Pine-beetle devastation marks end of B.C.'s pine forests
Oct. 12, 2007
My first glimpse of what has now become a catastrophic natural disaster for B.C. was in 2003, when I was travelling around the province writing stories from the so-called heartland.
At that point, the mountain pine beetle was already into its fourth voracious year of attacking B.C.’s pine forests. In my stopovers in Quesnel and Prince George, the briefest glance from the car window was all it took to see the damage. In the worst-hit spots, dead trees covered the landscape.
The people in affected areas were still trying to be cheery and entrepreneurial about the pine beetle disaster in those days. The greyish-blue wood colour that is a hallmark of a beetle-infested pine was being reworked as a niche product - “denim pine.”
I returned to the coast and didn’t think too much about pine beetles after that. Lodge pole pine is a rarity in coastal forests, so it’s easy to forget the whole tragic thing if you don’t get out of town much.
But a visit to my old haunts in Kamloops last week brought me face to face with the terrible reality of B.C.’s pine beetle infestation another four years on.
Most of the beautiful pine forests that dot the dry hills around Kamloops are dead now, or will be soon. I saw the red patches across the river valley first, and initially wondered if I was looking at deciduous trees turning colour. I drove past a familiar hill on the Yellowhead Highway and wondered if fire was responsible for the greying trees. Then I remembered.
By the time the beetle infestation peters out in eight or so years, 80 per cent of the pine trees on B.C.’s forestry lands will be dead. Half will be dead by next year.
In parks and on private lands, the damage will be equally catastrophic. The more established the forest, the greater the impact; pine beetles prefer older trees.
Like most catastrophes, there’s a tangle of reasons for why B.C. is in the grip of the biggest beetle infestation in North American history.
To start with, there are just more mature lodge pole pines in B.C. than there used to be. In 1910, the province had 2.5 million hectares of pine that was at least 60 years old. That figure had more than tripled by 1990.
A long-standing provincial policy to put out wildfires rather than leave them to burn is also a factor. Instead of burning up on a regular basis like they once did, B.C.’s pine forests now live long enough to grow old, which is just how the pine beetle likes them. Logged land that had been replanted with a single species added to the problem, as it concentrated stands of lodge pole pine.
Then came global warming. The only weather that will kill off a pine beetle is several straight days of cold temperatures below -35 C. Since 1999, when the current infestation started taking hold, the Interior hasn’t seen a winter like that.
The environmental impact of the infestation goes well beyond the aesthetic of 9.2 million hectares of dead lodge pole pines. A healthy forest soaks up significant amounts of runoff in the spring. It also creates a lot of shade, which slows the rate of snow melt.
So dead trees mean way more water making its way into B.C.’s creeks and rivers every spring. Topsoil on the forest floor gets stripped away in the rapid flow of runoff, and rivers jump their banks. Fragile ecosystems, roadways, farmland, fisheries - all will be put at risk by the time the infestation runs its course, in ways that no one can fully predict.
In terms of making money from those dead trees before they’re too rotten to sell, the province is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The annual allowable cut in half of the 20 hardest hit Timber Supply Areas has more than tripled in recent years as the government and forest industry scramble to salvage what value they can from the disaster. Take away too many trees too fast, however, and the subsequent flooding makes it much tougher to replant.
But the biggest impact of the beetle infestation will be felt in another 10 to 15 years. That’s when more than 30 logged-out Interior communities will hit the wall in terms of having any wood left to harvest.
At the moment, those communities are seeing some economic benefits from the infestation. With all those dead trees out there and a real sense of urgency at the provincial level around salvaging the wood as quickly as possible, there’s no shortage of logging work right now.
But when the trees are gone, they’re gone. New pine forests won’t be ready for harvest for another 60 to 80 years. And while forestry-dependent communities have been grappling with hard times for years now, the economic devastation caused by the pine beetle could easily be the worst blow yet.
What can be done about any of this? Short of saying a prayer for our vanishing pine forests and bracing for the disaster still to come, barely a thing. This is devastating history in the making, and we can only hope to sift some new understanding from the wreckage.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Ideology is no way to run a country
Oct. 5, 2007
The problems of ideology-based governance clearly must be more obvious from afar. Otherwise, Canadians wouldn’t be able to bear the hypocrisy of railing against oppressive and backward regimes elsewhere in the world while committing ourselves anew to the folly of a “war on drugs.”
With news this week that we’re returning full-force to the same fruitless battle we’ve already lost several times over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again reminded me why word of his 2006 election plunged me into a pit of despair.
