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.

Blog site, awaken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Who is Rod Baker?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter from Copan: The COVID crisis in Honduras

Casita Copan kids making puzzles during my 2016 visit

My partner and I lived and worked in Central America for the better part of five years, and I visited many development projects in Honduras and Nicaragua as part of our work with Cuso International in those years. But few projects have stuck with me like Casita Copan, in our old home town of Copan Ruinas, Honduras.

Started by a young American woman, Emily Monroe, Casita Copan began as a way of helping abandoned children in Emily's adopted home of Copan Ruinas. I've watched her lead that marvelous project for seven years now, and see it as a gold standard for addressing poverty and need not just for children removed from their families, but to prevent child abandonment. There's nothing like it in the country - or in Canada, for that matter.

As you can imagine, the spectre of COVID-19 is terrifying in a country like Honduras. BC has half the population of Honduras but more than seven times the number of ventilators in our hospitals: 732 compared to a paltry 102, and all but 12 of those 102 in private hospitals where poor people can't seek care. Because of the dire shortage of equipment, the country is on restrictive shelter-in-place rules enforced by police and the military. People aren't allowed to leave their homes.

This letter I've just received from Emily - who continues to live in Copan with her husband and young son - is a startling reminder of situations in low-income countries that have virtually no ability to deal with a pandemic. If you can, please send a donation her way. Money isn't going to get Casita Copan out of this pandemic, but it will help get things back on track more quickly when restrictions lift.

The sawdust alfombras depicting Easter

scenes that normally decorate Copan Ruinas

streets at this time of year.

***

First, I would like to send my very best to you and your loved ones during this difficult time, especially those who are working on the front lines, risking their lives to protect the most vulnerable. I wanted to share with you what is happening here in Honduras and at Casita Copán, as we face the unprecedented challenge of navigating a global pandemic.

I’m writing this from Copán Ruinas, Honduras, my home for the last ten years. This week is Semana Santa, “Holy Week,” traditionally a culturally rich time that draws tourists from around Honduras and the world to our little town. It’s the hottest time of the year, and in other years, we’d be taking the kids for a picnic by the river to cool off and share watermelon. Then we’d go into town to see the alfombras, brightly colored “carpets” of dyed sawdust painstakingly arranged by local artisans to create stunning designs in celebration of the holidays. 

Instead, we are inside, respecting the government’s mandatory shelter-in-place order, now in week four.

It was necessary for Honduras to take strict preventative measures in response to COVID-19 because the country’s healthcare system is the weakest in the region. The public hospital system for the entire country only has 12 ventilators; the private hospitals report approximately another 90. Because of the high rate of poverty, many people in Honduras suffer from preexisting conditions caused by poor nutrition and are particularly vulnerable. Weak infrastructure also means that many affected will be unable to access the care they need, especially those in rural communities like ours.

Here in Copán, we are currently in the eye of the storm. Safe for now, but preparing and waiting for what’s to come. We had to close our Children’s Center, the major source of food, education, recreation, and community for our children and families. We are still sending out packets of food since the majority of our moms are unable to work because of the government restrictions. While all of the kids in our Children’s Center are safe at home with their families, they are still lacking the daily support, education, and loving care that our center provides.

Here in Copán, we are not allowed to go out for a walk. Adults have one day a week (assigned by the last digit of our identification number) where we are allowed to go to the grocery store or pharmacy. Temperatures right now are in the 90s, and the majority of our Casita Copan Children’s Center families live in cramped one-room homes, often with only one bed for everyone. Mothers are unable to work because nearly all businesses are closed and movement is restricted, and if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. If you are caught outside past 6 pm, you can be arrested and forced to spend the night in jail. Rates of domestic violence have always been high in this area, and I am afraid of what the anxiety caused by this situation will provoke.

The children in our foster care program are safe and will still receive food, shelter, love, medical care, educational programs, and attention just as before, even if the routine is a bit different. So far, all of our staff are still receiving their full paycheck and benefits, though their daily responsibilities have changed due to the crisis. We will continue to do everything in our power to provide the maximum number of services possible to our children and families during this time. We don’t know what the future will hold, but we anticipate a serious blow to our local economy that will affect many families, businesses, and organizations. While this crisis will force us to make tough decisions, we will continue to uphold the values that Casita Copán was founded on – solidarity, transparency, responsibility, discipline, respect, and love.

