We call it luck. They called it planning

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

I wish you a Central American

 

My partner and I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for almost five years doing Cuso International development work in the 2010s. I concluded very quickly that if ever there was an apocalypse, I’d want to go through it with a small-town Central American at my side.

I’m feeling that more than ever in these eye-opening days of global reckoning.

Time and again during the period we lived there, I saw people in those countries come through with a quick fix for whatever unexpected weird thing had just happened. It was an ingenuity borne of centuries of certainty that nobody was coming to fix their problems.

They stepped up with little hesitation to help random strangers with their problems, too, because they knew a time would come soon enough when they’d need strangers to step up for them. It’s not just a nice thing to do down there, it’s smart and strategic. You need to be ready for anything, and living in a permanent state of pay-it-forward.

One day, the car we were in broke down on a quiet road past Leon, Nicaragua. Within 15 minutes, we were repaired and on our way after two strangers on a motorcycle pulled up and began scrounging up scraps of this and that from the roadside, and then used them to do something inexplicable but effective to the car engine to get it running again.

Such anecdotes are coming to mind more often these days as events play out around the world to remind me that nobody’s really got our backs.

How must the citizens of Israel feel to realize that their much-touted security systems were easily compromised? How do Libyans feel about all those decades of government ignoring dam maintenance? What do Americans make of the hard lessons first from Hurricane Katrina, and more recently in the Maui wildfires – that their emergency preparedness systems are in no way prepared?

How do we feel here in Canada, where successive governments were so wrongly presumed to be managing the work of making sure we’d always have enough housing? They weren’t even counting the number of new Canadians right.

How come we can’t access basic medical care anymore? How are 13,000 British Columbians dead from toxic-drug overdoses in the last seven years and we’re still bickering about public drug use?  How can governments be allowed to “step back” on fossil fuel use and the development of greener alternatives after the entire planet just spent a horrifying year seeing where climate change is taking us?

If I’d been born a small-town Honduran, I suspect I’d have known better than to believe that the big things of life were being taken care of by government. Honduras has no social safety net, minimal public health care, lousy schools, and wages so low that most people need two jobs and a side hustle just to get by. It’s a country where you learn early to take care of your own business.

But I was born a comparatively privileged Boomer in a peaceful, liberal democracy with a social and legal commitment to human rights and a better life for all. I just always figured everything was going to be OK, at least in Canada.

Ah, but there’s far less Canada in Canada these days. Free trade ties us to some of the world’s most fraught countries. With minor exceptions, we don’t make our own clothing, household goods, vehicles or parts. Ninety per cent of our medicines are made with ingredients imported from China or India.

We’re dependent on other countries’ supply chains, food production, human resources. When their wildfires burn, we breathe the smoke. When their people don’t come to fill our workforce, it’s our services that suffer. We're frighteningly dependent, yet still so blissfully unaware of that reality. 

For better and worse, the world has tied its fortunes together through intricate trade deals and border-crossing corporate entities outside the management of any government. No war, climate disaster, or economic collapse anywhere on Earth is far enough away to avoid a direct impact everywhere else.

And even though virtually everything tripping us up these days requires a long-term plan to fix, there is no long-term plan for any of it. Even when some government starts on a plan, it rarely lasts beyond the four-year election cycles that doom progress on the complex issues of the modern world.

This is the world we live in now. This is the world my grandkids will have to find their way through. If I hear that they ran away in search of cheap land where they could grow a simple diet, generate their own electricity and count on a handful of good neighbours who knew how to fix things, I will understand completely and cheer them on.

Develop your inner Honduran, kids. Things are going to get rough.