Here we are one more time, at least 60 years after we first heard from the experts that we were doing things all wrong, talking about “crackdowns” and the need to “get tough” with those who use illicit drugs. Posturing about all the butt-does kicking we’ll be doing at the border once our new anti-drug strategy is in place. Planning the latest version of an earnest but pointless campaign to convince teenagers not to use drugs.
Small wonder I eventually lost my appetite for journalism when I think how many times I’ve witnessed this particular story cycle unfold. The real tragedy is that the misuse of drugs continues to cost us $40 billion a year in Canada in direct and indirect costs, and that’s not even counting all the billions we’ve thrown away on misguided and ideologically driven attempts to do something about that.
Here’s the thing: Health issues can’t be resolved through ideology.
For the most part, we understand that. You wouldn’t catch us scrapping radiation therapy as a treatment for cancer, for instance, based solely on some politician’s belief that the only cure is to eat lots of vegetables. Were we to elect Jehovah’s Witnesses to office, I can’t see us banning blood transfusions.
So why do we continue to let our elected politicians ignore the science when it comes to drug issues? Why should anybody’s poorly informed position around drug use be the lens that we apply when trying to address complex health and social problems that are far too important to be left to political whim?
I respect the right of Stephen Harper and his MPs to believe that using illicit drugs is bad. It’s a free country and they’re welcome to their opinions, and never mind that alcohol is actually Canada’s most dangerous and readily available drug by a long shot. (The social costs of alcohol use in Canada are more than double that of all illicit drugs combined and health-related costs are three times higher.)
But why would we want to base something as important as our national drug strategy on opinion and belief?
We’ve got six decades worth of scientific studies underlining the importance of an informed, health-based approach in reducing the harm and societal costs of drug use. Yet we’re still letting vital public policy be decided by people who would rather maintain their personal fictions than take steps to fix the problems.
“This is a failed approach,” University of B.C. researcher Thomas Kerr commented to the media this week about the Harper government’s intention to launch yet another anti-drug strategy rooted almost entirely in enforcement. “The experiment is done. The science is in.”
We’ve researched drug-use issues from every possible angle over the years, and have established an astonishing amount of consensus at the scientific level in terms of how Canada can best manage problems related to drug and alcohol use. We verified a long, long time ago that concentrating our efforts on enforcement is not only futile as a way of reducing much of the problem, but also alarmingly costly.
But our current federal drug strategy devotes almost three-quarters of its annual $245 million budget to enforcement. The updated strategy being touted by the Harper government offers more of the same - and less of what’s actually working. Highly successful harm-reduction strategies like Vancouver’s safer- injection site are rumoured to be on the chopping block.
What is it that we`re trying to change? If it’s the flow of drugs into our country, then we need to tackle the issues of demand. We can knock ourselves out trying to stop drugs at the border, but they’re going to find their way in no matter what as long as there are Canadians to buy them.
If it’s the health risks we’re worried about, then we need to be providing honest information to everyone who might use drugs, particularly pre-teens heading into the inevitable experimental years. The key word is “honest,” which implies being truthful about which drugs are truly the scary ones.
Our old friend alcohol certainly wouldn’t fare well in that truth-telling. The annual health costs from alcohol consumption in Canada are almost 45 times that of marijuana, and alcohol is far and away the most dangerous drug of all to use during pregnancy.
If it’s drug addiction that we want to have an impact on, that entails dramatic, system-wide change, because we’re doing almost nothing right on that front at the moment. Addiction is a health issue, plain and simple. We’ll get somewhere when we start treating it like one.
So with all due respect, Mr. Harper, believe whatever you like in your personal life. But as prime minister, please run this country on facts and not fiction.
Oct. 5, 2007
The problems of ideology-based governance clearly must be more obvious from afar. Otherwise, Canadians wouldn’t be able to bear the hypocrisy of railing against oppressive and backward regimes elsewhere in the world while committing ourselves anew to the folly of a “war on drugs.”
With news this week that we’re returning full-force to the same fruitless battle we’ve already lost several times over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again reminded me why word of his 2006 election plunged me into a pit of despair.
Here we are one more time, at least 60 years after we first heard from the experts that we were doing things all wrong, talking about “crackdowns” and the need to “get tough” with those who use illicit drugs. Posturing about all the butt-does kicking we’ll be doing at the border once our new anti-drug strategy is in place. Planning the latest version of an earnest but pointless campaign to convince teenagers not to use drugs.
