The War at Home: An Intimate Portrait of Canada's Poor

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“It is a useful exercise to walk into any social service agency in
your own neighbourhood and to view it from the client’s perspective.
While you won’t find ‘coloured’ toilets and water fountains set
apart from ‘white’ ones, you will find a carefully replicated social
structure, including locked staff bathrooms and open client ones.
Including off-limits space, often the most desirable and attractive,
reserved for staff only. Including prominently posted rules of
acceptable behaviour, not for staff but for clients, that set the tone
and establish generalized assumptions about the people they purport to
help.”

The above is a sample of Pat Capponi’s perspective on social services
agencies in postrecession Canada. Besides being an accomplished
journalist, Capponi has been on both sides of the mental health system.
After a stint as a patient in a psychiatric hospital, she recovered and
went on to become an advocate for psychiatric patients and helped to
design new agencies to serve patients in the system.

The broader theme of this book is a cross-country tour of life at the
bottom rung of Canadian society. Capponi visits the mean streets of
Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and St. John’s. Not
surprisingly, she finds that some streets are meaner than others. In
Vancouver, she watches drug dealers opening conducting business in full
view of the local police station. In Winnipeg, she explores how
government-sanctioned gambling has become another snare for the poor. In
Toronto, she notes how provincial cuts to the welfare system have
changed the focus of those trying to help the homeless from providing
shelter to merely handing out sleeping bags to people who remain on the
streets.

Although her subject matter is often disturbing, Capponi’s humor and
accessible prose make for a highly readable look at life below the
poverty line in one of the richest countries in the world. Capponi does
not claim to have all the answers, but she makes a good start by asking
a few of the right questions.