This is the text of a speech delivered to the Calgary Food Bank Executive Committee by Derek Cook, a research social planner with the City of Calgary, in the spring of 2010.

I Have Heard Voices and Listened

  

“Every day the sun comes up in its glory of physics

and goes down in its glory of physics

and every day I doubt you.

Oh Lord I have been silly;

I have heard voices and listened

I may simply be crazy...”

                        - Erin Noteboom

      Does anyone else here wonder what just happened? Living in Calgary for the past five years has been like living in one of those games at the Stampede where you stand inside a cubicle filled with money and they turn on a fan. Then, you have exactly 30 seconds to grab as much of the cash that’s swirling around you as you can. In the frenzy which follows, no one is concerned with how much they’ve got, how they’re going to grab and stuff it, where it came from, or how it got into the air. The objective is simply to get more. And then, someone turns off the fan.

 Now here we are at the end of it, wondering “what just happened?”. “Oh Lord, I have been silly, I have heard voices and listened, I may simply be crazy.”

 Collectively I think we all heard voices and our mistake was to listen. And we may certainly have been crazy. The voices told us that we were the most prosperous city in the country, and that this was not going to come to an end any time soon. Calgary led the country in GDP growth, employment growth, income growth, wage growth, even skewing the national indicators. And the voices told us that this was our doing, not some fluke of geography. This was “The Heart of the New West.”

 The voices told us we deserved as much as we could get. The voices told us we were going to get rich and the ever increasing values of our homes seemed to confirm this self-evident truth, even if we didn’t feel quite so rich just yet. These were the voices of our leaders, our advertisers, our media, and even our neighbours and friends who discussed house values with the fervency of hockey fans. And we listened, oh how we listened.

       The problem was – none of it was real. There was another story, and other voices, that we simply didn’t listen to. We were in fact a city under stress, extremely vulnerable, living on borrowed money and borrowed time. Let me talk about that vulnerability through some of the stories that we were told, or told ourselves.

 1.    “We’re Rich!” – Well, some people were anyway. While it is true that Calgary had the highest average income in the country, averages are inherently tricky. The problem with averages is that if you take 100 people and 10 people have $1,000,000 and 90 people have $1000, the average is $100,900 each. A better measure is the median which tells you the mid point where half are above and half are below. If we look at what happened with income in Calgary, while the average was certainly going up, the median barely budged. And so the gap between the rich and the rest of us kept growing. In 2006, we looked at household incomes versus household expenditures for different income groups in Calgary. What we found was that the bottom 25% of the population were spending 130% of their income, the next 50% were breaking even, and only the top 25% had anything left over. Meanwhile, the cost of food and rent continued to climb as an overheated economy drove the price of everything upward. Yet we continued to tell ourselves that we were all getting rich. And, if we weren’t, it was our fault.

2.    “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats”.  Many people believed there was no real poverty in Calgary. Certainly, the economic boom should “cure” whatever poverty existed. In this respect, Calgary provides an interesting test case, for if ever there was a city where this should and could have happened, Calgary during the past decade was it. One could ask, if not now, when; if not here, where? Yet, if we look at the poverty rate between 2001 and 2006, it barely moved, dropping by less than a percentage point despite the most impressive economic boom in the city’s history. And if we look at who it is that’s poor, it is those who are already the most vulnerable among us – persons with disabilities, recent immigrants, single-parents. And nobody asks “why”.

3.    “Get a Job!” I was once at a meeting where a senior provincial official commented that Alberta’s social policy was “get a job”. Certainly there were lots of jobs in Calgary. In fact, employment growth in Calgary was so strong at one point that it was skewing the national statistics. We also had the highest labour force participation rate and lowest unemployment rate in the country and on record. If you wanted to work, you could, and if you were in difficult financial circumstances, getting a job would certainly cure that problem, or so the story went. The problem was, almost all of Calgary’s poor during the height of the boom were already working. In 2006, there were over 120,000 people living in poor households, less than a quarter of whom were actually receiving any form of federal or provincial income support whatsoever. And this showed up in the need for emergency food assistance, where the largest group of clients here at the Food Bank were those with jobs.

     4.    “We Did It Ourselves” – Calgary’s “entrepreneurial spirit” got most of the credit for the boom, along with individual traits of hard work and initiative. While admirable traits, in reality, Calgary was simply riding the wave. The lyrics to a popular song go: “When you ride upon a tiger, you can never get off until, it ain’t hungry”. Well, the tiger was hungry - primarily for oil. Globally, the economy was being driven by growing demand for natural resources due to the tremendous growth in the emerging Asian economies. This meant that economies relying on natural resources did extremely well, while others were left behind. So, over the past decade, Canada in fact had two economies. Western resource-based economies roared, while in the east, where the economy was based largely on manufacturing, economic growth had stalled a long time ago. No amount of hard work was going to alter that reality.

     5.    “I’m All Right Jack” In fact, we weren’t. A survey we conducted in 2006 found that over half of us were concerned about not saving money for the future, 40% about having too much debt, over a third about not having enough money for housing, and 20% about not having enough money for food. At the very height of the boom, one out of every five households in Calgary was concerned about not having enough money for food!

