We call it luck. They called it planning

 

I was standing on the beach at Esquimalt Lagoon a couple of days ago, gazing out across the sea at the Olympic Peninsula and having that usual thought of how lucky I was to live amid such beauty.

But it isn’t actually luck, is it? It’s planning.

If the beach I was standing on happened to have been located in a different part of the world, it would very likely all be private property now, bought up by people who love the vista too but want it only for themselves.

Or it might be covered in garbage and plastics. Or reeking of raw sewage. There might be a factory on the shore, or uncontrolled industry spread across the landscape. Someone might have built a big casino there, or a 24-hour disco. There almost certainly wouldn’t be a protected bird sanctuary across from the beach, with nice paths in all directions and easy, safe roadside parking.

That none of that happened had nothing to do with luck. Virtually everything about my very pleasant experience at the beach that day directly tied back to the actions of previous generations, who understood their vital role in laying the foundation for a great community for decades to come.

That beautiful beach is there because generations of people born before me did the planning, rule-making, regulatory framework and enforcement to ensure it would be. The same can be said about so much of what we deem "lucky" about our daily lives, from the provincial parks that our grandparents invested in on our behalf to our sewage systems and storm drains, medicare, public housing, environmental protections, neighbourhood design, on and on. 

Now look at us. O Boomers and Gen Xs, what have we wrought?

The United States is the brutal example of the moment, where they’re actively tearing apart the planning of so many far-sighted Americans who have gone before while throwing a wrench into the plans of every country that used to trust them. We’re not there yet in Canada, but I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that we couldn’t be.

I still see many of our municipalities trying to do the right things. But their ability to do that is increasingly compromised by the strange and destructive politics we now have at the provincial and federal levels, and voting habits that have come to resemble a rabid audience cheering on their favourite WWF wrestler rather than anything to do with thoughtful consideration for the future.

And we’ve all got these teeny-tiny little spans of attention now. It’s not just flavour of the week anymore, its flavour of the hour. Social media has worsened that, but we were doing it long before there was social media. Old-style media has played the flavour game for decades, always feeding us new worries with no sense of responsibility for following up old ones.

Consider, too, the copious stacks of reports, commissions and special investigations packed with urgent recommendations that never go anywhere. That’s not just a problem of ever-mercurial political will, but because most of the public never thinks to read any of it, or ask what became of whatever issue was getting the scrutiny.

We once at least paid half a mind to having a stable, non-partisan bureaucracy, which would keep things going even while the politicized lords and ladies of the manor did their flips and cartwheels for votes.

But I’ve watched our own bureaucracy become increasingly politicized over the years. I know there are many good people inside our governments still trying to do their best, but how strange that some of them are actually having to hide their good work so that it can continue unseen while the insane, illogical political tides churn overhead.

At any rate, what’s going on in the US right now demonstrates just how quickly any entity dependent on public funding can be politicized, and that extends to the people working there. Most people are ultimately going to put saving their own ass ahead of upholding democratic principle.

If there’s a plan at any level of government extending even a mere five years into the future, you can bet that it will be fragmented, inadequate, terrifyingly politicized, and at constant risk of being fully abandoned. I hear us worrying about the future, yet doing so little.

We are the boiling frogs waiting for our governments to save us from the stove. But they’re locked up tight in their own weird stuff, and they’re not coming. I’m sure most of them got into politics for all the right reasons, but whatever inner reserves of pragmatism, passion and community ethos they had going in are gone in about 10 minutes when it comes to party politics.

Down here at the joe-average level, we are accustomed to thinking that systems are all around us to make sure our lives go smoothly. This is Canada, after all. That’s the Canadian way.

But then we fall into some new need – lose our jobs, have a major health crisis, have a child with special needs, grow old – and learn painfully fast that our systems for the most part are fractured, under-funded, and completely unprepared for a society so different than the one they were built for.

I saw this over and over again in my journalism years, and still. People reach out to me to tell me of this or that crisis that they’re in for the first time ever, and how outraged they are to discover that there’s no help for them. But where were they when all the other people were calling out desperately about their own crises?

