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

Wal_172619 Pixabay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People just walk on by, which fosters complacency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If this smacks of heartlessness, it is anything but.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pump up the volume on the social crisis

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

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

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

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

Here's the piece: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could the stories of the dead shake us out of this moral panic?

Pixabay: Erika Wittlieb

This is a callout to people who know someone who has died in the toxic drug crisis in the last decade. I've got an idea. I'll need your help. 

Nobody can look at the faces in this Moms Stop the Harm video of lost loved ones without questioning what's going on, with more than 17,000 people dead in BC since 2016 and us seemingly powerless to act. (We aren't, but I've already written about that, so more on that later.)

That emotional connection is exactly what's needed to shake off this ennui around a four-alarm public health crisis. We seem to have parceled the toxic drug crisis into the part of our brains where we hold faint understanding of something that we don't think affects us. But it does affect us, in so many ways. 

Normally I'm all about the stats and evidence, but as the fantastic panel on moral panic pointed out at the Feb. 26 event in Peers Victoria's speaker series, we've got stacks of evidence on this issue and quite a lot of stats, at least at the death end of things. So the question becomes how you get past moral panic to actually implement the evidence-based strategies that will substantially ease the crisis. 

I think it's through the heart. Not in a Sally Struthers way - teary-eyed, sobby, pleading (sorry, Sally, loved you in Man on the Inside) - but in that way that almost instantly shakes off some of that "this is not my problem" way of thinking. I don't know what it is, but it's like the blinders come off and you finally see. For me, it was Stephen Lewis, of all things, pointing his finger out to the audience that I was in one spring day in 2004 and saying, "What are YOU doing?"

I've seen it happen a multitude of times for other people, where someone sees or experiences something out there in the realm of suffering that hits them where they live, and they get it. You can't predict when they'll have it or what's the magic sight that will open their eyes, because everybody is different, but it's a beautiful thing to see. (Tony Joe, I saw you have one.) Here's harm reduction and recovery advocate Guy Felicella talking about his father-in-law's moment. 

It can often be a long way to action from that point. But there will be zero action until a person at least has that moment. That's an important strategic reality to ponder for anyone pushing for social change, especially when an issue is stigmatized.

So let's help get them to that moment, I say. Let's bring the faces and stories of people killed in the toxic drug crisis into the world. Moms Stop the Harm's video has 300 faces, but there are thousands upon thousands more. I think there would be much power in a Humans of New York style of story-telling (an image and 150 words max) for all these people we have lost to an entirely preventable crisis.

What I'd ask for is an image, and the answer to this question: What did the world lose when this person died? I'd like their age and at least their first name, and two names are even better, because being out there with your full self, while hard, is a rejection of stigma.

The tools are in our hands, and free. Instagram would be great. Facebook has potential, though my personal sense is that the algorithm doesn't like things about toxic drugs. On the other hand, it DOES love things about people. 

Podcasts are a possibility, to bring out the voices that will reveal the enormous grief hanging over this province solely because of this preventable crisis. It would be very brave to consider X, but we could warm up on the friendlier BlueSky initially. 

We'll need some kind of consent form, of course. It's a proposal that people will need to think all the way through before participating. Some thought is needed as to who can consent to the use of an image and story. I'm imagining that things will go wrong, because they always do, and I'll tell you right now that the haters are going to hate. You're going to have to be like little Ruby Bridges in 1960 Louisiana, bravely entering the first integrated school while the white protestors hurled vile insults. 

But if you are one of the many frustrated families and supporters who can't bear the lack of action on this issue one minute more, then maybe you're OK with that. 

This thing I'm thinking about is meant to memorialize and honour those who have died, and hopefully stab people in the heart until we get action. But the use of drugs that our society believes are "evil"  is also possibly the most stigmatized social issue of our times, so it isn't an easy choice to step up. 

If you're reading this and are one of the lucky ones who doesn't know anyone who has died in the toxic drug crisis, I'd ask that you ask around and then share this with someone you know whose name comes up. Because there's definitely going to be someone in your circle. 

If you do know someone, write to me at jodypatersonmobile@gmail.com and tell me what you'd want to know before going ahead with something like this. I'm just seeing us spinning our wheels while people die, and it feels way past time to take things up a notch. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falling B grades signal community decline

Few things visualize the impact of the pandemic and the sad slide of social wellness in Greater Victoria quite so pointedly as the 2022 Vital Signs survey results.

