Mammography controversy a reminder of screening risks

Canada's finest health writer, Andre Picard, weighs in with his usual information-laden, clear-eyed view on the fuss about mammographies.
Women are accustomed to cancer screening as a good thing from lifetimes of Pap smears. But as Picard and the larger scientific community points out, screening can have a serious downside when false positives - more common than you'd hope in both mammograms and PSA tests for prostate cancer - lead people to have serious medical procedures and treatments that they didn't need.
Cancer is such an emotionally loaded word. We all know someone who has had it and we're all terrified to get it ourselves, but the truth is that the science of cancer is still something of a mystery. You'd think that highly developed screening tools that can catch the earliest signs of cancer would be a good thing. But now we're learning that some cancers never really get past the starting gate in our bodies, and that there's such a thing as "bad" screening when you end up getting chemotherapy, radiation or surgery you didn't need.

Occupiers didn't have the numbers they needed

Good try by the Occupiers, but it looks like things are fizzling out across the country. It's cold, for one thing, but probably the bigger problem is that unless a protest gets bigger with each passing day, everybody forgets about it very quickly and just returns to their routines. Then all you've really got is a camp pretty much like any of the other camps of impoverished people we've had in Victoria.
I like the Occupy movement, but I don't know if enough people are feeling the pain yet to give the movement the critical mass it needs. Not in Canada, anyway. The States - well, that's another matter. I think they've got any number of angry-and devastated-citizen protests ahead of them as the country's problems deepen.

WTO police chief cautions against similar response to Occupiers

A good read from regret-filled former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper. He presided over the disastrous 1999 "Battle in Seattle," when an aggressive police response to World Trade Organization protesters turned the city into a tear gas-laden war zone for several days.
I was there, having been sent south by the Times Colonist on Day 2 of the clash to cover the story. There were 5,000 armed police and military personnel in the city by that point, and it was a terrifying, life-changing experience for me to realize that every citizen is in danger when there's that much police aggression and weaponry around.
Stamper has been talking about his mistakes for a number of years now, and I admire him immensely for it. Who better than those who have already learned the hard lessons to remind us not to repeat the missteps of history?

Red River recall highlights food safety measures

Aside from an unpleasant period of paranoia brought on by seeing the documentary Food Inc., I’ve never put much thought into food safety.

But when the food police come for my Red River cereal - well, that certainly gets my attention.

At first I thought there’d just been a run on Red River when I saw the empty shelf. But after several forays to different stores in an effort to find my breakfast of choice, I spotted the little recall notices.

It’s unsettling to learn that something you eat every day has been recalled. So I went looking for answers this week and discovered how little I knew about the whole complicated business of food safety in Canada, let alone the dense regulatory regime that aims to protect Canadians from harmful foods.

In the case of the Red River recall, it’s a labelling issue. Soy is in the cereal but isn’t declared on the label. Food allergies have become a major focus for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after national labelling laws were tightened in February, and soy is apparently a big one.

Companies have until August 2012 to comply with the new labelling rules, which will require a nice, clear caution in plain English warning buyers if a product has soy, coconut or any other of the 14 known allergens CFIA watches out for.

Smucker Foods of Canada - which makes Red River - opted to recall the Canadian supply of the cereal early while the labelling issue gets sorted out. My loss, but probably a good thing for any Red River fans with soy allergies.

Allergens are a common reason for food recalls. We’ve had almost 600 recalls to date this year, and many involved various allergens that turn up in our packaged foods without our knowledge.

Immerse yourself in the very detailed CFIA Web site and you’ll soon see just how many other worrying things can affect our food and drink, from ground-glass fragments to botulism, salmonella and paralytic shellfish poisoning.

Fortunately, a third of this year’s recalls were rated Class 3, a relatively mild infraction that might just indicate a company hasn’t brought a certain practice up to code. (The Red River soy mixup is rated Class 1, because the potential for harm is significant for those with soy allergies.)

The even better news is that most food recalls in Canada are initiated by the companies that make the products. That’s a heartening indicator that they’re paying attention long before their products reach our tables. Most food recalls happen before anybody gets sick.

And that’s as it should be. We need to be able to trust that food manufacturers are doing their best not to harm us. No government body could ever stay on top of all the ingredients in all the food and drink we take in, and a complaints-based approach doesn’t work when a person could actually die in the process.

 But I’d guess that trying to prevent people from having allergic reactions to food products will turn out to be one of the industry’s more challenging problems, and not just because more people seem to be developing such allergies.

Take soy, for instance. People who are allergic to it presumably know to check the ingredients list on the side of a product before buying packaged or processed foods.

But soy goes by many names, and soy-based emulsifiers and thickeners go by even more. Knowing whether soy is in the chewing gum, the tuna or the bread crumbs you’re about to buy isn’t always as simple as reading the label.

The CFIA has a section on its site encouraging consumer responsibility around food safety, mostly urging us to report to the agency with concerns about food-related problems.

 But anyone worried about food allergies might also want to spend some time browsing the site just to get to know the many faces of their allergen when it comes to packaged foods. There’s a great recall search system that links you to all kinds of information - like the 13 Class 1 recalls that have been initiated in B.C. in the last month.

For all you Red River fans out there, I’d hoped to have word of a triumphant Canadian return (Note to cross-border shoppers: no recall in the U.S.) Alas, Smucker’s didn’t get back to me with that information, so we’re left to wonder.

In the meantime, visit inspection.gc.ca and see what your food supply is up to.  

