The secret "chill pill" for outrage: Grandkids
Aug. 22, 2008

Outrage is an opinion writer’s stock in trade. So at one level I’m grateful for having a deep vein of wide-ranging indignation inside me to mine as needed.
But just back from a holiday with the grandchildren, I’m also grateful for the things that allow me to let go for a while. Tending to the basic needs of young children is the best therapy I’ve found as a break from chronic outrage.
As any parent well knows, looking after young children is a full mind-body activity. I’m a superb multi-tasker in most areas of my life, but I can barely make it all the way through a single magazine article over the course of a long summer day if also charged with the care and feeding of three engaged and energetic little boys.
It’s a blessing that I didn’t appreciate the first time round, when I was a young woman fearful that my full-time life of raising children was turning me into the worst kind of bore.
In those days of endless skinned knees, playground visits and Kraft dinner lunches, I fantasized about having the time to think bigger thoughts. Now, I seek relief among my grandchildren from too much time spent doing that very thing, once again proving the old adage about grass looking greener from the other side.
We live in times that call for outrage, and I don’t much regret being born with lots of it at the ready for all the grand problems of the world. Still, I’m happy to have grown old enough to comprehend the world-changing potential of just looking out for the needs of young children, which obviously plays a key role anyway in the building of a better future.
When I’m in full grandmother mode - which is to say, returned temporarily to being a mother of young children, only with much more patience and sang-froid - I live happily in the moment. “Tomorrow” really means tomorrow, and the only thing about it that causes concern is how you’re going to keep the sandwiches cool enough to survive a hot couple hours at the beach.
Of course, even the best picnic lunch can never negate all of the woes of the world, particularly for a journalist couple who can’t resist buying at least the occasional newspaper in their grandparently travels.
So I won’t pretend we went indignation-free for the entire 10-day holiday. I won’t deny the occasional outburst over some bit of news that made its way to us (although not nearly so often as happens during our regular life, when we begin every morning with a coffee-and-newspaper routine that walks a fine line between beloved ritual and grim start to the day). Sad, bad and gloomy events continued to unfold around the globe regardless of whether we were on a road trip.
But the bad stuff just can’t take the same hold on you when you’re charged with looking after young children. Yes, things appear to be heating up worryingly between Russia and Georgia, but you’ve got three dripping popsicles to deal with right now and it’s just going to have to wait.
And should you manage against all odds to start into a rant anyway about some crazy development somewhere on this crazy planet, a young child will simply shut you down - either by falling headfirst from the monkey bars at that very moment or with a long, long anecdote about making it through to the sixth level of the new video game he’s trying to master.
Kids also knock the stuffing out of would-be outrage by cutting to the chase.
An example from this most recent trip: Having spotted one of those awful and arrogant “Best Place on Earth” licence plates that British Columbians have been saddled with, I was working up a head of steam on the subject when my five-year-old grandson interjected with a question. “Who’s second?” he asked. I couldn’t have made the point more effectively.
Re-entry into the workaday world is admittedly difficult after a holiday with the grandchildren. The descent is fierce and fast, usually starting with that first frightful peek into the e-mail inbox.
I’m always ready for the break from the rigours of full-time parenting when we get back, and curious to catch up on the news. But I still dread the first tingles of indignation returning (thanks, Tony Clements). I’d probably give the whole thing a miss if it weren’t for the fact that railing against the injustices of this world is another vital way we care for our grandchildren.
They give us the gift of living for today. I figure we owe it to them to worry about tomorrow.

Oldest profession much like any business
Aug. 8, 2008

The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand.
Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business.
The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country.
Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers.
The naysayers - and there were many of them - predicted the worst in the heated debate preceding legalization: Dramatic expansion of the industry; a flood of new “victims” forced into the work; a rise in trafficking and organized crime.
Fortunately, New Zealand academics had the foresight to launch thorough studies of the industry before and after changes to the laws. That virtually none of the dire predictions have come true five years on has done much to shift attitudes here about the industry. We’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone in our travels who has lingering concerns beyond the usual zoning and location issues.
“For the five-year anniversary, we had a little celebration in parliament and even the prime minister dropped in to congratulate us,” notes Catherine Healey, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective that played a pivotal role in the long battle for legal workplaces.
As you might expect, the most significant change since legalization has been for sex workers.
“Sex workers throughout the world can tell you how it feels to have to talk to the police when the work they’re doing is illegal,” says Healey. “They can tell you about that phone call from the school and the fear of losing their child because someone has found out what they do for a living. They live with the knowledge that they can be picked up by the police at any time.
“Since the changes in New Zealand, all of those feelings have started to dissipate. Sex workers now know they have rights, and that they’re not lawbreakers. They’re finally able to be honest about what they do.”
With everything about the industry now wide open, new regulations requiring “all reasonable effort” be taken to practise safe sex make it easier for workers to convince reluctant clients to use condoms. (One such client has already been prosecuted for refusing to do so.) Brothel managers can talk openly with workers about safe-sex practices rather than in the veiled and coded language previously used to guard against a new hire turning out to be an undercover police officer.
Workers are far more willing to go to police with concerns or with information about violent customers, a change particularly noticeable among those working the streets. One of Healey’s favourite stories of late is of the police officer who inadvertently blocked a street worker’s line of sight to potential customers when he pulled his car up one evening. Suddenly realizing his mistake, the officer apologized and moved the vehicle.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. A simple law change doesn’t eradicate every bad brothel owner or end exploitation.
Immigrant sex work remains illegal, an attempt to prevent cross-border trafficking that has instead trapped some workers in the shadows. Municipalities aren’t uniformally happy about having to govern the adult sex industry by the same rules as any other business, particularly around location. Abuse still occurs, and disadvantaged children remain at risk.
But what was bad about the industry was even worse when it was illegal, note sex workers. They now have the same rights as any other worker, including the ability to take a bad boss to court for sexual harassment or breach of contract. Like any other citizen, they’re finally able to turn to the police for help.
And with workers newly free to talk openly about their profession, they’re comparing notes more often and making different choices about where they work. The single biggest change with the legalization of the adult industry has been a shift away from brothels into small “solo” operations of three or four workers.
“It’s not like we’ve done away with all the problems,” acknowledges Healey. “But when it was illegal, the laws were always there to compound whatever problems a person already had.”

