Crazy-making cuts instantly increase government costs
The funny thing about the current government is that I often agree with what they say. It’s what they do that makes me crazy.
For instance, here’s the premier in an interview with the Times Colonist last week: "I think it's really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.”
Indeed. Health eats up 42 cents of every dollar the government spends. Premier, you’ll get no argument from me on that.
But on the very day that Gordon Campbell was saying that, his government was preparing to eliminate birth-control options for women and men living in poverty, who will soon lose access to IUDs and condoms. It was taking away $50 glucometers from people on income assistance who have diabetes, needed to measure their blood sugar every day. It was cancelling funding for a little plastic adapter that makes it easier for people with asthma to use their inhalers.
And I’m left to wonder: Hey, guys, what the heck are you thinking? And how on Earth did your talk ever come to be quite so far away from your walk?
“Who did they consult? Certainly not a doctor I could ever imagine,” says Dr. Danica Gleave, a Cool Aid Health Centre physician who predicts dire repercussions from the health cuts to people on income assistance. “It just baffles me. These are people who have no backup, no other resources.”
Looks like they didn’t fly the plan past the provincial health officer, either. Asked this week about the cuts, Dr. Perry Kendall wondered whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done. “The impact should be monitored, as this may turn out to be counterproductive to health and budgets in the longer run,” he noted.
Hopefully a journalism teacher has latched onto the press release announcing the cuts. It’s a fine example of modern-day propaganda. (As was Budget 2010; there must be a new communications mandate that all bad things are to be restated as good.)
The headline: “Province protects services for low-income clients.” The opening paragraph: Changes will be implemented “in a manner that is fair to all British Columbians and supports children and families.” The cuts to birth control, glucometers and asthma adapters are needed to “ensure these programs will be available to meet the most medically essential needs of clients.”
Well, except for impoverished people in their fertile years, diabetics and asthmatics. And the ones who no longer qualify for “ready-made” orthotics - insoles, braces and the like, which have also been cut. Oh, and the ones with HIV, hanging onto their health with the help of $20 worth of bottled water every month.
Doctors at the Cool Aid centre typically prescribe IUDs to at least a dozen women on income assistance a week, says Gleave.
“We see all kinds of women who benefit from an IUD - sex workers, people with developmental disabilities, people who have behavioural issues that make it hard for them to be compliant with taking a pill every day. These cuts are being made on the backs of the most vulnerable people,” she says.
“The cuts will result in an increased number of unwanted pregnancies. It will increase emergency-room visits for people with asthma. Every diabetic needs to have a glucometer - it’s a huge safety issue for insulin-dependent people. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
There are no savings to be had by denying access to IUDs, says Island Sexual Health executive director Bobbi Turner.
“The IUD is the most cost-effective form of birth control out there. Something like the Copper T costs $60 and lasts three to five years,” says Turner. “IUDs are not part of the ‘compassion program’ that drug companies have to provide free birth-control pills to these women, so this change cuts off a really effective form of birth control.”
I tried to get Health Minister Kevin Falcon to talk to me about this, because it’s obvious that the cuts in Rich Coleman’s Ministry of Housing and Social Development will increase health costs almost immediately. But it appears the government doesn’t like to talk about such things, because I just ended up routed back to the MHSD communications staff.
Maybe I should try for Mary Polak next over at the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The cuts ultimately mean more kids in care for the women who end up pregnant. But she’s probably too distracted right now, what with the $12.3 million in community cuts already going on for non-aboriginal children and families served by her ministry.
Or maybe just straight to the top. Premier, do you really want to get a handle on health-care spending? You have to know you’re never going to get there this way.
Showing posts with label provincial policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label provincial policy. Show all posts
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Friday, December 04, 2009
Telling details in letter to impoverished victims of identity theft
Picture what would happen if 1,400 middle-class British Columbians suddenly discovered that a provincial government employee with a criminal record for fraud had all their personal information stashed at his home.
We’re talking all the good stuff: social insurance numbers; birth dates; phone numbers and addresses; personal account numbers. Worse still, he’d had it for seven months by the time anyone who’d been affected even knew it had happened.
The halls of the legislature would be ringing for weeks with the howls of outrage and indignation. The government would be turning itself inside out to make things right for the victims.
Unfortunately, the actual story involves 1,400 welfare recipients. And the way the tale has played out in real life is so strikingly different than how things would have gone had the crime involved British Columbians with political clout, that there’s no hiding the government’s disregard for people on income assistance.
There’s a small but telling detail in the greeting line of the letter that government sent to those 1,400 people last month to inform them of the privacy breach.
How might you expect to be greeted by your government in a letter like that? “Dear Ms. Paterson”? Maybe “Dear Jody Paterson” if honorifics were too much hassle?
Nope. The actual letters opened thus: “Dear PATERSON, JODY LEE.” The impoverished recipients were then informed that they would need phone access, computers and ID to sort out their problems, and given a few Web sites and toll-free numbers to get them started.
It speaks volumes that the government couldn’t even bother to cut and paste a respectful greeting line into 1,400 letters to people being told they’d been screwed over.
The tone isn’t helped by the little note at the top of each letter telling recipients they may have accidentally received somebody else’s letter in the mail earlier due to a “clerical error.” Their privacy was breached twice, in other words: once by the theft of the information, and a second time when a botched mailing resulted in letters with people’s names and income-assistance file numbers being sent to someone other than them.
The letter - from the Ministry of Housing and Social Development - makes it clear that people are on their own to sort out problems arising from the theft. “Take the necessary precautions to protect yourself,” the letter urges before briskly listing the many things that will need attending to if people hope to make that happen. Good luck, little camper.
The recipients also found out in the letter that their health records have been flagged due to the breach, so they’ll have to show ID the next time they need medical care. A utility bill with people’s name and address on it will suffice, the ministry said this week, but added that it’s ultimately up to health-care providers to decide if that’s sufficient proof.
Is the ministry so out of touch with the circumstances of the people who walk through its doors every day that it doesn’t know that phones and computers are rare commodities for people scraping by on income assistance? Or that many of them will have no ID whatsoever? (One bit of good news: The ministry will waive the once-a-year-only proviso for replacing lost or stolen ID for these 1,400 people.)
Does the government get that some of the victims will have developmental disabilities, literacy issues or mental conditions that will make it impossible for them to understand those letters? Or that people move around a lot when they live in abject poverty and may not have even received their letters, let alone have a bill with a current address?
The privacy breach won’t go unexamined, mind you. The government has launched no less than four reviews into how this could have happened, including one by B.C. Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis. One day soon at what will doubtlessly be great expense, we will know much more about how the breach came about.
But come on, guys, free up a few thousand bucks for some community organization to help the 1,400 victims sort their stuff out - the people who are the actual victims of this crime. “I think a lot of this does fall to government to take on,” notes Loukidelis.
People have been frightened by the letter, says Katie Tanigawa of the Together Against Poverty Society, an advocacy organization that has fielded a number of calls from worried recipients.
“All the ministry has given people are phone numbers and Web sites to contact,” says Tanigawa. “But at the end of the day, it’s inaccessible information. And it makes life just that much more difficult for people who are already living in very stressful situations.”
Picture what would happen if 1,400 middle-class British Columbians suddenly discovered that a provincial government employee with a criminal record for fraud had all their personal information stashed at his home.
We’re talking all the good stuff: social insurance numbers; birth dates; phone numbers and addresses; personal account numbers. Worse still, he’d had it for seven months by the time anyone who’d been affected even knew it had happened.
The halls of the legislature would be ringing for weeks with the howls of outrage and indignation. The government would be turning itself inside out to make things right for the victims.
Unfortunately, the actual story involves 1,400 welfare recipients. And the way the tale has played out in real life is so strikingly different than how things would have gone had the crime involved British Columbians with political clout, that there’s no hiding the government’s disregard for people on income assistance.
There’s a small but telling detail in the greeting line of the letter that government sent to those 1,400 people last month to inform them of the privacy breach.
How might you expect to be greeted by your government in a letter like that? “Dear Ms. Paterson”? Maybe “Dear Jody Paterson” if honorifics were too much hassle?
Nope. The actual letters opened thus: “Dear PATERSON, JODY LEE.” The impoverished recipients were then informed that they would need phone access, computers and ID to sort out their problems, and given a few Web sites and toll-free numbers to get them started.
It speaks volumes that the government couldn’t even bother to cut and paste a respectful greeting line into 1,400 letters to people being told they’d been screwed over.
The tone isn’t helped by the little note at the top of each letter telling recipients they may have accidentally received somebody else’s letter in the mail earlier due to a “clerical error.” Their privacy was breached twice, in other words: once by the theft of the information, and a second time when a botched mailing resulted in letters with people’s names and income-assistance file numbers being sent to someone other than them.
The letter - from the Ministry of Housing and Social Development - makes it clear that people are on their own to sort out problems arising from the theft. “Take the necessary precautions to protect yourself,” the letter urges before briskly listing the many things that will need attending to if people hope to make that happen. Good luck, little camper.
The recipients also found out in the letter that their health records have been flagged due to the breach, so they’ll have to show ID the next time they need medical care. A utility bill with people’s name and address on it will suffice, the ministry said this week, but added that it’s ultimately up to health-care providers to decide if that’s sufficient proof.
Is the ministry so out of touch with the circumstances of the people who walk through its doors every day that it doesn’t know that phones and computers are rare commodities for people scraping by on income assistance? Or that many of them will have no ID whatsoever? (One bit of good news: The ministry will waive the once-a-year-only proviso for replacing lost or stolen ID for these 1,400 people.)
Does the government get that some of the victims will have developmental disabilities, literacy issues or mental conditions that will make it impossible for them to understand those letters? Or that people move around a lot when they live in abject poverty and may not have even received their letters, let alone have a bill with a current address?
The privacy breach won’t go unexamined, mind you. The government has launched no less than four reviews into how this could have happened, including one by B.C. Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis. One day soon at what will doubtlessly be great expense, we will know much more about how the breach came about.
But come on, guys, free up a few thousand bucks for some community organization to help the 1,400 victims sort their stuff out - the people who are the actual victims of this crime. “I think a lot of this does fall to government to take on,” notes Loukidelis.
People have been frightened by the letter, says Katie Tanigawa of the Together Against Poverty Society, an advocacy organization that has fielded a number of calls from worried recipients.
“All the ministry has given people are phone numbers and Web sites to contact,” says Tanigawa. “But at the end of the day, it’s inaccessible information. And it makes life just that much more difficult for people who are already living in very stressful situations.”
Friday, November 06, 2009
If you want to fight back, make it effective
I find myself thinking about protest a lot these days, mostly because of the ill-considered social cuts going on in B.C. right now.
It’s really the only form of democratic action we have in between elections, and a proven tool. When the public “blowback” is intense enough, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman might say, governments tend to change their minds.
