Traumatic brain injury a common and life-altering experience
July 11, 2008

One hard fall is all it takes. One punch. One smashup. One bolt out of the blue - a stroke, a case of meningitis.
The official name for what results is “traumatic brain injury,” but that little label barely touches on what it means to have to live with one. Life will never be the same for those whose brains sustain a severe injury. People sometimes feel so dramatically altered that they come to consider the date of their injury as their new birthday.
For Victoria man Des Christie, the injury was from a car accident at the age of 14. For the other 10,000 to 14,000 British Columbians who incur a traumatic brain injury in any given year, it might be a workplace accident, fall around the home, sports injury, medical problem, or any number of weird and unpredictable twists of fate.
“In this organization alone, we’ve got a staff member, my younger brother, another staff member’s daughter and another staff member’s husband - all of them with an acquired brain injury,” says Cridge Centre CEO Shelley Morris. “It’s much more common than people realize.”
The Cridge - more commonly known for its work with children and seniors - operates the region’s sole group home for people with traumatic brain injury. It’s for men only, but then again, men are twice as likely to experience a brain injury. The most common cause is a car accident, and the most common victim is a young man between the age of 19 and 25 injured while taking part in a risky activity.
McDonald House provides housing for 10 men. Christie has been living there for 14 years, but first had to put in a hard and trouble-ridden 22 years trying to make it on his own before finding a place that understood his challenges. Geoff Sing, the Cridge’s manager of brain-injury services and a brain-injury survivor himself, figures he could easily fill “three more McDonald Houses” if the resources were there.
One of the many little cruelties of brain injury is that it’s frequently invisible. The person looks unchanged to outward appearances, but no longer acts the same. They might not be able to hold their emotions in check. They’ll have memory problems. They tire much more easily. They may have suffered a permanent loss of motor control and brain function, and are unable to keep work or sustain a happy family life.
“The divorce rates after a brain injury are 85 per cent,” notes Sing.
Anecdotally, traumatic brain injury is presumed to be a major contributor to problems on Victoria’s streets. For some, the brain injury came first and resulted in a fall to the streets. For others, the street came first and the brain injury followed. Beatings, accidents and drug-induced disasters are daily possibilities for many of those on the streets, and injury rates overall are high.
The Cridge Centre wants to get a survey off the ground in the next few months to ascertain the level of brain injury on the street in a more formal fashion, in hopes of making a case for more resources.
“If we can get some specific numbers in the homeless community, my hope is that it will arm us - and the Vancouver Island Health Authority - with what we need to put more money into this,” says Morris. “I think it would be staggering to see the stats on this.”
As with any chronic and complex health condition, what’s needed for those with traumatic brain injury is a continuum of services. People typically start out in an acute-care hospital after their injury, then transfer to a rehabilitative facility. But what happens after that - or along the way - varies wildly. Without advocacy and support, life gets dicey quickly for those with brain injuries, and problems pile up fast.
Real work for real wages figures prominently in maintaining quality of life for those with a brain injury, says Morris. For the past two years, the Cridge has partnered with Camosun College to provide work training and on-the-job support for 36 people; Thrifty Foods, Carmanah Technologies and Rogers Chocolates are among the employers hiring from the program.
It’s not about lowering standards to suit people with brain injuries, stresses Sing, but rather about building flexibility and training into the work. Christie hadn’t worked for years before landing a job at Carmanah through the program, and is delighted with the boost to his disability income and his self-esteem: “I feel happier when I’m working. Otherwise, I just feel useless.”
Like the saying goes, it’s not exactly rocket science. “We want to grow residential housing and a job for people,” says Morris. “Can it get any more basic than that?”

