Thinking of the Children

Pitching the welfare state, one small cliche at a time:

I tabled a Private Member’s motion, which was put on the order paper of the House of Commons on November 23^rd, 2011, that calls on the government to: immediately initiate discussions with the provincial and territorial ministers responsible for agriculture, education and health; develop a comprehensive pan-Canadian school nutrition initiative; and fully fund on-reserve aboriginal student meals. I have spoken on many occasions in Parliament on the issue of student hunger with little response from the government. I therefore hope the motion will generate debate on a topic which I believe is of the utmost importance to the families of the one in seven children in Canada who struggle to provide the best possible start each morning.

My apologies for inflicting the above on you so early in the morning. Language like that is liable to put even the most hyperactive of children into a coma. The above comes from Kirsty Duncan, MP for Etobicoke North. That's in the north west corner of Toronto. Having lived in the Imperial Capital for many moons, I find Ms Duncan's comments somewhat perplexing. In all the years I attended Toronto public schools I never met a hungry student. It was not an affluent area and most of the kids were recent immigrants. Some of the kids were poor, the odd one was rich and most were somewhere in between.

If you make your way through the rest of Duncan's interminable prose - seriously, she's an MP, doesn't she have someone on her staff who can write? - there is no actual proof that Canadian children are going hungry. It is merely asserted again and again. When something close to evidence is provided it goes like this:

Tragically, more than twenty years later, 7.7 per cent of, or 961,000, Canadian households are “food insecure”, one in four First Nations and Inuit children grows up in poverty, and over 300,000 children rely on food banks.

Now there's a bait and switch. Being poor isn't the same as being hungry. Quite the opposite. One of the surest signs of poverty in modern Toronto is weight. The poorer the person, the wider the waist. And we're not talking about an office worker's spare tire. These people are a physical encumbrance to traffic. Now take a stroll through Yorkville, Old Oakville, Bay Street, Rosedale, the Beaches and it will take a special effort to find a fat person. They just aren't there. Rich people are thin. Fat people are poor. Only someone trapped in a parallel Dickensian version of Canada would assume otherwise.

Since actual hunger is a bit hard to establish in a country with a growing obesity problem, our friends on the Left have invented the word "food insecurity." This is part of a long standing process where the meaning of words is subverted. Security has historically meant security of persons and property from force and fraud. Now it's suppose to mean not having enough to eat of the right kind of food:

International research shows school feeding programmes achieve much more than feeding children. They provide a range of benefits in education, health, and agriculture, yet in Canada, forty percent of elementary students and 62 percent of secondary school students do not eat a nutritious breakfast.

That's probably because their parents are too tired and busy to make them a proper breakfast, not because they're poor. It's easier to shove full a kid's mouth with sugar flakes than scramble some eggs. Ms Duncan then goes onto admit that poverty and poor nutrition are not necessarily related:

Poor nutrition status leads to poor health outcomes for children, and Canadian children from all income brackets are vulnerable to inadequate nutrition, especially the one in five Canadian children who live below the poverty line.

How? Has Ms Duncan visited a No Frills or Food Basics recently? Does she know how ridiculous cheap food is these days? In real terms the cost of fruits, vegetables and meats has never been lower. Even our supply management inflated cost of milk is still, by historical standards, quite low. Good food has never been more affordable. Thing is that few people know how to cook it.

Back in the bad old days, before Pierre Trudeau saved Canada from the horrors of fiscal solvency and smallish government, school children, mostly girls, were taught something called home economics. The theory, terrible quaint though it sounds, is that since most woman would become homemakers they should be prepared for that role. Some, no doubt, came from good homes where dutiful mothers ensured that their daughters knew how to cook, sew and deal with troublesome infants. Some did not come from good homes. Part of the point of public education was to make sure that all girls knew how to cook nutritious food for their families. More broadly it was to ensure that all children acquired life skills along with whatever algebra and Shakespeare they could pick up.

That was one of the goals of public education. Educating a self reliant, sober and decent citizenry. Not rationalizing every vice and undermining the founding tenets of Canadian society. There was plenty of propaganda, but it was mostly propagating positive values. A tad parochial and silly by our standards, but not without its merits. It was not a platform for allowing anti-capitalist and anti-industrial zealots like David Suzuki to pontificate.

If there is a problem with "food insecurity" it's because many Canadians, especially among the lower classes, lack basic life skills. That, not incidentally, is why most are in the lower class. If the Pakistani cab driver with a scant English vocabulary can feed and cloth his family with some decency, what does that say about the Mackenzies who have been here since Simcoe? Some of the poor are poor because they're physically or mentally incapable of fending for themselves. In an advanced society they comprises only a small fraction of the working age population. Much of the poor in Canada are poor because they exhibit poor behaviour.

Most of the long-term poor, this excludes those who are simply suffering from temporary misfortune, think in a much different way than those in the middle class. The long-term poor are short-range in their thinking. Their savings rate is close to non-existent. They can't resist instant gratification, like junk food or gambling. This also extends to their sexual lives. They exhibit a strong tendency toward highly unstable short-term relationships based on fleeting desire. The notion of a long-term, emotionally stable relationship is either alien or absurd.

The only sure way to reduce poverty is to reduce the behaviours that lead to poverty. For generations that's what schools, churches and the media did. They projected values that lead to stable careers, stable families and peaceful communities. The smart and more aggressive members of any society will always find some way to survive and even thrive. But the great mass of any population lives off the values of its society. What makes a nation successful is its traditions, the routine embodiment of its values. For some bizarre reason in modern Canada we've decided to attack our traditions. As with all calamities it's the poor who suffer the most.

Food security isn't an issue, certainly not in Canada where our farmers are among the most productive in the world. Material poverty also isn't an issue in a country as rich and generous as Canada. The issue is a poverty of spirit, for lack of a better word. Man does not live by bread alone. That's something our friends on the Left have forgotten.

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Every day that Parliament isn't prorogued is another day that ambitious Parliamentarians are busy prying loose what few remaining adult responsibilities haven't already been outsourced to the state. Or, pimping the mindless back into slavery one day at a time.

Posted by: John Chittick | Monday, October 21, 2013 at 08:43 PM