We're on the road to nowhere

Hello CDD20, Pixabay

Nothing quite like talking to 140 or so people living homeless to get a clearer sense of what's really going on out there on our streets. I thought I knew a fair bit before I started into my little Instagram project five months ago to give voice to people living homeless here in Greater Victoria. But wow, the things I've learned.

In no particular order, here are a few of them: 

People are really, really sick out there. This is a major health crisis, plain and simple. People are enduring terrible infections, raging and highly contagious bacterial illnesses, bone-destroying weirdness from toxic drugs, and completely unsupported bouts of severe mental health crisis. They're dying at an astounding rate - at least 15 people dead just since early December, and those are just the ones that the street community has been able to keep track of. Meanwhile, our community's primary response has been to crack down harder on them for the "street disorder" caused by the jury-rigged shelters, blankets, clothing and other possessions that end up in plain sight when people have no place to go. 

These are mean days for people on the street. Endless bylaw enforcement, heavy police presence, a growing intolerance within the supportive-housing structure for anyone who can't do as their told. A fed-up public ready to turn loose the dogs if it will get rid of the visible crisis manifesting on our streets. Landlords turning away vital support services because they don't want the hassle, leaving essential services as homeless as the people they want to serve. Public electrical outlets shut down so people can't charge their phones. No washrooms, no laundry facilities, somebody always trying to move you along. So much open hatred shown toward people living in deep poverty and disability.

There really are no "systems" addressing homelessness. Things like housing, drug treatment, medical care and mental health support for people living homeless exist in some kind of theoretical world that gets talked about a lot by various levels of government when they want to highlight the many ways that they're helping. But on the ground, yikes.

Such services are completely overwhelmed and totally disconnected from each other. In many cases they're even at odds. Where there's any strategy for how things are intended to go - and that's a big if when it comes to the issues around homelessness - it bears no resemblance to how things are actually going. 

Consider this: The bridge from the street in BC starts with a shelter bed, which in turn is intended to bridge people to supportive housing, which then bridges to market housing in a perfect world (and could if there were realistic rent subsidies). But what happens when there aren't nearly enough shelter beds for everyone who needs one, and thus a growing number of people on the street who don't even have a toehold on that first bridge? What happens when there are 15,789 supportive housing spots in BC, and a waitlist of 10,000? 

You don't need to be a math whiz to figure out how that's going to turn out.

For every supportive housing placement that comes available in the region through BC Housing's centralized registry, there are 12 service providers bidding for it. Each of them could have a waitlist of 30 or more other people lined up behind the one who is being put forward on that particular day. 

Adding to problems, people routinely get evicted from supportive housing back to homelessness, and are much more unlikely to ever get another offer once that happens. A new group of people who nobody wants to house is establishing itself on our streets. There is no plan for changing any of this reality.

The state of our mental health "system" is shocking. You don't have to be talking to people living homeless to know that, of course. I know many families far from the issues of homelessness who are totally struggling with the starved and patchy mental health services in BC. But whatever the difficulties of accessing services even when you're an upper-income person of privilege in a comfortable home with a charged phone and plenty of money, multiply that 100-fold for anyone living homeless. 

One really disturbing sight is seeing how many people with severe mental illness are being put on "extended leave" under the Mental Health Act so they can be forced to get their injections for whatever psychiatric drug they're on, and then left to live homeless. What a cruel and damaging thing to do.

Politicians love talking up treatment, but we don't even know what it is. What constitutes "treatment," anyway? Most of it has been given over to private companies to deliver. Much has changed in health care in the last 100 years, but this thing called "treatment" is still largely guided by an idea that a couple of guys in Ohio came up with in 1935 - one that remains remarkably resistant to all the research and evidence that have come along since. 

Treatment costs a lot - or, in the rare chance that you get a funded spot, requires a long and uncertain wait to access. Here in BC, there is no way to even say how effective that treatment is, because there's virtually no provincial data, no stated outcomes to measure against, no followup. 

As for this dream that treatment will be the magic path out of homelessness, even filling out and submitting the elaborate 16-page form and having a working phone to get the callback confirming a bed is virtually impossible when you're homeless, not to mention managing through the long gaps between detox and treatment. And then there's that little issue of post-treatment housing. 

The ones who know how best to manage street homelessness are the ones living it. Whatever lofty wishes and warm thoughts that housed people might have for dealing with homelessness, the true experts are the people experiencing it. But they don't even get asked. I am routinely impressed in my conversations with people at their great ideas for getting themselves and others out of the trap of long-term homelessness. We should be listening.

What's said by our governments bears so little resemblance to what is. The news releases and warm statements issued from time to time around action to end homelessness are a million miles away from what's happening on the ground. Few people in positions of power appear to ever consider a walk through a hot zone of homelessness with their eyes and ears open, so seem to believe what they're hearing from their staff. Alas, their staff aren't out there either. 

So you'll hear government talking about $10 million for x or a new approach for y, and you might think it means that somebody's doing something meaningful about the disturbing social crisis on our streets. But in reality, it's just more money being spent far away from the people who need the help. It's spin. It's a fishing lure for voters. 

Or you'll hear a city councillor doing a bit on how there are 32 people who still need housing in Victoria, and they'll all be taken care of once the newest shelter opens on Bridge Street sometime in the future. Well, yay to a new shelter, but I've talked to almost four times that many people living homeless myself, just since October. (The councillor in question says he got his information from staff.)

It's very much like that moment in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy realizes the all-powerful Oz is just some dude from Kansas who has no clue. Trust no one.

The drugs are absolute poison. And while we work on figuring out how to end the trauma, disability, pain, shame, isolation and human suffering that lay the foundation for problematic substance use, the most immediate action we can take on the toxic drug crisis is to get more people onto prescribed alternatives and away from the unregulated disaster of the street supply, most especially the opioids.

The hypocrisy is unbearable. If you're going to sit on the city council that routinely sends out its bylaw officers to rip away tents, coats, blankets, personal belongings and more from Indigenous people on unceded Indigenous land, you should be called out on it after every land acknowledgment ahead of a council meeting and every utterance of the word "reconciliation." 

We know so very little about how and why homelessness happens, and how it ends. And even worse, we're doing very little to find out. The kind of data needed to understand the ebb and flow of people in and out of homelessness in BC is either not being collected, not being shared among the people who need it to do their own job better, or is collected in little go-nowhere bins of information for the purposes of keeping a funder happy and never amalgamated with anyone else's little bin, or analyzed for broader understanding. We aren't measuring or tracking the things that matter, and thus have no real idea of what's working and what's not. 

