The long wait for an easier death

“No consensus can be found in favour of the decriminalization of assisted suicide. To the extent that there is a consensus, it is that human life must be respected.”

With those words, Supreme Court Justice John Sopinka ended any hope Sue Rodriguez had of using her own death to change Canadian laws around assisted suicide. She got the word on Sept. 29, 1993, and less than five months later ended her life the old-fashioned way - illegally, helped along by a doctor who has never been publicly identified.

And for the most part, that has been that. A few criminal cases alleging assisted suicide pop up in the media from time to time, but little has changed. Imagine what the courageous Rodriguez might have to say if she’d lived long enough to see that we’d still be paralyzed over assisted suicide 18 years later.

But suddenly the issue is back in the news, with two different proponents now preparing to push challenges through Canada’s court system.

Lawyer Joe Arvay, acting on behalf of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, is representing Gloria Taylor. Like Rodriguez, the B.C. woman has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and wants the right to have someone assist her with her death when the time comes.

 Meanwhile, the Farewell Foundation for the Right to Die - a New Westminster group headed by a veteran of the right-to-die movement - is using its failed attempt to become a non-profit as reason for a constitutional challenge.

Foundation director and B.C. criminologist Russel Ogden has been in the media off and on for years as an advocate of assisted suicide, pursuing the issue with such intensity that it sometimes lands him in trouble with his college and university bosses. He’s got a clip on YouTube demonstrating how to kill yourself with helium.

He and Arvay both contend that much has changed since Rodriguez’s case, and that a legal challenge will have more traction this time around.

I’m not so sure.  Canadians still haven’t had a real conversation about the right to die.

Yes, more countries have changed their laws in the years since Rodriguez’s court fight. Their experiences have demonstrated that legalizing assisted suicide need not tear a society apart.  Oregon legalized assisted suicide the same year Rodriguez died, and in almost two decades only a scant 400 Oregonians - mostly older people with cancer - have chosen that option.

But if the incredibly affecting Rodriguez wasn’t enough to galvanize a country, I don’t know what the odds are for a challenge built around non-profit status. Perhaps Arvay will have more luck, although his goal of seeing Taylor’s challenge settled by November seems out of reach.

The Farewell Foundation was denied non-profit status in March by the B.C. Registrar of Companies, which noted in its decision that no organization whose purpose is criminal - in this case, assisting people to die - can be incorporated under the Society Act.

The foundation is leveraging that rejection into a larger fight about the constitutionality of the assisted-suicide laws. Its case in a nutshell: The activities of the Farewell Foundation are in fact lawful because the laws related to assisted suicide are themselves “unlawful.” 

(And if that doesn’t work, the foundation also filed a civil suit against the Attorney General of Canada challenging the constitutionality of the assisted-suicide prohibition.)

I watched old CBC footage of Rodriguez this week in news clips from the months before her death. I’d forgotten what an amazing advocate she was - so open and well-spoken, lighting up the screen with her big smile even in the late stages of a disease that was slowly taking away her every function.

If charisma had anything to do with whether justice prevailed, Rodriguez would have won her case hands down. The Farewell Foundation is taking things in a different direction, with an approach that will be a tougher sell with a public that still hasn’t sorted out its feelings around the right to die.

It could be that the concept of dying with dignity will find more traction this time around. The politically powerful baby boomer generation was perhaps too young during Rodriguez’s time to care much about the issues she was raising. That’s no longer the case.

A 2010 poll confirmed what other polls over the years have repeatedly found: That a majority of Canadians want assisted suicide legalized. But the missed opportunity of 1993 still hangs over us, and it seems we never quite want it enough.    

No disrespect intended to Times Colonist reporter Katie DeRosa, but what exactly has B.C.'s human-trafficking office been doing with its $500,000 annual budget, anyway?
What got me the most about this agency back in the days when I was at PEERS (and am again, so maybe that's why I'm so het up) was that it was ostensibly fighting the great scourge of human trafficking in B.C. even while the far greater risk was to the garden-variety outdoor sex workers on B.C.'s strolls and working invisibly in a thousand different venues around the province.
We spent $2.25 million on this office in the last four years, apparently to help 100 people. It kills me to think how that money could have been used for real needs rather than for chasing ghosts.
You'd think that with all the sex workers I'd met over the years in B.C., I might have met one who'd been trafficked at some point in her life. Nope.
Hey, maybe it's just coincidence. Or maybe it just seemed easier to fund an office of civil servants than to actually help vulnerable people, who rarely present as the perfect victims that we conjure when we hear the term "human trafficking."
Don't get me wrong - human trafficking is a terrible thing. But if you've got $500,000 a year to spend on helping vulnerable people in B.C., would this be it? Now we just have to hope the savings from this cut get redirected to helping the many vulnerable people in our province. 

