I will remember

 

Clockwise from top left: My father David Paterson; my aunt Joan Hepburn, solo and with her mates; my grandmother's brother Jack Feica; my uncle George Chow and wife Fan from a newspaper clipping after George's dramatic escape from a Japanese internment camp; my uncle Bill Chow; my uncle Pete Chow; and my grandmother's brother Tom Feica.

***

The benefit of being one of the people in your big extended family who hoards photos is that when struck by the thought of whether you could pull together a quick photo collage for Remembrance Day of relatives who served our country, there they all are.

This little collection certainly doesn't represent all of my relatives who have served, just the ones I have photos for. But even this handful reminds me of their bravery and commitment to a better world, putting their lives on the line for democracy and freedom. 

For my mom's brothers in particular, serving in the Second World War couldn't have been an easy choice, what with Canada still rejecting Chinese-Canadians until things got so desperate that they had to shift racist policies. My mom and her siblings were mixed race - Romanian and Chinese - but that was not enough to shield them from brutally racist times. Chinese-Canadians didn't get the vote until after the war, and even then it was a fight.

A person can get weighed down by the headlines of today, when it feels like we spend far more time warring with our fellow citizens and savaging the political leaders of the day than we do standing up for what's good and right about Canada. 

I am awed by my relatives' belief in this country as worthy enough to lay their lives down for. May we come together for the good fight again now that the enemy most capable of wreaking havoc is the contentious issues that divide us. 

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.