Add one more homeless man to Victoria streets
Sept. 14, 2007
For more than a year now, I’ve watched Roland Lapierre cobbling together at least some semblance of a normal life aboard his tidy little raft on the Gorge.
Once homeless on Victoria’s streets, Lapierre had found a way out. I’d see him sitting in the sunshine on his patchwork raft –reading the paper sometimes, or having a nap – and would send good thoughts his way for having the creative mettle to come up with his own solution.
I wondered how long he’d get away with it. The answer came this week. The City of Victoria has ordered Lapierre to leave the little bay where he anchors, off Banfield Park near the Selkirk Trestle.
In a city that knows no end to people living homeless on its streets, add one more.
The city is within its rights, of course, and I can already hear the “slippery slope” arguments taking shape in defence of rousting Lapierre. We can’t have people thinking they can just pull up a raft somewhere on the Gorge and live for free.
But the city’s action does beg the question: What now?
As pleasant as it may have looked from a distance, life couldn’t have been easy for Lapierre in his teeny-weeny waterfront home. It would have been cold out there a lot of the time, and there wasn’t much room on board to do anything other than sit very still or lie down.
But I loved seeing him on his raft as I made my way through the park. I have great admiration for people who are able to figure their way out of problems, and Lapierre had managed his way out from under a really big one.
One of my favourite travel destinations is Mexico, where there’s no shortage of desperately poor people coming up with innovative ways to survive. I wish for a better social safety net for all of them, but in the meantime appreciate the relative freedom they’re given by Mexican authorities to scratch together a life.
Homeless people have to live somewhere, after all. So while it isn’t pleasant to realize there’s an old, sick woman selling one-peso packs of gum out of the bus shelter where she lives on the road into your holiday resort, at least it’s honest.
The Capital Region, on the other hand, continues to pretend there is no poverty - just insufficient motivation. The street issues get more and more visible and we keep telling ourselves it’s just because there are too many lazy bums out there.
They gather in Cridge Park, and we roust them as vagrants. They find some crappy apartment building that no one else will live in, and we send in the health squad to shut the place down.
We tear down their makeshift tents on a daily basis in Beacon Hill Park. We throw out the sleeping bags they leave behind in our downtown doorways. We fence off another alley in another part of town. We send more police into the streets to move people along.
To where? Wake up, people. Ousting Roland Lapierre isn’t going to make or break the homeless issue in the region, but it’s one more perfect example of how we got here in the first place.
We can’t have it all ways. We can’t cut social supports and then be surprised that our problems are growing. We can’t abandon social-housing efforts and then insist that people get off our streets. We can’t slash mental-health care and then wonder where all the crazy people came from.
Lapierre didn’t choose to live on a raft because he wanted to get one over on the city. He did it because it was a vast improvement over camping out in some cold, dirty gap between buildings, where anybody and everybody is free to give you a hard time, rough you up, and steal your stuff.
Lapierre’s story could have had a happy ending - one where he gets the bad news about having to pack up his raft, but at the same time gets as much help as he needs in finding a more suitable place to live.
That approach would also work for tenants of buildings condemned as unfit, like the apartments on Carleton Terrace that were shut down this summer. But like Lapierre, those people have been left to their own devices as well. The streets await.
In Lapierre’s case, the city tried to be nice about it, offering him a job and even a more distant anchor. But for someone with chronic and severe mental illness - and who I suspect swims back and forth to his raft - neither are workable alternatives.
The city acted after fielding complaints from 15 people. I hope they also complained about the much larger boat anchored next to Lapierre’s raft for several weeks this summer. I hope the concern about “third party” use of the foreshore extends to the rich as well as the poor.
“I thought I had found a way,” Lapierre told the Times-Colonist this week. But his eviction was the final blow. He won’t be “fighting anymore.”
Watch for him looking sufficiently brought down to Earth in a doorway near you. Some victory.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
No big-city jams - but now's the time to take on Victoria traffic
Sept. 7, 2007
I noticed in this week’s Times-Colonist that the paper is planning a series on commuting in Greater Victoria. They’ve put out a request for commuter stories, so allow me to be among the first to weigh in.
I’m one of those lucky folks who are able to pick their own start/stop times for work, at least to the extent of avoiding the worst of early-morning and late-afternoon traffic.
So I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to be a frustrated commuter fighting her way through heavy stop-and-go traffic every day. But I do get caught in the crush fairly often anyway, because it’s hard not to if you’re driving anywhere near one of the region’s trouble spots at the wrong time of day.
Civil engineers, physicists and flow experts have been trying for decades to figure out traffic jams, the reasons for which go well beyond the superficial explanation of too many cars crammed onto too few roads. The latest theories view traffic as an element, capable of changing its form under certain conditions.
On a slow time of day on a wide-open road, the theory goes, traffic is comparable to a vapour or gas. Cars travel with ease at whatever speed each driver chooses. With more cars on the road, it manifests as water – still flowing, but at a much more fixed and inflexible rate that makes it harder for drivers to switch lanes or make quick adjustments.
And when the commuter rush is on, traffic turns to ice, leaving you and your car frozen in place.
Sometimes there’s an obvious explanation for the freeze: A stalled car; a poorly planned on-ramp; an accident. But not always. Traffic can slow to a crawl and then speed back up again for no particular reason.
“All of a sudden to go from free flow to stop-and-go – this remains one of the mysteries of our time,” traffic expert Hani Mahmassani of the University of Texas commented to the Washington Post when asked about the phenomenon.
While an overload of cars can’t explain everything, it’s definitely a factor. Traffic simply can’t flow as smoothly on a road originally built to carry 100 cars an hour once development has quadrupled the number of vehicles using the route. The “Colwood crawl” exemplifies that particular problem.
But traffic volume isn’t the whole story, as anyone can attest who has experienced the late-afternoon McKenzie/Trans-Canada Highway jam. Why is it that traffic travels at regular speeds through all sorts of busy intersections around the region – including those on either side of McKenzie - yet frequently slows to a stop at that one?
Sometimes the culprit is bad planning. I suspect the reason that westbound traffic piles up on the Bay Street Bridge at various times of day is because some planner made the big mistake of putting in a single shared lane for vehicles coming off the bridge at the Tyee Road intersection regardless of whether they’re trying to turn left on Tyee or drive straight through.
That shared lane means nobody travelling west across the bridge can move forward until cars turning left on Tyee have negotiated their turn across a fairly steady stream of oncoming traffic. With the lack of an advance left-turn arrow complicating the situation even more, traffic can sometimes back up all the way to Bridge Street and beyond.