More than half of the almost 1,800 people who were homeless on the night of the region's most recent point-in-time count (March 2025) reported ending up homeless after being in the care of either the child welfare system, a hospital, or a jail. A truly huge piece of this issue could be addressed just by making it so those three systems don't ever discharge people into homelessness. That is not an impossible dream. 

There's real community out there. One bright spot to leave you with: People find acceptance, love and caring on the street among others living homeless, sometimes for the first time in their lives. It's one of the reasons that some of them resist moving inside even when they could. They don't want to give up the community they've finally found. 

They're literally saving each other's lives in this era of toxic drugs. They're making sure people around them are getting fed, and guarding each other's stuff or their dog while someone's off trying to get health care. It's a big, bad world out there, and it makes me happy to see that they've at least got each other. 

Future generations will (rightly) shame us for this moment

 

Berthold Bronisz, Pixabay

What’s underway in Canada and the United States right now is the manufacturing of new classes of people who can be discriminated against legally. Both our countries have been here before, but I’d always thought I was in the generation that would end all of that awful business, not lay the groundwork for more.

The latest target for discrimination and harassment in the US are people with first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds from the ever-changing list that the government keeps of countries that it doesn’t like. In Canada, the target is people living homeless.

I’m not going to suggest that anyone’s wearing balaclavas and shooting people dead yet on Victoria streets. But that’s not to say there aren’t some striking – and disturbing - comparisons between ICE raids in the US and what’s happening for people living on our streets.

The principles are certainly the same: Identify a group of “undesirables” whose vanquishing can be politicized, and make life hell for them until they die or leave the area. It seems to be working to plan in the downtown, where at least 15 people have died since December.

BC’s brief and flawed experiment with decriminalizing small amounts of drugs ends today. Significantly increased search and seizure on Pandora Avenue this past week is an ominous sign of what’s coming, as the 180 people who use the overdose prevention site daily could be charged with possession anytime they walk up to the door carrying their drugs (yet are also not able to buy them inside).

Canadians don’t have to look far back in our past to find earlier examples of targeted discrimination. Indigenous people, Chinese and Japanese people, women, people with disabilities, people with certain health conditions – all have felt the wrath of state-sanctioned hate. Historically speaking, we are veteran haters.

But that was then, right? It’s 2026, and we’re so much more aware. We’re so sorry about the bad way we treated people in those days before we understood human rights and equality. We have so many nice laws now, and a library’s worth of court rulings upholding people’s rights.

So the question, then: How can we be doing this again?

I’m spending a lot of time on Victoria streets for a story-telling project. What I see is so many people needing more help than what our systems and service providers want to provide. I don’t know if it’s possible to pin down the moment when it became politically and publicly acceptable to blame and vilify this group of people rather than acknowledge the many factors and policy failures that got us here, but we’re certainly into that stage with gusto at this point.

Overlay that mean mindset with a brutal housing crisis for people in poverty, at a time when land is so valuable and neighbours are so NIMBY that there’s no welcome mat in sight for the poorest of the poor in any corner of our communities.

Add 10+ years of political paralysis as the toxic drug crisis exploded. Stir in some crazy thinking around mental health services that has resulted in the spectacle of seriously ill people being forced to take their medication yet at the same time abandoned to live homeless. Top it with not just gaps in the safety net, but no net at all.

Layer it all with a political climate so conservative that even the left leans right, and are only too happy to lure more voters by simplifying complex social failures into narratives of bad people making bad choices.

Decades into doing nothing right around addressing homelessness effectively, a growing number of people on our streets have essentially been deemed too difficult to bother with. I heard from someone who works in supportive housing that there are hundreds of such people in Victoria. They end up banned from everywhere, even “low barrier” places that they totally rely on for meals, bathrooms and a shower. They’re more or less stranded on the street; wary housing providers don’t want them as tenants, because the providers know they don’t get enough support hours to meet these people’s high levels of need.

Those needs can only increase as this group is singled out for enforcement and discrimination. They end up living in a permanently criminalized state – tents constantly searched, possessions seized, money taken without recourse if police decide that it must be from selling drugs. They sleep in stretches of two hours or less before a security guard or police rouse them and tell them to move along – to anywhere, to nowhere, just not here. Fight back and you’re a target for more harassment. The lucky ones might get a mat on a floor somewhere inside a shelter for a night, but they’ll have to be gone by 6 a.m. and line up for two hours or more that night to try for one.

Our modern society deems that this group can be spoken to roughly – in fact, MUST be, because to do otherwise is just “encouraging them.”  They can be treated disrespectfully. Called terrible names on social media platforms. Barred from fast-food restaurants just because of how they look. Denied use of restrooms. Filmed in the worst moments of their life with no consent. Discriminated against in the hospital emergency room.

Imagine for a minute if this was the situation for, say, Italians. Gay men. People with a limp. Israelis. Fill in the group of your choice, and consider how up in arms we’d all be to think of this identifiable group being singled out in our just, rights-based society for such hatred and discrimination. Intolerable.

But if a person is homeless, it’s open season.

Now maybe you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, hang on just a minute, most of these people are criminals because they’re using illegal drugs, and our society is certainly within its rights to make life difficult for people who are breaking the law. This is the same argument that ICE uses – “we’re only chasing down the sketchy immigrants who might be up to something, not the law-abiding ones.”

In this world view, it’s perfectly defensible to punish and harass people clinging to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, because they’re using illegal drugs. If they don’t want to be treated like sub-humans, then they can give up drugs, the logic goes. (Of course, they would still be homeless, but let’s keep the focus on the drugs, shall we?)

So many of us use drugs, though, legal and illegal. There’s absolutely no logic to why some drugs are legal and some aren’t in Canada, and certainly no logic to how someone can sit with Beer No. 4 in their hand going on about “drug addicts.”

Personally, I think we just want to be able to discriminate against people living impoverished on our streets. The fact of the drug use is a handy cover for selling that approach to a public who might otherwise be more reluctant to openly hate people just for being poor, sick and sad.

Lots of us hate that poor people exist. Some turn that hatred toward doing something about it. Others turn it toward sending the uniforms out to crank up the pressure and see if we can’t just make people magically disappear, or at least sicken them with sheer neglect and let their deaths pass without mention.

It’s sad as hell to see which way our government has chosen.  

Sometimes using drugs makes sense

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism.

I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction.

For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened.

Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The coping mechanism she’d unconsciously developed helped her manage through unmanageable times.

