Comment 97001

By Joshua W (anonymous) | Posted January 20, 2014 at 23:27:55

Robert D.,

There's a committee, with hope, being struck at Central Presbyterian Church to examine these questions.

Personally, building community and getting to know your physical neighbours, developing the relationships that are built on trust and understanding of another's life, would go a long way toward dismantling these cash loan facilities. So much, however, of social life is built around money these days that it's difficult to get to that part of the conversation and difficult for people to accept the charity of others; there's a sense of pride attached to self-sufficiency.

As far as community organizations go, churches and other places of worship might be a good place for these networks to begin. After all, most churches know that they are havens for people who need help, who come to ask for money for rent or food or whatever else is needful; it's a short step from there to coordinating with other churches and getting to know who is going where to get help. The benefit with such a network could be that it could happen off-the-grid, as it were, without the governmental oversight tied to Ontario Works or Ontario Disbility Support Payments, which are paltry enough.

My fear is that the middling classes, wherever and whatever they are these days, are beginning and continuing to feel the pinch of higher energy costs, higher insurance premiums (thanks to climate change), and higher inflation (heaven help us if our economy deflates, saith the International Monetary Fund's Lagarde), costs which they cannot escape. They are being priced from their homes and forced to downsize, to sell, to make bricks without straw; with the loss of physical land that is attendant to a home or to transportation infrastructure (what percentage of our land in Hamilton is a road versus greenspace?), people have less physical land to grow their own food, becoming more dependent on outside systems for assistance and help.

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