Do something
May 5, 2006
Some of my family members think I write too much about street issues. Maybe. But somebody has to.
One of these days, our children’s children will be struggling to get out from under the social disaster in their city centres, and they’ll order up a royal commission that will lead straight back to us, making one mistake after another in the final years of the 21st century.
I just want to my part to get us thinking about that while there’s still hope of changing things.
Were this a roadway falling apart beneath our feet, we would act quickly and decisively. We’d argue about the costs of the fixup and put off repairs as long as we could - that seems to be human nature - but we’d never let things deteriorate too far. Nobody likes a bumpy, dangerous road.
But bad roads are easier to think about than people whose lives are falling apart. Even though both represent a major problem, the forward thinking and common wisdom that keeps our roads in good repair have yet to become guiding principles of our social endeavours. We’ve been appallingly bad at having social policy of any kind, and even worse at doing any of it consistently. We’ve been adding fuel to the fire for more than 20 years now, so no small wonder that a firestorm is building on the horizon.
Every now and then, you still hear people reminisce of a time when a person could leave their front door unlocked without concern. When downtown visitors didn’t have to worry about someone trying to sell them drugs as they passed by.. When things were “different.”
What has changed since those kinder, gentler times? Us. Everything. The food we eat. The places where our goods come from. The kind of work we do. The world we see on television, and on-line. The number of children we have. The number of times we marry.
Even if we’d been paying attention these last few decades as to what all that change was doing to people, we’d still have had our work cut out for us just to keep up. But in fact, we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t doing anything for long enough to know if it worked, and mostly we weren’t doing anything at all. With the exception of short bursts of doing the right thing - the late-1980s Victoria Health Project comes to mind - we have done virtually nothing for years on numerous social fronts.
If you haven’t been to Streetlink, I recommend that you go. Volunteer. Talk to the people. Spend a few months taking in the environment, and get a sense of what’s going on among the people who frequent the place.
There was a time when a number of them would have been housed in institutions. That’s all over, wiped out back in the 1980s and never really replaced. You can argue the right and wrong of having institutions, but there’s no arguing that the people who used to go to such places now routinely land on the street.
We’ve slashed housing budgets and ignored aboriginal issues. We’ve cut welfare, and stumbled over our child-welfare policies to the point of inadvertently destroying untold thousands of lives by setting in motion a series of disastrous events. We’ve left people to stew in their tragic, debilitating addictions.
Our “hand up” is now a meager, mean one, and the lot of a single parent on assistance is increasingly grim. With that single act, we open the door for another generation that will struggle to thrive, and widen the chasm a little further between rich and poor. We’ve spent great wads of cash and talked up a storm even while barely figuring a single thing out, even while the problems have been multiplying right before our eyes.
We’re neck deep in potholes. And we’re still standing around blaming it all on Streetlink.
We can always pin it on government if we want. It’s so much easier than coming to grips with our collective inertia. I wish it was the government’ fault, too, because then I could still believe in elections as a cure for what ails us.
But really, it’s us. We’ve failed to see the utter disaster of our ways. We got so caught up in our own concerns that we forgot to apply even a fraction of the stewardship given to environmental causes to the vital work of sustaining our people.
Were we to start doing things right tomorrow, my grandchildren’s generation just might be looking back at this one with gratitude for the positive changes we set in motion for them. Some changes would come quickly, but well-managed social policy needs to be looking at least 20 years ahead. We can be the generation that changes the world.
Or we can continue to wait for somebody else to do something about that, and leave it to future generations to pay the steep price. Some legacy.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
It's not the milk
April 29, 2006
Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy milk products as much as the next person. I’m very fond of cheese and butter, and cream in my morning coffee.
But the dairy industry’s relentless drive to convince us that milk is essential to human life really does get to be a bit much sometimes. Like this week, when the news was full of stories that not drinking enough milk during pregnancy was tantamount to smoking in terms of its impact on birth weight.
In fairness, CTV did mention that the study - published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal - was partially funded by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. But most news outlets didn’t note that detail. An average reader would likely conclude from the overall coverage that any pregnant woman who really cared about her child should be drinking plenty of milk.
