SUBSIDIZING FRONTIER FANTASIES WON’T MAKE A HEALTHY PROVINCE

Michèle Raymond
Tuesday July 1, 2008

June brings the end of school and dreams of summer fun for many students, but for others, sports and structured recreation are a distant dream, far beyond the immediate needs for food, housing, heat and tested, clean water.

This month the Department of Health Promotion released “Costs and Affordability of a Nutritious Diet in Nova Scotia”, and a week later the same department announced it would spend nearly a quarter-million dollars on 66 childsized ATVs for children who may later ride vehicles purchased by their own families.

At any time, it’s hard to imagine how buying ATVs to train children in an imagined ‘rural’ lifestyle, (an activity highly protested by the farmers, hunters and woodsmen who actually live in rural communities), will promote a healthy province.

I hear regularly from rural residents furious about the noise and destructive paths of OHVs, whether in the woods or on shoulders of publicly funded highways. They tell me that people who use these vehicles to make a living, don’t ride them for fun at the end of the day, and they don’t like their communities (and businesses) being used as a public playground.

Subsidizing children’s ATV training doesn’t even help their health. Most of the energy used is burned from the fuel tank, not by the rider, and doctors are adamant that no amount of training will speed up children’s development and ability to respond in a crisis.

Just when Nova Scotians were asked to pay for these training vehicles, the Health Promotion study showed that 14.6% of Nova Scotian households find a basic, nutritious diet out of reach, compared with 9.6% of Canadians in general. That means Nova Scotians are 50% more likely than Canadians in general to be malnourished, risking obesity, and diseases like diabetes and various cancers. Thousands more may soon be “food insecure”.

Hunger makes it harder to learn, and the fact that many thousands of our children go to school hungry every day threatens our future as well as their present. In several Halifax Atlantic schools, breakfast programs and dedicated volunteers pick up the slack, but many students still go home to hunger at the end of the day, while food banks are desperately trying to meet an ever-increasing need..

“Heat or eat?” has become a familiar refrain. By the end of last winter, the cost of heating energy (fuel or electricity) was driving some NS families out of their homes, and into homeless shelters or to take refuge with friends. Now, the recent NS budget has put back an 8% tax on heat, on top of oil prices which are expected to nearly double in the coming winter. A promised onetime rebate is no use to anyone whose heating costs are built into their rent, no matter how rent rises to reflect the cost of oil.

In a world increasingly driven by energy costs, in a province where so many children are hungry, why would we pay for others to learn to drive for fun?

If we really want a healthy population, let’s work on making food and shelter affordable, and helping Nova Scotians develop healthy lifestyles, and less fuel-intensive recreation. Physical activity and recreation can be part of daily living, if safe bike routes, well-lit walking paths and water safety training are available.

Last year 23 Nova Scotians drowned. Whether they fell in the water, or drowned while swimming , many could have been saved by a simple three-hour survival swimming course, which costs about $25/person to deliver

The same $230,000 spent on children’s ATVs could have trained 9200 Nova Scotians in water safety.

I was glad to hear the province will look for a refund on its ATVs, and have written to the minister of Health Promotion to ask that at least some of this money be reallocated to survival swimming lessons in Halifax Atlantic, where lakes and beaches present affordable, accessible recreation, but also dangers. Many jurisdictions see survival swimming as an educational need, offering lessons in school, (an approach recently adopted by the Cape Breton-Victoria School Board).

Subsidizing frontier fantasies for a few won’t help the many Nova Scotians going without basic needs, and I hope the province can now find a more productive way to work to a healthy, safe population.

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