I'm in Vancouver tonight, working here for a couple of days. As always, I can't figure out how I feel about this city.
It's beautiful on a day like today - the sun shining, the beautiful mountains aglow in the distance. The high rises in the city core are things of beauty in their own right, catching the sunlight at different angles in the daytime and then turning into sparkling jewels as the night closes in. I drove along the Stanley Park waterfront at dusk today and marvelled at the city scape across the way, perfect right down to the neon-blue and green light spilling down the side of one of the tallest buildings like an electric waterfall.
And yet. Something about a tall city always makes me feel lonely. I don't know what that is - is it the spots of light all signalling other human being out there, yet no way to actually make contact? I'm in one such Rapunzel's tower myself at the moment, on a high enough floor that my only company is the lights from neighbouring glass towers. It just kind of weirds me out.
But earlier tonight, I came out of a day of conferencing, loaded my accordion into my truck, and headed down to the seawall around Stanley Park before the sun set.
I sat there playing music in this incredible sunset, looking at this amazing view of boats and water and beautiful urban landscapes. And it was a real moment.
Then a young couple on bikes rode up and stopped to listen for a couple of songs, which was more or less what happened the last time I played accordion in Stanley Park a year or so ago. That time, a couple passersby had also just dropped onto a bench to enjoy the music.
That's the thing about Vancouver - I feel this lonely vibe when I look out from my glass tower, but at the same time have had special moments in this city that I just don't think would have happened in Victoria. I'm not sure if I could live here, but then again, I'm often not sure I can live in Victoria, either.
But enough with the reflections. I think I'll head out into Vancouver's pretty night streets and find myself a bowl of noodles.

Another insightful report from the team of Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond, representative for B.C.'s children and youth, and provincial medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall. Lots of good information in this highly readable report.

Thank you, community-builders - where would we be without you?

Organizing an event is an unusual undertaking at the best of times. Things get even more interesting when you’re dependent on community donations and goodwill to pull it off, as has been the case for the three years I’ve been doing the annual Project Connect event for the street community.

Doing anything to benefit the poor evokes a peculiar reaction in some people, as if it’s sainted work. But staging an event like Project Connect, sponsored by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, is less the work of saints than it is of community worker bees.  They fill my heart with hope for a better day every time I have the privilege to see them in action.

Every year, the outpouring of goodwill and effort reminds me of how much can be accomplished when everyone steps up to the plate even just a little. From the local businesses that donate gift cards and products to the hundreds of people in the community who donate items for “survival packs” or give their time, people attach to the event for all kinds of reasons.

But what really stands out for me is the leadership shown by the local faith community, both in mobilizing for donations and providing wonderful, committed volunteers.

I’m a secular person myself, so my tendency is to look for some broader explanation as to what brings out humanity in people. But what I’ve come to see is that you often find a higher concentration of it within the faith community.

My time at PEERS Victoria helped me see the role that faith and hope play for people in desperate circumstance. They need to believe.

But really, don’t we all? Some of us are fortunate enough to enjoy abundance and happiness to the point of never feeling the need to reflect on the faith and hope in our lives. In truth, life would be unbearable without them.

Much to the benefit of our communities, faith and hope at a collective level manifest as a whole lot of good-hearted men and women prepared to do what it takes to make something happen. Like that noble character Horton the Elephant, the people I’ve come to treasure as community-builders say what they mean and mean what they say.

They show up. They work hard, and for all the right reasons.  

That’s not to suggest that everyone who helps out with Project Connect belongs to a church. But the faith community plays a significant part. I know we couldn’t have filled 700 packs so generously for people at Wednesday’s event at Our Place were it not for the efforts of local Christian congregations.

Every year is a learning experience with Project Connect. But the point that definitely sticks with me three years on is how much I like people who show up.

They say they’ll get a task done, and they do. They inquire about what you need help with, and then they make it happen. They reach out across their personal networks and pull in all kinds of kindnesses.

Obviously, you needn’t attach to a particular spiritual identity to do that work. (Case in point: Me.) But there’s no denying that a significant part of the hard, free work of our region gets done by the faith community, and by the broad base of volunteers they are skilled at mustering around them.

It’s faith and hope that brought so many of the 35 service providers into the room for Project Connect as well, and never mind that some do this work for a living. There’s real love at the heart of a lot of poverty work.

I saw a woman transform lives Wednesday with a set of hair clippers and a friendly willingness to jump into even the most tangled, wiry beard. Who’s to say God wasn’t among the crowd when one of her beaming, newly groomed clients emerged into the courtyard at Our Place to a spontaneous round of applause from his admiring peers?

A hand massage for a person who rarely feels a kind touch is, for the moment, a miracle. When your bike rides better, your dog gets help, your socks no longer cling damp and fetid on your aching feet, your sore tooth is finally dealt with - well, that’s how hope takes root.

Talk is cheap. So is caring, unless you’re prepared to put action to it. Thank God - literally, in many cases - for the people in our community who get that.

Goofy little story I thought you might find interesting. I mean, is this what "low-level" federal bureaucrats do all today - come up with peculiar ideas certain to inflame people? As you may have deduced by now, I'm very supportive of decriminalizing the adult sex industry, but that's not to suggest our country is remotely ready to be viewing that work as just another job to be posted on the regular job board alongside dishwashing and accounting.

I'm all for normalizing the work of adult, consensual sex workers, who have been doing "normal" work in our communities for a very long time. But putting too much politically correct spin on an issue like this will only outrage those who feel otherwise, and lend credence to that ridiculous argument that decriminalizing opens the door for governments to force women into sex work when they can't find any other kind of work.

I'm reprinting a letter from a desperate mom of a young man with a mental handicap, who is one of several thousand in B.C. experiencing major cutbacks in service and residential care right now. I've heard from many people like this woman - and there are many, many more people with developmental disabilities in our province who don't even have any family to advocate for them. 

Hi Jody

I'm a mother of a mentally handicapped 24 year old man. I would like to thank you for your article to let people know what's really going on. I think the government and CLBC should be sued for falsely advertising themselves as trying to help families care for their handicapped family member. 

My husband and I  take care of our son as he still lives at home. They do not want to give us as parents the help we need. All we hear is no money and wait lists! These government bodies are looking to take away their responsibility and push it on aging  family members.

