The icky truth about international students in Canada

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful.

But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students. 

It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students.

It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up.

The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour." 

Not only do post-secondaries bring in far more money from foreign students than domestic students, the high cost of living in Canada ensures that those students will have to look for work while studying here. That's great news for employers looking to fill low-end jobs. 

Langara College Prof. Jenny Francis told the Tyee that after studying the issues for foreign students in Canada, she'd concluded that they are "the new temporary foreign worker, basically."

And while the provincial and federal governments seem to want to point the finger for exploitive tuition fees at "the diploma equivalent of puppy mills," they'd be wise to take a look at what the higher-status universities are up to as well.  

Let's start with the University of BC, where the cost of completing an undergraduate program is typically more than eight times higher for an international student than a domestic one. The Medical Laboratory Science program, for instance, costs $7,500 for a Canadian student, while a foreign student will shell out $61,000. 

Need an applied science degree in engineering? That'll be $15,000 if you're Canadian, and $60,000 if you're not. Same with a commerce degree. 

Not surprisingly, the number of international students at UBC climbed from 8,685 in the 2012-13 fiscal year to 17,040 in 2021-22. If one international student pays as much tuition as eight Canadians, who can say no?

At the University of Victoria, the per-credit cost is five times higher for international students than for domestic students - $1,981 compared to $411. At any point where there's an additional fee, international students pay much more for that as well: $990 to challenge a course as compared to $205; $1,500 to challenge a co-op work term versus $776. 

Even the mandatory acceptance fee that has to be paid just to get started at UVic is three times higher for foreign students, coming in at $750.

Clearly, the primary responsibility for figuring out whether you can afford to study in Canada has to reside with the foreign student. It's up to them to do their research and make sure they're not signing up with Bob's Shady Career College. It's up to them to bring a healthy level of distrust for any recruiter who makes it sound like studying in Canada is a ticket to permanent residency. (In BC, less than a third of foreign undergraduates land permanent residency within five years of graduating.)

But if foreign students feel like they're doing their best on all of that yet still feeling like there's some plot afoot to take advantage of them, they're right. 

Canada planned things to go exactly the way they're going. The use of foreign students as cash cows and cheap labour was all carefully laid out in the 2013 federal report, "International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity." 

"We must recognize the immediate benefits of international education for Canada, which span economic growth, job creation, and increased exports and investment," noted the report. "These benefits are distributed across all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast."

And wow, did post-secondaries embrace the challenge. There were 239,000 international students in Canada at the time of that report, with a goal to double that by 2023. Instead, the number of students had quadrupled to a million by last year.

The Tyee notes a 2019 report to the BC government that highlighted the $3.5 billion in tuition fees that international students were bringing in that year. If they were an export commodity, said the report, they would be the third most valuable in the province, after fuel and timber.

Apparently a number of educators interviewed for the Tyee's story felt uncomfortable with that comparison. But that was exactly what our governments set out to do with the massive expansion in international students: Create cash cows and a new pool of cheap labour. 

I haven't seen anyone try to put an international-development-and-global-goodwill spin on any of this, and at least that's a relief. The only foreign students who could possibly afford these tuition fees come from wealthy families. Nobody's even pretending this is about supporting citizens from challenged countries toward a better future for themselves and their homeland. 

But trying to present this issue as being about "a few bad apples" is just plain wrong. We've been taking advantage of foreign students for at least a decade, and now we're a little embarrassed that we let it go this far. Just say it. 

In case you were wondering: A surfeit of social realities to explain (a bit) about how we got here

Image by Taken from Pixabay

I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for almost 20 years now, but people still pay me to go find things out. I have a habit of finding way more information than the person who hired me wanted, the curse of a curious nature. 

Here's some of the surplus I've accumulated recently from some of that work, all of it related to the multiple layers of social crises we're seeing emerging in virtually every BC community. I drive along 900-block Pandora Street sometimes and am at a loss to grasp just what the hell is happening to us, but when I consider all the snippets of social tragedy below, it makes a very, very sad kind of sense. 

For instance:

We shut down institutions and never really replaced them with much

Riverview Hospital used to be BC’s largest mental institution, housing 4,300 people at its peak in the 1950s. But by the early 1990s, locking up people deemed "mentally disordered" for indefinite periods of time, with or without their consent, had fallen from favour. Riverview had been scaled back to 1,000 beds, and plans to replace institutional care with community care were in their final stages.

But from the start, the political motivations for closing Riverview were as much about cost savings as they were about philosophical shifts in how best to support people with mental illness. Between 1994 and 1998, spending on in-hospital psychiatric units was cut almost in half, and spending on community services for mental health was reduced as well, despite years of political promises to the contrary. 