Two B.C. sex-worker organizations shutting doors

Yesterday, the news was about PEERS Vancouver closing in the spring. Today, the other primary Vancouver organization supporting street-level sex workers has also announced it's done. PACE Vancouver will run out of money to pay its staff in just three weeks.
I'm doing some contract work with PEERS Victoria and can tell you that even though that organization is also going through difficult times, it has a more diverse funding base and is hanging in under a great new executive director, Marion Little. But it will still be facing one of the biggest funding challenges in its 16-year history in the spring, when the same revamped employment contract that is wiping out PEERS Vancouver comes into effect across B.C.
Finding money to help sex workers is an extremely difficult undertaking, as I learned the hard way during my three years leading PEERS Victoria. The reason these groups are struggling is because the citizenry simply doesn't care enough about what happens to the impoverished, marginalized women engaged in survival sex work, and our governments know it.
Please speak up - to your MLA, to the provincial and federal governments. Please make this a personal issue, too, and donate money, warm winter clothing, food for hot soups and stews (PEERS Victoria serves more than 300 "meals" from its outreach van every month to women working our local strolls). Put some time into learning  more about the issues so that this isolated, stigmatized population isn't left to suffer at the hands of our massive disinterest.  

New resolve around better divorces, or just window-dressing?

I'm a bit puzzled by this story, on the province's big new initiative to reduce the court fights when people split up. A good idea to do that, of course, but isn't that the case already? Mediation has been the option of preference for divorcing couples for many years now, at least from the court system's point of view. The big sticking point is getting them to take that option.
As for the example of the Lee family and how we need to view violence against a spouse as threatening to a child - well, that's not a new thing either. In fact, for poor families caught up with the Children and Family Development Ministry, parents risk losing their kids into government care if there's any threat of spousal violence. So even when Dad's violent and Mom's not, she can lose her children just for not being able to figure out how to get away from Dad.
The problem in the Lee case is that the family was well-off. We all have a hard time believing that well-off families can be dysfunctional and dangerous. Different decisions get made - by the ministry, by police - when a family's got money. Tightening up the Family Relations Act isn't likely to change that.
But hey, I don't want to sound like Little Nancy Negative. It's just that this story line seems a bit like someone's trying to dress an old issue up in new clothes and sell it to us as change. 

Death at the Occupy Vancouver protest

A timely open letter to the powers that be from a B.C. blogger and activist very worried about what's going to happen at  the Occupy protest in Vancouver in the wake of a death at the encampment this past week. He's been a participant up until now, but is urging people to wrap things up before more tragedy occurs. 

Fired CLBC boss got $345,000 severance package

Say it ain't so! After all the heat and problems at CLBC, all the lost services to vulnerable people, we find out that fired (an important distinction - fired, not laid off or downsized or anything softer like that) CLBC chief Rick Mowles got a $345,000 severance package from the Crown corporation when he was axed last month. Yup, 18 months' severance after being on the job just six years.
Wow. Kudos to TC reporter Lindsay Kines for digging up this important story - he's been an ace on the CLBC issues since the start, and was the only reporter in B.C. even doing any meaningful writing about this stuff until things got so noisy that Global TV and now the Vancouver Sun finally took a look.

Fed changes start from frightening premise

It makes me nervous to read the news stories about plans the Canadian government has for reshaping the non-profit sector.

Sure, the sector needs some work. What sector doesn’t?

But it’s hardly the unaccountable, inefficient system that the federal government made it sound like this week in the media coverage about the new Canada Not-For-Profit Corporations Act.

“Right now, we ask [the non-profit sector] to take on these jobs,” federal Human Resources Minister Diane Finlay said while announcing new efforts to ensure more accountability from Canada’s 161,000 registered non-profits and charities.

“We give them money to do it. They receive the money whether they achieve their objectives or not. Now all we’re saying is all right, we still want you to do this, but you get more money if you actually achieve your objectives.”

Unless you’ve been involved with a non-profit having to jump through the many - and often meaningless - accountability requirements of federal funding, you might not appreciate how grating of a statement that is in a sector that works very hard for its money. How can we trust change pushed by a government that doesn’t have a clue?

Canada, Britain and the U.S. are all working very hard these days to extricate government from social responsibility. Their efforts tend to focus on initiatives that download the funding of community work to someone other than them.

 Socially invested municipalities and neighbourhoods, new charity hybrids capable of earning their own revenue, mysterious “investors” who are apparently waiting in the wings  to pony up for social causes as long as they can earn a return on investment - all are integral parts of the three countries’ plans for  non-profit reform.

And maybe such strategies will indeed turn out to be beneficial. But pardon me for noticing that underneath every proposed change is an expectation of offloading the cost of social care.

It’s very popular among the government set these days to talk about how charities and non-profits should run more like businesses.

For the most part, they already do. And that’s remarkable given the nutty processes, procedural hurdles and nonsensical funding cuts they deal with as a matter of course. If the goal is a healthy community sector capable of dealing with increasing social complexity, I’d suggest Ottawa start with some personal reflection on the many ways its own systems and policies devalue, complicate and compromise efficient community work.

The nature of non-profit work - running child-care centres, looking after old people, supporting challenged families, preventing environmental catastrophe, finding God, reconnecting lost souls - doesn’t lend  itself easily to standard measurement. In an era when “worth” has only one meaning to government, that’s a major disadvantage.

So much of non-profit work comes down to value-based goals like easing human suffering.  Building community. Saving the planet for future generations. Alas, governments like things that show a return on investment before the next election. 

Community work builds “infrastructure” as surely as construction companies build bridges and roads. So how come nobody has to build a bridge on year-to-year funding or uncertain contracts squeezed whenever the government feels like it? How come we don’t hear about road-builders getting stiffed as a matter of course on annual cost-of-living increases, as is the case for hundreds of social service agencies in B.C. doing the same work for a little less each year?

I do agree with government’s push for more tangible evidence of the benefits of community work. Improvements to the way outcomes are measured and reported would at least settle once and for all that the non-profit sector is doing essential, meaningful work. 

The sector could use a new name, too, because “non-profit” and “charitable” instantly bring to mind some pathetic soul who can’t figure out how to make money and so has to beg.

But what it doesn’t need is a government-led fix that even in its early days has revealed a biased and negative view of the non-profit sector.