In fact, sufficient Vitamin D was actually what made the difference in birth weight in the study of 279 pregnant women. The study, however, looked only at milk, noting slightly lower birthweights among the women who drank less than a cup a day.
“This is an important finding, because increasing numbers of women are restricting milk consumption during pregnancy,” noted the researchers, professors from Calgary and McGill universities.
Fears of weight gain, “self-diagnosed lactose intolerance,” and a belief that allergies in children may be linked to a woman’s pre-natal milk consumption are putting people off milk, say the researchers. They called for Canadian doctors to emphasize the importance of milk to their pregnant patients.
Indeed, fewer than 15 per cent of Canadian women drink cow’s milk. Milk sales across Western Canada are in decline. Were cow’s milk really the elixir of life, we’d be heading for a health crisis.
Fortunately, it isn’t. Milk has healthy properties, sure, and a lot of people love the taste of it. But you don’t have to be a biology genius to grasp that no species would evolve to be dependent on the breast milk of another species. We might like milk, but we don’t need it.
I admit to a certain bias, having not consumed more than 10 glasses of milk - and even then, all of them probably chocolate-flavoured - since emerging from my milk-mandatory childhood. “I always made you drink milk!” my mother often reminds me, and I remind her in turn that my compliance didn’t mean that I actually liked the stuff.
To each her own, however. Like I said, I eat plenty of other kinds of dairy products. But a study that clearly sets out to scare pregnant women into drinking more milk - well, that’s just wrong.
Research funded by industry interests is nothing new in Canada. Almost all research these days, including that done at universities, is funded at least in part by somebody with a business interest in the outcome.
So no surprises that the milk study concluded that the way to ensure a better birthweight for infants was for pregnant women to drink more milk - an extra cup a day. Wouldn’t that turn out to be a most perfect development for an industry with a major product line in decline? If every pregnant woman could be convinced that a lack of milk was virtually as harmful as smoking to her unborn child, milk markets would boom around the world.
What are the unbiased facts around Vitamin D? That turns out to be a tough question to answer, what with the Vitamin D supplement industry also hard at work these days spinning the health benefits of higher doses.
Once upon a time, the amount of sunshine we got in a day was all we needed. Our bodies produce Vitamin D in abundance when our skin is exposed to sunlight for at least 15 minutes daily. We’d have to drink more than 110 glasses of milk a day to get the same hit of Vitamin D that a little bit of sunshine can deliver.
But these days, sunshine is the enemy, and sunscreen the norm. People living in northern countries such as Canada generally don’t see enough sunny days anyway, particularly in the winter. Obesity is also thought to be interfering with people’s Vitamin D production, likely due to fat stores below the skin soaking up the vitamin before it can make it in to the rest of the body. Some researchers suspect that more than half of North Americans are Vitamin-D deficient.
Then again, none of that is a sure thing either.
“The reality is that we do not know what the Vitamin D requirement during pregnancy is,” noted independent researchers Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, of the Medical University of South Carolina, in their review of the milk study. “For that matter, we do not know the requirement for the general population, either.”
In the meantime, keep drinking your milk. Just don’t let them tell you that you have to.
April 29, 2006
Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy milk products as much as the next person. I’m very fond of cheese and butter, and cream in my morning coffee.
But the dairy industry’s relentless drive to convince us that milk is essential to human life really does get to be a bit much sometimes. Like this week, when the news was full of stories that not drinking enough milk during pregnancy was tantamount to smoking in terms of its impact on birth weight.
In fairness, CTV did mention that the study - published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal - was partially funded by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. But most news outlets didn’t note that detail. An average reader would likely conclude from the overall coverage that any pregnant woman who really cared about her child should be drinking plenty of milk.
In fact, sufficient Vitamin D was actually what made the difference in birth weight in the study of 279 pregnant women. The study, however, looked only at milk, noting slightly lower birthweights among the women who drank less than a cup a day.
“This is an important finding, because increasing numbers of women are restricting milk consumption during pregnancy,” noted the researchers, professors from Calgary and McGill universities.