Riverview was permanently closed in 2012. The long-abandoned promise of community services to replace what Riverview once provided isn't even talked about anymore. We are not going to return to the days of huge institutions, and that's a good thing, but there must be some middle ground between that and the modern-day reality of abandoning people with lifelong psychiatric health issues to figure out a hard life on their own. 

As for BC hospitals' psychiatric units, people pass through them so quickly nowadays that their mental health crisis doesn't even have a chance to stabilize. People used to stay an average 36 days in BC psych units before being discharged, but that fell to 15 days a number of years ago, and 14 days now. Psychiatric admissions between 2005 and 2017 increased 29 per cent, with no increase in beds[3].

People with developmental disabilities used to have to live in large institutions in BC as well back in the day. But deinstitutionalization happened for them around the same time as Riverview was being phased out. 

That population did seem to get better community care for a number of years after institutions like Tranquille, Glendale and Woodlands closed. But over time, the safety net has frayed substantially for them, too. It's not uncommon now to see people with developmental disabilities among the homeless. 

That is such a devastating ending for all the families who fought so hard in the 1960s-70s for the right for their children not to be locked away in institutions. Be careful what you wish for.

We are drowning in poisoned drugs

BC has always had lots and lots of illicit drugs. But what we've got going on in 2023 looks nothing like the relatively straight-forward drug scene of years past. With fentanyl, carfentanil, benzodiazapines and all kinds of other weird additives stirred into the mix now, people are getting sick in entirely new ways, and the death toll from toxic drugs is staggering. 

Since BC declared a public emergency in 2016, there have been 13,000 deaths from toxic drugs in the province, and no end in sight. Annual toxic drug deaths have increased almost ten-fold in the decade from 2012 to 2022, from 270 to 2,342.

For those who overdose on an opiate, prescription drugs like naloxone can save lives when injected immediately after an otherwise-fatal overdose. But people revived after an overdose are at high risk of having incurred a brain injury during the minutes when their brain was not receiving oxygen, and suddenly, a crisis of brain injury among people brought back to life after an overdose is emerging as a new (and almost completely unserved) concern.

Our governments quit building affordable housing

We all know there's a housing crisis going on. The increasing use of housing as an investment is often cited as a primary driver.  But as stats from BC's rental scene make clear, an equally big issue is that nobody has kept up with population growth. 

BC's population grew 34 per cent in the last 30 years. But in that same period, we've added exactly 6,000 more rental units. Our population grew by a third, while the number of rental units increased by a mere five per cent (from 114,129 units to 120,472[4].)

Equally problematic: Rents that are just so far beyond so many people's ability to afford. 

Average rents have increased 250 per cent in the last three decades. But the shelter allowance for those on income assistance was frozen at $375/month for the last 15 years up until this year’s increase to $500 (which still gets you nothing in any urban area). 

Given all of that, it's no surprise that the Lower Mainland's 2023 homeless count noted a 32 per cent rise in homelessness since 2020, with almost 70 per cent homeless for more than a year. We have created a permanent homeless class. 

We do jail differently now, mostly by accident

Even 15 years ago when the social crisis wasn't quite so obvious, people with mental illness or substance use disorders made up the majority of BC inmates, at 61 per cent. But now, it's almost like jail is the new psych hospital. Three-quarters of inmates now have a diagnosis of mental illness, substance use disorder or both. 

They and their fellow inmates churn through the system with unprecedented speed. The median length of stay in a provincial jail these days is 12 days. Almost a third of inmates across Canada are released from jail into homelessness. 

Provincial jail is where you do your time if your sentence is "two years less a day." But the majority of inmates in BC jails don't even have a sentence yet - they're in remand, where a person is held while awaiting trial if bail doesn't work out. People in remand units now account for 67 per cent of inmates in BC jails[7], up 15 per cent from a decade ago and slowly on the rise since the 1980s.

So we have recreated the institution part of Riverview by turning our jails into de facto psych units, but minus the psychiatric services and supports. Things that make you go hmmm.

We're still so far from doing right by Indigenous people

Indigenous people are over-represented in virtually every measure that matters for social wellness, health, safety and well-being. This is particularly true in terms of our jails.

Indigenous people account for six per cent of BC’s population, but make up more than a third of people in custody in the province[8]. In 2020-21, the incarceration rate for Indigenous people in BC was 22 in 100,000, compared to 2.3 for non-Indigenous British Columbians. 

A staggering 90 per cent of Indigenous people in provincial custody have been diagnosed with a mental health or substance use disorder[9]. Grimmer still: A Statistics Canada study released this year found that in the years 2019-21, almost one in 10 Indigenous men in Canada between the ages of 25-34 experienced incarceration[10]. 