Modern-day western governments are obsessed with the idea that charities and non-profits are inefficient users of tax dollars. They think the growing social divide in their countries are because non-profits and community members aren’t doing their job well enough, not because they’ve been hacking apart the social safety net for the better part of 20 years.

They’re wrong. And they won’t set things right with just more of the same.

     

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.

Bed bugs an expensive house guest for BC Housing

Here's a story to get you itching: A Sun piece on the $720,000 that BC Housing spent in a year fighting bed bugs in the buildings it owns.
The story makes the point that having a bed bug infestation isn't a sign of poverty or poor housekeeping. The little critters are just everywhere now, and extremely hard to get rid of.
My daughter came home covered with bed-bug bites after a stay in a three-star San Francisco hotel. I got bitten down the backs of my legs after sitting in a Mexican cab in shorts; the bugs had set up shop in a rip in the seat fabric.
What's with the seeming epidemic of bed bugs? Turns out we'd all but eradicated the bug by the 1940s, but they came back with a vengeance in the mid-1990s and for all kinds of reasons have now become part of the hotel/housing landscape. Check out the Wikipedia entry on bed bugs for more info, although I'm already scratching just from having to write this.

China's enormous environmental experiment

One of the many "instant" cities that have sprung up since China flooded out communities for the Three Gorges Dam project. This is Feng Du, now located across the river from the original city. 

For better or worse, I’m an experiential learner. I try to stay on top of the current events of the world, but it’s getting up close and personal with the issues of distant lands that really works for me.

So it was that I could have a headful of knowledge about China’s massive Three Gorges dam project from years of hearing about it, yet still find myself gaping at the altered landscape along the Yangtze River from a cruise-ship window last week in the realization that I didn’t actually know a damn thing.

I’d read the articles, of course. I’d seen the documentaries. Long before our family trip to China, I got that the Three Gorges project was a mighty big deal.

At stake: The promise of 100 billion kilowatt hours of “clean” hydro power for a country still burning coal. The relocation of 1.3 million people flooded out by a dammed river.  An end to the huge seasonal floods that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. A potential environmental disaster.

But what it would feel like to sail on a river that had been so dramatically changed, in a country full of people whose lives were turned completely upside down by the project - well, it just hadn’t hit me before. We spent three days travelling the Yangtze as part of our tour, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The cruise departed at Chongqing, a city that has swelled to a staggering 32 million in recent years. It’s a knockout, as were all of the big cities we visited in our two-week holiday.

Sure, you peer through a haze of air pollution to see any of them. But underneath the “fog” (as our guides liked to call it), China’s cities are feasts of clever, unique architecture; great food; interesting people; and a neon nightscape that’s to die for if you’re a night-light aficionado like me.

 A two-week trip is hardly enough time to understand a place, or explore why Communist countries are invariably hotbeds of capitalism at the level of the people. But an extended stay isn’t required just to notice the impact that economic progress is having on China, in ways both good and bad.

We toured a few Chongqing hot spots on the day we arrived, including an odd little exhibit in a city park featuring a detailed, winding mural of the Three Gorges region painted along a concrete passageway.

The artist had depicted the towns that lined the river’s edge before the dam, and then sketched in the new water line in red. It was remarkably effective at bringing the issues home.

Our young guide walked us along the painting, her tone of voice studiously neutral as she talked about the massive human impact.  When we gasped at the sheer number of people uprooted, the cities and heritage sites washed away, she observed sagely that “the coin flips both ways.”

She’s right. For China to be an economic leader - for its citizens to have the same standard of living we enjoy in North America - it needs the hydro power, the flood control and the huge transportation savings that the Three Gorges project created.

But what a price its people paid.

They didn’t just lose their riverside homes, they lost centuries-old towns and traditions. Many were relocated to unfamiliar regions and assigned to unfamiliar jobs. The government built them new housing - generally more upscale than they’d previously lived in - but at a cost of flooding their farm land and family histories under more than 150 metres of river water.

Seen from the cruise boat, the new shoreline looks unnatural, especially in the spots where abandoned farmland now runs straight into the water. Above the new water line, “instant” skyscraper cities and massive, dazzling bridges have sprung up to accommodate the displaced - they, too, look out of place.

Like so much of what we saw in China, the altered landscape is beautiful in its own way. You can’t help but feel the energy and growth in China, the sense of possibility.

But it’s hard to imagine any government getting away with such a bold manipulation of nature. Reports of environmental degradation since the dam was built bear that out.

As for the toll on the million-plus “emigrants,” China isn’t a country that talks about such things. I can only hope that in the end, the coin flipped the right way for them.

Paying bonuses to have our services cut

Back from my travels in China (wow, what a place!), struggling with the muzzy-headed feeling of jet lag. If anyone knows of a cure for jet lag, please send it along. I try this, I try that, but no matter what I still come home to several days of cloudy thinking and weird sleeping habits.
Must admit, I've enjoyed having a break from the news these past two weeks. I woke up to this morning's headlines in the Globe and remembered why I needed the break - so much of the news makes my blood boil, and who needs that first thing in the morning when they can't think straight to begin with?
Here's the one that got me going, detailing the bonuses federal civil servants stand to get if they can cut public services sufficiently. How crazy is it for us to be paying our taxes to government so that they can give themselves handsome bonuses for cutting our services? We can presume this is some strategy taken from the books of the big corporations, but it makes no sense when you're talking about a taxpayer-funded structure.

Travelling through Thanksgiving

I'm off to China this morning for a family trip with my mother, her sister and six of us cousins. I don't think I can be counted on to keep my blog up-to-date while away, so please check back for more regular postings starting Oct. 10. 

My world in 17 syllables

I’m almost three months into an odd little creative project, writing a daily on-line haiku about some aspect of the day that stands out for me.

I’ve since discovered I’m just one of many people out there using haiku in creative, unusual ways.

Maybe it’s a trend. Or maybe a tightly constrained form of writing that forces you to cut to the chase is simply a relief in a time of too much blah-blah-blah.