Fears of weight gain, “self-diagnosed lactose intolerance,” and a belief that allergies in children may be linked to a woman’s pre-natal milk consumption are putting people off milk, say the researchers. They called for Canadian doctors to emphasize the importance of milk to their pregnant patients.
Indeed, fewer than 15 per cent of Canadian women drink cow’s milk. Milk sales across Western Canada are in decline. Were cow’s milk really the elixir of life, we’d be heading for a health crisis.
Fortunately, it isn’t. Milk has healthy properties, sure, and a lot of people love the taste of it. But you don’t have to be a biology genius to grasp that no species would evolve to be dependent on the breast milk of another species. We might like milk, but we don’t need it.
I admit to a certain bias, having not consumed more than 10 glasses of milk - and even then, all of them probably chocolate-flavoured - since emerging from my milk-mandatory childhood. “I always made you drink milk!” my mother often reminds me, and I remind her in turn that my compliance didn’t mean that I actually liked the stuff.
To each her own, however. Like I said, I eat plenty of other kinds of dairy products. But a study that clearly sets out to scare pregnant women into drinking more milk - well, that’s just wrong.
Research funded by industry interests is nothing new in Canada. Almost all research these days, including that done at universities, is funded at least in part by somebody with a business interest in the outcome.
So no surprises that the milk study concluded that the way to ensure a better birthweight for infants was for pregnant women to drink more milk - an extra cup a day. Wouldn’t that turn out to be a most perfect development for an industry with a major product line in decline? If every pregnant woman could be convinced that a lack of milk was virtually as harmful as smoking to her unborn child, milk markets would boom around the world.
What are the unbiased facts around Vitamin D? That turns out to be a tough question to answer, what with the Vitamin D supplement industry also hard at work these days spinning the health benefits of higher doses.
Once upon a time, the amount of sunshine we got in a day was all we needed. Our bodies produce Vitamin D in abundance when our skin is exposed to sunlight for at least 15 minutes daily. We’d have to drink more than 110 glasses of milk a day to get the same hit of Vitamin D that a little bit of sunshine can deliver.
But these days, sunshine is the enemy, and sunscreen the norm. People living in northern countries such as Canada generally don’t see enough sunny days anyway, particularly in the winter. Obesity is also thought to be interfering with people’s Vitamin D production, likely due to fat stores below the skin soaking up the vitamin before it can make it in to the rest of the body. Some researchers suspect that more than half of North Americans are Vitamin-D deficient.
Then again, none of that is a sure thing either.
“The reality is that we do not know what the Vitamin D requirement during pregnancy is,” noted independent researchers Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, of the Medical University of South Carolina, in their review of the milk study. “For that matter, we do not know the requirement for the general population, either.”
In the meantime, keep drinking your milk. Just don’t let them tell you that you have to.
Democracy
April 25, 2006
We don’t devote too much time in our daily lives to caring for our democracy, in Canada or anywhere else in the world. Maybe we think we don’t have to.
But with the news this month that only a third of Canadians believe they’re being governed by “the will of the people” - well, that’s a pretty strong sign that we do. And it’s not just Canada. The figures weren’t much different in several other long-time democracies elsewhere in the world whose citizens were asked the same questions. All over the world, people are feeling disconnected from their governments.
The questions about democracy were part of a much larger global poll that Gallup International conducted a year ago in 68 countries, news of which broke this month with the release of a book on the findings: Voices of the People 2006. Almost 54,000 citizens took part in the poll - the largest in history.
Around the world, almost 80 per cent of those polled said democracy is the best governance system. In Canada, 85 per cent of us affirmed our support for “rule by the people.”
But only 30 per cent of respondents thought that they were actually reaping the benefits of democracy, or being ruled by the will of the people. In Canada, barely a third of us believed that the will of the people was guiding our goverments.
Germany came in at a truly disturbing 18 per cent. The French rated the state of their country’s democracy almost as dismally, at 26 per cent. Mexicans (20 per cent) and Russians (18 per cent) weren’t any happier. Even in the countries that scored the highest on that question - Israel and Kosovo - fully half of the population still didn’t believe they were governed by the will of the people.