This is all fine for us right now, as I want to care for my son. But I would like the resources and help I need to achieve this. As soon as he turned 19 all my rights as a parent were gone  because he's an adult. I had to pay a lawyer to be able to have something drawn up so I can represent my son.This province is pathetic - they keep low income, seniors and handicapped people in poverty. It's really disgusting.

I'm one of the lucky ones to be able to work my own hours. If I worked a 9-to-5 job I could never do it. His day program is over at 2 p.m. and he's home by 2:30 . With no funding for after-program hours what does a family do? My son can't stay be himself so I have to be home for him. This is also why people have to give up their family member, because they don't get the help they need and the stress becomes to0 much.

Now with all the closures what's going to happen ? I'm so scared for my son when we are no longer able to care for him. Like most parents who keep their adult children at home, we sacrifice the opportunity to have a normal life without kids at home .We don't have the same opportunity like most people whose kids grow up and leave home ......ours don't.

At this point even if I wanted to have him move out and be in his own home, the funding isn't there to help make this happen . I have no choice but to care for my son until we are physically or mentally not able to do so. 

We need to fight this government, for what they are doing is so wrong . I would like them to spend a week in my shoes.

It's cruel and stupid to close group homes

The provincial government can dance all it likes, and certainly has, around the sticky issue of whether it’s closing group homes for people with developmental disabilities.

But it is. So let’s give up this crazy pretence that B.C. isn’t closing group homes, when the fact is that anyone with an ear to the ground knows it’s already well underway. I mean, come on, guys - the least you can do is be honest.

Here’s Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman in the legislature April 13, as captured in Hansard during a strategically worded cat-and-mouse game on the subject with New Democrat MLA Shane Simpson.

“We don't do forced moves, if that's what the member is getting to,” Coleman told Simpson. “We do, though, sometimes, when we have a redesign or have to have a repositioning with regards to our facilities, work extensively with the families and the advocates to walk them through what other opportunities are available in addition to maybe moving to another facility, if there's a capacity issue.”

Whatever that tongue-twister means, you can see now that he was already parsing things carefully to clear the way for government and Community Living B.C. to cut $22 million in spending. (He’s also caught in a lie, because forced moves are happening.)

CLBC savings are to come from phasing out group homes and cutting support services.  I heard a heartbreaking story of a fellow who has gone to “work” with great enthusiasm for 20 years now at a program that fills his days, but will soon have nowhere to go.

The government likes to portray the issue as being more about having to spread the same amount of expenditure out over an ever-larger group of people and families who really need the help, as opposed to cutting services. It’s a “capacity issue,” as Coleman noted in April.

Whatever. Call it what you will, group homes are closing and services are being cut for people who are completely vulnerable without the right supports. Anyone who cares about rights, fairness, homelessness, abuse prevention, health-care costs down the road or even just plain human decency ought to be completely up in arms about what’s going on for people with developmental disabilities.

Mental illness and mental handicaps get mixed up all the time in the public’s mind. What I’m talking about here are people with low IQs, for all the reasons that such things happen. They often have physical disabilities as well, and some have mental illness complicating things.

I get the government’s point that they’re a drain on the public purse. Then again, so is the government itself, and all the rest of the vast public and political functions we pay for.

Smart government isn’t about singling out specific groups of people for misery because they cost us more. It’s about priorizing spending in ways that best satisfy voters while not burdening future generations with the fruits of our screwups. How does the stupid cruelty of cutting services to people with developmental disabilities benefit anyone?

The Victoria Foundation’s Vital Signs report this week highlighted the priority our region puts on social care. But if we really mean it, we should be jumping up and down right now on behalf of people with developmental disabilities.

We’re not talking big numbers. All told, just a third of the 36,000 British Columbians with developmental disabilities get any help from CLBC, and only 2,400 live in group homes.

The theory is that people moved out of their group homes will go onto enriched lives in a less structured, more independent housing arrangement.  A few group homes may linger on, but they’re no longer an option for new people coming into the CLBC system.

The whole thing has been done extremely quietly, and perhaps it would have all been a done deal by now were it not for a few anguished cries from family members of those getting the boot from the homes where they’ve lived contentedly for years, even decades. That government and CLBC seem surprised to have encountered resistance just underlines the disconnect with the real world.

British Columbians ought to be celebrating the network of group homes and day programs built by previous generations of taxpayers who invested in a better future for people with developmental disabilities. Do we want to be the generation remembered for tearing it apart for fleeting savings?

It’s wrong, and shameful. But families can’t win this on their own.  Learn more at www.momsnetwork.ca, and add some muscle to an important issue.

There's been some terrific (and terrible) commentary and writing about Canada's prostitution laws since the Ontario Superior Court struck down three key laws around the sex trade last week. Here are a couple pieces from the former category, one from SFU professor John Lowman in the Vancouver Sun, and the other from the Ottawa Citizen by Steve Sullivan, Canada's federal ombudsman for victims of crime. Nice to see some smart, thoughtful writing on this subject.

Court ruling finally brings sex workers out of the shadow

You’ll be reading this today, or maybe even weeks from now. By then it will be old news that the Ontario Superior Court tossed out the bulk of Canada’s prostitution laws.

But it’s Tuesday, Sept. 28 right now, 11:01 a.m. I’m sitting down to write this mere minutes after the first amazing email landed in my inbox with the news. I’ve been crying happy tears ever since. I’m still in the buzz of the moment, so please don’t mind me if I get all emotional.

Years of battle lie ahead, of course. Brothels, living off the avails and communicating for the purposes of prostitution were all rendered legal in Ontario with the decision, which ultimately has implications coast to coast. The first thing the Crown’s going to do after everybody gets past the shock is file an appeal. Then it’s off to the ultimate arbiter, the Supreme Court of Canada.

Still, there’s no going back from what has already changed. The moment Ontario Superior Court Judge Susan Himel handed down her decision Tuesday, sex workers finally became people. They became flesh-and-blood women and men, out there working for a living like the rest of us.

"By increasing the risk of harm to street prostitutes, the communicating law is simply too high a price to pay for the alleviation of social nuisance," Himel wrote in her 131-page ruling. The danger sex workers face “greatly outweighs any harm which may be faced by the public.”

