Voting a crap shoot at municipal elections
In just over a week, we’ll pick the mayors and councillors who will lead B.C. communities for the next three years.
It’s an incredibly important job. We “hire” municipal councils to tend to dozens of vital tasks in our communities - from dog-catching and parking tickets to policing, planning, roadwork and economic development. A single term of bad council can turn a community on its ear for years to come.
Councils also play an important role in representing our interests at the provincial and federal levels. Municipalities generate a scant eight per cent of the total tax base in the province, so we all want councils that are strategic and clued-in to ensure they’re effective at “managing up.”
You’d think that the hiring process for a big job like that would be done with the utmost care. You’d think we’d be really conscious of wanting to pick the right people to lead our communities.
But you’d be wrong. In truth, 70 per cent of us won’t even show up to vote in many B.C. communities, based on voter turnout from the 2005 municipal elections. Even those of us who do will often have no real sense of who we’re voting for.
Just 27 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls last time out in the City of Victoria. In Saanich, where the mayor was acclaimed in 2005, turnout was 19 per cent. Only Metchosin and North Saanich saw anything approaching a respectable voter turnout in our region, and even that was a minimal 50 per cent.
Turnouts in the 2005 municipal/regional elections throughout B.C. were 25 to 35 per cent in most communities. (Go to http://www.ubcmsurveys.com/election2005/turnout.asp for individual results).
Voter turnout on much of Vancouver Island was below 30 per cent. Tahsis and Alert Bay saw remarkable turnouts that topped 90 per cent, but those communities were notable exceptions in an otherwise dismal year.
As for whether those scant voters made the right picks in 2005, all we have is our councils’ accomplishments these past three years to help us come to a conclusion about that.
That’s never an easy thing to measure. We don’t ask our incumbent politicians for proof that they did a good job. Nor do we often have enough information to gauge whether the newcomers clamouring for our votes will make things better or worse. I suspect I’m not alone in heading into next Saturday’s election with much uncertainty as to who to vote for.
It’s up to each of us to get informed, of course. In Esquimalt, where I live, nothing is stopping me from contacting each of the candidates myself to see what I can ascertain, because at least I’ve managed to find all their e-mail addresses on the Township of Esquimalt Web site. But that’s hardly an efficient way to inform the most number of voters.
The Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce has a helpful “meet your candidate” feature on its Web site for the four core communities, at http://www.victoriachamber.ca/elections/
There’s a brief resume-style summary of each candidate, followed by their answers to five questions on topics including economic development, tax rates and top priorities. A sixth question asks about an issue specific to a particular community (sewage in Oak Bay, homelessness in Victoria, etc.).
But the Chamber can’t insist candidates take part, so the listings are incomplete. Only one Oak Bay candidate has bothered to post a response. Half of the City of Victoria’s eight mayoral candidates haven’t posted responses. And with only four municipalities included on the site, two-thirds of the region’s electorate are out in the cold at any rate.
The Times Colonist has begun community profiles, but can’t devote the space and resources required to feature each of the 100-plus candidates running for a seat in our region. As for all-candidates forums, most are unsatisfying affairs unable to give candidates more than a minute or two to state their case.
Small wonder, then, that local candidates have been inundated with questionnaires from people trying to figure out how they’ll vote. How else to determine who to pick?
The lack of meaningful engagement goes a long way to explaining why so many of us just give the whole process a pass. Yet to think we’re now electing our local governments based on the largely uninformed choices of a quarter of the eligible voters - well, that’s kind of scary.
There has to be a better way. But until we figure it out, it’s head-first into another crap shoot. I’ll see you at the polls Nov. 15, and we’ll just have to count on luck to take it from there.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Silence is golden, and frighteningly rare
I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there.
But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise.
That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that?
There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time when “staying in touch” has morphed from a sweet sentiment about human connection into a jangly way of life that smothers the silences under a din of ringing phones and buzzing Blackberries.
I made the mistake of taking my cell phone with me once on a bird walk - once and never again. I hadn’t expected it to ring, but it did, and I was mortified to be the one disrupting other people’s nature walks.
Choosing not to answer, I then wondered for the entire walk back who it was who had called, as if it made one whit of difference. The only thing that being available for constant communication does is ensure that no time is ever really your own.
I regularly see people interrupting their lunch dates - important ones, romantic ones, it makes no difference - to take a call. I see them digging wildly through their purses and pockets to answer the ceaseless calls of people who simply have to talk RIGHT NOW.
I overhear the most personal conversations everywhere I go, conducted at top volume by someone who I’m quite sure has no idea of how widely they’re disseminating the news of their breakup, medical problem or weight gain. I’ve been in the midst of what I thought was a genuinely engaged discussion with someone only to realize that in fact, they’re sneaking in text messages to someone else.
