Our parks and streets are full of homeless people and junkies, crack dealers sit in the playground, while swings and slides go unused for fear of needles.
In less than 10 years the economic consequences of Paul Martins savage dismemberment of Canada's social safety net have surfaced in our face like toxic sludge bubbling up from a landfill.
Security guards in every bank, even watching the ATM at night.
Security in fast food stores. Private security everywhere. More than half of the private security firms are owned at the top by American conglomerates.
Jails are full. New ones are being planned for this "growth sector". Arrests for petty theft and harrassment of homeless people trying to sell their pitiful little blankets of stuff at the side of the roadway. The cops are as fed up as everybody at the mess, they have better things to do than move people along who have nowhere to go.
Let's put this in perspective. Welfare per province was a little under 20 million per year.
Every major city in Canada spends 3 times that on parks in a year. 5 times that building new convention centers and libraries, art galleries, etc. A single municipality spends so much more than that on contracted out services for the homeless "problem" that barely existed before.
Before, we had parks full of hippies. Hippie girls sitting on the grass drawing, or knitting things for their neighbors. Twirling their sticks, singing, playing their drums and guitars, smoking their joints and being GOOD people of the earth.
Are the drug dealers and gangs better? Do you really like the streets filled with shopping carts and toothless beggars better than the hippies?
You didn't worry about your children on the swings when there were tons of do-good hippies helping you watch the young at play. You could leave your child with one of the ones you knew for an hour, or an afternoon, for much less than current childcare rates. No one can leave their children with the crackheads.
The junkies would get together and rent a flat. they'd crash in the flat, head in the clouds, not crash on the street. When their money ran out, 4 would chill in the flat and only 2 would go out to scrounge. Alcoholics for life would lie on a couch with their buddies, evaporating their vices, not out in the grass of the park.
We have to accept the fact that 3-5% of people will not be able to work at any fucking McJob.
No one is going to hire toothless Eddie the former bum. No one wants their McShitburger served to them by a toothless 60 year old man, no matter how clean and gleeful his McUniform is.
There are millions of Canadian artists, writers, poets who were enriching our lives, our coffee shops, our restaurant stages at night. They've been decimated by working poverty, hand to mouth, cultural dissolution policies. They were the rebels, and Paul Martin's attack on their measly $6000 a year that they were subsisting creatively on was as destructive and sneaky as a federal tainted blanket giveaway.
Colour in our cities has been starved away, replaced with expensive landscaping, shiny opulent edifices of machine culture, and sneering middle age muzak.
We look silently for our books in the library, while the security guard oversees the scene.
Is it really better?
Every Community center in every major neighborhood, should have a Social services office, a nightly soup kitchen for the poor, a thrift shop with free clothes for SS recipients, and the place should be manned with welfare recipients getting a bit of extra money over their check. Remove the barriers, cut the number of social workers and rigamarole. Return Community support to the poor from EVERY community. Instead of sending everyone down to skid row to stand in line for a religious meal of zeal.
I got so much more to say about this, but on we go.....
They're paying more out to consultants and rich person "committees" to solve the homeless problem than they ever paid out to the poor themselves, and most of welfare was cultural creatives, not alcoholics like they tried to make out when they were axing things.
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