Lock 'em up: Everything old is new again

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

And just like that, institutionalization is back. 

My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come. 

“This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby in a statement released yesterday in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe."

"We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said Eby. 

If it was possible to believe that a return to institutionalization would actually play out that way, maybe it wouldn't feel so damn sad to have us rolling the clock back 50 years. History tells us otherwise, however. The stories of suffering that journalists all heard in those years leading up to the closure of BC's big institutions were absolute heart-wrenchers.

The whole reason we abandoned institutionalization back in the 1980s is because it's a horrible idea that doesn't work, except as a means to shield "normal" people from realities they'd rather not have to think about. 

Like what happens to people with severe mental illness when they don't get help and support. Or, in this latest incarnation of "secure care" (aka imprisonment), the tremendous damage a product can have on its customers in a market totally controlled by the sellers/manufacturers and abandoned by the regulators.

Instead of trying to fix any of that, it appears we're just going to lock people up again so we don't have to see our policy failures in their shattered faces.

As researcher Gillian Kolla noted in The Tyee last week, B.C. is jumping to institutionalization without even trying to see how things might go if we actually had spaces in voluntary, trauma-informed, evidence-based treatment programs for all the people who are desperate for such services. Research and experiences all over the world - much of it right here in BC - have demonstrated time and again that institutionalization does not make people well, and in fact puts them at risk of even more harm.

Sure, temporary secure care might have a role in helping to manage some aspects of the social crisis unfolding in all of our communities. But it's meant to be a last resort, after all other attempts to help a person have failed. Please don't let anyone tell you that the people we're seeing spilling out onto our streets have had every social intervention provided to them already. That is so very far from the truth.

Our current social crises are in fact a result of decades of social needs gone unmet. We haven't even begun to try hard to help people with mental illness, substance disorders and brain injuries. Virtually all of the services we've got are patchwork, disorganized, uncoordinated, short-term and often unevaluated. BC doesn't even have an overarching social policy.

We have orchestrated a disaster with our indifference - and now we're going to "fix it" by finding new ways to hold people against their will? Not a chance. 

As Kolla also pointed out, BC does have the power right now to hold people against their will under the Mental Health Act. If someone is deemed a danger to themselves or others, they can be held. (And that definition includes threats and anti-social behaviour, as my uncle Joseph McCorkell found out back in the 1990s when he fought his own incarceration in the years before Riverview Psychiatric Hospital was fully phased out.)

How low will be the bar be for this new initiative? No details yet, but I'm going to take a wild guess that people who are impoverished, traumatized, unable to maintain paid work and with a lifetime of struggle and hardship will be the first ones in. Interesting as well that these new secure facilities are mostly going to be sited at prisons, not hospitals. 

To see brain injury thrown into the mix this time out just adds to the wrongness. Someone suffers a serious injury that causes behavioural changes that unravels a life, and our government decides the best course of action is to make it really hard for them to get any help, and then lock them up indefinitely when they inevitably fail to recover. 

As soon as I read that Vancouver story earlier this month about one person getting their hand severed by a stranger with a machete in a mental-health crisis and another person dying, I knew where this was going, especially mere weeks before a provincial election. 

Eby has been hinting at a return to institutionalization since 2022, when he was angling to replace John Horgan. BC Conservative leader John Rustad has made institutionalization part of his party's platform.  I suspect both will get plenty of support from the electorate for their positions, because everyone I know is sickened and fed up with the social disasters unfolding on their city streets. 

But the answer to the tragedies we're seeing in the hearts of our communities is not to lock people up. Where is the announcement of preventive measures to slow the flow of people onto our streets? Where are the services that would catch people early in their crisis? Why are we embracing the harshest "solution" first? 

I wonder if I will live long enough to be throwing out a bitter "I told you so" in 15 or 20 years when we are back to trying to undo the damage of this deeply sad return to institutionalization. People, we are making a mistake. 

BC leads pack by a long shot when it comes to Canada's missing persons

 

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

My news feeds have been bringing me so many reports of missing persons in BC recently that I finally went looking for stats this month to clarify what was going on. Was there actually more people going missing, or was I merely trapped in a bad Google algorithm?

The truth turned out to be astonishing. Not only has BC been leading by a long shot the missing-person stats in Canada for adults age 18 and up every year since 2015, when the Missing Persons Act took effect, but the number of adults reported missing in BC has grown by more than 48 per cent since then. (Our population has increased by 10.2 per cent in the same period.)

In 2022, BC police filed 14,751 missing-person reports involving adults to the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC). The province with the next-highest number of reports was Ontario, at 7,298. While various provinces have been No. 2 over the years—all with roughly the same notable gulf between BC’s numbers and theirs—BC has always come in at No. 1.

Looking at per-capita rates, BC has been a consistent leader there, too. In 2022, British Columbia had the highest number of missing-adult reports per capita, with 273 reports per 100,000 people. The next highest was Saskatchewan, with 146 reports per 100,000 people.

In fact, 42 per cent of Canada’s 33,913 adult missing-person reports in 2022 originated in BC. That number is on the rise as well, up two per cent since 2020.

Equally worrying is the growing number of adults who aren’t being found quickly, in BC and across the country.

In past years, 60 per cent of CPIC reports on missing Canadian adults were taken out of the system within 24 hours, and 90 per cent were removed within a week. But in 2022, for the first time since stats have been kept, those numbers dropped to 34 per cent removed within 24 hours, and 73 per cent within a week.

