On the third weekend of October, the weather in Regina, Saskatchewan was fair. As we pulled up to the Ring Road, we spotted a young man standing on the boulevard with a backpack and a sign. The sign read, Travelling Broke, Very Hungry. Anything Will Help. Since the youngster was a healthy specimen, neither filthy nor unattractive, and had puppy-dog eyes–in short, he looked much like your average university student–it didn’t take long before a lady walked over with a Tim Horton’s sandwich bag and invited him back to the restaurant to sit down.

He was standing in a place where a person could get a job and buy their own lunch, but he seemed oblivious to that. Right now, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have two of the most stable regional economies in the world. A lot of people in the States would give their left arm for the opportunities the prairie has managed to retain in the Great Recession.

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In the 1930s, during the dustbowl years, Dave’s Grandpa drove a covered wagon across Manitoba from south of Winnipeg to the western hill country. There, he homesteaded a quarter section of bushland. He cleared trees and broke the soil by horsepower and man-sweat, since a tractor was unaffordable. He built the house in which he raised his family with his own hands.

Most food was homegrown and homemade. Sugar was a luxury item. Grandpa grew a huge garden and supplemented the winter rations by selling oak fence posts with pre-sharpened ends–all done by axe and saw. Seventy-odd years later, at the age of 90, he sat with an old friend at his birthday party and reminisced about how hard work cured many an ill.

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Twenty years after Dave’s grandparents traversed the plains as some of the last true pioneers, my grandparents stepped off a boat in Montreal, fresh from Britain. They were directed west by the immigration administration of the time. They settled in Winnipeg’s North End.

My grandfather was an old-world upholsterer, trained by apprenticeship. He had skills far beyond an assembly-line worker in a furniture factory, and he retrained the marginalized to build custom furniture. A polio victim, he had been unable to go to war for his country; a gentle man, he went to war against different things. He never quite learned to live with the fact that someone else fought for his freedom.

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We expect corporations to serve us, the almighty consumer class. We demand alternative fuels, but woe betide if the semi-trucks don’t have the groceries on the shelf when we want them. We demand justice for the poor, tweeting the indignation from our iPhones ($375-$649) and laptops ($299-$3000) while soup kitchens struggle to fundraise.

Going to the soup kitchen to help? Someone else will do that. After all, someone else always has.

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In the New York Times, in support of the Occupy movement, Paul Krugman wrote,

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending.

The bankers, the government, and the myriad citizens who did not manage their personal credit all said: someone else can pony up.

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During World War II, the Germans bombed England in a siege that, some estimate, required fifty years of rebuilding. Along the Mersey, a family still found the pennies to go out for a movie. Money well-spent; it saved their lives. When they returned, their house had been reduced to rubble. My grandmother lived three doors down from them.

Most of my Canadian small town served in the Allied war effort. There are lists of the dead on monuments in every town around Manitoba. The monuments are not lost behind urban sprawl, easily ignored by a generation permanently plugged into earbuds; they stand out all the more as the towns slowly die of attrition.

Someone else fought those wars.

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In western Manitoba, businesses are importing workers from China and Mexico because Canadians will not do the jobs in manufacturing. Even if it puts fuel in the car and pork on the supermarket shelf, it does not offer an instant gratification lifestyle.

Locally, some of these immigrant families are buying upscale houses as a co-operative venture, sharing the excessive living space among extended relatives. They pay off one house, then buy another and gain a little more room to breathe. They take entry-level jobs and seek retraining. In short, they work to earn what they have. By the time they’re done, every family in the clan has a good lifestyle.

Are these people willing to settle for less? No. They’re willing to think long-term. They have ethics. They realize there’s more to life than what I want, right this minute.

This is neither capitalist nor communist. It’s different from our self-gratifying culture. It’s someone else’s wisdom.

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In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. (Krugman)

The American banks’ scrabble for self-preservation at the expense of families and taxpayers is a pudding-proof that Canada did well to regulate lending. And justice does need to be served, because it hasn’t been happening.

But corporate justice is not the only kind. There is also the kind that grinds an axe not for war (or fruitless discussion), but for self-determination.

This country’s prosperity was built of the sweat of hard labour and blood shed in time of war. It was built with immigrant ethics. The love of our forebears constrains us. This is what it means to be Canadian.

Yet we insist on defining our Canadianness only in terms of not being someone else.

In the third act, if we truly wish for a better future, we’ll be who we are: the living legacy of settlers and soldiers. The children of immigrants who understood that hope has reins, and they can be seized.

Lest we forget to honour what someone else has placed in the balance.