Most of us are blissfully unaware how much poverty Toronto exports.

The need on our doorstep overwhelms us. Our child poverty rate is the highest in the country. We have 78,000 families on the waiting list for affordable housing. Our charities are overburdened, our social safety nets threadbare. We have a growing underclass of low-paid, precarious workers. The number of “at risk” neighbourhoods is growing. We can’t imagine it being any worse than this.

It is, says Mike Balkwill, provincial organizer for Put Food in the Budget.

He has just completed a two-week tour of northeastern Ontario, visiting communities where no one collects poverty statistics and few politicians, bureaucrats, anti-poverty advocates or faith leaders ever visit. It was his second tour of northern Ontario. Last summer he went west. This year he went east. The symptoms of deprivation were similar, but a different theme emerged. “I was struck by the Toronto connection to poverty in these communities,” he said.

In Elliot Lake, people told him welfare officials in Toronto give low-income residents bus tickets to the community, thinking housing is cheap. (Anna McGrath of Toronto Employment and Social Services flatly denied this. “It is not our practice. We’re not aware of any cases where this has happened.”)

Real estate is affordable in the once-thriving uranium mining town, but there is no rental accommodation for newcomers. Nor are there jobs. Since the Algo Mall — the city’s commercial centre, administrative hub and community meeting place — collapsed three years ago, employment has dried up. The community’s greatest hope is that it will be chosen as Ontario’s nuclear disposal site.

In Kirkland Lake, residents complained that investors from Toronto bought their apartment buildings, jacked up the rent and evicted tenants who couldn’t afford to pay. These absentee landords could never be reached when repairs were needed. One tenant said she had to wear her outdoor winter clothes in her apartment and keep the oven door open for heat. Another said his landlord stopped paying the hydro bill in the middle of winter when the temperature ranged between -30 and -40 degrees.

Similar stories came up in Wawa, Kapuskasing and Sault Ste Marie. “In every community I visited, I heard about absentee Toronto landlords.”

In Virginiatown, close to the Ontario-Quebec border, workers at the health-care clinic told him people with life-threatening conditions were reluctant to go to the nearest hospital (in Kirkland Lake) because it cost $50 to get there by cab. “Toronto is getting a fancy transit system and we can’t even get a bus,” they said.

In Hearst, a logging community, people live in fear that bureaucrats based in Toronto who know nothing about their area will proceed with plans to declare the Abitibi River Forest a caribou conservation area, destroying their livelihood. There are no woodland caribou here, they told Balkwill. Why not move it 100 miles north, where the caribou are?

Wawa wasn’t originally on the tour, but the head of the town’s economic development corporation urged him to stop for an hour. When he arrived, a dozen people including the mayor were waiting. They told him the Eagle River mine operated by Toronto-based Wesdome Gold Mines, brought in workers who drove up housing prices and rents, did not patronize local businesses and left on the weekends. The company paid royalties to the Ontario government but provided no income or benefits to the municipality. The same issue — with different names and details — came up in Kirkland Lake and Kapuskasing.

Balkwill, who lives and works in Toronto, thought about its well-developed network of food banks supported by the major grocery chains; its multi-million-dollar United Way campaign that always exceeds its target thanks to big donations from banks and corporate head offices; and non-profit organizations that normally have a paid director and employees. In the north, charities are run by volunteers, food banks depend on individual contributions and poverty is neither temporary nor episodic.

One remark stuck in his mind as he headed home. It was from Chief Shining Turtle of White Fish River First Nation on Manitoulin Island. “What drives politics at Queen’s Park is the 416/905 area code. Until voters there care about northern issues, nothing is going to happen.”

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Balkwill’s mission is to spread the message as widely and energetically as he can.