A third of Canadians disagreed when asked if Canada had free and fair elections. So did almost that many in France and Israel. In the U.S., almost half said their elections didn’t meet that test.
That’s not good. We appear to love democratic principles, but are clearly becoming convinced that our countries are no longer governing themselves in ways that adhere to those principles. Democracy is on the ropes.
“The gap between those two perceptions. . . leads us to the hypothesis that many mature democracies in the world are undergoing a deep disillusionment about the ability of democracy to deliver rule by the will of the people,” said Marc Leger, the Canadian who supervised the global poll.
The original intent of the Greeks who invented it as a form of governance was that every man (women and slaves were excluded) would participate directly in all decision-making. The Greeks took the literal meaning of “democracy” seriously in governing their ancient city-states.
Other nations would follow the Greeks’ lead, but often with significant modifications. The men who created the United States stopped short of full-on “rule of the people,” and chose instead to elect representatives to run their country. Canada went with the party system, in which whatever political party wins the popular vote gets to declare their leader prime minister.
On the one hand, the voting processes of democracy have never in history been as inclusive as they are now. More of us have the right to vote than ever before , and discriminatory practices against women, ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups have largely ended. In terms of providing the most number of people with the opportunity to vote, we’re doing a lot better than the Greeks.
But on the other hand, very little is democratic about our governments beyond that brief casting of votes every four or five years. Royal commissions, inquiries and legislative committees come to town to ask our opinions every now and then, but government rarely acts on our advice. Big money is spent and major decisions made, and the public by and large has no idea about any of it. We have abdicated.
At the time of the Gallup poll last year, Canadians were coping with the grim revelations that were surfacing daily during the Gomery inquiry. Given that time frame, what’s most surprising is that the Gallup pollsters found anybody at all in those terrible weeks who still believed that the will of the people governed our decision-makers.
That’s not to say that all is lost. Less fortunate countries would go to war for a chance at the democratic rights that Canadians enjoy. We’re still a really great country for the majority of the world.
But we can’t go on dreaming idealistically about democracies while our actual governance drifts further and further from the people. We’ve got to seek change. We’ve got to revitalize this most vital of systems. We owe it to all the people who will come behind us as the centuries unfold.
History has shown us in clear and devastating terms the price that nations pay for hubris. Canada won’t be any different. Our only hold on democracy is the will of the people not to let it go.
April 25, 2006
We don’t devote too much time in our daily lives to caring for our democracy, in Canada or anywhere else in the world. Maybe we think we don’t have to.
But with the news this month that only a third of Canadians believe they’re being governed by “the will of the people” - well, that’s a pretty strong sign that we do. And it’s not just Canada. The figures weren’t much different in several other long-time democracies elsewhere in the world whose citizens were asked the same questions. All over the world, people are feeling disconnected from their governments.
The questions about democracy were part of a much larger global poll that Gallup International conducted a year ago in 68 countries, news of which broke this month with the release of a book on the findings: Voices of the People 2006. Almost 54,000 citizens took part in the poll - the largest in history.
Around the world, almost 80 per cent of those polled said democracy is the best governance system. In Canada, 85 per cent of us affirmed our support for “rule by the people.”
But only 30 per cent of respondents thought that they were actually reaping the benefits of democracy, or being ruled by the will of the people. In Canada, barely a third of us believed that the will of the people was guiding our goverments.
Germany came in at a truly disturbing 18 per cent. The French rated the state of their country’s democracy almost as dismally, at 26 per cent. Mexicans (20 per cent) and Russians (18 per cent) weren’t any happier. Even in the countries that scored the highest on that question - Israel and Kosovo - fully half of the population still didn’t believe they were governed by the will of the people.
A third of Canadians disagreed when asked if Canada had free and fair elections. So did almost that many in France and Israel. In the U.S., almost half said their elections didn’t meet that test.
That’s not good. We appear to love democratic principles, but are clearly becoming convinced that our countries are no longer governing themselves in ways that adhere to those principles. Democracy is on the ropes.
“The gap between those two perceptions. . . leads us to the hypothesis that many mature democracies in the world are undergoing a deep disillusionment about the ability of democracy to deliver rule by the will of the people,” said Marc Leger, the Canadian who supervised the global poll.