Little things mean a lot in halting a fall
July 4, 2008

Everybody stumbles in their life. Most of us will bounce through any number of ups and downs over the course of a lifetime, some of it the result of bad choices and a lot of it for no obvious explanation other than bad luck and lousy circumstance.
I suspect that’s why I’ve got a thing for issues like homelessness. I’ve seen my share of bad luck and lousy circumstance - nothing on a grand scale, but enough to help me see from an early age that life can hold some rough surprises. As the late John Lennon so eloquently penned, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
Fortunately, every object nudged over the brink of the abyss is not destined to plunge non-stop to the bottom. Any number of things along the way can break the fall. The researchers call them “protective factors,” but what they ultimately come down to is having people in your life to catch you before you fall any farther.
It’s a role that family is intended to play, and certainly did in my life. But what if they don’t - or won’t? That’s where community service agencies shine as a kind of substitute family, breaking people’s falls with any number of small interventions before they plunge any further.
Consider the potentially disastrous fall of a young man named Jason, a 30-year-old dad who got injured on the job. Partway through his claim, he had his compensation cut in half to $400 a month, and suddenly found himself unable to make the rent. Poised to get joint-custody rights of his two-year-old son, Jason faced losing it all if he lost his housing.
Enter the Burnside-Gorge Community Association, one of a number of family-serving agencies in the region that play a vital role in catching people on the way down.
In Jason’s case, they gave him a crisis grant for the balance of April’s rent and walked him through all the papers needed for subsidized housing. Then they got him a place he could actually afford in just a week. They gave him a $2 lunch whenever he felt like dropping by. And in no time flat, Jason got things together again.
“If I’d have lost my house, I’d have lost my son - and I’d just gotten him back,” says Jason, who describes his Burnside-Gorge outreach worker as “a little angel on my shoulder through the whole thing.”
For a former Hamilton woman, the descent began with a cancer scare and the growing needs of her two children. The woman - we’ll call her Charlotte - was worried about her health and exhausted from being a single, working parent of two special-needs children. She figured she’d wrap up her seven years in Victoria and return to Hamilton to get more family support, including from the children’s father.
Things didn’t work out. The children hated their school, and were routinely teased and bullied. The family was unprepared for the behavioural problems in Charlotte’s children.
But she had spent every last dime of her savings getting to Hamilton, and couldn’t afford a second cross-country move to get back to Victoria. For 18 months, she and her kids toughed it out in Ontario. Then she and her ex-husband struck a deal: She’d return to Victoria, stay with a friend, and then put in four months at whatever job she could find to get back on her feet. He’d keep the kids in Hamilton until then.
Three weeks after her return to Victoria, however, her ex had given up and the children were back with Charlotte. Sharing a tiny basement suite with a friend up to that point, Charlotte and her children suddenly had nowhere to live. The three of them ended up spending a month in a Victoria transition house, with no clear plans for where they’d go after that.
Enter Burnside-Gorge once more, this time with a damage deposit for a rental house for Charlotte and the kids. She’d gotten her old job back by then and had money to cover the rent, but wouldn’t have been able to get the place without that damage deposit.
“I really didn’t know how I was going to come up with it,” says Charlotte. “Getting the damage deposit was a real turning point for me. I had no idea the Burnside-Gorge program even existed before that. Now that the kids and I are in a more stable situation, I want to find a way to give back.”
Score two for little miracles.

Coleman's autocratic style could be problem in new ministry
June 27, 2008

Dare we hope that a new day is dawning with news this week that B.C.’s most pressing social issues are now the responsibility of a single provincial ministry?
The new Housing and Social Development Ministry is an amalgam of various challenging bits pulled from other ministries, and on that front reminds me of the old “Ministry of Lost Causes” - the wink-wink nudge-nudge name for the now-defunct Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Ministry, which seemed more than anything to be a place where unpopular issues went to die.
The rebundled housing ministry has responsibility for virtually everything that relates to poverty: welfare; subsidized housing and homelessness; addiction and mental health strategy; landlord-tenant disputes; transition houses. It’s also got responsibility for anyone with a disability, including those with mental handicaps. Every impoverished and disadvantaged person in the province will be a client of the new ministry in one way or the other.
But at the same time, the ministry also manages two major B.C. revenue streams: alcohol sales and gaming. That’s not to say it’s able to spend the almost $2 billion in net revenues that drinking and gambling generate every year in B.C., but surely it can’t hurt to be in the room whenever that much money is flying around.
MLA Rich Coleman will preside over the new creation. He’s familiar with at least some of the issues, having had responsibility for gaming in a previous cabinet job and more recently, for social housing as part of his Forests Ministry portfolio. Whether he’s up for a considerably more intense portfolio at a point in time when B.C.’s social problems have never been worse - well, I guess we’ll see.
I generally take the measure of a politician from their time in Opposition, when they haven’t yet been brought to heel by “party discipline.” So I browsed old newspaper files this week for stories from Coleman’s five years in Opposition under Glen Clark’s New Democrat government (1996-2001).
Coleman was new to politics then, having previously been a real estate developer, security adviser, and RCMP officer. Given that he was the housing critic at the time, the strategies he was promoting then have real relevance to his current position.
The good news: He’s clearly an engaged, caring kind of guy. The Fort Langley-Aldergrove MLA has an active history with Kinsmen and Rotary clubs and his local Chamber of Commerce, and has won three awards over the years for his community involvement. As a new MLA, he personally advocated on behalf of a family fighting to keep their children from being apprehended by the province.
The bad news: He’s a long-time believer in leaving it to the private sector to sort out housing issues. He’s on record opposing government construction of social housing, contending instead that the province’s role in the issue should be limited to providing individual rent subsidies. Coleman was so adamant on that point that a worried Co-operative Housing Federation formed a special committee in 2000 just to combat his take on the subject.
People change, of course, and Coleman’s tack these past two years as minister responsible for housing certainly seems to indicate some changed thinking.
Under his leadership these past two years, the province has bought a total of 32 building sites and old hotels in Vancouver for conversion into social housing, which will house 1,800 people all told when built out sometime around 2010. Purse strings are loosening in our region as well.
What’s perhaps more of a concern in the new gig, then, is Coleman’s style. As we’ve learned the hard way from the appalling handoff of forestry lands to private developers in Port Alberni and now Sooke, Coleman feels no need to consult with anyone outside of government before doing whatever he wants.
And while nobody likes hearing that they’re making mistakes, Coleman really seems to dislike criticism. In the past few months alone, he has challenged the findings of the forest-safety ombudsman, a team of Simon Fraser University researchers looking into homelessness, and planners working on a massive mixed-housing development at the Riverview psychiatric hospital site. As forests minister, his autocratic ways managed to unite industry workers and environmentalists in a call for his resignation.
That doesn’t bode well for his new position. Addressing the complex problems of poor and disadvantaged citizens simply can’t be done in the absence of genuine community consultation. We need a minister who knows how to listen, and Coleman doesn’t come across as someone who gets that.
But hey, maybe this time will be different. With a deepening social crisis hanging in the balance, we’ll know soon enough.