I mentioned some of the startling BC-specific stats to an acquaintance with decades of experience in high-level provincial government positions.  He said any dramatic gap between the provinces for virtually any stat almost always comes down to some reporting difference. “Nothing is ever that different from one province to another,” he said.

So I looked into that.

The stats are based on missing-persons reports filed by Canadian police departments into the CPIC database. Missing-person reports can be filed immediately (forget all those cop shows you’ve seen where people are always having to wait 24 or 48 hours before reporting a missing person), and you could certainly speculate that different departments or regions could have different cultural practices around how quickly they file a report to CPIC.

Perhaps there’s a Robert Pickton effect, too. BC police departments looked bad when the details came out about the 1990s-era serial killer, what with so many of his victims missing for years but ignored by police because they were survival sex workers living in poverty and addiction. Maybe BC police ended up being more devoted than most to filing missing-person reports from that point on.

So I tracked down media relations at the RCMP’s national communications headquarters, the spokespeople for missing-persons information, and asked them if they could help me understand why BC seemed to have so many more missing persons.

They noted “many caveats,” from not assuming that the stats are actually complete (many cases are resolved before they get to CPIC), to being very cautious when considering the 11 categories of probable cause that missing-persons cases are slotted into at the time of reporting.

“You cannot be assured that every single person categorized in each category indeed belongs there,” wrote RCMP media relations rep Robin Percival in her email to me.

They agree that the stats are almost certainly affected by “differences in reporting procedures, as well as geography, urban/rural mix, demographics, culture mix and other factors.”

But taking all that into account, I still see no way to explain away BC’s huge lead on the number of adult missing persons as just being about reporting differences. We just seem to have a whole lot more people who go missing. (Click here for the list of active missing persons investigations in BC RCMP jurisdictions.)

“BC has its own peculiar mix of factors, including an ocean,” wrote Percival, adding that many fishermen go missing. “It is also an area where people drift to and then go missing.”

On the upside, our rate of missing children seems much more in line with the rest of the country, though we’re still consistently among the top three. In 2022, we placed second behind Ontario with more than 5,500 children missing, after Manitoba managed to bring down some high missing-child numbers from years past and fell into third spot. Per capita, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have the highest rates.

Nationally, 33,394 children under age 18 went missing in 2022. Three-quarters of them were deemed “runaways,” and more than half were female.

Among Indigenous children, the percentage of missing girls is even higher. Girls account for two-thirds of the 8,300 Indigenous children reported missing last year.

Things that make you go “Hmmm…” Whatever the reason for BC to be lapping the pack when it comes to missing adults, it doesn’t feel good. Hope somebody other than a random blogger like me is taking a look at these numbers.

***

But also...I happened to be in my Google News settings recently for other reasons, and discovered that Google had singled me out for having a big interest in "missing persons" and had been sending all the stories of missing people everywhere to my news feed. So while it did turn out to be true that more people are going missing, I was also getting a tailored feed that was bringing this to my attention by feeding me way more sad news stories than a person could possibly handle on people gone missing. 

BC's decrim experiment: One giant step for governments, one really tiny step for fixing the problem

Credit: No Name 13, Pixabay

The BC government doubtlessly had to work very hard to get the OK from the federal government for a three-year test of illicit drug decriminalization. 

It's a good thing to have fought for, even if the pilot is so hamstrung with exceptions and rules that it can't help but be of minimal impact. We are so lamentably, tragically overdue to move on this problem of poisoned street drugs killing thousands of British Columbians every year that virtually any glimpse of a different future must be welcomed with enthusiasm. 

But just to be clear, the vast majority of people who use illegal drugs will not benefit from this pilot. Nor will it stop the endless tide of deaths.

That's not to say that any move toward decriminalization isn't to be treasured. But we do need to go into this teeny, temporary change in our senseless and destructive drug policies with the understanding that it's a flea on a fly compared to the complex issues that are actually driving BC's illicit-drug miseries.

The pilot will have no impact, for instance, on the disturbing reality of some 2,300 British Columbians dying year after year due to a toxic drug supply, almost all of whom are men. 

What the pilot will do is instruct police not to charge people if they find them carrying small amounts of four specific drugs, none of which can have been cut with any other drug. (Alas, anywhere from 20 per cent to more than half of BC's confiscated illicit drugs in 2022 were found to be cut with benzodiazepines, so there's a rather major stumbling block right there.)

The toxic drug crisis, on the other hand, is about illegal drugs being cut by sellers with all kinds of other stuff because it's cheaper and more readily available, and people dying because virtually nobody knows what they're getting anymore. 

Fixing that big issue is about figuring out how to ensure people know what they are purchasing and how to use a particular drug combo safely if it's that or nothing. It involves a full understanding of how drugs come into our province, and how and why they are altered once here. 

That would require consultations with the importers and the sellers, as would have happened long ago were it any other product. But an opportunity has been missed again, with sellers dismissed in the usual way as "predators" in the government's latest messaging.  

One of the most significant insights we've had into the workings of BC's bustling illicit-drug industry comes from a lone seller featured in a research paper published in the January 2021 BC Medical Journal.

"When asked about selling a bad batch of drugs and people overdosing, he said, 'If it’s a bad batch, I’ll probably still sell it because I don’t want to waste it and lose profit. That’s just the truth and the reality,'" noted the researchers who interviewed the anonymous John Doe.