In the years when I drove from Gordon Head into the downtown every day, I discovered the hard way never to attempt a left-hand turn across McKenzie in the morning, when a mass of University of Victoria commuters was making its way to school and work.
A morning traffic jam caused by doughnuts and coffee was shaping up in the same neighbourhood just as I was moving out of the area last year, the result of Tim Horton’s devotees trying to turn left off Shelbourne into the restaurant’s drive-through.
Now that I live in Esquimalt, a whole other group of problem roadways has emerged.
A late-afternoon trip from this side of the water to any area remotely close to the West Shore, for instance, is simply not on. Nor do you want to be heading out on Interurban or Wilkinson roads when commuters start flooding back home to Peninsula communities in mid-afternoon. (I don’t know how so many people got jobs that let them head home at 3:30 p.m., but that’s when the crunch starts.)
Then there’s that funny little spot where Blanshard Street morphs into Vernon, at the intersection with Saanich Road. Whatever mysterious forces are at work there, I now know to factor in the delay of getting through that intersection when heading out of town to catch an afternoon ferry.
Even the worst commute in the Capital Region has nothing on the best day in Vancouver or Toronto, mind you. Hard-core commuters from the big city would tease us mercilessly even for considering our little 15-minute holdups as “traffic jams.” But all big problems start small.
Got your own stories to share? I know the TC would love to hear them – traffic@tc.canwest.com
Sept. 7, 2007
I noticed in this week’s Times-Colonist that the paper is planning a series on commuting in Greater Victoria. They’ve put out a request for commuter stories, so allow me to be among the first to weigh in.
I’m one of those lucky folks who are able to pick their own start/stop times for work, at least to the extent of avoiding the worst of early-morning and late-afternoon traffic.
So I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to be a frustrated commuter fighting her way through heavy stop-and-go traffic every day. But I do get caught in the crush fairly often anyway, because it’s hard not to if you’re driving anywhere near one of the region’s trouble spots at the wrong time of day.
Civil engineers, physicists and flow experts have been trying for decades to figure out traffic jams, the reasons for which go well beyond the superficial explanation of too many cars crammed onto too few roads. The latest theories view traffic as an element, capable of changing its form under certain conditions.
On a slow time of day on a wide-open road, the theory goes, traffic is comparable to a vapour or gas. Cars travel with ease at whatever speed each driver chooses. With more cars on the road, it manifests as water – still flowing, but at a much more fixed and inflexible rate that makes it harder for drivers to switch lanes or make quick adjustments.
And when the commuter rush is on, traffic turns to ice, leaving you and your car frozen in place.
Sometimes there’s an obvious explanation for the freeze: A stalled car; a poorly planned on-ramp; an accident. But not always. Traffic can slow to a crawl and then speed back up again for no particular reason.
“All of a sudden to go from free flow to stop-and-go – this remains one of the mysteries of our time,” traffic expert Hani Mahmassani of the University of Texas commented to the Washington Post when asked about the phenomenon.
While an overload of cars can’t explain everything, it’s definitely a factor. Traffic simply can’t flow as smoothly on a road originally built to carry 100 cars an hour once development has quadrupled the number of vehicles using the route. The “Colwood crawl” exemplifies that particular problem.
But traffic volume isn’t the whole story, as anyone can attest who has experienced the late-afternoon McKenzie/Trans-Canada Highway jam. Why is it that traffic travels at regular speeds through all sorts of busy intersections around the region – including those on either side of McKenzie - yet frequently slows to a stop at that one?
Sometimes the culprit is bad planning. I suspect the reason that westbound traffic piles up on the Bay Street Bridge at various times of day is because some planner made the big mistake of putting in a single shared lane for vehicles coming off the bridge at the Tyee Road intersection regardless of whether they’re trying to turn left on Tyee or drive straight through.
That shared lane means nobody travelling west across the bridge can move forward until cars turning left on Tyee have negotiated their turn across a fairly steady stream of oncoming traffic. With the lack of an advance left-turn arrow complicating the situation even more, traffic can sometimes back up all the way to Bridge Street and beyond.
In the years when I drove from Gordon Head into the downtown every day, I discovered the hard way never to attempt a left-hand turn across McKenzie in the morning, when a mass of University of Victoria commuters was making its way to school and work.
A morning traffic jam caused by doughnuts and coffee was shaping up in the same neighbourhood just as I was moving out of the area last year, the result of Tim Horton’s devotees trying to turn left off Shelbourne into the restaurant’s drive-through.
Now that I live in Esquimalt, a whole other group of problem roadways has emerged.
A late-afternoon trip from this side of the water to any area remotely close to the West Shore, for instance, is simply not on. Nor do you want to be heading out on Interurban or Wilkinson roads when commuters start flooding back home to Peninsula communities in mid-afternoon. (I don’t know how so many people got jobs that let them head home at 3:30 p.m., but that’s when the crunch starts.)
Then there’s that funny little spot where Blanshard Street morphs into Vernon, at the intersection with Saanich Road. Whatever mysterious forces are at work there, I now know to factor in the delay of getting through that intersection when heading out of town to catch an afternoon ferry.
Even the worst commute in the Capital Region has nothing on the best day in Vancouver or Toronto, mind you. Hard-core commuters from the big city would tease us mercilessly even for considering our little 15-minute holdups as “traffic jams.” But all big problems start small.
Got your own stories to share? I know the TC would love to hear them – traffic@tc.canwest.com
Monday, September 03, 2007
More cuts to mental-health supports betray the lie of "community care"
Aug. 31, 2007
These are the first words I’ve written about the closure of Laurel House. Given that it’s closing for good in three weeks, that’s pretty late to be taking up the cause.
The problem was that I had a job in the non-profit sector up until very recently, which made it difficult to go shooting my mouth off about decisions being made by another non-profit.
In fact, I caught an earful a couple months ago just for sending an unhappy e-mail to other non-profits letting them know that Laurel House was closing and our community would be losing yet another resource for people with chronic mental illness. I learned the hard way that I’d have to keep my own counsel on the subject for the time being.
Me and my 800 words aren’t going to change a thing at this late date. But a lament for Laurel House is in order just the same.
If you’ve read the flurry of letters in the paper these past few weeks, you have the gist of the story. A beloved drop-in program in a Fernwood house that supports a couple hundred people with chronic mental illness is to be shut down and replaced with new, short-term programs focusing on “rehabilitation.”
It’s good news for people with lower levels of mental illness, who could go a long way with a little rehab help.
But for the people whose illnesses are more profound – the ones who loved Laurel House because it was the only place where they felt accepted for who they were – the closure is devastating. They don’t need a rehab program. They need a place to go where somebody isn’t always trying to “fix” them.
