It's community involvement that sets Project Connect apart

For the past two years, I’ve had the honour of organizing the Project Connect service fair for the street community, put on by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness.
This year, we saw at least 700 people through the door for the event at Our Place drop-in last Wednesday. They came for help: a new birth certificate, care for their broken and battered feet, a haircut, vet care, a backpack full of useful stuff They also came for food, eating a whopping 2,100 hamburgers and 1,000 hot dogs by day’s end.
I don’t know whether to be delighted or heartsick that the number of people at the event was up by more than 200 this year, or that we served twice as many burgers and dogs. Sure, it’s great to draw a crowd, but I dream of the day when an event for people living in profound poverty fails to attract anybody.
If you’ve done any event-planning, you’ll know it’s a crazy-making activity with a million details to attend to. But when it all comes together, it’s a whole lot of fun, especially when the event is Project Connect. What sets it apart is that it really is a community-wide effort - one that depends on hundreds of people in our region stepping up to make a difference.
Consider, for instance, what it took to be able to hand out 700 backpacks last week.
First, it took the efforts of leadership students at seven local secondary schools to help us hustle up some of those packs - 250 all told. But we needed many more than that, and couldn’t have done it without a generous cash donation from a local businessman and a sweet deal on back-to-school packs offered to us by Wal-Mart and Real Canadian Superstore.
Then we needed things to put in those packs. We wanted to put a dozen or so items in each pack: a new pair of socks, gloves, toque, scarf, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, and other essentials. But that meant collecting almost 9,000 individual items.
For that, we turned to the community. And people really came through.
The Church of the Nazarene bought us 500 pair of men’s gloves. Lambrick Park Church’s “The Place” congregation rustled up 400 toques and 200 scarves. St. Philip’s Anglican Church bought 400 emergency blankets. UM Marketing donated 200 deodorants, 800 razors, and 600 packages of tampons. Save On Foods, Safeway, Thrifty Foods, Lifestyle Market and Costco loaded us up with food.
Workplace donation drives at Telus, Queen Alexandra Society, Victoria Foundation, the Ministry of Housing and Social Development, Royal Bank Oak Bay and Shaw Cable brought us box after box of the kinds of things we needed. So did you - for four days straight in late September and again in early October, members of the public poured into Our Place with armloads of donations for Project Connect.
That all of the above happened was largely due to the efforts of five amazing volunteers I’d gathered around me to help organize the event. My deepest thanks to Gloria Hoeppner, Ruth Simkin, Deb Nilsen, Jill Martin-Bates and Willie Waddell - women who I’ve come to count on whenever the occasion calls for a crack team of volunteers.
The packs wouldn’t have been packed without them. Some 10,000 donated items would have gone unsorted. These women’s vehicles, husbands, living rooms, charge cards, friends and neighbours were all conscripted to the cause, as were mine. But hey, we got things done.
As for Our Place, which hosted Project Connect this year - well, I can’t say enough good things about those guys. Everybody on staff was unfailingly helpful and patient with us. I don’t know where we would have stored our overflowing bounty of pack items, let alone physically done the packing, were it not for Our Place making room for us every step of the way.
What was particularly nice was that anytime someone from our group arrived at the drop-in with the latest load of big heavy things needing to be carried in, at least four or five of the men who come to Our Place would immediately step forward with offers to help. Is there another place in the city where you can count on such gentlemanly behaviour?
And this long list was just what it took to get the packs together. Multiply the effort tenfold for all the volunteers who turned out that day, all the service providers who were there, all the work Gord Fry and the Capital Lions Club put in to help us feed such a big crowd, all the media support for getting the word out.
It was a remarkable community achievement. Thank you.