Small wonder I eventually lost my appetite for journalism when I think how many times I’ve witnessed this particular story cycle unfold. The real tragedy is that the misuse of drugs continues to cost us $40 billion a year in Canada in direct and indirect costs, and that’s not even counting all the billions we’ve thrown away on misguided and ideologically driven attempts to do something about that.
Here’s the thing: Health issues can’t be resolved through ideology.
For the most part, we understand that. You wouldn’t catch us scrapping radiation therapy as a treatment for cancer, for instance, based solely on some politician’s belief that the only cure is to eat lots of vegetables. Were we to elect Jehovah’s Witnesses to office, I can’t see us banning blood transfusions.
So why do we continue to let our elected politicians ignore the science when it comes to drug issues? Why should anybody’s poorly informed position around drug use be the lens that we apply when trying to address complex health and social problems that are far too important to be left to political whim?
I respect the right of Stephen Harper and his MPs to believe that using illicit drugs is bad. It’s a free country and they’re welcome to their opinions, and never mind that alcohol is actually Canada’s most dangerous and readily available drug by a long shot. (The social costs of alcohol use in Canada are more than double that of all illicit drugs combined and health-related costs are three times higher.)
But why would we want to base something as important as our national drug strategy on opinion and belief?
We’ve got six decades worth of scientific studies underlining the importance of an informed, health-based approach in reducing the harm and societal costs of drug use. Yet we’re still letting vital public policy be decided by people who would rather maintain their personal fictions than take steps to fix the problems.
“This is a failed approach,” University of B.C. researcher Thomas Kerr commented to the media this week about the Harper government’s intention to launch yet another anti-drug strategy rooted almost entirely in enforcement. “The experiment is done. The science is in.”
We’ve researched drug-use issues from every possible angle over the years, and have established an astonishing amount of consensus at the scientific level in terms of how Canada can best manage problems related to drug and alcohol use. We verified a long, long time ago that concentrating our efforts on enforcement is not only futile as a way of reducing much of the problem, but also alarmingly costly.
But our current federal drug strategy devotes almost three-quarters of its annual $245 million budget to enforcement. The updated strategy being touted by the Harper government offers more of the same - and less of what’s actually working. Highly successful harm-reduction strategies like Vancouver’s safer- injection site are rumoured to be on the chopping block.
What is it that we`re trying to change? If it’s the flow of drugs into our country, then we need to tackle the issues of demand. We can knock ourselves out trying to stop drugs at the border, but they’re going to find their way in no matter what as long as there are Canadians to buy them.
If it’s the health risks we’re worried about, then we need to be providing honest information to everyone who might use drugs, particularly pre-teens heading into the inevitable experimental years. The key word is “honest,” which implies being truthful about which drugs are truly the scary ones.
Our old friend alcohol certainly wouldn’t fare well in that truth-telling. The annual health costs from alcohol consumption in Canada are almost 45 times that of marijuana, and alcohol is far and away the most dangerous drug of all to use during pregnancy.
If it’s drug addiction that we want to have an impact on, that entails dramatic, system-wide change, because we’re doing almost nothing right on that front at the moment. Addiction is a health issue, plain and simple. We’ll get somewhere when we start treating it like one.
So with all due respect, Mr. Harper, believe whatever you like in your personal life. But as prime minister, please run this country on facts and not fiction.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Nothing beautiful about cosmetic surgery
Sept. 28, 2007
We ought to be grateful for people like Krista Stryland and Micheline Charest, whose sad deaths present an opportunity for all women to reflect on the demons that send us searching for happiness through surgery.
Stryland died last week in Toronto of a heart attack after undergoing liposuction, in which a thin, sharp instrument is rammed repeatedly into your body to break up pockets of fat. Charest died in Montreal in 2004 following six unconscious hours on the operating table being sliced, diced and skinned in the pursuit of “beauty.”
Death is merely the worst-case scenario on a laundry list of ugly possibilities when it comes to cosmetic surgery, mind you. So I’m grateful too to celebrities like Cher, Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, and legions more. One glimpse of their mannequin-like faces is all it takes to remind me of the mighty price people pay for thinking they can get one over on the aging process.
We can talk all we like about whether general practitioners should be allowed to call themselves cosmetic surgeons and start operating on people in their private clinics, as happened to Stryland. That seems to be the major theme in the news coverage of her death this week, and it’s certainly an important point in provinces that haven’t sorted that out yet (B.C. already has).
Or we can cut to the chase and ask ourselves what in hell is going on with us.
