Profits, losses and donations

Opinion

We don’t need an answer to recognize what’s wrong.

A recent donation by the Winnipeg Jets to a number of downtown social services proved overwhelming to some of its recipients. The Free Press quoted one as saying “I didn’t realize how big the cheque was.” (Though to be fair, the money was presented with a comically large cheque.)

Still, $234,890 is a lot of money, particularly for Winnipeg’s critical social services which have been cut to the bone, if not amputated, over the last number of city and provincial budgets. Though in the world professional athletes and their owners, this is closer to a rounding error.

I for one am tired of the song and dance our city and society play around questions of poverty and housing.

I am appreciative of any funding that goes to where it is needed. I am glad there is increasing funding for housing. Individual charity is good and critical but it should be considered baseline of being human not lauded as heroism.

In the same way, addiction and mental health struggles cut across class divides, but many of us know we can absorb the worst of it because of our social and economic base. And so, I long to hear voices in places of power and privilege acknowledge that individual acts of charity are not the solution to a structural problem and then to take the unprecedented step of being honest about the structural problem itself.

We don’t need to have utopia mapped out to name the deep and persistent problems of our economic system and the politics beholden to it.

Many of our problems derive directly from the sanctity of profit and property. We resign ourselves to charity because we are unwilling to face the demands and the bind that profit places on us.

After all, it feels natural to expect a return on our investment, an increase on our property value and increasing growth in our businesses. We literally view these makers as signs of a “healthy” society. But as economic conservatives have been at pains to remind us, “There is no such thing as a free breakfast.”

We need to name the cost of our wealth.

Those of us who own homes expect its value to increase which means limiting any real or perceived changes which could threaten that reality, denying the diversity of housing and resources in the name of protecting those investments.

Our pension funds are dependent on asset managers who siphon massive profits for themselves while pushing for increased privatizing of public services and utilities in addition to taking more houses off the market.

Personally, we feel pressured to “stretch” our dollar-finding deals, which drive us to online purchasing from companies that have gutted local businesses while funding the private space programs of billionaires. Local businesses feel the squeeze cutting labour costs, creating precarious and underpaid gigs.

Add to all this the increasing amounts of debt individuals take on trying to scrape by, never mind gaining even a minimum entry into a vanishing middle class. These social and economic pressures are needed for the profits we expect.

We have created an unprecedented global profit machine that many of us have benefited from.

But the roots of that wealth were always unjust and its ongoing cost reveals that it cares nothing for our wellbeing or the environment.

It often feels like we cower under the fear of losing any financial ground we might have, all the while more and more are losing ground, and homes, and sanity. Seeing this reality, we hold tight to our profit margins while comforting ourselves with what charity we are able to offer.

And to be clear, I am grateful for all the frontline workers and volunteers who offer so much in their impossible task.

But can we be clear and honest that we are working against ourselves in a losing battle to a system that disregards and disavows what should be obvious?

There is enough of what is needed.

David Driedger lives and works in the West End where he wrestles with, and writes about, issues of faith, politics, poverty and justice.