A Worthy Goal for a New Century

Toronto Star - January 8, 2000
By Carol Goar

The idea that any Canadian, rich or poor, shjould be able to walk into a doctor’s office and get help, was once considered revolutionary. In a single generation, it has become a defining principle of Canadian citizenship.

Debbie Field would like to launch a similar revolution in the 21^st century. Her goal: to ensure that every Canadian, rich or poor, has enough to eat.

She envisages a day when food banks will be obsolete, low income families will be able to put fresh fruit and vegetables on the table, no child will be too hungry to learn and no motehr will go without adequate nutrition to make sure her children are fed.

If the concept of food as a basic right sounds utopian, consider the objections that were raised 56 yeaers ago, when Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas pledged to make health services "an inalienable right of being a citizen."

People said he would bankrupt the province. They warned that the privilege of free medical care would undoubtedly be abused. They predicted that doctors would never join a state-controlled health plan. They said private medical insurance, with welfare covering the very poor, was a much more logical approach.

Today, many of the same barriers stand in the way of a universal food security plan.

There are concerns about the cos. There are fears that people would abuse the right to subsidized foo. There are predictions that the agri-food industry would refuse to participate in a public nutrition program. There are worries that restaurants and grocery stores would stop donating excess food to charity.

But Field is convinced that, with enough work, enough debate and enough determination, she can build a nation-wide consensus that healthy food is a basic right.

This is no flash in the pan millennial scheme for the 47-year-old social activist. She has been working since 1996 to develop a comprehensive plan to ensure that everyone in Ontario has access to affordable, nutritious food by the year 2002.

She has brought together representatives of the private food industry, the agricultural community, the health sector and grassroots organizations to talk about new ways of fighting hunger. She has come up with 28 specific policy recommendations. She has tested her ideas at the local level, establishing innovative programs such as The Good Food Box, which makes fresh produce available at cost to low-income people; Community gardens, which allow urban residents to grow their own vegetables on unused city lots and community kitchens which teach basic nutrition and cooking skills.

But it is a long way from a preliminary discussion of food security to a practical plan to eliminate hunger. It is a huge leap from a handful of successful community nutrition programs to a nation-wide food security network.

Unfortunately, Field has no podium from which to promote her vision. She has no simple solution to hunger– no plastic card that entitles a person to eat properly– to put forward. She does not even have across-the-board support of anti-poverty activists. Some think it is wrong to focus on food, when poor people really need a decent income, affordable shelter and a job.

What she does have working in her favour, besides her own indomitable spirit, is the obvious failure of the existing system.

Despite a robust economic recovery, hunger continues to grow. Food banks, set up in 1981 as an emergency stop-gap, have become permanent fixtures in most Canadian cities. Some have to ration scarce supplies, such as baby formula. Donors, tired of incessant food drives, have to be prodded to give.

Meanwhile, Canadian farmers, caught in a vicious global subsidy war, are struggling to hang on to their land as crop prices plummet and their debts pile up.

Clearly, something is wrong. Yet almost no one is asking the obvious questions:

Why should Canada, with its capacity to be the world’s bread basket, have both a farm crisis and a problem of chronic food insecurity?

Why should Ottawa spend billions of tax dollars treating illnesses that could be prevented by proper diet?

Why should 790,000 Canadians depend on charity every month to eat?

What Field needs is someone in a position of power to take up her cause with passion, commitment and willingness to take political risks as Douglas did, a generation ago.

If the founder of medicare were alive today, he would concede that his critics were right in some respects. Universal health care did put a heavy burden on taxpayers. Some people do overuse the system. Some doctors resent socialized medicine. Some politicians would like to privatize health care services.

But in a larger sense, Douglas was right: No Canadian should be penalized for getting sick.

Field’s critics may turn out to be right, too. Food isn’t the solution to poverty or homelessness. It won’t replace the social safety nets that have been yanked back.

But in a larger sense she is right: No Canadian child should grow up eating the crumbs from someone else’s table.