On the surface, the Capital Mental Health Association appears to have made an independent decision to close Laurel House. But I can’t shake the suspicion that the move has less to do with the will of the CMHA as it does with trying to hold onto almost half a million dollars in annual program funding from the Vancouver Island Health Authority.
Non-profits have to bend themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable positions when it comes to maintaining funding. Perhaps the CMHA risked losing the entire $500,000 unless they scrapped Laurel House in favour of more rehab-focused programs.
Whatever the real story, I find the association’s public position on the issue pretty unpalatable. In response to a fairly scathing opinion piece in the Times-Colonist last week written by one of several health-care professionals opposed to the closure, CMHA board president Karla Wagner wrote a letter to the editor noting that some clients were just coming for the cheap lunch anyway.
“They are understandably upset that the lunch will no longer be served, but in its place will be expanded nutritional guidance and a community kitchen to achieve economies of scale,” wrote Wagner.
“We will be teaching people to fish, rather than giving them fish.”
Oh, please. I’m all for the concept of giving people a hand up instead of a handout, but sometimes a person just needs someone to give them a damn fish – or at the very least, a friendly face to sit beside while they eat it. “It’s lonely sitting in a bachelor apartment,” noted one Laurel House regular.
And when you’re barely scratching by on an $800 monthly disability cheque, what’s so wrong about appreciating a one-dollar lunch? Have we no compassion left for chronically ill people who may never be able to get out there and land a paid job?
I’ve got a good friend who has relied on the kind folks of Laurel House for more than 20 years. Some days, she’s plain worn out from trying to “better” herself from an illness that will be with her for the rest of her life.
She must have done a dozen programs in the six years I’ve known her, some of which have admittedly been very helpful in stabilizing her illness. But Laurel House was the gentle background noise to all those programs – the place where she knew she was always welcome, free to pursue the painting and sculpture that makes her happy, and able to make her own choices around what she’d do that day.
Neither she nor any of the Laurel House regulars were asked about the changes that are now underway. They were just called to a meeting one day and told how it was going to be. Apparently drop-ins for the mentally ill are out of step with modern psychiatric theory - these days, it’s all about short-term, work-focused programs.
That the new programs will be run by an occupational therapist rather than the psychiatric nurse who headed up Laurel House says it all. God knows what will happen to the poor souls who just don’t have it in them to rehabilitate themselves any further.
Once upon a time when B.C.’s largest psychiatric hospital was being emptied in favour of a new kind of “community care,” we vowed we’d take care of the thousands of British Columbians who were ousted from Riverview. The closure of Laurel House is just the latest in a long string of betrayals of that promise.
Aug. 31, 2007
These are the first words I’ve written about the closure of Laurel House. Given that it’s closing for good in three weeks, that’s pretty late to be taking up the cause.
The problem was that I had a job in the non-profit sector up until very recently, which made it difficult to go shooting my mouth off about decisions being made by another non-profit.
In fact, I caught an earful a couple months ago just for sending an unhappy e-mail to other non-profits letting them know that Laurel House was closing and our community would be losing yet another resource for people with chronic mental illness. I learned the hard way that I’d have to keep my own counsel on the subject for the time being.
Me and my 800 words aren’t going to change a thing at this late date. But a lament for Laurel House is in order just the same.
If you’ve read the flurry of letters in the paper these past few weeks, you have the gist of the story. A beloved drop-in program in a Fernwood house that supports a couple hundred people with chronic mental illness is to be shut down and replaced with new, short-term programs focusing on “rehabilitation.”
It’s good news for people with lower levels of mental illness, who could go a long way with a little rehab help.
But for the people whose illnesses are more profound – the ones who loved Laurel House because it was the only place where they felt accepted for who they were – the closure is devastating. They don’t need a rehab program. They need a place to go where somebody isn’t always trying to “fix” them.
On the surface, the Capital Mental Health Association appears to have made an independent decision to close Laurel House. But I can’t shake the suspicion that the move has less to do with the will of the CMHA as it does with trying to hold onto almost half a million dollars in annual program funding from the Vancouver Island Health Authority.
Non-profits have to bend themselves into all kinds of uncomfortable positions when it comes to maintaining funding. Perhaps the CMHA risked losing the entire $500,000 unless they scrapped Laurel House in favour of more rehab-focused programs.
Whatever the real story, I find the association’s public position on the issue pretty unpalatable. In response to a fairly scathing opinion piece in the Times-Colonist last week written by one of several health-care professionals opposed to the closure, CMHA board president Karla Wagner wrote a letter to the editor noting that some clients were just coming for the cheap lunch anyway.
“They are understandably upset that the lunch will no longer be served, but in its place will be expanded nutritional guidance and a community kitchen to achieve economies of scale,” wrote Wagner.
“We will be teaching people to fish, rather than giving them fish.”
Oh, please. I’m all for the concept of giving people a hand up instead of a handout, but sometimes a person just needs someone to give them a damn fish – or at the very least, a friendly face to sit beside while they eat it. “It’s lonely sitting in a bachelor apartment,” noted one Laurel House regular.
And when you’re barely scratching by on an $800 monthly disability cheque, what’s so wrong about appreciating a one-dollar lunch? Have we no compassion left for chronically ill people who may never be able to get out there and land a paid job?
I’ve got a good friend who has relied on the kind folks of Laurel House for more than 20 years. Some days, she’s plain worn out from trying to “better” herself from an illness that will be with her for the rest of her life.
She must have done a dozen programs in the six years I’ve known her, some of which have admittedly been very helpful in stabilizing her illness. But Laurel House was the gentle background noise to all those programs – the place where she knew she was always welcome, free to pursue the painting and sculpture that makes her happy, and able to make her own choices around what she’d do that day.
Neither she nor any of the Laurel House regulars were asked about the changes that are now underway. They were just called to a meeting one day and told how it was going to be. Apparently drop-ins for the mentally ill are out of step with modern psychiatric theory - these days, it’s all about short-term, work-focused programs.
That the new programs will be run by an occupational therapist rather than the psychiatric nurse who headed up Laurel House says it all. God knows what will happen to the poor souls who just don’t have it in them to rehabilitate themselves any further.
Once upon a time when B.C.’s largest psychiatric hospital was being emptied in favour of a new kind of “community care,” we vowed we’d take care of the thousands of British Columbians who were ousted from Riverview. The closure of Laurel House is just the latest in a long string of betrayals of that promise.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Keep David Ramsay jailed
Aug. 29, 2007
She died in April, having survived a scant 22 years. The only good that comes of it is that at least she won’t have to hear the news that the B.C. judge who helped ruin her life has had the gall to apply for day parole barely halfway into his jail sentence.
