ChristianWeek

Between the new census figures, the Quebec election polls and results, Flaherty's budget and the new Canadian food guide cholesterol numbers, I am officially in statistics overload. If my calculations are correct, I could simul taneously maximize my tax status and my life expectancy if I move to Baffin Island, adopt 8.6305 children, vote for the Bloc PEI and claim my daily three kilogram intake of oat bran as a medi cal expense.

You've heard of the boss who told one of his two secretaries that some of the 50 plant workers felt the company newsletter should contain more useful statistics? When her office colleague announced her engagement to one of the plant guys, the newsletter editor wrote "50 per cent of secretaries to marry two per cent of plant workers."

Statistics sound impressive in the hands of politicians and other spin doctors but they quickly lose their meaning when you see the reality behind them.

While I am perturbed by violent crimes, I am more disturbed by the countless daily tragedies in our com munities that shouldn't happen-statistically speaking.

In a Montreal East apartment last month, a confused 90-year-old watched helplessly as her 60-year-old son died of a heart attack. Then she sat holding his hand, eventually dying of starvation. Statistically speaking-it shouldn't have happened. The ambulance was a min ute away. Dozens of organizations in the surrounding blocks offer free services that could have saved them both.

According to the official City of Montreal statistics, there are more than enough beds in emergency shel ters but even during the coldest winter spells hundreds find shelter in skimpy layers of cotton and cardboard.

Beyond the 200,000 Montrealers on social assistance, there are 300,000 working poor who shake the very core of the Protestant work ethic most of us grew up with-go to school, work hard, don't do anything stupid and you can get ahead. The inference, of course, is that I can be excused from caring for the poor around me since they gamble, drink, smoke, quit school or are just too lazy to work.

Difficult personal circumstances and a pang of con science forced me out of the house on a cold December night last year and brought me face to face with dozens of individuals and families who should not exist-according to the official sta tistics-and who have forced me over the past months to rethink everything I thought I knew about the statistics of poverty.

Among other things, I have discov ered that the grandest principles have little effect on a three-year-old's hunger pangs, and that on a cold winter night statistics make a lousy blanket-no matter how thick they are.