The original intent of the Greeks who invented it as a form of governance was that every man (women and slaves were excluded) would participate directly in all decision-making. The Greeks took the literal meaning of “democracy” seriously in governing their ancient city-states.
Other nations would follow the Greeks’ lead, but often with significant modifications. The men who created the United States stopped short of full-on “rule of the people,” and chose instead to elect representatives to run their country. Canada went with the party system, in which whatever political party wins the popular vote gets to declare their leader prime minister.
On the one hand, the voting processes of democracy have never in history been as inclusive as they are now. More of us have the right to vote than ever before , and discriminatory practices against women, ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups have largely ended. In terms of providing the most number of people with the opportunity to vote, we’re doing a lot better than the Greeks.
But on the other hand, very little is democratic about our governments beyond that brief casting of votes every four or five years. Royal commissions, inquiries and legislative committees come to town to ask our opinions every now and then, but government rarely acts on our advice. Big money is spent and major decisions made, and the public by and large has no idea about any of it. We have abdicated.
At the time of the Gallup poll last year, Canadians were coping with the grim revelations that were surfacing daily during the Gomery inquiry. Given that time frame, what’s most surprising is that the Gallup pollsters found anybody at all in those terrible weeks who still believed that the will of the people governed our decision-makers.
That’s not to say that all is lost. Less fortunate countries would go to war for a chance at the democratic rights that Canadians enjoy. We’re still a really great country for the majority of the world.
But we can’t go on dreaming idealistically about democracies while our actual governance drifts further and further from the people. We’ve got to seek change. We’ve got to revitalize this most vital of systems. We owe it to all the people who will come behind us as the centuries unfold.
History has shown us in clear and devastating terms the price that nations pay for hubris. Canada won’t be any different. Our only hold on democracy is the will of the people not to let it go.
Measuring schools
April 14, 2006
The Fraser Institute and I often differ in our views, but I can’t argue with the think tank’s comments this week that the institute’s annual “best of show” ranking measures only academic performance at B.C. secondary schools, not overall school success.
“The rankings certainly don’t tell the whole story of a school, no question,” said Peter Cowley, who helped put together this week’s report and is director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute.
The academic performance of a school’s students is obviously an important measure of a successful school, said Cowley, but just one part. And it’s even less of a meaningful measure in terms of knowing whether we’re teaching our students to be good citizens. Scoring well on tests is all well and good, but it takes a lot more than that to build a healthy community.
Are our students growing into good human beings? Are they voting? Healthy? Earning a decent income and sharing their good fortune through fair taxation? Raising their kids to be peaceful, responsible citizens? Connected to community? Surely those are the questions that we need to ask.
But as Cowley pointed out, nobody is measuring for such outcomes. The challenge, then, is to rethink this mild obsession we’ve developed with high-school marks and figure out other ways to gauge whether our schools are successful.
Many of the schools topping the Fraser Institute’s list would probably top a number of other lists, too; they’re just excellent schools, on all fronts. But others would surge ahead in different ways - perhaps as bastions of tolerance and diversity, or of critical thinking and engagement.
Such ideals sound somewhat la-la even to my own ear, but why should that be? Such successes are much more relevant to the ongoing progress of our world than test scores and sports prowess among teenagers, but we cling to those measurements in our schools as if they tell us everything we need to know.
A kid who gets straight As and a scholarship to McMaster’s clearly knows how to perform in school, it’s true. But how are we doing at preparing young people for the world? Are they going to be able to rise to the challenges of their adult years with grace, strength, goodwill and wisdom? Those are big questions to leave to chance. Societies change quickly when their citizens forget to keep an eye on things.
Yes, high-school test scores are part of that, but really quite a small part. Nobody asks you about your high-school grades once you’re out of school. We work ourselves into a lather over the ability of our schools to churn out kids who do well on tests, even though tests of the kind you do at high school are probably never going to be a factor in your life again in adulthood.
Perhaps parents are assumed to be managing the big job of raising good people single-handedly. But schools are powerful socializing forces - our children attend them daily for 13 or more years. A family’s role in raising good human beings can’t be overstated, but we still learn the shape of the world through the schools we attend.