But last week’s Olympic torch dustup reminds us that there’s protest, and then there’s effective protest. Those of us who want real change had best keep that in mind.
I mean no disrespect to those who protested the torch relay last Friday. The majority were there for all the right reasons. I certainly share their pain over a $6 billion party being thrown next February even while growing numbers of vulnerable British Columbians lose the programs and services that help them cope.
Still, little is gained when the only thing your protest accomplishes is to frustrate and sadden the people who didn’t get to carry the torch because you blocked the route. The media stories over whether it was protesters or undercover police who threw marbles under the police horses’ hooves didn’t help. Protest is a powerful tool, but less so when it alienates potential supporters.
The environmental movement has had remarkable success with protest. The Clayoquot protests of the early 1990s stand as great case studies of effective action for anyone wondering how it’s done.
The point of conflict at that time was a provincial plan to log the old-growth forests of Clayoquot Sound, on the Island’s west coast. We’d been logging coastal forests flat in B.C. for decades by that point, but a new environmental consciousness had started us questioning the prevailing wisdom that every B.C. tree was there for us to log.
The line in the sand turned out to be Clayoquot Sound. One summer day in 1993, almost 800 average British Columbians turned up on a logging road in the middle of nowhere, and stood down the logging trucks.
They got arrested by the dozens and went to jail - regular people, looking earnest in their Goretex jackets and Tilley hats as police led them away. Average folks, including grandmas and office-worker types, went to jail for the love of a forest that a lot of them probably hadn’t even heard of a year or two earlier.
And wouldn’t you know it, B.C. forest policy started to change. It wasn’t all love and flowers from that point on or anything like that, but the Clayoquot protests did indeed change the course of B.C. history.
So I flash back to Clayoquot whenever I need a reminder about how you go about getting the government’s complete attention.
First - and this is a big one - the Clayoquot protest had timing. British Columbians didn’t have much of an interest in environmental issues until the late 1980s, but we’d come a long way by the time Clayoquot was an issue. We knew enough to have an informed opinion on the subject, and to resist government’s usual attempts to pat us on the head while doing whatever it felt like doing.
Lesson No. 1, then: Make sure there’s sufficient public awareness out there of what you’re protesting about. Government responds only when they sense a major groundswell of opposition to their plans. If your issue isn’t yet well-known enough to elicit that groundswell (parents of autistic children losing services, take note), then doing something about that is your first task.
The Clayoquot protest also had a charismatic leader in Tseporah Berman and other home-grown environmentalists, and celebrity support from the likes of the late Robert Kennedy Jr. It had smooth-talking, well-informed spokespeople to disseminate its messages, but also slightly crazy protesters on the front line doing dangerous things like chaining themselves to logging trucks - guaranteed to draw the news crews.
It also had economic power, which perhaps more than anything explains why social protest has not been able to get off the ground in B.C. despite more than 10 years of ruinous policy. When the logging trucks didn’t roll, somebody somewhere didn’t get paid. That made all the difference to getting government’s attention.
We who toil for causes where the economic impact isn’t as instantly apparent need to figure that one out. History tells us that economic disruption matters much more than “heart” in changing the course of social policy. Protest works when it hits government and the private sector in the pocketbook.
As for last week’s Olympic torch protest, it will be a brief blip in history that most people will remember as a dispute over marbles. Whatever your issue might be, learn from Clayoquot and do it right.
I find myself thinking about protest a lot these days, mostly because of the ill-considered social cuts going on in B.C. right now.
It’s really the only form of democratic action we have in between elections, and a proven tool. When the public “blowback” is intense enough, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman might say, governments tend to change their minds.
But last week’s Olympic torch dustup reminds us that there’s protest, and then there’s effective protest. Those of us who want real change had best keep that in mind.
I mean no disrespect to those who protested the torch relay last Friday. The majority were there for all the right reasons. I certainly share their pain over a $6 billion party being thrown next February even while growing numbers of vulnerable British Columbians lose the programs and services that help them cope.
Still, little is gained when the only thing your protest accomplishes is to frustrate and sadden the people who didn’t get to carry the torch because you blocked the route. The media stories over whether it was protesters or undercover police who threw marbles under the police horses’ hooves didn’t help. Protest is a powerful tool, but less so when it alienates potential supporters.
The environmental movement has had remarkable success with protest. The Clayoquot protests of the early 1990s stand as great case studies of effective action for anyone wondering how it’s done.
The point of conflict at that time was a provincial plan to log the old-growth forests of Clayoquot Sound, on the Island’s west coast. We’d been logging coastal forests flat in B.C. for decades by that point, but a new environmental consciousness had started us questioning the prevailing wisdom that every B.C. tree was there for us to log.
The line in the sand turned out to be Clayoquot Sound. One summer day in 1993, almost 800 average British Columbians turned up on a logging road in the middle of nowhere, and stood down the logging trucks.
They got arrested by the dozens and went to jail - regular people, looking earnest in their Goretex jackets and Tilley hats as police led them away. Average folks, including grandmas and office-worker types, went to jail for the love of a forest that a lot of them probably hadn’t even heard of a year or two earlier.
And wouldn’t you know it, B.C. forest policy started to change. It wasn’t all love and flowers from that point on or anything like that, but the Clayoquot protests did indeed change the course of B.C. history.
So I flash back to Clayoquot whenever I need a reminder about how you go about getting the government’s complete attention.
First - and this is a big one - the Clayoquot protest had timing. British Columbians didn’t have much of an interest in environmental issues until the late 1980s, but we’d come a long way by the time Clayoquot was an issue. We knew enough to have an informed opinion on the subject, and to resist government’s usual attempts to pat us on the head while doing whatever it felt like doing.
Lesson No. 1, then: Make sure there’s sufficient public awareness out there of what you’re protesting about. Government responds only when they sense a major groundswell of opposition to their plans. If your issue isn’t yet well-known enough to elicit that groundswell (parents of autistic children losing services, take note), then doing something about that is your first task.
The Clayoquot protest also had a charismatic leader in Tseporah Berman and other home-grown environmentalists, and celebrity support from the likes of the late Robert Kennedy Jr. It had smooth-talking, well-informed spokespeople to disseminate its messages, but also slightly crazy protesters on the front line doing dangerous things like chaining themselves to logging trucks - guaranteed to draw the news crews.
It also had economic power, which perhaps more than anything explains why social protest has not been able to get off the ground in B.C. despite more than 10 years of ruinous policy. When the logging trucks didn’t roll, somebody somewhere didn’t get paid. That made all the difference to getting government’s attention.
We who toil for causes where the economic impact isn’t as instantly apparent need to figure that one out. History tells us that economic disruption matters much more than “heart” in changing the course of social policy. Protest works when it hits government and the private sector in the pocketbook.
As for last week’s Olympic torch protest, it will be a brief blip in history that most people will remember as a dispute over marbles. Whatever your issue might be, learn from Clayoquot and do it right.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Fight back - these cuts will do lasting harm
I’ve kept a rough list of the B.C. programs and services being lost as a result of government cuts this fall. Maybe there’s still nothing on the list that affects you and your family, but the odds are getting slimmer all the time.
A remarkably broad swath of British Columbians will be affected by the funding cuts being carried out by the provincial government and its five health authorities right now.
The cuts are coming fast and furious in all directions, with neither a plan nor an understanding at any level of what it’s all going to mean when the dust settles. Without a word of public discussion, vital social programs and supports that British Columbians have counted on for years are vanishing.
Our province will end up wearing the scars of these cuts for decades to come. We need to shake ourselves out of our respective silos and make it stop.
Whatever your political stripe, I’m sure we can all agree that we’re against bad decision-making. That’s what is going on in B.C. right now. Government and health authorities are so consumed with hitting their financial targets that they’re selling out the future health and well-being of British Columbia for poorly conceived, clumsily executed cuts that benefit no one.
It’s still hard for many of us to accept that tax dollars are well-spent on supports to strangers who need help in their lives. That’s why our governments generally assume they can shred social services with little fear of a voter backlash.
But this isn’t about votes. This is about what we’re giving up as a society. This is about services that are costing us a little money right now, but are preventing much, much higher costs down the road. Take a look at this sampling of recent cuts and think about the vulnerable people who will be cast to the wolves as the government and health authorities withdraw their support:
• School lunch programs
• Community mental health and addiction services
• School sports
• Intensive behavioural therapy for young autistic children
• Support for programs preventing fetal-alcohol damage in children
• Help for people raising their grandchildren
• Reading centres
• Treatment for children who witness abuse
• Outreach for victims of domestic violence (reinstated this week after public outcry)
• Help for problem gamblers
• Elimination of B.C.’s only prosecutor specializing in domestic violence
• Support for sports for people with mental handicaps
And none of that includes the cuts to gaming grants for the social sector still to come later this fall. Or the much deeper cuts coming in the March 2010 budget, and again the year after that.
Those familiar with government understand that whatever is lost in the next couple years is at risk of being lost for good. Government is writing off decades of experience, evidence and social infrastructure in its ill-informed rush to make up cost overruns on the backs of struggling families. We will not soon see these programs back if we let them go now.
Billings Learned Hand, a U.S. judge and philosopher from the early 1900s, once talked about change occurring only when things reach a point that “cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.”
Are we there yet? Surely we must be close. Thousands of people and communities are affected by the cuts, but I sense they haven’t yet realized their cumulative power to do something. It’s tough to go it alone against government, but so many people will feel these cuts that together, they could exercise considerable political clout.
Look only to recent headlines to verify that. Just this week, the government reinstated $440,000 that had been cut from services addressing domestic violence, all because the public went nuts. Cuts to camping programs for children with disabilities were also abandoned earlier this year after the public made its considerable displeasure known.
Fight, people. Be the squeaky wheel that haunts government’s dreams. Give government some of that “blowback” that Housing Minister Rich Coleman talked about a couple weeks ago, because they need a big blast of it to snap them out of these dangerously short-sighted, mean-spirited cuts.
As always, the poorest of the poor will feel all of B.C.’s cuts the hardest. I’m back organizing Project Connect for another year on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, and want to thank the community for the generous donations to date that will help us put on another really successful day for hundreds of people living in deep poverty and homelessness.
We’ve got one more drop-off day to collect things like new socks, new and gently used gloves, scarves and toques and travel-size grooming products like hand sanitizer to fill the 700 or so backpacks we expect to be handing out at the all-day service fair for the street community, Oct. 14 at Our Place. If you’ve got a backpack to donate, that’d be great too.
Can you help? Bring donations to Our Place, 919 Pandora, on the morning of Oct. 6. Contact me at the email on this column to donate time or money to Project Connect.
I’ve kept a rough list of the B.C. programs and services being lost as a result of government cuts this fall. Maybe there’s still nothing on the list that affects you and your family, but the odds are getting slimmer all the time.
A remarkably broad swath of British Columbians will be affected by the funding cuts being carried out by the provincial government and its five health authorities right now.
