Governments struggle to get it right on social issues

You learn things over the course of a journalism career.
A lot of it just flies right out of your head a month or two later. But some sticks. I wouldn’t say it gives you wisdom, exactly, but you do start developing a sense for how certain stories tend to turn out.
Observing government has been particularly informative. We all know history repeats itself, but it repeats itself really quickly when it comes to government. With a new cast of characters every three or four years, there are always newcomers to stumble into the same mistakes as their predecessors. Pretty soon, you start to recognize the signs.
First, a moment of appreciation for all the good things that our regional, provincial and federal governments do. Trying to represent the interests of all of us is one heck of an undertaking, and on many fronts governments get it right.
The roads are paved. The lights are on. The taxes are collected and the debts are paid. Sure, we grumble, but much of what governments do on our behalf works out perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, there’s one area that trips up virtually all of them. Governments routinely get it wrong around social issues.
I know, I know - who am I to define something as “wrong” just because I don’t agree with the tack taken? But what I’m talking about is a measurable kind of wrong, one that hurts the economy, the citizenry and the culture in the long term.
That almost 30 per cent of B.C. children are developmentally behind by the time they start kindergarten, for instance, will cost the province 20 per cent in lost GDP growth by the time this generation of five-year-olds reaches retirement age. We talk about improving that vulnerability rate, but the cuts to community services going on right now are taking us in the opposite direction.
Social decay happens in increments, and over a very long time. A government that cuts social supports will in most cases not be around when the chickens come home to roost, so they have little to fear in making such cuts.
I’ve seen every shade of politician cut social spending. Perhaps it’s because it seems like such an “easy” place to find short-term savings, with little risk of political repercussion. In some cases I think it’s because a political party genuinely believes that tough love is the answer, although you’d think the huge growth in homelessness over the last couple of decades might at least give small pause to the validity of that belief.
Looking at the issue through a political lens, you can see why a politician might conclude that the place to cut is around social support.
When social care is working, it’s all about an absence of problems. Get it right, and families don’t break up. Teenage girls don’t get pregnant.
Adolescent boys don’t fall into youth gangs. Old people live out their final years without event. People don’t commit crimes. Little children grow up healthy and happy, the bad life that they might have been headed for never gaining a foothold.
Happy news in terms of healthy communities. But how is a politician supposed to take credit for nothing happening as a selling point in his or her re-election? You can see why things like bridges and arenas and Olympics events are so appealing to elected officials - they’re tangible proof of something accomplished during their time in office.
Cutting social support also seems to be an easy sell to voters, many of whom are only too happy to back a Darwinian approach if it means they get to pay less tax. They fail to recognize that yesterday’s shattered family is tomorrow’s public expense, for reasons ranging from chronic illness and poor health to low productivity, more violence and crime, intergenerational poverty and increased disability.
It certainly doesn’t help that there’s such a long gap between when social cuts are made and when problems start manifesting. A journalist might make note of such things as the years unfold, but the average person isn’t necessarily going to connect the dots.
Even when they do, who are they supposed to hold accountable? It was a Social Credit government that kick-started the crisis of mass homelessness we’re now experiencing by closing B.C.’s big mental institutions in the mid-1980s, but they were nowhere in sight when things started to derail.
By the time the real costs from the current cuts hit home, this government will probably be long gone, too. Too bad the bill for their short-sighted mistakes will linger on.

