It's All Performance Art 65

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person who ever notices our tendency in Canada of electing governments that have nothing but contempt for us.  This seems like the most logical conclusion, when we think of how far we have allowed homelessness and housing unaffordability spiral downward to this point of almost no return.  Only recently have our governments really begun to address this crisis, and it's for now all patchwork and bandaids.  They still need to declare this as a humanitarian catastrophe (what else could this be?) so that sufficient funds and boots on the ground can be released, but hey, you're innocent when you dream.

It is of course our governments that created the crisis in the nineties when housing and social programs were scrapped, gutted or eliminated by all levels of government and the poor became the sole remaining default option for public scapegoating.  When the BC Liberals first came to power in 2001, no one seemed to pay much attention when less than a year later homelessness soared by nearly four hundred percent.  The barmy idiots that elected them simply went, oh tut-tut, they all come from other parts of the country so they can sleep outside in our fabulous mild climate.  The fact is that eighty-one percent of the homeless surveyed in Greater Vancouver, all had housing here in Greater Vancouver for at least one year before they became homeless.  And a sizeable portion of those people were actually born and raised here.

But people will live in denial so long as it serves their purposes and their need to stay oblivious to the destruction they leave in their wake.   And they keep electing governments that have nothing but scorn for us.  In other developed, and even in at least one developing country, Colombia, at least some dental care is covered by public funds.  Here in Canada our politicians seem to agree with dentists that teeth are not part of the human body, therefore should not be part of our public health coverage.

Our social services safety net is a travesty.  On basic welfare you can't even cover your rent and will almost always end up homeless if you live in an expensive city like Vancouver.  You don't do that much better if you are drawing a disability pension or if, like me next year, you are  a low income pensioner.  Unless, like me, you have the good fortune of living in social housing.  And don't get me started about the lack of funding for post secondary education. 

Empowerment is great and wonderful and hugely necessary for the disempowered.  Power with the already privileged, often becomes something ugly, a hideous force that only becomes a truncheon for hurting or disempowering anyone that gets in your way.  I would suggest that our highest elected officials, while even wearing a smiley face mask to show everyone how nice they are (sunny ways, prime minister Junior?), are already so entitled and corrupted by power and privilege that they are really beyond redemption. 

My question here is why do Canadians elect such odious leaders and why do we really hate each other and ourselves, because underneath all that niceness for which we have become global boy scouts, that is what we really are: little welterings of self-loathing.