Thank you for taking the time to read about what is going on here in Honduras. I truly hope that you and your loved ones are safe. Please reach out if you would like to hear more details about what is going on. We are busy but happy to get in touch when we can!!

One positive thing I can say that has emerged from this crisis is the realization of how interconnected we truly are. We are all in this together and we truly thank you for your support and compassion during this unprecedented time.

In solidarity,
Emily

A most unsettling story list of this thing we still call farming

Credit: Moscow Ministry of Agriculture and Food

I'm a loyal reader and financial supporter of the British non-profit news outlet The Guardian, and subscribe to its "Animals Farmed" newsletter. Every couple of months or so, the newsletter arrives in my email inbox with news of the wild, weird world of what we still call farming, but that mostly just looks like mass murder at this point.

Even just reading the little summary blurbs about the stories is an excellent reinforcer of my efforts to ramp back my meat consumption to almost nothing. I used to love my farm set when I was a kid, but realistic play with a modern-day "farm set" would require stuffing your cute plastic animals into an overcrowded, hellish stink-barn for a very short life of misery, with not a whiff of green grass or fresh air to be found.

So let's start there with my first link from this morning's newsletter, about how Russian industrial farms are experimenting with virtual reality for dairy cows, to see if tricking them into thinking they see an open meadow will make them happier. And able to produce better milk, of course. Because it's a given that anything we do in industrial farming that outwardly looks like we're being a bit kinder to the animal is in fact just a way to trick them into giving us better, tastier, or more products from their bodies.

Next time you eat a lamb shawarma in the Middle East, think about the 14,346 Romanian sheep that died last week when the cargo ship they were being carried on overturned. Romania is the third biggest exporter of sheep in the European Union, and the sheep were bound for Saudi Arabia. Speculation is that the ship was overloaded, but at any rate, the sheep were trapped in the hold and didn't stand a chance when the ship flipped.

Only 254 sheep ended up rescued. I'm hoping that none of the dead creatures were among these sheep that passed by us when we were visiting Romania this past spring, but the future's not bright for Romanian sheep overall.

The risk of mass sheep death at sea is not just an issue from "over there," either. More than 22,000 lambs a year make the journey from New Zealand to the United States to satisfy hungry consumers, and that number is up 20 per cent from a decade ago.

And how is life going for our pig friends? Not so good. African Swine Fever is in the process of wiping out what's expected to be a quarter of the world's pigs. In China alone, some 100 million infected pigs were killed last year in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease.

But that's great news for "farmers" of non-infected pigs, who are finding surging global demand and increasing sale prices when piggies go to market nowadays. The value of monthly UK pig exports hit £36.4 million - $63 million in Canadian dollars - in September, a 50 per cent increase over a year ago.

In other pig news, Britain's Conservative Party has backed away from a promise to ban farrowing crates, because they go against everything a mother pig would naturally do to prepare for and care for her piglets. But pig producers have worked equally hard to shut down that conversation.

The crates are small cages that pregnant pigs are kept in from before their piglets are born until they are a month old.

Now let's turn to China, the home of my ancestors but also a country that often seems viciously committed to eating every species from the face of the Earth. That includes donkeys, 4.8 million of whom are killed every year just to satisfy China's demand for a gelatinous traditional medicine called ejaio, which is made from the hides of donkeys. If demand continues apace, half of the world's donkey population will be wiped out within five years.

Bummed out yet? We ought to be. I get that humans are omnivores and have a long history of killing animals for food, but we're so far past any kind of hunter-gatherer framework with modern-day industrial farming. One last link before you go, this one to a deadly algae bloom of "red tide" in Florida that wiped out 200 manatees, 127 dolphins, 589 sea turtles and hundreds of tonnes of fish when it hit in 2018, and is now back again.

