Lock 'em up: Everything old is new again

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

And just like that, institutionalization is back. 

My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come. 

“This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby in a statement released yesterday in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe."

"We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said Eby. 

If it was possible to believe that a return to institutionalization would actually play out that way, maybe it wouldn't feel so damn sad to have us rolling the clock back 50 years. History tells us otherwise, however. The stories of suffering that journalists all heard in those years leading up to the closure of BC's big institutions were absolute heart-wrenchers.

The whole reason we abandoned institutionalization back in the 1980s is because it's a horrible idea that doesn't work, except as a means to shield "normal" people from realities they'd rather not have to think about. 

Like what happens to people with severe mental illness when they don't get help and support. Or, in this latest incarnation of "secure care" (aka imprisonment), the tremendous damage a product can have on its customers in a market totally controlled by the sellers/manufacturers and abandoned by the regulators.

Instead of trying to fix any of that, it appears we're just going to lock people up again so we don't have to see our policy failures in their shattered faces.

As researcher Gillian Kolla noted in The Tyee last week, B.C. is jumping to institutionalization without even trying to see how things might go if we actually had spaces in voluntary, trauma-informed, evidence-based treatment programs for all the people who are desperate for such services. Research and experiences all over the world - much of it right here in BC - have demonstrated time and again that institutionalization does not make people well, and in fact puts them at risk of even more harm.

Sure, temporary secure care might have a role in helping to manage some aspects of the social crisis unfolding in all of our communities. But it's meant to be a last resort, after all other attempts to help a person have failed. Please don't let anyone tell you that the people we're seeing spilling out onto our streets have had every social intervention provided to them already. That is so very far from the truth.

Our current social crises are in fact a result of decades of social needs gone unmet. We haven't even begun to try hard to help people with mental illness, substance disorders and brain injuries. Virtually all of the services we've got are patchwork, disorganized, uncoordinated, short-term and often unevaluated. BC doesn't even have an overarching social policy.

We have orchestrated a disaster with our indifference - and now we're going to "fix it" by finding new ways to hold people against their will? Not a chance. 

As Kolla also pointed out, BC does have the power right now to hold people against their will under the Mental Health Act. If someone is deemed a danger to themselves or others, they can be held. (And that definition includes threats and anti-social behaviour, as my uncle Joseph McCorkell found out back in the 1990s when he fought his own incarceration in the years before Riverview Psychiatric Hospital was fully phased out.)

How low will be the bar be for this new initiative? No details yet, but I'm going to take a wild guess that people who are impoverished, traumatized, unable to maintain paid work and with a lifetime of struggle and hardship will be the first ones in. Interesting as well that these new secure facilities are mostly going to be sited at prisons, not hospitals. 

To see brain injury thrown into the mix this time out just adds to the wrongness. Someone suffers a serious injury that causes behavioural changes that unravels a life, and our government decides the best course of action is to make it really hard for them to get any help, and then lock them up indefinitely when they inevitably fail to recover. 

As soon as I read that Vancouver story earlier this month about one person getting their hand severed by a stranger with a machete in a mental-health crisis and another person dying, I knew where this was going, especially mere weeks before a provincial election. 

Eby has been hinting at a return to institutionalization since 2022, when he was angling to replace John Horgan. BC Conservative leader John Rustad has made institutionalization part of his party's platform.  I suspect both will get plenty of support from the electorate for their positions, because everyone I know is sickened and fed up with the social disasters unfolding on their city streets. 

But the answer to the tragedies we're seeing in the hearts of our communities is not to lock people up. Where is the announcement of preventive measures to slow the flow of people onto our streets? Where are the services that would catch people early in their crisis? Why are we embracing the harshest "solution" first? 

I wonder if I will live long enough to be throwing out a bitter "I told you so" in 15 or 20 years when we are back to trying to undo the damage of this deeply sad return to institutionalization. People, we are making a mistake. 

So you think you want to be a housesitter...

https://pixabay.com/users/sinousxl-7554155/

People who have been gone from home for a while often say some version of "I can't wait to be back in my own bed" as their time away comes to an end. I haven't had my own bed since December 2011.

