Corporate double-speak can't hide Hydro's problems

You catching all this fast talking coming out of BC Hydro? Takes me back to my old corporate days, with all those interesting interpretations the Big Guys had in order to create the impression of a good bottom line even when there wasn't one. Times Colonist editorial staff did a good analysis of the situation today - it's hard to imagine that any person taking a common-sense look at this thing wouldn't see that we're really just pushing today's problems onto tomorrow's Hydro users.
Also loved the opening to today's TC story on the same issue.  BC Hydro can't lose money because the government expects a stable profit for its budget each year, said Hydro's chief financial officer, Charles Reid. Oh, if only that was the way life worked. 

History of sorrows and stumbles for CLBC

All the problems and drama at Community Living B.C. these days got me digging through the story archives this week to try to see when it was that things started going wrong for the Crown corporation.

I was prepared to be outraged. But really, I just felt sad.

I’ve often made mention here of a 1978 book I was introduced to a few years ago, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. I’ve seen so many real-life examples of the cautionary tales laid out in that fascinating book through my work helping people with few resources push change.

The heartbreaking story of CLBC just might be the clearest example yet.

Poor People’s Movements documents the histories of four protest movements involving lower-class groups in the U.S. I’d read it in hopes of learning strategies for shaking things up around homelessness and sex-work issues, but happily discovered the book was even more valuable for understanding why good intentions so often go awry in the drive for change.

In B.C.’s community-living movement, the families and advocates of people with developmental disabilities have always been the ones driving change. If it weren’t for them, we’d still be back in the day of giant, impersonal institutions for anyone with a mental handicap, because that’s certainly the easiest model from a government perspective.

CLBC was to be the movement’s greatest triumph. For the first time, people whose lives had been touched by developmental disability were going to be the ones guiding services. Families, advocates and those with disabilities would no longer be just another category of “stakeholder,” but would actually be making the decisions.

So how sad is it to see where things have ended up a mere six years later?

The situation in B.C. feels more challenging than ever for people with developmental disabilities. It’s harder to find services, harder to hold onto them, and the certainty of being housed is no longer a given.

 During a recent visit to a local shelter, I was stunned to see how many people with visible developmental disabilities were there for services - the leading edge of a new problem that will grow much worse in coming years now that we’re giving up designated housing for this population.

People are being pushed out of their group homes and programs even while CLBC senior managers take $14,000 bonuses as thanks from government for getting that done.

Such revelations from other parts of government generally bring to mind some opportunistic, cosseted civil servant with no idea of what it feels like to be in need.

But in the case of CLBC, a number of the senior managers are the same family members and advocates who led the movement for years - people who know exactly how it feels. How did it come to this? 

If only they’d read the book. It turns out there’s a deadly phase for grassroots movements, and it comes dressed up like success.  It’s the point where the government or authority they’ve been railing at suddenly puts a friendly arm across their shoulders and invites them closer to work out a “solution.” Talk turns to joint committees and partnerships.

Movements must approach such invitations with great care, warns the book. Stepping inside the circle may look like a win, but it’s more likely to be a takeover. The goals of the movement are soon crushed beneath the weight and wishes of the new “partner,” and soon everybody’s too co-opted to complain.

CLBC was also created in total chaos. I’m a big believer in organizational culture as a determinant of how things will turn out, and by that measure CLBC never stood a chance.

Firings, investigations, disgraced ministers, delays, painful media stories about funds unaccounted for and sweet-deal contracts - it was a messy, protracted birth. Add in the constant reorgs that have swept through CLBC since its inception, and I doubt the Crown corporation has known many normal days.

And that’s not even taking into account the politics. Cutting social services has always been a top priority of the B.C. Liberals, and community living has been in their sites for 10 years now. The cost of housing people has been a particular irritant, which is why CLBC execs were up until recently being rewarded for moving people out of their group homes.

Families and advocates for this issue know how to fight, and it’s good to see them out there again. They won’t trust as easily next time, but what a discouraging truth that is. 

Household income flat-lined for young families

The people at the Human Early Learning Partnership do good work, like tracking the (rising) vulnerability rate in B.C. Here's a new report from HELP that's full of facts and figures that are good to have around - informative in the moment, but very useful for comparing stats down the line as things undoubtedly worsen for younger generations of Canadians. Who would have thought that the idealistic baby-boomer generation would be the one that would leave behind a world in worse shape than when we arrived? Here's a fact sheet with more info and some proposed solutions from the University of B.C.-based HELP.