Tips for getting noticed when you're gone

I heard a very amusing talk on death a while ago, given by Globe obituary writer Sandra Martin. Among other things, she discussed how she picked the people she wrote about.
Would she pick you if you died tomorrow? It’s an intriguing thing to ponder, should you be the type who likes to reflect on the criteria for leaving a splashy national obit behind.
I don’t write obituaries, but I do read them, along with the media coverage that certain deaths tend to generate. I’ve spotted a few surefire strategies for getting noticed after you die.
Be a celebrity. If you’re a Margaret Atwood or a Gordon Lightfoot, or even that friendly looking guy from Corner Gas, you’re going to get a decent obit in virtually every major paper in the country. If you don’t make it to the national stage, no worries - be a celebrity in your own hometown.
Be a humanitarian. We love remembering people who do good things. Stephen Lewis, Romeo Dallaire, Craig Kielburger - they’re in.
Be a scoundrel, or a monster. We also love remembering those who do bad things. Garden-variety criminals need not apply, though; this category is for the charming psychopathic rogues and the truly heinous. No need to worry that Clifford Olson’s death will slip by unnoticed, or Ian Thow’s either.
Be “first” at something. The first monkey in space, the first aboriginal hockey player, the first woman to file a sex-harassment suit against her boss - such acts make you a permanent part of history. We will remember you, at least for a day or two right after you die.
Be interesting. This one is harder to define. We all like to think of ourselves as interesting, but to qualify for a big media response you really have to kick this one up a notch. For instance, you know Renee Richards is guaranteed a ton of coverage when she dies, because what’s not interesting about a transgendered professional tennis player who became a renowned eye surgeon?
Be a hero. To die doing something perceived as noble is guaranteed to get headlines. You’ll have noticed, for instance, that all Canadian soldiers killed in the line of duty get written about in the media.
As for the rest of us, anyone who dies in the midst of a “heroic act” gets much more media coverage than if death comes in more ordinary fashion. The boy who drowns after diving into the river to save his dog gets a feature, the boy who just tumbles in on his own gets a couple of paragraphs.
Be local. If your name transcends jurisdiction, go ahead and die anywhere in the world. The media will find you. But for those of us whose name has little resonance beyond our yards, your best bet when you die is to live somewhere that people can recall you having lived a very long time.
That is, unless you already fit in a category I’ve noted, in which case your home town will probably remember you even after you move away. There will always be a spot in the Ladysmith Chronicle to observe the passing of Pamela Anderson.
Be young. There’s something so wrong about the death of a young person that it generally attracts media attention if it’s at all public - a car accident, a violent death, a drowning. The one exception to this is death by suicide, which in fact is the second leading cause of death among young people but rarely mentioned in the media.
Be extremely old. Why, when I was a young reporter, you could live to be 100 certain in the knowledge that you’d be getting your picture in the paper. How times have changed. Living for a century is old hat now; if you want public recognition of your passing, you’re going to want to make it past 110 these days.
Be rich and powerful. This is a bit like being a celebrity, but not always. Rich and powerful people often keep a low profile during their lifetime, and it’s only when you read their obituary that you realize they owned everything in the world.
Build a weirder mousetrap. The guy who invented the “Magic Fingers” vibrating bed got an obit. So did the guy who invented Teflon (he “slid away,” the headline opined), and the fellow who owned Britain’s last fairground boxing booth. Get creative.
Be a journalist. I used to roll my eyes at the newsroom tradition of doing mandatory obits on anyone who’d ever worked in the business. Now I’m counting on it.

Change comes, but never easily

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as French novelist Alphonse Karr so aptly noted a long, long time ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A career in journalism really brings that home. I think I’d been a reporter for less than a year when I first experienced that sense of déjà vu that would eventually become so familiar to me.
I was flipping through the newspaper archives at the time, looking for one of those “25 Years Ago Today” items (hey, somebody has to write them). I came across a long string of stories about the regional district’s struggles to fix the outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system plaguing the Thompson Valley Regional District at that time.
Having just finished up a story that very afternoon about the district’s outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system - which everyone was still worrying about 25 years later - I wondered if my archival find was just an amusing coincidence.
It wasn’t. With many years of journalism now under my belt, I can assure you there’s definitely a lot of Groundhog Day in the things we call “news.”
That’s not to say that the daily news is always the same, or that nothing ever changes - if that were true, I’d still be pecking out stories about the annual stud auction in Kamloops on a typewriter, using hand-me-down carbon paper from the accounting department to satisfy our cheapo corporate owners.
But the big, difficult issues of this world - well, they do have a tendency to drag on.
Some assume a kind of mythic proportion, looming so large that mortal man is brought to his knees at the very thought of trying to find a resolution. I put sewage treatment for the Capital Region in that category, because nothing new has been added to the debate in the 21 years I’ve lived here and yet we still can’t sort it out.
Others present as problems that in fact end up getting fixed, at least for a while. But then everybody mistakenly takes that as meaning they can quit worrying about the issue. And then the money dries up, because nobody’s paying attention anymore.
And then the problems re-emerge, and you find yourself back at the beginning again as if nobody ever did anything.
The Victoria Health Project was a sad example of that. It was a fabulous three-year pilot project to test whether seniors with health and mobility problems could be maintained in their own homes with a few key homecare services, thus avoiding ending up in expensive hospital beds that they didn’t really need.
The pilot worked really well. And for a while, we all lived happily with the programs that grew out of the project - at least until one tight community-health budget after another over the next 20 years starved most of them to death.
Barely 10 years after the Victoria Health Project had identified a better way, health administrators were back grumbling to the media about old people blocking hospital beds. I started calling them to find out how this could be, and discovered not only that the programs were a shadow of their former selves due to funding erosion, but that most of the people now in charge of the health system had never even heard of the project.
That lack of institutional memory is clearly a major factor in why we spin our wheels over problems that we’ve already solved. But inertia strikes me as the primary reason for why the news repeats itself.
An example: Assisted suicide. Sue Rodriguez fought a hard battle in the early 1990 for the right to have someone help her die.
She was a perfect “poster child” for the issue: Smart, young, well-informed, and tragically dying of ALS with no cure in sight. If anyone was going to make us change the laws, it was her.
But nothing happened. Nearly 20 years passed, and all of a sudden my dear friend Bernice Levitz-Packford materialized in the local media earlier this year trying to resurrect the issue. Fortunately for her (but sadly for us), she died at home not long after at the fine age of 95, freeing us to ignore the issue for another couple of decades.
We can’t give up, of course. Inertia and institutional amnesia aside, some things are simply worth fighting for. Change is possible, but what’s striking is how difficult it is to make it last.

