Stealing food 2023

 

Stealing food 2023

STOP Sir! Last Monday my wife and I went to Calgary to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of one grandchild. On the way, we stopped at a Co-op to get a cake. In the front foyer, I noticed a young man leaving the store holding a basket of unwrapped food. I saw eggs, lettuce, bread, and in his other hand, a small bag of potatoes. Still looking, a store manager passed beside me shouting, stop Sir. The young man started running away and the bread from his basket flipped onto the pavement. An elderly lady picked it up and called after the young man, excuse me, sir. I went in, realizing that I just witnessed the theft of food. I felt sorry for the young thief but another old guy beside me said, “we will pay for it.” He was right. The prices will rise to pay for food thefts and some seniors who worked all their lives and now live on a pension that is not enough to pay rent, medicine, and basic food will pay or do without. Shouldn’t the young man work as we did and pay? There is a shortage of workers in our province. At the bakery, I saw the same loaf of bread, whole wheat toasting bread on the counter. The manager brought it back. They will probably toss it in the garbage, I thought.

The young man at the door looked homeless and could easily suffer from some mental illness. His eyes looked haunted and his movements were jerky. Could be a drug addict, I couldn’t tell. What are we to do with people like that? A person in jail costs society hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Should we just pay the price? I bet we will. The old lady who picked up the bread may live on less than twenty thousand a year pension. A homeless person on the street, if we consider police, ambulance, emergency doctors, and other related expenses, may cost the city just short of two hundred thousand a year. There is no easy way. The young man I saw could have full-time employment at minimum pay and be short on food. Just check the cheapest rent in the city and draw your own conclusions.

 We could point out that we have excellent shelters in the city but it can’t solve the problem. We cover only half of the homeless population and many of them can’t use it. If they have mental health issues or drug addictions, the shelters probably can’t or will not help them. Look for places like drug rehabilitation clinics and you will find less than a hundred spaces for thousands of people. The governments throw money at the problem, but we need leadership, not just money. How much money is allocated for subsidized housing and what portion of it truly translates to poor people’s housing? Someone should investigate and do the math. It reminds me of the money spent on carbon capture technologies. We will not see favorable results in our lifetime, but it’s sold as an alternative to reducing emissions.

On our way out of the giant food store, I saw two police uniforms coming in. Property taxes will pay for their time, and store insurance will go up raising food prices. If they apprehended the young man, which I doubt, he may get a meal or two and sleep in a warm jail, which he may have wanted to begin with. You can’t live long on a few eggs, lettuce, bread, and some potatoes.

What happened to cause the problem is critical for poor people in many ways, one in particular. During COVID, governments tried to shore up the economy by throwing a lot of money to businesses (some to workers) with no strings attached, trusting that they will help with the emergency. They didn’t. They bought their own shares, causing more privatization, and financed new investments. A major investment was in Real Estate.

Here it began with foreign investors buying homes and quickly spread to everyone who had some free money. First Vancouver and Toronto and soon later adjacent communities were bought out at inflated prices. Interest rates went up and the dream of regular people owning a home went out of the window. As the pandemic receded, we saw that rent and or mortgage payments were up by an average of 25%. People could no longer have a roof over their heads and eat at the same time. Many little “Investors” bought two or more homes, often renting them for recreational pursuits for short durations. Many working people simply gave up on the rat race and quit even trying to work and make ends meet. Inflation set in to cover the losses and things went from worst to impossible. Add to it problems with the supply chain, a war in Europe, and the growing instability of governments in many countries, and we have a disaster.

The main political forces resorted to lying, to stay in power, and hope disappeared. One political ideology advocates letting the market solve the problem by privatizing even more and the other is not better. They expect the working class to rescue the situation, forgetting that there is an end to how much we can shoulder. The “fix” would take restructuring of the economy, which can’t be done in the election cycle of four years with the constant changing of leaders and governments.  

The guy who stole the bread didn’t get to eat it. I wonder what he will do next.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.