The cuts are coming fast and furious in all directions, with neither a plan nor an understanding at any level of what it’s all going to mean when the dust settles. Without a word of public discussion, vital social programs and supports that British Columbians have counted on for years are vanishing.
Our province will end up wearing the scars of these cuts for decades to come. We need to shake ourselves out of our respective silos and make it stop.
Whatever your political stripe, I’m sure we can all agree that we’re against bad decision-making. That’s what is going on in B.C. right now. Government and health authorities are so consumed with hitting their financial targets that they’re selling out the future health and well-being of British Columbia for poorly conceived, clumsily executed cuts that benefit no one.
It’s still hard for many of us to accept that tax dollars are well-spent on supports to strangers who need help in their lives. That’s why our governments generally assume they can shred social services with little fear of a voter backlash.
But this isn’t about votes. This is about what we’re giving up as a society. This is about services that are costing us a little money right now, but are preventing much, much higher costs down the road. Take a look at this sampling of recent cuts and think about the vulnerable people who will be cast to the wolves as the government and health authorities withdraw their support:
• School lunch programs
• Community mental health and addiction services
• School sports
• Intensive behavioural therapy for young autistic children
• Support for programs preventing fetal-alcohol damage in children
• Help for people raising their grandchildren
• Reading centres
• Treatment for children who witness abuse
• Outreach for victims of domestic violence (reinstated this week after public outcry)
• Help for problem gamblers
• Elimination of B.C.’s only prosecutor specializing in domestic violence
• Support for sports for people with mental handicaps
And none of that includes the cuts to gaming grants for the social sector still to come later this fall. Or the much deeper cuts coming in the March 2010 budget, and again the year after that.
Those familiar with government understand that whatever is lost in the next couple years is at risk of being lost for good. Government is writing off decades of experience, evidence and social infrastructure in its ill-informed rush to make up cost overruns on the backs of struggling families. We will not soon see these programs back if we let them go now.
Billings Learned Hand, a U.S. judge and philosopher from the early 1900s, once talked about change occurring only when things reach a point that “cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.”
Are we there yet? Surely we must be close. Thousands of people and communities are affected by the cuts, but I sense they haven’t yet realized their cumulative power to do something. It’s tough to go it alone against government, but so many people will feel these cuts that together, they could exercise considerable political clout.
Look only to recent headlines to verify that. Just this week, the government reinstated $440,000 that had been cut from services addressing domestic violence, all because the public went nuts. Cuts to camping programs for children with disabilities were also abandoned earlier this year after the public made its considerable displeasure known.
Fight, people. Be the squeaky wheel that haunts government’s dreams. Give government some of that “blowback” that Housing Minister Rich Coleman talked about a couple weeks ago, because they need a big blast of it to snap them out of these dangerously short-sighted, mean-spirited cuts.
As always, the poorest of the poor will feel all of B.C.’s cuts the hardest. I’m back organizing Project Connect for another year on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, and want to thank the community for the generous donations to date that will help us put on another really successful day for hundreds of people living in deep poverty and homelessness.
We’ve got one more drop-off day to collect things like new socks, new and gently used gloves, scarves and toques and travel-size grooming products like hand sanitizer to fill the 700 or so backpacks we expect to be handing out at the all-day service fair for the street community, Oct. 14 at Our Place. If you’ve got a backpack to donate, that’d be great too.
Can you help? Bring donations to Our Place, 919 Pandora, on the morning of Oct. 6. Contact me at the email on this column to donate time or money to Project Connect.
Friday, September 25, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Autism cuts add one more burden to families
Cuts to government-funded programs are raining down in all directions. Alicia Ulysses gets that the end of free karate lessons for her 16-year-old autistic son is pretty small potatoes given all that.
But sometimes a mother just has to stand up and say: Hey, you guys, have you ever considered what you’re really taking away from the child at the other end of a decision like that?
In B.C., families can qualify for up to $20,000 a year in government funding to help pay for special services for a child with autism who is under age six. That amount will be increased to $22,000 next April. Nicholas Ulysses is 16, so the maximum his family qualifies for is $6,000 a year.
It’s a needed program, and here’s hoping nothing bad happens next year when the government makes changes to the way parents access the money. But the problem for families of older children is that the kinds of activities that would benefit their child often don’t qualify for funding - or not for long, at any rate. So it is for Nicholas, whose government-funded karate lessons came to an end this summer.
The kinds of autism services government prefers to support are therapies that target very young children, who benefit immensely from early intervention. Once a child moves into the “six to 18-year-old” category, however, they’re as developed as they’re going to get in terms of their autism. They qualify for considerably less support, and far fewer services that fit their changing needs.
Up until the latest rejection letter, Nicholas’s mom has been able to make a case to government that karate lessons qualified as an “other intervention recommended by a professional.” Even so, the decision has been revisited almost every year since the family was approved for $4,000 a year in funding in 2005. Each time, Alicia has to get yet another letter of support from a registered psychologist attesting that karate is beneficial for Nicholas.
It’s true that the teen enjoys both the sport and recreation of karate, and that neither of those activities qualifies for autism funding. He definitely needs the exercise, which Alicia is pretty sure the government would agree with if they’d ever actually met him.
But Nicholas’s karate is about much more than that, says his mom. When he’s at his karate lessons, he feels like he belongs. He’s got friends. He’s got purpose. Those are things that a lonely boy with autism doesn’t get to feel very often.
“At school, people treat Nicholas very nicely, because they know that’s what you’re supposed to do,” says Alicia. “But they never call once to invite him to a movie, or to a birthday party. These kids want to feel normal - they want to be involved in normal things. Not everything in their life has to be a therapy.”
Therapy is no longer the issue for a child the age of Nicholas, she adds.
“Now, it’s about coping. I took Nicholas for a job interview today and it went really well. But that’s because I did his resume. I got him in the right clothes and shoes. I made sure he brushed his teeth. He doesn’t need intervention anymore - he needs help with everyday things.
“OK, the research says that people with autism need this or that kind of service, and that’s what we’re supposed to want. But meanwhile Nicholas is a lonely boy, nobody’s calling, and he wants a girlfriend. Slowly, slowly, these kids learn to give up, because they feel the rejection.”
Laurel Duruisseau, of the Victoria Society for Children with Autism, says karate and gymnastics are two of the biggest bones of contention between her society’s 150 members and government. She says occupational therapists recommend such activities all the time, but government resists funding them.
“The funding is really intended for one-to-one intervention, which is fine for a four-year-old but not such a good fit for a 16-year-old,” says Duruisseau. “We’ve pretty much all been through it with our kids. Any activity that you can put a typical child in, chances are the funding won’t cover it.”
Her group created a new charity - Mosaic - just to try to get around the problem. It runs drama and art programs for autistic teens. “Karate is actually on the list for us to look at adding,” says Duruisseau.
A high-profile B.C. court case over funding for services kept autism in the headlines for a long time, until the case was lost at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. Alicia says there’s still “a lot of noise” about autism in the province, but little change. This week, the government scrapped a $5 million fund that paid for a particular kind of autism therapy for 70 B.C. families.
“When we speak up, I don’t think they want to hear it,” she says. “My case is a minor one, but there are others that aren’t. And it’s not fair. Every little thing adds another burden to a family that’s already stretched.”
Friday, September 04, 2009
Muddy waters hide true level of cuts in BC budget
The devil’s in the details, as the saying goes. But good luck trying to find them in the revamped provincial budget if you’re looking to understand where the cuts to provincially funded services are going to hurt the most.
What is clear is that somebody’s definitely going to be feeling pain. The revised 2009-10 budget reflects a major downturn in provincial revenue. Government has earmarked almost $2 billion in cuts over the next three years that will come from “administrative efficiencies” inside government, and an additional $1.5 billion in cuts to various community services receiving year-to-year grants.
The government calls such grants “discretionary.” What they mean by that is that government is under no obligation to provide the money in the first place, or to keep it coming. Discretionary grants have become a very common but extremely unstable way of funding many kinds of community services.
The $159 million or so the government hands out every year in gaming grants are considered discretionary, for instance. But that’s only the government’s opinion. Ask any of the thousands of community groups that desperately count on that money to fund important services and they’ll tell you that those gaming grants are essential.
A senior Finance Ministry bureaucrat told me at this week’s budget release that it only makes sense to cut discretionary spending first. “Isn’t that what you’d do in your own household?” he asked me.
Sure, but in that case it would be up to me to decide what expenses could be classified as discretionary. Who is it that defines “discretionary” at the provincial level for purposes of funding cuts? Whose grants are on the hit list? I spent six hours poring over pages and pages of budget documents Tuesday and am still no closer to the answer.
Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer asked the question of the day on this point when he queried Finance Minister Colin Hansen at the budget lockup as to why there wasn’t a list of all the grants being cut. I wonder whether anyone in government even has such a list, or has any idea of what the cumulative effect will be from cutting so many community grants all at once.
Hansen invited Palmer and any other interested media to scrutinize three account classifications in the “Supplement to the Estimates” to find that out. Such classifications are known as Standard Objects of Expense - STOBS - and the ones in question are numbers 77, 79 and 80. All three provide funding for community partners, whether in the form of discretionary grants, required payments, or contractual agreements.
So I put on my reading glasses and scrutinized, aided by a kind Finance Ministry staffer who dug up the original supplement from the February budget needed to compare any differences between the two.
But as it turns out, the task is impossible even with both documents in hand. That’s because while government ministries were cutting discretionary grants, they were muddying the waters by also recategorizing a whole bunch of other STOBs that fit into those same three classifications.
For example, what looks like the wholesale slaughter of discretionary grants within the Attorney General’s ministry turns out to be just a shifting of legal-aid services into a different. Discretionary grants in the Health Ministry look like they’ll shrink from $50 million to a mere $4.3 million, but ministry bureaucrats say that, too, is just the result of funding being moved around.
In the Public Service and Solicitor General’s ministry, there’s $1 million less for discretionary grants related to policing, community services and victim services. In the Ministry of Children and Family Development, there’s $2 million less for child and family development.
Can we presume those are cuts to community groups? I don’t have a clue. Nothing I could find in the documents added up to anything like the $385 million in cuts to discretionary funding that have apparently already been made this year, so who knows what it all means?
It will be weeks or even months before anyone on the ground has any real sense of what’s being lost. At the same time, communities will be feeling the effects of local health authorities cutting $25 million a year from their budgets by reducing admin costs and their own “discretionary” spending.
The provincial cuts have all been made for this year, the Finance Ministry assures me. But that’s not to say that those on the receiving end have been informed yet, or are in any way prepared for even heavier cuts this spring. Listen for the wails in a community near you.
The devil’s in the details, as the saying goes. But good luck trying to find them in the revamped provincial budget if you’re looking to understand where the cuts to provincially funded services are going to hurt the most.