     Not surprisingly, then, the most frequently reported issue of concern was being stressed, with almost two-thirds of Calgarians feeling that they were too stressed. And the things that could help reduce stress, such as recreation and leisure activities, people said they either couldn’t afford or had no time for. Meanwhile, our community agencies were under immense pressure due to a lack of funds, labour shortages and skyrocketing operating costs, even as people were pulling back on their volunteer work due to a lack of time, and the clamour for tax cuts eroded the public support they relied on.

 So how did we maintain this facade of being “ok” when so many things suggested we were anything but? Well, financially, we borrowed on our equity and went into debt, ate up our savings, and worked longer and longer to make ends meet. Nationally, Canada’s debt to income ratio reached 130%. In Calgary, the number of two-earner families went down as the number of three earner families went up. Our labour force participation rate reached such a high level that it prompted one commentator to suggest it may be the canary in the coal mine. This facade of being ok was really a house of cards that could be sustained only in the context of high commodity prices, low interest rates, stable employment and rising house values.

When these factors began to change, many people simply didn’t have enough in the bank, literally or figuratively, to withstand the shock. We heard the voices and we listened. We may have simply been crazy.

 Where to From Here?

     The short answer is, of course, that nobody really knows. The joke about economists is that an economist is someone who can tell you what’s going to happen in five years, and can spend the next five years explaining to you why it didn’t happen. The best forecasts at the moment are that the economy will recover this year, but unemployment will continue to go up for another year still. As unemployment rises, poverty also goes up and with poverty comes increasing demands for help with basic needs. Between 2008 and 2009, the demand for food bank services in Alberta jumped by 61%, not even close to second place Nova Scotia whose usage rose by a mere 20%. And as our income support programs continue to vastly under-support our vulnerable families, basic needs issues can only be expected to grow. Currently, the best you can do on provincial Income Support is half the poverty line, if you are a couple with two children. If you’re single, you will receive about a quarter of what you actually need.

    The longer answer to the question “where to from here”, however, requires I believe a considerable amount of collective soul searching. I recall a column by Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid from the fall of 2007, exactly a year before the bottom fell out. In this column he noted:

 

“Wary of strangers, we rely too much on symbols to judge people. I often test this theory with the family cars. It proves true every time. When I drive the nice new vehicle, moms and dads smile cheerfully as they push the stroller through the intersection. But when I climb into the other car – the 1989 Volvo with 348,406 kilometers on the clock – the glares say I must be violating parole.”

 Braid went on to write how, against the backdrop of social stress, there is a growing feeling of discontent. He noted that people are intuitively feeling that their city has somehow changed, stating:

 “This discontent ... is partly due to our gung-ho focus on getting things built. While we were busy excavating Glenmore Trail and driving LRT lines deep into             the suburbs, somehow the city’s soul went sideways.”

    In thinking about the city’s soul, I think we are challenged today to come to grips with who in fact we are. When I moved to Calgary fifteen years ago, a friend remarked: “Calgary – that’ll be a great city once they get their bags unpacked.” The truth is, most people in Calgary are from somewhere else, and most of us are engaged in unpacking our bags to some degree. For many people, it was been this city’s tremendous economic opportunity that brought them here. This prompted another commentator to call Alberta “Canada’s ATM”.

 Economic opportunity is important, but is it enough? If our sole reason for being here is simply to make money and pay the least amount of tax possible (isn’t that the Alberta Advantage?) it doesn’t give us much on which to build a community, particularly in times of crisis like now. 

What is it really, that will make people want to not just come here and make money, but to stay? What is it that will make this city a community? There is a saying that a bird doesn’t soil its own nest. We need to decide if this is truly our nest, and how we are going to care for it. Robert Roach of the Canada West Foundation posed the question:

 “When it comes to finding meaningful responses to urban social challenges like homelessness, prostitution and rundown neighbourhoods, we need to decide if we want to fix broken windows or broken lives. Do we focus on cleaning up the streets or helping people in need?”

     I would like to conclude with an excerpt from another poem, this one by the Canadian poet Dennis Lee. In his work Civil Elegies, which won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, he ponders his city and what it means to belong.

 “In the city I long for, green trees still

asphyxiate. The crowds emerge at five from jobs

that rankle and lag. Heavy developers

pay off aldermen still; the craft of neighbourhood,

its whichway streets and generations

anger the planners, they go on jamming their maps

with asphalt panaceas; single men

still eke out evenings courting, in parks, alone.

A man could spend a lifetime looking for

peace in that city. And the lives give way around him – marriages

founder, the neighbourhoods sag – until

the emptiness comes down on him to stay.

But in the city I long for, men complete

their origins. Among the tangle of

hydro, hydrants, second mortgages, amid

the itch for new debentures, greater expressways,

in sober alarm they jam their works of progress, asking where in truth

they come from and to whom they must belong.”

 

So in thinking about where we’re going, I challenge us to also think about where we come from, and what it means to belong. Which voices will we hear, and which ones will we listen to?

     Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning, and I commend you for the tremendous work that you do.

 

Derek Cook  B.A., M.Sc., R.S.W. 
Research Social Planner, 
City of Calgary, 
Community and Neighbourhood Services, 
Social Policy and Planning Division