A small exemption on possession charges will have no effect on the illicit-drug industry. As John Doe points out in the paper, the industry is a masterful example of unfettered capitalism that can quickly turn any disadvantage into opportunity, including the supply-chain disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nor will the pilot do much to move people toward treatment who weren't already well along on the arduous journey of wanting treatment.

Being charged with drug possession is arguably pretty low on the long list of worries for British Columbians trying to access treatment, starting with how impossible it is to find it in the first place for anyone without major resources; the reality of having to wait months for a spot while magically staying "clean"; an absence of other problems like poor mental health; and the ability to put your life on hold with no support for weeks of residential care.

Even John Doe understands that people use drugs for complex reasons that are often rooted in trauma and pain. “It would be hard to treat someone with just their addiction and not treat their mental health," he told researchers. 

Now there's the kind of guy whose insights would be useful if the day ever comes when we get serious about all of this.

I wouldn't even expect that the pilot will stop many people from being charged with possession. The small amount of drugs a person can possess under the pilot - 2.5 grams - and the requirement for those drugs to be pure, are pretty much impossible scenarios in the current drug scene. 

But as Premier David Eby rightly notes, it's vital to do something. 

“When you talk to parents who have lost a kid who thought they were taking party drugs at an event, and end up taking fentanyl and dying, you understand how serious this issue is and how it crosses partisan lines and how we all need to work on solutions,” he told CityNews last week after federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilevre called the Downtown Eastside a hell on earth and said all the usual uninformed stuff about drug use.

And if this pilot turns out to be the way to crack the door open on decriminalization overall, hurrah. Until then, it's just the smallest of stepping stones at the edge of a raging river.

We won't slow climate change with niceness

Extinction Rebellion UK says it will prioritize "relationships over roadblocks" this year and move away from public disruptions as a prime strategy for getting the world's attention on climate change. 

That's a warm and fuzzy statement for a new year. But hopefully they aren't going to get too nice. Nobody's going to solve the climate crisis with niceness. 

Of course, one does want to be strategic when in the business of disrupting. Throwing cans of soup at famous works of art - not the work of Extinction Rebellion; that was Just Stop Oil - and other poorly considered attention-grabbing antics may get your unknown organization headlines, but simply being offensive in a public space is not a strategic protest. (Put away the soup cans, go disrupt a fracking operation.) 

That said, we sure as hell won't move this crisis with niceness. Co-operative behaviour is one component of an effective change strategy, just like acts of protest, but systemic change at this grand scale cannot be achieved without anger, shouting, threats, arrests, financial loss, deaths and a lot of other not-nice things.

In the case of the climate crisis, consider the long list of potential opponents who benefit from the current system, a number of them with deep pockets for dragging this out indefinitely.

First, there's the vastly wealthy fossil-fuel corporations, which have enjoyed almost $3 billion US in daily profits for the last 50 years. Then there are the governments that are absolutely dependent on the revenue and jobs. International energy policies so friendly to industry that countries that sign on have to promise not to make energy policy changes without consulting Big Oil first. 

There are the global investors clamouring for endless returns on investment. The billions of people completely reliant on fuel to heat their homes, operate their businesses, get to work, and wage war on real and imagined enemies. The travellers, the tourists, the legions of individualists who have never had a collective thought in their life and are just fine with riding Earth into oblivion as long as they can be "free."

There are mega agricultural operations spread across mega land holdings to serve a world that eats 350 million tons of meat a year. There are more than 50,000 merchant ships criss-crossing our oceans every day just to feed our hunger for stuff. There are trade agreements in all directions that bind our governments' hands even when they're willing to do better.

Every one of those things and so much more is going to have to change if the end of this global story we're living is going to be remotely happy. We need to have so many big, brave conversations. We need big, brave leadership at all political levels - leadership that gets past the typical political urge to pander and please and treats this issue like the global emergency that it is. 

And while we can strive to be respectful in all of that, we can't expect that any of this is going to be nice. 

Extinction Rebellion says part of its decision to shift tactics is because we live in times in which protest has been criminalized. "Thriving through bridge-building is a radical act," the group says.

But really, what big change has ever come about without arrests and conflict with the law? In the case of global emissions, we're talking about trying to stop activities that make people so much money. They're not going down that road without a really big fight. Read sociologist Frances Fox Piven's eye-opening Poor People's Movements for more on that.

While it's certainly important to get your allies in order and build those relationships, there still has to be disruption in a crisis this big. If XR wants to play nicer, then somebody else needs to step up to be the disruptor. Climate change is a disruptor itself, and those of us who want better for our world are going to have to meet its chaos head-on.

Change this big will be very painful for those who benefit from the current system. That can't be sugar-coated. 

For the sake of future generations, let's just go straight to being tough and skip the part where we all think we can settle this like friends. That's just going to drag out the bloody ending that's coming one way or the other. 

Drugs don't kill people, poisoned drugs do

BC's crisis of poisoned street drugs is hitting men in the prime of their working years the hardest. Three-quarters of the 10,000 deaths in BC from poisoned illicit drugs since 2015 have been men ages 30-59.

As this fact-filled story in The Tyee today highlights, one in five of them was working in the trades or transportation when they died. But while this information matters, it's not where we're going to find solutions for BC's poisoned street drugs. 

There are many reasons for why tradespeople are dying from using drugs, as the piece explains. The manly-man culture of the trades, the chronic pain of injury, crazy shifts, intense working conditions, long stints isolated in work camps, reluctance to reach out for help and risk looking "weak."