The young Prince George woman had a hard life, as did the other three girls who David Ramsay was convicted of sexually exploiting and assaulting while a provincial court judge in Prince George and neighbouring communities.
They were terrified of testifying against the former judge, and understandably reluctant to come forward. But when one of the girls learned in 2002 that Ramsay was the judge who would be deciding whether she got her kids back from foster care, she decided enough was enough.
Ramsay must have seen the writing on the wall when the four girls came forward, because he quickly pleaded guilty in the opening days of his 2004 trial. Prosecutors had asked for a five-year jail sentence for the 61-year-old, but Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm deemed Ramsay’s crimes heinous enough to warrant an additional two years.
Ramsay had been buying aboriginal children for sex for at least nine years – 1993 to 2001 - while a judge in Prince George. The girls were typically broken, homeless kids in the years when he was hustling them into his car for rough sex and beatings.
The girl who died five months ago had seen trouble in her life. Ramsay made a sad little girl’s life significantly more miserable. For that, he got seven years in jail.
Sentences have little bearing on the time somebody actually spends in jail, and Ramsay is in fact looking at less than five years behind bars if he’s a model prisoner. Given his ability to hide his sex crimes against children from his friends, family and co-workers for many years, we can all presume he’ll have no problem acting well-adjusted to his jailers.
Few people would know the ins and outs of the justice system better than a guy like Ramsay. So it’s no surprise that he’s right on schedule with his application for day parole, to be heard Sept. 11. Ramsay would know that in Canada, you’re eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of your sentence and for day parole six months before that.
But I guess I just thought he might have understood how easy he got off in the first place, facing less than five years in jail for crimes that in my mind that are among the worst of the worst when committed by someone with the authority and community stature of Ramsay. Instead, he’s jumping on those early-release dates like none of that means a thing.
He’ll never again be held in high public regard, of course, and will no doubt pay an immense personal price for his loathsome crimes. I don’t suppose any term in jail could be as bad as that for a “pillar of the community” like Ramsay.
But I’d still like to picture him pacing in a cramped, barren cell for some time to come – if not for the rest of his life, then at least for as long as we’re legally able to keep him there. Seven years isn’t nearly enough, but it’s better than the three he’ll have done if he wins day parole this fall and is allowed to move into a halfway house.
That Ramsay will sooner or later be a free man is a certainty, and people like me will have to take comfort in the knowledge that the remainder of his life will be lived in the dark shadow of his appalling crimes.
But can that truly be the end of the story? Archives of the Prince George Citizen reveal at least three relevant cases of sex crimes involving children that Ramsay presided over during the years when he was buying children himself for violent sex. A man who buys children for sex and violence can hardly be presumed to have presided fairly over cases of other men doing the same thing.
In one case, Ramsay sentenced a man who molested his 12-year-old babysitter to 15 months’ house arrest. In another, he cut five years off the recommended sentence for a pimp living off the avails of girls as young as 13 after finding the man to be “the kinder of two pimps.” A third case ended with a $1,000 fine for a 49-year-old man caught buying sex from a child.
Maybe those sentences were fair under the circumstances. But considering how compromised Ramsay was on the subject of sexually exploited children, maybe not.
With one of his four known victims now dead, fewer voices remain to raise a ruckus at the prospect of Ramsay returning so soon to the pleasures of a privileged life they’ve never known. The least we can do for them is ensure their tormentor remains in jail for his full sentence.
Aug. 29, 2007
She died in April, having survived a scant 22 years. The only good that comes of it is that at least she won’t have to hear the news that the B.C. judge who helped ruin her life has had the gall to apply for day parole barely halfway into his jail sentence.
The young Prince George woman had a hard life, as did the other three girls who David Ramsay was convicted of sexually exploiting and assaulting while a provincial court judge in Prince George and neighbouring communities.
They were terrified of testifying against the former judge, and understandably reluctant to come forward. But when one of the girls learned in 2002 that Ramsay was the judge who would be deciding whether she got her kids back from foster care, she decided enough was enough.
Ramsay must have seen the writing on the wall when the four girls came forward, because he quickly pleaded guilty in the opening days of his 2004 trial. Prosecutors had asked for a five-year jail sentence for the 61-year-old, but Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm deemed Ramsay’s crimes heinous enough to warrant an additional two years.
Ramsay had been buying aboriginal children for sex for at least nine years – 1993 to 2001 - while a judge in Prince George. The girls were typically broken, homeless kids in the years when he was hustling them into his car for rough sex and beatings.
The girl who died five months ago had seen trouble in her life. Ramsay made a sad little girl’s life significantly more miserable. For that, he got seven years in jail.
Sentences have little bearing on the time somebody actually spends in jail, and Ramsay is in fact looking at less than five years behind bars if he’s a model prisoner. Given his ability to hide his sex crimes against children from his friends, family and co-workers for many years, we can all presume he’ll have no problem acting well-adjusted to his jailers.
Few people would know the ins and outs of the justice system better than a guy like Ramsay. So it’s no surprise that he’s right on schedule with his application for day parole, to be heard Sept. 11. Ramsay would know that in Canada, you’re eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of your sentence and for day parole six months before that.
But I guess I just thought he might have understood how easy he got off in the first place, facing less than five years in jail for crimes that in my mind that are among the worst of the worst when committed by someone with the authority and community stature of Ramsay. Instead, he’s jumping on those early-release dates like none of that means a thing.
He’ll never again be held in high public regard, of course, and will no doubt pay an immense personal price for his loathsome crimes. I don’t suppose any term in jail could be as bad as that for a “pillar of the community” like Ramsay.
But I’d still like to picture him pacing in a cramped, barren cell for some time to come – if not for the rest of his life, then at least for as long as we’re legally able to keep him there. Seven years isn’t nearly enough, but it’s better than the three he’ll have done if he wins day parole this fall and is allowed to move into a halfway house.
That Ramsay will sooner or later be a free man is a certainty, and people like me will have to take comfort in the knowledge that the remainder of his life will be lived in the dark shadow of his appalling crimes.
But can that truly be the end of the story? Archives of the Prince George Citizen reveal at least three relevant cases of sex crimes involving children that Ramsay presided over during the years when he was buying children himself for violent sex. A man who buys children for sex and violence can hardly be presumed to have presided fairly over cases of other men doing the same thing.
In one case, Ramsay sentenced a man who molested his 12-year-old babysitter to 15 months’ house arrest. In another, he cut five years off the recommended sentence for a pimp living off the avails of girls as young as 13 after finding the man to be “the kinder of two pimps.” A third case ended with a $1,000 fine for a 49-year-old man caught buying sex from a child.
