useful to do with leftover food, I feel sure. In the meantime, the system we have, if it can be called a system, brings disgrace to all of us.  And now pressure is on pensions, as corporations try to slip out of commitments made in previous decades, trying to leave seniors to their own devices in the days and years ahead.

And we have this exercise called an election every four years in the hopes of getting change, getting what we want. The playing field in elections seems to be tilted toward those with a great deal of money. Not the fairest mechanism I can think of. So the campaign team here in Newmarket-Aurora is using creativity instead of bottomless resources. They are an exciting group, and it is wonderful to be surrounded by such strong commitment. It will be interesting to see what we can do together to move closer to a society where true fairness is a routine expectation, not a distant hope.

Tomorrow: off to market (farmers' markets, that is), in both towns to meet people and hear what's on their minds. More on that later.