We're returning to the days of poverty for some seniors, only this time they're homeless too

More than a fifth of people identified as living homeless in the 2023 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count are ages 55 and up. Nearly half of them became unhoused for the first time after turning 55. People age hard once homeless; those who are chronically homeless have life spans 20 years shorter than the rest of us.

Even comparatively comfortable BC seniors are struggling. BC Seniors Advocate Isobel Mackenzie noted in her 2023 "It's Time To Act" report that seniors in privately run, publicly subsidized assisted-living units are having a hard time keeping up with the array of additional costs that housing operators now charge for every little service, not to mention rent increases of up to 15 per cent a year at some facilities. 

And here's a strange trend: Even though BC's senior population is expected to increase to 25 per cent from 19 per cent over the next 15 years, the number of assisted living units per 1,000 population has fallen 15 per cent in the last five years in the province.

Is that because people don't want to live like that and they're finding other options, or because somebody has quit building that type of housing because they can make more money doing other things? Tune in 15 years from now to find out.

***

Ah, feels so much better to get those unused stats off my chest. I should wrap this up with some pithy conclusion, or a ringing call to action to fix this by doing a, b and c. But seriously, is it even possible to wish for a fix anymore? We are so profoundly late to the game. 

---

[1] https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/lbrr/archives/cnmcs-plcng/cn28441-eng.pdf

[2] BC Ombudsperson report Committed to Change

[3] BC Schizophrenia Society and BC Psychiatric Association joint report

[4] https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Table?TableId=2.1.31.3&GeographyId=2410&GeographyTypeId=3&DisplayAs=Table&GeograghyName=Vancouver

[5] https://globalnews.ca/news/10030845/vancouver-homeless-seniors/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe're%20already%20in%20crisis,32%20per%20cent%20from%202020

[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/prison-mental-health-sfu-study-1.6271915

[7] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/14691-eng.htm

[8] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/justice/criminal-justice/corrections/reducing-reoffending/indigenous#:~:text=Indigenous%20people%20are%20nearly%206,and%2027%25%20in%20the%20community.

[9] https://www.oag.bc.ca/sites/default/files/publications/reports/BCOAG-Mental-Health-Substance-Use-Services-Corrections-Report-February-2023.pdf

[10] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2023001/article/00004-eng.htm

Can we talk? No, really - can we?

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Virtually every day, I go out on a dog walk and start putting together the start of a blog post in my head. But I never get them written.

It’s not so much writer’s block getting in my way as a feeling of pointlessness.

My schtick is persuasive writing, which I had the great pleasure of doing for almost a decade in Victoria’s daily newspaper as a columnist and editorial writer back before I gave it all up for a chance to get closer to the action on social-justice issues. Now I do communications work and lots of writing for non-profits with noble visions of a better world, because I want to be doing that, too.

The draw of persuasive writing as a tool for social change, however, is the presumption that there are people out there open to being persuaded. It’s a means of bringing important things to people’s attention and maybe shifting their thinking a little.

It did used to feel like that was possible in years past. Yes, people who hated what I had to say would phone (and later email) from time to time to bury me in a stream of horrible invectives, but we’d often work around to finding some shared views on the issue at hand. As much as I disliked being yelled at, I came to love the challenge of seeking even a bit of common ground with the people who most disagreed with whatever I’d written about. And sometimes, they shifted my thinking as well.

But that was then. We all seem so far apart now. At this point, it feels like anything I write will get read only by people who already think like I do. That’s not just because we’ve entered into a worrying new state of polarized opinion on every single damn issue, but the reality of algorithms that push us ever deeper into our corners and make us even less likely to interact with – or understand - anyone who doesn’t think like us.

How will we ever build bridges across the cavernous divides in opinion these days? We’re like the human manifestation of climate change, full of extreme developments and dramatic overstatement. When some issue of the day needs a little rain to cool things down, we bring a hurricane.

Those of us who found their greatest writing happiness in trying to convince people to think a little differently are crushed about this. Where is the motivation now in writing about the critical issues of our times when the only readers are people on the same side of the “war” as me?

I embrace them as brethren in a frightening new world, of course. But we’re already singing from the same songbook. They don’t need convincing. And it’s pretty clear by now that preaching to the choir is not a successful strategy for social change, because otherwise we’d be there by now, right?

A kind fellow I ran into on a dog walk this week remembered me from my columnist days, and told me I’d had a knack for putting things a certain way that got people reflecting even if they didn’t share my views. Nice of him to say, but neither here nor there when applied to this very different period of time.

The people who I liked to aim my writing at 20 years ago in the hope of influencing their thinking ever so slightly wouldn’t even see my words nowadays. The newspaper industry was in serious decline even then, but the Victoria Times Colonist was still the media outlet that a lot of locals counted on for their news. Every column I wrote put my thoughts in front of a potential 70,000 readers.