Traditional haiku are, of course, exquisite jewels of 17 carefully chosen syllables, organized in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. They’re most often about nature and the seasons.

My goal was to use the form for journaling rather than to strive for high- quality haiku. So while I follow the five-seven-five syllable rule, my haiku are less like poetry and more like something you’d write on a Post-it note to remind yourself about the day.

It has been an interesting exercise. Having to come up with a haiku every night means I have to think about what was distinctive about the day. It makes me dig deep for the 17 syllables that I hope will still summon the feel of a day decades later.

I’ve been a hot-and-cold journal writer for much of my adult life, alternating between months of pouring out the intimate details of my life and years of not writing a single word.

I’m better when I travel, when every day tends to feel like a rich new experience that you want to make note of. I was flipping through one such travel diary of mine when it struck me that I wanted to work harder at identifying those same moments in my daily life.

Growing older unsettles me with the way it compresses time. Each day rolls past just a little faster, often so similar to the previous day in its routines that it’s hard to tell one from the other. I feel the need to make each day stand out.

What is it that distinguishes a day for me from the other 19,950 days that went before it? That’s the question I reflect on every night as I try to pull together that day’s haiku. It’s definitely making me much more aware that even an ordinary day is unique.

My mother has long kept a journal, of the kind that scrupulously notes weird weather, special occasions, unusual family illnesses and unprecedented sports scores. If ever there’s dissent in the family about what the weather was like in the summer of 1982 or which year Dad came down with pneumonia, out comes the journal.  

She encouraged me from a young age to follow suit, but the largely empty Barbie diary from my girlhood speaks to my early history of sporadic record-keeping.

Still, there’s something very special about seeing the inane declarations of your 11-year-old self, or the angst-ridden entries from your various periods of torment. Your life, in your own words - it’s compelling.

Doing haiku-style journaling came to me while I was flipping through an old daytimer that I had maintained off and on as a bare-bones diary for three years in the 1970s.

As an actual journal, it’s fairly worthless. My habit was to write one or two sentences in fairly random fashion, never with much consistency.

But when the book surfaced during a recent housecleaning, a browse through it reminded me of the value of even scant observations from your own past. It’s all personal history.

July 14, 1975, for instance: The start of a long, painful strike at the mill where my then-husband worked. August 15, 1977: My first cable-car ride in San Francisco. December 14, 1978: The doctor extracts a huge piece of mouldering bread from the nose of my two-year-old.

They’re not exactly the major events of my life. But they call up a lot for me in a few words. The haiku form is ideal for doing that, as it leaves room for nothing but the essence of a day.

And making the journal public forces me to write a haiku even on the nights when I’d really rather not. I’m leaving for China with my mom tomorrow so won’t post those haiku until our return Oct. 10, but I’ve got my travel scribbler packed and remain committed to the discipline.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments,” Italian poet Cesare Pavese once said. I’ll hold onto mine syllable by syllable.

Feds get "tough", but what's the real impact?

Here we go, introducing get-tough-on-crime legislation in a period when we really ought to be celebrating how effective we've been at lowering crime rates these past 20 years. But enough of the public seem to want to believe otherwise that the Conservatives see a political edge in doing this. Time will tell how these laws will translate on the ground, but you do have to wonder about what will happen to people's rights.
Case in point: The Preventing the Trafficking, Abuse and Exploitation of Vulnerable Immigrants Act. 
The act sounds good on paper. It gives power to immigration officials to refuse work permits to people if they suspect the person is vulnerable and being brought to Canada to do "humiliating or degrading" work (the nickname for the act is the "anti-stripper law," reports the Globe). Hey, nobody likes human trafficking and exploitation.
But how exactly will an immigration officer decide who's "vulnerable"? What criteria will be used? Who will be deciding whether a job is humiliating or degrading, and whose definitions will they be using?  What's the process for assessing someone's "vulnerability"? Where are the protections to ensure powers like these don't end up being used just to block certain categories of people from getting work permits?  
And really, if we're so deeply concerned about people's vulnerability, is denying them a work permit the best way to help them?
But of course, helping immigrants was likely never the goal of this act. It's just a new way of being able to say no to more people. 

We're failing future generations

Excellent piece in this morning's Times Colonist from a Toronto doctor who reminds us of all the ways things are growing worse for certain populations of Canadian children. It disturbs me no end to be part of the generation that has made life more difficult for coming generations. Aren't we always supposed to leave the world better than when we arrived?

Media far from fair in kidnapping coverage

Maybe Randall Hopley really will turn out to be every parent’s worst nightmare - a scary, creepy predator who snatches children from their beds in the night.

That rough-looking mug shot of Hopley certainly seems to confirm the image. And how about all the news reports about him being a convicted sex offender? Surely he’s the guy.

Unless he’s not. What’s striking about all the media coverage around Hopley and the kidnapping/return of little Kienan Hebert this past week is that other than police saying so, no evidence has been put forward connecting Hopley to any of it.

I’m stunned by how roundly ignored that fact has been in the reporting of this story. Police have offered no detailed explanation for why they’re convinced that it’s him. Yet we’re all just so certain.

Hopley has been the featured bogeyman in every news story from the moment three-year-old Kienan Hebert’s disappearance went public. His unkempt mug is now known around the world. The make of his vehicle and licence plate number are public information.

All this on the basis of police comments. Innocent until proven guilty? Forget it.

The media coverage of Hopley has been downright inflammatory.

One story quoted a former classmate recalling 46-year-old Hopley as “the dirty, creepy guy who always rode his bike around.” The little boy’s dad lashed out in the national media at “the system” for not doing more to stop a dangerous, damaged guy like Hopley. His conjectures were left to hang there like facts.

No small wonder that at Hopley’s first court appearance Wednesday, picketers outside were calling for the death penalty.

And yes, Hopley could be the bad guy. But it’s way too soon to say, let alone assert it as fact in the media.

Hopley is routinely referred to as a convicted sex offender in news coverage, a phrase that brings all kinds of horrifying images to mind when a child goes missing.