Disasters small and large are happening all around us – no health care when we need it, toxic drug crisis raging on, wildfires burning, mountains and forests falling to development as we rush to build the next big housing development that nobody can afford to live in.

We are in a housing crisis because our governments pulled out of social housing and gave so much of the sector over to the investors, who seek only profit. We are in a social crisis because government after government cut services to suit their own political agendas and didn’t consider for a second how that would amplify and intensify social crises years on.

We have had 18,000 British Columbians die of toxic drugs not because the rate of use changed, but because the drugs changed and we just kept doing the same old same old. We don't have anywhere near enough support for elders who can't live independently anymore because we paid zero attention to decades of warnings about just such a crisis once the Boomers got old. 

We are in a climate crisis because we can’t get off the growth track, can’t stop ourselves from our insatiable consumerism, and tolerate political parties that have no intention of keeping the promises spilling out of their mouths during their election campaigns. We don't even expect them to anymore.

We gave away made-in-Canada hopes and family-supporting jobs for the allure of cheap goods made by countries who could do it for so much less. Now we posture furiously about having to buy our ferries in China, as if we haven’t been sitting in the front row for all these years while the death of manufacturing and the devaluing of trades happened in front of our very eyes as we clamoured for cheaper everything.

Visible and dramatic social decline in every community. Public school systems in crisis. The big-profit mongers all around us, expanding their global empires in ways that never work out in the common person’s favour.

It’s like we’re free-styling into a future that we’re pretty sure is no future at all, and that we’ve seemingly disconnected ourselves from caring about.

So yeah, lucky us to live in a part of the world that still looks like Eden and hasn’t yet been fully eroded by the carelessness and galloping greed of governance that serves only itself, and a disengaged populace that leaves them to it. But the luck’s running out.

 

When "passing" isn't an option

Pixabay - Roninmd

The concept of “passing” has presumably been around since whenever the first person on the outside of the dominant social group of the day figured out they could hide in plain sight because they had the good fortune of looking like they belonged.

You’re a black person in the pre-Civil Rights era, but your genetics gave you light skin and straight hair. You’re Jewish in Hitler’s Germany, but with an acceptably Aryan bone structure as to draw no negative attention. You’re a trans woman using a women’s washroom, but your physical appearance is sufficiently “feminine” that nobody has a thought about that.

You’re a sex worker in a hostile room of those mean kind of feminists who hate sex work, but everybody treats you respectfully because you look like them and they have no idea what you do for a living. You’re LGBTQ in a land that will have none of it, living out your secrets from inside a heterosexual marriage. You’re a daily user of street drugs, but you’ve got a job, a nice house and a good haircut, and no one would think to label you a “drug addict.”

That’s passing. It’s obviously an uneasy place to exist, what with having to hide your true self in order to not be called out, fired, or even killed by the dominant social group. But in terms of how effective it has been throughout history as a means to live without harassment alongside the dominant social group, it brings home so well that decisions about who gets “othered” largely come down to visibility.

Since time immemorial and across all states of stigmatized being, we have always been free to be whoever we are as long as nobody finds us out. The dominant social group’s objections aren’t so much about someone actually being black, Jewish, trans, a drug user, etc, they’re about having to know that they are.

Sex work provides a useful local example. When I first moved to Victoria some 35 years ago, outdoor sex work strolls were common on both Government and Broad streets downtown. Everybody complained about them regularly.

Business owners lamented their presence. Social agencies worried about the vulnerability of the workers. Police conducted undercover operations where they pretended to be customers, in that usual way of pretending that enforcement would clear things up. Many, many media stories were written.

So when was the last time you heard complaints about sex work strolls in the city? So long ago I can’t even remember. That change isn’t because sex work doesn’t exist anymore, it’s because the instant connection via cellphones and online communication has ended much of the need to walk streets so your customers can find you.

A more distant example: Colombia. Not so long ago, it was widely viewed as a dangerous country neck-deep in the cocaine industry and completely unsuitable to visit. Today, tourists love it, and return home raving of its beauty and sophistication.