Court decisions seem like pretty sterile documents by the time the public gets a look at them. But there’s real pain, and incredible bravery, in the process that brought about this most recent judgment.

The sex workers who appeared before the court were subjected to intense and prying questions by prosecutors. I still remember the day a friend of mine came back from giving her testimony, the broken way she looked. It had been a hard and humiliating experience.

These women put their lives on public display as few would be willing to do. Without them, there would have been no case. I hope they are celebrating like crazy this week.

University of Toronto law professor Alan Young and the legal team who took on this challenge worked for free. They went to extraordinary effort to build a story that spoke to the law while also bringing the voices of Canada’s sex workers and advocates to the fore. There would have been no case without them, either.

When all of this got underway, I couldn’t have guessed how the court might finally rule. At that level, the law is not often something that the common person can understand.

But then I learned a few months back that the legal test was essentially whether Canada’s prostitution laws caused more harm than good. And that’s when I knew there was a good chance that the sex workers were going to win.

Our laws are well-documented for hurting and killing sex workers while doing nothing to curb the industry. If harm versus public good was the test, there was no question in my mind.

Even when the laws aren’t enforced - which is mostly the case in Canada for the laws around keeping a bawdyhouse or living off the avails - they cause harm by shutting sex workers out of the mainstream and deepening stigma.

It took me a long time to form my views on sex work, through many twists and turns in career and personal experience. I now feel unequivocally that adult, consensual sex work must be legalized.

But it took me years to get here, and I respect that not everybody will greet Judge Himel’s ruling as a gift from the heavens. Some may even see it as the end of the world.

But what is the argument for anyone being subjected to injury, death, immense shame and stigma just because another segment of the population believes the way they make their living is immoral?

Perhaps you can’t imagine doing the work and wouldn’t want it for your own daughter. But is that really reason enough for laws that ramp up the danger and difficulty for other people’s daughters and sons?

People struggle with the idea that sex work could ever be part of their community. But the truth is that it already is. Thank you, Judge Himel, for seeing the people in the shadows.

Wow, we are living in kooky times when a U.S. newspaper does a straight-up story about how homeless students have a tougher time than other students when schools in their neighbourhood close down. Pretty unsettling story not so much because of what it's actually about, but because it treats the concept of homeless students like it's a normal thing.

Check out the fascinating buzz going on at the CCSVI Facebook page, where the piece I wrote today about multiple sclerosis got posted. This is clearly one hot topic among people with MS.

What's the real reason for resisting help for people with MS?

Paulo Zamboni must have been hanging out with the marketers too long when he coined that cursed phrase “liberation therapy” for a garden-variety angioplasty.

Maybe if the Italian doctor hadn’t made it all sound quite so fancy and amazing, we’d just be doing what we always do for people with blocked veins, giving them angioplasties to open things up.  Instead, we’re acting like it’s some unheard-of procedure and putting up a real fight to stop people with MS from trying it.

You probably know the story by now. Zamboni tried angioplasty on people with MS to test his theory that the devastating illness might be caused by blocked veins that affected blood flow in the brain. Patients responded in near-miraculous ways, and the “liberation therapy” was quickly news all over the world.

But even as people with MS grew hopeful at the news, a massive resistance was building among governments, doctors, MS support groups and virtually anyone else with a professional tie to the issue.

On the one hand, it’s understandable.

Zamboni didn’t do the double-blind, control-group kinds of studies that are required in countries like Canada.  His theory goes against everything we think we know about MS, challenging the common wisdom that it’s an incurable auto-immune disorder best managed through lifelong drug therapy.

On the other, what’s this wave of resistance really about? More than 35,000 angioplasties are performed in Canada every year, 99 per cent of them without incident. Other than touting it as a potential cure for MS, Zamboni isn’t advocating an unusual or dangerous procedure.

 So why are the MS professionals so resistant to even considering that people with MS might have blocked veins? Why are we forcing ill Canadians to travel to other countries on their own dime just to get a scan to confirm whether their veins might indeed be blocked? Why are we making it so hard for desperate people to hold onto hope of reclaiming at least a little mobility?

“Right now, it’s my only hope,” says Sharon Kristiansen, a Victoria woman who has lived with MS for 31 years. “Maybe it would mean that one day I could walk again. But if not that, then at least maybe I could get more feeling back in my fingertips. The slightest things make a difference.”

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the power of the pharmaceutical companies can’t be underestimated when trying to understand the resistance.

On average, people with MS use $20,000 to $40,000 worth of prescription drugs every year to control their symptoms. (Kristiansen’s annual drug costs are $25,000.) Onset is typically between ages 20 and 40. MS isn’t noted for shortening your lifespan, so many people live 40 to 60 years with the disease.

Close to three million people around the world have MS, including 55,000 Canadians. Based on my rudimentary math calculations, that means that just the current crop of Canadians with MS will use between $44 billion and $134 billion worth of prescription drugs over their combined lifetimes.

Assuming people in other countries are also paying at least $20,000 a year for drug therapy and living with MS for the same length of time, we’re talking a mind-blowing $2.4 trillion worldwide  just to treat the people who have the disease right now.

That’s a lot of sales at risk. I know that’s an ugly thing to say, but can we honestly feel confident that we’re exploring potential cures for MS when that much money is at stake?

Drug companies are very good at public relations, to the point that everyone from researchers to doctors to advocacy groups and “grassroots” health organizations ends up compromised. Case in point: The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada.

Kudos to the society for issuing its first-ever proposal call last fall for further research into Zamboni’s theory. That can’t have been an easy decision given that drug companies donate half a million dollars or more every year to the society.

Six drugs are approved for use in Canada for the treatment of MS. The manufacturers of five of them were listed as major donors in the MS Society’s 2008 and 2009 annual reports.

Just four donors in the country gave at the top level last year, with gifts of $100,000 or more. Two were drug companies.

Is any of that proof of something afoot? No. Zamboni’s theory challenges the status quo in all kinds of ways, and for all I know the resistance is simply about sound medical practise.

But for the first time ever, there’s a glimmer of real hope on the horizon for people with MS. I just find it odd that we’re putting so much effort into raining on their parade.