But BC is a resource province, and we've had manly men working in pain, isolation and wild working conditions throughout our history. They have used drugs to numb all that - or as a reward at the end of a hard day -  for as long as rough jobs have existed. Those of us who grew up with our eyes open in any BC resource town can attest to that.

Admittedly, such men have probably been dying at a much higher rate than the rest of for all this time; we just didn't think to measure those deaths in relation to the type of work the dead man was doing at the time. But they weren't dying like they're dying now.

So what's different this time? The drugs. They're poisoned. How and why they have ended up poisoned is a story I'm still waiting to read, but it seems pretty obvious that we won't slow this crisis until we figure it out. 

The standard how-why responses for illicit drugs having become so toxic tend to focus on suppliers using cheaper substances to increase profits. Street drugs are being cut with fentanyl, benzodiazipines and other weird and deadly stuff because it allows a much greater profit for the supplier and seller.

But cutting drugs with weird stuff to increase profits is also a time-honoured tradition in BC. The crisis in toxic drug deaths that we're seeing now is very specific to the last 10 years, and strangely specific to BC. 

The United States has its own drug crisis going on with opioid overdoses, now killing more than 1,500 Americans every week. But an overdose is not the same as poisoned drugs. The people who are dying in BC aren't dying because they used more drugs than were safe, they're dying because the drug supply is toxic.

This is an important distinction. You can't set about fixing a problem until you fully understand it, and it's important for us to let go of this wrong idea that people are dying just because they used drugs (a belief that lets us fall back on moralizing and dismiss this crisis as something that "good people" don't have to worry about). 

Were you ever a kid who gulped down street drugs without a second thought? Because I was. Happily, I grew up in the 1970s, when the drugs that a kid could access mostly weren't going to do anything worse than send you into a gas station bathroom to barf your guts out, or get you in trouble with your parents. 

Had I been a teen in today's world, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. 

The Tyee's story notes that the employers of tradespeople have a lot to answer to, from inhumane shifts and their own culture of denying anything is wrong in their industry. But understanding why tradespeople need drugs to hang in at their jobs, while important, will not solve the toxic drug crisis. That won't be solved until we no longer have a poisoned drug supply.

The judgment we feel about the use of any drug other than alcohol so quickly sends us off into pointless and meaningless conversations about why people use drugs. (We use drugs because they make us feel better.) But addressing this toxic-drug crisis has to focus on the poisoned drugs, not the users. 

Imagine for a moment that more and more infant formula coming into Canada was turning out to be poisoned, and babies were dying. 

We would not address that with a public awareness campaign about breastfeeding, would we? We would not call it a solution to distribute pharmaceuticals to new moms so they could inject their babies and stall off the effects of the poison long enough to get to the hospital. We'd just dig in to figure out why the formula was poisoned, and how we could ensure a safe supply.

Where are the big drug importers in this conversation, and what could they tell us about how those imports, or their own practices, have changed? Where are the policy makers who can put aside political qualms and posturing to act bravely in the name of saving lives? 

We are stuck, and so many people are dying. This is so wrong. 

The man who refused to kill baby bears: A win in the Court of Right Thinking

A cute bear from Pixabay to stand in 
for the cubs that Casavant saved.

Court judgments are often answering questions that the average person wouldn't possibly think to ask about the issue of the moment, like "Did the judge err in declining to consider the jurisdictional issue on judicial review?"

But here's the quick version of BC conservation officer Bryce Casavant's story: He disobeyed a direct order from his boss to kill two bear cubs and instead took them to a rehabilitation facility (they've since been released back to the wild). He got fired as a result. And now the BC Court of Appeal has overturned that firing.

It wasn't overturned for the reasons that I would have overturned it, which would have been around things like questioning why you'd fire a guy who made an informed decision that saved wildlife without harming the public. That would be the Court of Right Thinking, and we don't have one of those.

But hurrah for all the complicated legal arguments the court cited that still ended up with Casavant winning his appeal. I like a conservation officer who tries to conserve.

The story starts out pretty low-key. Casavant was working in Port Hardy back in 2015 and got a call from a resident that a mother black bear and her two cubs were rummaging through the resident's garbage.

Casavant was told by his superiors to kill all three bears because they'd been habituated to eating human food and would continue to be nuisances. The resident said she hadn't seen the cubs eating garbage, so Casavant killed the mother and took the two cubs to a veterinarian for assessment. Deemed healthy, they were transferred to a wild animal recovery centre and would be eventually released back to the wild.

Then all hell broke loose back at Casavant's workplace, and he ended up being dismissed from his conservation job and told he was now working for the Forests Ministry. "The hope is that in your new position, given the different nature of the work involved, you will not suffer from the same inability to follow instructions and policies," his superiors wrote, citing two other incidents when he didn't follow their orders.

Much conflict and union involvement later, Casavant lost a lower court case about his dismissal and took it to the BC Court of Appeal. The court battle was all based on high-faluting legal arguments that had nothing to do with sparing the lives of two perfectly healthy bear cubs, but the upshot is that Casavant won, though perhaps only because the discipline procedure was messed up.

"In my view the best that can be done in these circumstances is to declare that the proceedings before the arbitrator and Board were a nullity, to confirm that Mr. Casavant’s dismissal should have been addressed under the Police Act, Special Provincial Constable Complaint Procedure Regulation, and to leave the parties to sort out the consequences of those declarations, if any, on the settlement agreement," wrote Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon in a June 4 unanimous decision.