Until Jack Knox got his Blackberry (why, Jack, why??), I hadn’t realized that the cursed devices buzz every time an e-mail arrives, prodding you into thinking that yes, you’d better answer right now.
Sounds like a genuine nightmare to me. But researchers say they’re finding that wired-up Canadians have actually begun to “crave the idea of access to a world of information,” and to associate their ringing phones and Blackberries with feelings of importance. “Being plugged in validates your importance,” noted Solutions Research Group in a report last March.
The private consumer-research and consulting firm, which conducts surveys four times a year on the communication and technology habits of Canadians, noted rising levels of anxiety in its spring report when people were asked about being unable to use the Internet or their cell phones.
Almost 60 per cent of the 3,100 people SRG surveyed reported experiencing “disconnection anxiety” at the thought of being left out of the communications loop, even temporarily.
“It’s almost like you lose your sense of freedom because you can’t just call someone,” explained one respondent in the Fast Forward survey.
“It’s like you are cut off. You’re just a little person walking around. You might as well be in the 1800s, like you don’t have contact. We are so used to having that with us nowadays, it is like security.”
Just 10 years ago, less than a third of Canadian teens and adults had cell phones. Now, almost 70 per cent of us do - 19 million people. In just four short years, Blackberries and other “smart phones” have emerged from obscurity to rule the lives of more than two million Canadians.
That the din from all that communicating renders us deaf to the small pleasures of life that are audible only in the silences - well, that’s a given. But what else are we no longer able to hear over the din of our constant chatter? How is it possible to think deeply about anything amid all this noise?
The lesson of the birds: Take in the silences once in a while. You’ll be amazed at how much you can hear.
I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there.
But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise.
That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that?
There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time when “staying in touch” has morphed from a sweet sentiment about human connection into a jangly way of life that smothers the silences under a din of ringing phones and buzzing Blackberries.
I made the mistake of taking my cell phone with me once on a bird walk - once and never again. I hadn’t expected it to ring, but it did, and I was mortified to be the one disrupting other people’s nature walks.
Choosing not to answer, I then wondered for the entire walk back who it was who had called, as if it made one whit of difference. The only thing that being available for constant communication does is ensure that no time is ever really your own.
I regularly see people interrupting their lunch dates - important ones, romantic ones, it makes no difference - to take a call. I see them digging wildly through their purses and pockets to answer the ceaseless calls of people who simply have to talk RIGHT NOW.
I overhear the most personal conversations everywhere I go, conducted at top volume by someone who I’m quite sure has no idea of how widely they’re disseminating the news of their breakup, medical problem or weight gain. I’ve been in the midst of what I thought was a genuinely engaged discussion with someone only to realize that in fact, they’re sneaking in text messages to someone else.
Until Jack Knox got his Blackberry (why, Jack, why??), I hadn’t realized that the cursed devices buzz every time an e-mail arrives, prodding you into thinking that yes, you’d better answer right now.
Sounds like a genuine nightmare to me. But researchers say they’re finding that wired-up Canadians have actually begun to “crave the idea of access to a world of information,” and to associate their ringing phones and Blackberries with feelings of importance. “Being plugged in validates your importance,” noted Solutions Research Group in a report last March.
The private consumer-research and consulting firm, which conducts surveys four times a year on the communication and technology habits of Canadians, noted rising levels of anxiety in its spring report when people were asked about being unable to use the Internet or their cell phones.
Almost 60 per cent of the 3,100 people SRG surveyed reported experiencing “disconnection anxiety” at the thought of being left out of the communications loop, even temporarily.
“It’s almost like you lose your sense of freedom because you can’t just call someone,” explained one respondent in the Fast Forward survey.
“It’s like you are cut off. You’re just a little person walking around. You might as well be in the 1800s, like you don’t have contact. We are so used to having that with us nowadays, it is like security.”
Just 10 years ago, less than a third of Canadian teens and adults had cell phones. Now, almost 70 per cent of us do - 19 million people. In just four short years, Blackberries and other “smart phones” have emerged from obscurity to rule the lives of more than two million Canadians.
That the din from all that communicating renders us deaf to the small pleasures of life that are audible only in the silences - well, that’s a given. But what else are we no longer able to hear over the din of our constant chatter? How is it possible to think deeply about anything amid all this noise?
The lesson of the birds: Take in the silences once in a while. You’ll be amazed at how much you can hear.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Court decision on homeless 'camping' is ticket to real change
So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long.
Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness.
Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down.
B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds for everyone on our streets, the people who have to spend the night outside have the right to put a tarp over their heads while they’re sleeping. Hardly an extreme position to take.