Take a look at these charts highlighting findings from the Victoria Foundation report. 

What caught my eye was the one that compared 10 years of survey data where participants grade a dozen "key areas" that together make up a healthy community - things like belonging, arts and culture, the economy, health and wellness, standard of living, etc.

Straight As are a lot to ask for, but a B grade ought to be achievable for a Canadian city of privilege and wealth in 2022. Respondents are asked to give a B grade if they think a particular key area is good but could use some improvement. In years past, a majority of Greater Victorians responding to the survey ranked most of the key areas at B or higher.

But that was before. Vital Signs 2022 compared B grades across 10 years' worth of surveys, and what is revealed is a community that fell hard in the pandemic and has yet to find its way back out. Scores for every one of the 12 indicators fell significantly in 2020, and most are still falling. 

Sure, we're talking a global pandemic. Excuse us if we're not back to normal yet. But take a moment to mull over that decade of numbers and you'll notice how little improvement we were seeing in any of them since well before the pandemic got us. We've been "good but needs improvement" for years on key measures of community wellness, and now we're not even achieving that. 

If you've lived in Greater Victoria for any length of time, your own eyes have probably been telling you that for some time now. Mine certainly have. It's disturbing to see that housing has consistently scored poorly at least back to 2013, and yet each new year comes and goes in worsening crisis.

So yeah, could be it's the pandemic messing with our community wellness and things will be good again soon. Or not.

I pulled out five key areas to highlight in this graph below. They've seen the most dramatic decline, and yet are such necessary components of a healthy community. Belonging, getting started in the community, health and wellness, housing, safety - those are the foundations of a good life. These falling indicators are telling us that all is decidedly not well. 

What can be done? A lot. But how it will get done is the burning question. On housing, I hear the same conversations now that were going on 15 years ago. They are getting us nowhere, even while the tents and the chaos and the poisoned people and the abandoned grocery carts keep piling up along Pandora Avenue.

We are paralyzed by political cycles, shifting priorities, clashes in opinion and perspective, and a general feeling that "somebody ought to do something about that" without anyone actually thinking it's them. 

These are the crises of our times. If we are unable to figure out how to take action collectively across long-term, difficult issues that are really going to hurt to fix, our problems can only deepen. How many bad things in your own life have ever gotten better because you ignored them?

Yes, our region is a beautiful place and life is pretty good for most of us. But it's quite awful for others of us, and it's getting worse. We either get on that for real or it gets worse for everyone.

Deniers, Hoarders, Invincibles, Worriers - the many faces of our COVID-19 tribes

Sixteen faces of COVID-19 “personalities” are emerging around the world as people react to unprecedented weirdness in very different ways.

In work published at Nature.com last month, Norwegian researcher Mimi Lam identifies 16 COVID-19 personality types that are in evidence across the globe as the pandemic grinds on.

She argues that countries need to understand these "viral identities" and strive to educate people in ways that unite people rather than drive them farther apart, and to use the personality types to improve modelling of how the virus will spread in a specific region or country. "The global COVID-19 pandemic unites us with a common virus, but divides us with emergent viral identities," she notes.

“These emergent viral identities are influencing individual behavioural and government policy responses to the heightened uncertainty posed by COVID-19. Individuals often respond to policies by protecting their values and identities, so for some, COVID-19 has reinforced social and political identities,” writes Lam.

“Social identities foster a sense of belonging via attachment to social groups and their behaviours. Salient identities contribute to common views on policies and shape behaviours to benefit in-groups These salient viral identities have heightened inter-group differentiation and explain the rampant racism against the Chinese, as well as initial policy responses of border closures oriented to protect ‘Us’ against ‘Them.’ “

Here are the 16 personality types:

• Deniers, who downplay the viral threat
• Spreaders, who want the virus to spread, herd immunity to develop, and normality to return
• Harmers, who may spit or cough at others or dub COVID-19 “Boomer Remover”
• Realists, who recognise the reality of its harm and adjust their behaviours
• Worriers, who stay informed and safe to manage their uncertainty and viral-induced fear
• Contemplators, who isolate and reflect on life and the world
• Hoarders, who panic-buy food, toilet paper, and other products to quell their insecurity
• Invincibles, often youth, who believe themselves to be immune and flock to beaches and parties
• Rebels, who defiantly flout social rules restricting their individual freedoms
• Blamers, who vent their fears and frustrations onto others, discriminating against racial groups or health-care workers
• Exploiters, who exploit the situation for power or brutality
• Innovators, who design or repurpose resources, for example, for face masks, ventilators, and other medical
• Supporters, who show their solidarity in support of others through, for example, claps, songs, and rainbows
• Altruists, who help the vulnerable, elderly, and isolated
• Warriors, like the front-line health-care workers who combat its grim reality
• Veterans, who experienced SARS or MERS and willingly comply with COVID-19 restrictions

Lam notes that using these personality types to refine forecasts of COVID transmission and impact could be an important tool in managing the virus. To forecast viral transmission, for instance, these behaviours can be “clustered by their projected compliance” into the modelling, and will reveal the benefits of not just flattening the viral curve but shifting behaviours.

Deniers, Harmers, Invincibles and Rebels are “non-compliers.” Spreaders, Blamers and Exploiters are “partial compliers.” Realists, Worriers, Contemplators, Hoarders, Innovators, Supporters, Altruists, Warriors and Veterans are “compliers.” What works to shift the behaviours of one group can inflame the mood among another. 

Lam cites the different way that countries reacted to social-distancing measures as exemplifying the need for approaches that recognize the 16 types of COVID personalities and identify strategies and modelling that take into account their very different behaviours during a pandemic.

“UK and US models assumed a uniform 85–90 per cent reduction in social contacts, as reported by Chinese citizens. However, unlike authoritarian regimes, liberal democracies cannot compel their populace to follow state-imposed restrictions. Variance in individual responses and willingness to comply with COVID-19 policy interventions can be captured if epidemiological models group individuals by their salient viral identities, informed by demographic variables.”

Oh, what are my thoughts on what we need to do to improve social health in BC? Why, thanks so much for asking...

Illustration by Avril Orff for provincial forum

The lines between my professional and personal interests are quite blurred at this stage in my life, as I've had the great privilege of being able to work for many years now on issues that I feel very passionate about personally.

One such issue is social equality - in other words, supports and strategies for better social health that lift us all up, whether we need something relatively mainstream like good childcare and a safe, friendly place to grow old in, or something more intense like trauma counselling, help getting out of a gang, services for mental health, substance use, immigrant settlement and so on. Social health wears many, many hats.

In my role as part-time executive director of a very small umbrella non-profit, the Board Voice Society of BC, I was invited to speak Nov. 15 in Richmond at the Provincial Social Services Forum. I'm part of that forum through my Board Voice role, as there are a number of umbrella organizations sitting at a roundtable with government right now trying to work out a more resilient, mutually agreed upon partnership that will achieve our shared desire to strengthen, organize and sustain good social care in BC.

I was asked to speak on how the work of the roundtable could impact social change in BC. Here's what I had to say:

We do a lot of visioning about social health, in BC and around the world. We do less well at figuring out how to realize that vision. We dream big – ending homelessness, supporting every child, eliminating poverty, creating community well-being. But we rarely have structure in place underneath those dreams to guide us in achieving them.

I like metaphors, so let’s use the roofs on our houses for this one, and start with a suitably sweeping vision: “My family will live under a roof that doesn’t leak.”

It’s a great goal. But what if the reality was that you had leaks all over the place? Buckets overflowing. Bits of weakening tarpaulin pasted over some of the holes. A major reno in one corner that worked for a while but can’t keep up. Leaks patched a couple of years ago that have started dripping again. You’ve spent a fortune in buckets, mops and make-do repairs by this point. But still the roof keeps leaking.

So it is with social care, where we dream big but often struggle to identify and effectively tackle the root causes. The roof leaks until you fix the leak, right? Social care fixes social problems, and supports healthy communities in so many ways.

But just like fixing a roof, the only way to get there is by taking our lofty visions and breaking them all the way down to the strategies that can fix each one. After that, we apply them - in a planned, thoughtful, flexible, routinely updated, client-centred manner that understands that social care is as important as health care and education to all of our futures. Because we know that’s true.