No doubt the questionable psychologist's report used to justify firing Casavant because he was unfit for the work played a role in the appeal court's thinking. Asked to perform a general workplace environment assessment, the psychologist "instead provided an opinion about Mr. Casavant’s suitability for his position (a report for which the psychologist was eventually sanctioned by the College of Psychologists, which found the report to be unreliable and improperly obtained)."

Conservation officers play difficult roles mediating the relationship between wildlife and the public. Complex legal arguments aside, Casavant's case highlights that officers appear to be governed in quasi-military fashion, taking their orders from someone who isn't at the scene, didn't talk to the affected residents, and perhaps isn't even trained in conservation. (Haven't we all had bosses with zero experience in the work they're now supervising?)

Is this how the BC public imagines conservation to work? Surely we want skilled conservation officers able to assess the situation in that moment and make a decision that saves wild animals whenever possible. Casavant didn't win his appeal on that argument, but the Court of Right Thinking is feeling good about this decision.

Suicide by car: On trauma, tragedy and ICBC policy

The tragic suicide by car of a 24-year-old on the Pat Bay Highway on Sunday takes me back to another similar suicide back in 2000 that I wrote about for the Times Colonist. 

There's a whole other set of victims when people kill themselves in the manner that these two young men did, 19 years apart.

Whoever is in the vehicle when a person randomly picks a moment to step into the road and be killed is almost certainly going to be haunted forever by that stranger's decision.

Here's my column on Ian Davidson's suicide on the Malahat in 2000, and a wish that ICBC does not play rough with the people involved in Sunday's tragedy like it did with the Coopsie family 19 years ago. 

***

Jody Paterson column in TC, January 2000

Davidson settled on death a long time ago. The only question was who would be the killer.

It turned out to be the Coopsie family, picked randomly from among the many travellers making their way north on the Malahat on that sunny afternoon two days after Christmas. Davidson, 25, waited beside his idling car just past the Spectacle Lake turnoff, waited until the Coopsies' truck was so close that there could only be one ending to this sad drama.

And then he jumped onto the road.

Dave Coopsie, driving to Duncan for a family dinner with his wife Dawn and their two youngest children, swerved toward oncoming traffic to avoid hitting him. But there was no room left to manoeuvre when Davidson lunged at the truck a second time. The young man died moments later, his years of suicide attempts finally over.

It took anguished minutes for the Coopsie truck to slow to a stop, anguished minutes more to walk back and try to figure out what had just happened. Dawn Coopsie cries every time she thinks of that young face pressed into their windshield, the sound of her two boys screaming at the sight of what her 10-year-old called ''the scary, scary man.'' He hasn't said a word about it since then; his mom found out only a couple of days ago that he'd been worrying that his dad was going to go to jail.

Greater Victoria Victim Services arrived soon after the accident to offer support, and the Shawnigan RCMP urged the family to consider counselling for their traumatized sons.

The Coopsies didn't have a clue who picks up the tab for the aftermath when your truck is written off by someone's suicide, when life goes sideways after an intimate involvement in a stranger's death. But they had car insurance and so did Davidson, and they figured ICBC would sort out the details.

ICBC had other plans, as it turned out. The adjuster spent all of five minutes with them the first time they met, just long enough to let them know that because they didn't have collision insurance, they'd have to pay for their towing charges and vehicle replacement themselves. Davidson wasn't actually driving his car at the time of the accident, noted the adjuster, so his insurance didn't come into play.

The insurance corporation had a bit of a change of heart a few days later after hearing from MLA Andrew Petter's office, which took up the Coopsies' cause after getting their desperate phone call. They'd get their towing fees reimbursed and a payout for their vehicle, ICBC told them, but no counselling. The adjuster wanted them to sign an agreement forfeiting their right to sue.

The family has already used up Dave Coopsie's annual health-plan allotment of six counselling sessions getting help for their boys after the suicide. They know it wasn't enough. But with five kids to raise, there isn't any money for more.

They were still trying to figure out how it is that a guy can kill himself on the hood of your car and you end up paying for the damage to your kids when ICBC had yet another change of heart late yesterday.

''There was a miscommunication between the manager and the adjuster,'' said ICBC spokeswoman Elizabeth Goldenshtein. ''The manager had advised paying for counselling, but the adjuster didn't know that. I'm going to be calling the family right now to tell them that.''

Maybe that will help counter Dawn Coopsie's impression that an adjuster's job must be to ''open and close a file as fast as possible.'' Maybe it will help a shattered family come to grips with the fact that there was nothing they could have done that day to get out of the way of a young man determined to die.

The coroner has yet to weigh in on the lonely death of Ian Davidson, whose long struggle with mental illness led him to try to kill himself several times in the past, once by jumping in front of a train. Dawn Coopsie wonders how he slipped through a system that apparently knew all about him, and her heart breaks for another suffering family whose own lives went sideways that day on the Malahat.

Victim services has sent a read-aloud booklet on suicide to the Coopsies to help them talk about it with their sons. Until 15 days ago, the boys barely knew what the word meant.

Open procurement and social care: Why that should scare you

Find me here in the Vancouver Sun writing on the scintillating issue of open procurement, and other strange happenings bombarding the community-based social services sector.

While you may think that whole sentence is unbelievably dull and referring to things you have zero interest in, I urge you to read my piece anyway. People, this stuff really matters.

For those who can't or won't click, I'm just going to paste the article right here as well. That's how easy I want it to be for you to read it. Also, I wrote this as the executive director for the Board Voice Society of BC, work I do two days a week, but I am such a believer in this issue that I would have written it even if it wasn't my job.