For better or worse, our schools have a powerful influence on the shape of tomorrow’s citizens. Their halls are the incubator for coming generations of leaders, thinkers, criminal minds and immensely troubled people. The lessons we learn in our school years inform us in how we shape our communities, and very little of that will be revealed through our schools’ test scores alone.
Cowley issues an interesting challenge: If B.C. really wants to know which of its schools are successful on fronts beyond test scores, then somebody needs to be asking different questions. I didn’t get the impression it was going to be him - the Fraser Institute has a distinct point of view, and that limits the kinds of statistics it gathers. But other groups and agencies can gather what we need to know. We just need to come up with the questions.
Some of the work is already underway, through community-mapping projects that pair up health and social indicators to measure the overall “wellness” of a particular neighbourhood. To properly gauge school success, we’d need census-style follow-ups of B.C. secondary students that went on for years - school by school, even class by class. We’d end up with a genuinely broad understanding of the impact our schools are having on our young people, in far more detail than the “good grades” model allows for.
Schools that know how to push kids to the top of their academic game deserve recognition for their accomplishments. Excelling academically takes a great deal of effort and focus.
But great schools don’t always have high test scores. Good human beings don’t always get good grades. Academic performance counts, but not for everything.
April 14, 2006
The Fraser Institute and I often differ in our views, but I can’t argue with the think tank’s comments this week that the institute’s annual “best of show” ranking measures only academic performance at B.C. secondary schools, not overall school success.
“The rankings certainly don’t tell the whole story of a school, no question,” said Peter Cowley, who helped put together this week’s report and is director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute.
The academic performance of a school’s students is obviously an important measure of a successful school, said Cowley, but just one part. And it’s even less of a meaningful measure in terms of knowing whether we’re teaching our students to be good citizens. Scoring well on tests is all well and good, but it takes a lot more than that to build a healthy community.
Are our students growing into good human beings? Are they voting? Healthy? Earning a decent income and sharing their good fortune through fair taxation? Raising their kids to be peaceful, responsible citizens? Connected to community? Surely those are the questions that we need to ask.
But as Cowley pointed out, nobody is measuring for such outcomes. The challenge, then, is to rethink this mild obsession we’ve developed with high-school marks and figure out other ways to gauge whether our schools are successful.
Many of the schools topping the Fraser Institute’s list would probably top a number of other lists, too; they’re just excellent schools, on all fronts. But others would surge ahead in different ways - perhaps as bastions of tolerance and diversity, or of critical thinking and engagement.
Such ideals sound somewhat la-la even to my own ear, but why should that be? Such successes are much more relevant to the ongoing progress of our world than test scores and sports prowess among teenagers, but we cling to those measurements in our schools as if they tell us everything we need to know.
A kid who gets straight As and a scholarship to McMaster’s clearly knows how to perform in school, it’s true. But how are we doing at preparing young people for the world? Are they going to be able to rise to the challenges of their adult years with grace, strength, goodwill and wisdom? Those are big questions to leave to chance. Societies change quickly when their citizens forget to keep an eye on things.
Yes, high-school test scores are part of that, but really quite a small part. Nobody asks you about your high-school grades once you’re out of school. We work ourselves into a lather over the ability of our schools to churn out kids who do well on tests, even though tests of the kind you do at high school are probably never going to be a factor in your life again in adulthood.
Perhaps parents are assumed to be managing the big job of raising good people single-handedly. But schools are powerful socializing forces - our children attend them daily for 13 or more years. A family’s role in raising good human beings can’t be overstated, but we still learn the shape of the world through the schools we attend.
For better or worse, our schools have a powerful influence on the shape of tomorrow’s citizens. Their halls are the incubator for coming generations of leaders, thinkers, criminal minds and immensely troubled people. The lessons we learn in our school years inform us in how we shape our communities, and very little of that will be revealed through our schools’ test scores alone.
Cowley issues an interesting challenge: If B.C. really wants to know which of its schools are successful on fronts beyond test scores, then somebody needs to be asking different questions. I didn’t get the impression it was going to be him - the Fraser Institute has a distinct point of view, and that limits the kinds of statistics it gathers. But other groups and agencies can gather what we need to know. We just need to come up with the questions.