  

Why some of our biggest problems just drag on (and on)

My late father took to calling me “Little Miss Know-It-All” once I became a columnist. My mother still teases me about it.

It’s a funny thing, being an opinion writer. You have to be out there with something to say - otherwise, what’s the point? It seems I’m always weighing in on one thing or another, and never mind that I might not have known the first thing about the subject prior to that. 

I wish I really did know it all, because wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing? But what journalists are good at is identifying problems. That doesn’t mean we know how to solve them.

Still, you learn a lot after years of writing about problems.  The upside of journalism is getting to see big thinkers working together with the information, insight and team skills needed to solve a problem. The downside is realizing how often we get stuck, and how the ruts in the road just keep on getting deeper in the places where we’ve spun our wheels a hundred times before.

Every positive change - gay rights, fewer motor-vehicle deaths, lower dropout rates, higher birth weights, environmental protection, equality for women, on and on - came about because people who knew their stuff simply got to it and figured things out. We’re impressive problem-solvers when we want to be.

Yet other problems linger on. Why? In my opinion, it usually comes down to a lack of honesty within the process and conflicting interests. We talk about our commitment to the issue at hand, but not about the hidden agendas and politically influenced decision-making that derails any problem-solving process.

We do not badly in the first stage of problem-solving, where we’re gathering information. Think of all those fabulous reports that have come out of the many royal commissions, task forces and inquiries we’ve created to help us with stubborn, complex issues.

But so many of those recommendations never make it off the shelf. We appear genuine in our search for answers, but rarely are.

I was part of a corporate process years ago in which complex problems got addressed by bringing anyone with a piece of the issue into the same room to figure things out as a group. It’s amazing how quickly a problem can be resolved when everybody puts aside their own self-interest and works for the greater good.

But there’s the sticking point. If anybody is there for the wrong reason, or less than honest about adopting the solutions that emerge from the process, it all goes wrong pretty quickly. You need to be willing to compromise your own interests to solve a problem, and honest in talking about the challenges. Change can’t happen otherwise.

An example: We can’t possibly solve the problem of people with mental illness falling into homelessness until those with the power and the funding base to change that are honest about the level of service needed and the fact that we’re not even close to having enough.

We can’t wish everybody off our streets while at the same time slowing the building of subsidized housing across Canada to a trickle and gentrifying every neighbourhood to suit the middle-class.

We can’t address the crisis in our health, social and justice systems caused by drug addiction without acknowledging that we’ve stripped down services so aggressively in the last decade that treatment these days is readily available only if you’ve got  money to buy private care at $10,000-plus a month.

We can’t address the needs of the 35,000 British Columbians who live with mental handicaps while cutting and capping vital supports that were never generous in the first place. We can’t feel good about expanding disability services to include people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder while at the same time cutting overall funding so that everybody will receive less help.

We can’t help people with brain injuries by scrapping a community program that used to help them make the transition from hospital to home, as we did two years ago. That not only exacerbated problems for that group, it complicated potential solutions around homelessness: Brain injury is a fact of life for more than half of the people living on our streets, and the reason why many are homeless in the first place.

We’ll solve our tough problems when we’re honest about them, and cognizant of the political spin and self-interest that undermines the process. 

I’d like to say the day is soon coming. But Little Miss Know-It-All isn’t at all sure about that.

There's a great new report out from the Vancouver Board of Trade and the Justice Institute that really puts some solid figures to the argument that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to social services to children and families.
We all know that - even government knows it. But the reality is that time and again we ignore the wisdom and scrap preventive services, leaving some future taxpayer to foot the bill for all the crisis costs that will come due once the child who didn't get the support they need grows up into the adult awash in poor health outcomes, criminal involvement and low productivity.
Read the report here. 

I can relate to that poor bus driver who got lost on the way to Bamfield with a busload of students. I've done that drive, and found myself wondering many times along the way which was the most likely outcome: That I would take a wrong turn and get lost forever on the winding gravel roads between Victoria and Bamfield, or be killed by one of the giganto super-size logging trucks whooshing past me.
Fortunately, I happened to pick up a mom-and-son hitchhiking duo a couple weeks ago on a drive back to Victoria from Courtenay, and they hailed from Bamfield. The son gave me very sound advice for staying on the straight and narrow while driving to Bamfield: Follow the power lines.
Either that or drive in sensible fashion to Port Alberni and take the Lady Rose steamboat in. Lovely way to see Bamfield.

Thank you, UBC researcher Kate Shannon, who wrote this piece for the Canadian Medical Association Journal this month. Note the tremendous surge in arrests for outdoor sex workers in Canada due to short-sighted changes in the communications law in the 1980s, and with zero improvement in the lives of sex workers despite a lot of talk around that time of how the new laws were going to "help" women. We can't let them add another bad, poorly considered law to the mix by toughening up sentences for keeping a common bawdyhouse.

From the September edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

(All editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the Can adian Medical Association.)

The hypocrisy of Canada’s prostitution legislation

Often described as the world’s oldest profession, the exchange of sex for money has always

existed and will continue to exist worldwide.

For many, the sex industry evokes a sense of moral unease, and divides feminists and society alike on whether it is an oppression and commodification of women, or a woman’s right and choice to sell her body. Canada’s federal legislation reflects this divide: The buying and selling of sex among consensual adults has always been legal, yet criminal code provisions on communicating, procuring, bawdy houses and living off the avails of prostitution make it virtually impossible to work legally in safer indoor settings.

Against this backdrop, the numbers of missing and murdered women continue to swell in Canadian cities and street-involved women engaged in sex work experience some of the worst health outcomes in our society, including drug-related harms, trauma, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

Standardized mortality rates among female street-based sex workers are higher than any other population of women in North America, with homicide being the most common cause of death.

Sadly, there are multiple examples of convictions of serial murderers of sex workers over the last decade in North America and the United Kingdom, and ongoing concerns remain of potential

serial murderers in Edmonton, Winnipeg and along the “Highway of Tears” in Northern British Columbia. The recent convictions for the gruesome homicides of women on the streets of Vancouver and Seattle — the largest serial murders in Canadian and American history — should be a vivid and chilling reminder.