***

Editorial pages of Vancouver Sun
March 22, 2019
By Jody Paterson

Open procurement policies put community social-services groups at risk

I work in the non-profit community social-services sector. If your eyes glazed over when you read that, that nicely demonstrates the kind of PR problems besetting the sector now.

We’re in all your lives, though you likely don’t know us by that “community social-services” tag. We’re your daycares, your home care, your crisis line, your social housing. We’re treatment services, counselling, mom-and-tot groups, immigrant settlement, supports for people with special needs. We’re the soup-to-nuts helpful array of thousands of local services around B.C., every one of our organizations born out of the dream of passionate people who saw a need for social care and stepped up to address it.

That sounds so warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? Everyone loves us. Virtually everyone has a story about an amazing community non-profit they have known, and an expression of heartfelt respect for the vital work of the sector. “Good people,” as one B.C. politician summed it up in a recent meeting with me.

But it doesn’t feel like love is in the air right now from inside the sector.

The work is challenging at the best of times, what with it mostly funded project-by-project and for short periods, with the tightest of margins for operating. Right now, however, there are so many layers of other unexpected and negative developments adding to the mix that there’s a real life-and-death feeling to the moment.

Here’s where the PR problem comes in for our sector: Very few people even understand what we do, let alone appreciate that we’re the best ones to do it.

We were born to do it, literally. Every community non-profit’s birth story begins with motivated citizens identifying a need, then building a non-profit to address it. Every one of us is required to have an elected volunteer community board overseeing everything we do, and to reinvest every penny of profit back into our communities (that’s why they call us non-profits).

I mean, what’s not to like about that perfect community model?

And yet we’re losing ground. Two multinational corporations took 22 per cent of the money in the recent awarding of Work B.C. employment-training contracts. Last week, we woke up to news in the media that home-support services are moving back to health authorities next year — news that has left shell-shocked non-profit providers scrambling to figure out whether they can still keep the doors open once they lose those contracts.

An emerging issue is open procurement. In a nutshell, that involves government procuring more and more of its services through open bids that treats companies and not-for-profits exactly the same.

That might sound “fair.” But if you don’t build in points in the bidding process for the extras that non-profits bring to social care — community connection, services built on passion rather than profit, reinvestment back into community — the whole raison d’etre of the non-profit model counts for nothing. When you create larger service regions managed by far fewer suppliers, you create major financial risk that few community non-profits are prepared to take on.

And eventually, the global corporations moving into social care all around the world end up owning social care in B.C. as well.

Just last week, our sector learned that open procurement will be used to secure the next round of contracts for B.C.’s child-care resource and referral centres, established in 38 communities around the province to support families and child-care providers. Unless the scoring for that procurement includes points for the unique values that community-based non-profits bring to this work, these services as well could end up the work of multinationals.

Governments in Canada do have to manage procurement in accordance with international free-trade agreements. But do we actually want to view the social health of our communities as a commodity on the open market? Do we have any proof that open procurement is the best way to go about selecting who provides vital social-care services to our citizens?

There are fundamental issues at stake here. And what worries me most is that we aren’t talking about them. Change is just happening, looking a lot like surprise one-offs until you start keeping a list and realize just how many unsettling and unexpected developments are going on for B.C.’s community non-profit sector.

Some of them won’t survive — and not because their services were inferior, unnecessary or unvalued. Simply because somebody somewhere changed things up without thinking about unintended consequences on community services that really matter.

Am I whining? Is this “self-interest”? Our sector always seems to get that term thrown at us when we raise issues. Sure, we’re self-interested — who isn’t? I’ve got a big two-day-a-week job without benefits at stake here.

But just because we work in the sector doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to us. Good and important services delivered by caring people who really know their stuff are at-risk as never before. A wonderful community model for delivering social care is under serious threat, and all without a word of public consultation.

Social care should be as sustainably funded, prioritized and planned for as health and education in B.C. That’s how we achieve economic prosperity. It’s how we strengthen our communities and engage people to live their best lives. We’re as committed to the government’s dream of reducing poverty, improving child care and responding more effectively to mental health and addiction as they are.

But every day is a fight to stay alive in this sector. The new threats looming on so many fronts are a painful reminder that people still don’t grasp that our work is the foundation of community social care in B.C. Our non-profit model was created for the task. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Jody Paterson is executive director of the Board Voice Society of B.C., representing volunteer boards and senior staff of B.C. community non-profits serving the social determinants of health. The irony isn’t lost on her that March is Community Social Services Awareness Month.

Proportional Representation: One British Columbian's heartfelt, well-considered and very linked-up case for voting YES to PR

I am rooting like mad for British Columbians to vote in favour of switching our voting system to  proportional representation when the referendum gets underway Oct. 22.

But I'm nothing if not a realist, and thus quite worried that people's resistance to change - especially when it requires taking time to understand something that appears dull and technical on the surface - will doom yet another rare opportunity to reform the tired and deeply flawed way that we choose our governments.

Still, a person has to try. I want to  share with you here why I will be voting YES, in bolded capital letters and large font. If you're on the fence, I hope you'll have a read and see what resonates. If you support PR already, I hope this piece makes it easier for you to find the information you need to inform others.