It's a naturally occurring phenomenon, but you can likely guess what makes it much, much worse. Yup, industrial farming, which in Florida is flooding the sensitive wetlands with agricultural runoff.

I started into "flexitarianism" mostly because there's only so long you can keep telling yourself that your eating habits are harmless, but reducing our meat intake is also a major step toward reducing our individual (and ultimately, global) carbon footprints. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that industrial livestock production is responsible for 14.5 per cent of human-caused carbon emissions.

Do the right thing. Put peas on your fork.

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.

Allergies: The View from Here

I've been wanting to write about my experiences with allergies for a while now. I expect I have a level of insight that could be useful to others after 60-plus years of a life lived allergically. Permit me to share my thoughts here, with the qualifier that I am in no way an expert on allergies except as a person who has always had a bunch of them.

My late mother used to tell of an angora hat she put on me when I was a baby that was apparently the first indicator that I was going to be allergic. I get itchy just thinking about it. The list grew rapidly to include eggs, animals, pollens, molds, grass, chocolate, dust mites and many other things that are impossible to avoid completely. (I sometimes wonder if the mass giving away of my beloved stuffed animals in the name of a dust-free bedroom was an early childhood trauma.)

Eventually I got old enough - 11, maybe? - to have one of those scratch tests on my back, which made for a horrible hour of being forced to lie still on my stomach while my back raged with itching. The test confirmed that I was allergic to pretty much everything they tried. I've since had a lifetime of unexplained periods of fluctuating duration in which I might have hives, itchy eyes, wheezing, a kind of weird mouth thing that I know as "tingle-lips," and various bumps, welts and scratchy bits that emerge and subside unpredictably.

One time, I ate cheezies while riding a horse in the rain, and some strange combination of that left me looking like a child version of The Hulk for several hours as every part of my face swelled up with itchy bumps and my ears turned into thick, twisted lumps. Another time, I got giant, water-filled hives on my torso from some drug they'd given me for my asthma, and it left scars that lingered for more than a year.

So yes, I know a thing or two about allergies. I'm nothing like how I was when I was kid, but I still get rashes for no discernable reason, and tingle-lips at parties if anybody has put blue cheese too close to the other cheeses on the charcuterie plate. (Oddly enough, a friend cooked blue cheese in a macaroni casserole recently and I ate it without knowing, and nothing happened. Does that mean cooking the blue cheese changed something, or that it's all in my head?)

One of the top learnings from a lifetime of allergies is that controlled and gradual exposure to many of the things I'm allergic to has been a huge help in getting over them. That said, the strategy doesn't work for everything. The tricky thing is in figuring out which of your allergies might improve from gradual exposure and which ones never will.

Cats, for instance. As a kid, I couldn't even walk into someone's house who had a cat without starting to wheeze. But then I grew up and went through many years of owning cats because I loved them anyway, and realized that I quickly got used to whatever cats we had in the house at the time. For a few years, we had a cat that had a lot of litters (I know, irresponsible, but we always found them good homes and loved them madly for those months before giveaway). I'd be allergic to each new litter for about 3 weeks and then would adapt.

Now, I barely think about being allergic to cats. I still can't pick one up and rub my face in its fur, and I wash my hands after petting so I don't accidentally touch my eyes with cat hands (the weak link). But other than that, I'm fine to hang with cats. I'm fine with rabbits, too, having bought a house rabbit for my youngest daughter once upon a time and endured six intense weeks of wheezing, nose-blowing and scratching while getting used to dear Nutmeg.

But then there's mold.

In the 1960s-70s when I was growing up, it was common to give kids injections for their allergies, the theory being that if you were exposed gradually to increasing doses of an allergen, you would develop a tolerance. I'd go in every week or so and get a pollen mix injected in one arm and mold in the other.

The pollen series worked well, and I give those shots credit every spring, when so many others are suffering with their allergies and I'm not. But my mold injections had to be stopped early, because my arm was swelling more and I was getting sicker with each injection.

Just a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the surprising information that one of the world's most common food additives is produced from a mutant strain of the fungus Aspergillus niger, which is responsible for black mold. When cultured in a sugary substance, the fungus - a known allergen - creates citric acid as a byproduct.

