In a world where all causes have a spokesperson, there is one that remains, so to speak, voiceless: that of poverty. The poor are not invited on television to tell their story, comment on the news or criticize government decisions. They have no seat in Parliament and are not subject to any publicity campaign. We don’t see them anywhere, for the good reason that poverty is still today a source of shame, that it is part of those sufferings that are not said.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Those who would like to talk about it do not always dare to do so, perhaps for fear that they will be reproached for not knowing what they are talking about, or that their privileges will be criticized. I am not poor, but I have been for a long time.
As a child, I felt the anguish of my parents, at the mercy of a broken car or household appliance, subsisting from one check to another and monitoring the price of the smallest product purchased, often forced to say no to the demands we made of them, for lack of resources. I knew the fear of lack, I lived in the embarrassment of comparison with my friends, whom I hesitated to invite to my home, worried that they would discover the excessive modesty of our way of life.
There are of course more terrible stories than mine. During my master’s studies, I taught in underprivileged areas of Montreal. I remember an adaptation class in secondary three that I had been assigned to in a school in the Centre-Sud district, whose students were on average three or four years behind in their schooling. Many bore the physical marks of misery. Some looked twice their age, as if the hardships had aged them prematurely. This did not prevent them from having a thousand things to say and energy to spare.
One day, I even took the liberty of interrupting a lesson to describe to them a trip to France that I had just made – it was my first stay across the Atlantic – to better invite them to tell a trip in their turn. . I remember the heavy silence that reigned in the class. Of the twenty students, only two raised their hands to speak, one of a week of camping in the North, the other of a stay with an aunt in Gaspésie, and I was surprised that their companions , usually so talkative, don’t want to add anything.
During the break, one of them came to explain to me the reasons for this silence: most of them had never set foot outside the island of Montreal, and he himself could count on the fingers of a hand the times he was out of his neighborhood. I was speechless. I was ashamed of my question and wanted to cry thinking about the courage of this 15-year-old young man who confessed his sad truth to me.
For years, governments have courted members of the middle class. The “ordinary family”, the “good tax payer” and the “average voter” have become the central figures of a political discourse centered on what we like to call the “real world”. But this hype around average incomes, averages to reach and the means to reach them makes us forget those of our fellow citizens who are thrown so low below the average that they do not even know how they could catch the first rung of the ladder. .
For these folks, the recent spike in food and energy prices isn’t just forcing a trip to be postponed or a kitchen remodel to be made, it’s forcing choices to be made between basic needs, perhaps even replacing some basic foods have become too expensive.
The meteoric rise in real estate prices, which leads to rent increases and housing repossessions, is pushing more and more people into exile far from the neighborhoods where they have made their lives. Some of the bravest marched last weekend in the streets of Verdun to demand that we take an interest in their fate1.
In all these stories of humiliation and economic segregation there is a violence that is all the more cruel for being invisible.
With the rise in inflation, of which it is no longer certain that it is only temporary, the question of purchasing power risks imposing itself during the next electoral campaigns, as is already the case in France for a long time. There, studies show that the share of pre-committed household consumption expenditure, such as housing, energy and insurance, continues to grow. According to Insee, the French Statistical Institute, between 1960 and 2018, these expenses increased from 12.6% to 29.2% of the household budget, which means that the share available to meet other essential needs, such as food, clothing, transport and health, is constantly decreasing. Not to mention that these figures represent an average, the situation being much worse for low-income households, who often spend more than half of their budget on housing alone.2.
This is undoubtedly the blind spot in our analyzes of the rise of the far right in this country, whose support is particularly high among disadvantaged populations – in the former working-class areas of the North and of the East, in rural areas and overseas territories3.
Without defending or excusing it, perhaps this vote should be seen as a desperate protest, the equivalent of a blank vote, on the part of an electorate who has seen their living conditions deteriorate for too long.
This is why it is urgent to recognize that poverty is not only the affair of the poor, that their misfortune is also ours, without which we risk, like France, paying an ever higher social and political price.