Twelve Million Canadians.
What do you mean, twelve million? Canada's population has grown to a full 41 million people.
True. Yet twelve million of those Canadians opened a government envelope last Thursday. Inside was a cheque, meant to make life a little easier for those with modest means. Food prices have shot up to painful heights since COVID and the pandemic. To ease the hurt at the checkout — bread, vegetables, meat — individuals received 267 dollars and families 533 dollars as a supplement.
How much does dignity cost, to get through life reasonably well? A few people inside the Government of Canada landed on these amounts. I can already hear the relieved sighs, because with this cheque a whole three weeks of the month the weekly shop for daily needs is a little less of a burden. Eating and drinking are, after all, the basic necessities of life and should be affordable for people.
In New York City, the new mayor has taken a somewhat different approach to making life easier for New Yorkers. Last week he opened the city’s first municipally owned grocery store. The prices there are affordable.
I think back to my youth in Muttenz near Basel. My mother was well aware that some families in the neighbourhood were struggling with similar problems around food. Since we had a huge garden and Mama was a fierce champion of organic growing, she would quietly give away lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and potatoes to families nearby. That was her non-governmental contribution to making a burdened life a little lighter.
For those who need it, the basket of vegetables or the dollar amount is immediate help. And that in itself is a caring and welcome gesture of humanity. Still, a small background noise lingers, with a question attached. Why do people need such financial or material support from the state and from neighbours? Why is food — basic nourishment, that is — no longer affordable for so many? Could food corporations like Loblaws and Sobeys here in Canada, and COOP, Globus, and Migros in Switzerland, set their prices a little more moderately? We are still waiting for an answer to that one.
As an aside: the Christoph Merian Foundation was established because in Basel, in 1854, the price of bread went up. Christoph Merian donated 100,000 francs to bring the price of bread back down.
It seems we always need interventions — from the state, from institutions, from neighbours — just so people can afford to live. Because the much put-upon food conglomerates simply cannot afford lower prices. Why? Because the so-called stakeholders — the shareholders, that is — would never be satisfied with single-digit dividends.
Free market economics has its price. For the population.
Perhaps the truly tragic element today is not inflation itself, but that caring has become automated
.