Photo credit:
chaetomiumqueen.com/aspergillus-niger/

That byproduct is everywhere, in a vast array of juices, pops, coolers, cosmetics, "fruit-flavoured" bars, jams and more, even though no research has ever been done on its safety or the impact of increased exposure. More than two million tonnes are produced annually, most of it in China.

Fed up with more than a year of a persistent, itchy rash under my arms and some seriously uncomfortable bouts of heartburn after drinking lemon-lime diet drinks, I scanned the list of ingredients of some of my favourite beverages a couple of months ago and got to wondering about citric acid. So I looked it up, and was stunned to learn that it came from a mold.

Could that be the source of my irritating rash? Hard to say, but it wasn't too tough to excise citric acid from my diet and test my theory. So I did. The rash is gone. Could be coincidence, could be an ah-hah. Personally, I'm just glad to not be itchy anymore. I can live without citric acid.

If my mother the nurse was still alive, she'd probably pooh-pooh my citric acid theory and note that if that were the case, why would the allergies only be bothering me now? To which I would tell her that people in general are experiencing increasing allergies to food and cosmetic additives, because we are being exposed to greater and greater amounts of them in this unnatural life we lead.

The growing exposure to a grand number of weird little lab-made chemicals is creating sensitivities even in people who have never had allergies. I talked to a University of Victoria researcher a while back who told me of the race in the cosmetics world to find a substitute for preservatives like parabens and methylisothiazolinone. Both are now omnipresent in cosmetics due to a shrinking list of safe preservatives, and are triggering sensitivies because of overexposure.

I've tried many vitamins and herbs over the years to see if they help with my allergies. I've never noticed much impact from any of them. The effective strategies for me have been gradual exposure to the things I'm not too allergic to, avoidance of the things that I can't get a handle on (those scented sticks in oil just kill me - what the heck is in that oil??), and antihistamines for the occasional times when I know I''ll be allergic but want to do whatever the thing is anyway. (Horseback riding!)

Antihistamines are very useful when used well and in moderation, but you need to figure out which ones work for you. The word "antihistamine" covers a number of drugs, all of which work in different ways and react differently from person to person. You'll need to do some experimenting and label-reading to figure out which one brings you relief. (For me, it's loratadine. The brand name is Claritin but it's gotten so expensive lately that I've switched to the generic versions, which seem to work equally well.)

When heading into an allergy-rich situation, I take an antihistamine before I go. You never want to wait until the allergies set in, because the drugs don't work nearly as well once that happens.

Photo credit: Vancouver Sun

So if I'm going to a barn party in a working barn, or spending the day at the Saanich Fair, I take one, because hay and big animals like horses still get to me. If I've got the care of a dog that has allergies itself (hot spots, for instance), I know I'll need antihistamines for the first couple of days while I adjust, because something about an allergic dog really makes me allergic, too.

If you've got allergy stories and solutions of your own, I'd love to hear them. Having allergies is the kind of thing that requires a lot of figuring out so they don't interfere with your life, and they feel to me like they're too variable and individualized for modern medicine to respond to well. I think a lot of it comes down to individual strategies.

One last observation: If you're sensitive to pollens, don't believe the assurances of the clerk in the vitamin store that supplements like bee pollen and royal jelly don't cause allergies in people with pollen allergies. I learned the hard way that's not true. I unknowingly triggered a three-week stretch of terrible, almost-in-the-hospital asthma before it dawned on me that the culprit was the bee pollen I'd been taking daily.

One more Naked Truth

And another good read from The Naked Truth sex work blog and Annie Temple, who writes here about the highs and lows of "squaring up" given that the workplace culture of the sex industry is just so very different than what you find in a more conventional workplace.

My favourite kind of sex-work writing (well, writing about anything, really) is when it's like this: Straight up "this is how it is" kind of stuff. For sex work in particular, the misconceptions people have about the industry are so very far from reality that some people will probably need to read a thousand pieces of writing like this one before thinking starts to shift. But hey, now they only need to read 999 more.

