MY TAKE
THERE HAS TO BE A NEW NORMAL THAT IS KINDER
Image by TREVOR COLE from Unsplash.
By DR VICKI BISMILLA
The world has come to a standstill and billions of people across the globe are in a lockdown.
Most are experiencing this lockdown from positions of privilege in their middle-class or better homes with ample food, water, entertainment and comforts. However, large swaths of people are experiencing the desperation of poverty.
Millions have nothing and even that nothing is diminishing. I look at journalists’ videos about poor people in India having to walk 150 km back to their homes in villages because the cities where they eke out a wage have locked them out and they are literally having to walk those hundred kilometres home with no food, no water and babies in arms.
Even here in the luxurious west, people in precarious jobs are out of work, with no pay, no benefits, living in tiny rooms struggling to meet the rent.
All we can do is boost our donations, start monthly donations to food banks and help from a distance in whatever way we can. Somehow this pandemic has to change the way a country looks after vulnerable workers.
There has to be a new normal that is kinder.
According to Statistics Canada a million Canadians lost their jobs in March and the April figures are awaited with fear.
Young people, women and service workers in unsteady low-paid jobs were laid off en masse and since then more than five million Canadians have applied for federal income support.
But what about those undocumented workers who do not qualify for government support programs?
Marginalized migrant workers, construction workers, house cleaners, nannies and a range of service sector workers are left without wages to feed their families.
Refugee centres are reporting hundreds of appeals from people in precarious immigration status who have been laid off and are in need of food and shelter. Their fridges are empty and their families face eviction from apartments.
The co-director of FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto reports that, “Migrant workers, non-status people, international students and temporary residents are the most vulnerable because there’s a lack of language and understanding of the system, and they have no idea of what resources are out there for them, if any.”
And Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in Toronto, says that, “Government assistance is designed for Canadian citizens and permanent residents, and won’t be available to most of those in the country with temporary status.”
So the migrant workers who put produce into our supermarkets so we can eat, are now starving.
Outside of Canada and around the world, including countries from which many of us desis have come, there are millions who live in shantytowns with no access to clean water, food, medication and no way of self-isolating.
Al Jazeera gave the example of a farm worker in India who survives on 100 rupees a day ($1.3 dollars) plus a widow’s monthly pension of 1000 rupees ($13.1 dollars.)
She lives in a village and ran out of money and groceries. “So, I started feeding my three young girls rice with a chutney made of crushed onions or tomatoes,” she says. She managed to find work in a neighbouring village for a day and with the money she earned, she was able to buy some food from a market ten kilometres away.
But getting to the market by auto rickshaw cost her 300 rupees ($3.9) – three times her daily wage – as no buses were running due to the lockdown. She offered to compensate the driver later, but he insisted on her paying him immediately. “So I gave him my necklace to keep, till I can pay him back,” she says.
He agreed but said he would charge additional interest. Nearly two hundred million people in India live in extreme poverty like this woman.
Some say they are feeding their children rice and chutneys mashed from any edible greens they find.
It is the same in shantytowns in Africa where communities devastated with AIDS are saying that this COVID pandemic is worse than AIDS.
What little work they had as maids, gardeners, road workers, etc., has stopped and with that their wages and access to food. Similarly, around the world, millions of people are not able to scrape together the little food that they had previously managed on meagre daily wages so they are going hungry.
And forget about sanitizing in the face of this virus – soap is a luxury.
Inevitably, the poor of the world, the essential cogs that serve the rich, are beginning to see the callousness of the rich.
Media in England are pointing to COVID tests easily accessed by the prime minister and the prince while the poor are refused the test like the sanitation worker who died of the virus.
The Save the Children charity is reporting that while the coronavirus has so far affected children less severely, children nonetheless, are suffering in homes crippled by poverty as their parents are laid off.
Children may not be affected as badly by the virus but are now in danger of starvation.
And in the midst of all this devastation there are the unscrupulous scammers, criminals who are robbing unsuspecting people online, by phone and even door-to-door pretending to be offering masks and benefits to unsuspecting people desperate to buy protection.
Beware of scammers. Use only government websites for information. And if you are able to donate to legitimate organizations that are helping to feed vulnerable people please use only legitimate websites such as www.dailybread.ca.
• Dr Vicki Bismilla is a retired Superintendent of Schools and retired college Vice-President, Academic, and Chief Learning Officer. She has authored two books.