What is clear is that somebody’s definitely going to be feeling pain. The revised 2009-10 budget reflects a major downturn in provincial revenue. Government has earmarked almost $2 billion in cuts over the next three years that will come from “administrative efficiencies” inside government, and an additional $1.5 billion in cuts to various community services receiving year-to-year grants.
The government calls such grants “discretionary.” What they mean by that is that government is under no obligation to provide the money in the first place, or to keep it coming. Discretionary grants have become a very common but extremely unstable way of funding many kinds of community services.
The $159 million or so the government hands out every year in gaming grants are considered discretionary, for instance. But that’s only the government’s opinion. Ask any of the thousands of community groups that desperately count on that money to fund important services and they’ll tell you that those gaming grants are essential.
A senior Finance Ministry bureaucrat told me at this week’s budget release that it only makes sense to cut discretionary spending first. “Isn’t that what you’d do in your own household?” he asked me.
Sure, but in that case it would be up to me to decide what expenses could be classified as discretionary. Who is it that defines “discretionary” at the provincial level for purposes of funding cuts? Whose grants are on the hit list? I spent six hours poring over pages and pages of budget documents Tuesday and am still no closer to the answer.
Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer asked the question of the day on this point when he queried Finance Minister Colin Hansen at the budget lockup as to why there wasn’t a list of all the grants being cut. I wonder whether anyone in government even has such a list, or has any idea of what the cumulative effect will be from cutting so many community grants all at once.
Hansen invited Palmer and any other interested media to scrutinize three account classifications in the “Supplement to the Estimates” to find that out. Such classifications are known as Standard Objects of Expense - STOBS - and the ones in question are numbers 77, 79 and 80. All three provide funding for community partners, whether in the form of discretionary grants, required payments, or contractual agreements.
So I put on my reading glasses and scrutinized, aided by a kind Finance Ministry staffer who dug up the original supplement from the February budget needed to compare any differences between the two.
But as it turns out, the task is impossible even with both documents in hand. That’s because while government ministries were cutting discretionary grants, they were muddying the waters by also recategorizing a whole bunch of other STOBs that fit into those same three classifications.
For example, what looks like the wholesale slaughter of discretionary grants within the Attorney General’s ministry turns out to be just a shifting of legal-aid services into a different. Discretionary grants in the Health Ministry look like they’ll shrink from $50 million to a mere $4.3 million, but ministry bureaucrats say that, too, is just the result of funding being moved around.
In the Public Service and Solicitor General’s ministry, there’s $1 million less for discretionary grants related to policing, community services and victim services. In the Ministry of Children and Family Development, there’s $2 million less for child and family development.
Can we presume those are cuts to community groups? I don’t have a clue. Nothing I could find in the documents added up to anything like the $385 million in cuts to discretionary funding that have apparently already been made this year, so who knows what it all means?
It will be weeks or even months before anyone on the ground has any real sense of what’s being lost. At the same time, communities will be feeling the effects of local health authorities cutting $25 million a year from their budgets by reducing admin costs and their own “discretionary” spending.
The provincial cuts have all been made for this year, the Finance Ministry assures me. But that’s not to say that those on the receiving end have been informed yet, or are in any way prepared for even heavier cuts this spring. Listen for the wails in a community near you.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Throne Speech foreshadows cuts to come
Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones and barely feel a blip when the provincial government reveals its retooled budget next week.
But in the capital city, in a region dependent on government jobs and provincial funding on all kinds of fronts, there can’t be many of those kind of people out there. My sense is that a lot more are awaiting Tuesday’s budget announcement with trepidation and fear, and this week’s throne speech certainly brought no comfort.
Throne speeches are typically pretty vague with the details. They give the flavour of the budget to come, and set the tone. But they don’t actually say what’s going to happen, leaving those who desperately want to know more to read between the lines.
The gist of the Aug. 25 throne speech is roughly this: “B.C. is in the grips of something so awful that we couldn’t have imagined it, and we’ve really had to make some tough decisions around spending. But you can trust us to look after what’s important.”
The throne speech that Lt.-Gov. Steven Point delivered opens with heartfelt sympathies to the families of various prominent British Columbians who died in the last six months, and ends 4,000 words later with an ode to the Olympics. There are no less than a dozen warm references to the importance of B.C.’s children.
But you can hear what’s really being said in the phrases about seismic economic change and decimated government revenues, and in the promises to protect indispensable services while rooting out unnecessary spending. I get the shivers when government starts talking like that, because those are nice little setup lines for all kinds of cuts.
The feeling I got from reading the throne speech was of a worried-uncle type peering sincerely into my eyes, giving me one of those sad-faced, isn’t-this-just-crappy-but-what’s-a-province-to-do looks.
He’s telling me that he’s sorry, so sorry. But these are extraordinary times, and we’re all just going to have to hunker down and tough it out. Why, if he had the money, he’d be taking me out to paint the town red right now, but his fiscal cupboard is bare.
He urges me to trust him, and assures me that all will be well soon. He squeezes my shoulder and says I should be happy that he’s here to take care of things, because at least he knows how to live within his means.
Not quite, what with four or more years of deficits on the horizon. But never mind. What worries me more is having to trust that government will think things all the way through before making cuts. I’m not sure I have much trust left for any government after decades of politicized, poorly informed and random cuts and policy changes that definitely haven’t turned out well for B.C.
When I read in the throne speech that government is going to minimize spending on non-essential services, I wonder: Who’s defining “non-essential”? When I see a pledge to “protect critical health and education services,” I’m curious to know what government considers critical, and why it is that so many other vital government-funded services were left off that very short list.
I guess we’ll all find out in the weeks and months to come, when the long columns of figures in Tuesday’s revised budget become the flesh-and-blood faces of people and communities who are affected negatively by whatever cuts are coming.
You and I will have no say in any of it, because the decisions have already been made. The programs and services that government considers “non-essential” or “discretionary” have already been identified and marked for cuts. Our input wasn’t sought, but we’ll be the ones living with whatever new world order comes out of this.
The throne speech is as interesting for what’s not in it as it is for what’s mentioned. There’s not a single word about income assistance, poverty, affordable rental housing, or mental health and addiction services during hard times ahead, even though the downturn is already having a heavy impact on all those areas. Aside from a brief reference to the need to “strengthen our social fabric,” there was no talk of social services at all.
Shall we take that to mean such issues are so deeply a part of our value system in B.C. that we no longer need to include them when talking about indispensable public services? I fear not.
But we’ll just have to wait until Tuesday to know, and then through the months and years it sometimes takes for the impact of cuts made in haste to hit home. In the meantime, read between the lines at http://www.leg.bc.ca/39th1st/4-8-39-1.htm.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
We're NOT going to take it - are we?
Ever been to one of those meetings where you’re thinking damn, if I have to take another five minutes of this, I’m going to run screaming from the room?
BC Ferries has found an easy solution. They just pay their directors to go - $1,500 a pop if you’re there in person, $750 if you phone in. And that’s on top of the $48,000-$58,000 a year the directors are already getting just to be on the board - an amount that’s quite a bit more than the full-year working wage of an average Canadian.
What the heck is going on? So much is weird in this world around the things we give value to that I sometimes fantasize about becoming one of those crazed tax resisters holed up in a (sunny) hideaway in some distant land. I mean, really, when IS the revolution?
Something dehumanizing must happen to people when they reach the top of the food chain. Otherwise, how could it be that just sitting on a board of directors ends up being worth more than, say, a full year of difficult, stressful work for a bullet-sweating manager of a typical non-profit?
There are nine directors on the ferry authority. Eight receive an annual stipend of $48,000 for agreeing to be on the board, and $10,000 more if they chair a committee. The ninth is the board chair, who gets $140,000. In the last fiscal year, the directors met six times as a full board, and 10 additional times as committees.
If we assume that all nine attended the board meetings (wouldn’t you if someone was paying you $1,500 to be there?), that’s another $81,000, and a further $75,000 if half are presumed to have attended the committee meetings. All in: about $700,000.
My mind often goes to the non-profit sector when I hear about stuff like this, because the contrast is just so dramatic - especially with the government revising its 2009-10 budget downward at this very moment and scaring the wits out of every non-profit in town.
So here’s an interesting fact: What the ferries board got paid last year just to go to a few meetings and stand as directors is substantially richer than the total annual budget of PEERS when I was finishing up my time there as executive director in 2007.
We employed 11 people at PEERS at that time, most of whom were coming out of tough circumstance. We provided outreach to more than 100 women. We ran a training program for another 50 or so participants who came for help getting their lives on track. I like to think we made a real difference in a lot of people’s lives.
Obviously, it’s difficult to compare the worth of providing support to citizens in need with keeping the ferry service running. I’ve seen loads of stats on the tremendous value the ferry service adds to the B.C. economy, but nothing from government that measures the worth of the thousands of little agencies that help British Columbians stabilize and improve their lives.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be clear on any of that to question whether being on the board of the ferry authority should ever be worth more than a year of work for the average Canadian. I say no.
Another example of top-of-the-food-chain syndrome: the use of gambling revenues. Anticipate disaster for non-profits if the grants really are frozen this year, because the arts and culture grants hitting the headlines now are just the first of seven waves of annual grants that thousands of agencies depend on.
Once upon a time, British Columbians agreed to let government turn gambling into a major revenue stream, largely because charities were supposed to reap the benefits. And gambling did indeed turn into a major revenue stream, one that generates over a billion dollars a year in net profit for the province. That’s more than a 100 per cent increase from a decade ago.
But the amount designated for charity has risen less than 25 per cent. Ten years ago, 5,000 B.C. charities shared just under a third of all government gaming profits. Now, almost 7,000 charities compete for just 17 per cent of the pie, and the average annual grant per charity has fallen almost $3,000. And we just take it.
Throw open the nearest window, people, and lean out all crazy-eyed like Peter Finch did in the movie Network. Shout loud enough to rattle the roof in the places where it’s so painfully clear they don’t have a clue how it feels to be us: We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Ever been to one of those meetings where you’re thinking damn, if I have to take another five minutes of this, I’m going to run screaming from the room?
BC Ferries has found an easy solution. They just pay their directors to go - $1,500 a pop if you’re there in person, $750 if you phone in. And that’s on top of the $48,000-$58,000 a year the directors are already getting just to be on the board - an amount that’s quite a bit more than the full-year working wage of an average Canadian.
What the heck is going on? So much is weird in this world around the things we give value to that I sometimes fantasize about becoming one of those crazed tax resisters holed up in a (sunny) hideaway in some distant land. I mean, really, when IS the revolution?
Something dehumanizing must happen to people when they reach the top of the food chain. Otherwise, how could it be that just sitting on a board of directors ends up being worth more than, say, a full year of difficult, stressful work for a bullet-sweating manager of a typical non-profit?