But Hopley’s conviction involves a sex assault from 25 years ago on someone of unknown age, with no suggestions that he has done anything similar since. He got a two-year sentence.

He’s also been reported as having “at least one brush with the law involving a child.” That refers to an incident in which Hopley says he was trying to take a 10-year-old away from a foster home on behalf of the boy’s parents. The charge was stayed for lack of evidence.

Hopley’s criminal record - at least for the eight years of it available in the newly public provincial court database - doesn’t mark him as an obvious child predator. His crimes have been more likely to be break-and-enters and breaches. (He does appear to be fresh out of jail, though, having been sentenced in June to two months for assault.)

Police do what they need to do. I don’t blame them for the tone of the media coverage.

I imagine it makes sense when you’re the police to identify someone like Hopley - he’s well-known to them, after all, and constantly in trouble - in hopes of enlisting the entire country in finding him. If he turns out to be the wrong guy, that’s a problem for another day.

But media have a different duty. They’re expected to be fair and accurate in their reporting of the news. That’s particularly true when reporting on crimes, because you can ruin a person’s life and reputation with a single story that gets things wrong.

Perhaps the news outlets chasing the kidnapping story each made a thoughtful decision that obliterating the rights of a possibly innocent man was worth it given that a child was missing. My fear is that they didn’t even think twice about it.

One observer noted before Hopley’s arrest Tuesday that his image was so high-profile he was virtually “a caught man walking” in terms of public recognition.

In fact, he could have ended up a dead man walking. Imagine if an intense dad had been the first to spot Hopley and acted on the presumption he’d found the sick pervert who grabbed the little Sparwood boy.

If Hopley did it and is competent to stand trial, then may the misery of a lifetime in prison rain down on him. Kidnapping a child is unconscionable, regardless of whether this particular story had a happy ending.

But right now, we don’t know anything. News media have a responsibility to remember that. 

A fine editorial in today's Times Colonist on the dreadful things happening to people with developmental disabilities in B.C. these days.
Government obviously hoped this announcement of "new" money - a third of it is money that was always supposed to go to Community Living B.C. but had been withheld by the province up until now - would make its critics ease up. That scares me, because it strikes me that government must genuinely have no idea of the scope of the problems in the way we're supporting British Columbians with mental handicaps these days.
Developmental disability is forever. Someone in the system obviously has to focus on cost efficiencies, but not to the point where the exhausted families and advocates of people who will need quality care and support for a lifetime are left to struggle for the most basic services.

What shall we make of the mysteriously wonderful return of little Kienan Hebert?  The stories I've read so far made the alleged kidnapper sound like an unsophisticated fellow with a mental handicap, yet during a period when there was a national manhunt on for him and police everywhere, he sneaked back into the house where Kienan lived to return the boy safe and sound.
At any rate, I will quell the skeptic in me for now, because this really is an incredibly good outcome to the whole sad scenario. But the police certainly haven't made Randall Hopley out to be the kind of clever - and clearly empathetic - man who would do something like this.
I wouldn't have thought it easy for anyone to break into a closed crime scene at 3 a.m., let alone the alleged kidnapper. But perhaps police had let their guard down in the presumption that Kienan's home would be just about the last place that Hopley would return to.
Still, I hope someone's out there digging on this one. The pieces just don't fit. And really, Hopley's life hangs in the balance, because he's exactly the kind of guy to end up gunned down in a confused standoff with police.
But for now, let's just celebrate a genuine happy ending.

Campbell honour puts political taint to awards

**Note: North Vancouver blogger Norm Farrell pointed out an error in my column around Luigi Aquilini's donation, so that has now been corrected. Thanks, Norm!

You have to feel for all the other 2011 recipients of the Order of B.C., whose many accomplishments have been overshadowed in the public eye by all the din around former premier Gordon Campbell getting the award.

We’ll presume from the time stamp on the government’s news release - late afternoon on a Friday before a long weekend - that it knew from the outset that people wouldn’t be happy that Campbell and three other high-profile B.C. Liberal stalwarts made the list.

That’s a great time to send out a news release if the sender hopes to slide something by unnoticed.  The time-tested government communications strategy makes it much less likely that media will be able to find the sources they need to build a big story or have the resources to go after it.

 But there’s no hiding an incendiary list like the one government sent out last Friday announcing that Campbell would be honoured with the Order of B.C. And there’s no hiding the growing prowess of B.C.’s political bloggers, who never sleep. Word spread fast.

Campbell’s government wove politics into everything B.C. did during their time in office. So I guess it’s naive to think that the Order of B.C. would somehow remain exempt from all that.

Still, I think there must be people inside the selection process who are very, very unhappy with the way things went this year. The annual awards haven’t really had a political feel up until now. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true.

I mean, think about it. A committee is tasked with selecting 14 fine citizens to be honoured for their hard work, passion and dedication. That’s all, just 14, out of the whole province. You really have to be exemplary to be picked for an honour like that.

But this year, we’re supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence that four of the 14 recipients happen to be very tightly connected to the B.C. Liberals. They want us to buy that a guy who British Columbians hounded from office because they were so unhappy with his leadership is one of the 14 most exemplary people of 2011.

Could it really be just one of those unfortunate coincidences? Maybe the selection committee concluded completely independently that Gordon Campbell, his former deputy Ken Dobell, fellow politician and Campbell “star” David Emerson, and Liberal Party donor Luigi Aquilini - who has given more than $500,000 to the party - all deserved to be honoured in 2011.

Or not. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s now a taint to an award that up until now had none.

Live long enough and you’re bound to accumulate a few skeletons, so maybe it’s no big deal that someone busted for drunk driving while premier gets named to the Order of B.C.  If you had to be a saint to qualify, we’d have run out of eligible nominees long before now.

But having the selection committee declare Campbell a “visionary” whose efforts have made B.C. a better place - well, that’s a bit harder to take. Says who?

