Choosing death ought to be our right
June 15, 2007

With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death.
I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another.
But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that.
I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest.
People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions.
I can live with that. What scares me is imagining being in the same position as the 93-year-old Vernon woman who made the news this week after her doctor was convicted of trying to help her commit suicide.
The woman managed to secure a lethal dose of pills for herself. But staff at facility where she stayed found out before she could take the pills. They stopped her.
I think we’re supposed to be happy that her life was saved. Instead, I find myself nervous at the reminder of how tough it still is for people to die with dignity.
If it were up to me, I would have a death like in the Dutch movie Antonia’s Line - holding court with one loved one after another in a long and final farewell.
My dad’s oldest sister had a death very much like that. I still remember her resplendent in her white negligee, inviting each of us into her bedroom in her final weeks for a last warm word. It seemed a perfect death, if there could be such a thing.
But here we are eight years later, convicting a doctor for trying to help another tired old lady die sooner rather than later. And I realize how tenuous it all is.
I can strive to die like my aunt. But I could just as easily end up stuck someplace where nobody knows how important it is for me to have some control over my death, and end up living long enough to see my doctor convicted of trying to help me out.
The laws needn’t be sweeping. We don’t need to get into abortion, or any actions that might lead to people dying who aren’t ready to die.
But an old person grown too tired and sick to live anymore - that’s a different matter. There has to be a way to create laws that maintain respect for the right to life overall while making exceptions for personal choice at the end of life.
In some cases, there’s nothing wrong with choosing death over life. We accept that in theory. More than seven out of 10 of Canadians polled last week by Ipsos-Reid came out in support of the right to die.
In practice, it all depends.
If your type of death involves a great deal of pain, your chances of getting enough legal medication to kill you is more of a possibility. If you’re dying of less dramatic causes and without much pain, you could linger for years.
You can do things like living wills, or pieces like this one so that nobody ever thinks for a moment that you’d choose to be kept alive at any cost.
But what kind of a guarantee is that? Until Canadian law enshrines some mechanism that gives people the right to die under certain circumstances, even the best-laid plans can go awry. Next thing you know, they’re “saving” your life and trying to send your doctor to jail.
Ultimately, the problem seems to be that we can’t shake the feeling that nobody sane would ever choose to die. In fact, we all die. We deserve the chance to exercise at least a modicum of control over how it goes.
We had a heck of a time registering gun owners, and I imagine that endorsing the right to die could be even more paralysing. But we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.
Not when three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say they support the right to die. Not when doctors still risk criminal records for giving their patients a helping hand.
When time ran out for my mom’s old dog Jake, the vet came by the house and shot him up with something that sent him into a gentle, happy stupor, and then deep sleep. When it came to the final needle, he didn’t even notice.
It was a great way to go. I can only hope for the same.

Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk
June 8, 2007

Vic Poleschuk had to go.
Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice.
But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top.
Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president.
During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective.
But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and the need for lottery operations to be above reproach.
Before a government can “ normalize” gambling in the minds of its citizens, it must first convince doubters that yesterday’s sin is today’s legitimate revenue stream. That can be a tough sell.
In terms of gambling, a government has to convince people that the system is honest. You may not win after a night of government-sanctioned gambling, but the theory is that at least you can rest assured that you lost fair and square.
It’s an issue that the Canadian gambling industry has worked hard on. And so it should. It’s an industry that very readily lends itself to corruption.
Poleschuk - a lottery man ever since stepping out of the University of Manitoba back in 1978 - knew that keeping the trust of British Columbians was paramount. He wanted to see gambling “normalized” as a regular and acceptable activity, as did others at a national industry conference in Vancouver last year.
“Why do we have so much anti-gambling (sentiment) rather than focus on what we do and how we should support our customers?” asked Ontario Lottery chief Duncan Brown at the summit. “Until we can better frame that policy debate, we’re never going to be accepted in the same way as alcohol.”
A little disturbing, but probably true. The transformation of gambling’s image from sinful and bad to a fun thing for the whole family will be complete when gambling and alcohol are equally acceptable in our culture.
Given the ongoing challenges around gambling’s image, how did BC Lottery Corp. miss the signs that a handful of retailers might be cheating people out of their winnings? Whatever the answer, it’s much bigger than Vic Poleschuk.
B.C. Ombudsman Kim Carter dug deeper after lottery customers complained to her, and found a retailer who won more than $300,000 in small batches over five years. A second retailer won $10,000 annually for four consecutive years. Two others collected $8,000-plus for three out of four years.
Every penny might have been legitimately won, of course. The lottery corporation contends that a high win rate among its retailers merely reflects that they buy more tickets.
That’s undoubtedly true. Most retailers aren’t cheating anyone. Carter’s findings overall are heartening proof that the vast majority of lottery retailers are honest folks.
But the bigger problem identified in the ombudsman’s report is that there’s no way to say for sure.
Insubstantial to begin with, the various systems and processes the lottery corporation uses to prevent retailer fraud appear to be just plain missing in action.
For instance, customers are supposed to know to listen for a certain song whenever a winning ticket is presented to a retailer for verification. If you hear that song - You’re In the Money - I guess you’re supposed to challenge the clerk if he tries to tell you you’re not a winner.
I’d have my doubts about any security strategy that boils down to leaving it to customers to listen for a song. But it’s truly pointless when retailers merely have to turn off the sound of the computer to thwart the process.
Should customers grow suspicious of a retailer and complain to BC Lottery, the worst that can happen is a retailer no longer having the right to sell lottery products. No further investigations are done unless the customer can convince the police to do it. No word on how often police say yes.
Part of Poleschuk’s job was to see the inadequacies in such policies. In the wake of the current scandal, he had to be jettisoned as evidence of a corporation dedicated to maintaining system integrity and public trust.
But where was everybody else as the ? We have an entire branch of government devoted to gaming enforcement, and a billion-dollar-a-year need for its profits. If a problem as obvious as retailers being tempted to cheat slides under the radar, what else goes unnoticed?
Possibly nothing at all. But with an audit soon to come, now’s the time to be sure about that.

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care
June 1, 2007

I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was.
They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist.
On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process.
Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking.
We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to more people needing help.
Few documents provide more heartwrenching proof of that than this week’s release from Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-LaFond.
Written with provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, the report examined how B.C.’s kids in care are faring in school. Its grim findings answer a lot of questions about the roots of our growing social problems.
The study looked at 32,186 B.C. youngsters who had been in government care between 1997 and 2005. They were compared to 1.5 million other B.C. kids, to see what differences came up in terms of their education.
The differences are massive.
For starters, the high school dropout rate among kids in care is 79 per cent, versus 22 per cent for other students.
What do we know about a lack of education? Among other things, that it correlates with poorer health, lower income, more family problems and the likelihood of jail time.
People who drop out of high school are five times as likely as graduates to end up on income assistance, notes the study. They’re twice as likely to go to jail. Their physical health is poorer.
In other words, a high-school education goes a long way to predicting how the rest of your life turns out.
But the story gets worse for B.C.’s children in care. More than half of those in the study were designated “special needs,” compared to a scant 8.4 per cent of the other students. By age 16, fully three-quarters of boys in care were considered to have special needs.
Most of those special needs related to behaviour problems and mental illness. That was sharply different than other children in the study, who were most likely to be designated as having “special needs” because they were gifted.
The study found a disturbing pattern: Children in care came to kindergarten less prepared to learn, started falling behind the other students almost immediately, and continued stumbling until they finally dropped out.
True, children who need to be taken away from their families can be presumed to already have the deck stacked against them.
Indeed, even in kindergarten, these children were three times as likely as their peers to have poor physical health, language and cognitive barriers, and less social competence.
But the really sad story revealed by the report is that they stayed that way. They arrived at school already struggling, and never really caught up.
Many of those kids will nonetheless live out their lives in honest and hard-working fashion, because what happens in high school doesn’t tell the full story of a person’s life.
But no doubt some of those children from the early period of the study have already drifted to the streets by now. Bad things can happen to anyone, it’s true, but they’re way more likely to happen to a poor kid who starts out life disadvantaged and never does get his feet underneath him.
That must have always been so, of course. I have no definitive answers for why the disadvantages of today seem to have a far greater impact on a person’s life than seemed the case 50 years ago - when the dropout rates were far higher and social supports even less.
But whatever the reasons, things are different now. Proof of that is all around us. The way it used to be is no longer the way it is, nor will change happen just by wishing for it.
On the streets, we’ll begin the transformation when we recognize the problems for what they are and start building housing, more comprehensive supports and a disease-management plan for addiction.
But the future is in our schools. The problems of tomorrow will be avoided in large part by meeting kids’ needs today. We’ve just been given a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go.