Why do more than a quarter of a million Canadian women undergo some kind of cosmetic “enhancement” procedure every year in an attempt to feel more attractive? Why do Canadians spend more than half a billion dollars annually having ourselves tightened, tucked, lasered and poisoned in the elusive - and ultimately hopeless - pursuit of youth?
The self-loathing that characterizes so much of the female experience in this day and age has now spread to men, who once seemed virtually immune to such dangerous vanities. But while the number of men seeking solace through cosmetic surgery may be on the rise, 85.5 per cent of the Canadians undergoing the procedures in any given year are female.
Men tend to come looking for a better nose, or less droopy eyelids. Women have different goals: Less fat; bigger breasts; fewer wrinkles. The procedure that Stryland was undergoing, liposuction, is the most requested cosmetic surgery among Canadian women, accounting for a quarter of the total surgical market.
Cosmetic enhancement has become so popular, in fact, that a loan company in Toronto now more or less specializes in lending money to people wanting to be operated on. Medicard lends money to people facing a bill for an unfunded medical procedure, three-quarters of whom have are people wanting cosmetic enhancements.
In 2004, Medicard surveyed 1,000 doctors doing that work. The survey produced some of the first hard numbers specific to the thriving cosmetic-enhancement industry in Canada.
The numbers are pretty frightening. Almost 25,000 Canadians a year are having liposuction. Some 17,000 women a year get their breasts enlarged. More than 100,000 doses of the botulism toxin are injected annually into people happy to pay for the privilege of getting rid of a few wrinkles by having their facial muscles paralysed.
Cosmetic procedures overall rose almost 25 per cent in Canada between 2002 and 2003, Medicard reports. In the U.S., the growth in the industry is staggering: close to 11 million Americans now undergo cosmetic procedures in a typical year, an increase of almost 500 per cent in the past decade.
Our sisters down south are even more enthusiastic than we are about putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of false youth and beauty. Women account for 91.4 per cent of the U.S. market, which now drives an industry worth close to $12.5 billion.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? We like to blame the fashion industry, or Hollywood, or all those magazines endlessly haranguing us to lose 10 pounds by Christmas/summer/next week. The cult of youth, the anorexic runway models - what can a girl do but try to keep up?
But we wouldn’t respond to the negative messaging if we were confident in our own skins. If we weren’t so tragically uncertain about our own worth, all the images in the world of skinny, airbrushed, smooth-skinned 20-year-olds wouldn’t ruffle us a bit.
Were we whole to begin with, we wouldn’t be here wondering why a happy, fit young mom would die for the sake of a little less flab on her belly. We wouldn’t be borrowing money by the thousands to get our faces cut up and our breasts filled with plastic pouches.
Perhaps the patriarchy had something to do with all of it way back when. But we’re long past the time for laying the blame on anyone except women themselves.
If we stopped buying the magazines that exist to make us feel inadequate, there soon wouldn’t be any. If we quit buying teeny-tiny vials of vastly overpriced creams to dab on our unstoppable wrinkles, we could feed the planet with the money saved. If we aged with grace instead of desperation, whole industries would collapse overnight.
Just say no, ladies. There’s no beauty to be found at the end of a knife.
Sept. 28, 2007
We ought to be grateful for people like Krista Stryland and Micheline Charest, whose sad deaths present an opportunity for all women to reflect on the demons that send us searching for happiness through surgery.
Stryland died last week in Toronto of a heart attack after undergoing liposuction, in which a thin, sharp instrument is rammed repeatedly into your body to break up pockets of fat. Charest died in Montreal in 2004 following six unconscious hours on the operating table being sliced, diced and skinned in the pursuit of “beauty.”
Death is merely the worst-case scenario on a laundry list of ugly possibilities when it comes to cosmetic surgery, mind you. So I’m grateful too to celebrities like Cher, Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds, and legions more. One glimpse of their mannequin-like faces is all it takes to remind me of the mighty price people pay for thinking they can get one over on the aging process.
We can talk all we like about whether general practitioners should be allowed to call themselves cosmetic surgeons and start operating on people in their private clinics, as happened to Stryland. That seems to be the major theme in the news coverage of her death this week, and it’s certainly an important point in provinces that haven’t sorted that out yet (B.C. already has).
Or we can cut to the chase and ask ourselves what in hell is going on with us.
Why do more than a quarter of a million Canadian women undergo some kind of cosmetic “enhancement” procedure every year in an attempt to feel more attractive? Why do Canadians spend more than half a billion dollars annually having ourselves tightened, tucked, lasered and poisoned in the elusive - and ultimately hopeless - pursuit of youth?