Under his leadership, we slashed needed community services, sold off public forest lands for a song, increased poverty, politicized every government decision and greatly enriched the salaries of MLAs and senior government. What’s visionary about that?

And it’s downright disrespectful to have Campbell and his friends shoved at us all at once at a time when so many of us are still fuming about the guy.

The selection committee even appears to have broken its own rules to allow his nomination. No sitting politician is eligible for the award, but Campbell had five days left in his term when nominations closed. So did they stretch the deadline to accommodate him, or ignore the rule about sitting politicians?

If the process really has been neutral up until now, these must be sad days for any non-partisan staff and committee members involved with the Order of B.C. Perhaps it’s just another odd coincidence that last week’s news release was nowhere to be found on the order’s own Web site until late Tuesday afternoon, but I’m choosing to interpret it as a sign that they’re red-faced with shame and protesting in their own small way.

My sympathy to the other recipients of the 2011 order, who really are a very select group picked for all the right reasons. Special congratulations to Crystal Dunahee, a tireless community-builder and fundraiser in our region. Find out more about these worthy recipients here: http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/downloads/OrderofBC2011_Backgrounder.pdf

How sad that the Order of B.C. has been revealed to be politically influenced. The awards body has done an exceptional job at keeping itself above the political fray, but has clearly thrown that all away with this latest round of nominations, which honour a strangely predictable list of clubby B.C. Liberals and hangers-on including Gordon Campbell, Ken Dobell and David Emerson.
Campbell was even a sitting politician when he was nominated, which ought to put him out of the running right then and there. But no. He's in, and only the second B.C. premier ever to get the award. (Bill Bennett was the other, but only in 2007 -  21 years after leaving office.)
I know Campbell has his fans, but really, what is the "exemplary" behaviour he exhibited that has distinguished him as worthy of the honour? He did great things for all his friends, but little for the rest of us. I'm sure Dobell and Emerson are competent, caring people in their own way, but I suspect their tight ties to the Campbell government played more of a role in their nomination than their actual service to B.C., seeing as many fine civil servants who have done great work on behalf of the province have never received the honour.
The toll his government took on social services will take generations, if ever, to repair. He tore up valid union contracts and privatized health-care support services, and I don't think it's coincidental that food quality and cleanliness plummeted in B.C. hospitals after that. He has created a virtual kleptocracy in government, where senior civil servants make buckets of money and are paid bonuses for cutting public services. He got caught driving drunk while in office, a crime that was suffcient to get Steve Fonyo stripped of his Order of Canada.
Obviously, his award has generated just a little controversy, including an online petition through Facebook that has already garnered almost 3,000 of the 5,000 signatures the organizers are trying for. I'm waiting with eager anticipation to hear what the good folks at the Order of BC have to say about all of this - the story broke over the Labour Day weekend, so none of the stories thus far have had any comment from the office.
Unfortunately, the brouhaha over Campbell's award has overshadowed news coverage of some of the truly worthy recipients, like Crystal Dunahee. Here's the news release issued late Friday by government, which lists all 14 recipients of the 2011 award.
Interesting that the Order of B.C. Web site doesn't have a news release posted, or any listing of the 2011 recipients. Hmmm - could it be there are some people inside that office cringing at Campbell getting the award?

A case of city envy

Sure, I get the cliché about the grass always being greener somewhere else.

I was in a coffee-shop line in Portland waxing poetic about that fair city just this past weekend, in fact, while up ahead of me a Portland couple enthused about a recent visit to Victoria. There you go.

Still, I wish we could be more like Portland. No city can get everything right, but Portland comes pretty close.

I gave up amalgamation as a column topic years ago, because there’s just no point. It’s not going to happen of its own accord in our region, and the province is never going to step in to force anything. So I’ve let it go.

But then I go to a place like Portland and get thinking about the possibilities.

In a region and climate not that much different from ours, Portland has created a friendly, vibrant city. Whether you’re walking, cycling, using rapid transit or driving a car, it’s an easy place to get around in.  

There’s cheap food everywhere, courtesy of the city’s many food carts. There’s a Saturday market packed with local wares, and a huge waterfall fountain downtown that the locals treat like an urban swimming hole.

Portland has a distinct core, but it also has any number of walkable, food-and-drink-laden neighbourhoods nearby - each with an individual feel but still part of a whole. It’s got homeless people and panhandlers, but nobody seems too worried in a city known for its sensible and humane homelessness initiatives.

Could we be that kind of city? Is that achievable in a region segmented into 13 separate municipalities?

Not that I’ve seen. But hey, I’ve only lived here 22 years. That sewage-treatment plant being debated when I first arrived here might actually happen one day, so you never know.

The south Island doesn’t even feel like a region, really - we feel like 13 strikingly different places. Spend a few years here and you’ll soon learn how very hard it is to introduce anything that extends across many municipal boundaries. Strong-minded neighbourhood associations add to the sense of living among individual enclaves each focused on their own thing.

Many locals seem perfectly happy with the way things are, and would probably tell people like me to just go ahead and move to Portland if we like the place so much. People aren’t exactly chafing for better regional governance, let alone a directly elected body like Portland has to handle all land-use planning.

But the incredulity is unmistakeable in the voices of people new to our region when they first find out that fewer than 350,000 people are governed by 13 mayors, councils and distinctly different bureaucracies. Then comes the frustration, after they realize how hard it is to make big things happen in a small region of small, inward-looking towns.

We like to talk about light rail transit for this region, something which Portland has done well. But think about how things would actually play out with an issue like that.

Think of the land-use hurdles. The politics. The conflicting interests and ideologies. Then multiply it by 13. Picture all those overheated public hearings. Imagine trying to secure agreement across 13 sets of taxpayers to pay for it all.

Well, maybe we could start with something simpler than LRT - more food carts, say. You can’t walk far in Portland without bumping into a food-cart cluster, with everything from fried peach pies to po’boys and lavender milk shakes on offer until late into the night.