All of the information you need to understand PR is available on sites like Fair Vote Canada, Elections BC and Vote PR BC, which is where I've gone for much of what I'm including here. The vote is by mail; you'll get a ballot in the mail soon (send it back completed to Elections BC by Nov. 30) with four check boxes: First, one to ascertain your vote for PR or to stick with what we have now, and then an optional choice to recommend one of three kinds of PR: Dual Member, Mixed Member, or Rural Urban. You can vote in favour of PR without choosing one of those options.

Those options are summarized nicely at those links and in the infograph I posted here. I'll be voting for Rural-Urban PR, which to me looks like the best fit for BC and its mix of dense population in a handful of areas and large rural regions. (Click here to register online as a voter or check your status.) Here's my case for supporting proportional representation, for BC and the entire country:

Whatever form of PR you choose, they all deliver a government whose makeup actually reflects how people voted. If 30 per cent vote for a particular party, that party ends up with 30 per cent of the seats. We would no longer see governments winning 40 per cent or less of seats, yet ending up with 100 per cent of the power - a common issue with the current First Past the Post system. FPTP is a "winner take all" system that gives total power to the party that wins the highest percentage of votes, even if that percentage is well below majority.

PR frequently requires that parties collaborate, concede and negotiate to achieve political goals. Elections that use a PR voting system create a legislature that people genuinely voted for. If a party doesn't win a majority on its own, it will need to build alliances across ideology. Collaboration and concession are essential in everything we do outside of politics, so why the heck would we want anything different for our political process? Try to imagine your family or workplace functioning under a "winner take all" model, and you can see the problem here. 

PR lets voters choose political representatives who share their values. Unlike our winner-take-all system, which virtually always limits us to endless swings between two dominant ideologies, PR permits voters whose beliefs do not cleave to a particular political dogma to elect people who they think will represent them well. Those people have an opportunity to build coalitions with other like-minded souls to achieve goals outside the interests of the dominant political parties.

Around the world, PR is the most common electoral system. Of the 195 countries on this map, only 64 use the "winner take all" system that we currently have. Many stable, well-managed countries have PR systems.

BC's referendum is putting forward three "made in BC" options. All will maintain strong local and regional representation, and ensure our MLAs are elected by voters, not parties. 

Between 40 and 50 per cent of eligible BC voters don't bother to vote. Doesn't that strike you as a pretty big concern? Might that not be related to people knowing that their vote doesn't actually count for anything because the causes and candidates they care about are not issues for the dominant parties? Wouldn't it be nice to vote your conscious, without fear that your vote is either meaningless or could let a party you despise win through a split vote? 

British Columbians have already done the work and recommended PR. In 2004, an independent, non-partisan group of 161 randomly selected British Columbians, the Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform, spent 10 months considering electoral reform. They conducted 50 public hearings and reviewed 1,603 submissions from fellow British Columbians. They emerged with a consensus to support a form of PR that will be on this fall's ballot, Single Transferable Vote. When a large group of random people with no axe to grind puts in a ton of effort to get completely informed on a subject and then puts forward their recommendation, I listen. 

If we vote for PR here in BC and end up hating it, we can change back to FPTP after two elections. Important to note here that no country in the world has ever reverted to winner-take-all after introducing PR. But if we want to, that option is built right into the referendum.

BC has seen two referendums already on PR, one in 2005 following on the work of the Citizens Assembly and another in 2009. 

The first vote was actually a win, with 57.7 per cent of British Columbians voting for PR. But then-premier Gordon Campbell - who was against PR but had promised a referendum if elected - had built in a poison pill requiring a "super majority": approval by 60 per cent of voters overall as well as majorities of 60 per cent in each of 79 electoral districts. All but two districts did hit that mark, but the overall vote fell short at 57.7 per cent. 

Support for PR fell in the 2009 vote, to 40 per cent. But there are a couple of important points that bear noting: First, that the Liberals redrew riding boundaries that would take effect in the event of a "yes" vote  in ways that left many voters concerned and uncertain; and second, that the voter turnout overall for the provincial election that included the referendum question was a mere 50 per cent. 

What a ballot might look like under Rural-Urban PR

What are the arguments against PR?

 Primarily, opponents fear that it creates uncertainty in governance, as majorities are a less predictable outcome. Ending up with a majority may require parties to find  common ground in order to form a coalition government. (The 2017 provincial election provides an example of that even in the FPTP system, as the three seats that the Green Party won gave them enormous power to determine whether the NDP or the Liberals would rule.)

Italy is often cited as a cautionary tale of what happens under a PR system, as the country has gone through periods in the past where voters ended up going to the polls every two years because of troubles with rickety coalitions. 

But even Italy mostly ends up with governments that last as long as any of ours do. New Zealand, another PR country, sets its election term at three years in its constitution, and has adhered to that for at least the past 68 years. As well, PR has allowed New Zealand to ensure minority Maori representation.

Opponents also raise the spectre of parties with extreme views taking over. This viewpoint largely feels like fear-mongering to me, not only because this already happens in our existing election system when extreme factions take over a dominant party (federally, Reform to Alliance to Conservative offers a recent example), but because it's a declaration that if people don't think like "us" - that being, people who support one of two dominant ideologies - they don't deserve political representation. 

To me, concern about extremism makes me even more supportive of PR, where at least everything is out in the open. Think about it: If a majority percentage of voters in your country/province would choose extreme parties, which then might join forces to form government, then you've got so much more to worry about than just which voting system you're using. At least PR lets you see dangerous shifts in thinking straight up, rather than having them sneak up on you through a once-moderate party that ends up subverted by ugly thinking.