The self-loathing that characterizes so much of the female experience in this day and age has now spread to men, who once seemed virtually immune to such dangerous vanities. But while the number of men seeking solace through cosmetic surgery may be on the rise, 85.5 per cent of the Canadians undergoing the procedures in any given year are female.
Men tend to come looking for a better nose, or less droopy eyelids. Women have different goals: Less fat; bigger breasts; fewer wrinkles. The procedure that Stryland was undergoing, liposuction, is the most requested cosmetic surgery among Canadian women, accounting for a quarter of the total surgical market.
Cosmetic enhancement has become so popular, in fact, that a loan company in Toronto now more or less specializes in lending money to people wanting to be operated on. Medicard lends money to people facing a bill for an unfunded medical procedure, three-quarters of whom have are people wanting cosmetic enhancements.
In 2004, Medicard surveyed 1,000 doctors doing that work. The survey produced some of the first hard numbers specific to the thriving cosmetic-enhancement industry in Canada.
The numbers are pretty frightening. Almost 25,000 Canadians a year are having liposuction. Some 17,000 women a year get their breasts enlarged. More than 100,000 doses of the botulism toxin are injected annually into people happy to pay for the privilege of getting rid of a few wrinkles by having their facial muscles paralysed.
Cosmetic procedures overall rose almost 25 per cent in Canada between 2002 and 2003, Medicard reports. In the U.S., the growth in the industry is staggering: close to 11 million Americans now undergo cosmetic procedures in a typical year, an increase of almost 500 per cent in the past decade.
Our sisters down south are even more enthusiastic than we are about putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of false youth and beauty. Women account for 91.4 per cent of the U.S. market, which now drives an industry worth close to $12.5 billion.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? We like to blame the fashion industry, or Hollywood, or all those magazines endlessly haranguing us to lose 10 pounds by Christmas/summer/next week. The cult of youth, the anorexic runway models - what can a girl do but try to keep up?
But we wouldn’t respond to the negative messaging if we were confident in our own skins. If we weren’t so tragically uncertain about our own worth, all the images in the world of skinny, airbrushed, smooth-skinned 20-year-olds wouldn’t ruffle us a bit.
Were we whole to begin with, we wouldn’t be here wondering why a happy, fit young mom would die for the sake of a little less flab on her belly. We wouldn’t be borrowing money by the thousands to get our faces cut up and our breasts filled with plastic pouches.
Perhaps the patriarchy had something to do with all of it way back when. But we’re long past the time for laying the blame on anyone except women themselves.
If we stopped buying the magazines that exist to make us feel inadequate, there soon wouldn’t be any. If we quit buying teeny-tiny vials of vastly overpriced creams to dab on our unstoppable wrinkles, we could feed the planet with the money saved. If we aged with grace instead of desperation, whole industries would collapse overnight.
Just say no, ladies. There’s no beauty to be found at the end of a knife.
Monday, September 24, 2007
U.S. corporation takes another piece of B.C.'s human service work
Sept. 21, 2007
For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation.
The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services.
But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada.
Providence bought WCG less than a month after the Victoria company had secured the better part of $18 million in contracts with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. Of the eight contracts awarded in B.C. for services to people with disabilities, WCG secured four of the most lucrative ones - Vancouver Island north and south, the Fraser Valley, and northern B.C.
WCG has run welfare-to-work and the Triumph disability program for several years now, so no surprise it got the contracts. First hired by the New Democrats in the mid-1990s to get people off welfare and back to work, the company has continued to do very well under the Liberals.
It’s difficult to gauge the success of the venture overall, given that the only absolute measurement is whether fewer people are receiving welfare. We don’t know if their lives have been improved because of that, or if they managed to maintain whatever job was found for them. External factors - a booming economy, for instance - complicate things even more.
So all that can be said with certainty about this past decade’s efforts is that 230,000 fewer British Columbians are on welfare now compared to 1995, and that companies like WCG have played a key role in that.
That our streets, hospitals and jails are now overflowing with people who are no longer receiving welfare - well, that’s a subject for another day. For now, let’s stick to the sale of WCG, and what it means to have a U.S. monolith now calling the shots in great swaths of the province.
Providence founder Fletcher Jay McCusker was running for-profit reform schools when he “saw an opportunity” in the mid-1990s to expand the business.
Governments throughout the U.S. were losing interest in providing social services, but in many cases were required by federal law to continue the work. Meanwhile, social need was growing. For the private sector, those factors pointed the way to a “recession resistant” industry, notes the Providence Web site in its section for investors.