Don't let Scotch broom's pretty flowers fool you
June 20, 2008

I drove up-Island to Courtenay one night last week and was treated to a spectacular sight. The normally drab stretch of the Inland Highway north of Parksville had been transformed into a twinkling sea of blue lupines and yellow broom, which dazzled me all the way to my destination.
Unfortunately, I knew too much about broom to be able to give in fully to the pleasure of the moment. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but hard to ignore what it meant to be passing through dense thickets of broom on both sides of the road for well over an hour.
Scotch broom is native to Africa and the Mediterranean, but made its way here after Capt. Walter Grant brought a handful of seeds to the Island in 1850 from his travels in Hawaii. Three plants grew from the seeds he planted in Sooke. Within 50 years, the plant had naturalized on the Island.
In simpler times, B.C.’s Highways Ministry used to plant Scotch broom along our highways for its cheery colour. That stopped after everyone figured out that the tenacious plant takes over in every sunny spot where it gains a foothold, squeezing out native species and producing an alarming 18,000 seeds per plant each year.
We also came to see over the years that broom was tough to poison, difficult to plough under, resistant to seemingly all insect predation, and too woody and unpleasant for any animal to consider eating. It wreaked havoc with reforestation. It drove up the cost of road and power-line maintenance.
Still, we let it get away from us just the same. Here on the Island, Scotch broom now covers more than 300,000 hectares - 10 per cent of the total land mass.
Oh, it’s a pretty plant, all right. But it’s bad news on just about every other front.
Scotch broom has yet to make the province’s official “bad weed” list, but it’s the source of much concern. It’s a particular problem on southeastern Vancouver Island due to its disruptive impact on two tree species that thrive in our region and few other places: Garry oak and Douglas fir.
Broom certainly isn’t the only problem facing those trees in these wild days of Island development. But its aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of growth blocks sun to new seedlings. Broom also wipes out plants that Island deer depend on for food, and creates such dense thickets in open, sunny spaces that resident quail are forced out of their habitat.
The time to do something about broom is right now, when the bloom is on. Waiting any longer allows the seeds to develop, and ultimately to be spread even farther afield through our fruitless attempts to burn, bury or otherwise destroy the resilient seed pods.
But whose job is it to curb the spread of bad plants? That there’s no real answer to that question perhaps explains why Scotch broom has flourished in B.C.
The Invasive Plant Council of B.C. identified the problem nicely in the title of a symposium on the issue a few years back: “Weeds Know No Boundaries.” Controlling the spread of invasive plants requires, at a minimum, the co-operation and commitment of all surrounding landowners. With B.C.’s mishmash of Crown land, aboriginal reserve, federal land, forest reserve and private property, it’s a major challenge just to accomplish that initial step.
Small wonder, then, that topping the plant council’s list of 10 biggest challenges around tackling invasive species is the task of “improving co-operation” between B.C. landowners. It has to be all for one and one for all when you’re talking about plant control, because nobody’s going to put in the hard work of wiping out broom on their property only to have a few hundred thousand seeds drift down from neighbouring lands where the owner didn’t bother.
Loss of habitat is the major reason for the extinction of native flora and fauna in B.C. But the spread of invasive species comes a close second. On the heavily developed southern Island, that’s a one-two punch for native species.
A 1997 inventory of B.C.’s sensitive ecosystems found only eight per cent of our Coastal Douglas fir region remained in a “relatively natural state.” By 2002, a further 8,800 hectares had been negatively affected. The losses are heaviest in second-growth forest, and you can bet that Scotch broom is doing its part to make matters worse.
Want to join the battle against broom? Visit www.broombusters.org for tips on how to take action.
As for those lovely lupines, enjoy. They’re native.