No magic to weight loss - just eat less

One of my friends is an avid reader of the TC’s “Celebrations” section, that Saturday feature where people turning 50 or marking double-digit wedding anniversaries send in photos of themselves from back in the day. She says nobody is ever overweight in those photos.
It’s true. People weren’t nearly so likely to be heavy in those years. Children were virtually never overweight.
But that was then. Nowadays, the kids are getting fat and the adults are getting fatter, and the many health ailments and societal costs related to obesity just keep stacking up higher around us.
What happened to change things? A lot. Still, there’s only one key difference that matters: While previous generations consumed the right amount of calories for their energy needs, ours doesn’t.
True, there were many things about life in the 1950s or ‘60s that made it easier to keep your weight down.
For starters, everybody smoked. (Sure, nicotine is evil, but it does have an effect on body weight.) People were also much more likely to have jobs that required physical work.
Families were more inclined to order their children out of the house to play, which meant children were more active. There was less money for eating out, and far less “fast food.”
Moms didn’t work outside the home as much, so families sat down for regular meals together more often. Most families had only one car, which meant a lot more walking for everybody in the household. Everything was just a little more physical, even changing the TV channel.
In food terms, it’s all just calories burned. People in those years burned as many calories as they ate, so they didn’t accumulate fat.
Our generation’s calorie intake, on the other hand, is profoundly out of whack with our activity levels.
Blame it on societal change. Blame it on corporate food production. Blame it on poor parenting, higher levels of anxiety, and food science manipulating our taste buds, because it’s about all those and more.
But for all that, it’s a simple enough problem to resolve. We just need to eat much less.
How many of us even know how many calories we eat in a day, let alone how many we burn? Until I got my first Big Book of Food Counts a few years ago, I didn’t have a clue about the caloric content of most of what I ate and drank.
I don’t imagine our thin predecessors were particularly well- informed either. But for all the reasons listed above, they didn’t have as much need for awareness. They kept busy enough to burn off the calories they ate, and didn’t have anywhere near the access that we do to cheap, high-calorie foods.
The Vancouver Sun provided a marvellous public service late last year with the creation of the “Fatabase,” a searchable database of 64 restaurant chains operating in B.C. If you haven’t given it a try yet, visit http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/rate-your-plate/fatabase.html for a disturbing insight into your favourite restaurant meals.
As you might expect, the most horrifying counts are at fast-food chains. A Burger King Triple Whopper with cheese, for instance, weighs in at a whopping 1,240 calories - representing more than half the calories and all the fat that an average person needs for a whole day. Throw in a large order of fries and a 12-oz pop, and that’s pretty much your daily caloric max in a single meal.
But don’t think that eating more upscale will save you. A dinner of parmesan-encrusted sole at the Macaroni Grill is 1,710 calories. It contains almost enough fat to meet two days’ worth of dietary needs, and more sodium in one meal than you should eat in an entire day. God help you if you finish things off with a cheesecake dessert.
Maybe humans needed calories like that in our hunter-gatherer days. But we’re a long way from those days. Pecking away at my computer for a full eight hours only burns a scant 240 calories. That’s one piece of buttered toast and an apple.
People like to think that their exercise programs are taking care of their caloric indulgences. But I’d have to run for two full hours just to burn off the calories from a single Triple Whopper with cheese.
Buy a food-count book. Browse the Fatabase. Learn the caloric content of the foods you and your family eat, and how that number stacks up against the calories you burn in a typical day.
That’s how we’ll get a grip on global obesity. One smaller mouthful at a time.

Hi, blog readers. I'm away travelling now until May 1. I've left behind some columns that will be running in the Times Colonist during that time but won't be posting them to my blog until my return. Hope you'll continue to read me at the TC site - you'll find my columns here.