I posted this piece on Facebook as well and heard from a number of connections that Annie's top 10 "cultural shock challenges" resonated with them as well, as they have their own work culture expectations that don't conform to the rather odd one that we tend to think of as "normal."

There's another reason to read more writings of sex workers - because we have the same issues. We are sisters and brothers in the same causes, which is a critical point to emphasize given the amount of stigma, judgment and discrimination sex workers experience because of people in the "square world" demanding that sex workers be viewed as different - so different, in fact, that they deserve to be denied basic human rights.

The Naked Truth: Susan Davis on the life of a migrant sex worker

Photo of Susan Davis from the
Naked Truth website

There's few better ways to start to understand sex work than reading the writing of sex workers. I'm grateful for The Naked Truth for its efforts to bring those pieces to a broad audience, most especially this fascinating piece by long-time warrior Susan Davis.

Susan is a Vancouver entrepreneur, activist and sex worker who has played such an important role in bringing the issues of BC sex workers into the spotlight, and challenging the tired trope of broken victims in need of rescue. 

Her account here of making her way across Canada as a young sex worker, and the frightening challenges of settling into a new scene when you're in the sex industry, makes for a gripping read.

It will also make for an uncomfortable one for some people, as violence can be a routine part of a sex worker's life due to laws that keep the work in the shadows and make it virtually impossible for workers to avail themselves of police protection. (Reading Sue's many futile attempts to sound the alarm on serial killer Robert Pickton certainly gave me the chills.)

I haven't met many issues as capable of polarizing a conversation as sex work. I've listened to decades of those conversations and once upon a time, used to play way nicer and try to convince people of why it was important to decriminalize sex work to increase worker safety. Not so much anymore on the playing nice. When people literally have their lives on the line because we can't get past our moral objections and uninformed opinions, there's no room for "nice."

Canada has had bad law around sex work for its entire history, and arguably worse law since the former Harper government criminalized the purchase of sexual services for the first time ever in 2014.  The Liberal government made mumbly sounds of "considering the issue" when they first came into office, but never acted (one of the reasons why I have mixed feelings about Jody Raybould-Wilson, who never lifted a finger for sex workers in her time as Attorney General).

While police attitudes in certain Canadian cities have shifted significantly over time, that's still not the case in many communities across the country, where sex workers continue to work in extremely dangerous conditions with no hope that the police officer they approach will be prepared to help them.

You don't have to approve of the existence of sex work to get that criminalizing it is just about the worst way to oversee the industry. All our laws do is increase danger for people in the industry, the majority of whom are women. And yet here we are 152 years on, still doing the same old same old.

Add it to the list of Things That Make Me Weep. Or scream.

The Great Hack: Watch It

I've been alarmed anew by the Cambridge Analytica horror story after watching the documentary "The Great Hack" last night on Netflix.

We're all rightly offended by the massive invasion of privacy that occurred in that scandalous period. But what's far more frightening for me after the film is the monumental scope of global democratic disruption.

What Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook's happy help was psychological warfare funded by wealthy people. Carried out on behalf of political parties that the wealthy people resonate with, it targeted carefully selected "persuadibles" chosen for their fear-based, authoritarian-leaning personalities. Everything they needed to know was mined out of Facebook and other social media, via a "fun" little personality quiz developed by an American researcher working at Cambridge University.

And the rest is history, as they say. Brexit. Trump. But so much more, because Cambridge was active all over the world. When authoritarian interests came calling, Cambridge was there.

One of the most unsettling revelations for me was the film's evidence that Cambridge ran a campaign aiming to increase voter apathy among young black adults in the 2010 Trinidad and Tobago election. Cambridge's secret Facebook campaign targeted those who were naturally prone to checking out and showing a low interest in their world with a campaign that encouraged them not to vote.

Parties are known to attract distinct race-based support in that country, so the goal of Cambridge's clients was to see the Indian-based party win by increasing voter apathy among those who supported other parties. The Do So campaign targeted young black adults with a song-and-dance, fun-loving barrage of videos encouraging them not to vote as a symbol of protest.

That is pure evil at work, don't you think?