The latest survey from AskMen seems to prove the old adage about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. But really, who would actually expect basic behaviours and attitudes around sex and relationships to have changed that much?
Yes, I suppose it's a little disappointing to see that the men who would consider having office affairs would do so only if the woman was in a lower work position than they were, but were you to ask the same question of women, I suspect they'd mostly be aiming up. Is that better?

A century of caring for B.C. parks - until now

The B.C. parks system marked its 100^th birthday this spring. So how are things going?

As an enthusiastic camper, I can attest that the campsites are still lovely, the scenery amazing, and the pit toilets tolerable. By the numbers, though, I think British Columbians have cause to be a little concerned.

It’s been a hard 10 years for BC Parks. Park operations were among the first to be targeted for cuts by former premier Gordon Campbell, whose government closed campgrounds, scrapped forest-reserve sites, dumped interpretative programs and jacked up user fees soon after taking office.

Visits fell by almost four million the year after the 2002 cuts. They’ve never fully recovered, and took another turn for the worse this past year.

Some 19.2 million people visited a B.C. park in 2010-11. That’s down a million from the previous year, and not even close to the 25 million visitors of the mid-1990s. Satisfaction ratings are slipping as well, falling below the 80-per-cent mark for the first time in years.

B.C. Liberals have been enthusiastic proponents of handing off public services to the private sector during their tenure. Private interests now run everything from hospital food preparation and health care to children’s group homes, seniors’ care, employment training and parks. The Socreds had dabbled with privatizing some parks functions in the 1980s, but now virtually all park and campground management has been privatized.

Thinking like a B.C. Liberal, I’d probably argue that it doesn’t really matter who’s running things. People could count on pulling into a nice, clean campground back when government was renting the spot, and they still can.

Sure, they’re paying a little more for the experience, but the taxpayer is paying less. Sure, it bugged visitors when they started being charged for parking, but isn’t it nice that a new premier has rescinded that? Everybody’s happy.

Well, almost. As both a taxpayer and a parks user, I’m feeling a bit taken advantage of. What used to be a cheap night in the woods now feels like something of a shakedown.

Might that have anything to do with why park visits have fallen 20 per cent in the last 15 years?

Here’s a summer night of camping at Bamberton Provincial Park as an example.

The place looks like a deal at $16 a night. But you’ll need to add in the $6-a-night reservation fee that you’re probably going to opt for in the high season.

Then there’s the $7-a-night firewood purchase. The $8 a night for a permit for an extra car to park at your site. The $5 to dump your holding tanks if you’re in a trailer or motor home. Oh, and don’t forget the HST.

Camping revenues have risen 27 per cent since 2006-07, even while camping visits have flatlined. The increase is all due to higher fees.

You get access to a beautiful little piece of B.C. for all those fees, absolutely. But what you don’t get is the power, water, swimming pool, video arcade and store, cable TV and horseshoe pit being offered at the private campground up the road for about the same money.

A provincial park does give you a serene camping experience that few private campsites can rival. But falling visitor numbers - now forecast to stall at around 19 million for the next three years - make it pretty clear that more than a few park visitors aren’t feeling the love.

Meanwhile, a decade-long focus on cutting costs has had a serious impact on the development of new park facilities.  The Socreds built thousands of vehicle-accessible campsites during their tenure. The New Democrats built 1,500. The Liberals haven’t built a single one.

I admire private enterprise for its amazing ability to find new ways of turning a profit. We couldn’t live without the energy and drive of capitalists. I don’t mean to criticize the work of the private sector, or knock the quality of operations in the parks system.

But really, is this what we want for our parks? The private sector is great at making money, but should that be the primary goal for the B.C. parks system? Where’s the vision?

Some things just aren’t suited to the private sector.  Not everything is meant to be a revenue-generating opportunity. After 100 years of public investment, it’s downright shameful to be part of the generation that measures success by how little our government spends on parks.

Happy birthday, BC Parks. At your age, we ought to be showing you more respect.

If families are first, who's second?

My TC colleague Dave Obee usually writes about history when he's not writing editorials for the paper, but I think I like him best when he gets a little edgy and sarcastic, as he does in today's amusing (and dead-on) riff on Premier Christy Clark's "Families First" slogan.