There are nine directors on the ferry authority. Eight receive an annual stipend of $48,000 for agreeing to be on the board, and $10,000 more if they chair a committee. The ninth is the board chair, who gets $140,000. In the last fiscal year, the directors met six times as a full board, and 10 additional times as committees.
If we assume that all nine attended the board meetings (wouldn’t you if someone was paying you $1,500 to be there?), that’s another $81,000, and a further $75,000 if half are presumed to have attended the committee meetings. All in: about $700,000.
My mind often goes to the non-profit sector when I hear about stuff like this, because the contrast is just so dramatic - especially with the government revising its 2009-10 budget downward at this very moment and scaring the wits out of every non-profit in town.
So here’s an interesting fact: What the ferries board got paid last year just to go to a few meetings and stand as directors is substantially richer than the total annual budget of PEERS when I was finishing up my time there as executive director in 2007.
We employed 11 people at PEERS at that time, most of whom were coming out of tough circumstance. We provided outreach to more than 100 women. We ran a training program for another 50 or so participants who came for help getting their lives on track. I like to think we made a real difference in a lot of people’s lives.
Obviously, it’s difficult to compare the worth of providing support to citizens in need with keeping the ferry service running. I’ve seen loads of stats on the tremendous value the ferry service adds to the B.C. economy, but nothing from government that measures the worth of the thousands of little agencies that help British Columbians stabilize and improve their lives.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be clear on any of that to question whether being on the board of the ferry authority should ever be worth more than a year of work for the average Canadian. I say no.
Another example of top-of-the-food-chain syndrome: the use of gambling revenues. Anticipate disaster for non-profits if the grants really are frozen this year, because the arts and culture grants hitting the headlines now are just the first of seven waves of annual grants that thousands of agencies depend on.
Once upon a time, British Columbians agreed to let government turn gambling into a major revenue stream, largely because charities were supposed to reap the benefits. And gambling did indeed turn into a major revenue stream, one that generates over a billion dollars a year in net profit for the province. That’s more than a 100 per cent increase from a decade ago.
But the amount designated for charity has risen less than 25 per cent. Ten years ago, 5,000 B.C. charities shared just under a third of all government gaming profits. Now, almost 7,000 charities compete for just 17 per cent of the pie, and the average annual grant per charity has fallen almost $3,000. And we just take it.
Throw open the nearest window, people, and lean out all crazy-eyed like Peter Finch did in the movie Network. Shout loud enough to rattle the roof in the places where it’s so painfully clear they don’t have a clue how it feels to be us: We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Old West-style justice system strands binner in Oak Bay
Hear the one about the homeless guy stranded in Oak Bay?
It’d make a pretty good opening line for a joke. But there’s nothing funny about it in reality, seeing as the man who it happened to had no access to food or shelter for 10 days because of a court order banishing him from the City of Victoria.
The courts routinely use “red zone” orders for drug charges to keep people away from certain areas where drugs are bought and sold. The red zone in our region is typically downtown Victoria - roughly the area bounded by Cook, Store, Belleville and Discovery streets.
But binner Ron Beland got hit with the red-zone order of all time last month. Charged with assault after a fight with another homeless man, Beland found himself ordered out of the entire City of Victoria until his next court appearance 10 days later.
Seeing as the region’s only services and supports for homeless people are in the City of Victoria, that left Beland to dig through dumpsters for food and sleep in an Oak Bay park for the duration. Lucky thing it all happened during a stretch of good weather; had it happened during winter, it might have been “a death sentence,” notes Beland.
“Everything I need - everything - is in the downtown,” said Beland. “I showed the Oak Bay cops my order, and they were like, ‘What??!’ They can’t even take me to the drunk tank, because Oak Bay doesn’t have one and I’m not allowed in Victoria.”
Crown counsel spokesman Robin Baird was unaware of Beland’s case and surprised to hear of the extent of the order, although he recalled another time when a judge ordered a Nanaimo man to stay south of the 49th parallel.
“It kind of smacks of the old westerns - taking someone to the outskirts of town,” admitted Baird. “I think that’s too broad a brush for the court to be using. [The justice system] bears the onus at every stage to show that the restrictions on a person’s liberty are not being unduly infringed upon.”
Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton hadn’t heard about Beland’s banishment either. He was concerned both for Beland’s well-being and the risk to Oak Bay citizens, seeing as Beland was charged with assault.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” said Causton. “I don’t know what the backup is at times like this, but we don’t have any services.”
John Howard Society executive director Dave Johnson said he’s been noticing “red-zone creep” in the court orders of his organization’s clients, both in the reach of the zones and the types of offences the orders are used for. It’s not uncommon to see red-zone orders nowadays that extend all the way to the John Howard neighbourhood of Rock Bay, said Johnson - meaning a client risks breaching a court order just by coming in for support.
“But I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says Johnson of Beland’s order. “The downtown red zone at least had boundaries that kind of made sense. Being compelled to reside in Oak Bay - well, that’s interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if police helped him relocate to Saanich.”
Defence lawyer Tom Merino deals with people like Beland all the time through his legal-aid work. He didn’t know the Beland case personally but said he’s not surprised by it, given the court’s ever-more desperate attempts to manage problems beyond its realm of expertise.
“I find these kinds of orders offensive in the extreme,” said Merino. “I understand the frustration of those in power, trying to use the limited tools available to them. But this doesn’t work. You can’t solve social problems through the courts.”
People can return to court to argue that an order is too onerous, said Merino. But they certainly can’t count on having a lawyer represent them, what with ongoing cuts to legal aid.
Had Beland breached his City of Victoria ban by sneaking downtown for a meal, for instance, he wouldn’t have qualified for legal aid. “Category one” offences such as breaches were delisted as a legal-aid category in B.C. two months ago.
Last we talked, Beland was surviving his 10-day banishment with a little help from his friends - two Victoria binners whose daily bottle routes take them to the Oak Bay border. They shared food, sherry and companionship with Beland, who wasn’t used to the quiet Oak Bay scene.
“I have to get back downtown. I need the services,” said Beland. “It’s also the money spot for a binner like me.”
Hear the one about the homeless guy stranded in Oak Bay?
It’d make a pretty good opening line for a joke. But there’s nothing funny about it in reality, seeing as the man who it happened to had no access to food or shelter for 10 days because of a court order banishing him from the City of Victoria.
The courts routinely use “red zone” orders for drug charges to keep people away from certain areas where drugs are bought and sold. The red zone in our region is typically downtown Victoria - roughly the area bounded by Cook, Store, Belleville and Discovery streets.
But binner Ron Beland got hit with the red-zone order of all time last month. Charged with assault after a fight with another homeless man, Beland found himself ordered out of the entire City of Victoria until his next court appearance 10 days later.
Seeing as the region’s only services and supports for homeless people are in the City of Victoria, that left Beland to dig through dumpsters for food and sleep in an Oak Bay park for the duration. Lucky thing it all happened during a stretch of good weather; had it happened during winter, it might have been “a death sentence,” notes Beland.
“Everything I need - everything - is in the downtown,” said Beland. “I showed the Oak Bay cops my order, and they were like, ‘What??!’ They can’t even take me to the drunk tank, because Oak Bay doesn’t have one and I’m not allowed in Victoria.”
Crown counsel spokesman Robin Baird was unaware of Beland’s case and surprised to hear of the extent of the order, although he recalled another time when a judge ordered a Nanaimo man to stay south of the 49th parallel.
“It kind of smacks of the old westerns - taking someone to the outskirts of town,” admitted Baird. “I think that’s too broad a brush for the court to be using. [The justice system] bears the onus at every stage to show that the restrictions on a person’s liberty are not being unduly infringed upon.”
Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton hadn’t heard about Beland’s banishment either. He was concerned both for Beland’s well-being and the risk to Oak Bay citizens, seeing as Beland was charged with assault.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” said Causton. “I don’t know what the backup is at times like this, but we don’t have any services.”
John Howard Society executive director Dave Johnson said he’s been noticing “red-zone creep” in the court orders of his organization’s clients, both in the reach of the zones and the types of offences the orders are used for. It’s not uncommon to see red-zone orders nowadays that extend all the way to the John Howard neighbourhood of Rock Bay, said Johnson - meaning a client risks breaching a court order just by coming in for support.
“But I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says Johnson of Beland’s order. “The downtown red zone at least had boundaries that kind of made sense. Being compelled to reside in Oak Bay - well, that’s interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if police helped him relocate to Saanich.”
Defence lawyer Tom Merino deals with people like Beland all the time through his legal-aid work. He didn’t know the Beland case personally but said he’s not surprised by it, given the court’s ever-more desperate attempts to manage problems beyond its realm of expertise.
“I find these kinds of orders offensive in the extreme,” said Merino. “I understand the frustration of those in power, trying to use the limited tools available to them. But this doesn’t work. You can’t solve social problems through the courts.”
People can return to court to argue that an order is too onerous, said Merino. But they certainly can’t count on having a lawyer represent them, what with ongoing cuts to legal aid.
Had Beland breached his City of Victoria ban by sneaking downtown for a meal, for instance, he wouldn’t have qualified for legal aid. “Category one” offences such as breaches were delisted as a legal-aid category in B.C. two months ago.
Last we talked, Beland was surviving his 10-day banishment with a little help from his friends - two Victoria binners whose daily bottle routes take them to the Oak Bay border. They shared food, sherry and companionship with Beland, who wasn’t used to the quiet Oak Bay scene.
“I have to get back downtown. I need the services,” said Beland. “It’s also the money spot for a binner like me.”
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction'
Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests.
But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system.
Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with.
Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify as sub-par.
Kudos to the B.C. Liberals for initiating the satisfaction surveys in 2003. It's important to be taking the measure of all our systems to ensure they're effective and efficient. I appreciate government that opens itself up to public scrutiny in the interest of doing a better job.
But if we're bothering to ask students and parents whether they're happy with our schools, you'd presume we'd also want to act on what they tell us. Five years of poor scores in several major categories looks to me like we're not doing that.
The satisfaction surveys are given annually to parents, school staff, and certain grades of students. The 18 questions gauge people's perceptions of how well their school is doing in terms of student achievement, human and social development, school environment, safety, computer skills and physical activity.
There are bright spots in the 2007-08 survey. Most students feel safe at school. Most report that their teachers help them with their problems. More than 80 per cent think their school is inclusive and welcoming to people who are "different." At least three-quarters of parents are satisfied with what their child is learning in school, up four percentage points since the surveys first started.
Still, there's significant room for improvement on all fronts, and work to do to understand why satisfaction rates drop so precipitously as students enter secondary school.
Students are surveyed in Grade 3-4 and again in grades 7, 10 and 12. The across-the-board drop in satisfaction as they progress through the grades is striking. Asked whether they're getting better in math, for instance, 81 per cent of Grade 3-4s in the most recent survey agreed. The figure falls to 72 per cent among Grade 7s and 59 per cent for Grade 10s. By Grade 12, only half of the students are seeing improvement.