Five years of fair treatment for sex workers in New Zealand

 Aug. 1, 2008
As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself.
New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals.
Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen.
It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspects of consenting adult prostitution are now legal, while the “genuine harms” of prostitution have been separated out to be managed in different ways.
Like Canada, New Zealand’s laws up to that point made it a crime for an adult to solicit sex for money in a public place, keep or manage a brothel, or live on the earnings of sex work. Like us, the country tolerated a bustling sex industry while maintaining pretence of trying to eliminate it, trapping sex workers in a grey zone of quasi-legality. (Also like us, they had laws and policies prohibiting children from working in the industry and preventing exploitation and violence, and those laws have rightfully remained in place.)
If you’ve watched the creeping progress through government of any issue of significance, let alone one as controversial as this, you recognize how amazing it is that in just three years, New Zealand made it all the way to decriminalization. How did that happen?
That’s an important question for people like me, who want to be part of making something happen sooner rather than later on the same front here in Canada. Here’s how it unfolded in New Zealand:
Barnett had been a long-time advocate of sex workers’ rights, and it was his bill that ultimately got the attention of New Zealand’s House of Parliament. But many other organizations had been pressing for reform as well, including the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Council of Women, the national YWCA, and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.
Not all of the groups condoned prostitution. But they came together in recognition that continuing to pretend the industry didn’t exist was simply making things much worse for the people working in it.
Barnett’s bill was sent to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee for a hard look, and the committee drafted a four-stage process for reform.
• First, identify the risks from the activity. Coercion, sexually transmitted infections, and being trapped in the industry were all seen as examples of risk associated with prostitution.
• Next, identify which risks could realistically be dealt with by law, and which required public education, better community services, etc.
• Third, separate the risks that do need a special legal solution from those that could be covered by current law. Thus the issue of sex workers ages 16 to 18 was to be dealt with differently than the regular employment policies that would apply to adult sex workers.
• Lastly, create new prostitution law.

It all came to be, but not without considerable dissent. The law squeaked by in a vote of 60 to 59, ultimately helped along by a passionate speech to parliament from a fellow MP who was a former sex worker. “It is about accepting that which occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights,” Georgina Beyer told her peers.
Those opposing the law cited a number of concerns going into the reform: growth of the sex industry; more visibility of street prostitution; an increase in violence against sex workers; the spread of disease and organized crime; the exploitation of children.
Research before and after the new law took effect found that hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, the the newly regulated industry could now be brought to task for the first time around health and safety issues, workers’ rights and contractual obligations.
That’s not to suggest that everything problematic about the sex industry vanishes when you decriminalize. But if the worst didn’t happen when New Zealand sex workers were finally given the right to earn a living, what’s our excuse for continuing to do nothing?

