Could have put this banana peel
in the Green Bin,
let it go
to the city plant
where it decomposes in four weeks.
Releasing much carbon dioxide
into the air.
Instead,
I drop it
into the garbage bin.
Now it goes to the landfill
where it will stay
for forty years.
Giving us time
to figure out
what we do with all that carbon
we carelessly pump
into the atmosphere;
all that garbage
we mindlessly pile
in landfills.
By Shai Ben-Shalom 
Poverty makes people work hard just as being chased by a bear makes people run fast, but only a sadist would recommend either as a character-building exercise. A million Canadians work two jobs and sixty-hour weeks, by official estimate. The late Senator Hugh Segal recounted this drudgery in his own childhood memories of Mother and Father pulling night shifts to pay the rent in a cramped world lit by 40-watt bulbs.
“Being on the cheery edge of poverty is not, as some bootstraps proponents assert, about building character and ambition,” wrote Segal. “It is about understanding that the financial insecurity at the centre of your existence, once installed in your memory bank, never leaves.”
The Segals were working poor, cabbies and garment salesmen and drugstore clerks. They ate meat and Hugh had his own bedroom in their Montréal walk-up. Segal recalled a prized bottle of Crown Royal saved for extraordinary occasions. No one took a vacation. The bailiff repossessed their car.
Young Hugh remembered the time his older brother caught hell for taking the two of them to a carnival for the day. Working poor never ask, “What would you like to do today?” Every day is like the last.
“I realized poor people had far fewer choices than everyone else,” he wrote. “That money pressures took their toll: on relationships, on outlook, on day-to-day life, on parental harmony, on future prospects.”
Boot Straps Need Boots is a great Canadian memoir of a poignant Canadian experience recognizable to millions. And it is more than that. Segal recalled as a 12-year old the day Prime Minister Diefenbaker spoke to his school assembly. Diefenbaker had a way of mesmerizing schoolchildren. “The family table we call Canada is the finest table in the world,” said the Prime Minister. “There is space and food for all.”
Here Segal comes to the point of Boot Straps, a plain argument for a national guaranteed income program. This has been the policy of the Canadian Labour Congress for fifty years. “Not trying something different – not even attempting to see if poverty can be alleviated in a more humane and efficient way – is a very serious mistake,” he wrote. “The only thing worse than a bias shaped by poor expectations about low-income citizens and their prospects is a sense of complacent defeatism about how, as a mature and productive society, we can reduce poverty and its impact.”
Successive governments endorsed direct federal aid to working people who are hard up, albeit in a piecemeal approach. Parliament in 2016 introduced the Canada Child Benefit that paid low-income parents $6,946 per child. Parliament also charges the working poor GST on home heating and parkas, levies corporate income tax on the smallest of small business, and in 2018 passed a carbon tax that pays an identical rebate to all tax-filers whether you are a billionaire who winters in Florida, or a single mother who shuttles 200 kilometres a week to a job at Walmart.
Boot Straps Need Boots appeals for a reasoned approach, a reconsideration of all scattered aid programs into one coherent, universal guaranteed income plan. In this minority Parliament, the proposal has friends.
By Holly Doan
Boot Straps Need Boots, by Hugh Segal; University of British Columbia Press; 216 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-90458; $32.95
A new luxury Manhattan penthouse for New York Consul Tom Clark cost taxpayers four times the expense of renovating the apartment used by his predecessors, records show. Clark is testify next week at the Commons government operations committee over the multi-million dollar purchase that outraged MPs: “How did that purchase come to pass?”
Almost a quarter of Canadians are so hard up they expect to eat at the food bank this fall, Statistics Canada said yesterday. The rate was higher than reported during the pandemic: ‘This is the first time in 40 years we have seen unemployment so low and food bank usage so high.’
Media under any future Conservative cabinet must forego federal aid and rely on private revenue as they did for centuries, says Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. His remarks yesterday were quoted in an interview with a subsidized weekly: “Sell subscriptions and advertising, get sponsorships and do what media have done for, I don’t know, 3,000 years.”
Federal office buildings were 40 percent empty even before the pandemic sent 240,000 employees to work from home, says a briefing note to Public Works Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. Cabinet has proposed selling half its office buildings nationwide but expects it will take decades: “Infrastructure is the second largest expense to the Government of Canada after salary expenses,”
New Democrats yesterday warned cabinet to take no action against Teamsters in a threatened national rail shutdown. A 2022 dispute with Teamsters lasted 60 hours after New Democrats similarly vowed they would never support back-to-work legislation: “Maintain a neutral stance.”
Cabinet mismanaged a housing crisis in the one jurisdiction where it has complete oversight, First Nations reserves, says a federal audit. Housing Minister Sean Fraser has promised to solve the housing crisis for the entire nation by 2031: “Demands of housing far exceeds the funds available.”
Cabinet is seen as uncaring by a middle class now weary and stressed, says in-house research by the Privy Council. Canadians said the “quality of life for the middle class had changed in their lifetimes.”
A British Columbia lieutenant-governor is among a handful of historic figures to have plaques removed by a federal agency. Edgar Dewdney was named and shamed by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board for approving the hanging of Louis Riel in 1885: “No new plaque will be prepared.”
The Canadian Transportation Agency has avoided Court scrutiny over a website notice that discouraged travelers from lawfully claiming billions in compensation for Covid-cancelled flights. The consumer group Air Passenger Rights had asked the Federal Court of Appeal to review the notice as inappropriate: “This was a period of air travel chaos.”
The interim leader of Canada’s newest federal party yesterday advocated the biggest revision of the Income Tax Act in 60 years. “I promise we are going to be courageous,” said Dominic Cardy, former New Brunswick education minister: “We can be very clear about our principles.”
At least a quarter of Department of National Defence buildings and other infrastructure dates from the 1970s and requires “significant maintenance,” says an internal audit. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had proposed to recycle federal property for housing: “We will be reviving the dream of home ownership.”
The Commons public safety committee yesterday agreed to summon cabinet members for questioning over suspected failures in immigration security checks. MPs questioned how two men arrested on terror charges could enter Canada after Parliament spent millions on fingerprinting and other screening: “Canadians deserve answers.”
The 2012 Conservative cabinet is to blame for a suspected terror plot foiled three weeks ago, Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell (Pickering-Uxbridge, Ont.) yesterday told the Commons public safety committee. Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper compromised national security, she said: “Cuts have consequences.”