But in adulthood, this tool that she’d relied on since she was a toddler started to become a problem. She was no longer living a life of abuse, but she still reacted to high-stress situations by falling back on that old coping mechanism. And things often went badly as a result.

Her “switching” wasn’t a conscious act, so sometimes the full-grown woman with years of work experience was gone and a helpless child was in her place, with not a clue how to do the job. Or an angry, drunk customer would throw hot coffee at her, and the hothead personality who existed to punch first and ask questions later would emerge and deck the customer.

Over time, this beautiful coping mechanism that had seen her through terrible years began to interfere with her ability to work. It affected her friendships and relationships. She self-isolated out of fear that anyone who learned the truth about her would reject her. Her dissociating left her highly vulnerable to all kinds of dangers; more than once, she woke up in strange places far from home, with no clue as to how she got there.

She owed her life to her ability to “switch.” But in a changed situation, it had become the thing that was causing her the most harm.

Consider substance use disorder through a similar lens. 

Technically, it’s also a mental illness, presuming that someone’s substance use meets at least three of the 11 criteria laid out in the DSM-V psychiatric manual. In fact, people whose primary “mental illness” is a substance use disorder now account for a quarter of the 30,000 cases a year in BC of people detained and treated against their will under the Mental Health Act.

But is it a mental illness? I’ve been spending a lot of time these past few months talking with people living homeless in our region, and the drug use I’ve seen looks very much like a coping mechanism to me. A sane response to an insane situation.

Who among us could live the dystopian life of a modern homeless person in an affluent society for more than a few days without turning to drugs as a way to check out of the misery? Not to mention all the misery suffered in the runup to homeless. Painful childhoods, histories of abuse, intergenerational trauma, brain injury, disability - off you go into a life of being constantly hated on, and these days hunted multiple times a day by bylaw officers intent on taking all your possessions away. 

If all that and more are going on in your life, drugs that take it all away for a bit make total sense.

Like my friend’s unconscious dissociating, however, what starts out as a useful tool to soothe a savaged soul can end up being your most obvious problem.

Using street drugs at a level that lets you check out of your life is definitely not compatible with jumping through the hoops that await anyone trying to get off the streets, for instance. It also makes the neighbours very unhappy, to the point that they’re soon supporting political initiatives to round everybody up and force them into substance treatment. 

The toxic chemical soup that's now the illicit drug supply adds a whole other layer of misery, bringing death, nerve damage and chronic infection. Soon enough, the only thing anyone is talking about is the need to force people to stop their drug use, like that's the only problem.

That’s how it was for my friend, too. She was poked, prodded and counseled by so many psychiatrists, all of them focused on eliminating her coping mechanism, as if all would instantly be well if she just quit using that tool she needed so badly. 

Nobody asked to help her explore why she needed that coping mechanism in the first place, or how she was supposed to manage in some future new life if she couldn’t fall back on it at times of high stress. Nobody said hey, girl, hurray to you for discovering a coping mechanism that kept you going through some really heavy stuff, but now let’s go find some new tools that won’t get in your way quite so much.

She had to do all that work on her own. (And she did.) It took many years, and many retreats back to the old ways before she was fully ready for a different way of doing things. 

These days, she’s still got a few of her people on hand if needed, but she’s got a whole range of new coping skills, too. She can still dissociate, but it’s no longer the only coping mechanism she has.

In theory, there’s a lot more services and systems to manage harmful substance use than there was for my friend and her Dissociative Identity Disorder, and a lot more people who do understand substance use as a coping mechanism. 

But there’s also a big chunk of the public – the ones with the biggest influence on government thinking, it appears – who believe that if people just didn’t use illicit drugs, there would be no crisis on our streets. They are easily swayed by political rhetoric that maintains that falsity, and messaging that blames, shames and criminalizes substance users for “choosing” to use unregulated substances.

Between the general lack of understanding and the deliberate political posturing, we’re in quite a state.

We’re stressing out about the drugs, but not about the underlying reasons for using them. We’re fixating and fighting over substances as if all the answers lie there, even while the crisis on our streets intensifies and the harmful shaming of people just trying to get through a hard day rages on. 

People living homeless have a lot of stuff to cope with. They use substances to cope. Whatever “treatment” there will be for that, it starts with the stuff underneath.

Half a millenium is long enough to know that what you're doing isn't working

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving.

Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times.

Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for.

“The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse. The “involuntary unemployed” and “the helpless” qualified as deserving poor and could get some aid, albeit with a ton of strings attached.

Sound familiar? Almost half a millennium later, that basically describes our current anti-poverty approach. And as anyone with eyes may have noticed at this point, it’s not working so well.

We have many more fancily named bins to divide people into these days, and many streams of funding that make it look like lots of innovative new approaches are going on. But getting virtually any social support still largely comes down to whether the gatekeeper decides that the person at the gate is deserving.

You can imagine how well this system works for, say, a poor person who is actively using drugs. They’re the ultimate “undeserving,” what with drug use while visibly poor being a seemingly widely accepted signal that a person isn’t trying hard enough.

But in these modern times of scarcity, even “the helpless” can’t depend on qualifying for much support, and certainly the “involuntary unemployed” are having to fight for it nowadays. I’ve been out there a lot in the last couple of months for an Instagram project I’m doing, and it’s stunning to see just how many categories of people are being abandoned under the 2025 version of English Poor Laws.

Not so long ago, you’d never see people with intellectual disabilities - or freshly amputated limbs, or people released post-surgery from hospital an hour ago, or jail  – living homeless. You wouldn’t expect to find people in acute mental distress, being held involuntarily under the Mental Health Act in order to force them to take their psychiatric medication, yet still left to live homeless.

But none of those populations are even rarities out there anymore.

The deserving/undeserving framework encompasses the surprisingly common view that the only reason people live homeless is because they’re just too lazy to get jobs and a proper place to live. (Seriously, take a slow and observant walk down 900-block Pandora and then tell me if that’s still your opinion.)

This flawed belief fuels the modern city’s primary weapon for battling homelessness: a set of bylaws dictating where, when and how impoverished citizens will be prohibited from "loitering," "congregating," or all those other words for gathering that are applied only to people who look visibly poor, and that permit the state-sanctioned theft and disposal of homeless people's possessions.

Cities then use those bylaws, and millions in enforcement dollars, to chase people around town like pigeons being shooed away to a new roost somewhere out of sight. Alas, there is never anywhere to go but to some other street. Yet consecutive versions of city councils keep trying, as if there’s a magical pit that the "undeserving poor" will eventually fall into if chased for long enough.