Maybe those sentences were fair under the circumstances. But considering how compromised Ramsay was on the subject of sexually exploited children, maybe not.
With one of his four known victims now dead, fewer voices remain to raise a ruckus at the prospect of Ramsay returning so soon to the pleasures of a privileged life they’ve never known. The least we can do for them is ensure their tormentor remains in jail for his full sentence.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Co-op brothel long overdue
Aug. 24 2007
I’ve been trying to pin down the moment when I got so caught up in the issues of the sex trade.
The kick in the butt that got me moving was an interview 10 years ago with former sex worker Cherry Kingsley, when I was working full-time at the Times-Colonist. She blew me away with stories from her tough, sad life.
But even in my fledgling newspaper days I was prowling the streets of Kamloops trying to find sex workers to talk to. So maybe it’s just always been my particular fascination.
In those days, I was adamantly against the sex trade, and for all the reasons you hear in any discussion of it – exploitation, victimization, terrible violence, suffering.
A lifetime of movies, news stories and documentaries about desperate, drugged-out women eking out a mean living on the streets had left their mark on me. I’d heard countless stories from women whose abusive childhoods had primed them to fall into the trade as adolescents, and assumed that all sex workers were victims in need of rescue.
But my views changed over my three years heading up Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
Given the rare opportunity to learn about the industry directly from women in the trade – including those who chose to work in it - I came to see that our need to take a moral position against prostitution is in fact a major reason for why aspects of the trade are so dangerous and exploitive.
And now I find myself launching into the planning of a co-op brothel. Who’d have thought?
I’m working on the social enterprise with another former director of PEERS, Lauren Casey. She and I made it relatively unscathed through our intense 15 minutes of fame this week after news broke of our plans.
I think the media were all a little disappointed to discover there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet, other than that the time has come. But planning for any successful business - let alone one centred on the rather incendiary proposition that there are happy, healthy, adult sex workers out there – simply has to proceed at a slow and painstaking pace.
What’s the dream? A terrific work place for sex workers who are in the industry by choice, in which all profits beyond the cost of running the business are mandated to go to social causes.
We want the money to help fund the work PEERS does supporting disadvantaged sex workers wanting to leave the street trade. Street prostitution makes up just 10 to 20 per cent of the total trade, but that group of people are in desperate need of housing, drug detox and treatment, mental-health support, and any number of other services.
What the work place will look like will depend on what we hear from sex workers when we get to that stage of the plan, but we’ve got a few ideas we’d like to test.
Like salaries instead of 100 per cent commission work. Vacation pay. Medical leave. Employment Insurance benefits. Workers’ compensation coverage. Fair shifts, and regular time off.
A letter in the TC this week from a woman I greatly admire condemned our plan as a dangerous “normalization” of prostitution that could attract even more people into the business. I understand that concern.
But sex is a legal commodity in Canada – and like it or not, the industry is thriving. We’ve done nothing to curb the demand that fuels the sex trade, and much to make it even more secretive, stigmatized and dangerous for the tens of thousands of Canadians who work in it. It’s the height of hypocrisy that we buy sex with alacrity but take no responsibility for ensuring workers are fairly paid and well-treated.
Hundreds of functioning brothels are operating discreetly across the country. Some already provide a safe, fair work environment. But it’s far from a given. Our need to deny the existence of the sex trade pushes workers into a twilight zone of wink-wink, nudge-nudge pretence that none of it is happening.
As for the money Lauren and I hope to make from our brothel project, even my younger, more black-and-white self couldn’t have quibbled with the concept of using profits from the customers of the sex trade to fund programs and services for disadvantaged workers wanting to change their lives.
My time at PEERS underlined for me how very difficult it is to find money for that work. A person can only rage for so long at public and government indifference before looking for new ways around the problem. If you knew what I know about the great tragedies unfolding out there, you’d do the same.
I don’t know how we’ll make this brothel happen. But Lauren and I are both of a type to just keep slogging until things work out.
I think we’ll find good people to help us. Work is already underway on similar fronts: planning a co-op brothel in Vancouver; legal challenges going forward both nationally and in B.C. around the lack of safe, legal work places for sex workers.
So we’ll begin, and see what happens. This country’s done nothing for long enough.
Aug. 24 2007
I’ve been trying to pin down the moment when I got so caught up in the issues of the sex trade.
The kick in the butt that got me moving was an interview 10 years ago with former sex worker Cherry Kingsley, when I was working full-time at the Times-Colonist. She blew me away with stories from her tough, sad life.
But even in my fledgling newspaper days I was prowling the streets of Kamloops trying to find sex workers to talk to. So maybe it’s just always been my particular fascination.
In those days, I was adamantly against the sex trade, and for all the reasons you hear in any discussion of it – exploitation, victimization, terrible violence, suffering.
A lifetime of movies, news stories and documentaries about desperate, drugged-out women eking out a mean living on the streets had left their mark on me. I’d heard countless stories from women whose abusive childhoods had primed them to fall into the trade as adolescents, and assumed that all sex workers were victims in need of rescue.
But my views changed over my three years heading up Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
Given the rare opportunity to learn about the industry directly from women in the trade – including those who chose to work in it - I came to see that our need to take a moral position against prostitution is in fact a major reason for why aspects of the trade are so dangerous and exploitive.
And now I find myself launching into the planning of a co-op brothel. Who’d have thought?
I’m working on the social enterprise with another former director of PEERS, Lauren Casey. She and I made it relatively unscathed through our intense 15 minutes of fame this week after news broke of our plans.
I think the media were all a little disappointed to discover there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet, other than that the time has come. But planning for any successful business - let alone one centred on the rather incendiary proposition that there are happy, healthy, adult sex workers out there – simply has to proceed at a slow and painstaking pace.
What’s the dream? A terrific work place for sex workers who are in the industry by choice, in which all profits beyond the cost of running the business are mandated to go to social causes.
We want the money to help fund the work PEERS does supporting disadvantaged sex workers wanting to leave the street trade. Street prostitution makes up just 10 to 20 per cent of the total trade, but that group of people are in desperate need of housing, drug detox and treatment, mental-health support, and any number of other services.
What the work place will look like will depend on what we hear from sex workers when we get to that stage of the plan, but we’ve got a few ideas we’d like to test.
Like salaries instead of 100 per cent commission work. Vacation pay. Medical leave. Employment Insurance benefits. Workers’ compensation coverage. Fair shifts, and regular time off.