Sure, untold thousands would choose not to read me. But there was at least the chance that any of them might. Their eyes might have drifted across the headline, or the first few words. They might have read a paragraph or two, called me up to yell, and ended up in a brief conversation with me that left them thinking.

Today? Even if I was still writing for a newspaper, everything has changed. The years when the daily paper was a person’s primary news vehicle is long, long gone. We’ve splintered into a thousand online news sources, some of them still striving for journalistic neutrality and others so opinionated and cross-eyed that the content is largely fiction.

I don’t know what to do about it. There are still so many things I want to bring to people’s attention, but it’s hard to motivate myself when it’s almost like talking to myself. I used to be able to post a link to a blog post on Facebook and get a fair jump in readership out of it, including a few people who wanted to yell at me like in days gone by. 

But things have changed there as well, and the almost complete absence of interaction that now occurs just reminds me of the pointlessness again.

Dear reader, I tell you all of this partly because I’m sad to be trapped in this state of mulling big and important issues over in my head on every dog walk, still looking up all the history and stats as if I was going to write something but never getting it written. For me, writing never feels better than when I can put it to use as a tool for social change, and I don’t like it that the tool is failing me.

Ultimately, however, this issue is so much bigger than one person’s whine about feelings of writerly pointlessness.

It’s about all of us now listening only to the people whose views we know won’t challenge our own. It’s about people going down rabbit holes and not even noticing how narrow the view has become. It’s about algorithms trying to make us happy by surrounding us with like minds in all our social media interactions, but in actual fact destroying any chance we might have had of talking things through long enough to find common ground. 

It’s really about an end to civil discourse, and it leaves me wondering how social change will come about in a world where we can’t tolerate each other’s views enough to try to find compromise on the points we disagree on.

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. 

Curbs on social-media sharing will only intensify the divide

What will happen once social media cuts us off from sharing news stories with our connections? That strange development has the potential of sending us even deeper into our respective echo chambers, where no complex problems can ever be addressed. 

We have been heavily manipulated into our interest groups by social media for a number of years now, and it's becoming very obvious that it hasn't been a good thing. So on the one hand, so long, social media, and thanks for nothing for getting us all weird and angry at each other about every damn thing. But on the other, what now?

If you are reading good journalism from totally trusted sources and generally living life with your eyes open, you will be well aware that the world is in a kind of Black Mirror moment. It's like one of those movies where a bunch of chimpanzees or a flock of birds suddenly start doing something super-odd, and every viewer knows to interpret that as code for some very big which-what-everywhere weirdness to come. 

Those are the times we're in. And now, having been shoved into our corners by social media's marketing algorithms for many years, we face being blocked from sharing news items with our networks because of a game of chicken between social media corporations and government, which is  taking up arms on behalf of media companies unhappy that advertisers like social media best.

This is all taking place just as we are facing some of the biggest issues the human race has ever confronted. 

Climate change, artificial intelligence, book burning, the threat of nuclear warfare, one wild precedent-setting storm or fire or flood after another, people being killed on subways because their mental illness is annoying other passengers, communities running out of water. There's some intense stuff going on.

We're either going to start talking to each other reasonably about how to find solutions that are as fair as possible to all concerned, or we're setting the stage for human annihilation. (Not to be overly dramatic, but don't you think so?) 

We are wasting precious time, people. Whatever side you're on, whatever the issue, you know in your heart it's not possible to yell the other side into submission. We're going to need to talk. 

I'm not going all unicorns-and-rainbows here and imagining the lions lying with the lambs, peace and love among humankind. I know that's not going to happen. But we can find ways to identify common cause, and start there. Right, left or straight down the centre, none of us wants the water to run out on our kids and grandkids or to lose what a healthy environment gives us. 

Social media certainly has the potential to help. I still remember how excited I was at the thought of people from all around the world and a million perspectives suddenly able to talk to each other freely about all the big things on their minds. (Ha. Silly me.)

But we were never able to share information freely, as we all know now. Our feeds are curated, using criteria that is pulled from all the bits of information that we offer up about ourselves when we use social media. Advertisers like it that way.

I've noticed in my own page that my posts are no longer being seen by people who don't think like me, as judging by the very long time it has been since anyone contrary posted anything on my feed. I guess I'm supposed to be happy about an algorithmic defence against trolls provided to me by Facebook whether I wanted it or not, but I can't see how we ever solve problems if we all stay in our boxes surrounded by people just like us.

Meanwhile, a tiny fraction of the people in each of our social media networks even see what we share. If you're sharing a link these days, that seems to send your post into purgatory as well. I can tell that Facebook's algorithms like it best when I offer up a cheery here's-my-day kind of thing, or a photo of my dog. If only the world's problems could be solved with photos of my dog.