Some of the work is already underway, through community-mapping projects that pair up health and social indicators to measure the overall “wellness” of a particular neighbourhood. To properly gauge school success, we’d need census-style follow-ups of B.C. secondary students that went on for years - school by school, even class by class. We’d end up with a genuinely broad understanding of the impact our schools are having on our young people, in far more detail than the “good grades” model allows for.
Schools that know how to push kids to the top of their academic game deserve recognition for their accomplishments. Excelling academically takes a great deal of effort and focus.
But great schools don’t always have high test scores. Good human beings don’t always get good grades. Academic performance counts, but not for everything.
Sex trade
March 10, 2006
These days, I drive along Rock Bay Avenue more often than I used to. I think it has something to do with my job as executive director of a non-profit that supports sex workers, PEERS. When your work life is tied to whatever’s going on in the city’s sex trade, detouring along the outdoor prostitution stroll just becomes kind of a habit.
The street is gentrifying: a new brick facade for one building, a paint job for another. Were it not for my PEERS-altered perspective, I would applaud the improvements as a positive change for our community. Everybody likes a street refit.
But when it’s Rock Bay, I drive past thinking about what the changes mean for the outdoor sex trade. In that world, a street’s gentrification signals the beginning of the end. Once a street looks good, it’s a matter of months before businesses and residents start thinking about how much nicer things could be if they could also dump the commercial sex scene going on outside their doors.
So what a street refit more often than not means for outdoor sex workers is increased police presence, more trouble, and eventually a relocation to some new street in a darker part of town. The businesses along Rock Bay have been much better than most about tolerating the visible face of sex work in the region, and supportive of PEERS’ efforts as well. But sooner or later, the pressure’s on.
I listened with interest to Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean in Victoria this week denouncing violence against women. She’s familiar with the issue both personally and professionally, having grown up in an abusive family and gone on to develop a network of women’s shelters in Quebec. But what she and most of Canada may not grasp is that vicious assaults and rapes occur constantly on the outdoor prostitution strolls in our communities, and nobody does a damn thing about it.
I don’t blame the police; the Victoria Police understand the issues of the local stroll far better than most. I think fault rests with Canadians overall. We’d rather tolerate laws that tacitly create the most dangerous workplace in the world rather than admit that people in their communities want to buy sex.
“In the name of ideology, they are harassed, assaulted, beaten, raped and murdered,” said Jean in her speech at Government House. She was referring to women from distant lands and cultures, but could have just as easily been speaking about outdoor sex workers right here in Victoria. Our poorly articulated and uninformed ideology around prostitution has led to a most terrible situation.
A local woman was knocked unconscious two weeks ago by a man wielding a two-by-four, then raped anally with a traffic cone. Can a country that sets up a whole class of women to endure such acts - not even as anomalies, but regular occurrences - consider itself to be tackling the issue of violence against women? Hardly.
The critics could argue that the laws are already in place for redress. A working girl can report her assault to the police, can’t she? And access all the services any victim of crime can?
But that’s not really true for outdoor sex workers, who in fact are breaking the law just by talking to their customers. With addiction rates at nearly 100 per cent on the local stroll, an outdoor sex worker most likely has an illegal drug or two in her possession as well. She may have warrants out for her arrest. Or she may just be terrified of anyone in authority finding out she’s a sex worker, having learned through hard experience that things usually go badly after that.
The larger point, though, is that sex workers shouldn’t have to endure a violent workplace in the first place. What other job features beatings and rapes on a regular basis? What other Canadian workplace exists with virtually no regulation or oversight? An estimated 850 workers are in the industry in this region alone, including at least 85 working the violent outdoor stroll. Who’s looking out for them?
Until we figure out why men drive around looking for people to buy sex from, I’m not counting on an end to outdoor prostitution. But that’s not to say we couldn’t improve. We certainly couldn’t do too much worse.