Pointless prostitution laws help no one but hurt many

Sex work is back in the headlines again, and will be for quite some time with a constitutional challenge to Canada’s prostitution laws finally underway this week.
I wish miracles for the three brave sex workers who launched the challenge. That’s what they’ll need to survive the savaging they’re in for at the hands of those who staunchly oppose anything that might make it easier or safer to be a sex worker.
The case in front of the Ontario Superior Court is challenging three sections of the Criminal Code: the “common bawdyhouse” laws that make anything to do with operating a brothel illegal; procuring or living off the avails of prostitution; and communicating for the purposes of prostitution.
In deciding the case, Justice Susan Himel will be gauging whether our prostitution laws are proportionate to their purpose, or if they have the effect of forcing sex workers into unsafe situations where they can be preyed on by deviants and serial killers.
So let’s ponder those two issues for a moment.
Sex work is legal in Canada, yet everything required for a sale to take place is illegal - location, marketing, even the earnings. That renders the work just legal enough for men to be able to acquire paid sex anytime they like in any city, and just illegal enough to continue the pretence that Canadian society is hard at work trying to eradicate prostitution. What exactly IS the purpose of laws like that?
As for whether the impact of the laws is proportionate to their purpose, I can’t wait to hear the arguments on that point. How many vulnerable women have died across Canada just in the last decade because our laws forced them to work out of sight in the rough parts of town, getting into cars with strangers? How could a gruesome impact like that possibly be proportionate in a civilized society?
What gets me the most about the laws around prostitution is the grand hypocrisy of it all.
We wrung our hands and wept for all the missing women when Robert Pickton’s exploits were the news of the day. We went to their vigils. But we didn’t do one thing that made life safer for the women working our streets.
We tell ourselves that only deviants and weirdos buy sex, and only victimized, desperate people sell it. But Canadians of every stripe are frequenting the places where sex is sold, and leading secret lives as part-time sex workers. Were a scarlet letter ever to appear on all the chests of people who have ever bought and sold sex, I think you’d be amazed to see who was in the club.
The sale of sex is a rip-roaring business in every Canadian community. Every moment spent denying that is another nail in the coffin of women working in isolation and danger on the nation’s outdoor strolls. Outdoor work is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of the scope of the industry, but it’s certainly the place where the most negative impacts of our poorly considered laws are felt.
I understand the powerful emotions that drive the abolitionist movement. I know that some people have had tragic experiences in the sex trade. It’s definitely a job for adults only, and even then it’s not something that most people are cut out for.
But it’s still a job. Occasional monsters and victims notwithstanding, the buyers are for the most part ordinary people. The sellers are by and large happy for the money. Meanwhile, those who aren’t happy in the work take no solace from the law, because it can only punish them further.
I read an opinion piece the other day from an abolitionist exhorting Canadians to resist anything that might normalize prostitution as a legitimate career choice. That tired old argument is trotted out anytime someone dares to mutter about decriminalizing the industry: “Oh, horrors, your child could end up working as a prostitute!”
Read the research. Prostitution doesn’t increase when it’s decriminalized, because it’s already so well-entrenched in every community that there’s no increase in demand just because it’s now legal. All the men who buy sex are already buying it.
Nor is the growth of sex tourism much of a concern in Canada. Sex workers here are no more likely than any other Canadian to work for the pathetic, exploitive wages that sex workers earn in countries like Thailand.
And even if all that weren’t so, surely we don’t want to support laws that maintain an ugly and dangerous work environment just so our own daughters won’t be tempted into that line of work.
Every woman who works in the industry is somebody’s daughter. We owe it to all of them to fix this mess we’ve made.

Fight back - these cuts will do lasting harm

I’ve kept a rough list of the B.C. programs and services being lost as a result of government cuts this fall. Maybe there’s still nothing on the list that affects you and your family, but the odds are getting slimmer all the time.
A remarkably broad swath of British Columbians will be affected by the funding cuts being carried out by the provincial government and its five health authorities right now.
The cuts are coming fast and furious in all directions, with neither a plan nor an understanding at any level of what it’s all going to mean when the dust settles. Without a word of public discussion, vital social programs and supports that British Columbians have counted on for years are vanishing.
Our province will end up wearing the scars of these cuts for decades to come. We need to shake ourselves out of our respective silos and make it stop.
Whatever your political stripe, I’m sure we can all agree that we’re against bad decision-making. That’s what is going on in B.C. right now. Government and health authorities are so consumed with hitting their financial targets that they’re selling out the future health and well-being of British Columbia for poorly conceived, clumsily executed cuts that benefit no one.
It’s still hard for many of us to accept that tax dollars are well-spent on supports to strangers who need help in their lives. That’s why our governments generally assume they can shred social services with little fear of a voter backlash.
But this isn’t about votes. This is about what we’re giving up as a society. This is about services that are costing us a little money right now, but are preventing much, much higher costs down the road. Take a look at this sampling of recent cuts and think about the vulnerable people who will be cast to the wolves as the government and health authorities withdraw their support:
• School lunch programs
• Community mental health and addiction services
• School sports
• Intensive behavioural therapy for young autistic children
• Support for programs preventing fetal-alcohol damage in children
• Help for people raising their grandchildren
• Reading centres
• Treatment for children who witness abuse
• Outreach for victims of domestic violence (reinstated this week after public outcry)
• Help for problem gamblers
• Elimination of B.C.’s only prosecutor specializing in domestic violence
• Support for sports for people with mental handicaps