So yes, this whole social media business was fraught from the outset. There's a lot that's wrong with it. But eliminating the sharing of legitimate news articles is just about the last thing we need as we try to fight through all the hot air out here.

Modern media has much on its mind, including having to figure out new revenue streams and get more readers. But give me a well-researched Guardian or New York Times article any time over a bunch of random people's opinions about stuff they know nothing about.

The difficult conversations are stacking up. We're down to a talk-or-die situation on a number of fronts. We were never going to settle it all on Facebook, true enough. But it sure isn't going to be settled by making it even harder for people to get to information from a source they can hold accountable.

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.

Sometimes a good shaming is all you've got

It's hard to talk about Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. 

I fully believe that the right thing is happening to her as she is held up to the searing light that the CBC's Geoff Leo has shone on her fictions. Pretending to be someone you're not feels especially egregious when high-privilege people fake low-privilege backgrounds. 

I am completely on the side of the betrayed Indigenous women who have had to experience a champion from within turning out to be nothing of the sort. All the worse that Turpel-Lafond purported to speak for them, and to have walked that same difficult road to success that Indigenous people so routinely have had to walk.

But it's still hard to watch. For a settler like me, it's also hard to talk about with my settler acquaintances. I can feel the grand discomfort we feel at watching a person whose past work we still admire experiencing a profound public shaming. 

We engage on the subject ever so carefully, tip-toeing around the astonishing betrayal and in the end, not saying much at all. I have exactly one non-Indigenous friend who I can fully engage with on the shocking subject of Turpel-Lafond, and we put our heads down and talk in low voices as if to hide that we've got strong thoughts on the matter.

And yet, these modern versions of a public stoning are important things to bear witness to. We do need to publicly shame those who engage in such blatant frauds. We do need to talk about the massive betrayal, and to reflect on and share the pieces that Indigenous women are writing about how this has impacted them.

Humiliation is both the way we punish and the way we deter when it comes to faking. It's literally the only way to punish those who come from privilege and fake an underprivileged back story - surely one of the most offensive kinds of fakery, given that the faker lays claim to space, key positions, prestige, money and air time that are routinely denied to underprivileged groups. 

And aren't there just a lot of fakers? That's what is really sinking in for me lately. Fake nurses, fake experts, fake college degrees, so many scammers. Grandparents scammed by fake grandsons. Whole police departments duped by modern-day snake-oil salesmen selling fake post-traumatic stress credentials.

Not that I think of Turpel-Lafond as a scammer. Her fakery feels so bizarre and recklessly self-destructive that my thoughts go toward her mental health instead. I have met people in both my personal and professional lives who have told themselves a made-up story for so long that they somehow come to believe it. 

I don't know if that's the case for her, but what else can explain the crazy risk she took by creating a persona and credentials that didn't belong to her? Did she think about this moment, when it all would fall apart and suddenly all would be revealed? 

Now we are left to reconsider everything Turpel-Lafond accomplished in her many significant years in high-profile positions. None of it is work that should be discounted automatically now that the truth is out, but I can't help but wonder how all of that work might have turned out had a real Indigenous person done it.

It's obvious that Indigenous people are struggling to talk about this one as well. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs issued a statement last fall confirming their support for Turpel-Lafond, who they described as a “fierce, ethical and groundbreaking advocate for Indigenous peoples for decades.”

They contended that issues of First Nations identity are for Indigenous peoples, families and governments to sort through based on their laws, customs and traditions, and condemned the initial CBC stories as “digging into private matters.”

But as other Indigenous people have repeatedly emphasized, she could have been that same fierce advocate without faking her background. Being a fierce advocate for Indigenous rights does not require that one pretends to be Indigenous.

Which Indigenous people went uncelebrated for their own contributions while Turpel-Lafond was receiving 11 honorary degrees under false pretences? 

Who might have authored the report into systemic racism toward Indigenous people in BC's health care system had that prestigious and well-paid work not gone to Turpel-Lafond? 

Who might have been the genuinely Indigenous representative for BC children and youth in a province where Indigenous children continue to be vastly over-represented in child apprehensions? What might they have done with a decade of their own in that vital position? 

What important perspectives from lived experience have been missed entirely in all of her work? What depths of wisdom went untapped because privileged space was taken up by somebody who hadn't had the life she said she'd had?

These things matter. In an era so fake that we can't even believe the things we see with our own eyes, authenticity of the person has never been more important. 

I feel for Turpel-Lafond in what must surely be an exquisitely painful time. But her deception has shaken the foundations of every good thing she did. We have all been hurt by her fakery, and Indigenous people most of all. 

***

Here's a November 2022 piece from the same CBC writer, this one on the report from Metis lawyer Jean Teillet on another Indigenous faker, Carrie Bourassa. 

