The lessons My Grandparents taught me serve me well today!

 As economic hardships begin to affect people across Canada, they are rediscovering the value of making things from scratch rather than spending large sums on prepared foods and other consumer goods.

This summer, driving around I began to see much more community engagement with a significant rise in community-based gardens in public spaces, as well as a renewed interest in not only food preparation and preserving but also a surge in local coop groups getting together as buying groups to break away from the large grocery store monopolies to community buying of food stuffs at wholesale prices.  

People, both women and men, are once again sewing and using hammers and saws to repair the old before throwing it out.  

People, I think, now are beginning to realize that the price of convenience far outweighs its advantages and are getting great satisfaction and release from daily stresses by creating something with their own hands while saving money and reaping the rewards of the value of their own creation. 

Years ago, our Grandparents and great-grandparents knew this well. As the Great Depression hit hard across Canada, people banded together in communities to support one another as work, money, and food were hard to access.  

Edmonton itself built up a community league system, with each area having its own community association. Most now think it is tied predominantly to amateur sports, and this could not be further from the truth. The community league system provides all sorts of programs for people of every walk of life in every aspect of life in that community. 

I remember all the things that my grandparents created, repaired, or spent time nurturing. I think for the most part, this came out of necessity due to the depression or the rationing during the war. Whatever it was, I grew up mainly in clothes not purchased at the store but ones my grandmother sewed from an extensive supply of Butterwick patterns or from her sweaters, which she would spend hours knitting every year. She would preserve all our food for the winter months, and her vegetable gardens stretched over an acre. Every weekend, the smell of freshly baked breads, pies, and cookies could be smelled for blocks around, and I miss her devotion to family and those who had little. To this day, I still have a pair of mittens strings attached tucked away in a chest of memories and mementos of the time capsule of my life.  

It is not surprising to me then that at the bookstore, books on how-to are becoming to have a much larger presence in them, and the popularity of sites like Pinterest continues to explode into our day-to-day lives as we rediscover the joy of one's own self-creating ability. 

A great deal of credit goes to the creative spirit passed down from our Grandparents is far overdue, and I know that they would all be pleased that people are beginning to return to the days of a certain amount of self-reliance and community building.  

To many Canadians are going hungry! Immediate action is needed not empty rhetoric!

 With the release of the hunger count by Food Banks Canada, the numbers should ring alarm bells for every Canadian about the state of hunger in a country considered one of the richest and most livable in the world.  

HungerCount - Food Banks Canada 

Night after night, we continue to hear the words food insecurity as millions of Canadians go hungry every day. This is a tragedy that should not be happening as grocery stores, food producers, and manufacturers throw away tons of consumable food every day. 

I think the first phrase that bothers me is the term food insecurity. These people are not food insecure, they are hungry near the point of severe malnutrition, causing drastic impacts on their physical and psychological well-being. 

The notion in my mind when I hear the words food is insecure is that there is not enough food to go around. That's food insecurity! 

These people are hungry, and that is what it should remain. Many of them are children, seniors, and those living on fixed incomes. 

 This, combined with the recent unemployment numbers, which show those between 15 and 30 having close to a 30% unemployment rate, is a sign of a failed economy that has progressively gotten worse over the last 30 years.  

Our politicians' rhetorical jabs at one another do nothing to help the situation, as both Carney and Poilievre are more than happy to get photo ops at area food banks, smiling as they put together food hampers for the many hungry in our country.  

Carney's school lunch program should be seen as a useless, mean gesture to any Canadian out there. Social programs such as this should not be means-tested if a child is hungry at school and needs to be fed! Just because a parent might make enough money does not help. Means tests do not consider their other costs that prevent them from providing the primary necessities of life.  

Poilievre has made his move on inflation, calling it the main culprit in rising food costs. Yes, the deficit does place some burden on inflation, but so many other factors also need to be considered when calculating the rising costs of food items.  Leaving his rhetoric again, like Carney's, empty and void of a reasonable solution.  

One of the main things I can focus on is greed. As people spend less at grocery stores. They are beginning to increase their prices. Why? Because our supermarkets are monopolies responsible to their shareholders, anything that reduces their profit margins also reduces dividends. So, the consumer continues to pay a premium on greed and greed alone. 

The other is waste! There is no viable reason why so much food in this Country goes into our landfills rather than into the hands of Canadians. This is another reason that prices remain high. Supply is not an issue, as worldwide food production still exceeds demand; rather than dropping prices at retail or at the point of origin, the excess is wasted in landfills or left to rot in the fields. 

Canada needs to allow its citizens to thrive, live, and work so that each and every Canadian's basic needs do not go unfulfilled. This is why we elect Governments to protect those most vulnerable from falling between the cracks of a system that threw most Canadians overboard thirty-five years ago.  

These are the needs the Government has to address, and after that, a great many other issues will ultimately take care of themselves.