That isn’t because Colombia wiped out its cocaine industry. It’s because the industry decided to tone down its visibility. Dress a high-ranking narco in a nice suit and he looks no different than any other corporate guy.

Consider the current hubbub about street issues through this lens, and you can see why everyone is so worked up. It’s all so visible at this point. People have always lived sick and impoverished with profound disability, but now it’s fully out there for all to see. The days of being able to hide our social problems are long gone, especially during a housing crisis.

I suspect the fervor around starting up involuntary treatment again is largely related to this high-viz situation. We’re pretending that it’s about getting people the help they need, even if it means shoving it down their throats. But in reality, we’re mostly just craving a place where people we don’t want to look at are locked up out of our sight.

There’s obviously a big human-rights perspective on this issue of “passing,” of course. Someone should not have to blend in with the dominant social group just to ensure they have human rights.

But as a diehard pragmatist, I also see the utility of just reducing visibility so that we can all settle down for a while. Some kind of fast housing solution that turned down the public profile has a lot of potential to calm things down.

In a dream world, we would build some beautiful facility full of support where everyone with all their challenges could find peace, a bed to call their own, and the stability to take a few hopeful steps into a new life.

We’re far from a dream world, however, so how about we figure out a slapdash fix in the meantime? If an earthquake put 100 people onto the streets of Pandora Avenue, we’d scrabble together a hasty fix in a heartbeat. Yet here we are, years into the crisis, paralyzed, grasping at the ridiculous idea of locking everybody up “for their own good” just so we don’t have to see them anymore.

All around the world, people leading troubled lives find a modicum of peace and community in hidden places where they can get out of sight. Slums, tarp huts under the freeway, tent cities, condemned buildings, empty lots – not great solutions by any means, but still better than a filthy square of Pandora Avenue sidewalk amid the endless misery of constant scrutiny and community loathing.

Many big, big problems to sort out on Pandora, and no end in sight of new people falling into high-viz homelessness. But we can’t even get started when we’re this worked up. Making it all a little less visible has to be a priority. Get these poor people a place to live. 

Life's a mess for people on the streets. But at least they've got friends

Bianca van Djyk, Pixabay

I spent a bit of time on “the block” this past weekend, that stretch of Pandora Avenue that is currently one of the city’s most visible hot spots of social crisis.

I hope the city’s big plan works out well for all concerned, and sign me up for helping. But after three decades of watching so many variations of Victoria councils trying to get a handle on this issue, it's obvious that we'll just be moving street problems into someone else's neighbourhood unless we grasp what really creates these hot spots. 

There's a tough little core of maybe 70-100 people at any given point in time in our region who are youngish, hardy, and deep in a late-stage struggle with whatever substance has got them, generally with mental and physical illnesses taking an additional toll. Their chaotic and unpredictable lives place them far outside the many rules, online forms, waiting periods, and service restrictions they face when trying to get help.

Like anyone, they need to get their needs met. So they settle in areas where there's food, washrooms, and a shelter mat in bad weather or some shade when it's hot. The drug sellers follow, and in many cases are the same people, because how else does an impoverished person afford a $50-100 daily habit?

But there’s another factor at play in why this group of people find their way to each other. They are each other’s community. Most everybody else in town either hates them, fears them or views them with disgust, pity, or some mix of the two. On Pandora, the judgment stops.

Get talking to people on the block and it quickly becomes clear that as sad, rough and garbage-strewn that life on a sidewalk appears to be to people like me, there is community on that street. More than one person told me they would be so happy for housing, but that it would need to be big enough for all the people on the street who they consider to be their family.

If you are a sick, struggling person who is spat on, sworn at, and openly scorned pretty much everywhere in the region, it must be pretty nice to have one place you can exist where most people aren’t going to hate on you. Anyone who has known the feeling of being an outsider finally finding their “people” can surely relate.

Can we even fix the multi-pronged social disaster that has been created from decades of neglect? I don’t know anymore. But if we’ve got any chance, it hinges on recognizing that people living homeless don’t just need homes that accept them as they are, they need community. "Don't put us all two by two in a bunch of different buildings where nobody likes us," said one woman. "Let us stay together."

