National Network for Equitable Library Service

In 2013, a violent crime left Jane Harris seriously injured and tumbling down the social ladder toward homelessness -- for the second time in her life -- leading her to question the underlying conditions that could allow this to happen in a country like Canada. Finding Home in the Promised Land is the result of her harrowing journey through the wilderness of social exile. Her Scottish great-great-grandmother Barbara's portrait opens the door into pre-Confederation Canada; Harris's own story lights our journey through 21st-century Canada. Harris asks how Canadians can ignore the obvious -- that trauma and poverty are inextricably linked. Why did Canada, a nation of exiles driven to create their own Promised Land accept first poorhouses, then soup kitchens, food banks, shelters, and a silent suffering class of working poor?With insight and an understanding born of first-hand experience, Harris uncovers the sad truth that taxes and charitable gifts the prosperous among us pay to avoid looking at the poor fund a poverty industry that keeps the dispossessed in a thorny exile. But she also uncovers a path out of the bureaucratic wilderness.