Fraser Institute findings ought to worry us
May 25, 2007

The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day.
Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue.
Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools.
But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools.
In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did when tested in Grade 4 and again in Grade 7 on their reading and numeracy skills.
Once upon a time, the institute’s report didn’t tell you much more than the test scores. But the information now being gathered includes more detail, like the percentage of a school’s students who are categorized as special needs, or are learning English as a second language.
Not surprisingly, the Fraser Institute report reveals that higher numbers of students with those additional challenges generally correlates with a school’s poorer academic performance.
But not always, which is why the school-by-school analysis ought to be mandatory reading for every parent in the province.
What the figures show is that throughout the province, things are not going well in some of our schools.
Of the 154 Vancouver Island schools surveyed, very nearly half now have 20 per cent or more of their students performing below Ministry of Education expectations. At one Nanaimo school, the majority of students scored below expectations.
That ought to worry us.
Schools can be measured any number of ways, and tests aren’t even necessarily the best way. But the percentage of students performing below expectations in provincial tests is still a significant indicator of overall school performance.
If scores are low in B.C. because there are an abundance of young students needing special-needs support or help learning English as a second language (ESL), then more of that kind of support will be needed to fix the problem.
But those challenges alone don’t explain everything about why some Island schools do poorly.
At Nanaimo’s North Oyster school, for instance, some of the poor test performance can likely be attributed to having 23.6 per cent ESL students, let alone another 8.3 per cent with special needs. It’s the obvious explanation for why more than half of the North Oyster students are scoring below provincial expectations.
Except that at Torquay Elementary here in Victoria, the percentage of ESL students is 30 per cent, and 8.7 per cent of the students have special needs. Yet only three per cent of their students scored below expectations.
Why such a gap? I hope we would want to know. We need to know, if only for the sake of every little kid who’s trusting us to provide a useful education.
At 14 Island elementaries, at least 30 per cent of the students are performing below expectations. The problem seems particularly alarming in the Nanaimo school district, which has eight of those 14 schools.
The rates of ESL and special-needs students fluctuate dramatically at those poorly performing schools. The level of challenge is definitely a factor in overall school performance, but clearly not the only one.
In the Comox Valley, Cumberland Elementary has just 3.1 per cent ESL students, and 7.9 per cent special needs. Over at Glacier View Elementary, there are twice as many ESL students, and almost twice as many special-needs students.
But when it comes to student performance, Glacier View scores notably higher. Twenty per cent of its students scored below provincial expectations, compared to almost 33 per cent at the Cumberland school.
That’s not to suggest we leap to the conclusion that the problem is about teaching quality. Still, something’s obviously up. Whatever the reasons behind our schools’ failings, we need to take them very seriously. We need to know why they’re happening.
Statistics have to be handled with care, of course. It just might turn out that the real problem is the Grades 4 and 7 assessments themselves, or that the student populations being looked at for the study are too small to be translated into meaningful percentages.
But we owe it to B.C.’s kids to figure that out. Maintaining an effective public system means addressing the inexplicable differences in performance at our schools before the gaps grow any larger.
Visit www.fraserinstitute.ca/reportcards/index.asp?snav=rc for school-by-school results. And if it looks like your child’s school is struggling to meet standards, ask why.