People who pretend to be Indigenous feed off the ignorance of the non-Indigenous population, notes Teillet. "The fraudsters enact stereotypes they know will be recognized by the non-Indigenous audience. There is often silent and resentful recognition by Indigenous people that the performance is a stereotyped image of themselves."

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day...

When I was a kid and got too whiny about some little difficulty in my life, I'd get shaken back to reality by a parent or grandparent with a version of one of those Walked Five Miles to School in a Blizzard stories from their own childhoods. 

The examples varied, perhaps invoking a time when there was nothing but shrivelled potatoes to eat, or comparing my comfy bedroom to the mattress on the floor that they remembered sharing with some ridiculous amount of siblings. 

But the moral was always the same: this parent/grandparent had known deprivation, and I should be so glad and eternally grateful for living in different times.

It struck me the other day that the Boomer generation that I'm part of just might be the first generation in Canada whose own stories will instead be of how good they had it compared to their grandkids. 

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day we had houses for people. We didn't even have a word for homelessness, and you camped for fun, not because it was that or nothing. We burned through natural resources like there was no tomorrow. (Turns out that last part was true.) 

Back in my day, we made real money, and if we hit a bad spell, could fall back on employment insurance that actually covered most of a person's bills. We had doctors. Weather was just weather, not an ominous portent of end of days. 

Sounds a bit like a tall tale at this point, doesn't it? In fairness, not everything has gotten worse in my lifetime. 

Rights have improved significantly, at least on paper. We are woke, more or less, to the cruelties and inequities around race, gender, sexual preference and disability. We appear to be finally getting real about addressing the historic theft of Indigenous lands. 

Crime in Canada is half of what it was at its peak in the early 1990s, and the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has declined by more than a billion people since 1990.

But while rights, personal safety and a little less global poverty are vital components to a good life, so is purchasing power and hope for the future in a world that at times feels dangerously close to losing it.

 And on that front, my generation can only hang its head in shame.

I've told the story of my 17-year-old newlywed self many times, so apologies for dragging it out again for this post. But it's just so perfect for summing up what has happened over my lifetime when it comes to the growing social decay we see around us and the deepening struggle to achieve the basics of a good life.

In the late 1970s in Courtenay, I was a stay-at-home teenage mom teaching a little piano on the side and my then-husband worked at the Campbell River paper mill. He made around $28,000 a year, which the Bank of Canada inflation calculator tells me is equivalent to $105,000 in 2022. Pretty decent pay for a couple of kids starting a life.

We bought a cabin on the water at Royston for $10,000 when we got married in 1974. We had two cars, and regularly holidayed with the kids to the Okanagan and Disneyland. We moved on to a bigger house a couple of years later and had a small, manageable mortgage and no appreciable credit card debt, possibly because it was hellishly hard to get a credit card in those days.

When there was a five-month strike at the mill that really hurt, we caught and ate so much salmon that I couldn't eat it again for years. Because our seas were full of salmon.

Fast forward 50 years and it's an entirely different life for a young couple with kids anywhere on Vancouver Island or the Lower Mainland. 

Not only is the thought of ever being able to buy a home out of reach for many of them, they can't even count on staying put in a rental home if the property owner opts to "renovict." They certainly can't count on easily finding another place to rent at a price they can afford. 

The number of two-income families in Canada has doubled since the 1970s, during which time purchasing power has fallen far below what it once was. Forget the dream of a two-income family able to participate more fully in the economy. What has actually happened is a flat-lining in wages that now requires two people to work just to earn the same amount that one person once earned. 

The average hourly wage in Canada in 1975 was just over $10. Today, it's $20. Meanwhile, inflation has risen almost 470 per cent in the same period - which means that the hourly wage in 2022 ought to be $47 to have maintained the same purchasing power. 

The rich get richer and the not-rich lose ground. Canada's wealthiest 20 per cent of households now hold two-thirds of all assets in the country, while the least wealthy 20 per cent hold just 2.8 per cent. That top 20 per cent is the only quintile to have increased its share of national income over the years; all the others have seen a loss. 

It was my generation that inked the free-trade deals that have tied the world together so tightly for hungry global capitalists and consumers eager for cheap goods that now we're dependent on distant countries for everything. When a relentless drought grips California farms and the rivers get so dry in China that the freighters can't run, it's our store shelves that sit empty.

It's my generation that's sitting fat and happy on our investment portfolios, rooting for growth to continue unfettered every quarter so we can live in grand comfort. Those who come after us will live with the fallout - crashed pension plans, climate change, unattainable dreams of a home to call your own, weakening social benefits. "Populist" governments to come will worsen every crisis with their self-serving agendas, even while their meaningless rhetoric acts as a siren's call to the disaffected and disappointed.

