There always comes that time when we have to look under the rug. Maybe we were just sending the rug out for cleaning but we can hardly ignore the detritus of time that we have collected. It is like this covid-19 emergency. This dust from under the rug was what finance minister Bill Morneau meant when he admitted recently that he did not know how to help.
This is when all the problems politicians have tried to ignore come back to bite them. It is also a time when they must face the reality of the past myopia and do something about it.
It was like my reporting early in the Ontario shut-down about the problems of washrooms for long-distance drivers. Professional truck drivers, desperate auto drivers and even city bus drivers have been faced with the closing of all public washrooms. How careless! How thoughtless! How typical of our politicians.
I hear that the Tim Hortons people are stepping into the breech—so to speak. They should be compensated for the extra staff and supplies they will need to try to keep those coffee-shop washrooms reasonably sterile and usable.
But what about those members of our society whom we always seem to ignore? We walk by them on the sidewalks of our cities. They are the homeless, the invisible rejects of society, the mentally challenged, the sick, the despairing, the old, the lonely—a smile, a friendly word, a bit of help, can make their day. And what do you need?
These are problems we ignore as we shrug and say, “What can I do?”
And if you are not tired of this direction yet, what of the overcrowding in our prisons. That guy responsible for prisons, a minister of the crown, named Bill Blair, even asked the parole board recently to do something about it. What else is he doing about the overcrowding?
I guess, we should all check under the rug.
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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