Peace in a kayak
May 18, 2007

Being a woman of many enthusiasms, I was bound to stumble upon kayaking sooner or later.
I’d been curious about it for years. How can you grow up on an island without feeling the pull of being out on the water?
Boats had figured more prominently in my life in my younger years - the benefit of growing up in an era when Vancouver Island’s then-thriving logging and fishing industries put real money in people’s pockets.
But except for a canoe or two, it had never been me who’d owned those boats. Eventually there came a time when the only boating I was regularly experiencing was aboard a BC ferry, on a routine journey so familiar to me that it barely felt like being on the water at all.
Kayakers caught my eye throughout the Ferry Years, but I tended to write the sport off as something that would require more skill, knowledge and money than I was prepared to invest.
I guess they just looked so sleek and expert out there in their beautiful boats that I assumed I couldn’t easily become one of them.
Then came a sunny, warm weekend last September, when my partner and I finally acted on our much talked-about plans to rent kayaks for a couple hours. We launched into the Gorge with only the briefest of instructions around how to hold our paddles.
The love affair was on.
September turned out to be an ideal time to fall in love, what with it being the season of the sell-off in the world of rental kayaks. By the next weekend, we were the proud owners of two slightly used kayaks, paddles and life jackets, for less than $1,500 all in.
I’ve kayaked almost every weekend since then. It’s been a transforming experience.
My little plastic kayak is light enough for me to sling easily into the back of my pickup truck, and to lug from the parking lot to whatever small beach I’ve found for my launch.
I assumed initially that I’d put my kayaking on hold when the winter cold set in, but I never did.
It turns out there’s a miraculous invention known as the “pogey” - a big neoprene mitt that fits over your hand and paddle - that keeps your hands toasty no matter the weather. A half-decent waterproof jacket and pants take care of the rest.
As for gentle ocean waters for a beginner to learn on, a Capital Region kayaker couldn’t be more blessed.
The Gorge. Portage Inlet. The Inner Harbour. Esquimalt Harbour. Saanich Inlet. Esquimalt Lagoon. Sooke basin. With basic paddling knowledge and even a rudimentary understanding of tides and weather, there are easily a couple dozen two- or three-hour paddles in our region suitable for a beginner.
I’ve made some bad calls, mind you. One particularly cold December day in Portage Inlet, I got stuck on the wrong side of surface ice blocking my route home, and then trapped in the middle of it. (No rescue necessary - I managed to hack my way through.)
Another time, I found myself paddling feverishly but barely moving while fighting a strong current near Sooke Harbour, after what had already been an exhausting couple of hours in choppy water.
But a tubby little plastic kayak turns out to be quite a stable fellow. Coupled with my healthy fear of the power of the ocean, that has made for very few scary moments.
If ducks are your thing, kayaking in the winter is a bird bonanza. Having limited most of my previous boating to summer months, I’d had no idea of the vast varieties of ducks that winter in our waters.
With summer now approaching, the scene has changed: the ducks largely gone, but ospreys, eagles and hawks now everywhere. Seals and otters are common viewing fare on every trip.
Even if nature isn’t your thing, kayaking has other pleasures. For one, you can’t believe the spectacular, over-the-top waterfront homes going up around our region.
A paddle from Brentwood Bay to Patricia Bay one day this week left me agog at the massive new houses along that route. There’s a kayak-based real estate service just waiting to be discovered, because there’s no more appealing way to view a waterfront mansion than from the water.
On the night of the winter solstice, Dec. 21, my partner and I slipped our kayaks into the Gorge to look at Christmas lights. I could see that short trip developing into an annual event if we could figure out a way to lure more waterfront homeowners into lighting up for the season.
So if you’ve wondered even a little about whether you might like kayaking, make this the year to test your theory. Serenity is a rare commodity in these clamorous times, and for me to have found it so close at hand has been a most wonderful gift.
See you on the water.