More cart pods like the little one in Cook Street Village would not only bring much happiness to aficionados like me, but add more jobs and buzz to commercial areas. They would draw people in.

But forming ourselves into 13 tiny towns has also made us a region of many, many rules. Portland’s food-cart experience certainly isn’t a free-for-all, but it doesn’t much resemble the scrubbed-up, tightly regulated way we do things here. Could we ever loosen up enough to try?

We’re a charming place in our own right, as those Portland residents noted. But we could be so much better. If we won’t amalgamate, can we at least find more effective ways to reach past our municipal self-interest and get this region popping?

Until then, there’s always Portland.

Good column this morning from TC writer Paul Willcocks, who notes the correlation with income levels in the HST vote. It really is unsettling to see what has happened in B.C. - having grown up on the Island, I too share a memory of young people of my generation having much more of a chance of finding a decent-paying job, buying a house and having a "good" life.
I got married for the first time when I was 17, a fact that might signal a life on welfare in this day and age. Happily, my husband had a great job at the Campbell River mill. We had two cars, a cabin that we owned on the beach (!) in Royston, and within a couple of years had moved up to a new house in a nearby subdivision.
My two oldest kids have managed to buy into the housing market in the Comox Valley, but they're 37 and 34, so of a previous generation themselves. And it has certainly stretched them to be homeowners regardless.
My youngest child, in her mid-20s and living in Victoria, doesn't stand a chance of buying here. The ratio between an average British Columbian's income and housing prices has lost all proportion.
It's so discouraging, to be of the generation that did this.

This study from the Canadian Centre for Police Alternatives puts some figures to a trend that many of us have already figured out - the tax burden has shifted significantly in B.C. in the last 10 years in ways that leave high earners paying less and the poorest paying more. Not too surprising that voters defeated the HST given that reality.
When taxes decrease for people with higher incomes, it also has a disproportionate effect on the tax base. A one or two per cent tax reduction on an income of, say, $300,000 is significantly more of a loss than can ever be made up through a corresponding one or two per cent increase for the province's lowest earners.
What does it mean for the rest of us? Less money for government-funded services, the risk of rising social disorder, government spending at the most expensive end of the scale due to the savings of today morphing into the ballooning costs of tomorrow.
With reduced investment in preventive services and strategies due to sinking tax revenues,  future generations can expect to spend much more covering the increased costs for health care, courts, police and jails once all those people who aren't getting the help they need now run into major problems down the line.
Yeah, yeah - heard it all a million times before. But only because it's true. 

A different take on the issue of human trafficking - which, as this professor points out, is a phrase that tends to bring out emotional prose, gigantic numbers and no real evidence that it really is the major problem everyone says it is.
I'd hate to be considered pro-trafficking, because that would be just plain weird, but I do think it's one of those issues we use to justify throwing money into initiatives that sound good until you realize they're not actually helping anyone other than the people paid to do them.
Yes, there are vulnerable people out there trapped in horrible situations. But maybe we should be figuring out how to help them instead of chasing ghosts. 

I know everyone's posting this wonderful letter from the late Jack Layton, but what the heck - I want it on my blog, too. It's just a lovely sentiment to keep close. Bye, Jack. 

Be careful what you wish for around gaming grants

When the New Democrats first turned aggressive about gambling in the mid-1990s, they knew they had to tread lightly.

The public was nervous, as were B.C. charities. With their long history of running bingos, special-event casinos, poker nights and raffles to fund community services, they were worried about government’s plans to turn gambling into a new provincial revenue stream.

The charities put up quite a fight in the late 1990s. But despite those valiant efforts, it’s pretty obvious in 2011 who has won this battle.

When a group of the charities formed the B.C. Association of Charitable Gambling and signed a memorandum of understanding with the province in 1999, charities were guaranteed a third of the pot for distribution as grants to non-profits doing good community work.

That lasted about as long as it took for the government of the day and every government since then to forget that there ever was such an arrangement. Twelve years later, just 12 per cent of net revenues are distributed as grants, and earnings from charity-run gaming events are down more than 60 per cent.

Gaming grossed a record $2 billion in the last fiscal year. Just $159 million went to non-profits, the smallest dollar amount in 10 years.

There’s a review of the community gaming grant process underway in B.C. right now, led by former Kwantlen College president Skip Triplett. He’s looking to hear from people on how they think gaming revenue should be used, and what kinds of non-profit groups should get priority. 

It’s not going to be one of those things that will catch much public attention. But I know of at least 6,000 B.C. non-profits that will be riveted. Gaming has become the go-to funding source for community groups in this decade of social famine. They rely heavily on those year-to-year grants for thousands of community services, from food banks and youth outreach services to sports camps for kids with disabilities.

Flipping through the years of gaming data on the Public Safety and Solicitor General’s Web site, I don’t know what to hope for from Triplett’s report, due Oct. 31.

Should we root for a larger share of gaming revenue to go to non-profits? That sounds like a good thing, until you get to thinking about how that could play out.

The province might, for instance, take that to mean that all other avenues of government funding to community groups could be reduced now that charitable groups were being given a larger share of gaming dollars. The current government has been particularly bloody-minded when it comes to cutting the legs out from under community services.

Equally disturbing is the prospect of charities growing so dependent on gaming revenue that they get excited about ways to “grow the business” so they can earn even more.

That’s the position municipalities now find themselves in after government cleverly started cutting them into the profits as a bribe for allowing a casino within their borders.

For community groups, that level of hypocrisy just might be too much. Some are far too familiar with the impact of problem gambling on people’s lives, a not-uncommon scenario on the front lines of B.C.’s social problems.

That’s the thing about gambling as a government revenue stream. We tell ourselves it’s all about happy tourists flooding into our towns and cities for a weekend of fun gambling, but most gambling dollars come straight out of the pockets of British Columbians, many of whom can’t afford to give them up.

Or Triplett could decide after his 14-community tour of B.C. that non-profits shouldn’t have any claim on gaming funds, and that all the money should go into - health care, say, or debt reduction.