Teen finds hope amid the traumas of her life
June 13, 2008

These days, Karlie passes her time in an old Victoria restaurant, where she’s working on getting past all the bad things that came her way in the last two years.
She’s 15, and already a veteran of crystal-meth addiction, alcoholism, sexual assault and homelessness. It’s been quite an adolescence.
But clean and sober for a year now, she’s back living with her parents. She’s enrolled in the brand-new Youth Hospitality Training Centre run out of the former Taj Mahal restaurant, and liking it a lot. And she’s dreaming of the day when it’s just her and her dog in their own place - after all, it was the dog that got her through.
Karlie (not her real name) now knows that addiction runs in her family. But at the tender age of 10 - her age when she first started babysitting the children of an addicted neighbour - she had no idea of the trouble she was walking into.
The neighbour used drugs in front of her from the time she was 11, and got her drinking before she was 13. As things took a turn for the worse and Karlie hit Victoria’s streets for a year at age 14, she worked her way in short order through ecstasy, powder cocaine and crack. Then came crystal meth, and she knew from the first hit that she was lost. “I went down pretty fast,” Karlie recalls.
Her father never could stand the neighbour. And for good reason, as it turns out. Karlie was a little girl and the neighbour was 12 years older than her, but that didn’t stop him from pouring her drinks and eventually talking her into having sex with him when she was 13.
She didn’t put the words “statutory rape” to what happened, but her mom did when she snooped in Karlie’s diary and saw what the teen had written about the event. The mother called police. When Karlie told the neighbour, his harsh response set her on the fast track to the streets.
“He wanted me to lie and say it was all a fantasy. But I wouldn’t ,” says Karlie. “So he said he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and that I couldn’t see his kids either. He’d been my best friend, my brother, my boyfriend, even my dad in a way. It was like I lost everything. Not even a week later, I was on the streets.”
Police picked her up regularly during the year she was out there, but just as regularly she ran back to the streets. She found a “street grandpa” who looked out for her, and a 13-year-old “street sister” to curl up with on cold nights. Drugs ruled both of their young lives.
Change comes in unexpected ways, and Karlie certainly wouldn’t have pegged a squabble outside Pacific Christian School as a turning point at the time. She’d yelled at a kid who wouldn’t stop throwing snowballs at her, and told him she’d stab him if she saw him downtown. He told his parents; Karlie ended up charged with uttering threats.
She got six months probation, and then another nine months when she breached one of her conditions. (Her total sentence was several months longer than the house arrest the neighbour got for having sex with her, but she’s trying to let that go.) Ordered by the court into youth detox, Karlie started the hard climb out of her addiction.
Karlie’s got a new dream now: An animal shelter for youth on the streets, one that understands that sometimes a dog or cat is literally the only friend a kid has. Nothing in the bylaws stops a youth on the street from having a dog as long as it’s licensed and on a leash, but Karlie says the reality is that dogs are seized all the time regardless of whether their owners are in compliance.
She was so angry at the loss of two pitbull puppies she and her street sister had that she tried to take Victoria Animal Control to court. But only adults have that right, she discovered.
Karlie has another dog safely stashed at home these days, and credits her pet as the primary motivator for her getting clear of crystal meth. When it seemed like all the world had turned against her, the dog never left her side.
“My shelter will let people drop their dogs off if they need to go to rehab, because that’s a big problem out there,” says Karlie. “I want to change the way homeless people are treated with their dogs. I want to help.”