Importantly, growing peer-reviewed research published in some of the top medical journals now suggest that enforcement of criminal sanctions targeting sex work, including communicating

in public spaces, displaces sex workers to isolated alleys and industrial settings away from health and support services.

Enforced displacement and lack of access to safer indoor work environments independently increase sex workers’ risk of physical violence and rape, and reduces their ability to safely negotiate condom use with clients, thereby protecting themselves from sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies. Qualitative evidence further describes how criminal sanctions limiting sex workers’ ability to regulate safer industry practices (e.g., create unions,

safer indoor work spaces. etc.) compound health-related risks.

Globally, evidence-based public health research is being used in calls to remove criminal sanctions targeting sex work; one such call even came from the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Yet in Canada this public health policy gap has been met with

scaled up enforcement-based efforts targeting sex workers and their clients.

According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, following the enactment of the 1985 ‘communicating code’legislation designed to remove the visible presence of sex work, annual prostitution arrests increased nearly 10-fold,

from 1, 255 arrests in 1985 to 10, 457 arrests in 1987. These rates have remained constant at about 10, 000 arrests per year, with 97 per cent occurring in Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal.

Despite three separate parliamentary sub-committees on prostitution since the

mid-1980s, sex workers and human rights experts are now being forced to

challenge the criminal sanctions through the courts, as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Now, as we wait for the Ontario Supreme Court decision on one challenge, the federal government has taken another backward step, this time by reclassifying the Criminal Code on

“keeping a bawdy house” (a place kept for the purpose prostitution) making it a

serious crime with a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment.6 This new

Criminal Code regulation, introduced without Parliamentary debate, is in blatant

disregard of the evidence and has the concerning risk of pushing sex workers

further underground and outside the public health umbrella.

In perhaps the saddest reflection of this public health policy gap, in 2008 sex workers in Edmonton began giving samples of their DNA to a community agency and RCMP network to ensure their bodies would be identified in case of future harm.

While rigorous evaluation of legal policy approaches to sex work remains critical, it is also time for government and policy makers to take into account the evidence of the failures of the criminalized approach to sex work on health and human rights in Canadian society.

Kate Shannon PhD

Assistant professor

Department of Medicine

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, BC

REFERENCES

1. Shannon K, Strathdee SA, Shoveller J, et al. Structural and environmental barriers to condom use negotiation with clients among female sex workers: Implications for HIV prevention strategies and policy. Am J Public Health 2009;99:659-65.

2. Shannon K, Kerr T, Strathdee SA, et al. Prevalence and structural correlates of gender-based violence in a prospective cohort of female sex workers. BMJ 2009;339: b2939.

3. Rekart ML. Sex-work harm reduction. Lancet 2005;366: 2123-34.

4. Goodyear M, Cusick L. Protection of sex workers. BMJ 2007;334:52-3.

5. Duchesne D. Street prostitution in Canada. Ottawa (ON): Statistics Canada; 2002. Cat. no. 85-002-XPE

6. Perreaux L. Tory legislation takes aim at brothels and bookies. The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 2010 Aug. 5. Sect A:6 DOI:10.1503/cmaj.100410

© 2010 Jupiterimages Corp.

Previously published at www.cmaj.ca

CMAJ • SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 • 182(12)

© 2010 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors

Canada has a habit of following the U.S. into good times and bad. But with that big country to the south of us deep in the grips of truly terrible economic times, let's hope we're not following too closely.
Here's an alarming read about the astounding amount of U.S. households going into foreclosure these days, and the equally astounding rise in homelessness happening in the big cities like Los Angeles, where homelessness grew  30 per cent between 2007 and 2009.
As the story notes, one in 400 homes went into foreclosure in July 2010. In Nevada and California, the foreclosure rates are five times higher - one in 80. Scary to contemplate where this is all going.

If you needed any more of an excuse to lie around in the sun (oh, wait - that's me), there's a new study linking a lack of Vitamin D to the development of schizophrenia. Seeing as a lack of that vitamin has also been linked to higher risk of multiple sclerosis and a few cancers, maybe it's time for us to quit slathering on the sunscreen QUITE so thickly and start letting a little of that Vitamin-D-maker-in-the-sky shine on our skin. Just a little.

Google has changed my life, but you do have to wonder if they're aiming to take over the world. Here they are talking about their new "instant search" feature, in which you don't even have to wait that draggy millisecond after you hit Enter to find the info you're searching for on-line. Pretty soon, you won't even have to type in your search criteria - Google will just know.

Scientific evidence isn't for everybody

An intriguing article out of the U.S. on how people have a tendency not to trust scientists. Apparently we don't trust scientists as a general rule, and tend to pay more attention to the bad news and less to the good. But really, why is it a surprise that we don't always trust science? Science has been known to get things wrong many times in the past. So it is when you're human, of course - scientists are no more able than any of us to avoid mistakes and see past their own prejudices and presumptions that could slant findings. Pharmaceutical companies' growing power as funders of scientific research should only make us even more suspicious.

Have years of dislocation taught us nothing about people living homeless?

What’s left to say on the subject of homelessness? We’ve studied the issue from every angle for almost 20 years now. We’ve lamented it, lived it and produced many, many reports on it, all urging immediate action.

And yet at the end of the day, we’re still standing here wringing our hands - this time over conditions on the Pandora boulevard, but ultimately about a recurring problem we’ve pushed around the city for a long time now.

Once it was the neighbourhood around Holiday Court. Then Speed Street. Then Fernwood, and Cormorant.  Now it’s Pandora. A couple years from now - who knows? If we still haven’t comprehended by then that the solution is to fix the problem and not just move it along, bet on a new hot spot somewhere in the city.

Don’t get me wrong - good things are happening around homelessness. We’ve come a long way in understanding the complex problems and societal changes at the root of modern-day homelessness, a relatively recent phenomenon in every western country. We generally get that things happened to create homelessness in Canada, and things will have to happen to get us out from under it. 

And we’re doing some of those things. A partial list: Cool Aid’s brand-new shelter and services on Ellice Street, opening this fall. Pacifica’s Clover Place housing development. Woodwynn Farms. Longer hours for Our Place.  A terrific new health centre. The fledgling Streets to Homes program. Outreach teams focused on crisis intervention and stability.