I see the roundtable as a vehicle for getting us there. Nothing about social care is ever simple, but we now have a place to talk about it, one that brings us together as partners with a shared interest in improving social health.

Quality child care. Affordable housing. Interventions for kids with physical, mental or intellectual disabilities. Lifelong supports for people with intellectual disabilities. Services that improve Indigenous people’s lives. Newcomers settled in and helped to find work. Good homes for children in care all the way through to genuine adulthood, not an arbitrary age.

Supported housing for people as they age and lose function. Employment services. Recreational opportunities. Income assistance. Wellness programs. Trauma counselling. Community centres. Good work and fair wages. Clean and green communities.

These are the true determinants of health, and fundamental to the health of a province’s economy and future. Any region, any community, any neighbourhood is only as good as the health and connection of the people who live and work there.

But much like climate change, social health is mired in public opinion, politics, fear, judgment, stigma, and a general tendency in humans to waste a lot of time casting about for someone to blame when people’s lives go sideways.

Do we even think of the same thing when we hear “social services”? I would bet we don’t have consensus even in this room, let alone at a provincial level. I see the roundtable as a means for establishing measurable social goals, so we all know what we’re chasing.

What are the social challenges that are priorities for tackling in BC? We need to agree on that. We need to establish achievable outcomes and then measure them relentlessly, and constantly adjust our approaches and supports to account for emerging issues, changing priorities, unintended consequences.

We need to agree on all these things and then raise that work above the political cycle, as we do with education and health care. Because social care is foundational to a life well-lived, but it can’t be realized in a three- to five-year political cycle.

Emerging social issues are almost always just the visible evidence of problems that began 10 or 20 years earlier, now grown so big that you can’t help but notice them. Homelessness is one such example. If you’re my age, you’ve seen it go from a word that didn’t even exist to a persistent and seemingly intractable problem in every BC community.

There are so many reasons for that. And if you want to vanquish homelessness, you have to do something about every one of them.

Yes, homelessness is about homes, but it’s equally about things like early childhood nutrition and child development, quality education, family supports, mental health, good work, income assistance based on the true cost of living, and the way our justice and foster systems function.

Our governments play a key role in supporting strong foundations for social health. But they can’t stand alone in that important work. This is work for all of us, from the community-based organizations that know this work and how to raise money for it, to the engaged citizens already involved in building well-being in their own communities.

From the BC businesses that get that good social health is fundamental to a strong economy and workforce, to the five million British Columbians who will all benefit when social health is addressed in a planned, strategic, realistic and sustained way in our province.

For me, the roundtable and this forum is a statement that all of that has been recognized – not just by government, but by the community-based organizations that have been doing the work of social care since long before there was government funding for it. I look around at who’s at the provincial roundtable and marvel that we’re finally all there together. And today, here with all of you.

And no, this is not the first time we’ve tried to figure this one out. But it could be the time that changes everything. It could be the time that we actually get this done.

I really appreciate that all of you are here to deepen a conversation that might finally fix that roof, to everyone’s benefit. Thank you.

Open procurement and social care: Why that should scare you

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

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

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

***

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

Open procurement policies put community social-services groups at risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homelessness is still a problem. Gee, go figure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I forget who I am, please give me the music to remind me

 

     If you haven’t already seen the 2014 documentary “Alive Inside,” fire up Netflix tonight and watch it. And as soon as it’s done and you’ve mopped up what might very well be a small bucket of sad-happy tears at all the lives changed by something so small, you just might want to get started on your own music playlist.

     The documentary is about a quest to give people back their music, most especially those living with dementia in U.S. care homes.

     The film opens with a scene of a near-comatose, non-verbal old man being outfitted with a headset and iPod loaded with all his favourite music, and his instant transformation into a wide-eyed, smiling guy singing along and recalling a dozen stories from his youth. (Maybe you were one of the 2 million people who viewed the clip on YouTube?)

     Anyway, it’s an amazing scene, but there are many more equally powerful ones in the full documentary. I felt like evangelizing after I saw the film. I wanted to start calling up care homes in Canada to ask if anyone was doing something similar, and how I could help. Anyone who ran into me in the days that followed had to put up with me exhorting them to see the film.