I first encountered this group (not the same individuals, of course) 25 years ago when they were living at Holiday Court, a rundown motel on Hillside Avenue. I was working as a journalist at the time. It was a crazy little scene at that motel, but you didn't have to be there for more than a few minutes before you saw that they were mostly glad for each other's company and assistance. 

Soon enough, the motel scene got too hot for the community to handle, and Holiday Court closed and was torn down. The group moved somewhere else, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, with new people falling into the group at roughly the same pace that others were falling out. They would stay until neighbours or police started howling, then move on.

Eventually there was no place where they were tolerated but the street, where a person has no choice but to live every moment of a problematic life out where everyone can see you. The rest of us make a lot of noise about having to see them, but reflect for a moment on what it must be like on the other side of all our loathing and intolerance.

So many things have changed since the days we dream of returning to, when Pandora's tree-lined boulevards weren't blocked off with ugly blue construction fencing lined with litter. Businesses used to operate side by side with social services that have dominated the block for many years. But that has all changed since the pandemic, when we fully lost control of our weakening social safety net.

Housing affordability, the job market, easy access to medical care, the mood in our communities - all that has changed since the pandemic as well. We definitely weren't doing great before 2020, but we've been doing so much worse ever since. 

Our jails have filled with people with mental illness. Our schools have more and more students who don’t fit into the way we’d like to teach them. Our child-welfare system pumps out half-grown “adults” into homelessness, poverty and substance use disorders. Our street drugs are toxic with fentanyl and more, causing death and chronic health problems at unprecedented levels.

Brain injuries abound, an unintended consequence of bringing people back from the dead in the toxic drug crisis. People with intellectual disabilities are falling into homelessness as “inclusiveness” becomes an excuse to cut services. Mental health issues are increasingly common, even while resources are increasingly scarce.

And now the City of Victoria is setting out to fix things once again with its Community Safety and Well-Being plan. The days of anything resembling an easy fix are long past. I don't want to be a wet blanket, but let's just say I'm moderating my expectations accordingly. 

If we truly want this time to be different, though, then we need to see the problem through the eyes of the people living it. There are many reasons why people end up on Pandora, and feeling like they're finally part of an accepting community is a pretty big one. Is that in the plan?

My radio interview on - surprise! - the toxic drug crisis

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20, Pixabay

Anyone else like a radio opportunity that gives free range to say whatever you want to sound off about,  but then you listen to it and think good grief, couldn't I have been more eloquent and organized in my thinking?

Ah, but then I wouldn't be me, right? Or that's what I like to tell myself. 

Here I am, blathering on People First Radio this month about the street scene in Victoria. For some reason, I'm listening to it for the first time today, 10 days after it aired. I think that might relate to my reluctance to not want to hear myself talking in random, wandering, no-key-messages fashion. That's my dealio, but that's not to say that I love that I do it that way. 

But all that said, thank you, Joe Pugh, for letting me sound off in my usual stream-of-conscious style, and for including some clips from the speaker series on the toxic drug crisis that I organized in partnership with Peers Victoria earlier this year. 

On the upside, illicit drug deaths in BC fell to 143 in March, from a monthly peak of 241 in December 2023. That's about where we were at in April 2020, though up from February 2025 when we saw "just" 132 deaths. 

But I note that figures on the BC Centre for Disease Control dashboard haven't been updated for  April and May, and I wonder what that means. My connections are telling me that BCCDC communications now have to be vetted by government first. I am really hoping that is not impacting the data they are able to put out. 

Just saw a Conversation piece from a US academic who specializes in communication strategies for resistant audiences. I sent her an email for any advice. All I see is people like me talking like crazy, and nobody listening. 

Sidney McIntyre-Starko was loved. So were the other 50,000 people who didn't get their stories told

Pixabay

I hope the inquest recommendations that have come out of tragedy in a University of Victoria residence really do lead to major change. What happened to Sidney McIntyre-Starko is very sad, and there were some major stumbles on a number of fronts leading up to her death at 18 from toxic drugs.