A letter in the TC this week from a woman I greatly admire condemned our plan as a dangerous “normalization” of prostitution that could attract even more people into the business. I understand that concern.
But sex is a legal commodity in Canada – and like it or not, the industry is thriving. We’ve done nothing to curb the demand that fuels the sex trade, and much to make it even more secretive, stigmatized and dangerous for the tens of thousands of Canadians who work in it. It’s the height of hypocrisy that we buy sex with alacrity but take no responsibility for ensuring workers are fairly paid and well-treated.
Hundreds of functioning brothels are operating discreetly across the country. Some already provide a safe, fair work environment. But it’s far from a given. Our need to deny the existence of the sex trade pushes workers into a twilight zone of wink-wink, nudge-nudge pretence that none of it is happening.
As for the money Lauren and I hope to make from our brothel project, even my younger, more black-and-white self couldn’t have quibbled with the concept of using profits from the customers of the sex trade to fund programs and services for disadvantaged workers wanting to change their lives.
My time at PEERS underlined for me how very difficult it is to find money for that work. A person can only rage for so long at public and government indifference before looking for new ways around the problem. If you knew what I know about the great tragedies unfolding out there, you’d do the same.
I don’t know how we’ll make this brothel happen. But Lauren and I are both of a type to just keep slogging until things work out.
I think we’ll find good people to help us. Work is already underway on similar fronts: planning a co-op brothel in Vancouver; legal challenges going forward both nationally and in B.C. around the lack of safe, legal work places for sex workers.
So we’ll begin, and see what happens. This country’s done nothing for long enough.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Governments chase ghosts to stop on-line myth
Aug. 17, 2007
Three years ago, a Texas body-shop estimator by the name of John Lockwood got the not-so-great idea of an on-line hunting business catering to hunters with disabilities.
One guy apparently did manage to use Lockwood’s Web cam setup to shoot a caged hog from the comfort of his own living room, or at least believed he had. But the concept never caught on, and Lockwood’s enterprise tanked within a matter of months.
Just another bad idea, gone almost as soon as it surfaced.
Except that the Humane Society of the United States got wind of Lockwood’s failed experiment, and turned it into one of the hottest legislative non-issues in years.
And the story of how that came to be the case is a discouraging reminder of our inability to focus on the things that really matter.
After hearing about Lockwood’s attempt at Internet hunting, the humane society sent out 50,000 flyers condemning it. The society implored legislators to stop “such horrific cruelty,” and launched a vigorous political campaign to ban Internet hunting coast to coast.
The campaign was very successful. Thirty-three states have passed laws to this point prohibiting the practice. A law to ban Internet hunting nationwide is making its way through Congress right now.
“It’s one of the fastest paces of reform for any animal issue that we can remember seeing,” humane society spokesman Michael Markarian told media outlets.
Unprecedented alliances were formed in opposition to Internet hunting. Animal-rights activists and the National Rifle Association were surprised to find themselves fighting on the same side.
“The NRA believes the element of a fair chase is a vital part of the American hunting heritage,” spokesman Kelly Hobbs told media. “Shooting an animal from three states away would not be considered a fair chase.”
Indeed. But in fact, Internet hunting wasn’t happening. Governments were working themselves up over a fiction, while any number of truly bad things went unattended to.
I wouldn’t want to calculate the time, energy and resources that went into 33 states passing laws against Internet hunting. And how many genuine issues were knocked off the discussion table just to make way for the non-issue that Lockwood inadvertently spawned?
The irony is that if Internet hunting had genuinely existed, governments wouldn’t have acted nearly as quickly to stop it, if at all.
Had there been an actual industry with private interests making money from it, hot-shot lobbyists would have been hired to defend the practice to government. Much money would have been thrown around to buy support.
Soon, an industry-funded organization would have surfaced - the Disabled Hunters Alliance, perhaps - to launch a court challenge alleging that a ban was discriminatory.
But with no Internet hunting going on, the state bans sailed right on through. Who’s going to bother fighting a law prohibiting something that isn’t happening in the first place?
To their credit, a handful of U.S. politicians did. Of the 3,563 state legislators nationwide who voted on Internet-hunting bans, 38 voted against the bans, the Seattle Times reported last weekend.
“Internet hunting would be wrong,” said one such legislator, Delaware’s Gerald Hocker. “But there’s a lot that would be wrong, if it were happening.”
Not surprisingly, most of the legislators who spearheaded campaigns to ban Internet hunting had never heard of the practice until the humane society brought it to their attention.
But they jumped on that bandwagon anyway - and aren’t climbing down even now despite word getting out that the whole thing was much ado about nothing.
“You just wonder, who would do something like this?” mused Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who sponsored a ban in his home state. (On-line news site TechDirt.com noted cheekily: “As it turns out, nobody, really.”)
Melanie George Marshall, a Maryland representative who sponsored the call for a ban in her state, acknowledges that she’s newly aware that there’s no Internet hunting going on, but says it’s good to get on top of the issue anyway.
“What if someone started one of these sites in the six months that we’re not in session?” she asked. “We were able to proactively legislate for society.”
Uh-huh. And if everything was already coming up roses in the U.S. - no poverty, no 40 million people without medical coverage, no school shootings or people gunning down their wives and children in the family SUV - fair enough for governments to turn their minds to imaginary problems.
But that’s not the case. Like Canada, the U.S. is in the grip of significant social problems.
School drop-out rates among African-American and Hispanic students in the U.S. are close to 50 per cent. Gun-death rates are higher by far than in any other Western country. There’s an unpopular war continuing in Iraq that’s costing citizens a staggering $475 million a day, and an increasingly unpopular president.
In other words, the country’s got a lot of things to sort out. Internet hunting isn’t one of them.
Aug. 17, 2007
Three years ago, a Texas body-shop estimator by the name of John Lockwood got the not-so-great idea of an on-line hunting business catering to hunters with disabilities.
One guy apparently did manage to use Lockwood’s Web cam setup to shoot a caged hog from the comfort of his own living room, or at least believed he had. But the concept never caught on, and Lockwood’s enterprise tanked within a matter of months.
Just another bad idea, gone almost as soon as it surfaced.
Except that the Humane Society of the United States got wind of Lockwood’s failed experiment, and turned it into one of the hottest legislative non-issues in years.
And the story of how that came to be the case is a discouraging reminder of our inability to focus on the things that really matter.
After hearing about Lockwood’s attempt at Internet hunting, the humane society sent out 50,000 flyers condemning it. The society implored legislators to stop “such horrific cruelty,” and launched a vigorous political campaign to ban Internet hunting coast to coast.
