You've Got To Wonder

That old saying, "charity begins at home" represents a tired old tedium, but the fact is we have responsibilities toward others, wherever they happen to be. Still, it's quite absurd that Canadians are invested with the responsibility to respond when disaster strikes abroad, while too often turning a blind eye to the inequities and misery that resides among us.

We anguish - and so we should - over the horrendous situation in places like Sudan, over the poverty and want in Haiti, over the violently unsettled conditions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. When natural catastrophes shake the world, we respond as generously as we can. As a country we encourage our government to do likewise, in the name of her people.

In many situations, where we send Canadian troops abroad to keep the peace, or more likely, engage in battle against those whose purpose it is to topple legitimate governments and terrorize their populations, we suffer the horrors of personal loss through the deaths of soldiers, and maimed returnees.

We vociferously hold countries like China and Burma, Iran and Zimbabwe to account for their human rights abuses, and in China's case, threaten to upset the stability it hopes for surrounding the Olympic Games because of her totalitarian burden on Tibet. Yet here is Canada, in the throes of expectation for the upcoming advent of Vancouver's hosting of the Olympics - complicit in denying basic human rights for our own.

It's an exceedingly costly proposition for any city of any country to take on the monetarily onerous task of mounting the world extravaganza of sports excellence that is the Olympic Games. The city, the province, the federal government, all commit to spending inordinate sums of taxpayer-funded monies to ensure the success of such a venture.

The payback is seen in terms of world prestige, in the fall-out of spending locally by foreign tourists who flock to witness the Games in person. But in the final analysis no Games site has ever been able to recover the equivalent of funds expended on the mounting of the games, from building vital infrastructure, to policing, to accommodating the needs of participants.

Those funds have to come from somewhere. How inconvenient for aficionados of the Games that activists for the poor and the homeless in Vancouver are threatening to appeal to the United Nations to weigh a human rights complaint against Canada for her failure to provide low-cost housing accommodation for the homeless.

What were once called vagrants and a low criminal class, are now countless homeless people in cities across the country. They are middle-aged white men and women, youth, aboriginals. They suffer from mental illness, from isolation and dislocation, from addiction, from dependence on the hand-outs that the responsible few in society can offer them, scantily, inadequately.

While the country celebrates the upcoming 2010 Olympics in Vancouver with huge anticipation - and ungrudgingly supports governments at every level in their attention to so. many details which must be in place to ensure the Games will be a success - the plight of the homeless goes without response.

Metro Vancouver through the work of volunteer activists, recently conducted a count - later proven to be vastly under what the true figures would be - but that count came to 2,592 homeless individuals. The Province of British Columbia hosts an estimated 15,500 homeless people. Their degraded plight has never been adequately addressed.

Moreover, any community within the country also has notable numbers of low-income families, families in dire need of assistance. Yet the municipal governing bodies, no more than their provincial and federal counterparts, in a northern country like Canada's with its extreme winter climate, has never sufficiently addressed this national calamity.

What we do is react to emergencies. We make no meaningful attempts to avert such human emergencies. And while those emergency reactions, from policing to temporary overnight accommodation, to medical and hospital requirements, and social services monitoring, are extremely expensive, they solve nothing, and are mere temporary measures to emergency situations.

Whereas, if we really cared enough, far fewer funds could be realistically spend on building suitable housing for those unfortunates in our society, providing them with adequate social counselling and health care, as required. The misery of their temporary lives would be immeasurably improved, the country would have the benefit of their eventual absorption back into mainstream society.

We would then have good reason to feel good about ourselves knowing that we cared enough to reach a solution that took some depth of commitment. Rather than celebrate the hollow achievement of hosting an international sports event, regardless of the cachet.