But if anyone is thinking that the terrible stigma that hangs over illicit drug use got eased by all the news coverage of this young woman’s death, just let that one go. If anything, the coverage deepened stigma.

Right to the final stories, we have seen photos of beautiful Sidney in all her active, “normal” roles, been reminded that this was the first time she’d ever used drugs. She was a good person, we have been assured many times by those quoted in the stories. She died because of system failures, the stories emphasize, not because she was a drug user.

And there it is. The stigma. The coverage is careful not to say out loud that Sidney was not like all the other drug users who are dying, but it comes through clearly. She was different – active and beautiful and loved, with a bright future. She even got her own inquest.

The lives of the other 50,000 lost souls who died the same way that Sidney did in these terrible nine years ended largely without comment, and certainly without government investing any scrutiny as to how systems may have failed them.

I mean no disrespect to Sidney or her family. Her death will change the way things are done, and that is a big deal. 

But this young woman’s tragedy has been put forward in a way that affirmed from the start that she was Not Like Those Other Drug Users. The coverage has confirmed - if not intensified - the terrible stigma that hangs over all the other active, beautiful and loved people with bright futures who also continue to die in the toxic drug crisis.

The irony is that in a way, Sidney was killed by stigma. If someone had said from the get-go that Sidney and her friend had just used random drugs someone had found in an abandoned case of wine coolers downtown, I expect things would have gone very differently.

But the young people who knew drugs were involved felt the stigma so heavily that they didn’t acknowledge it to any of the first people they asked for help even when two young women lay before them turning blue and having convulsions. That is some kind of stigma that can do that.

In a way, stigma likely led to those young women using the drugs they found in the first place. 

They went from age 9 to 18 in the years since BC declared a state of emergency over toxic drugs, which started killing so many people after the heavy-duty pain drug fentanyl and all its analogs started to creep into the street drug supply as a substitute for heroin.

How is it that two girls who literally grew up in the era of a horrendous toxic drug crisis in BC didn't know that using random drugs from an abandoned box of booze a friend found downtown was a dangerous risk to take?

I’m pretty dubious of that story if I’m being honest. But if it’s true, then that’s because of stigma too. And if it's not true, then there's the stigma again, getting in the way of these young people admitting that they'd actually bought the drugs.

If the conversations we have about street drugs were at all realistic, those young women would have known from years of education that just about the craziest thing to do in a toxic drug crisis killing 150-200 people a month was to take unknown drugs from a completely unknown source. At the very least, they'd have known to take them to the UVic drug-checking storefront first to see what was in them. 

If we hadn’t criminalized and cast shame over drug use (well, other people’s drug use, never our own), then we would acknowledge that lots of people use drugs, and that it’s actually in everyone’s best interest if people find their way to a regulated supply.

I don't know about you, but I really appreciate going to liquor stores knowing that none of the bottles has been topped up with methanol. I haven’t minded giving up the strange lengths I used to go to for acquiring cannabis now that it’s just in a store, with a label and everything.

I’m glad that when my nurse practitioner gives me a prescription, I know what’s in that drug, who made it, and that I’m taking the recommended dose.

People seek drugs. So why have we put this stigma around a very narrow little group of them, and told ourselves that we are protecting our children by doing that? And how is that working out for us, what with toxic drug deaths now the No. 1 killer in BC from age 10 up?

We are paralyzed with fear that regulating illicit drugs will put our children at risk through easier access. But that's like drawing a comparison to some dream world we aren't living in. The reality is that our children are at tremendous risk right now - never more at risk than now, in fact, and still we dither over our political opinions and our support of tactics that have failed us for decades.

That’s one tough stigma, locking us up like this so completely and for this long.

Sidney, you died far too young. I feel sure you were growing into as beautiful a person as all the photos of you in the media depicted.

But the families of all those other people who have died have those beautiful photos too, and there were so many system failures for so many of them as well. If something good can come out of your death, Sidney, I hope it’s a realization among all of us that there’s no difference between you and them.