Let me tell ya, kid, that is all so very wrong. Wish I could tell you that we're working on it, but I don't think we are. Think of it this way: You'll have some great stories of deprivation to tell your own grandkids.

Blog site, awaken!

I'm emerging from almost five years of largely ignoring this 15-year-old blog of mine with a plan to get back to more writing. Here's a photo of me and my partner on a bit of a crazy horseback trek this past summer, just to put me back in the minds of those who once read me.

I like writing about things that catch my attention with some element of weirdness, wrongness, out of syncness, or some other quality that can be broadly summed up as "Things that make you go, 'Hmm.'" 

I am not a funny writer, so don't expect that. I did write one piece 10 years ago when we were living and working in Honduras that I continue to find quite amusing, but that's pretty much it. I am also not a muser about things in the 'hood, people I know, foods I like/hate, or all that softish lifestyle stuff. 

(An exception might be some unexpected opportunity to share eye makeup tips for aging women, because that is a long-standing interest of mine and I have exactly one friend who I can talk to about that. I wish I could write about my low-histamine diet as a wonder cure for my allergies, too, but I've already seen just how glazed people's eyes get when I try bring that subject up.)

I expect to be writing a lot about sex work and that we're way past time to decriminalize it in Canada. That issue is my No. 1 hobby horse. 

To that end, here are a couple of pieces I wrote recently for the blog of a long-time friend who runs an escort agency here in Victoria, BC. These take a look at two men with significant disabilities who hire sex workers when their fixed incomes allow for a bit of a treat. Find Frankie's story here, and Vinnie's story here. 

Other hobby horses include climate change, the very obvious decay in BC's ability to support all the citizens who need help, and various hypocrisies that emerge in the headlines from time to time and drive a right-thinking person mad. 

I do a little amateur video work on occasion because I find it an intriguing story-telling medium; to that end, I grabbed some charts from the BC Centre for Disease Control report on the impact of BC's poison drug supply and made up this little two-minute video, astounding for what it reveals about just how profoundly we are failing on this issue. 

So sometimes I'll mix some of that issue in here, because the fact that 10,000 British Columbians have died since 2015 from taking poisoned drugs is pretty freaking astounding. I'm still waiting to read The Story that answers how the hell we got to this point and why we can't seem to fix it, so maybe I'll just go see what I can find out.

This is not my first rodeo with a blog, and I go into my site's revival with low expectations of  readers, who will be scarce and likely still strangely obsessed with a long-ago post I did saying I didn't like David Suzuki much, which has inexplicably been read by more than 22,000 people. 

As for those who leave comments on my posts, they will mostly be spambots inserting links advertising Mumbai escorts and treks in Nepal. 

Occasionally a real person will post a genuine comment, and some of them will say something really trollish and horrible. But I've been out there as a writer in the public eye since 1982 and have skin of a rhino after all the terrible things said to me over the years. (OK, I admit that I'm still stung by the random dude who saw me doing a newspaper promo on TV way back when while I was at the Victoria Times Colonist and called up to tell me I looked like "a blowsy biker chick.")

There's something to be said for just having a place where your thoughts can be thrown out into the world - a place that I can rely on as well to help me rediscover some past insight I remember having rather than realize that I put it on Facebook instead and it's now lost to time.

 And so, dear blog, I bring you back to life. Let's go see where a closer look might lead us. 

Who is Rod Baker?

Up until getting caught this week flying into a tiny Indigenous community in the Yukon to fake his way into an early COVID-19 vaccine, Rod Baker was a very, very wealthy Vancouver man presiding over a casino empire. 

What was going through his head when he chartered a plane into a hamlet of fewer than 100 people and made up a pack of lies so that he and his wife Ekaterina could jump the queue for their vaccinations? We may never know. Baker appears to have kept a low profile before the Beaver Creek scandal, and is certainly keeping one now. 

But poking around in the information that is available on Baker is intriguing, if only to gain a little more understanding of the kind of guy who launches quite an elaborate plot to get himself into a vaccine lineup intended for vulnerable Indigenous elders. 

Baker was president and CEO of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation up until his abrupt resignation this week after the Beaver Creek story hit the headlines. He has been in that position since 2010, although the "CEO" part of the title wasn't added until 2011. 

Before that, he was the long-time president of the mysterious Ridgeline Corporation, a financial investment and private merchant banking firm that was headquartered in Toronto but whose office is now listed as "permanently closed." No website or corporate information turned up in my searches. Baker led Ridgeline from 1995-2018. 

Not only was Baker the CEO of Great Canadian, he sat on its board. His father Neil Baker was on the board for several years as well, appointed in 2011 and on the Corporate Compliance and Security Committee before leaving the board in 2018.