Everyone has their opinions on how we’ve gotten to this point, with almost 1,800 people living homeless just in Greater Victoria, and 60,000 across Canada. 

But enough with the opinions. We are here now. There is a growing problem on our streets that serves nobody. It’s overlayered with a street-drug crisis of the likes we have never seen, fed by an ever-changing and toxic chemical soup that now makes up the street supply - and that continues to flow no matter how many weird ways politicians come up with to fight the unwinnable "war on drugs."

Meanwhile, business owners in the hot zones grapple with weird new challenges with no easy answers. I was in Wildfire Bakery the other day when a man clearly in some kind of altered state raged into the bakery, snatched food off the counter, and was gone. Or Allied Glass in Rock Bay, targeted repeatedly for vandalism by someone whose own altered state is telling him the business means harm.

I honestly wonder if we can even get back from this.

And yet here we are, still sticking with a shame-based approach put in place by British royalty facing a famine 500 years ago. How’s that working for us?

Rising intimate partner violence rates are just one of the many canaries in our coal mine

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done. 

The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014.

It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years.

What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface.

But the rising stress of daily life on Planet Earth can’t be ignored. Trend lines tied to family well-being on so many fronts are headed in the wrong direction. Yet our country lacks even the most basic of plans for dealing with the multitude of issues feeding into our growing social crisis.

It isn’t just intimate partner violence that’s increasing. Police-reported violence against children and youth in Canada has hit historic highs, having risen 32 per cent since 2018.

Financial worries are increasing: 42 per cent of Canadians in a recent FP Canada survey say money is their top source of stress. The housing crisis rages on, with two-thirds of Canadians reporting they’re unable to comfortably afford a monthly mortgage payment of more than $1,700 a month even while the mortgage payment for an average-priced Vancouver condo is almost three times that much.

Business insolvencies are on the rise after their own brief dip in the road came to an end in 2020. The unemployment rate is the highest it has been in a decade. Poverty rates are rising, as are stress levels; almost a third of Canadians ages 35-49 report feeling very stressed every day.

Families with children are under even greater stress, as are their children. More than a quarter of the cohort of young Canadians followed in a national study tracking mental health perceptions reported in 2023 that their mental health wasn’t good, which was twice as many as four years earlier during the first wave of the study.

School absentee rates are up, with some Canadian school districts reporting as many as two-thirds of elementary-age students absent at least 10 per cent of the time.

All of those trends are known to have an impact on the incidence of family violence. Stressors like household finances, job insecurity and poor mental health are known risk factors for increased violence within families.

Life pressures are mounting in all directions. A rise in family violence is too often the result.

Family violence causes harm long after the act is done and gone, both to the person experiencing the abuse and to any children in the home who see it happen.

The direct victims of an act of violence are at major risk of brain injury if the abuse involved impacts to the head, shaking, or strangulation. At least 65 per cent of victims of intimate partner violence end up with a brain injury.

A child who witnessed the violence may have their own health and economic opportunities negatively affected long into adulthood, or end up with a brain injury themselves if they’re also targeted for abuse. So many people living with a brain injury from abuse won’t even know they have one, even as it complicates their health, relationships, parenting, and ability to function at work.

We have talked for decades in Canada about the urgency of ending intimate partner violence. But reducing family violence can’t be achieved in isolation from work that strengthens Canada’s social safety net and supports a strong, equitable economy.

On that front, the trend lines are equally alarming. The gap between Canada’s richest and poorest citizens hit a historic high earlier this year. The top 20 per cent of wealthiest Canadians now accounts for two-thirds of our country’s total net worth, while the bottom 40 per cent accounts for just 3.3 per cent.

The rise in intimate partner violence is a red flag across multiple indicators of social health. We are not doing well. Worse, we have no actionable plan for doing better.

We have been winging it for far too long. With so many social indicators going in the wrong direction, the question that hangs over all of us is how much worse we’re prepared to let it get.

The cruel, pointless belief that we can address a social crisis with enforcement

Scrambling to pack up as bylaw gets ready to close in

In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement.

The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle.

I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by one young fellow out there I spoke with, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here know their rights. That doesn't leave people with enough courage to stand up to police or bylaw."

The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays the groundwork with a number of sections prohibiting people from being on sidewalks, medians and boulevards in the downtown area between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. (Of course, people with money sipping a latte or having a hearty meal at a sidewalk cafe are exempted.)

Section 102 (1):

- A person must not place, or cause or permit to be placed or left, any of the following items so as to occupy, obstruct, or cause a nuisance on any part of a street, sidewalk or other public place: 

(i) any property or thing, or

(ii) a sign, as defined in the Sign Bylaw.

- A person must not place or cause or permit to be placed on, above or in a street, sidewalk, or other public place waste matter of any description, including without limitation, litter, rubbish, garbage, offal, filth, or any noxious, offensive or unwholesome substance or matter;

102 (3)

The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a bylaw officer, or a police officer, may remove, seize, and impound or cause the removal, seizure or impoundment of any property or thing that unlawfully occupies, or has been unlawfully placed or left in, a street, sidewalk or public place, and such item will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw

103 (1)

Without limiting the generality of section 101, a person must not obstruct a sidewalk by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. of the same day if the sidewalk is located at any of the following locations: (a) (b) (2) in the area that is bounded by Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets; abutting or adjacent to those parts of Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets that form the boundary of the area referred to in paragraph (a).

103A 

(2) A person must not place, construct, erect or cause or permit to be placed, constructed or erected any structure, tent, object or thing that encroaches on, obstructs, or otherwise occupies a boulevard or median without first obtaining written permission from the Director of Engineering.

(4) The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a Bylaw Officer, or a member of a police force, on behalf of the City may cause the removal, detention or impounding of any structure, tent, object or thing found on a boulevard or median in contravention of this section, and the portable sign will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw.

(5) Between sunset of one day and sunrise on the next day, a person must not: (a)  (b) occupy a median by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it;  stand or walk on a median except while lawfully crossing a street.

So that's the bylaw that provides the foundation for enforcement. In 2023, the City brought in the Property in Custody Bylaw, which is the one that gives power to bylaw officers to seize people's goods if they're found anywhere in the no-go zones and hours defined by the Streets and Traffic bylaw.