My partner and I have been permanent housesitters around Greater Victoria for more than eight years now, and before that, volunteers with Cuso International in Honduras and Nicaragua. We slept in the beds that came with the house rentals in Central America, and have slept in probably 60 or more beds since returning to Vancouver Island in May 2016 and taking up a life of living in other people's houses while they travel.

We had a classic black and white striped mattress with coils you could feel through the padding in our Copan Ruinas time, and then quite a decent and stiff box spring set in Managua, where you need a bed that barely dents when laid on if you're going to survive months of 38 C with nothing but a ceiling fan. 

We logged some crazy mattress hours when travelling in the countryside with our Central American work colleagues, who could sleep with ease in the damndest situations and expected us to do the same when on the road with them. The nights of six people in one small room on homemade bunk beds stand out for me.

Since returning to Victoria, we've pretty much had every variation of bed: some with super-thick mattresses, rock-hard ones, memory foam, one that was too short, adjustable ones that tilted up at head, foot and middle. Some have rolled us inward, while others sent us plummeting to the floor on a sloped edge. We generally get a decent night's sleep no matter what.

We've had a few conversations with people who would like to be permanent housesitters like us. I wouldn't say that an ability to put up with any kind of mattress is the first thing that needs to be considered, but it definitely needs some thought. Are you prepared to spend all your nights on whatever bed is in play? Are you ready to give up that late-holiday yearning for a return to your own bed?

People hearing for the first time that we are permanent housesitters - perhaps more realistically described as houseless drifters who carry their belongings around in reuseable grocery bags and mismatched totes - have one of two reactions. Either their faces light up and they immediately start thinking about how cool it might be to do the same, or they pull back in instant horror. It's as clear as that. 

If you're the type who would lean in excitedly, housesitting as a lifestyle choice has a lot of pros. 

The permanent housesitter lives virtually without household costs, enjoying a wonderfully diverse array of experiences in all kinds of different homes and locations that might otherwise be outside their affordability range. 

They aren't weighed down by stuff, mortgages or tenancy agreements. They never have to worry about managing bad neighbours; they'll never have one for longer than a few months at most. They live in the gaps of other people's lives, which really appeals to me at a philosophical level as another way to minimize my impact on this world. 

The daily reality, of course, does have some bumps that have to be considered. 

For one thing, you're almost certainly going to have a series of dogs to look after, because that's the No. 1 reason people want a housesitter in the first place, based on our experience. We love dogs, so yay to that, but they do require your full attention, especially if you want the homeowner to invite you back.

For another, you're going to live like a packhorse. Cancel out any images in your head of a footloose housesitter arriving at your latest housesit with a breezy backpack and nothing more. This is your LIFE, so you're going to arrive at every door with bags and bags of the craziest stuff. (We never let our hosts see us move in or out.) 

Anything you can't live without, you're going to be carrying around. I think you'd be surprised at just how many things you end up carrying. 

Some examples from our own experience: My keyboard and stacks of music, because I must have  piano time in my life. Our sound bar and Roku box, because you can't be sure whether a person's going to have good TV sound and a Netflix subscription. 

Baking utensils, laptops and electronics, essential spices or cooking oils, a favourite frying pan. All bathroom stuff. (I invite you to open up your bathroom cupboards right now and reflect on how many things that actually is.) My makeup and jewellry. A giant light-up 10x mirror, because who can put their makeup on without one? 

Seasonal clothing and outer wear, while remembering at least a few fancier pieces for when you go out. The perfect collection of five pairs of shoes/boots that cover all needs. Recreational equipment, like our two bikes, a folding kayak, a blow-up boat for the grandkids. Food and baking supplies, including the 20-kg bag of sugar bought impulsively during the Rogers Sugar Crisis of 2023. 

And obviously, it would not be the life for your child-rearing years. That would just be a misery all round.

The housesit that you're moving into may or may not be ready for all the stuff you'll be dragging. We've had housesits where people kindly clear out dresser drawers and space in the closet for our clothes and leave a roomy fridge, and housesits without an inch of space to spare anywhere. You won't know which one you're getting until you move in, so that old Cuso International motto of "flexible and adaptable" that got us through our four-plus years in Central America is still as useful as ever. 

How often will you be moving? So often. Curious people who think they want to give housesitting a try ask me for advice and inevitably note that they'd prefer something long-term. Just let that concept of long-term fly right out of your head if you're thinking about this life. Mostly you're going to be moving every three to four weeks. 