Hope you'll watch it. Those of us with ethical character can't even imagine the scenarios that those motivated solely by money and power get up to, but it feels important to get a big reminder every now and then, something that gets you reading deep or watching some revelatory documentary that shakes you to the core.

Sure, let's focus on the positive, too. But we wouldn't want to get complacent thinking everything's pretty much OK. The Great Hack reminds us that it most definitely isn't.

Message I was left with: Wake up! Wake up! It's so much bigger than somebody having access to everything on your Facebook account. We're talking an act of war.

Governments are complicit because they want to win. Cambridge Analytica-type firms are complicit because they not only want to grow rich, but get a rush from being disruptors without ethics. Facebook and other social media are complicit because there is so damn much money to be had.

(In her powerful TED talk on this issue, Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr asks social-media executives if this is how they want history to remember them, as "handmaidens to authoritarianism.")

Question I was left with: Where the heck was the academic, Alexandr Kogan, who created the infamous personality test that Cambridge used to identify "persuadibles"? He barely got a mention in the film.

He took his field of research and used it commercially to deliberately subvert democracy. He made this whole thing possible. So many people behaving badly, but I definitely have him on my list.

Don't Get Scared, Get Effective: A Linked-Up Guide to Doing Something About Your Personal Carbon Footprint

Copyright:(c) Allexxe | Dreamstime.com

The frightening realities of the global climate crisis have me looking for ways to reduce my personal impact. For those of you trying to do the same, this one's for you. (And for those of you still denying there's a problem, feel free to stop reading now and fire off an uninformed comment, and I will feel free to not read it.)

I was stunned to learn recently that there's a view out there that people shouldn't have to take personal responsibility for their carbon outputs, because the climate crisis is the fault of corporations and governments and must be left to them to fix.

Seriously? There is absolutely no way to mitigate the effects of climate change without taking personal action. Corporations exist because we feed them. Governments exist because we elect them. This one's all about us - collectively and individually. I am right there in rage with those who are fed up with corporate greed and government paralysis, but it's each and every one of us who has to step up to fix the damaging and damaged society we're becoming. (Did anyone else notice how much Boris Johnson looks like Donald Trump from the back?)

It's pretty damn daunting to even consider how to get a grip on this crisis, I admit. I would love to be able to blame this one on someone, and leave them to clean up the mess. But like that little cartoon possum Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." If you really want to end bad government and hurt evil corporations, then it's about getting a grip on rampant consumerism and electing better people (and with better electoral processes).

Where to begin? The first step is in finding the tools to help us understand our personal carbon footprint so we can take action to reduce what we can and offset what we can't.

Today's Guardian piece on that very subject is a good place to start, though go into this exercise knowing that many people are already trying to figure out how to make money from your privileged North American guilt. (You have to hand it to capitalism - it's always there first.) Do a lot of research before you start donating to a cause promising to use your money on projects aimed at making you feel less guilty about your carbon-heavy lifestyle.

Plus if we're actually going to get serious about reducing our individual footprints, we'll need to put more skin in the game than merely sending money to some random organization promising to plant trees or start a hydro-electric project in our honour. There is so much that we can each do that will have real impact. Take a browse through these telling emission charts to see that while Canada may not be topping the charts globally in our carbon emissions, we are right up there with the United States in our per-capita emissions. We only look good at the global level because we have a small population.

Travel that involves flying gives me particular guilt. Now I see why. Using the handy-dandy flight calculator in that Guardian story, I learned that my flight from Vancouver to London and back this spring meant I personally generated more than 1.3 tonnes of CO2 just from that trip. There are 67 countries where the average person doesn't emit that much in an entire year. Yikes.

Then I tripped on over to the Offsetters site to expand that search (I couldn't get the first search to identify Bucharest as an option, which was our final destination). Their calculator put me at three tonnes for the return trip from Vancouver to Bucharest, with a stopover in London. (You may need to calculate total distances for your flights for some of the sites, so here's a place to do that.)