A smart city would respond to such a ruling by using it to bully and push other levels of government into compliance around making things happen on the homeless front. A stop-gap bylaw that misses the point of the judgment won’t get us far.
With municipal elections coming up next month and a provincial election in the spring, hold your representatives accountable for what they’re going to do about homelessness. I’ve put a few questions on my blog at http://closer-look.blogspot.com that I think are important to ask.
An enormous thanks to all the people who responded to my Oct. 3 column by donating goods and volunteer time to a big gathering we put on for the street community last week.
We saw more than 500 people through the door at the region’s first-ever Project Connect, which I organized on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. In my column I’d asked readers to help us by volunteering their time and buying some of the goods for the 500 “survival packs” we wanted to hand out at the end of the day.
You came through in every possible way. We ended up with an abundance of everything, including that most precious of commodities: People’s time. You donated socks, gloves, personal products, rain ponchos, blankets, thermal shirts, hats and more, but more importantly you gave us your time to ensure we’d be able to pull the whole thing off.
More than 120 people volunteered that day and in the intense week leading up to the event. I can’t thank them enough for their help, and hope in turn that the gift the event gave them was the chance to meet - with open hearts - the very interesting and often heartwrenching people stuck in the middle of this thing we call “homelessness.”
(Visit http://streetstories.blip.tv for Christopher Bower’s moving video vignettes of some of the people on hand that day.)
Thanks as well to the two dozen-plus service agencies and professionals who showed up that day to help people in whatever way they could. We saw an impressive array of services delivered in a single room on a single day. A standing ovation to Gordon Fry and the Capital Lions Club in particular, who served up 1,000 burgers and 500 dogs with astounding efficiency.
It was still just one day, of course, and one day does not a solution make. But what I witnessed that day was a new way of doing business in terms of service delivery, and a powerful way to bring together the mainstream and street communities to work together on addressing the many problems at the root of modern-day homelessness.
We’ll do it again sometime soon, and hopefully again and again. When the day comes that we actually have housing to offer people, a Connect event will be a great way to make that happen. In the meantime, we’re really going to have to build, renovate and hang onto any and all cheap forms of housing, because we simply don’t have anywhere near enough of it to meet the need.
For those who made it happen last week, thanks for a magical day. A special thanks to the street community for their respectful participation, and willingness to share their stories one more time in the hope of bringing about real change.
So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long.
Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness.
Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down.
B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds for everyone on our streets, the people who have to spend the night outside have the right to put a tarp over their heads while they’re sleeping. Hardly an extreme position to take.
A smart city would respond to such a ruling by using it to bully and push other levels of government into compliance around making things happen on the homeless front. A stop-gap bylaw that misses the point of the judgment won’t get us far.
With municipal elections coming up next month and a provincial election in the spring, hold your representatives accountable for what they’re going to do about homelessness. I’ve put a few questions on my blog at http://closer-look.blogspot.com that I think are important to ask.
An enormous thanks to all the people who responded to my Oct. 3 column by donating goods and volunteer time to a big gathering we put on for the street community last week.
We saw more than 500 people through the door at the region’s first-ever Project Connect, which I organized on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. In my column I’d asked readers to help us by volunteering their time and buying some of the goods for the 500 “survival packs” we wanted to hand out at the end of the day.
You came through in every possible way. We ended up with an abundance of everything, including that most precious of commodities: People’s time. You donated socks, gloves, personal products, rain ponchos, blankets, thermal shirts, hats and more, but more importantly you gave us your time to ensure we’d be able to pull the whole thing off.
More than 120 people volunteered that day and in the intense week leading up to the event. I can’t thank them enough for their help, and hope in turn that the gift the event gave them was the chance to meet - with open hearts - the very interesting and often heartwrenching people stuck in the middle of this thing we call “homelessness.”
(Visit http://streetstories.blip.tv for Christopher Bower’s moving video vignettes of some of the people on hand that day.)
Thanks as well to the two dozen-plus service agencies and professionals who showed up that day to help people in whatever way they could. We saw an impressive array of services delivered in a single room on a single day. A standing ovation to Gordon Fry and the Capital Lions Club in particular, who served up 1,000 burgers and 500 dogs with astounding efficiency.
It was still just one day, of course, and one day does not a solution make. But what I witnessed that day was a new way of doing business in terms of service delivery, and a powerful way to bring together the mainstream and street communities to work together on addressing the many problems at the root of modern-day homelessness.
We’ll do it again sometime soon, and hopefully again and again. When the day comes that we actually have housing to offer people, a Connect event will be a great way to make that happen. In the meantime, we’re really going to have to build, renovate and hang onto any and all cheap forms of housing, because we simply don’t have anywhere near enough of it to meet the need.