Providence now has a workforce of more than 7,000 operating a soup-to-nuts list of social services in 37 states. The purchase of WCG marks Providence’s first foray into work programs for people with disabilities, but its other offerings run the gamut: probation services; domestic-abuse counselling; foster care; parole supervision; child and youth behavioural programs. Florida’s entire child-protection system is now run by Providence, under a contract the company touts to potential investors as “economically insulated.”
In the topsy-turvy world of profiting from human misery, worsening economic conditions are actually “market drivers” for companies like Providence. There’s a financial interest in maintaining poverty and suffering.
With all the social problems the U.S. is experiencing, that means there’s nowhere to go but up. The emerging industry that Providence defines has the potential to thrive in times of economic downturn.
And if two years in a row of “double-digit returns” aren’t enough to convince wary investors of that, Providence offers a grim array of statistics to verify the growing dependency on its services. More than 40 million Americans now living in poverty. Almost five million adults released every year on parole. Two million children needing protective care. Half a million kids in foster care. High-school dropout rates at 33 per cent and rising.
The company adds that it is “further driving revenue growth by expanding into select geographic markets, including Canada.” We’re a prime market, as it turns out - lots of “liberal benefits” for job training and government interest in offloading the provision of social services.
Do we want to go in this direction? Is there even time to ascertain that before all is lost?
Providence is voraciously expanding its empire by buying up businesses like WCG and signing management contracts with not-for-profits. In an age when bigger is always assumed to be better, each acquisition positions Providence to snap up even more government contracts.
“Most of our competitors are small, local, not-for-profit kind of United Way agencies. This has historically been very parochial - that is, they are interested only in their community and providing services to their community,” McCusker said in a recent interview with the Wall Street on-line magazine TWST.com. “The more we do, the more credible we become with the state procurement people.”
He’s right. And it really scares me.
Sept. 21, 2007
For better or worse, the bulk of B.C.’s back-to-work programs for people with disabilities are now under the control of a large, aggressive American corporation.
The ink is barely dry on the Aug. 3 agreement that saw the sale of the local company that has run the programs up until now - WCG International - to Arizona’s Providence Service Corp. So it’s much too soon to speculate whether clients will notice any difference, or to assume that it’s automatically a bad thing when one more big U.S. company takes over yet another aspect of B.C.’s human services.
But man, I get cold shivers down my spine when I think about how easily British Columbians are giving this stuff up, all of it without a whisper of public debate. Providence in particular is a heavy-duty acquisitor of government social-service contracts, and delighted to be gaining its first foothold in Canada.
Providence bought WCG less than a month after the Victoria company had secured the better part of $18 million in contracts with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. Of the eight contracts awarded in B.C. for services to people with disabilities, WCG secured four of the most lucrative ones - Vancouver Island north and south, the Fraser Valley, and northern B.C.
WCG has run welfare-to-work and the Triumph disability program for several years now, so no surprise it got the contracts. First hired by the New Democrats in the mid-1990s to get people off welfare and back to work, the company has continued to do very well under the Liberals.
It’s difficult to gauge the success of the venture overall, given that the only absolute measurement is whether fewer people are receiving welfare. We don’t know if their lives have been improved because of that, or if they managed to maintain whatever job was found for them. External factors - a booming economy, for instance - complicate things even more.
So all that can be said with certainty about this past decade’s efforts is that 230,000 fewer British Columbians are on welfare now compared to 1995, and that companies like WCG have played a key role in that.
That our streets, hospitals and jails are now overflowing with people who are no longer receiving welfare - well, that’s a subject for another day. For now, let’s stick to the sale of WCG, and what it means to have a U.S. monolith now calling the shots in great swaths of the province.
Providence founder Fletcher Jay McCusker was running for-profit reform schools when he “saw an opportunity” in the mid-1990s to expand the business.
Governments throughout the U.S. were losing interest in providing social services, but in many cases were required by federal law to continue the work. Meanwhile, social need was growing. For the private sector, those factors pointed the way to a “recession resistant” industry, notes the Providence Web site in its section for investors.
Providence now has a workforce of more than 7,000 operating a soup-to-nuts list of social services in 37 states. The purchase of WCG marks Providence’s first foray into work programs for people with disabilities, but its other offerings run the gamut: probation services; domestic-abuse counselling; foster care; parole supervision; child and youth behavioural programs. Florida’s entire child-protection system is now run by Providence, under a contract the company touts to potential investors as “economically insulated.”