In theory, seized goods that aren't deemed "rubbish" are to be held for 14 days (it used to be 30 days) in a mysterious location that the City won't disclose. Word on the street is that between the difficulty of the process to get something back, the lack of a proper chain of custody, and the distance that a person without a car is expected to travel to get their goods back from wherever they're held essentially means nobody gets anything back. 

Here's what is required to get something back. Please take a walk down 900-block Pandora and try to imagine who among the sad, sick people stranded out there could make this happen:

Claiming and Disposal of Retained Property

5 (1) (2) (3) (4) Within 14 days of the date of removal, seizure or impounding, owners of retained property may attend at the property return facility to claim and request the return of the retained property, after which the City will endeavor to return the retained property within 48 hours.

Any retained property that is not claimed pursuant to subsection (1) may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person. Permanent disposal of unclaimed retained property may be made to a landfill, recycling facility, or other waste disposal facility or, with the permission of the Director, to a registered charity. Notwithstanding subsection (1), the Director may provide any retained property to the police if they believe that such property may be stolen, may have been used in commission of a crime, or may be misplaced or lost.

6    (1) (2) (3) (4) For each removal, seizure or impounding of any property or thing under a City bylaw, the owner of that property or thing must pay the fee prescribed in Schedule A to the City.  Retained property which has been seized shall not be released without payment of the applicable fee. 

(The fee is waived for a first seizure in any given year, $50 for a second, $100 for a third.)

Notwithstanding subsections (1) and (2), no fee is payable for return of retained property to a person experiencing homelessness where in the opinion of the Director (of bylaw services, or authorized delegate) such item is a life-supporting item such as a tent, sleeping bag, medication, medical device, cell phone, personal identification, or waterproof or winter apparel.  

6 (5) 6 Persons claiming retained property must, as a condition of claiming such property, execute a compliance agreement in a form prescribed by the Director stating that the claiming party will not repeat the unlawful behaviour.

7 - Nothing in this Bylaw shall be construed to impose a private law duty of care on any City employee, agent of the City, or police officer with regard to the removal, seizure, impounding, return, disposal or donation of any property or thing pursuant to this Bylaw or any related statutory authority. No Liability 8 No City employee, agent of the City, or police officer shall be liable to any person or entity for the application of this Bylaw.

Perhaps more importantly than any of that, the definition of rubbish under the bylaw is so broad that it's likely most of the 10 tonnes (!) of stuff being seized every week by the city is immediately garbaged. Whether the person who actually owns it thinks that it's rubbish - well, that makes no difference. It's totally the bylaw officer's decision. 

4) Any property or thing that is removed, seized, or impounded may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person if it is rubbish, hazardous material, or a bulky item.

Definition of rubbish:

includes any item that, in the opinion of a City employee: appears to be of no resale value, or negligible resale value, is damaged or soiled to the extent that it appears it cannot reasonably be used for its intended purpose, was manufactured for single use, appears to contain an unidentifiable, noxious, or hazardous substance,  is perishable,  was manufactured for the purpose of packaging a product or thing, including food or beverage, or was part of a cart, bicycle, machine, or other similar item, including wiring and other small parts;

Definition of bulky item: 

includes large, heavy, unwieldy or irregularly shaped items, such as furniture, sheet plywood, lumber, heaters, fencing, structures, and includes a shelter, unless such shelter is lawfully temporarily placed, secured, erected, used or maintained by a person experiencing homelessness in accordance with Parks Regulation Bylaw;

Now let's say you're not one of those people who cares much for human rights for people living homeless, and you just want your damn streets to not look like such a mess. I do get that, because the truth of the current situation is that it's a lose-lose for all of us. 

But here's the rub: Enforcement only works if there's someplace for people to go. If you want to force people from building messy structures and keeping all their worldly possessions with them on the sidewalks of our downtown, then there needs to be some other place where they can relocate. 

I'm definitely seeing people relocating to try to escape the seizures, which are killing them (sometimes literally - I heard tell of a fellow who died of an asthma attack after he couldn't get into his taped-off tent to get his inhaler). But they're just relocating to other people's neighbourhoods. It's not like there's some magical housing where they can all disappear into if we just keep chasing them hard enough. 

So yeah, the seizures are cruel, almost certainly illegal if tested in a court of law, and completely pointless to boot. If the baton-carrying bylaw teams in their anti-stab vests are ever successful in clearing out the downtown core, that just means that pockets of visible homelessness are building up elsewhere. How is that a win for anyone?

What to do about it? It's absolutely essential to identify someplace where it's OK to be homeless. That doesn't mean accepting homelessness; a wealthy country like ours should never do that. But there is just nothing to be gained by this cruel and pointless pursuit of people who are barely surviving and now having to endure the added misery of running from bylaw twice a day, and the government-sanctioned theft of their possessions.

Some of the people living on our streets have been outside for years. It's going to take a lot more services, support and housing than we currently have to address the complexities of their highly individual situations. 

But there is no question that there is nowhere near enough low-income housing for the people who need it. If we don't want homelessness in the downtown core, OK, that can be arranged. But not without designating some other area where people without housing can exist in peace.

Shoving a few of them into "supportive housing" for a few weeks under prison-style rules won't do it. Nor will this insubstantial pipe dream of involuntary treatment, which not only lacks any kind of evidence base but has no plan that I'm aware of for housing people post-treatment, or the massive expansion in social supports that would be needed to ensure all the disabilities and traumas underneath people's substance use are addressed as part of their treatment. (And if we were actually committed to creating such a system, why wouldn't we just make it voluntary?)

Surely no one still believes that homelessness is a problem of wilful people determined to live "free and easy" on the street so they don't have to work for a living. If anyone still thinks that, I'd invite them to come walking with me one day and meet some of the people who are stuck out there. They break my heart with their stories of trying so hard, in many cases since they were children.

Or maybe just wait until a day not far down the line when bylaw chases people into your neighbourhood. Then you can ask them yourself. 

Word volley on the social crisis from the local newspaper, in order

Wal_172619 Pixabay

If words in a newspaper could solve the social crisis on our streets, we'd be on our way with the back-and-forths that have been happening in the Victoria Times Colonist since a Sept. 24 column by Les Leyne kicked things off. 

But things have gotten confusing on Facebook what with the ridiculous fight between Meta and the Canadian government that has left us unable to share newspaper links in Canada. So here's all four parts of the back-and-forth laid out in order - Les's piece, then my response, then a comment piece by retired nurse Barbara Wiggins, then my response to that.

Hope this helps for those trying to follow all of this. And while there are some differences in opinion throughout, it's really heartening to see the TC devoting all these column inches to this issue.

