One, two… 390,000? Yet this is what we agree to do as a society year after year by literally choosing which children will have a chance of success and which will remain in an almost hermetic cycle of precariousness.
More than a third of people suffering from food insecurity in Quebec are children, or nearly 400,000 young people whose future is compromised in the face of almost general societal indifference.
As difficult as it may be to see, we will quickly have to learn to prioritize serious societal issues, just as we sort out the critical health conditions of several patients at an accident scene.
Concretely, let’s stop getting bogged down and blinding ourselves with flashy solutions and let’s make sure we really help the population to focus on the sustainability of actions over time.
However essential they may be, the large sums of public money granted punctually by the government to food banks to meet the demand of community organizations overwhelmed by the meteoric rise in requests for emergency food aid are one-way aid that cannot be sustainable and effective in the long term.
It is time to give up the temporary and superficial solutions that deceive and entangle us, and to start thinking seriously about the real social problems we face.
– A full-time worker paid minimum wage earns less than $24,000 net per year.
– 45% of Quebecers over 75 live on less than $26,000 per year.
– One in five children suffer from food insecurity.
Poor child one day, hungry child forever: unacceptable!
Offering the younger generations the only option of returning to queue month after month for emergency food with their parents as we are currently doing is not a sustainable or acceptable solution.
Let’s get to the basics: simply supporting a child in their school career, by equipping them adequately, feeding them, guiding them and surrounding them with significant people, will have the direct impact of keeping them in school potentially until the end of their studies by offering them the same opportunities as a child from a more affluent background.
A child who arrives at school confidently with all his school supplies and whose only thought is not the fear of not eating will have a greater attachment to his school career.
The Canadian Paediatric Society even notes in various studies the correlation between sufficient food intake at breakfast and improved academic performance and cognitive function. In short, feeding children adequately tends to increase their cognitive capacity and allow them to access their full intellectual potential. That’s 390,000 little brains to support for optimal development.
It is critical that we act quickly while we still can to support as many school-aged children as possible. Let us not sacrifice these future talents, these future workers, these future citizens. Let us not sacrifice these children…
The future of Quebec depends on it!
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