The campaign was very successful. Thirty-three states have passed laws to this point prohibiting the practice. A law to ban Internet hunting nationwide is making its way through Congress right now.
“It’s one of the fastest paces of reform for any animal issue that we can remember seeing,” humane society spokesman Michael Markarian told media outlets.
Unprecedented alliances were formed in opposition to Internet hunting. Animal-rights activists and the National Rifle Association were surprised to find themselves fighting on the same side.
“The NRA believes the element of a fair chase is a vital part of the American hunting heritage,” spokesman Kelly Hobbs told media. “Shooting an animal from three states away would not be considered a fair chase.”
Indeed. But in fact, Internet hunting wasn’t happening. Governments were working themselves up over a fiction, while any number of truly bad things went unattended to.
I wouldn’t want to calculate the time, energy and resources that went into 33 states passing laws against Internet hunting. And how many genuine issues were knocked off the discussion table just to make way for the non-issue that Lockwood inadvertently spawned?
The irony is that if Internet hunting had genuinely existed, governments wouldn’t have acted nearly as quickly to stop it, if at all.
Had there been an actual industry with private interests making money from it, hot-shot lobbyists would have been hired to defend the practice to government. Much money would have been thrown around to buy support.
Soon, an industry-funded organization would have surfaced - the Disabled Hunters Alliance, perhaps - to launch a court challenge alleging that a ban was discriminatory.
But with no Internet hunting going on, the state bans sailed right on through. Who’s going to bother fighting a law prohibiting something that isn’t happening in the first place?
To their credit, a handful of U.S. politicians did. Of the 3,563 state legislators nationwide who voted on Internet-hunting bans, 38 voted against the bans, the Seattle Times reported last weekend.
“Internet hunting would be wrong,” said one such legislator, Delaware’s Gerald Hocker. “But there’s a lot that would be wrong, if it were happening.”
Not surprisingly, most of the legislators who spearheaded campaigns to ban Internet hunting had never heard of the practice until the humane society brought it to their attention.
But they jumped on that bandwagon anyway - and aren’t climbing down even now despite word getting out that the whole thing was much ado about nothing.
“You just wonder, who would do something like this?” mused Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who sponsored a ban in his home state. (On-line news site TechDirt.com noted cheekily: “As it turns out, nobody, really.”)
Melanie George Marshall, a Maryland representative who sponsored the call for a ban in her state, acknowledges that she’s newly aware that there’s no Internet hunting going on, but says it’s good to get on top of the issue anyway.
“What if someone started one of these sites in the six months that we’re not in session?” she asked. “We were able to proactively legislate for society.”
Uh-huh. And if everything was already coming up roses in the U.S. - no poverty, no 40 million people without medical coverage, no school shootings or people gunning down their wives and children in the family SUV - fair enough for governments to turn their minds to imaginary problems.
But that’s not the case. Like Canada, the U.S. is in the grip of significant social problems.
School drop-out rates among African-American and Hispanic students in the U.S. are close to 50 per cent. Gun-death rates are higher by far than in any other Western country. There’s an unpopular war continuing in Iraq that’s costing citizens a staggering $475 million a day, and an increasingly unpopular president.
In other words, the country’s got a lot of things to sort out. Internet hunting isn’t one of them.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Grandparents live in blessed times
Aug. 10, 2007
Twice in the last month, I’ve been asked whether I love my grandchildren as much as my children.
I do. But I understand why people who aren’t yet grandparents might be uncertain on that front. It’s hard to imagine loving anyone as much as you do your children.
Of course, that’s a key factor right there in terms of getting things started.
Grandchildren are the children of your children, after all, and thus loved by your son or daughter more than anything in the world. If nothing else, you’ll love your grandchildren because your children love them so much.
Fresh off a 10-day holiday with our three grandsons, however, I’m newly reminded of all the other ways that grandchildren find their way into your heart. Doubters, worry not.
Mine are ages eight, seven and four. My partner and I have been spiriting them off for little holidays almost from the beginning - initially as a gift to their weary parents, and soon as a routine event.
First came Bowser Bill’s, which had grassy fields and gentle shoreline well-suited to outdoor naps and a baby’s tottering first steps. I envisaged years of peaceful seaside idylls with the little ones.
But the years slip away even faster with your grandchildren. This year’s idyll manifested as boisterous jumps from a rope swing into the Englishman River and icy plunges into the depths of Cameron Lake. Back at camp, Robert Munsch had to make way for R.L. Stine on the motor home bookshelves.
I won’t try to tell you that hanging out with the grandkids is all happiness and light.
Looking after small children is exhausting in middle age, and there are moments on our camping holidays when I’m frazzled, furious and badly in need of a time out. At moments like that, I can only express my gratitude to the inventor of the portable DVD player.
There were times on this last trip when I would have been way happier to have just me and my partner enjoying our little motor home, quietly taking in an evening’s sunset instead of mediating the bickering over whose marshmallow will be first on the fire. There were times when the last thing I wanted to do was spend my morning in the splash zone of the jam-packed campground pool.
Overall, though, the holidays are quite wonderful. I’m young again when I’m with the grandsons, and grateful to be able to relive years with my own children that I didn’t know enough to value the first time around.
It’s a bit like being given a second chance at raising children - this time with the benefit of experience as well as the broader viewpoint that comes with aging.
So it’s all just a little easier. More relaxed. You don’t sweat the details nearly so much. You don’t try to win every battle, and get way better at avoiding one in the first place.
From this distance, it’s also easier to see the impact of genetics. I once believed that it was all about nurture, but have come to appreciate through my grandchildren the profound effect that nature also plays.
One of my grandsons, for instance, appears to have been born to walk on logs, go on the fast rides, swim in the deep water. It’s only in the last couple of years that he’s accumulated enough experiences to know to slow things down a little.
The other two - brothers - were infinitely more cautious as toddlers. They’ve grown more comfortable with risk only by building up enough safe experiences to convince themselves that they’ll be OK.
Alas, the arguments and unhappy moments that might have been avoided with my own children if only I’d had a better grasp of who they really were underneath it all. I couldn’t see for looking that so much of who they would grow up to be was already there when they were born.
Perhaps the best part of time spent with your grandchildren - or any children, really - is that it allows you to have fun again. You do things that your rational, sensible adult self just wouldn’t do in the regular scheme of things.
Would I choose to plunge repeatedly into a cold, cold swimming hole above Englishman River Falls if not for three young boys calling me in to join them? Or dope myself to the eyes on anti-histamines in order to survive my horse allergy long enough for a trail ride at Tiger Lily Farms?
Would I crawl on my elbows in a half-metre of water through the endless shallows of Rathtrevor Beach? Try to tempt butterflies to land on my head?