For those who made it happen last week, thanks for a magical day. A special thanks to the street community for their respectful participation, and willingness to share their stories one more time in the hope of bringing about real change.
Monday, October 20, 2008
With a municipal vote coming up in the Capital Region in November, here's a few questions that might help you quiz your municipal candidates as to what they plan to do about homelessness in the region if elected:
CANDIDATE QUESTIONS
What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues?
How do you think those problems should be handled?
Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city?
How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge?
Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of:
the federal government?
The provincial government?
Municipal and regional government?
The business community?
Individual citizens?
If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and holding other levels of government accountable for their own areas of responsibility?
How would you get around the many challenges that other politicians have faced on this issue? Please tell us what you’d do to manage each of the following challenges:
-lack of regional buy-in,
-no certainty around funding for new construction, land, operating costs,
concentration of street services in the downtown core
-"silos" of service and a lack of co-ordination in service delivery
-NIMBYism,
-lack of addiction services,
-tight vacancy rate,
-lack of affordable, supported housing,
-mental illness on the street
-open selling and using of drugs
-crime and vandalism affecting people who live, work and shop in the downtown
CANDIDATE QUESTIONS
What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues?
How do you think those problems should be handled?
Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city?
How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge?
Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of:
the federal government?
The provincial government?
Municipal and regional government?
The business community?
Individual citizens?
If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and holding other levels of government accountable for their own areas of responsibility?
How would you get around the many challenges that other politicians have faced on this issue? Please tell us what you’d do to manage each of the following challenges:
-lack of regional buy-in,
-no certainty around funding for new construction, land, operating costs,
concentration of street services in the downtown core
-"silos" of service and a lack of co-ordination in service delivery
-NIMBYism,
-lack of addiction services,
-tight vacancy rate,
-lack of affordable, supported housing,
-mental illness on the street
-open selling and using of drugs
-crime and vandalism affecting people who live, work and shop in the downtown
Sunday, October 12, 2008
1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind
Oct. 10, 2008
Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing.
Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side.
I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family.
The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia.
Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when you hear a story like that. It wasn’t the only one I heard that day with troubling parallels to modern times.
The museum constructs its program around a tenement built in 1863 on Orchard Street by an immigrant tailor from Germany. More than 7,000 people subsequently lived in the five-storey building over the next 70 years, until tougher health codes finally shut the place down.
The museum’s tours are built around the lives of the actual families who lived in the apartments, their stories painstakingly stitched together from census data and genealogical research.
Those were tough times. The Lower East Side was awash in poverty and people, and the city was struggling to develop health standards as a new understanding developed of how disease spread.
It’s interesting to compare the way things were handled then and now. Back then, the public health authorities dealt with the problems of inadequate housing by demanding improvements - in the case of the Moores’ building, a minimum of two indoor toilets per floor and running cold water to every flat.
I’m sure the landlords didn’t like it. But they lived with it, and held the rents at about 30 per cent of the typical family income. Today, the more likely action would be to condemn the building and order the tenants out, with no other place for them to live. It’s not exactly what you’d call progress.
Life was pretty miserable for the Moores and their neighbours, and I don’t mean to suggest that there haven’t been improvements since those bleak days.
But as awful as it was for poor people in the 1860s, things were in fact improving for those living in poverty at that time - fewer dead babies every year, better living conditions, new and better care for sick people. Can we make the same claim now?
The 20-year-old tenement museum was set up by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a group of museums and historical sites with an interest in raising awareness of past injustices and struggles. After our tour, we shared popcorn and ice tea with our little group of fellow travellers at a session facilitated by museum staff - a “kitchen conversation” designed to get people reflecting on what they’d seen.
Our group included a couple from Oakland, Calif., and four British travellers from London and Birmingham. As talk turned to housing in our own home towns, everyone reported similar problems: an erosion of supported housing programs; more people on the streets; the emergence of what appeared to be a permanent underclass.
(“In Canada?” the woman from California asked us incredulously. “I thought you were the ones who were doing things better than us!”)
The building where the Moores lived was a grim place: 120 people sharing four outhouses and one water pump at the back of the building, families with three or more kids squeezed into 325 square feet of space.
We don’t tolerate tenement buildings like that anymore, it’s true. But we can hardly claim the moral high ground given that children are still dying by the dozen from swill milk, and tens of thousands of Canadians don’t even have running water and an indoor toilet, let alone 325 square feet to call their own.
The Moore family eventually moved to a nicer building. Their three children grew up, got jobs, bought houses, and lived better lives than their parents.
Life was bad back then, but it was getting better. A century and a half later, we can’t make the same claim.
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