Lessons learned from the brothel project
July 25, 2008

It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life.
Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers.
As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair and friendly place to work.
Next thing you know, things were happening - at warp speed, of course, which I’ve learned is the standard operating speed for those working in the industry.
By June, the two young women had the licensing and business requirements in hand for a Victoria agency. By July, the Web site was up and eight independent workers had signed on give the new model a try. My head’s still spinning at how quickly things came together.
Like any fledgling business, it’s still very much a work in progress. The indoor sex industry has much in common with any industry, but some significant differences as well, including finding investors willing to put their money into an enterprise that at best can be categorized as “kind of legal.”
Developing workplace policy also isn’t as simple as just following standard business practice. As just a small for-instance, consider the delicacies of a workplace drug and alcohol policy when having a drink or two with a customer is often part of the job. Given the nature of the work, it’s a fine line as well that has to be walked to ensure that no worker ever feels exploited or forced to work, yet at the same time can be counted on to show up for her shifts.
Nor is our little business donating any profits yet, or firm on when the point will come when that’s financially possible. We’re not yet a brothel, either, as that really requires either buying a place or having an open-minded landlord in terms of maintaining the discretion required to operate in the land of the quasi-legal. Independent workers generally work out of their homes anyway, and that might work better with the coalition of independents with a centralized administrative core that’s taking shape.
I could fill a book with what I’ve learned about the sex industry in recent years, and in fact think I’ll do that one day soon. Perhaps the most surprising thing has been my own shift in thinking in the past decade - from a decidedly anti-industry position to someone helping to launch a new escort service. Much to my amazement, I’m even starting to understand why men buy sex.
I know I’ve baffled some people with my newfound embrace of the industry, a position that has cost me two friends in the past year alone due to irreconcilable differences in our opinions. I’m uncomfortable and sad to find myself pitted in the media against dedicated, caring feminists for whom I’m now the enemy. Sex work is almost as notable as abortion as a polarizing issue among people who thought they knew each other.
But at the same time, I cherish the memory of a former Catholic nun who took my hand and told me that if I was taking this brothel project on, then she had to presume it was worthy. I’ve been deeply touched by the support of people from all walks of life who, regardless of whether they like that the sex industry exists, share my view that as long as it does, we might as well try to make it as safe and healthy as possible for the tens of thousands of Canadian adults who work in it.
Lauren and I have had a documentary crew following us for a year now as we worked on our project (watch for us on Global TV’s Global Currents show sometime in the spring of 2009). We’re leaving Monday to tour the brothels of New Zealand with documentary director April Parry and the Force Four production crew to see how that country is coping since legalizing brothels five years ago.
Stay tuned for my updates from afar over the next couple Fridays. I’m counting on a very interesting experience.

Drunkenness at Music Fest puts teens at major risk
July 18, 2008

As always, I had a wonderful time at Courtenay’s Island Music Fest this past weekend, and I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken as criticism of what is truly a summer highlight for my family.
But holy moly, there was some out-of-control drinking going on up there.
There were kids drinking so hard that I suspect some of them were putting their lives at risk. They were falling-down, glassy-eyed, fumble-footed drunks. I can’t imagine the drunken coupling that went on in the teens’ sprawling, bottle-strewn campsites that wouldn’t have met the legal test of consent.
I like young people, and saw a whole lot of them at Music Fest who were there for all the right reasons and not just to drink themselves blotto in the campground. So I definitely wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I’m pointing the finger at young people in general - or even underage drinking. What actually disturbed me was not that some teens were drinking, but that they were drinking so heavily.
I saw one girl, maybe 15 or 16 years old, staggering around between the tents absolutely blasted, wearing an itsy, bitsy bikini and carrying a beer. It was 10 a.m. I couldn’t help but wonder at all the bad things that might have happened to her already.
One worried camper started bringing water to the drunken teens camped near his site, trying to help them stay hydrated as they sat drinking fearlessly for hour after hour in the hot sun.
The studies call it “binge drinking.” It’s defined as any single drinking session where you consume four or more alcoholic drinks (four for females, six for males). Not surprisingly, it’s the riskiest way to drink, and the most likely to lead to something bad happening.
Binge drinkers are five times more likely to have unprotected sex. They’re more likely to drive drunk - and cause accidents that kill people. They’re at significantly more risk of getting in trouble with police, and much more likely to get in fights. Gender matters: men are three to six times more likely than women to binge-drink.
Should a binge drinker develop hard-drinking habits that last - another known risk - he or she is looking at higher risk of more than 60 health conditions down the line: heart disease, brain damage, liver failure, cancer. Hard drinkers also risk chronic problems with sexual performance and fertility.
In other words, nothing good comes from binge-drinking. But the health stats still don’t really get at the issue that scares me most when I see kids drinking hard, which is how completely vulnerable they are at that moment to unforeseen events that could change the course of their life forever.
I drank to get drunk myself as a young teen, although I can’t recall ever being quite as blasted as some of the girls I saw last weekend. I’d put the age range of those drinking hardest at 14 to early 20s, but that’s not to say there weren’t a number of older festival-goers hammering it back as well.
Drinking is more or less sanctioned at the festival, what with a beer garden on site and a liberal alcohol policy in the campsite. Perhaps that’s something organizers will want to reflect on.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you have to, and it’s that point that requires the most thought going forward.
More than a fifth of British Columbians are occasional binge-drinkers. In terms of consumption - which is rising - Vancouver Island is second only to the Interior as the B.C. region that drinks the most. In Europe, where binge-drinking is a growing concern, a 2006 study found that 80 million Europeans were drinking at harmful levels once a week or more.
Hopefully we all know the drill on alcohol: That it slows the functions of the central nervous system; affects parts of the brain that control emotion, movement, balance, judgment and impulse; lowers people’s pain thresholds; fogs all five senses. If you’re pregnant, it wreaks havoc on the developing fetus. Too much of it and you’re dead, as a group of California teens were reminded in March when a 16-year-old pal drank herself to death at their party.
The message: Don’t binge-drink, both for your sake and for that of whatever young kid is noticing how you knock them back and concluding that’s the way it’s done.
And one for the parents: What the heck are you doing blithely dropping off young teens at the festival campground for three days as if somebody’s looking out for them? Teens need their parents to help them learn when to draw the line.