Daily Inspiration Quote by Kim Campbell

Campbell’s line is a deliberate rebuke to the technocratic reflex: the habit of treating joblessness and poverty as a spreadsheet problem that can be solved with the right model, the right program architecture, the right set of indicators. By naming “structure, or design, or statistics” and then pushing them aside, she isn’t denying policy complexity; she’s warning against the moral anesthesia that often comes with it. The sentence works because it makes a quiet power move: it re-centers legitimacy. The people most harmed by unemployment don’t experience “labor-market frictions.” They experience shame, stalled futures, family stress, and the daily bureaucratic humiliations that can turn survival into a full-time job.

The subtext is political as much as compassionate. A statesman talking this way signals an argument about how government should see its citizens: not as aggregates, but as individuals with dignity. It’s also a preemptive defense against the cynicism that social policy debates attract. When poverty is framed as numbers, it becomes easier to blame the poor, or to debate whether suffering is “worth” the cost of alleviating it. Calling it “profoundly human” insists on a different ledger: one where empathy is not a sentiment but a governing principle.

Placing this in Greater Montreal matters. It invokes a specific urban landscape where deindustrialization, language politics, immigration, and neighborhood inequality collide. Campbell’s phrasing reaches across those fault lines, suggesting that whatever the structural causes, the political obligation begins with recognition: people first, metrics second.