The downward trend is similar for all categories, and particularly dramatic in the area of school environment. Students who replied affirmatively to the question of whether their teacher cared about them, for instance, goes from a high of 92 per cent among Grade 3-4 students to just 54 per cent by Grade 12. Even parents seem to be aware of a shift in teachers' attitudes toward their children as they make their way through the grades, with 89 per cent of elementary-school parents reporting that teachers care for their child compared to just 71 per cent of secondary school parents.
Much like their children, parents become significantly less satisfied with the system as students get into higher grades. Some of the lowest satisfaction rates for parents are around secondary schools' efforts to prepare their child for a job or college/university.
Fewer than half of secondary-school parents think their child's school is doing a good job of preparing the student for work. Just 57 per cent think their child is being well-prepared for post-secondary. (Those are 2007-08 figures, but the numbers have barely budged since surveys started in 2003.) Students have an even poorer perception of how ready they are, with just 40 per cent of Grade 12 students agreeing that their school has prepared them adequately for the workforce.
The surveys also identify a major gap between school staff's perceptions of how well they're doing compared with parent and student perceptions.
In general, staff members feel strongly that their schools are doing a good job on all fronts (with the possible exception of teaching computer skills, which everyone seems to agree isn't going well).
That's a problem. How can staff tackle the serious concerns identified by parents and students if, in their mind, everything's just fine?
It's clearly not.
To read the full report, click here: http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/PubDocs/bcdocs/447534/prov.pdf
Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests.
But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system.
Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with.
Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify as sub-par.
Kudos to the B.C. Liberals for initiating the satisfaction surveys in 2003. It's important to be taking the measure of all our systems to ensure they're effective and efficient. I appreciate government that opens itself up to public scrutiny in the interest of doing a better job.
But if we're bothering to ask students and parents whether they're happy with our schools, you'd presume we'd also want to act on what they tell us. Five years of poor scores in several major categories looks to me like we're not doing that.
The satisfaction surveys are given annually to parents, school staff, and certain grades of students. The 18 questions gauge people's perceptions of how well their school is doing in terms of student achievement, human and social development, school environment, safety, computer skills and physical activity.
There are bright spots in the 2007-08 survey. Most students feel safe at school. Most report that their teachers help them with their problems. More than 80 per cent think their school is inclusive and welcoming to people who are "different." At least three-quarters of parents are satisfied with what their child is learning in school, up four percentage points since the surveys first started.
Still, there's significant room for improvement on all fronts, and work to do to understand why satisfaction rates drop so precipitously as students enter secondary school.
Students are surveyed in Grade 3-4 and again in grades 7, 10 and 12. The across-the-board drop in satisfaction as they progress through the grades is striking. Asked whether they're getting better in math, for instance, 81 per cent of Grade 3-4s in the most recent survey agreed. The figure falls to 72 per cent among Grade 7s and 59 per cent for Grade 10s. By Grade 12, only half of the students are seeing improvement.
The downward trend is similar for all categories, and particularly dramatic in the area of school environment. Students who replied affirmatively to the question of whether their teacher cared about them, for instance, goes from a high of 92 per cent among Grade 3-4 students to just 54 per cent by Grade 12. Even parents seem to be aware of a shift in teachers' attitudes toward their children as they make their way through the grades, with 89 per cent of elementary-school parents reporting that teachers care for their child compared to just 71 per cent of secondary school parents.
Much like their children, parents become significantly less satisfied with the system as students get into higher grades. Some of the lowest satisfaction rates for parents are around secondary schools' efforts to prepare their child for a job or college/university.
Fewer than half of secondary-school parents think their child's school is doing a good job of preparing the student for work. Just 57 per cent think their child is being well-prepared for post-secondary. (Those are 2007-08 figures, but the numbers have barely budged since surveys started in 2003.) Students have an even poorer perception of how ready they are, with just 40 per cent of Grade 12 students agreeing that their school has prepared them adequately for the workforce.
The surveys also identify a major gap between school staff's perceptions of how well they're doing compared with parent and student perceptions.
In general, staff members feel strongly that their schools are doing a good job on all fronts (with the possible exception of teaching computer skills, which everyone seems to agree isn't going well).
That's a problem. How can staff tackle the serious concerns identified by parents and students if, in their mind, everything's just fine?
It's clearly not.
To read the full report, click here: http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/PubDocs/bcdocs/447534/prov.pdf
Friday, March 27, 2009
Big picture essential when deciding on run-of-river projects
Once upon a time, a previous generation of British Columbians made tough, costly choices on behalf of future citizens. Now it’s our turn, with no certainty that we’re ready for it.
B.C. has enjoyed a seemingly limitless supply of cheap “green” electricity for 40 years thanks to the giant dams built on the Peace and Columbia rivers back when mega-projects and environmental sensitivities weren’t quite so at odds with each other.
But in recent years the population has grown to the point that we’re using more electricity than we generate. The painful process of figuring out what to do about that is underway, but with all-new challenges and complexities that render much of our previous hydro history moot as a guide for what needs to be done.
Is the provincial government up to the task? That’s a big question, as revealed in this week’s headlines about the feverish interest building in the private sector over “run of river” projects. Using similar principles to the big dam sites but on a much smaller scale, such projects are busting out all over B.C., with virtually no public process in place to ponder what it’s all going to mean at the end of the day.
We can’t have it all ways, of course. If we want continued access to inexpensive, abundant electricity generated in ways that are relatively easy on the environment, we’re going to have to tolerate some fairly major industrial development along the way.
As those massive dams on the Peace attest, reliable and affordable electricity always comes at something of a price. You simply can’t produce a consistent supply of clean electricity without cutting down trees, altering scenic vistas, threatening fish and erecting new power lines.
Renewable energy sources such as wind and water may sound gentle and benign. And when you’re talking about a little hydro project on the creek at the back of your property, maybe they are. But the infrastructure needed to harness such natural resources at a provincial scale is considerable.
The 17 projects being proposed by Plutonic Power Corporation for Bute Inlet, for instance, will each require construction of a powerhouse, a flooded area that at minimum is the size of a soccer field, and river diversions of anywhere from two to nine kilometres. In total they’ll require more than 300 kilometres of new roads and 450 kilometres of new power lines, all of it in a pristine part of the province.
It could be that we just need to suck it up and deal with all that if we want to keep the electricity coming. Environmentalists have been touting run-of-river for many years as a green alternative, and B.C. is blessed with an abundance of the kind of rivers that lend themselves well to such projects. (To be profitable for private developers, river segments tagged for diversion require a grade of at least 10 per cent.)
Several run-of-river projects are already in place on Vancouver Island, and nobody’s been howling about devastated rivers and landscapes so far. Most rivers tapped for hydro use are in remote areas anyway, so it’s not like we have to look at them on our way to work every morning.
But the truth is that we’re newbies to this business of run-of-river. And the very fact that it all takes place in remote locations means most of us will have no real clue as to the size and scope of such projects, or their impact on the local environment.
Nor do we know the cumulative impact of going ahead with several dozen such projects all at once. Many are significantly larger than anything B.C. has seen to date. All are envisaged as privately owned and managed projects.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing. But these are uncharted waters for B.C. It’s infinitely wise to proceed with great caution when starting into something new, yet government is plunging in with what appears to be wild abandon.
Yes, there is a lengthy permitting process in place for run-of-river projects - one that many proponents won’t make it through. But can we be certain that developers are getting the thorough once-over given that BC Hydro is on a tight timeline for striking new deals with private suppliers? Is anyone keeping an eye on the big picture?
Sober second thought. Public input. Careful consideration of long-term impacts. B.C.’s Liberals have been consistently weak in all these areas. If we’re not yet worried about what that will mean this time out, we ought to be.
Once upon a time, a previous generation of British Columbians made tough, costly choices on behalf of future citizens. Now it’s our turn, with no certainty that we’re ready for it.
B.C. has enjoyed a seemingly limitless supply of cheap “green” electricity for 40 years thanks to the giant dams built on the Peace and Columbia rivers back when mega-projects and environmental sensitivities weren’t quite so at odds with each other.
But in recent years the population has grown to the point that we’re using more electricity than we generate. The painful process of figuring out what to do about that is underway, but with all-new challenges and complexities that render much of our previous hydro history moot as a guide for what needs to be done.
Is the provincial government up to the task? That’s a big question, as revealed in this week’s headlines about the feverish interest building in the private sector over “run of river” projects. Using similar principles to the big dam sites but on a much smaller scale, such projects are busting out all over B.C., with virtually no public process in place to ponder what it’s all going to mean at the end of the day.
We can’t have it all ways, of course. If we want continued access to inexpensive, abundant electricity generated in ways that are relatively easy on the environment, we’re going to have to tolerate some fairly major industrial development along the way.
As those massive dams on the Peace attest, reliable and affordable electricity always comes at something of a price. You simply can’t produce a consistent supply of clean electricity without cutting down trees, altering scenic vistas, threatening fish and erecting new power lines.
Renewable energy sources such as wind and water may sound gentle and benign. And when you’re talking about a little hydro project on the creek at the back of your property, maybe they are. But the infrastructure needed to harness such natural resources at a provincial scale is considerable.
The 17 projects being proposed by Plutonic Power Corporation for Bute Inlet, for instance, will each require construction of a powerhouse, a flooded area that at minimum is the size of a soccer field, and river diversions of anywhere from two to nine kilometres. In total they’ll require more than 300 kilometres of new roads and 450 kilometres of new power lines, all of it in a pristine part of the province.
It could be that we just need to suck it up and deal with all that if we want to keep the electricity coming. Environmentalists have been touting run-of-river for many years as a green alternative, and B.C. is blessed with an abundance of the kind of rivers that lend themselves well to such projects. (To be profitable for private developers, river segments tagged for diversion require a grade of at least 10 per cent.)
Several run-of-river projects are already in place on Vancouver Island, and nobody’s been howling about devastated rivers and landscapes so far. Most rivers tapped for hydro use are in remote areas anyway, so it’s not like we have to look at them on our way to work every morning.
But the truth is that we’re newbies to this business of run-of-river. And the very fact that it all takes place in remote locations means most of us will have no real clue as to the size and scope of such projects, or their impact on the local environment.
Nor do we know the cumulative impact of going ahead with several dozen such projects all at once. Many are significantly larger than anything B.C. has seen to date. All are envisaged as privately owned and managed projects.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing. But these are uncharted waters for B.C. It’s infinitely wise to proceed with great caution when starting into something new, yet government is plunging in with what appears to be wild abandon.
Yes, there is a lengthy permitting process in place for run-of-river projects - one that many proponents won’t make it through. But can we be certain that developers are getting the thorough once-over given that BC Hydro is on a tight timeline for striking new deals with private suppliers? Is anyone keeping an eye on the big picture?
