I was laid off from my employment a year ago for "economic reasons". Those reasons were a direct outflow of the local economic recession our entire province and, arguably, the whole western part of our nation. If this was only about our personal story, I wouldn't be sharing it, but it is only part of a much bigger story.
Next door to us, the owner of the house was forced to move out of our province for employment reasons because his work was ended by the aforementioned downturn. He rented his house and moved on. This changed the nature of our neighbourhood and the local economy more.
Our next door neighbour on the other side went through an arduous and stressful two-year process of having his 13-year career slowly evaporate. His employer, to their great credit, did everything in their power to keep him working and on the payroll, but the downturn was deepened and extended by the provincial and federal policies that were detrimental to the petrochemical industry as a whole. My neighbour kept his home, but he lost 13 years of seniority and a huge portion of his income.
Two doors down from that neighbour the family living there lost their home to bankruptcy, and next to them, the owners sold their home because they could no longer afford it. Since then, both homes have fallen into disrepair so I can see three roofs, two houses and a garage, that seriously need new roofs.
In another city in my province my middle son lost the best paying job he ever had because the company he was working for was servicing the petrochemical industry.
I will be 58 years old this July. In my entire life, which includes living through an general recession in our country, and a time of mortgage interest rates in the double digits, I have never experienced such a profound economic downturn. And these are just the effects I and my family have experienced.
Meanwhile, the provincial and federal governments have done little to help, and have actually made the situation worse. All the while claiming that our nation is doing very well on the whole. I have to grudgingly agree. But the bigger numbers don't do anything for the local economy.
What has been most startling to me has been the inability of local resources to be of any help until a family or individual reaches the absolute bottom. And the complete lack of resilience of the local economy to absorb such a pointed loss.
I have spent the last half of my life in the pursuit of community that can absorb and redeem the losses that life inevitably presents to us individually and collectively. At the deepest level, the communities I have served have presented the doctrine of collective support and the sharing of resources. The idea of self-sacrifice lies at the core of the narrative that defines these communities.
What I have experienced is a lot of emotional and spiritual support, but very little in the way of practical support. Somewhere, somehow, the communities have lost the ability to be of practical help to those affected by economic loss. And the reasons are not clear, so I will offer no pronouncements as to why in this blog.
Only this...
We have to work to discover better ways to serve and support those who have been damaged by economic loss that is out of their control. We have to ask why. We must not speculate. We need to seriously search ourselves and our communities to discover how we have become so ineffective in this area.
The reason why is simply this:
There is no economic issue that truly matters to the vast majority of people except the local economy. When one is facing huge economic loss, nothing else matters.
Food for thought.
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