But I can see with my own eyes anytime I drive along Pandora that despite the wins, we haven’t yet found a solution for a small and very specific group of people living on the streets. With problems too big to hide, they’re the visible face of homelessness, and lightning rods for virtually all of the community’s wrath and indignation around the issue.

The makeup of the group changes regularly, depending on whose addiction has worsened, whose meds are working, whose families are still clinging on, who’s headed for jail or just got out. Everybody’s got their own story to tell, but they all lead down.  

The group creates big problems wherever it settles. Petty crime rises, as does chaos, garbage, public health hazard, visible drug use and trafficking. Complaints to police increase. Media stories ensue, and businesses operating nearby feel the impact on their bottom line as customers shift away from the area.

I first met a version of the group at Holiday Court, a little motel on Hillside Avenue near Douglas that was the hot spot of the day back in 2001. As is the pattern, frustrated residents and businesses in the area tolerated the problems for longer than you might expect, but eventually cranked up the pressure until police moved people along.

Happy days for neighbours of Holiday Court, but not so good for the string of neighbourhoods that followed. These days, even a rundown motel with rain leaking through the plaster or a fleabag apartment in Fernwood looks like luxury compared to the full-on homelessness the group now lives with.

There was once about 30 people in this public and chaotic group, then 70 by the time they’d shifted to Cormorant Street. Now, it’s around 100. It’s obvious we’re losing ground on this particular front.

Why is that? Let me count the ways: Severe addiction with no ability to access treatment. Severe mental illness with no place to go. People so lonely that even a war zone feels friendly. People so poor and broken that they have to live near the free stuff.

Mental handicaps. Brain injuries. Poor social skills. A system of policing and justice that doesn’t work when people have nothing to lose. A splintered region that doesn’t yet get that homelessness is everybody’s problem.

Put it all together and it’s a recipe for bedlam, and immensely frustrating for all involved. I’ve long thought that someone should just put money on the table and hold a contest to come up with solutions for reducing the friction over this small group. What could we do differently - and immediately?

The transient group is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homelessness, but their presence shapes the community dialogue.  It polarizes the debate. It leaves us thinking that nothing is working even when it is, because the rubble of these people’s lives is so obvious.

We can do better than just pushing the mess and chaos into another neighbourhood. We can fix this problem. We have to.

Public forum coming up with Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham, Sept. 7, from 7-9 p.m.  at Canada West University, 950 Kings Rd. The topic: "Families, Mental Illness and Police Involvement." Sounds like required viewing if you've ever wondered how police deal with people in an acute phase of their mental illness when they get a complaint.

 If you follow the news, you'll know that a significant number of people in Canada and elsewhere end up killed by police in conflicts that occur due to somebody's mental illness. Often the person's family has even phoned in the initial complaint as a way of getting help for their loved one. Too often, it goes very badly - witness the tragic story unfolding in Pickering, Ont. right now. We all know police have a tough job to do, but there has to be a better way.

Sadly, I can't make this Sept. 7 forum, but I hope to send somebody in my stead to report back. Register at  250-384-4225 or admin.bcss@shaw.ca. The forum is being hosted by the local chapter of the B.C. Schizophrenia Society. 

I'm going to be writing about the "camping" problems on Pandora boulevard this Friday - did a quick search on Google News around homelessness and discovered this story out of Australia, which now puts its homeless population at 105,000. Can't imagine what Canada's figure would be if we ever added everything up, seeing as B.C. has at least 15,000 people living homeless even by conservative estimates. The one thing that seems to unite all the western, democratic countries these days is a staggering rise in homelessness over the last couple orf decades.

I always wondered how funerals for poor people got paid for, and now we know, at least in Toronto. Haven't been able to find B.C.'s rules yet, but here's a related story from 2008 about the same issue in Quebec. Looks like prices have risen significantly in less than two years if you compare the figures from these two stories.

Creating prey for the next Pickton

Our sex-work laws kill people.

We had a reminder of that just last week, when Willie Pickton’s murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him, and it’s our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work that create those streets.

Then last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come - one that detailed the tragic inability of B.C.’s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton’s farm. I’ve watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public’s muted response to that damning report.

We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women who Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It’s beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.’s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that can only increase risks for sex workers.

We light candles for dead women without a moment’s thought for the appalling working conditions that primed them as targets for murder. We lament the Pickton legacy without giving one hoot for the people who we continue to banish to the fringes. The hypocrisy is unbearable sometimes.

I was working with sex workers at PEERS Victoria when Pickton was on trial. Media outlets from across Canada called me frequently to ask what I thought, and whether anything was changing for sex workers now that there had been so much publicity about the hard life of a street-entrenched sex worker.

How can anything change when our laws remain resolutely the same? Working outdoors and alone in the middle of the night would be a dangerous business no matter what product is being sold. As long as we continue to deny adult sex workers a safer workplace and a place in our communities, nothing changes.

The federal government’s recent decision to ramp up penalties for people convicted of keeping a common bawdyhouse will add significantly to the risks. People convicted of operating a brothel will now face a mandatory jail sentence of at least five years (compared to a maximum of two years under the previous law). 

The Department of Justice says the change is needed to fight organized crime. Unfortunately, the tougher penalties will also ensnare many, many independent sex workers and small business people operating thousands of escort agencies, massage parlours and bathhouses across Canada.

Perhaps there are still some people who believe that closing down brothels will eliminate the sex trade. I’m not one of them.

The commercial sex industry thrives in every country of the world, courtesy of a rock-solid customer base and a strong profit motive. A crackdown on indoor venues won’t stop prostitution, it will merely push sex workers deeper into the shadows and closer to the streets.

How is it that we can mourn the Pickton murders so eloquently, yet do nothing to address the real issues for sex workers?

We have erected monuments to murdered women. Lit a few thousand candles in their memory. Spent a small fortune on bringing Pickton to justice.  But we haven’t done a thing to reduce the risks for  Canada’s sex workers, who apparently hold our interest only when they’re dead.

Our laws are as conflicted as we are. The sale of sex is legal in Canada but anywhere that it happens is by definition illegal, because a bawdyhouse is wherever a sex worker regularly conducts business. You can sell sex through a newspaper ad, but risk arrest if caught soliciting customers in a public place.