Les Leyne column in the Sept. 24 Times Colonist that started things off:

B.C. has slid into an attitude of “endless accommodation” of antisocial behaviour by desperately ill people on downtown streets, says the man at the epicentre of the epicentre of Victoria’s downtown decay.

Julian Daly, CEO of Our Place, the agency most directly involved in the drug-infused mental-health crisis most obvious on Pandora Avenue, told municipal leaders at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention that the balance between compassion and enforcing expectations has been lost.

The ongoing “what to do” debate has flattened into an overly simple artificial choice between compassion and enforcement, he said, but both elements and a lot more are needed to make a difference.

One camp, which the B.C. government endorsed for years, focuses on empathizing with drug addicts. It stresses that addiction is a health problem, not a choice, and concentrates on the sufferers.

On the other side are people suffering the consequences of the disintegration of social order and losing patience.

But reducing it to that choice is a mistake, said Daly, who has spent his career caring for the marginalized.

“We’ve slid into what sometimes feels like endless accommodation of behaviours on our streets that … frighten people and make them feel unsafe, including other homeless people.

“In our desire to be compassionate, we have sometimes lost the balance for accountability.

“When ‘anything goes,’ it really does.”

Our Place is the largest provider of free meals on Vancouver Island, but Daly said “many people who desperately need our food … are simply too frightened to come into our building … because of what’s happening outside.”

Meanwhile, the charitable donations the organization relies on are dropping because of disgust at the situation outside their doors.

“Long-time generous donors have told me bluntly they’re no longer giving because they associate us with the disorder … They believe wrongly that we are somehow responsible …”

Daly said that while the desperately ill are being demonized by some, the compassion-first stand is also problematic.

The NDP’s disastrous decriminalization effort, which disintegrated as an official policy within months, was well-intentioned, Daly said, but had unintended consequences.

It gave people permission to use drugs openly and took away police leverage to discourage drug abuse.

“What was once hidden is now everywhere at the same time.”

The firmly established catch-and-release process in the judicial system has reduced police morale, Daly said.

Police want to maintain order, but when the legal system doesn’t impose consequences for criminal behaviour, they shy away from enforcement, and there is no fear of repercussion on the street.

“It may sound harsh to say, but sometimes well-meaning interventions can end up feeding the problem.”

Once-shocking scenes of misbehaviour have been normalized now and are a routine part of city life, Daly said.

People just walk on by, which fosters complacency.

The government spent millions buying motels for homeless people, and housed 800 of them in the region in recent years. But many of those still on the street today were in safe housing. They lost it because of their continued addiction and mental-health problems, he said.

An all-encompassing strategy of housing, treatment, recovery and enforcement is needed.

He said involuntary care is controversial, but has to be part of the solution. Leaving someone to die on the sidewalk — with their liberty intact — “is not compassion, it’s abandonment.”

“Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is intervene.”

After years of dithering, the NDP government took the first tentative steps toward secure involuntary care last year. It was telling that they had to hire an outside special advisor — psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Vigo — to chart the rationale for doing so.

Daly said the New Roads recovery programs are showing real results.

He urged more targeted enforcement by police. Not to criminalize addiction or poverty, but to attack predators within the street population who exploit homeless victims.

“Enforcement used wisely is not the enemy of compassion. It is a tool of protection.”

He also stressed the need for prevention, by way of immediate interventions before the cycle gets entrenched.

That means stepping in “when the first tent goes up” in order to start solving the crisis instead of just managing it.

It feels like the province has adjusted its stance over the past year or so, partly in the general direction that Daly advocates.

But the government drifted a long way from the balance he stressed is needed before the course correction came.


My response to Les Leyne’s column, which ran as a comment piece Sept. 27:

Everything about Les Leyne’s Sept 24 column filled me with rage, most especially Our Place CEO Julian Daly’s stunning misrepresentation of problems at the core of this social crisis burning in the hearts of our communities.

To take the tragic situation that is happening on our streets and blame it on our “anything goes” attitude and “endless accommodation” – I don’t even have words for the fury that evokes in me after decades of observing how this four-alarm social crisis came to be. We simply must quit listening to people speaking from the comfort of their nice, non-impoverished lives and get a grip on this tragic humanitarian crisis from the point of view of the people living it.

Medical triaging treats the sickest people first. Social triaging works in the opposite way – you must prove yourself to be sufficiently ready, worthy and stable enough to get help like housing and treatment. What that approach has created is a situation where the absolute sickest people are the ones left without care.

Imagine if cancer patients had to prove themselves “ready” to qualify for support. Still smoking? Not eating enough greens? Overweight? No care for you. Unable to fill out dozens of forms that you don’t even know exist while maintaining a polite, pro-social façade despite being racked with pain and anguish? Back of the line, buddy.

As if. But that’s what we’ve done here. We set up rules that only the healthiest of a sick population can possibly achieve, and blame the ones left behind for not trying hard enough. We dangle the promise of housing like a carrot to be had if someone can sufficiently demonstrate that they’re worthy of it. We tear apart encampments as if we expect the people living in them will vanish.

This is the criminalization of poverty and disability. We are sectioning people under the Mental Health Act as risks to themselves or others and then sending them, still sectioned, into the community to live homeless. We are walking all over people’s human rights, every single damn day.

This is not “endless accommodation” – this is brutal, socially sanctioned neglect of extremely ill human beings, who are viewed with something far from compassion.

None of this is about drugs. Any of us would be using drugs if left in this situation. The drugs are the top layer on people’s multi-layered problems, but they’re the symptom, not the cause.

Why does this deepening social crisis never respond to any of our actions? Think about that. They’re the wrong actions. The sickest people are being shut out of support. That’s not “endless accommodation,” that’s just stupid, inhumane policy that leaves the very visible flames of a four-alarm social crisis to burn unattended on our streets.


Next, retired nurse Barbara Wiggins responds to my piece with her own comment Oct. 9. She has a degree in health ­informatics from the University of Victoria:

I am pleased to see several letters and opinions recently on our urban crisis of addictions and social disorder.

It is worthwhile to revisit the theories that our policies are based on and determine if ­evidence supports those ­theories.

With any social policy, ­evaluating our efforts and ­determining whether we are making a difference, whether we could do better and whether our policies are creating new problems is imperative.

Jody Paterson wrote an impassioned commentary from which I inferred she believes that compassion is the ultimate guiding principle.

I believe that she and many others employed in this sector are both sincere and committed to their noble cause.

But there is a key element to her argument that needs to be examined.