     And then I got thinking about what songs some good-hearted person might put on my own personal playlist should the day come when I can no longer remember who I am. That kind of freaked me out.

     I mean, what if the nice people looking after me presumed that because I was a teenager in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that’s the only kind of music I want to hear? I’m sure grooving to The Night Chicago Died or Sylvia's Mother would bring a smile to my face, but being stuck until I died in the memories of my early teenhood would be its own kind of nightmare.

     If the goal is to evoke the memories of a lifetime, who but me really knows what those songs are? I’m practically like the guy in the movie “High Fidelity,” with a different signature song for each profound memory. But it’s not like I share much of that with people as a general rule. (“Hey, honey, did I ever tell you that even 45 years on, hearing Me and Mrs. Jones makes me feel nostalgic for the boy who first broke my heart?”)

    Were I to be heading into the dark night of dementia, I’m pretty sure I’ll want all the memories I can get my hands on. Which means I’d best get my list together.

     I doubt that even my kids would think to include Blue Rodeo’s Rose-Coloured Glasses, which would deny me a magical day in my late 20s when my three young kids and I were singing that song at the top of our lungs after a day on Denman Island, and I suddenly felt free for the first time in my life. No one would know to put on Bob Seger’s version of  the Tom Waits song Blind Love, which would mean I’d never go back again to those three weeks in 2013 when the bar in the scary little Moskitia town I was staying in mixed that song in with its many narco-corridos, and I felt less lonely.

     Just When I Needed You Most – my son’s first heartbreak, and an important memory for me because I realized for the first time that my own heart would be breaking right along with my children’s as life brought its cruel lessons. Murder In The City  – the song that made us laugh through our anxiety as we headed into our big Honduras adventure. One Hand In My Pocket – me and a vanload of Grade 7 girls coming back from my daughter’s field trip, stereo cranked so loud that we proudly earned a look of disapproval from a fellow motorist at a red light.

     Bizarre Love Triangle, the stripped-down Frente! version that made me cry and cry in my early days with Paul because I thought he’d put it on a mixed tape he made for me as a hint about how he felt about our relationship (when in fact, he’d just recorded a whole Unplugged album that it happened to be on). Teddy Thompson’s I Don’t Want to Say Goodbye,  because it conjures a misty morning kayaking in Saanich Inlet when I was listening to it on my headphones as geese took flight, and I paddled through the breathlessly still waters thinking that if I were making a movie of that moment, that song would be perfect for the soundtrack. Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, because my grandsons (and Paul) still love retelling the story of me hearing that song on a road trip to Idaho and mishearing the chorus as, “Grew up on Mexican hockey.”

     At any rate, you get the picture. My personal playlist is deeply personal, and in all likelihood will span all the decades of my life. So yeah, please do throw some Beatles in there, but don’t forget Sweet Cherry Wine  or Which Way You Going, Billy? Don’t forget ACDC, because nothing puts me back on the road with the 2001 Tour de Rock quicker than the distinctive opening of Thunderstruck.  Don’t forget Barbie Girl, because I know I'm going to want to think back on the sweetly astounding sight of my very serious and quiet five-year-old grandson dancing like he was possessed when he first heard that song.

     May the gods trigger someone who loves me to go carefully through whatever musical catalogue I’m keeping at the point that I start to lose myself, and find a way to give it all to me.

     Even better, they could throw in some new songs that will be the background for whatever memories I’m laying down during those intense final months or years. Nothing would make me happier than to be listening to some cool new tune when the end finally comes, and thinking to myself, “Wow, what a perfect song to remember the moment I died.”

     Now go watch “Alive Inside.” And may your greatest-life-hits list be as fun to remember as mine has been.

When all the smoke clears and you see

The median family, before the little girl on the right broke her leg

     I’m just back in Nicaragua after a couple of weeks in Canada hanging out with my family, and going through one of those re-entry things where I’m suddenly reawakened to the many sad stories in Managua.

      Mostly, people cope down here, and with a smile on their face. But when you re-enter after two weeks of happy family time with all your healthy, well-fed and extremely well-tended grandchildren and their many friends, there can be this brief period where you see the place as it compares to where you just came from. And that can really get you down.