The last time our country’s police forces cracked down hard on indoor sex venues was in the 1970s. The result was a notable rise in street prostitution and an even more notable increase in assaults and murders involving sex workers.

Can we possibly be here again? That would be the biggest tragedy of all - to have learned nothing from the deaths and suffering of so many women and their families.

Not everybody shares my opinion on the sex industry, of course. But I think even the nay-sayers want laws that work. Our laws are all but useless in preventing the sale of sex, but frighteningly effective at increasing the misery and danger for those in the industry.

Canada has poorly considered law, random enforcement and a strong undercurrent of moral judgment when it comes to sex work. It’s a lethal combination.

More jail time for people with the audacity to want to work indoors certainly won’t change that. Neither will tears and candlelight vigils.

Very worrying stuff going on around the changes to Canada's bawdyhouse laws. By lumping bawdyhouses in with other "signature activities" of organized crime, the federal government will dramatically increase jail term for people convicted of operating a bawdyhouse - from a maximum two years to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least five years.

 Seeing as the law has already defined a bawdyhouse as anywhere that a sex worker routinely does business with her clients, that sets the stage for a crackdown on indoor sex work. And as we learned in the last crackdown in the 1970s, that in turn sets the stage for an increase in street prostitution and a rise in violent crimes against sex workers.

Here's the press release and the backgrounder on the issue released by the Department of Justice in early August. I'll be writing about this in my Friday column.

Troubling news: The federal government wants to ramp up enforcement of Canada's bawdy-house laws as part of a "crackdown" to reduce gang activity. In the last crackdown in the 1970s, the result was a drastic increase in street prostitution and a corresponding rise in the violence experienced by sex workers, what with them having lost a safe indoor place to work. Here's an excellent Vancouver Sun editorial from last week and a column by Sun writer Peter McKnight on this alarming issue.

Back to my blogging today after a great kayaking trip in the Discovery Islands. More on that later. In the meantime, let's get serious: here's the report from the Vancouver Police Department on the problems within the VPD and the RCMP that tripped up investigators looking into the Pickton killings in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Kudos to the Times Colonist's Lindsay Kines for kicking his excellent reporting up a notch and cranking up the pressure to get this report out there.

Special friendships grow out of Cool Aid connection

The two young women across the table from me look a lot like friends.

They keep up a running banter. About the disastrous time they tried to go ice-skating. The great meal they shared at Anawim House. How weird it is that they each have parents who’ve been to Germany to see The Passion, and mothers who are nurses.  

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes. The only thing that distinguishes this one is that it took a little planning to make it happen.  One of the young women is a mentor and the other, her mentoring match. They met through a local program that aims to nurture new friendships to life in the region.

The Mentoring Project is a joint effort of the Victoria Cool Aid Society and the Umbrella Society, and is fully funded by the United Way.  Mentors and participants come from all walks of life, although most have in common an experience with mental illness or addiction either in their own lives or that of their families.

Neither Brieana Murray nor Beth Cormier had ever tried anything like the Mentoring Project before signing up last summer.  

Murray, the mentor, heard about it through a friend, and liked the idea of giving her time in a hands-on way. Cormier was just coming out of a rough patch in her life that had briefly landed her on the street; she was searching for ways to “reconnect” when a staff member at Our Place told her about the program.

Eleven months into their match, they’re happy at how things have worked out. Program co-ordinator Marna Lynn Smith says the matches don’t always click so beautifully, but it’s obvious that these two women have found a fit.

“You’re matched with someone your own age and you just hang out,” says Cormier. “It’s not counselling, it’s not meeting with some doctor, it’s not anything so official. Meeting Brieana has provided a little normalcy for my life. I like being able to just chit-chat, and not always dealing with the heavy stuff.”

The program starts with 30 hours of training over 10 weeks for mentors. (Email Smith at msmith@coolaid.org for information on the next training session in September). Smith tries to match people by age and gender, but that’s not always possible; at the moment, there are five mentors under age 25 ready to be matched, but most of the people looking for support are older.

The matching process is “both an art and a science,” says Smith - one that can come down to a gut feeling about “the right moment” for a specific match. People are asked to commit to spending at least two or three hours a week together, face-to-face ideally but via email and phone when the demands of life interfere.

The contract is for a year, with the opportunity to renew at that point or wrap it up with Smith’s help.

“We can check in any time people feel it’s needed. We can even have team meetings to talk things over,” says Smith. “But mostly I don’t micro-manage. The sooner you can get the ball rolling between the people who have been matched, the better things work out.”

The program is intended as an add-on to the more intensive kinds of support some people require.  Smith won’t match mentoring participants unless they’ve got other supports and connections in their lives. Fortunately, the service is part of Cool Aid’s REES program for people with mental illness and addiction, so they can get connected to other supports just by walking through the door.

Cormier appreciates that addiction is included in the mentors’ training. Not all participants have addictions, but having it out there in the open as a potential issue meant Cormier was comfortable talking openly with Murray about her own recovery.

“From my experience, you become your addiction. You become your mental-health issue. To find people who will look at me and take me as a person has meant a lot to me,” says Cormier. “You do get shunned when you’ve got those kinds of problems, and it’s nice to be able to connect through something like this. There’s nothing else like it in the region.”

For those hesitant about stepping forward for support, Cormier has some advice: “Don’t be afraid.” Murray has similar advice for prospective mentors worried about what kind of relationship they’re getting into.

“It’s a friendship,” says Murray. “I don’t know if it’s that way for everybody, but it is for us.”

Public gatherings test our civility - and we get a pass

I always enjoy the annual Island MusicFest, and had my usual good time grooving to the tunes at the Courtenay festival last month.

But it’s the people-watching that’s the best part of a music festival. Pack several thousand people of all ages and backgrounds into a fairground for three days and nights, and things are guaranteed to get interesting.

A whole lot of people in tight quarters is a true test of our civility. Yes, there are rules at MusicFest, and quite a number of security guards and police on hand to try to enforce them.

But when that many people gather in one place, what really determines how things will go comes down to people’s willingness to be tolerant and respectful of each other. And the MusicFest crowd always delivers.

If you’ve been to a music festival, you’ll know all about blanket rules, and the strict but unwritten code that governs the sea of blankets stretched out in front of the main stage.