Alas, that would be disastrous in a whole other way. Our community services have been left too long to fill in program gaps with gambling revenue to be able to take a hit like that. Gaming grants are the threads holding together an increasingly frayed social safety net.

Triplett wants to hear from British Columbians about their priorities for gambling revenue. I hope he knows what a loaded question that is.

Community groups are already being pitted against each other in a struggle for most-worthy status for the purpose of gaming grants. If there were ever “frill” programs in the mix, they’re long gone.

We’re now talking services for foster kids versus elementary-school sports groups. Parent Advisory Committees against community theatre. Disabled youth against impoverished women. Good luck, Mr. Triplett.

Please take this rare opportunity to share your opinion on community gaming grants. If we have to have government-run gambling, let’s at least help government put more thought into how we use the money. 

Not too surprised to see the Farewell Foundation lost its first attempt to get Canada's assisted-suicide laws struck down. The group clearly has passion for the issue, but the judge made it clear they'll need more than that if they want to proceed - they'll need someone with a terminal illness willing to be their modern-day Sue Rodriguez.
Keep an eye on Joe Arvay's case coming up in November, though. That second assisted-suicide case is much more similar to the Rodriguez one, involving  a B.C. woman dying of ALS trying to do the same thing Rodriguez tried in 1993 - to die with dignity when the time comes. 

Thank you, thank you, Warren Buffet, our go-to guy when we need sane comment from the super-rich. It hadn't escaped my attention that sacrifice and belt-tightening are words governments direct only at the lower income classes.
Sure, the rich will be able to afford bigger compounds and better weapons when it all goes sideways for good, but I can't believe they're any happier than the rest of us at where things are going. 

It's rough out there, but don't turn away

I made my way through the grim headlines flooding in from all sources this week, feeling anxious at the sheer abundance of bad news. The unanswered questions leaped out in every direction - no shortage of column fodder. But could I really bear to know more about any of it?

It’s a big question. There are days when it would be so appealing to just shut the door on trying to understand anything about anything.

Why the Air France pilots didn’t hear the “stall” alarm. What it means that the U.S. is falling apart. Why London is beset by violent riots. Why people are starving to death, struggling, hurting each other.

There are cheerier things to think about, so why wouldn’t we? But then I get to thinking about what would happen if we genuinely quit concerning ourselves with the problems of our world.

A lot of people seem to find that an appealing option. I just read about a mega-wealthy U.S. woman noted for the staggering amounts of fans she has attracted with her blog about cowboy life on her mega-ranch, with a spouse she calls the Marlboro Man.

She sells a fantasy, not this gritty, messy and unpredictable thing we call reality. She’s all country living, home-schooling and good food for your man. You won’t find any images of cadaverous Somali toddlers on a blog like that.

Over here in Reality Land, things aren’t so sunny. We live in a fast-flowing tide of world events, fed to us in real time through all the electronic gadgetry that now connects us to the events of this stressed-out, troubled world.

And with all that news comes a feeling: Wouldn’t my life be better if I didn’t know about all of this?

No wonder people check out. I regularly talk to friends who I once considered informed, but who now don’t have a clue about what’s going on outside of their immediate circles. They’re not paying attention at any level unless it directly involves them or their family.

Like I say, I can see the draw of that sometimes. Ignorance really can be bliss, at least until disaster strikes.

But what will happen if too many of us turn away from the pressing issues of the day? Who will be left to solve the problems?

Consider the case of the Air France jet crash, for instance. The inquiry going on right now into that fatal crash in 2009 has the feel of one of those distant stories from a land far away - a tragic event with little relevance to most of our lives.

Except that vast numbers of us rely on jet travel all the time. We put our lives directly into the hands of men just like those poor befuddled souls in the cockpit of Flight AF447. Whatever happened in the cockpit that day, every air traveller in the world has a personal stake in understanding it.

Good-news proponents would point to all the flights that never crashed that day as a better story. And they’ve got a point. Most planes don’t crash.

But this one did. And because the world’s information gatherers jumped on the inquiry as a story, we know much more about what went wrong - with how the pilots were prepared for the unthinkable, the way the stall alarm sounded, the confusion around communications and decision-making in those frightening final moments.

It’s an anxiety-inducing story. You can’t fault any frequent flyer for thinking that news about planeloads of relaxed passengers landing uneventfully would be preferable.

Unfortunately, focusing on what’s going right doesn’t change what’s going wrong. Bad news might be a downer, but it’s how we identify and address problems.  

There’s definitely such a thing as too much bad news, mind you.

Crime has been on the decline for years in Canada, particularly among youth. But one-off stories of individual crimes around the world still dominate the news.

The result: We waste our time electing governments that pander to our fears with promises of getting “tough on crime.” Not surprisingly, that just gets us more jails - and none of the social programs of 15 and 20 years ago that actually brought about the current drop in crime.

If you need a break from the gloom, by all means take one. Even cowgirls get the blues.

But please come back when you’re feeling better. The world needs you.

Here's a strongly worded comment piece from the Guardian on the London riots. It will really be quite a tragedy if government genuinely can't see the role that spending cuts and social policy played on creating the perfect climate for these riots.
Are they so married to their dogma that they'd rather see the riots as a random outburst of criminality among their young citizens - which truly would be a frightening development - instead of the highly predictable, preventable outcome of poverty, disenfranchisement and the absence of hope that it actually was? Now that's sad. 

Could willpower be the missing link in why some succeed and others don't? Check out this intriguing read on the subject. And wouldn't you know it - it's all about those preschool years, and how your genetics combines with your upbringing. But all is not lost if that period of your life wasn't so great, as they've done an experiment briefly detailed here that shows that a couple weeks of brushing your teeth with the wrong hand can kick-start a little willpower.
My partner's singing "Lady Willpower" now due to reading over my shoulder. Alas, that song's just about Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's seeming obsession with songs about trying to guilt young women into making out with him/them.