She contends that in medical triage, the sickest are treated first, whereas in social triage, they are treated last. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Medical triage was established as a means of streaming the injured into similar groups in a mass-casualty event.

The first group is the walking wounded and those whose treatment can safely be delayed. Their treatment is delayed.

The second group is those who need immediate, usually intensive, intervention to survive. This group receives priority care.

The third group is those who are terminal — either dead on arrival, or whose condition is so dire that death is inevitable. This group gets little or no intensive treatment, as the efforts to revive them will be futile, and comfort measures may be the best that can be offered.

Furthermore, the efforts of caregivers are better spent on those outcomes that can be improved by medical interventions. This system, far from being heartless, is born of both compassion and logic.

I am not advocating a harsh “let them fend for themselves” approach.

But I will support the notion that some individuals are in the unfortunate overlap of brain injury, addiction, mental health disorders and criminality, who are not only not benefiting from our social programs, but who make it more difficult to provide effective service and care to those who have a chance of being helped.

Also, some of these individuals may victimize those clients for whom the programs were created.

Unfortunately, there is so little hard data or program evaluation to guide decision-makers one way or the other.

But it has become clear that we have an unmanageable, expensive, inefficient, illogical, heartless mishmash of programs.

Can we at least agree that the state of unresolved addiction is a hell we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy?

If we can agree on that, then perhaps we could all get off our ideological soapboxes and start planning and funding programs based on the likelihood of success in helping people transition back to a non-addicted life, where it is possible to have a healthy life with healthy social connections.

And we provide compassionate care to those for whom recovery is no longer part of their care plan, as long as their programs don’t increase the risk of harm to others.

And, for those who perpetually victimize the most vulnerable, we need to have the courage to incarcerate them using the prison system.

If this smacks of heartlessness, it is anything but.

Out here in the homes and neighbourhoods, we live with and witness the damage done by the addiction/social disorder crisis.

We witness our children, the children of our friends and the friends of our children fall victim to this mass casualty event. We see that not all approaches work for all people and that some are lost despite massive attempts to help.

We have a vested interest in this problem that goes way beyond our role as taxpayers. We have skin in this game.

One definition of madness is to endlessly repeat the same action and expect a different outcome. It is time for a fresh perspective.


And my Oct. 16 response to Barbara Wiggins'  piece. Last in the series, so far....:

Thank you to Barbara Wiggins for her informed commentary on Oct. 9, which clarified that medical triage actually has three groupings: Help these ones right away; these ones can wait a bit but must be prioritized for care; and the group that is essentially the walking dead, who need medical help the least because there’s no chance they’ll make it.

The social triage is similar but different: Easiest to help so pick them first; these ones next because at least they’ve got an advocate; and the final group, essentially the “dead man walking” group noted in the medical triage description. The people who the system decides are not worth helping.

But while this group takes care of itself neatly in the medical world — they just die — that’s not how it goes with social crisis.

The people deemed “hopeless” don’t die, they end up living hard, sick, poor, ­incredibly stigmatized lives in ways that are not only cruel, wrong and expensive, but that annoy the hell out of the neighbours, ­business owners, city councils and every colour of government.

Wiggins rightly points out that the hopeless group at least get comfort in medical triage. In the social triage, this group is treated as harshly as possible.

They live in dystopian ­conditions — chased from place to place, personal items freely taken from them, rounded up for forced injections and then released to the street.

A young man is shuffling his feet ­endlessly on Pandora right now, affected by a major side-effect of the psychiatric drug he has to be on and is helpless to ­challenge. More importantly, the people we’re talking about are only looked at as hopeless cases because they’ve been left for years without the support they need.

In medical triage terms, a lot of them would have been in the “priority care” group once, born into challenges and with ­disabilities, but they were left in line so long that now they’ve come to be thought of as beyond help.

They’re definitely not. But they also don’t fit in our boxes. We keep pushing them in and they keep falling back out.

That’s not an unsolvable ­problem. But it is if you continue to view the problem from the perspective of the people ­wanting it gone, not living it.

Can we be (Instagram) friends?

 

Bylaw sweep is on in Victoria and this man
has to run to get to his stuff before it's gone

A communications strategist living through a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude right here in her own province spends a lot of time mulling how to shift the conversation to the advantage of all the people living the crisis. 

So I'm testing something new on Instagram, @streetstoriesvictoria. If you're familiar with Humans of New York, my little test is taking the lead from that fine feature. My aim is to be a pair of eyes out there and tell some small stories - no opinions, no casting blame, just seeing. 

I've only just begun so currently have a mere seven posts, but stick with me and I'll get those numbers up fast. After 40 years of observing all the factors that have gotten us to this tragic place, I am seeing people - the public, policy makers, most definitely the politicians - getting things so wrong on so many fronts, and I think much of that is because people have somehow convinced themselves that those living hard lives on our streets are not human beings. I want to see if I can help with that. 

I don't expect that my little stories will be the magical fix to turn that around, but the first step on righting all that's wrong is to rehumanize people. Hope you'll come on over to @streetstoriesvictoria and have a look. 

Pump up the volume on the social crisis

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Victoria Times Colonist that they ran Sept 27 as an opinion piece, which I then posted on Facebook, where it got major traction primarily among people who aren't my "followers." 

I'm saying all of that because it has led me to conclude that those of us who think like this about the social crisis burning on all of our communities' streets need to be way more out there in public spheres with our thoughts. There is more support than we might think, and governments that only ever hear from the highly active lock-em-up types need to know that. 

Let's take a leaf from the populist playbook and get loud at every opportunity. (Ideally by pointing out the reality rather than just shouting angrily at the "other side" that they're idiots, though I admit I came pretty close to doing that in this particular rant, didn't I?) I fear that some of us in this fight have concluded that it's hopeless to openly push back against the current dominant narrative around the social crisis, because nobody's listening. I think we're wrong about that. 

Here's the piece: 

Everything about Les Leyne’s Sept 24 column filled me with rage, most especially Our Place CEO Julian Daly’s stunning misrepresentation of problems at the core of this social crisis burning in the hearts of our communities.

To take the tragic situation that is happening on our streets and blame it on our “anything goes” attitude and “endless accommodation” – I don’t even have words for the fury that evokes in me after decades of observing how this four-alarm social crisis came to be. We simply must quit listening to people speaking from the comfort of their nice, non-impoverished lives and get a grip on this tragic humanitarian crisis from the point of view of the people living it.