In the topsy-turvy world of profiting from human misery, worsening economic conditions are actually “market drivers” for companies like Providence. There’s a financial interest in maintaining poverty and suffering.
With all the social problems the U.S. is experiencing, that means there’s nowhere to go but up. The emerging industry that Providence defines has the potential to thrive in times of economic downturn.
And if two years in a row of “double-digit returns” aren’t enough to convince wary investors of that, Providence offers a grim array of statistics to verify the growing dependency on its services. More than 40 million Americans now living in poverty. Almost five million adults released every year on parole. Two million children needing protective care. Half a million kids in foster care. High-school dropout rates at 33 per cent and rising.
The company adds that it is “further driving revenue growth by expanding into select geographic markets, including Canada.” We’re a prime market, as it turns out - lots of “liberal benefits” for job training and government interest in offloading the provision of social services.
Do we want to go in this direction? Is there even time to ascertain that before all is lost?
Providence is voraciously expanding its empire by buying up businesses like WCG and signing management contracts with not-for-profits. In an age when bigger is always assumed to be better, each acquisition positions Providence to snap up even more government contracts.
“Most of our competitors are small, local, not-for-profit kind of United Way agencies. This has historically been very parochial - that is, they are interested only in their community and providing services to their community,” McCusker said in a recent interview with the Wall Street on-line magazine TWST.com. “The more we do, the more credible we become with the state procurement people.”
He’s right. And it really scares me.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Add one more homeless man to Victoria streets
Sept. 14, 2007
For more than a year now, I’ve watched Roland Lapierre cobbling together at least some semblance of a normal life aboard his tidy little raft on the Gorge.
Once homeless on Victoria’s streets, Lapierre had found a way out. I’d see him sitting in the sunshine on his patchwork raft –reading the paper sometimes, or having a nap – and would send good thoughts his way for having the creative mettle to come up with his own solution.
I wondered how long he’d get away with it. The answer came this week. The City of Victoria has ordered Lapierre to leave the little bay where he anchors, off Banfield Park near the Selkirk Trestle.
In a city that knows no end to people living homeless on its streets, add one more.
The city is within its rights, of course, and I can already hear the “slippery slope” arguments taking shape in defence of rousting Lapierre. We can’t have people thinking they can just pull up a raft somewhere on the Gorge and live for free.
But the city’s action does beg the question: What now?
As pleasant as it may have looked from a distance, life couldn’t have been easy for Lapierre in his teeny-weeny waterfront home. It would have been cold out there a lot of the time, and there wasn’t much room on board to do anything other than sit very still or lie down.
But I loved seeing him on his raft as I made my way through the park. I have great admiration for people who are able to figure their way out of problems, and Lapierre had managed his way out from under a really big one.
One of my favourite travel destinations is Mexico, where there’s no shortage of desperately poor people coming up with innovative ways to survive. I wish for a better social safety net for all of them, but in the meantime appreciate the relative freedom they’re given by Mexican authorities to scratch together a life.
Homeless people have to live somewhere, after all. So while it isn’t pleasant to realize there’s an old, sick woman selling one-peso packs of gum out of the bus shelter where she lives on the road into your holiday resort, at least it’s honest.
The Capital Region, on the other hand, continues to pretend there is no poverty - just insufficient motivation. The street issues get more and more visible and we keep telling ourselves it’s just because there are too many lazy bums out there.
They gather in Cridge Park, and we roust them as vagrants. They find some crappy apartment building that no one else will live in, and we send in the health squad to shut the place down.
We tear down their makeshift tents on a daily basis in Beacon Hill Park. We throw out the sleeping bags they leave behind in our downtown doorways. We fence off another alley in another part of town. We send more police into the streets to move people along.
To where? Wake up, people. Ousting Roland Lapierre isn’t going to make or break the homeless issue in the region, but it’s one more perfect example of how we got here in the first place.
We can’t have it all ways. We can’t cut social supports and then be surprised that our problems are growing. We can’t abandon social-housing efforts and then insist that people get off our streets. We can’t slash mental-health care and then wonder where all the crazy people came from.
Lapierre didn’t choose to live on a raft because he wanted to get one over on the city. He did it because it was a vast improvement over camping out in some cold, dirty gap between buildings, where anybody and everybody is free to give you a hard time, rough you up, and steal your stuff.
Lapierre’s story could have had a happy ending - one where he gets the bad news about having to pack up his raft, but at the same time gets as much help as he needs in finding a more suitable place to live.
That approach would also work for tenants of buildings condemned as unfit, like the apartments on Carleton Terrace that were shut down this summer. But like Lapierre, those people have been left to their own devices as well. The streets await.