Rod Baker isn't mentioned in the 2020 financial documents on Great Canadian's website, but he figures prominently in a 2018 "Letter to Shareholders."  The letter notes that Baker owned/controlled 86 per cent of Great Canadian's common shares at that time. His father owned 12 per cent of common shares back when he was appointed to the board in 2011. 

Together, then, father and son owned or controlled 98 per cent of the company's shares - a signal that Great Canadian wasn't a publicly held company in any real sense of the term, but more like a family dynasty. 

That is an important detail to remember when reading that letter to shareholders, in which the company proudly notes its philosophy of "aligning the interests of the executive with the interests of shareholders" as a reason for Baker's multi-million-dollar compensation package. Rod Baker was top executive, member of the board and owner/controller of the majority of shares, rendering him pretty much the living embodiment of aligned interests. 

Notable about the decade of Baker's reign at Great Canadian is the company's prominence in allegations of money laundering. An Oct. 28, 2020 story in the Globe and Mail has this to say about Baker's lack of interest in looking too closely at the source of the mountains of cash that gamblers were bringing into Great Canadian - revenues that were directly tied to how much richer he would get. 

Stone Lee, a long-time investigator with British Columbia Lottery Corp., testified that in 2012 his boss Terry Towns, vice-president of corporate security and compliance at the time, told him and two other money-laundering specialists that they were to stop banning suspicious gamblers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at River Rock. 

"I recall [Mr. Towns] said, ‘You guys are not police officers. Cut it out. You should not approach patrons, that's not your job. Your job is to observe and report.

Mr. Stone said the order from his boss was a result of Rod Baker, chief executive officer of Great Canadian Gaming Corp., which owns River Rock, complaining to the provincial gambling agency.

Once upon a time, Great Canadian was a small BC company launched to capitalize on the provincial government's growing interest in legalizing gambling. I remember those early casinos, which tended to be sad and scruffy places serving soggy eggroll bites to a handful of desperate-looking people. 

These days, Great Canadian owns gaming operations in four provinces and sold for $3.3 billion four months ago to Apollo Global Management, a "global alternative investment manager firm" out of New York City. Ah, how the times have changed. 

Rod Baker reportedly resigned from Great Canadian after the embarrassing Beaver Creek incident. It's probably safe to consider that a resign-or-we'll-fire-you move, but the wording also might signal that Baker's transgression didn't trigger the "just cause" clause in his contract. 

What does a top dog like Baker get when leaving a company that was essentially all his? That 2018  letter to shareholders estimated the cost of terminating Baker without just cause at $79 million (most of that from stock options).

So maybe this week's shaming stings a little. But it looks like the rent will still be covered. 

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.

Time wasted and energies spent on non-events gone viral

Here's a must-read from the New Yorker on the strange and unsettling ways that social media and mainstream media interact in the modern world to take a thin story involving almost nobody and turn it into a viral phenomenon that actually looks like something big happened.

The example of the moment: the uproar over those Covington Catholic High School students. With one side crying racism and the other side saying the Indigenous guy started it, the world quickly divided according to their viewpoints, and everybody got savaged.

This think piece takes a step back to reveal that in fact, none of the participants came out looking good when you get beyond the massive media firestorm and take a look at the video footage.

Perhaps more importantly, the analysis reveals that the world blew up over an event so small that the reaction is actually the story. Yet that reaction changed nothing, other than to push us all a little farther into our individual perspectives and away from each other.

Where once the mainstream media unfairly dismissed information on social media as so much bumpf, it now gives it too much weight. And in the age of international manipulation by bots and Russians, that is a very bad thing. Worse still, there are real firestorms that require our collective energy - climate change, racism that's significantly deeper than name-calling, increasing inequality, growing poverty. As a species, we are losing our heads over the little stuff while real disaster looms.

Where the heck are we headed? There's still much to love about social media; it's got so much potential to turn all of us into storytellers able to share our individual experiences and perspectives with the world. Alas, it's also a powerful weapon - one that has demonstrated much capability to manipulate our thinking, rile us up over non-news, pit us against each other, and show us a false version of the world that simultaneously overwhelms us with the stories that intensify our biases while keeping us away from the truths that might open our minds.

"We may need to change the way we think," writes Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker article. "Instead of seeing virality as a genuine signifier of newsworthiness, we need to see it for what it is—a product. Covington is the kind of product our social-media platforms sell to us. Perhaps we should be warier consumers."

Yes, indeed. There are those who want us divided and arguing, whether for personal gain or just because it's fun to see us spend all our energies fighting battles that go nowhere. Social media is a dynamic tool in the disruptor's tool box, and I love that about it. But it also lures us into the pointless fights of furious retweeting and name-calling that now passes for "taking action," even while the real battles go unfought.