As I write, we're living in a Fairfield housesit that we've been in for four years, but there is a unique and quirky series of reasons for why it has lasted this long, starting with the pandemic. I'm very sure we'll never see the likes of this housesit again. And even though it's been four years, we've still had to live that whole time in complete uncertainty, having to be at least somewhat prepared to move out at any moment.

So maybe you'll be the lucky housesitter who lands the year-long gig in some perfect beachfront home, but I'd strongly counsel against even thinking that's remotely likely. If you aren't prepared to move around a lot, with much loading and unloading of your weird pile of stuff, you'll grow tired of this life very quickly.

One more thing: It's a lot of work to ensure a steady string of housesits, particularly without a Plan B. When we're in full drifter mode, I'm constantly hustling and looking. People aren't going to drop housesits in your lap, so be prepared to devote time to the hunt. 

But if you've read to this point and are still thinking that a housesitting life sounds great, let me tell you, it's got a lot going for it (and not just the absence of household costs, though that is obviously a very significant draw.) If you like staying in motion, keeping things lean, a constant change of scenery and time spent with many, many dogs and the occasional cat, it's all that and more. 

As it turns out, housesitting also lets us spend time in beautiful homes on well-gardened properties that we'd never be enjoying if it weren't for housesitting. We had a full-size pool for one long, hot August stay, and have spent many weeks in Gulf Island homes close to the water. 

We've enjoyed the most gigantic televisions. We've lounged on the nicest of decks and the comfiest of lazyboy chairs. Housesitting brings so much variety into my dog walks and cycling as well, with one new neighbourhood after another to explore.

"It is within the tension that uncertainty brings that creativity is truly born," wrote Daniella Sachs on Medium. If uncertainty and constant change is your jam, this is the life. 

A family's need to believe their son's innocence extended his jail time by 20 years

 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

Once upon a time, I got captivated by the story of Derik Lord, whose absolute denial of having anything to do with the brutal murder of two women in Tsawwassen in 1990 went against all the evidence - and most especially, the evidence provided by his teenage companion on that terrible night, David Muir, in his own confession.

That's the kind of thing that always pulls me in for a closer look. The double murder of Sharon Huenemann and her mother Doris Leatherbarrow in a quiet Tsawwassen neighbourhood would have been sensational all on its own, but the fact that Sharon's teenage son Darren had actually hired two of his friends to kill them so he could inherit a large sum of money and one of them was now claiming to have been home in his North Saanich basement the whole time - well, that just took things to a whole new level. 

I wasn't the reporter who covered the boys' trials in 1992. But after several years of reading about Derik Lord's obsessed parents in the news, passionately contending his innocence, I went to interview the family at their Chilliwack home in 2001. 

Derik's father David Lord had a criminal record by that point owing to his increasingly frantic antics to clear his son of wrong-doing, which regularly landed him in trouble with authorities. "I've been in every prison from Agassiz to Victoria in the past 10 years, and before that I hadn't been in one of them," the father told me in 2001. "I think that says something about how my life has changed."

I was fascinated by this family that just couldn't seem to move on. I spent a day with them, and together we went to Matsqui Institution to talk to Derik. I left feeling very sad for all of them, but still quite certain that Derik was guilty as charged. 

To believe that Derik wasn't there that night requires believing that David Muir wasn't there either, because that's the story that Derik's mother Elouise put forward - that the two boys and Darren Huenemann were in fact in her North Saanich basement at 8:30 that night, not travelling back and forth to Tsawwassen with murder on their minds. 

Her statement completely contradicts the testimony of Huenemann's girlfriend at the time - and more importantly, of David Muir, who gave police a detailed account of how he and Derik made their way to Tsawwassen and killed the two women. 

Yet sitting there with the family at their home more than a decade after the murders, I saw how completely they believed that version of events. Derik seemed as swept up in the story as his parents. 

Sticking to that story had major consequences for Derik Lord. Among the ironclad rules of the justice system is that nobody gets parole if they continue to deny their guilt. David Muir was paroled in 2003, and has been a free(ish) man living under a new name for the last 21 years. Darren Huenemann got day parole in 2022.