     First thing I saw after I hailed a cab near the airport Wednesday night was a motorcycle accident in which the stunned driver sitting on the roadside appeared to have his lower leg nearly severed. He sat bleeding and in shock as a huge crowd of people tried to wave down people with trucks and vans who could take him to hospital.

     The ambulance will come, my taxi driver assured me. But all I could think of was the legion of first responders who would have been all over that guy back in my land. And what will happen to him once the ambulance comes? There are good hospitals in Nicaragua, and the people tell me there are decent public ones. But the life of a young Nicaraguan with a serious leg injury and a long recovery ahead of him will be difficult well after the hospital work is done.

     And how will he work? Because if he can’t, there’s nothing for him other than to depend on his family to help him. There’s a form of social security here for people of a certain age who have had many years of steady employment in the right kind of jobs, but other than that there is very little for anyone who can’t pay their own way. No worker’s comp, no unemployment insurance, no income assistance, no special help for people with disabilities. I suspect we sometimes forget that ending global poverty isn’t just about wages and access to work, it’s about state-managed social support and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all citizens.

     So that leads me to my next sad story, of a four-year-old girl with a broken leg who begs with her mother in the median near one of the malls not far from our house. I met the family when I took their photo playing Monopoly on the street, and now that I know where they hang out, I am finding them in my view much more often.

      I brought some Value Village toys back for the kids from Canada. There are four of them, and they look to me to be roughly ages 13, 11, 8 and 4. They live near the bus station down the road. I think the oldest three go to school, but the mom is always on the median until about 5 p.m. with the youngest one, who broke her leg in some accident while under her aunt’s watch, the mother tells me. The mother has the girl on her knee and an empty paper coffee cup in her hand, hoping the motorists will toss a few córdobas her way.

     The girl is on her third full-leg cast. I feel like it’s taking really long, and today she looked quite listless and jaundiced. But unless it’s someone like me who steps up – and what exactly am I even proposing to do? – a family like that will just have to go along and see where it all ends up. They will accept the care they’re given and get by as they can, even if the next generation of median beggar is being born right at this moment, inside a little four-year-old girl who at this moment has a broken leg that just won’t heal.

     OK, so now imagine that whole scene again if they lived in Canada. And there’s the sad moment right there. It wouldn’t happen that way in Canada. But it does in Nicaragua and around the world, and sometimes it just gets me to see such a blatant statement of how unfair life can be.

     A good Canadian can end up paralyzed by Western guilt and pity at moments like that. But really, a better reaction would be to take the hit of sadness, think about how a society even begins to change some of that stuff, and then point a little well-aimed wealth from richer countries toward getting all of that happening in countries that are struggling.

     As for you and me, I guess our role is to elect governments that feel the same way while opening our eyes to the quixotic and cruel ways of the world, and doing what we can when we see a problem unfolding in front of us. Act locally, think globally.

          Because if all we do is fix our own country, we leave a whole lot of people behind solely because they were born in the wrong time, wrong country. What with all of us dependent on the other in so many ways in this modern world, that’s got to change. “Somebody has to do something about that, and it’s incredibly pathetic that it has to be us,” as Jerry Garcia once said.

     Anyway. Go hug a happy child – yours or someone else’s – and thank your lucky stars you are a Canadian in 2016. Then maybe just let the sadness come for a few hours and see what it tells you to do. That's what I'm going to do. 

On the inescapable privilege of privilege

   

Having worked in poor countries for most of the last four years, there’s a lot about The Guardian’s Secret Aid Worker feature that’s really resonating with me.

    Of course, I continue to attach the most value to pieces that bravely carry the writer’s name, because few things keep you more honest as a writer than putting your stuff out there with your name attached, for all the world to see. But sometimes it’s anonymous or nothing, so I’m cutting some slack to the unidentified writers producing pieces for Secret Aid Worker.

    I’m not exactly an aid worker in my current role of doing communications work for Central American NGOs on behalf of Cuso International. My work experience in Honduras and now Nicaragua has not been that different than it was in Canada, except for much lower pay and a dramatically different work culture. But both home and abroad, I do my work for aid organizations, whether it’s in aid of sex workers back in Canada, or women farmers scratching out a marginal living on tiny plots of land, as it is here in Nicaragua.