Sober second thought. Public input. Careful consideration of long-term impacts. B.C.’s Liberals have been consistently weak in all these areas. If we’re not yet worried about what that will mean this time out, we ought to be.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Sheer madness and massive waste of money to release BC prisoners to homelessness
What I’d planned for today’s column was a look at what happens when somebody without housing is released from a provincial jail in B.C.
I’d run into an interesting fellow named Reg in my downtown travels, who’d wanted to talk about the practise of releasing prisoners straight onto the streets after they’ve served their time at the jail on Wilkinson Road. He told me it had happened to him more times than he could count.
But sometimes a column ends up becoming the story of what happened on the way to the story, and this is one of those.
First, a few statistics to give you a sense of the issue at hand. B.C. has nine jails, which at any given point in time are housing close to 2,800 prisoners serving sentences of less than two years. The average stay is 55 days, so that means as many as 18,500 people moving in and out of B.C. jails in any given year, at a cost of almost $160 million.
That’s just the cost to lock them up, of course. On top of that are the far larger costs of crime itself - obvious things like policing and courts, but also the incalculable costs borne by the 300,000 British Columbians who are victims of crime in a typical year.
Big stuff. You’d presume somebody in the provincial government would be keeping a careful eye on all of that, wouldn’t you? You’d presume somebody would have realized that releasing prisoners to the street is a recipe for more crime, more street problems and more cost.
But you’d be wrong. It turns out the government doesn’t even keep records of how many prisoners are being released into homelessness, let alone question the practise.
Nor is anyone monitoring the number of repeat offenders cycling through B.C. jails. BC Corrections spokesman Bruce Bannerman tells me the provinces have never been able to reach agreement on a single definition of “recidivism,” so nobody tracks it anymore.
I’d initially set out to try to talk to somebody at Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre about the problem, but that turned out to be a wild fantasy. I was diverted to BC Corrections first, then made my own way to the Public Safety Ministry four days later when my calls still hadn’t been returned.
Six days after my first inquiry and half an hour past the time I’d given as my absolute deadline, I got a call from Bannerman.
Corrections worries about corrections issues, he told me. Once a prisoner’s sentence is done, it’s up to “community partners” and other government agencies to take it from there.
Considering that there is no government agency that actually finds people housing - and no housing to be found by the weary, underfunded “community partners” who are out there looking - I guess that answers my question about whether prisoners are being released straight to the streets.
Bannerman says that at least these days, everyone coming out of B.C. prisons gets $200 or so from the welfare ministry as they leave. That’s a change from a few years ago when they walked out the door with nothing. Reg says it’s hard not to want to buy drugs or alcohol with the money, especially given how many prisoners these days have addictions.
BC Corrections wants me and you to believe that we can leave it to “community partners” to take care of things on the other side of the prison wall. But it’s just not true. Agencies are doing what they can to find housing, but there’s very little housing to be found. The new Victoria Integrated Community Outreach Team (VICOT) is showing some early successes in housing 50 chronic offenders with diagnosed mental illness, but there are far more people than that who need the help and VICOT already seems to be at capacity.
Reg says he can always tell during a stint at “Wilkie” when a fellow prisoner is due for release, because all they’ll be talking about is whether anyone knows a place where they can stay.
When Reg got out of jail three weeks ago, he was under a court order stipulating he stay at a recovery house as a condition of being released. Yet he still ended up released to the streets. He dreams of opening a transition house specifically for men coming out of prison and trying to stay out of trouble - men like him.
“Right now, people are getting out of Wilkie and are back there almost immediately,” he says. “How long’s it going to take once you’re out on the street before you get some crack and booze in you and kick in somebody’s door?”
What I’d planned for today’s column was a look at what happens when somebody without housing is released from a provincial jail in B.C.
I’d run into an interesting fellow named Reg in my downtown travels, who’d wanted to talk about the practise of releasing prisoners straight onto the streets after they’ve served their time at the jail on Wilkinson Road. He told me it had happened to him more times than he could count.
But sometimes a column ends up becoming the story of what happened on the way to the story, and this is one of those.
First, a few statistics to give you a sense of the issue at hand. B.C. has nine jails, which at any given point in time are housing close to 2,800 prisoners serving sentences of less than two years. The average stay is 55 days, so that means as many as 18,500 people moving in and out of B.C. jails in any given year, at a cost of almost $160 million.
That’s just the cost to lock them up, of course. On top of that are the far larger costs of crime itself - obvious things like policing and courts, but also the incalculable costs borne by the 300,000 British Columbians who are victims of crime in a typical year.
Big stuff. You’d presume somebody in the provincial government would be keeping a careful eye on all of that, wouldn’t you? You’d presume somebody would have realized that releasing prisoners to the street is a recipe for more crime, more street problems and more cost.
But you’d be wrong. It turns out the government doesn’t even keep records of how many prisoners are being released into homelessness, let alone question the practise.
Nor is anyone monitoring the number of repeat offenders cycling through B.C. jails. BC Corrections spokesman Bruce Bannerman tells me the provinces have never been able to reach agreement on a single definition of “recidivism,” so nobody tracks it anymore.
I’d initially set out to try to talk to somebody at Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre about the problem, but that turned out to be a wild fantasy. I was diverted to BC Corrections first, then made my own way to the Public Safety Ministry four days later when my calls still hadn’t been returned.
Six days after my first inquiry and half an hour past the time I’d given as my absolute deadline, I got a call from Bannerman.
Corrections worries about corrections issues, he told me. Once a prisoner’s sentence is done, it’s up to “community partners” and other government agencies to take it from there.
Considering that there is no government agency that actually finds people housing - and no housing to be found by the weary, underfunded “community partners” who are out there looking - I guess that answers my question about whether prisoners are being released straight to the streets.
Bannerman says that at least these days, everyone coming out of B.C. prisons gets $200 or so from the welfare ministry as they leave. That’s a change from a few years ago when they walked out the door with nothing. Reg says it’s hard not to want to buy drugs or alcohol with the money, especially given how many prisoners these days have addictions.
BC Corrections wants me and you to believe that we can leave it to “community partners” to take care of things on the other side of the prison wall. But it’s just not true. Agencies are doing what they can to find housing, but there’s very little housing to be found. The new Victoria Integrated Community Outreach Team (VICOT) is showing some early successes in housing 50 chronic offenders with diagnosed mental illness, but there are far more people than that who need the help and VICOT already seems to be at capacity.
Reg says he can always tell during a stint at “Wilkie” when a fellow prisoner is due for release, because all they’ll be talking about is whether anyone knows a place where they can stay.
When Reg got out of jail three weeks ago, he was under a court order stipulating he stay at a recovery house as a condition of being released. Yet he still ended up released to the streets. He dreams of opening a transition house specifically for men coming out of prison and trying to stay out of trouble - men like him.
“Right now, people are getting out of Wilkie and are back there almost immediately,” he says. “How long’s it going to take once you’re out on the street before you get some crack and booze in you and kick in somebody’s door?”
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Do you know where your laws are?
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
Monday, September 24, 2007
U.S. corporation takes another piece of B.C.'s human service work
Sept. 21, 2007
For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation.
The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services.
But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada.
Providence bought WCG less than a month after the Victoria company had secured the better part of $18 million in contracts with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. Of the eight contracts awarded in B.C. for services to people with disabilities, WCG secured four of the most lucrative ones - Vancouver Island north and south, the Fraser Valley, and northern B.C.
WCG has run welfare-to-work and the Triumph disability program for several years now, so no surprise it got the contracts. First hired by the New Democrats in the mid-1990s to get people off welfare and back to work, the company has continued to do very well under the Liberals.
It’s difficult to gauge the success of the venture overall, given that the only absolute measurement is whether fewer people are receiving welfare. We don’t know if their lives have been improved because of that, or if they managed to maintain whatever job was found for them. External factors - a booming economy, for instance - complicate things even more.
So all that can be said with certainty about this past decade’s efforts is that 230,000 fewer British Columbians are on welfare now compared to 1995, and that companies like WCG have played a key role in that.
That our streets, hospitals and jails are now overflowing with people who are no longer receiving welfare - well, that’s a subject for another day. For now, let’s stick to the sale of WCG, and what it means to have a U.S. monolith now calling the shots in great swaths of the province.
Providence founder Fletcher Jay McCusker was running for-profit reform schools when he “saw an opportunity” in the mid-1990s to expand the business.
Governments throughout the U.S. were losing interest in providing social services, but in many cases were required by federal law to continue the work. Meanwhile, social need was growing. For the private sector, those factors pointed the way to a “recession resistant” industry, notes the Providence Web site in its section for investors.
Providence now has a workforce of more than 7,000 operating a soup-to-nuts list of social services in 37 states. The purchase of WCG marks Providence’s first foray into work programs for people with disabilities, but its other offerings run the gamut: probation services; domestic-abuse counselling; foster care; parole supervision; child and youth behavioural programs. Florida’s entire child-protection system is now run by Providence, under a contract the company touts to potential investors as “economically insulated.”
In the topsy-turvy world of profiting from human misery, worsening economic conditions are actually “market drivers” for companies like Providence. There’s a financial interest in maintaining poverty and suffering.
With all the social problems the U.S. is experiencing, that means there’s nowhere to go but up. The emerging industry that Providence defines has the potential to thrive in times of economic downturn.
And if two years in a row of “double-digit returns” aren’t enough to convince wary investors of that, Providence offers a grim array of statistics to verify the growing dependency on its services. More than 40 million Americans now living in poverty. Almost five million adults released every year on parole. Two million children needing protective care. Half a million kids in foster care. High-school dropout rates at 33 per cent and rising.
The company adds that it is “further driving revenue growth by expanding into select geographic markets, including Canada.” We’re a prime market, as it turns out - lots of “liberal benefits” for job training and government interest in offloading the provision of social services.
Do we want to go in this direction? Is there even time to ascertain that before all is lost?
Providence is voraciously expanding its empire by buying up businesses like WCG and signing management contracts with not-for-profits. In an age when bigger is always assumed to be better, each acquisition positions Providence to snap up even more government contracts.
“Most of our competitors are small, local, not-for-profit kind of United Way agencies. This has historically been very parochial - that is, they are interested only in their community and providing services to their community,” McCusker said in a recent interview with the Wall Street on-line magazine TWST.com. “The more we do, the more credible we become with the state procurement people.”
He’s right. And it really scares me.
Sept. 21, 2007
For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation.
The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services.
But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada.
Providence bought WCG less than a month after the Victoria company had secured the better part of $18 million in contracts with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. Of the eight contracts awarded in B.C. for services to people with disabilities, WCG secured four of the most lucrative ones - Vancouver Island north and south, the Fraser Valley, and northern B.C.