In Lapierre’s case, the city tried to be nice about it, offering him a job and even a more distant anchor. But for someone with chronic and severe mental illness - and who I suspect swims back and forth to his raft - neither are workable alternatives.
The city acted after fielding complaints from 15 people. I hope they also complained about the much larger boat anchored next to Lapierre’s raft for several weeks this summer. I hope the concern about “third party” use of the foreshore extends to the rich as well as the poor.
“I thought I had found a way,” Lapierre told the Times-Colonist this week. But his eviction was the final blow. He won’t be “fighting anymore.”
Watch for him looking sufficiently brought down to Earth in a doorway near you. Some victory.
Sept. 14, 2007
For more than a year now, I’ve watched Roland Lapierre cobbling together at least some semblance of a normal life aboard his tidy little raft on the Gorge.
Once homeless on Victoria’s streets, Lapierre had found a way out. I’d see him sitting in the sunshine on his patchwork raft –reading the paper sometimes, or having a nap – and would send good thoughts his way for having the creative mettle to come up with his own solution.
I wondered how long he’d get away with it. The answer came this week. The City of Victoria has ordered Lapierre to leave the little bay where he anchors, off Banfield Park near the Selkirk Trestle.
In a city that knows no end to people living homeless on its streets, add one more.
The city is within its rights, of course, and I can already hear the “slippery slope” arguments taking shape in defence of rousting Lapierre. We can’t have people thinking they can just pull up a raft somewhere on the Gorge and live for free.
But the city’s action does beg the question: What now?
As pleasant as it may have looked from a distance, life couldn’t have been easy for Lapierre in his teeny-weeny waterfront home. It would have been cold out there a lot of the time, and there wasn’t much room on board to do anything other than sit very still or lie down.
But I loved seeing him on his raft as I made my way through the park. I have great admiration for people who are able to figure their way out of problems, and Lapierre had managed his way out from under a really big one.
One of my favourite travel destinations is Mexico, where there’s no shortage of desperately poor people coming up with innovative ways to survive. I wish for a better social safety net for all of them, but in the meantime appreciate the relative freedom they’re given by Mexican authorities to scratch together a life.
Homeless people have to live somewhere, after all. So while it isn’t pleasant to realize there’s an old, sick woman selling one-peso packs of gum out of the bus shelter where she lives on the road into your holiday resort, at least it’s honest.
The Capital Region, on the other hand, continues to pretend there is no poverty - just insufficient motivation. The street issues get more and more visible and we keep telling ourselves it’s just because there are too many lazy bums out there.
They gather in Cridge Park, and we roust them as vagrants. They find some crappy apartment building that no one else will live in, and we send in the health squad to shut the place down.
We tear down their makeshift tents on a daily basis in Beacon Hill Park. We throw out the sleeping bags they leave behind in our downtown doorways. We fence off another alley in another part of town. We send more police into the streets to move people along.
To where? Wake up, people. Ousting Roland Lapierre isn’t going to make or break the homeless issue in the region, but it’s one more perfect example of how we got here in the first place.
We can’t have it all ways. We can’t cut social supports and then be surprised that our problems are growing. We can’t abandon social-housing efforts and then insist that people get off our streets. We can’t slash mental-health care and then wonder where all the crazy people came from.
Lapierre didn’t choose to live on a raft because he wanted to get one over on the city. He did it because it was a vast improvement over camping out in some cold, dirty gap between buildings, where anybody and everybody is free to give you a hard time, rough you up, and steal your stuff.
Lapierre’s story could have had a happy ending - one where he gets the bad news about having to pack up his raft, but at the same time gets as much help as he needs in finding a more suitable place to live.
That approach would also work for tenants of buildings condemned as unfit, like the apartments on Carleton Terrace that were shut down this summer. But like Lapierre, those people have been left to their own devices as well. The streets await.
In Lapierre’s case, the city tried to be nice about it, offering him a job and even a more distant anchor. But for someone with chronic and severe mental illness - and who I suspect swims back and forth to his raft - neither are workable alternatives.
The city acted after fielding complaints from 15 people. I hope they also complained about the much larger boat anchored next to Lapierre’s raft for several weeks this summer. I hope the concern about “third party” use of the foreshore extends to the rich as well as the poor.
“I thought I had found a way,” Lapierre told the Times-Colonist this week. But his eviction was the final blow. He won’t be “fighting anymore.”
Watch for him looking sufficiently brought down to Earth in a doorway near you. Some victory.
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