Blanket rules probably don’t occupy even a few seconds of your thoughts in your non-festival life. But at a music festival, they’re a major preoccupation. When the sun’s shining and the music’s fine, as it was last month, you’ll spend most of your day on a blanket on the grass in front of one stage or another.

So your blanket really weighs on your mind.

You think about how to set it up in the morning in front of the main stage so that you won’t need to check on it again until that night’s concert gets started. You think about the sea of blankets all around you, and how to strike a path through them that avoids the trampling of other people’s blankets. You contemplate the space that your blanket takes up, and whether it could truly fit unobtrusively into that gap in front of the older couple comfortably positioned on their own blanket, or if it would be rude to even try.

Trivial stuff, sure. But the thing about blanket rules is that they work even though there are no actual rules. That they do is a small but heartening testament to the basic decency of human beings.

Camping at MusicFest is another major test of civility. With no reservation system and no designated spots, it’s essentially a free-for-all once you’ve made it into the fairgrounds and a supreme patience-tester just to get to that point.

The painfully slow check-in for campers is the first place civility is severely tested, but I didn’t see anyone lose it in the long, long hours of waiting to get into the campsite.

Once in, there’s simply no predicting what kind of neighbours you’ll get. Too bad for you if you inadvertently end up in the site beside a horde of drunk teenagers  with a dozen coolers of beer loaded up for the weekend. (Thanks for the “Quiet Area” campground this year, MusicFest organizers! Loved it.)

Even if you’ve got the nicest camping neighbours in the world, you’re still going to be in each other’s laps for days on end.

You’re going to hear that nice young couple having a nasty fight, because their tent is right outside your trailer door. You’re going to get a ball bounced off your head from the kids playing soccer two campsites over. You’re going to be in the middle of life being lived out loud, and that includes those enormous snores coming from the guy  in the tent less than a metre away from yours.

You’re going to line up for food, and for the porta-potty. Your bag is going to be searched regularly, and your wrist band examined at every opportunity. You’re going to be cheek-to-jowl with the young, the old, the beautiful, the weird and the vaguely creepy, and you might even end up dancing with one of them.

In other words, you and thousands of other festival goers will endure a series of inconveniences that you probably have little tolerance for in your regular life. But this time you’re just going to go with the flow.

To see it all unfold that way - well, it restores my faith. Rules and laws are all well and good, but it’s the unspoken agreements we make to tolerate each other that actually keep our world rolling along. How we behave when stuffed into tight and potentially unpleasant circumstance speaks to the essence of civility.

Group hug, people. And to all those volunteers and security staff who make MusicFest and all those other big public events enjoyable for the rest of us by riding herd on the handful of party animals who don’t get it: Thank you.

Silence from CLBC frightens people waiting for axe to fall

I met with three families recently who are frightened by the rumours they’re hearing about the group homes where some of their family members live. They’re not alone.

Back when B.C. was closing the big institutions like Woodlands and Glendale in the 1980s and 90s, group homes housing four to six people were touted as the way of the future for people with severe mental handicaps, and money-savers to boot.

But that was then. Now, the government is back looking for more savings. The group homes that families believed would always be there have suddenly become the focus for budget cuts at Community Living B.C., the five-year-old Crown agency charged with overseeing housing and support services for adults with developmental disabilities.

A shift away from group homes isn’t necessarily a bad thing if well-handled, at least not for residents with the potential to thrive in more independent housing. More than 2,700 CLBC clients already live outside of the group-home system in B.C., in foster- style arrangements known as “home shares.”

Ellen Tarshis - whose agency Community Living Victoria runs home shares as well as 15 of the region’s group homes - says the world is a changed place for the current generation of people with developmental disabilities, who have benefited from changed thinking and practises that let them participate in ways that previous generations never could. Many don’t need or want the intensive level of support and supervision provided in group homes.

But a group-home closure is a terrifying prospect for families like the ones I talked to, and not only because they’ve been shut out of the process so thoroughly that all they’ve got to go on are rumours and innuendo.

They’ve got stories to tell - about the bad things that can happen to vulnerable people in a poorly monitored home-share, about the years of troubled behaviour and poor health that finally ended when  their loved one found a well-run, stable group home, about all the assurances that their family member would never have to move again . But they can’t find a receptive ear anywhere.

New Democrat MLA Nicholas Simons says group-home residents are in the process of being ranked by CLBC - in many cases without the knowledge of families or advocates - according to their level of disability. A dollar value is attached to each ranking representing how much CLBC is prepared to spend on people with that level of disability. Those who score below the level needed to keep their place in a group home will be moved.

Not that anyone is actually saying that out loud. According to CLBC communications, some group homes may close in coming years due to an aging population and people choosing “more person-centred and inclusive residential choices.” And some savings may be achieved down the line through service redesigns that embrace “more person-centred and cost-effective approaches.”

The reality is a little more pressing. CLBC and the mix of private and not-for-profit agencies that operate group homes have already struck a deal to identify residents who can be moved out. Plans are well underway.

So on the one hand, you’ve got Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman and CLBC chief Rick Mowles on record that nobody will be forced from group homes against their will. On the other, you’ve got families, advocates and residents who are completely in the dark about any of it, and unable to access even basic information about the redesign plans or the status of a specific group home.

“Families have been relegated to the role of bystander in one of the most important decisions of their lives,” says Simons, fresh from a successful fight in his Powell River-Sunshine Coast riding that prevented the closure of a local group home. 

If a more independent style of housing gives people a richer life and saves money at the same time, then it’s an idea whose time has come.

But the government’s stated motives look just a little suspect considering the process is unfolding with no attempt to include those most affected by the changes.  

Community supports and day programs are also being cut at the same time. Does that sound like something you’d do if you were genuinely committed to a better quality of life for people with developmental disabilities?

“Done properly, I think many people can lead even better lives than they are right now,” says Tarshis of home-sharing. Her agency is one of seven in the region already doing that work.

“But have I lost sleep over this? Yes, I have. There are things that I worry about.”

Me, too.

A link to the Vancouver Sun's story on that creepy penile-arousal test they've been doing on kids in B.C. for the last 20 years. Where the heck are the university ethics types when you need them??

Oh, no! So now our premier shows his true colours as well around the census.