My father’s generation had a word for the men who came through his neighbourhood looking for work: transients. They rode the rails from town to town, sleeping in boxcars, lining up at soup kitchens, carrying what little they owned in a bundle over one shoulder. Hunger was not an abstraction to them. It was arithmetic: How many meals could stretch across how many days? How far was the next harvest job?

That was less than a hundred years ago. Two generations. Maybe three. Some of those men had come out of federal relief camps, paid twenty cents a day for clearing bush and building roads, and rode the rails east to Regina in 1935 to demand something better than that. Their grandchildren mostly never had to learn what a relief camp was.

Then, Canada did something remarkable. Out of the wreckage of Depression and war, we built a country that took the boxcar riders off the rails and put them into factories, then into homes, then into a middle class that assumed, reasonably, that hunger was behind us. Unemployment insurance. Public pensions. Hospital care that did not bankrupt a family. A minimum wage that meant something. For a few decades, Canada behaved........

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