Canadians are Running on Empty
I am 2 days late writing this weekly reflection. Too much on my plate – and I am retired with money in the bank! It makes no sense that I and many Canadians I know are exhausted. We’re running on empty.
Financially from inflation, absurd home prices, an inability to even order a car at a time that used cars are often as expensive as new ones, approximate doubling of natural gas for heating, etc. Here’s a fun fact to show you how much of a financial mess we are in: in the USA almost half of young adults are living at home; the highest rate since the Great Depression. In Canada our personal debt has ballooned to unheard of levels. Our bank accounts are certainly running on empty.
Emotionally from the stress of kids being in and out of school, from an inability to even get access to some medications, from waiting 20 hours in the ER, from living alone and loneliness, from being afraid of being ripped off by some internet scam and data breach, from not feeling like you can trust people any more and certainly not news on the internet. My experience has been taking care of my 93 year old mother who lives with us. After having a toe amputated we had other issues and had to spend 2 nights in a row in the ER: on the 2nd night waiting so long in a chair that my mother and I, from lack of sleep and food [she only got 1 sandwich all day & night], cracked and walked out without seeing the Dr. to hear the results from a Catscan report. The ER was too busy – not their fault; just a health care system running on empty.
Physically from having to repeat calling for help and only being answered by bots and recordings and even when you finally get help the work is not done quite right – for example, my GP ordered furniture and 12 of the 14 pieces were wrong in some way. The same thing has happened to me. I could like to showcase a specific example of a person, in this case a Nurse – because my wife and daughter are Nurses – on what running on empty does to people.’
On the same day Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the province has “not seen a mass exodus of nurses” leaving the profession – a remark some nurses say was “dismissive” and “painful” to hear, I stopped my active nursing license
I say stopped, not resigned. It’s a more active description of my decision. Like countless nurses, I’ve had enough.
Grant you, I am not an emergency room or intensive care unit nurse. I am not seeing paediatric COVID patients. I work in the nebulous area of community health, public policy, and advocacy, informed by decades of frontline work as a street nurse in the social welfare disaster called homelessness.
Yet, I feel equally dismissed as my hospital nursing colleagues.
During the pandemic I collaborated with frontline workers to fight for the most basic public health measures: portable toilets, free masks for unhoused people and two metre spacing of cots and beds in shelters. I say fight because none of it was easy. For the struggle to obtain the two metre physical distancing of sleeping spaces, we had to take the City of Toronto to court (and won). These stories are expanded upon by people who fought the good fight in Displacement City. Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic. I watched the unlearned lessons from SARS repeat themselves.
Community health nurses in the early days of the pandemic worked without adequate PPE and without extra funding despite an additional workload. I helplessly watched as 43 nurses, who were providing homeless health care in the pandemic, were terminated when the Ontario government ended funding, as if the pandemic let alone homelessness was over. Like my hospital colleagues I have listened and watched as nurses who are working in what can only be described as a war zone become ill or get COVID or burnout – or all three. It is highly likely their mental health may be permanently damaged. Decades of government neglect to the health care system is now patently apparent. It’s safe to say nurses are now politicized, and they are angry.
It’s not unlike the government’s decades-long neglect to housing.
I am reminded that the term street nurse is in fact a political statement. It says that homelessness has gotten so bad in our very rich country that a nursing specialty called street nursing developed.
When I worked at Street Health, the first nursing-led organization in the country that provided homeless health care, we were directed to engage in politics and to speak out. Always. ‘I See and am Silent’, the motto of the old Mack School of Nursing did not apply to us. Nurses are not encouraged to advocate by speaking out.
Working at a community health centre my manager told me I could not speak about the tuberculosis outbreak that had hit the homeless population and had killed several men. I was also told I could not do outreach at Tent City because they were outside of our ‘catchment area’. Sadly, the nurses I worked with did not support my fight for whistleblower protection in our contract.
I was dangerously close to being penalized for my advocacy when the Atkinson Charitable Foundation awarded me their Economic Justice Fellowship. I was freed to work as a street nurse locally and nationally without constraints for six years. That freedom spoiled me and to this day I am reminded that for the most part nurses do not have that freedom.
Admittedly, leaving nursing has been on my radar despite friends and colleagues discouraging me from making that decision. I am stopping.
If you think its only Nurses that just means you are not aware of the Great Resignation – take a look at this video entitled I Quit! – Why Millions of People Are Quitting Their Jobs to learn about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK1EXbNx6js
I was working McDonalds as a staff manager(lowest rung on the management ladder) and tried to balance school with my work. I was paid $10 an hour for a job. Before then I had thought the fight for the 15 movement was stupid – but I truly believe that a massive business like McD should be able to compensate. Working there I had a gun stuck to my face , I had food thrown at me, I have had people throw racist insults at me (I am White , Racism is racism), I’ve been hit. When I asked my boss for a raise he laughed at me and said “For what?” And Talked about sales. The next week the guy took a vacation. The week after we were preparing for a big festival in the town that attracts many people. He showed up to work 2 days whilst I had to work my 40 hour week balanced on top of school. The next week following that he took another vacation. That week was hell. We had shortages of everything. We had a shortage of employees because half our staff were students and we were getting slammed in the lunch rush. One day I even gave someone a more than 50 dollar refund, they were waiting an hour and I am not just gunna screw someone around that came out to the town to have fun. After my shift another manager threw a temper tantrum. Calling me retarded , etc etc. I decided after that to quit. For 10 dollars and receive that amount of shit? Fuck That. Fuck McD.
What does this tell me? We are trying to sustain a way of life that can no longer be sustained. We have hit our limits. We want, no our governments demand exponential growth to keep their programs, which keep them in power, programs which are now badly underfunded. Why, the Feds have a couple of million immigrants in the pipeline and can’t even process the paperwork in a reasonable time [i.e.. Years]! More than that, it feels to me like our First world country is slipping into a Second world status. I can’t quite explain how and why I feel that – perhaps it’s the lack of certainty, the lack of optimism, the lack in believing that our behaviours and infrastructure are adequate for the needs. Perhaps its because my 93 year old Mother is now sleeping most of the day on our sofa because she too is running on empty. Does this sound like I have lost hope? No! Far from it. It’s just that I have taken to heart a quote that a dying mother gave to her son in the 1970s when she said: “Life is hard. You’ll be fine.” Thus, my real message is one of hope and the fact that each of us can make a choice that can refill our gas tanks.
So, what are you & I going to do about this? Stop running on empty, fill your gas tanks so that we can create the future that our kids and grandkids deserve!
Whatever it is, there is, of course, something you and I can do to change our little part of the world. Live within our limits. Do and have less. Create positive experiences with friends and family. Decrease our ecological footprint – all the things we know – but are still hard to do. Let’s all of us Canadians, whether at the level of personal debt or health care stress or housing unaffordability or immigration levels that now, unlike in the past, seem to be decreasing the quality of life for Canadians instead of increasing it stop running on empty. Let’s focus on what brings us joy in a non material way and then, within those limits, we can fill up our gas tank and wake up no longer feeling overwhelmed and negative about the future. Does this sound all just like silly Kindergarten advice? Well, perhaps in some ways it is, but without feeling that each of can do a bit to be in control of our lives the “doom” that some prophesize becomes inevitable because really the future is what we make it. So, stop running on empty and fill up your financial, emotional and physical health gas tanks so that we can create the future that our kids and grandkids deserve!
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