Government knows how to end homelessness - and it's not arrest

These are times when all ideas need to be on the table, so I’m trying to restrain my impulse to go berserko at the B.C. government for thinking that you can manage homelessness by arresting people.
But really, it’s enough to break your heart. All the effort and thought that has gone into this issue in recent years, all the proven solutions and strategies pulled together by brilliant and informed minds right here in B.C. - and this is what the province has taken away from that? Say it isn’t so.
Housing Minister Rich Coleman has been in the news this week talking about giving police the power to arrest people who refuse to go to shelters over the winter. His early plans turned shelter staff into jailors by forcing people to stay inside, but now he says police would just deliver people to shelters and leave it up to them whether they walked through the door.
The argument will likely play well with many of us in the comfortable class, who shudder at the thought of being out on a cold, wet winter night. Who can blame us for presuming that anyone who’d choose to sleep outside at night must be certifiably insane?
But the truth is that there are all kinds of sane reasons for choosing the streets over a shelter bed.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as not being able to bear the thought of lying on a mat in a big room with 70 or 80 other troubled souls trying to make it through the night in noisy, restless fashion. Or about having no place to leave your cart without all your worldly belongings being stolen by the morning, or another night of waiting in line outside the shelter just to find out there are no beds left, by which time all the good outdoor sleeping spots are long gone.
It’s about having a spouse and wanting to sleep like a couple, or having a pet that you can’t possibly leave outside alone in the cold. When our region’s “cold wet weather” protocol kicks in - and believe me, it’s damn cold and wet before that happens - only one adult emergency shelter, the one at St. John the Divine, welcomes couples and pets.
Then there’s a whole other group of resisters with severe addictions, whose sleep/wake cycles are so completely out of whack that the idea of lying down quietly at night for eight hours isn’t even an option.
Some have mental-health issues that keep them out of shelters, although not many in my experience, and certainly not enough to give Coleman the quick street cleanup he’s envisaging. There’s also a tiny group who would actually choose to live outside no matter what: modern-day hermits, maybe 32 people in all in our region based on the findings of the expert panel that worked on the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness.
Challenging issues, yes. But not insurmountable, as Coleman well knows. The City of Vancouver has had amazing success with such populations using a new kind of shelter piloted late last year. None of it has required arresting people.
The goal of the project was to lure resisters inside by providing shelter with a difference - locked spaces for carts, couples and pets allowed, 24-hour TV room to accommodate the sleepless, the dignity of booking another night before you left the shelter rather than having to line up much later in the day and hope for the best.
The empty buildings used for the shelters were pulled together quickly and on the cheap, with an operating cost of roughly $1.5 million for the three-month pilot. All were located in areas where people were already sleeping.
The plan worked like a charm. More than 500 people who’d previously refused to use shelters came inside within a few days of the shelters opening last December.
A similar solution for the 100 to 150 people in our region who avoid shelters would cost just $750,000 to cover five months of cold, wet weather. Much could be accomplished merely by extending Our Place drop-in hours over the winter and expanding the Cool Aid winter shelter that’s run out of St. John the Divine church.
The vast majority of people on our streets desperately want shelter and housing. But that’s not to say they’re prepared to give up everything of themselves just for one night out of the cold. Arresting people “for their own good” is something that a civil society does with the utmost of care, and only after all other options are exhausted - something that’s most definitely not the case in B.C.
You know what works, Mr. Coleman. Please don’t waste any more time and tax dollars on a plan that fails on every level.

Now's the time for scrutiny of BC government

We’re heading into a big year for B.C. Faltering economy, provincial election looming, massively expensive sporting event on the horizon - if ever there was a time for us citizens to take the measure of our government, this is it.
The election will be upon us in five months. In the run-up to it, B.C. politicians’ eyes will be on us for a change. We get such a chance no more than two or three times a decade - a brief window of opportunity for the public to capture the attention of politicians at a time when they’re highly motivated to listen.
Most of the politicians I know are good people wanting to do the right thing. But good intention isn’t the same thing as effective governance, something that the citizenry needs to be much more mindful of when choosing its politicians.
Are B.C.’s Liberals running an effective government? Before you head to the polls in May for the provincial election, make a New Year’s resolution to determine the answer to that.
Whatever you care about most - the environment, social problems, health care, taxes, school support - make it a priority to seek out information that will tell you whether the Liberals have been effective (The government’s own comprehensive Web site at www.gov.bc.ca is a great place to start.)
I’m a political agnostic, so will make no recommendations as to who to vote for when the time comes. My own vote remains undecided, except for saying “Yes” to electoral reform in the referendum happening at the same time as the election. I’ve seen no evidence in my years observing B.C.’s political scene that any party has all the answers.
Accountability is the watch word in my mind. Close to home, I note that newly elected Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin is promising in a Globe and Mail interview that there will be a resolution to homelessness in the downtown within six months. The Globe lists Fortin on a prestigious list of “Ten to Watch” in 2009, which I assume means he’s going to be working miracles this year.
It’s a wonderful bit of politicking, but the test is whether he means it. We’ll know soon enough by Fortin’s actions whether he’s the visionary leader we’ve been waiting for in the city, or if it’s all just more empty words leading nowhere. What’s important in the case at hand and anytime a politician makes promises is to hold them to what they said.
That they’re being held accountable at all times by the public ought to be a constant reality of any politician’s tenure, of course, not just at election time. We can’t be waiting three more years to hold the new Victoria council accountable for what it achieves around homelessness.
But it’s in the months before an election that politicians listen most intently. The 2009 provincial election is particularly important , not only because of the financial uncertainties B.C. is heading into over the next few years but also because a major electoral-reform referendum is being conducted at the same time with the potential to dramatically change the face of politics in B.C.
So it’s the public’s time in the sun now - to think about what matters and get some answers from government about its priorities and past performance. If we don’t like what we hear, government has five months to adjust course or risk losing our votes. Nice and direct.
What’s essential to the process, however, is public engagement. Go looking for the evidence that tells you whether government is doing its job. Keep score. Demand better. Extract commitments from those vying to be your MLA, and let them know you’ll be holding them accountable.
Read any reports you can find. Search the Mansard records on the government Web site. Follow the money. Read media coverage, but never rely on it exclusively.
Whoever you choose to vote for, do what you can to establish the person’s performance record. Accountability is vital, but what’s even more important is to know before we elect somebody that they’re up to the challenge.
It’s more difficult to establish a candidate’s performance record if he or she isn’t in government right now or has never run for office before, but you can still learn a lot these days from a Google search and visiting a few good blog sites.
For my part, I’ll spend the next few months trying to take the measure of the government’s performance for my column. But the wisdom will come from all of us. Effective government starts with electing effective people, and we’ve got five precious months ahead of us to figure that out.