Extremists can infiltrate any party, and corrupt any political system. We are living in the age of Donald Trump and Doug Ford, living proof. 

But people, a winner-take-all system is never going to be the cure for that. There was a time when I couldn't have imagined a political time like we're living in, but here we are, living it, suffering through it, getting up every day only to be astounded one more time at what the headlines bring, and how quickly a country can drift into Lord of the Flies territory. 

We are seeing the rule of men whose sole skill is to get elected. They not only don't know how to govern, they've got no intention of even trying. Their "moral compasses" are no more than animal instincts to win. 

They're the political arm of the wealthy, who control our governments and elections now more than ever. Yet the ugly stuff that comes out of their mouths is carefully designed to appeal to people who feel powerless and angry - people vulnerable to being persuaded to use their votes like Molotov cocktails to destroy the amorphous "establishment" that they blame for their failed lives. As we now know, the results are horrifying. 

And it was First Past the Post that got us here. Say no more. Vote yes to PR.

Homelessness is still a problem. Gee, go figure

Ten years ago now, I was part of a major initiative to address homelessness in Victoria. The Mayor's Task Force on Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness brought together some of the most informed, passionate people in the country to look into the issue of people living on our streets and what needed to be done about it. 

In four intense months, the task force put together a comprehensive report, packed with thoughtful, meaningful research, strategies and findings. What lands people into homelessness in these modern times turned out to be quite a complex series of things, starting with people's own personal crises, health issues and inability (for all kinds of reasons) to manage the major problems and stressors of their lives, and then deepening into shifting priorities at all levels of government, systemic failures, flawed decision-making, disconnects and deep funding cuts across the existing system of support, and a general failure by our society to grasp how much effort and investment is needed over a very long time to try to address an entrenched social problem.

The key message repeated over and over again in that report was that while we do indeed need much more housing and social supports, we will always have homelessness unless we address the root causes of it. Without that, you are simply housing those who are homeless right now, even while new people fall into homelessness behind them.

A decade on, we have built some more housing. We have added more outreach. We have shifted thinking in the judicial system to the point that judges now routinely make much more humane decisions when confronted with cases that so clearly come down to homelessness and poverty rather than criminal intent.

We have also talked and talked about the root causes of homelessness, so much so that I'd like to think that virtually everyone now understands much more that homelessness happens not because someone is too lazy to work or reluctant to "pull up their bootstraps," but because of things like mental illness, poverty, disability, catastrophic injury, substance issues, a lifetime of disadvantage, and the lack of any kind of personal support system to fall back.

But while public awareness may have improved, the strategies that might staunch the flow of people into homelessness have never come about. That explains why we are still talking about homelessness like nothing has changed, and why there were a thousand or so people living homeless in Victoria when the task force got underway in 2007 and still is. And why there still will be 10 years from now if we keep doing things in the same ineffective, reactive way.

A new report was released last week confirming that the majority of homeless youth in our country are survivors of the foster system. Children from families investigated through Canada's child-welfare system are almost 200 times more likely to end up homeless at some point in their lifetime compared to children with no involvement in the system.

Shocking. But we knew that already 10 years ago. We've heard about it repeatedly in the intervening years from former BC Children and Youth representative Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond, who penned report after report pointing out this tragic statistic. Yet here we are, still being shocked. Still doing nothing effective in response.

We also knew 10 years ago that discharging people from our provincial jails with no plan also fed into homelessness, not to mention led some of them to instantly commit another crime to get themselves out of their dire economic situation. We knew that discharging people with chronic mental illness from hospital without a solid plan did the same. As did relentlessly wearing down social supports to the point that people on the edge began to fall into the cracks.

So yeah, it's a bummer to still be talking about homelessness all these years later. But until we get serious about why we can't seem to get on top of it, it will remain a heartbreaking example of societal failure and wasted human potential.

Who's right? Who's wrong? Who cares - just get a grip and negotiate like everybody else

    A looming strike/lockout in B.C. schools gets my attention more these days due to living with my son and his two school-age boys, who are bracing themselves for disappointment now that their final month of school is about to be disrupted by lockouts and rotating strikes.
     One of the boys is worried about losing out on his band trip to Tofino this week, which looks pretty likely. The younger one will probably have to give up a field trip to Victoria. I'm sure there are kids like them all over B.C. who - far from cheering for more days off in the event of a work shutdown - are really worried about what this latest work action at their schools is going to mean to them.
    Way to go, government and teachers. Stick it to the kids just because you're completely incapable of settling a contract like grownups.
    As a CBC report rightly notes, the essence of the problem between teachers and their employers is that "this is a dysfunctional bargaining relationship." In 20 years, the B.C. Teachers' Federation and bargainers for the provincial government have successfully negotiated just two contracts. All the rest have ended up like this one.
    What's up with that? If there's one thing that ought to be obvious to both sides by this point, it's that contracts come due with surprising regularity. The rest of the world manages their employment contracts without getting into a work stoppage virtually every time. Why can't these guys?
    Read the media coverage and you'll soon see that there's much more than the usual contract issues running below the surface here. But really, big deal. This is not a question of who's right, it's one of why each side can't get past their own interests long enough to see how pointless and damaging all of this is.
    And as always, what a disastrous message to our young people: That our government can't be trusted; that the people in charge of educating our kids are ready to throw them under the bus any time a contract expires.
     Shame on everybody. Grow up, people. Find a new way, just like everybody else does when their relationship turns toxic. This public scene you're always making got tiresome quite some time ago.