    At any rate, the moral dilemmas and ethical conflicts that the aid workers tend to write about in the Guardian feature strike a chord with me. Two recent pieces in particular caught my eye, one about how quickly a person’s idealism to help people in poor countries ends up corrupted by life as a privileged ex-pat; and the other a counterpoint noting that expecting foreign aid workers to “live like monks” is hardly a solution either.

    The Cuso stipend I receive in Nicaragua feels like more or less the going rate for a Nicaraguan communications consultant working in the country. I get the equivalent of about $1,600 CAD a month, which includes up to $585 a month for housing. (Cuso rates vary from country to country and town to town, depending on the cost of living of where a person is placed.)

    You’re working as a professional when you do a Cuso position, and getting a liveable stipend for the work you do is probably important for recruitment and retention. But at the same time, you take a Cuso position because you want to help, not for the money. I think Cuso does a good job of establishing a stipend level that keeps things real for volunteers while also ensuring their safety and comfort.

    But just because I’m paid like a middle-class Nicaraguan doesn’t mean anything else about my experience is the same as theirs. Even if I worked for free, I’d still be privileged just by dint of being born a Canadian.

    Sure, I'm opting to take the city bus to work, and walking in the heat and the dust to Managua’s sprawling public markets with just as much of a desire as any Nicaraguan to score a good price on tomatoes, cucumbers and limes. I’m not going to the pricey restaurants where the rich Nicaraguans eat any more often than my low-paid co-workers.

    But small stuff aside, my life isn’t even remotely comparable to the experience of an average Nicaraguan. (For starters, minimum wage here is less than $500 CAD, and a whole lot of people make nowhere near that much.) However long I might live in Central America, I will never be able to declare that I know how life feels for an average Nicaraguan any more than a comfortable Canadian who spends a night on the street pretending to be homeless knows about how real homelessness feels.

    If there were bugs in my bed, a sickness in my household, a crisis with one of my parents’ health, I could do something about it in an instant. If I hated my boss, I could quit. If I needed a holiday, I could pay for it. If I had to jump on a plane to anywhere in the world to help a family member out of a jam, I’ve got a gold-standard passport that nobody would question, and the credit card and line of credit to make it happen even if my savings weren't adequate.

    If life went sideways on me in Nicaragua, I could pack it all up tomorrow and come running home, to the land of public health insurance, pensions, and subsidized care and bug-free housing. It’s like that line from Pulp’s song Common People – “when you’re laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, you could call your dad and he’d stop it all.”

    And there’s the dilemma. I’m innately privileged, with a comfortable Plan B. Yet if I’m here wanting to be helpful to impoverished Nicaraguans, I absolutely have to check my privilege at the door and consciously consider everything as if I were a struggling Nicaraguan with no safety net. Which I’m not.

     I try to remind myself of that every day, because it really matters. Otherwise, you risk being one of those awful people who forget how privileged their world view is and get petulant when the locals don’t see things the same way they do. Otherwise, you become one of those annoying development types who grows sour from years of disappointments and ends up living like just another rich person enjoying the perks of abundant cheap labour. (Check out "The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems" to understand more about why good people go sour.)

     I’ve visited some terrific international development projects. But I’ve also seen a lot that feel foisted on the locals because countries with money to spend presume that what worked in their land will work in others. There’s a certain flavour-of-the-month quality to much of the world’s development work, and much time, energy and hope is wasted trying to force square pegs through round holes.

     Ultimately, a country finds its own path toward change. Economic opportunity, revolution and protest, responsible government, guaranteed rights and a healthy justice system – that’s where real change comes from. Foreigners can play integral parts on all those fronts, but their contributions are most successful when they take their signals from those who live in the country.

     Aid works when it’s based on strategies that call on those with privilege not to come to other countries to implement their own ideas, but to walk alongside people who are already bringing about change in those countries and require help to get there. They need us; people of privilege not only hold the purse strings, but can recognize and develop opportunities that countries enmeshed in poverty don’t yet see.

    So yes, a person from a wealthy country who lives and works in a poor country is privileged. But that’s just how it is.  We can’t pretend to know how it feels to be poor and without a Plan B. I think the best we can do is keep that fact top of mind, and strive to follow rather than lead. 

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