Imagine walking into a store, picking out all your groceries for the week and not having to worry about facing an expensive bill at the checkout.
For clients of the Regina Food Bank, that will soon be a reality.
Since the pandemic, there has been a spike in food bank users across the country, up 25 per cent in Regina alone. One in eight families — and one in four children — are now food insecure in the city. Of the 16,000 monthly clients, 44 per cent are kids.
The new Regina Food Bank Community Food Hub, modelled after a traditional grocery store, is set to open this summer in the former government liquor store location downtown.
Forget all the “not actually first” and “misleading headline” stuff. If we can do this on donations, probably mostly from people only a paycheque away from needing a food bank themselves, imagine what we could do with an actual social system funded by properly taxing wealth, high income, and corporations. We could turn that headline into something approaching reality.
Whoa, careful there. Our opposition - and some proclaim our next administration, due to people disappointed with imperfection taking a hard exit into pure cruel failboatism - would have a lot to say about the taxing of the wealthy and the helping of the ‘others’ who aren’t rich. Something about boot-straps and laziness or some such, is the usual pablum they serve.
If we want to continue helping people who need it the most, we do need to seriously point out the (sometimes-hidden) cruelty of every conservative platform ever, and how that kind of magical thinking is repeatedly harming actual progress toward people getting onto the good side of the tax-and-spend fence.