Derik Lord got day parole in 2020 but continued to be denied full parole. But that changed at a hearing this week, after the Parole Board of Canada was ordered by the Appeals Division to reconsider its decision of February 2024. The board reviewed the decision and this time, granted him full parole. 

The column I wrote for the Times Colonist about Derik in 2007, after he was turned down for parole for the fourth time, remains one of my most read, commented-upon posts here on my blog site. People still wade in with comments on that 17-year-old post, and even the news media came looking for me this week in hopes I might have something to say about him finally being granted parole. 

What's left to say? A terrible crime was committed, and three stupid and greedy teenage boys spent much of their adult lives in jail as a result. Just like the families of Sharon Huenemann and Doris Leatherbarrow, their families endured tremendous tragedy that surely changed them forever. 

The Lord family has certainly paid a mighty price for clinging to a fantasy for 34 years. Derik Lord himself has borne the highest cost of that. 

Having to stick to the story that his mother put forward ultimately left him imprisoned for more than two decades longer than the boy who was his accomplice on that terrible night. Like David Muir, Derik could have been paroled when he was 30 rather than at 50, but going all in with the fantastical story that his mother made up effectively tripled his jail term. 

Relatives of the victims are angry that Derik Lord won parole without ever having to own up to his crime. But if it was punishment they wanted, they got it. 

Mom, you could have told me

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago. 

I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises. 

But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father. 

Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery. 

People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful." 

Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, from start to finish and without question. That's a Dad.

As for expectations of monogamy, they've always struck me as just painfully in denial of human behaviour. Our great big family on my mom's side has some classic stories of profound human-beingness in our history, and I've always loved those stories the best. 

In my case, everybody is dead who might have more details on this DNA surprise, but at least an aunt remained who remembered the affair, though not nearly with the level of detail I would have liked. 

It turns out that getting your head around the fact that half of your genes are not what you thought is quite a big thing, at least in my experience. There are stories in my bones, but I don't know what they are. The stories that I had grown up believing were shaping my very being were not my stories. 

Some people I've talked with disapprove of me even getting my DNA done. They see it as me going looking for a secret that my mother clearly didn't want me to know. But does one person's wish to keep a secret outweigh another person's right to know who they are at their biological foundation? Not in my opinion. 

Too late now for such reflections anyway. Easily accessible DNA tests will be tossing many cats out of the bag from this point on. Mothers, if you have secrets, tell them now, so your children can start sooner to learn about who they are at their genetic core, and how it all turned out this way. (Oh, the fantasies I've had about Mom still being alive and the questions I'd ask...)

I'm just beginning to get to know the people who share my paternal DNA. Maybe one day I will call them family, but right now they are strangers - and in some cases, very wary ones. 

I'm hungry for the smallest of stories about the man I've only seen in a 1949 photo, but I'm working on trying to bide my time, not to scare them off with a thousand questions.

I get their suspicion. When a random woman calls from nowhere to declare herself your surprise half-sister, how can you not be weirded out and wary? Why should you suddenly answer all her deeply personal questions about this man that maybe you, too, have a lot of unanswered questions about? 

What's the protocol for approaching a "new" relative after a DNA test? I felt like a bit of a stalker for a while there, googling names on Facebook and writing messages to strangers who I thought might be a relative, or able to lead me to one. 

That tactic scared off at least one relative, who felt I was breaching their privacy. But some of them inched forward to take a closer look, and some of them have been very welcoming. We're talking on the phone now, and making plans to meet in person. 

They bring me stories, and I bring them news of their ancestors found in my prowls through paid databases: the mysterious grandmother who disappeared and then died in an asylum; the aunt who tried to cross the US border with a felon she'd met in a classified ad; the lawsuit that Uncle Joe brought against the government. We don't even know each other, yet these are our shared stories.

I'd done a DNA test in 2018 with a different company, but there was no one in my matches closely related enough to trigger any suspicion on my part. That test also didn't break down UK heritage by country, so all I saw was that I was 50 per cent UK, as expected.

Things went differently for my second test. For one thing, this time the UK heritage was parcelled by country and I turned out to be Irish, not Scottish, on my paternal side. That got my attention.

I also wasn't a match for my other cousins in the database on my dad's side. And then there was the matter of a first cousin in Toronto, with a name I'd never heard of even though I know ALL my first cousins. 