That woman knocked out with a two-by-four: she had no idea the guy would turn out to be a violent “trick.” You and I won’t recognize him, either. He could be sitting across from you at the board table - or lying in your bed - and you none the wiser. As long as violence against sex workers remains in the shadows, so does he.
I wish Rock Bay well in its gentrification, and hope they keep trying to be tolerant. It can’t be easy to be grappling with your street being Ground Zero for a 10,000-year-old social problem.
But I’d understand if one day they got sick of the whole thing. Me too.
March 10, 2006
These days, I drive along Rock Bay Avenue more often than I used to. I think it has something to do with my job as executive director of a non-profit that supports sex workers, PEERS. When your work life is tied to whatever’s going on in the city’s sex trade, detouring along the outdoor prostitution stroll just becomes kind of a habit.
The street is gentrifying: a new brick facade for one building, a paint job for another. Were it not for my PEERS-altered perspective, I would applaud the improvements as a positive change for our community. Everybody likes a street refit.
But when it’s Rock Bay, I drive past thinking about what the changes mean for the outdoor sex trade. In that world, a street’s gentrification signals the beginning of the end. Once a street looks good, it’s a matter of months before businesses and residents start thinking about how much nicer things could be if they could also dump the commercial sex scene going on outside their doors.
So what a street refit more often than not means for outdoor sex workers is increased police presence, more trouble, and eventually a relocation to some new street in a darker part of town. The businesses along Rock Bay have been much better than most about tolerating the visible face of sex work in the region, and supportive of PEERS’ efforts as well. But sooner or later, the pressure’s on.
I listened with interest to Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean in Victoria this week denouncing violence against women. She’s familiar with the issue both personally and professionally, having grown up in an abusive family and gone on to develop a network of women’s shelters in Quebec. But what she and most of Canada may not grasp is that vicious assaults and rapes occur constantly on the outdoor prostitution strolls in our communities, and nobody does a damn thing about it.
I don’t blame the police; the Victoria Police understand the issues of the local stroll far better than most. I think fault rests with Canadians overall. We’d rather tolerate laws that tacitly create the most dangerous workplace in the world rather than admit that people in their communities want to buy sex.
“In the name of ideology, they are harassed, assaulted, beaten, raped and murdered,” said Jean in her speech at Government House. She was referring to women from distant lands and cultures, but could have just as easily been speaking about outdoor sex workers right here in Victoria. Our poorly articulated and uninformed ideology around prostitution has led to a most terrible situation.
A local woman was knocked unconscious two weeks ago by a man wielding a two-by-four, then raped anally with a traffic cone. Can a country that sets up a whole class of women to endure such acts - not even as anomalies, but regular occurrences - consider itself to be tackling the issue of violence against women? Hardly.
The critics could argue that the laws are already in place for redress. A working girl can report her assault to the police, can’t she? And access all the services any victim of crime can?
But that’s not really true for outdoor sex workers, who in fact are breaking the law just by talking to their customers. With addiction rates at nearly 100 per cent on the local stroll, an outdoor sex worker most likely has an illegal drug or two in her possession as well. She may have warrants out for her arrest. Or she may just be terrified of anyone in authority finding out she’s a sex worker, having learned through hard experience that things usually go badly after that.
The larger point, though, is that sex workers shouldn’t have to endure a violent workplace in the first place. What other job features beatings and rapes on a regular basis? What other Canadian workplace exists with virtually no regulation or oversight? An estimated 850 workers are in the industry in this region alone, including at least 85 working the violent outdoor stroll. Who’s looking out for them?
Until we figure out why men drive around looking for people to buy sex from, I’m not counting on an end to outdoor prostitution. But that’s not to say we couldn’t improve. We certainly couldn’t do too much worse.
That woman knocked out with a two-by-four: she had no idea the guy would turn out to be a violent “trick.” You and I won’t recognize him, either. He could be sitting across from you at the board table - or lying in your bed - and you none the wiser. As long as violence against sex workers remains in the shadows, so does he.
I wish Rock Bay well in its gentrification, and hope they keep trying to be tolerant. It can’t be easy to be grappling with your street being Ground Zero for a 10,000-year-old social problem.
But I’d understand if one day they got sick of the whole thing. Me too.
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