Important information or just more nameless dread?

This is the kind of story that makes me crazy. 
I mean, if high levels of BPA really do cause problems in-utero for girl babies, hey, let's ditch the stuff. I'm perfectly happy with my metal water bottle. But stories that just float a little information out there are decidedly unhelpful on issues like this, and mostly just add to all the nameless dread that builds up in us from a steady diet of vague stories like this one.
 What exactly ARE "higher levels" of BPA, and why did these women have more in their system than others? In fact, how much BPA is OK to have in your system, and what's a typical amount you'd see in an average person? What are the lessons to be learned for future mothers-to-be so they can avoid hyperactive baby girls - or shall they just add BPA to the long list of possibly bad things to worry about when pregnant?
And note that you'd have to search for the actual study if you wanted to see exactly how many more toddlers got hyperactive due to higher levels of BPA in their moms, or even for a clear definition of the behaviours that researchers saw more of.

Pine beetles a lesson in messing with nature

It’s 2001 all over again in forestry news these days now that those nasty little mountain pine beetles have worked their way into Alberta.

The story in the Edmonton Journal this week about the beetle infestation could have been lifted from any B.C. newspaper a decade ago, when the insidious insects first began upping their game in our own lodgepole-pine forests.

More than 17 million hectares of B.C. pine forest have been affected since then. The province has spent more than $750 million so far trying to mitigate the damage.

Here in the land of Douglas fir and cedar, the pine beetle invasion tends to feel like old news. But forestry-dependent communities elsewhere in B.C. are all too aware of the ongoing impact the ravenous bug is having.

The province gave another $9 million this past spring to the three community coalitions set up to identify and fund mitigation strategies in the hardest-hit areas: Cariboo-Chilcotin; Omineca; and Southern Interior.

The beetle explosion created a boom in B.C. forestry for a few years, when the government cleared the way for more intensive logging to make use of all the dying pine trees.

Government didn’t have much choice about that, as beetle-killed trees would have rotted on the ground if they hadn’t been harvested. Might as well make some money and create some jobs from all that lost forest.

But the short-term bump in harvesting has left a long-term problem: Much smaller - even non-existent - harvests for many years to come in forestry-dependent communities. They’re left waiting for a new generation of pine forest to grow large enough to log, which will take 40 years or more.

 “Stakes in beetle invasion are enormous,” said this week’s Journal headline. Indeed. Having recently travelled through the beautiful pine forests of the Rockies, I can’t imagine the landscape without them.

Then again, I drove the Princeton highway this summer and noticed that the devastation of a few years ago is barely visible through the new growth.

That’s a marked change over the way things looked in a previous road trip, when red, dead pine trees were all you could see. The heartening thing about nature is how forgiving it can be of our transgressions.

And the invasion is definitely about our transgressions. Pine beetles have been infesting pine trees for centuries, but climate change and past forestry practices created ideal conditions for the bugs.

We planted monocultures - great swaths of nothing but pine, which is not how Nature would have it. We fought forest fires with vigour to protect forestry revenues, only to discover that by suppressing fires we had weakened forest health and created dense stands that made it easy for pine beetles to migrate from tree to tree.

Warmer winters have contributed to the problem. A good, long cold snap is the only real defence against the beetles. But we haven’t seen too many of those in recent years.

The beetles kill a tree by burrowing into its soft tissue and cutting off the water supply to its upper branches. The bugs also spread a blue fungus (remember “denim pine,” a branding exercise aimed at putting a positive spin on the faded-blue colour of beetle-killed wood?) that also speeds the tree’s death.

You’d think in this age of a chemical for everything, there would be a remedy for death by beetle.

But aside from the removal of infected trees and some hasty thinning, nobody has come up with a real solution. In the U.S., the pine beetle has already destroyed 16 million hectares of forest in Idaho national parks. The forest service is busy in Montana parks right now thinning stands in hopes of staving off more devastation.

The lesson learned from all this? Mother Nature knows best. There’s a reason for bio-diversity, and for leaving forest fires to burn. Woe to any culture that tries to trump nature.

***

Oops. I confused my watts in a column last week on China’s Three Gorges dam. As an astute reader pointed out, it would take five million projects the size of Three Gorges to generate the 100 billion megawatts of hydro power I said the dam was capable of.

Make that 100 billion kilowatt hours. Still a heck of a lot, but nowhere near the staggering amount I erroneously suggested. When the project’s 32 turbines are all up and running (29 are currently in operation), they will in fact generate about 22,400 megawatts.