WCG has run welfare-to-work and the Triumph disability program for several years now, so no surprise it got the contracts. First hired by the New Democrats in the mid-1990s to get people off welfare and back to work, the company has continued to do very well under the Liberals.
It’s difficult to gauge the success of the venture overall, given that the only absolute measurement is whether fewer people are receiving welfare. We don’t know if their lives have been improved because of that, or if they managed to maintain whatever job was found for them. External factors - a booming economy, for instance - complicate things even more.
So all that can be said with certainty about this past decade’s efforts is that 230,000 fewer British Columbians are on welfare now compared to 1995, and that companies like WCG have played a key role in that.
That our streets, hospitals and jails are now overflowing with people who are no longer receiving welfare - well, that’s a subject for another day. For now, let’s stick to the sale of WCG, and what it means to have a U.S. monolith now calling the shots in great swaths of the province.
Providence founder Fletcher Jay McCusker was running for-profit reform schools when he “saw an opportunity” in the mid-1990s to expand the business.
Governments throughout the U.S. were losing interest in providing social services, but in many cases were required by federal law to continue the work. Meanwhile, social need was growing. For the private sector, those factors pointed the way to a “recession resistant” industry, notes the Providence Web site in its section for investors.
Providence now has a workforce of more than 7,000 operating a soup-to-nuts list of social services in 37 states. The purchase of WCG marks Providence’s first foray into work programs for people with disabilities, but its other offerings run the gamut: probation services; domestic-abuse counselling; foster care; parole supervision; child and youth behavioural programs. Florida’s entire child-protection system is now run by Providence, under a contract the company touts to potential investors as “economically insulated.”
In the topsy-turvy world of profiting from human misery, worsening economic conditions are actually “market drivers” for companies like Providence. There’s a financial interest in maintaining poverty and suffering.
With all the social problems the U.S. is experiencing, that means there’s nowhere to go but up. The emerging industry that Providence defines has the potential to thrive in times of economic downturn.
And if two years in a row of “double-digit returns” aren’t enough to convince wary investors of that, Providence offers a grim array of statistics to verify the growing dependency on its services. More than 40 million Americans now living in poverty. Almost five million adults released every year on parole. Two million children needing protective care. Half a million kids in foster care. High-school dropout rates at 33 per cent and rising.
The company adds that it is “further driving revenue growth by expanding into select geographic markets, including Canada.” We’re a prime market, as it turns out - lots of “liberal benefits” for job training and government interest in offloading the provision of social services.
Do we want to go in this direction? Is there even time to ascertain that before all is lost?
Providence is voraciously expanding its empire by buying up businesses like WCG and signing management contracts with not-for-profits. In an age when bigger is always assumed to be better, each acquisition positions Providence to snap up even more government contracts.
“Most of our competitors are small, local, not-for-profit kind of United Way agencies. This has historically been very parochial - that is, they are interested only in their community and providing services to their community,” McCusker said in a recent interview with the Wall Street on-line magazine TWST.com. “The more we do, the more credible we become with the state procurement people.”
He’s right. And it really scares me.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Caution essential to revamp of BC Wildlife Act
Aug. 3, 2007
Hunting isn’t my thing, but I recognize it as a genuine B.C. activity beloved by tens of thousands.
So I’ve worked hard at staving off any kneejerk reaction to recent news that the Environment Ministry hopes to get another 20,000 hunters out into the woods over the next few years.
Six per cent of British Columbians hunted 25 years ago. Nowadays, just two per cent of us do. In real numbers, that’s a 50 per cent drop - from 168,000 active B.C. hunters in 1981, to 84,000 today.
I can see why hunters might want to bolster their ranks. I can also see why the government is on side, given the potential boost to the economy of B.C.’s struggling rural communities that could result from increased hunting activity.
But look beyond the headlines about the push for more hunters, and you’ll find more substantial things to worry about. While a few more hunters likely won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, other proposed changes to the provincial Wildlife Act are potentially less benign.
Whatever you or I might think about hunting, the reality is that it’s a traditional B.C. industry and a pleasant seasonal past-time for resident hunters.
The various aspects of hunting generate roughly $50 million a year in B.C. The money flows from a number of sources - from the sale of hunting licences to recreational local hunters wanting a freezerful of venison, to the big-ticket extravaganzas booked by rich U.S. hunters in search of big game.
Hunting revenues are a drop in the bucket compared to tourism overall. They represent a mere one per cent of the $5-billion tourist industry, and a fraction of the $900 million generated every year by the wildlife-viewing industry.
A thoughtful, well-enforced Wildlife Act is obviously key to keeping all those industries healthy while also protecting the wonderful birds, fish and animals we’ve been blessed with in this province. A series of public consultations around the act has just wrapped up, and the Environment Ministry’s 2007-2010 service plan has also put forward several major operational changes for consideration.
Boosting the number of hunters is part of that plan. But there’s also a proposal to deregulate many aspects of the commercial hunting industry, and to hand off oversight to an industry-led board that would take over much of the supervisory functions currently done by government.
That’s considerably more scary than a campaign to find more hunters.
The Liberals’ viewpoint - leaving aside their ideological drive toward smaller government - is that those making money from a resource are the most motivated to look after it into the future. If you’re a guide-outfitter making a good living at helping U.S. hunters bag mountain sheep, you’re presumed to have more of an interest than most of us in making sure that B.C. doesn’t run out of them.
I get the theory, and appreciate that self-interest very often creates positive change in surprising ways. B.C. guide-outfitters, for instance, often end up as passionate advocates of saving old-growth forest, because logging disrupts grizzly-bear habitat.
Unfortunately, history is littered with any number of catastrophes that resulted from leaving industry insufficiently supervised.
When oversight falters, terrible things happen. Surely we’ve devastated enough fisheries, forests, mines and pristine wilderness in B.C. alone to have seen that for ourselves, and that’s not even counting things like the leaky-condo debacle, toxic prescription drugs, corporate fraud and numerous other examples of industry malfeasance.
I don’t mean to suggest that anything like that is going on in B.C.’s hunting industry. No doubt most folks in the industry are abiding by the rules, even in the absence of significant enforcement on the ground.
Yet we still need to think long and hard about what it would mean to shift to “outcome-based” oversight of the industry, as detailed in the ministry’s service plan.
For those not used to the jargon, achieving an outcome simply means you accomplished a specific goal. You made more money. Found more customers. Saved more lives. Gave better service.
But when it comes to natural resources, outcomes are a tricky business. On the one hand, industry could turn out to be better stewards of the resource than government itself. On the other, maybe not - and the damage could be irreparable by the time we realize that under an outcome-based regulatory system.
The challenge lies in balancing the needs of today against those of tomorrow. The reason B.C.’s rural economies are floundering right now is because previous generations didn’t get that balance right. We’ll be picking up the pieces from our shattered forest and fishing industries for a long time to come.
In terms of managing B.C. wildlife for the future, 20,000 more hunters isn’t likely to be the tipping point that brings things crashing down. The same can’t be said for handing over to industry the bulk of regulatory control for this precious resource.
Aug. 3, 2007
Hunting isn’t my thing, but I recognize it as a genuine B.C. activity beloved by tens of thousands.
So I’ve worked hard at staving off any kneejerk reaction to recent news that the Environment Ministry hopes to get another 20,000 hunters out into the woods over the next few years.
Six per cent of British Columbians hunted 25 years ago. Nowadays, just two per cent of us do. In real numbers, that’s a 50 per cent drop - from 168,000 active B.C. hunters in 1981, to 84,000 today.
I can see why hunters might want to bolster their ranks. I can also see why the government is on side, given the potential boost to the economy of B.C.’s struggling rural communities that could result from increased hunting activity.
But look beyond the headlines about the push for more hunters, and you’ll find more substantial things to worry about. While a few more hunters likely won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, other proposed changes to the provincial Wildlife Act are potentially less benign.
Whatever you or I might think about hunting, the reality is that it’s a traditional B.C. industry and a pleasant seasonal past-time for resident hunters.
The various aspects of hunting generate roughly $50 million a year in B.C. The money flows from a number of sources - from the sale of hunting licences to recreational local hunters wanting a freezerful of venison, to the big-ticket extravaganzas booked by rich U.S. hunters in search of big game.
Hunting revenues are a drop in the bucket compared to tourism overall. They represent a mere one per cent of the $5-billion tourist industry, and a fraction of the $900 million generated every year by the wildlife-viewing industry.
A thoughtful, well-enforced Wildlife Act is obviously key to keeping all those industries healthy while also protecting the wonderful birds, fish and animals we’ve been blessed with in this province. A series of public consultations around the act has just wrapped up, and the Environment Ministry’s 2007-2010 service plan has also put forward several major operational changes for consideration.
Boosting the number of hunters is part of that plan. But there’s also a proposal to deregulate many aspects of the commercial hunting industry, and to hand off oversight to an industry-led board that would take over much of the supervisory functions currently done by government.
That’s considerably more scary than a campaign to find more hunters.
The Liberals’ viewpoint - leaving aside their ideological drive toward smaller government - is that those making money from a resource are the most motivated to look after it into the future. If you’re a guide-outfitter making a good living at helping U.S. hunters bag mountain sheep, you’re presumed to have more of an interest than most of us in making sure that B.C. doesn’t run out of them.
I get the theory, and appreciate that self-interest very often creates positive change in surprising ways. B.C. guide-outfitters, for instance, often end up as passionate advocates of saving old-growth forest, because logging disrupts grizzly-bear habitat.
Unfortunately, history is littered with any number of catastrophes that resulted from leaving industry insufficiently supervised.
When oversight falters, terrible things happen. Surely we’ve devastated enough fisheries, forests, mines and pristine wilderness in B.C. alone to have seen that for ourselves, and that’s not even counting things like the leaky-condo debacle, toxic prescription drugs, corporate fraud and numerous other examples of industry malfeasance.
I don’t mean to suggest that anything like that is going on in B.C.’s hunting industry. No doubt most folks in the industry are abiding by the rules, even in the absence of significant enforcement on the ground.
Yet we still need to think long and hard about what it would mean to shift to “outcome-based” oversight of the industry, as detailed in the ministry’s service plan.
For those not used to the jargon, achieving an outcome simply means you accomplished a specific goal. You made more money. Found more customers. Saved more lives. Gave better service.
But when it comes to natural resources, outcomes are a tricky business. On the one hand, industry could turn out to be better stewards of the resource than government itself. On the other, maybe not - and the damage could be irreparable by the time we realize that under an outcome-based regulatory system.
The challenge lies in balancing the needs of today against those of tomorrow. The reason B.C.’s rural economies are floundering right now is because previous generations didn’t get that balance right. We’ll be picking up the pieces from our shattered forest and fishing industries for a long time to come.
In terms of managing B.C. wildlife for the future, 20,000 more hunters isn’t likely to be the tipping point that brings things crashing down. The same can’t be said for handing over to industry the bulk of regulatory control for this precious resource.
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