And none of that includes the cuts to gaming grants for the social sector still to come later this fall. Or the much deeper cuts coming in the March 2010 budget, and again the year after that.
Those familiar with government understand that whatever is lost in the next couple years is at risk of being lost for good. Government is writing off decades of experience, evidence and social infrastructure in its ill-informed rush to make up cost overruns on the backs of struggling families. We will not soon see these programs back if we let them go now.
Billings Learned Hand, a U.S. judge and philosopher from the early 1900s, once talked about change occurring only when things reach a point that “cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.”
Are we there yet? Surely we must be close. Thousands of people and communities are affected by the cuts, but I sense they haven’t yet realized their cumulative power to do something. It’s tough to go it alone against government, but so many people will feel these cuts that together, they could exercise considerable political clout.
Look only to recent headlines to verify that. Just this week, the government reinstated $440,000 that had been cut from services addressing domestic violence, all because the public went nuts. Cuts to camping programs for children with disabilities were also abandoned earlier this year after the public made its considerable displeasure known.
Fight, people. Be the squeaky wheel that haunts government’s dreams. Give government some of that “blowback” that Housing Minister Rich Coleman talked about a couple weeks ago, because they need a big blast of it to snap them out of these dangerously short-sighted, mean-spirited cuts.
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As always, the poorest of the poor will feel all of B.C.’s cuts the hardest. I’m back organizing Project Connect for another year on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, and want to thank the community for the generous donations to date that will help us put on another really successful day for hundreds of people living in deep poverty and homelessness.
We’ve got one more drop-off day to collect things like new socks, new and gently used gloves, scarves and toques and travel-size grooming products like hand sanitizer to fill the 700 or so backpacks we expect to be handing out at the all-day service fair for the street community, Oct. 14 at Our Place. If you’ve got a backpack to donate, that’d be great too.
Can you help? Bring donations to Our Place, 919 Pandora, on the morning of Oct. 6. Contact me at the email on this column to donate time or money to Project Connect.

MLAs' meal allowance just the tip of the iceberg

Ida Chong is the one we’ve all been talking about, but this meal-allowance business is much bigger than the $6,000 per-diem Chong claimed in the last fiscal year.

I can feel it in the public reaction. Like me, people see the Chong story as symbolizing much more than just one politician’s per-diem spending.

There’s real outrage and betrayal in the letters to the editor and on the radio call-in shows. Genuine hurt. It’s a shame that MLAs have reacted by circling the wagons and closing ranks, because this is an important moment to try to understand.

I’ve been surprised at my own wounded reaction, especially after learning this week that MLAs don’t even have to submit receipts for the $61 per diem they’re eligible for when doing official government work in Victoria or Vancouver. (“It costs more to administer the receipting process than to just set a flat rate,” said a communications spokesman with the Finance Ministry.)

Call me naive, but I had no idea.

Sure, I’m all for reimbursing our hard-working MLAs for legitimate expenses they incur. I know they’re putting in long hours and sacrificing family time, and all those other things that hard-working people everywhere can relate to.

But just handing them a wad of cash so they can eat, park and sleep at the taxpayers’ expense raises questions for me, and not just in an eye-rolling, cynical-about-politics kind of way. Before government started cutting vital public services last year, did anybody even consider steps to reduce these kinds of expenditures?

I browsed the government Web site for more information on the Capital City allowance that landed Chong in the news, and quickly found myself in a labyrinth of per-diems and meeting payments I hadn’t known existed.

The same arrangement that MLAs have is available to certain classes of civil servants. They get $47 a day, and $61 if their work on a particular day involves hanging out with an MLA or senior bureaucrats getting the higher rate.

Whether anyone actually spends the money on food is entirely up to them. It’s really just a non-taxable bonus on top of a (generous) salary.

The thousands of non-government people who sit on the province’s many advisory boards, tribunals and review panels can also claim meal per-diems. But I doubt many of them bother, seeing as the real money is in attending meetings, most of which pay from $350 to $750 per meeting.

I can’t tell you what all the costs would add up to, because nothing is gathered in one place. I sense from the government’s own slow response to my query for more information on this subject that they’d be hard-pressed to tell you, either.

But clearly it’s a potful.

Consider this one small example:  We paid almost $800,000 in the last fiscal year for 268 British Columbians to attend meetings of B.C.’s 75 Property Assessment Review panels.  Some panel appointees made as much as $10,000 from the meetings, held Feb. 1 to March 15 every year for unhappy homeowners wanting to appeal their provincial assessments.