Seeing as the global goal is to reduce everyone on Earth's average per-capita carbon footprint to 1.8 tonnes by 2050, the extent of the challenge is obvious. I'm well over my annual allowance just from one holiday flight, and I haven't even begun to add in all the other emissions resulting from my day-to-day life.

Fortunately, Columbia University has a calculator to help me calculate those emissions, and a list of 35 simple ways to reduce my carbon footprint. They suggest this site for calculating your footprint.

My partner and I have an bit of an unusual lifestyle in that we live in other people's spaces as permanent housesitters, so we're already doing pretty good on a lot of these. Moving to a new house every 3-4 weeks turns out to be an excellent mechanism for keeping your stuff to a minimum. We live in other people's spaces, which also serves to reduce our impact.

But we do love to travel. We still need to do better in all of these 35 areas if we hope to offset a joy that we aren't prepared to give up.

We adopted a "flexitarian" eating regimen earlier this year that for the most part eliminates meat. That was mostly because we realized we could no longer bear the hypocrisy of eating creatures made to suffer from their earliest days so that we can eat their deeply unhappy flesh and consume their breast milk. I'm happy that it also coincides with efforts to reduce my carbon footprint.

I've talked to a surprising number of people who are really worried about the climate crisis but at the same time kind of shrug their shoulders in a "What can one person do?" way when they talk about it. We can actually do quite a lot, and in fact will have to if we want to steer this Titanic away from the rocks. And it's going to hurt, because humans just don't change until it hurts.

We need to be priced out of our cars. We need to be regulated into improving the energy efficiences of our homes. We need development that accounts for changing climate and the energy efficiences of renovating rather than tearing down and rebuilding. We need to curb our rampant consumption, and quit buying vehicles that look like they're armed for the zombie apocalypse when we're really just driving from Oak Bay to downtown. (Read this strangely radical Globe opinion piece on making do.)

We need every level of government to get its act together and do what's good for the planet rather than take it easy on their electorate in hopes of another victory. We need to quit electing governments that pander to the completely unreasonable beliefs of uninformed people. (Fascinating that "conservative" is now attached to a social ideology that doesn't view climate change as a big concern.)

I was changed forever by a year and a half of doing communications for the University of Victoria. My work introduced me to a lot of climate scientists. What they knew scared the hell out of me, and shook me out of that paralysis that I think so many of us are in on this one.

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at UVic has some great research here, in accessible language. Through my conversations with climatologist Frances Zwiers at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, I came to understand the challenges scientists face when trying to determine whether it's climate change or just a weird weather event, but that there's still a lot that can be done to mitigate the issues either way.

Francis also introduced me to this marvelous site, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. They work on behalf of the insurance industry. I can get lost for hours in their fascinating and well-researched reports.

Good luck to all of us. It won't be easy. But who would you rather be, that person in the disaster movie whose reaction to the terrifying asteroid headed for Earth is to freeze up and do nothing, or the determined one who reaches deep and takes action? The Arctic is melting, for pete's sake. Do your part.

Things we saw: Road trip in Eastern Europe

Town square at Piatra Neamt, Romania

Loved, loved, loved our three-week road trip through Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria in May and June. I came home with hundreds of photos, but also a bunch of video clips that I had no real plan for but we collected anyway. Glad we did, because the resulting half-hour video really captures the trip beautifully. A lot of the shots are out the front window of the car as we drove along, and captured the scenes that really call up memories of a place but often don't make it into your photo gallery.

We used Google Maps to guide us. Mostly it was just plain wonderful to have that service, because otherwise we would have been constantly lost. (We learned right at the start of our trip that Priority 1 upon arriving in any country was to get a local SIM card in our phones.) But it also took us on some of the strangest routes - often not the big freeways, which I was grateful for, but sometimes true backwaters that looked like they weren't even real roads.  And every now and then on a big freeway, we lost serious time when Googleova couldn't figure out what to do about a detour or major construction at an interchange, and sent us down the wrong road with no way to fix the error until the next exit - which in some cases was 30 kilometres down the road.

This video is recommended viewing for anyone who loves road trips but hasn't been on one for far too long, for no particular reason but just because they kind of forgot how much they love them. Watching this made me want to get back on the road all over again.