Letter from Prague
April 13, 2007

His name is Alin. I’ll likely never know much more than that about him.
I had come to Prague on holiday, initially without much thought of seeing how the other side lives in that beautiful city. But having heard news of a refitted barge Prague was testing as a shelter for homeless people, I grew curious to see it for myself during my visit to the city last week.
My partner and I first spotted the barge while on a boat tour along the Vltava River, which winds through the centre of Prague.
It matched the photo from an on-line Czech story about the project that I’d asked our bemused hotel clerk to print out for me, and bore the same name: Hermes. Docked in the river below a massive metronome the city had installed to replace a statue of Stalin, I figured the barge wouldn’t be too hard to find again on foot.
The big ship had something of a foreboding look to it when I made my way there a couple days later, as did the man on deck who gestured at me to leave as I made my way down the gangplank. I retreated to the street, eventually spotting Alin as he approached the barge.
Wearing the demeanor and the faded tattoos of someone who’d had a hard life, he seemed like the kind of fellow who might know a thing or two about a barge for the homeless. Neither of us could speak each other’s language, but we managed to settle into something of a conversation.
I pointed to the barge and asked if he slept there. Yes, but he didn’t want the man who had scared me off to see that I was talking to him. Yes, he’d be happy to pose for a picture, but not here. We walked out of sight of the man who Alin nervously called the “chef.”
I asked Alin how many people slept aboard the barge, counting on my fingers to convey my meaning. He pulled out an alarm clock from his backpack and slowly pointed to one number and then another: 68.
I learned later that the barge can actually hold 250 men and women. It opened as a shelter in February, after city council spent the equivalent of $1.3 million to refit the ship, which once travelled the waters between Prague and Hamburg.
People like Alin can sleep there for 20 korunas a night - about $1. On a balmy spring night, with a vast park just a couple staircases away across the street, maybe that fee gets in the way of a full house.
Or maybe it has more to do with the non-stop clatter of the high-speed motorway running alongside the river where the Hermes docks, or the pounding jackhammers from the bridge being renovated directly above. Alin shrugs, and I take his meaning: Nothing wrong with a bed on the barge, but nothing particularly right about it, either.
In Prague, some 6,000 to 10,000 people live homeless, left behind these past 18 years during the city’s massive post-Communist transformation.
Unlike Victoria, Prague still has some bad parts of town where it can hide its growing number of lost souls, out of sight of the international tourists who now flood its vibrant streets by the thousands. Had I not gone looking for the barge, the only visible evidence of social ills would have been a handful of prostrate beggars in the city’s Old Town and the occasional staggering, stumbling street drunk outside a Metro station.
But flourishing economies in cities like Prague, Berlin and London are fuelling the same kind of phenomenal real-estate growth that our region has seen. With even the slummiest of neighbourhoods now facing development pressures, homelessness won’t be invisible anywhere for much longer. Europe alone has more than 2.7 million people living homeless.
Alin and I could talk of none of this, of course. Enthusiastic gestures and pointing only get you so far. So once we’d walked far enough to avoid being seen by the man on the barge, Alin cheerfully posed for a picture, then scratched his palm in a last gesture that I clearly understood: Money, please.
I dug out some korunas, the equivalent of $10 or so. In exchange, he loaded me up with goods from his backpack - stolen, I suppose - that he indicated were for my children and husband.
An electronic sudoku game. A package of modelling clay. A wooden bird with a broken tail. A child’s jacket. A whiskey flask, whisper of spirits still intact. The broken alarm clock he and I had employed in our communications. I resisted all of it, but saw quickly that he interpreted my refusal as an insult.
My own backpack now bulging, we said our goodbyes, and I headed back to the shops at the heart of the city. Alin’s gifts in my pack triggered the anti-shoplifting devices in every store I tried to go in.
An apologetic young Czech security guard at the Bata store finally asked to empty my bag, then repacked it without a word and sent me on my way.

Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change
April 6, 2007

The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly.
I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand.
But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust.
Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later.
Aboriginals failing in school. Children in government care. A better life for people with mental illness. An improved health-care system. A better way to help our kids learn. I’d be hard-pressed to tally all the major Canadian studies I’ve seen come and go in the last couple of decades.
A lot of them were powerful calls for transformation. I sat nodding my head in emphatic agreement through page after page of reports like B.C.’s royal commissions on health and education, or the marvelous Tom Gove report on reforming the way we look after children in care.
Hardly surprising, I suppose. The way to solve a problem is to understand every facet of it, and that’s exactly what royal commissions and other big reports set out to do.
But why do we so rarely take their advice?
One of our primary problems is an inability to focus long enough on an issue to get the job done. Big issues take big solutions, not teeny-tiny strategies mapped out a year at a time.
We also let political parties hijack the public agenda. We end up talking about what the parties feel like talking about, which leaves us lurching from one disjointed strategy to another in the artificial four-year cycle created by our election process.
It’s a disastrous approach when it comes to complex problems requiring patience, support and vision to solve.
One moment, we’re inching closer to finally getting a grip on the ridiculous way we deal with addiction. The next, Vancouver’s safe-injection site is being threatened with closure and Victoria’s main needle exchange is being run out of town.
One day, we’re wiping away tears over some poor little sod killed while in government care. The next, it’s 10 anguished years later and we’re still crying.
I wish I could tell myself I’m just aging into cynicism. But I’ve read the reports, and gone on to live in the brand new world that was supposedly going to result from them. And for the most part, not much changes.
Our national paralysis has us frozen up on some pretty frightening fronts.
By never following through on what our own reports and royal commissions have told us, we’ve actively created the kinds of deep-rooted problems that our country used to be proud not to have. We’re following countries like the U.S. into a mire of social problems and overflowing prisons, and class-based systems of care and schooling.
The worst of it is that we’re walking straight into it, undeterred by the living example of flawed social strategies unfolding in the country just south of us. Their reports have told them to do things differently as well, of course, for many years. But they haven’t, and it shows.
Even 20 years ago, could we have imagined a day when U.S. children would be walking through metal detectors to make sure they weren’t carrying guns? Or when poor, rural Midwesterners in states like Missouri and Iowa would be cited as one of the risk groups for high rates of crystal-methamphetamine use? Isn’t that enough to tell us there’s a high price to pay for getting this stuff wrong?
What it underlines for me is that change won’t come from the top down. Our governments may write a nice report, but the push has to start coming from the people if we ever want to see real change. Shuffling down to the polling booth once every four years just isn’t going to do it.
Where to start?
Pick an issue that’s really bugging you, and go learn something new about it. Track down the series of reports that were almost certainly written about it, and figure out a way to act on whatever part of the solution is within your grasp. Like the late Jerry Garcia tried to tell us, we’ve got to do more than just grumble that “somebody ought to do something about that.”
Sure, they ought to. But they aren’t. So it’s going to have to be us.

True tolerance much deeper than word choice
March 30, 2007

While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.

B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action
March 23, 2007

We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.

If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control
March 16, 2007

I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.