And that’s just one small for-instance. Land yourself on any of the big government-appointed boards in B.C. and you’ll get $750 every time you go to a meeting.

That’s the price of doing business, some would argue. But during a recession like this one, no stone should go unturned when government is looking for savings.

Were these expenses scrutinized and considered for reduction? Were MLAs approached to reduce their own claims on public money?

One less meeting of Property Assessment Review panels would save a bundle - maybe even enough to spare a high-school-upgrade program for young moms. MLAs who were conscious of their spending and claimed only for what they spent could have made a real impact on community services that have now been lost.

Government has felt the pain of the recession, of course. Travel spending was cut in half in the past year, to $39 million, and office expenses were cut by a third. It’s been hard times for civil servants working in ministries singled out for layoffs, and for staff and clients of increasingly starved public services.

But the per-diem claims suggest that at the political level, it was business as usual. The MLAs took what the rules allowed them to take. The paid meetings continued unabated. A typical front-line community worker would have to work more than five days to earn what some people get paid just for a half-day meeting.

It’s a grave betrayal of the public trust, and profoundly unsettling for what it reveals about how our government views us. Serfs, let ‘em hear you roar.

Government knows how to end homelessness - and it's not arrest

These are times when all ideas need to be on the table, so I’m trying to restrain my impulse to go berserko at the B.C. government for thinking that you can manage homelessness by arresting people.
But really, it’s enough to break your heart. All the effort and thought that has gone into this issue in recent years, all the proven solutions and strategies pulled together by brilliant and informed minds right here in B.C. - and this is what the province has taken away from that? Say it isn’t so.
Housing Minister Rich Coleman has been in the news this week talking about giving police the power to arrest people who refuse to go to shelters over the winter. His early plans turned shelter staff into jailors by forcing people to stay inside, but now he says police would just deliver people to shelters and leave it up to them whether they walked through the door.
The argument will likely play well with many of us in the comfortable class, who shudder at the thought of being out on a cold, wet winter night. Who can blame us for presuming that anyone who’d choose to sleep outside at night must be certifiably insane?
But the truth is that there are all kinds of sane reasons for choosing the streets over a shelter bed.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as not being able to bear the thought of lying on a mat in a big room with 70 or 80 other troubled souls trying to make it through the night in noisy, restless fashion. Or about having no place to leave your cart without all your worldly belongings being stolen by the morning, or another night of waiting in line outside the shelter just to find out there are no beds left, by which time all the good outdoor sleeping spots are long gone.
It’s about having a spouse and wanting to sleep like a couple, or having a pet that you can’t possibly leave outside alone in the cold. When our region’s “cold wet weather” protocol kicks in - and believe me, it’s damn cold and wet before that happens - only one adult emergency shelter, the one at St. John the Divine, welcomes couples and pets.
Then there’s a whole other group of resisters with severe addictions, whose sleep/wake cycles are so completely out of whack that the idea of lying down quietly at night for eight hours isn’t even an option.
Some have mental-health issues that keep them out of shelters, although not many in my experience, and certainly not enough to give Coleman the quick street cleanup he’s envisaging. There’s also a tiny group who would actually choose to live outside no matter what: modern-day hermits, maybe 32 people in all in our region based on the findings of the expert panel that worked on the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness.
Challenging issues, yes. But not insurmountable, as Coleman well knows. The City of Vancouver has had amazing success with such populations using a new kind of shelter piloted late last year. None of it has required arresting people.
The goal of the project was to lure resisters inside by providing shelter with a difference - locked spaces for carts, couples and pets allowed, 24-hour TV room to accommodate the sleepless, the dignity of booking another night before you left the shelter rather than having to line up much later in the day and hope for the best.
The empty buildings used for the shelters were pulled together quickly and on the cheap, with an operating cost of roughly $1.5 million for the three-month pilot. All were located in areas where people were already sleeping.
The plan worked like a charm. More than 500 people who’d previously refused to use shelters came inside within a few days of the shelters opening last December.
A similar solution for the 100 to 150 people in our region who avoid shelters would cost just $750,000 to cover five months of cold, wet weather. Much could be accomplished merely by extending Our Place drop-in hours over the winter and expanding the Cool Aid winter shelter that’s run out of St. John the Divine church.
The vast majority of people on our streets desperately want shelter and housing. But that’s not to say they’re prepared to give up everything of themselves just for one night out of the cold. Arresting people “for their own good” is something that a civil society does with the utmost of care, and only after all other options are exhausted - something that’s most definitely not the case in B.C.
You know what works, Mr. Coleman. Please don’t waste any more time and tax dollars on a plan that fails on every level.