Medical triaging treats the sickest people first. Social triaging works in the opposite way – you must prove yourself to be sufficiently ready, worthy and stable enough to get help like housing and treatment. What that approach has created is a situation where the absolute sickest people are the ones left without care.

Imagine if cancer patients had to prove themselves “ready” to qualify for support. Still smoking? Not eating enough greens? Overweight? No care for you. Unable to fill out dozens of forms that you don’t even know exist while maintaining a polite, pro-social façade despite being racked with pain and anguish? Back of the line, buddy.

As if. But that’s what we’ve done here. We set up rules that only the healthiest of a sick population can possibly achieve, and blame the ones left behind for not trying hard enough. We dangle the promise of housing like a carrot to be had if someone can sufficiently demonstrate that they’re worthy of it. We tear apart encampments as if we expect the people living in them will vanish.

This is the criminalization of poverty and disability. We are sectioning people under the Mental Health Act as risks to themselves or others and then sending them, still sectioned, into the community to live homeless. We are walking all over people’s human rights, every single damn day.

 This is not “endless accommodation” – this is brutal, socially sanctioned neglect of extremely ill human beings, who are viewed with something far from compassion.

None of this is about drugs. Any of us would be using drugs if left in this situation. The drugs are the top layer on people’s multi-layered problems, but they’re the symptom, not the cause.

Why does this deepening social crisis never respond to any of our actions? Think about that. They’re the wrong actions. The sickest people are being shut out of support. That’s not “endless accommodation,” that’s just stupid, inhumane policy that leaves the very visible flames of a four-alarm social crisis to burn unattended on our streets.

¡Basta ya!

I remember a time when I thought that online comment sections under news stories would encourage the sharing of fascinating insights and common wisdom, and that social media would be such a force for good in bringing us together in community around the world.

Who WAS that stupid woman? She’s long gone now, though I do miss her optimism. She didn’t yet know that human beings are really quite awful and unstable when grouped by the millions into dangerous tribes brimming with hate and given free licence to say the most awful things about each other.

I’ve done a lot of reading over the years to try to understand human beings. It has given me more understanding at a scholarly level, I suppose, but I’m still pretty baffled overall. We are wild animals dressed up in the thinnest veneers of civility. We achieve greatness, then we tear it all down.

The blame for our increasingly outrageous ways gets apportioned depending on your tribe, of course. It’s the alt-right. It’s the woke. It’s the trans people. It’s the gun lobby. It’s the immigrants. It’s the people who vote for idiots. It’s the people who don’t vote. It’s media. No, wait, it’s social media. It’s the intellectuals. It’s the uber-rich.

It’s all of the above and about a thousand more, each simplistic belief to be embraced or despised according to what your tribe decides is the right way to think.

And each of us in our hard-walled camps are absolutely certain that whatever our tribe says is right must be absolutely, fully right. If somebody says it isn’t, then they are clearly the enemy, and must be openly loathed. Lucky us, we can now hate freely from the safety of our own social media feeds, full of other hand-picked tribal members just like us who can reinforce that our hatred is justified, and shield us with indignant and shaming replies to anyone who tries to say otherwise.

Can’t we all just get along? Apparently not. This was the conclusion I was left with after seeing the violent life of Ugandan chimpanzees in the 2023 this-ain’t-your-momma’s-nature-doc Chimp Empire. Sure, they’re chimps, but with minimal difference between human and chimp DNA, it gave me pause. Their deeply tribal and warring natures ought to at least be a point of reflection for humans in these mad times.

More recently, I’ve been reading Robert Sapolsky’s super-sciencey tome Behave, which looks at human behaviours good and bad through a long, long lens that starts with the hormones and neuro-chemicals of the moment and goes all the way back through how the day was going, earlier life experiences, genetics, even ancient ancestral heritage. It talks a lot about which parts of the brain light up when this or that happens to us, and how those brain-level reactions can in turn shape longer-lasting changes in our behaviour.

What I saw in the findings was how very much alike we are to those chimps of Uganda. How we differ is that humans have (mostly) chosen to subdue the most anti-social of those behaviours in order to get along in a modern world that is neck-deep in law and policy requiring us to tame our wild chimpedness for the sake of civilizing principles like human rights, equity, and polite social engagement.

But when the social pact breaks down, as it certainly is right now, look out. Social media provides the means and feeds the flames, but the horrible behaviour is all ours. And it’s not just about the obvious stuff that’s clogging our news feeds and stripping away our civility, it’s more like a hate virus that’s spreading across all of us. It’s going to take us to a very dark place if we just keep piling all that hate up.

I’ve been told that podcaster Joe Rogan has talked about being similarly affected as I was by Chimp Empire. I felt non-plussed initially after hearing that, but now I feel almost cheered by it, thinking that he and I might actually have the basis for at least one enjoyable conversation together.

That’s where we’ve got to go if we’re ever going to end the hate-fest. We have to find things that we DO agree on, and talk about those things for a while. We have to get past the deep tribal lines we’re drawing around ourselves and remember that we’re a species that has to depend on each other for our survival. We don’t have to like each other, but we sure as hell have to figure out a way to co-exist.

If not, we’re headed for war. Every war throughout history starts just this way: Hatred; othering; elaborate justification for othering; lines hardening around who constitutes Us and who constitutes Them. And then comes a more frightening kind of hardening that prepares Us to do whatever it takes to get rid of Them.

I joked last week to one of my daughters that I was going to get a T-shirt made that said, “Everybody, shut the fuck up!” I wasn’t even really joking. We all think we’re on the side of right, but this much out-loud hatred can’t possibly lead anywhere good.

Whatever you believe about whatever hot-button issue has your back up these days, I ask you to consider whether you’ve ever been convinced to think differently because somebody threw hate in your face and shamed your thinking. It’s certainly never worked for me.

At the high-impact level of social media where we battle each other now, open displays of hatred are siren’s calls to those whose social veneers have worn thin. They are the drums of war. Each of us must make a conscious decision to not add to that deadly chorus, to muster every ounce of whatever makes us different from chimps and just…stop.

Take a deep breath and go engage with somebody surprising, someone you don’t usually talk with. Don’t ask them about Gaza, abortion, Trump, homelessness, trans rights, Charlie Kirk or climate change. Talk about stuff that nobody can hate – your summer vacation, your brother’s new business, your worry that your kids are never going to find jobs.

Or just stand beside them and breathe. Note that they’re breathing too. If that’s all you’ve got in common in that moment, good enough. We all just need some time to calm down.

Image: Elisa, Pixabay  

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.