And away things went from there. Now, after a lifetime of believing that I had no biological siblings, I'm booking flights to go see my half-sister. 

I think my mom would like knowing that. I think we probably would have had a good laugh about this once we got through that first awkward conversation. I wish she was alive for me to tell her that none of this changes a thing about how I felt about her or my dad. 

***

Click for the article on my DNA discovery that ran on CTV National. Long story as to how I ended up going quite so public, but I had thought I was one anecdote in a much larger story of "people like me," only to realize later I was THE anecdote. 

Life sentence for victims of intimate partner violence

Sharing an opinion piece I wrote this week that was published today in the Times Colonist, sparked by the sentencing of a serial assaulter of women. 

Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. And on the one hand, that’s a win in the world of intimate partner violence, where 80 per cent of the crimes aren’t even reported to police and a conviction is far from certain.

But the impact of the Greater Victoria man’s beatings will be felt by the women he attacked for so much longer than he’ll be in jail. That’s not just about having to live with the trauma - it’s about brain injury. 

People experiencing intimate partner violence end up with a brain injury (IPV-BI) from that violence as frequently as 90 per cent of the time.  A majority of them, in fact, end up with multiple brain injuries, because intimate partner violence is rarely something that only happens once.

Denniston was given a four-year jail term this week for attacking his then-girlfriend in 2018 and 2019. But he has a history of major assaults of previous girlfriends before that, all of a type most associated with brain injury. He strangles his intimate partners. Hits them in the head. Smashes their heads into furniture.

One of his victims said in an impact statement at Denniston’s trial that since her abuse, she has become someone she doesn’t recognize. She has trouble falling asleep, has terrible nightmares when she does, and is experiencing periods of explosive anger, panic and suicidal thoughts.

Whether she knows it or not, that could be because she is now living with a brain injury on top of all the trauma she has endured.

But if she’s like the vast majority of victims of intimate partner violence, her brain injury will go undiagnosed and unsupported. IPV-BI is such a newly emerging concept that even victims themselves don’t think about whether they’ve incurred a brain injury. The impact of their untreated brain injury can put them at risk of losing their job, their housing, their kids and so much more, and they won’t even know why.

It seems unbelievable that a woman who is beaten by her partner violently enough to incur a brain injury could suddenly find herself on the precipice of profound poverty, homelessness, child-protection involvement and social isolation as a result of the assault. Surely services are there to support her, or she could move to the head of the line for housing and supports to keep her safe?

Unfortunately, there are no designated services at any level – in BC or Canada – specifically for people experiencing IPV-BI. While some bright spots are emerging within Island Health around piloting occupational therapy assessments as a means of helping victims get past diagnosis barriers, that work is in its earliest days.

More broadly, there are no guidelines for health professionals to follow to ascertain IPV-BI-caused injury. No overarching plan. No targeted funding. No consensus as to what should be done, or data being collected.

And if work on all of that got going tomorrow, there are other hurdles. Start with the fact that only one in five women beaten by their partners even report the assault to police, rendering most victims of IPV-BI completely invisible in our systems.

Add in the stigma, lack of witnesses and fear factor for the victim around doing anything that might spark a whole other assault, and it’s not surprising that the majority of women aren’t even going to visit the doctor about that hit to the head they took, or after they’ve regained consciousness from being strangled.

And even when they do seek medical attention, there are no provincially funded community services for them unless their concussion shows up on an MRI scan. Which is not often the case, because it’s an injury that doesn’t show up well on an MRI, and is much better diagnosed through its impact on a woman’s ability to function.

At any rate, unless a woman can pay for that assessment of her functioning, and the services she needs as a result of what’s discovered, she’s never going to get that support anyway. It was nice to see IPV-BI get some solid mentions last fall in the BC government’s Safe and Supported action plan against gender-based violence, but we are so badly overdue for some genuine action on this appalling state of affairs.

So yes, Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. But he’ll be out in not much more than a couple of years if he behaves himself, and his life will carry on pretty much the way it always has. His victims, on the other hand, have been handed a life sentence.

Jody Paterson is a lobbyist and advocate on the issue of intimate partner violence and brain injury on behalf of The Cridge Centre for the Family and the Board Voice Society of BC.