Not likely. While I’d love to think that my inner child will always be readily accessible, the truth is that it mostly takes kids to get me acting like a kid.
The days when my own children filled that role slipped past quicker than I ever could have imagined. Like the song says, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
I’d never make the same mistake twice. God bless grandchildren.
Aug. 10, 2007
Twice in the last month, I’ve been asked whether I love my grandchildren as much as my children.
I do. But I understand why people who aren’t yet grandparents might be uncertain on that front. It’s hard to imagine loving anyone as much as you do your children.
Of course, that’s a key factor right there in terms of getting things started.
Grandchildren are the children of your children, after all, and thus loved by your son or daughter more than anything in the world. If nothing else, you’ll love your grandchildren because your children love them so much.
Fresh off a 10-day holiday with our three grandsons, however, I’m newly reminded of all the other ways that grandchildren find their way into your heart. Doubters, worry not.
Mine are ages eight, seven and four. My partner and I have been spiriting them off for little holidays almost from the beginning - initially as a gift to their weary parents, and soon as a routine event.
First came Bowser Bill’s, which had grassy fields and gentle shoreline well-suited to outdoor naps and a baby’s tottering first steps. I envisaged years of peaceful seaside idylls with the little ones.
But the years slip away even faster with your grandchildren. This year’s idyll manifested as boisterous jumps from a rope swing into the Englishman River and icy plunges into the depths of Cameron Lake. Back at camp, Robert Munsch had to make way for R.L. Stine on the motor home bookshelves.
I won’t try to tell you that hanging out with the grandkids is all happiness and light.
Looking after small children is exhausting in middle age, and there are moments on our camping holidays when I’m frazzled, furious and badly in need of a time out. At moments like that, I can only express my gratitude to the inventor of the portable DVD player.
There were times on this last trip when I would have been way happier to have just me and my partner enjoying our little motor home, quietly taking in an evening’s sunset instead of mediating the bickering over whose marshmallow will be first on the fire. There were times when the last thing I wanted to do was spend my morning in the splash zone of the jam-packed campground pool.
Overall, though, the holidays are quite wonderful. I’m young again when I’m with the grandsons, and grateful to be able to relive years with my own children that I didn’t know enough to value the first time around.
It’s a bit like being given a second chance at raising children - this time with the benefit of experience as well as the broader viewpoint that comes with aging.
So it’s all just a little easier. More relaxed. You don’t sweat the details nearly so much. You don’t try to win every battle, and get way better at avoiding one in the first place.
From this distance, it’s also easier to see the impact of genetics. I once believed that it was all about nurture, but have come to appreciate through my grandchildren the profound effect that nature also plays.
One of my grandsons, for instance, appears to have been born to walk on logs, go on the fast rides, swim in the deep water. It’s only in the last couple of years that he’s accumulated enough experiences to know to slow things down a little.
The other two - brothers - were infinitely more cautious as toddlers. They’ve grown more comfortable with risk only by building up enough safe experiences to convince themselves that they’ll be OK.
Alas, the arguments and unhappy moments that might have been avoided with my own children if only I’d had a better grasp of who they really were underneath it all. I couldn’t see for looking that so much of who they would grow up to be was already there when they were born.
Perhaps the best part of time spent with your grandchildren - or any children, really - is that it allows you to have fun again. You do things that your rational, sensible adult self just wouldn’t do in the regular scheme of things.
Would I choose to plunge repeatedly into a cold, cold swimming hole above Englishman River Falls if not for three young boys calling me in to join them? Or dope myself to the eyes on anti-histamines in order to survive my horse allergy long enough for a trail ride at Tiger Lily Farms?
Would I crawl on my elbows in a half-metre of water through the endless shallows of Rathtrevor Beach? Try to tempt butterflies to land on my head?
Not likely. While I’d love to think that my inner child will always be readily accessible, the truth is that it mostly takes kids to get me acting like a kid.
The days when my own children filled that role slipped past quicker than I ever could have imagined. Like the song says, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
I’d never make the same mistake twice. God bless grandchildren.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Caution essential to revamp of BC Wildlife Act
Aug. 3, 2007
Hunting isn’t my thing, but I recognize it as a genuine B.C. activity beloved by tens of thousands.
So I’ve worked hard at staving off any kneejerk reaction to recent news that the Environment Ministry hopes to get another 20,000 hunters out into the woods over the next few years.
Six per cent of British Columbians hunted 25 years ago. Nowadays, just two per cent of us do. In real numbers, that’s a 50 per cent drop - from 168,000 active B.C. hunters in 1981, to 84,000 today.
I can see why hunters might want to bolster their ranks. I can also see why the government is on side, given the potential boost to the economy of B.C.’s struggling rural communities that could result from increased hunting activity.
But look beyond the headlines about the push for more hunters, and you’ll find more substantial things to worry about. While a few more hunters likely won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, other proposed changes to the provincial Wildlife Act are potentially less benign.
Whatever you or I might think about hunting, the reality is that it’s a traditional B.C. industry and a pleasant seasonal past-time for resident hunters.
The various aspects of hunting generate roughly $50 million a year in B.C. The money flows from a number of sources - from the sale of hunting licences to recreational local hunters wanting a freezerful of venison, to the big-ticket extravaganzas booked by rich U.S. hunters in search of big game.
Hunting revenues are a drop in the bucket compared to tourism overall. They represent a mere one per cent of the $5-billion tourist industry, and a fraction of the $900 million generated every year by the wildlife-viewing industry.
A thoughtful, well-enforced Wildlife Act is obviously key to keeping all those industries healthy while also protecting the wonderful birds, fish and animals we’ve been blessed with in this province. A series of public consultations around the act has just wrapped up, and the Environment Ministry’s 2007-2010 service plan has also put forward several major operational changes for consideration.
Boosting the number of hunters is part of that plan. But there’s also a proposal to deregulate many aspects of the commercial hunting industry, and to hand off oversight to an industry-led board that would take over much of the supervisory functions currently done by government.
That’s considerably more scary than a campaign to find more hunters.
The Liberals’ viewpoint - leaving aside their ideological drive toward smaller government - is that those making money from a resource are the most motivated to look after it into the future. If you’re a guide-outfitter making a good living at helping U.S. hunters bag mountain sheep, you’re presumed to have more of an interest than most of us in making sure that B.C. doesn’t run out of them.
I get the theory, and appreciate that self-interest very often creates positive change in surprising ways. B.C. guide-outfitters, for instance, often end up as passionate advocates of saving old-growth forest, because logging disrupts grizzly-bear habitat.
Unfortunately, history is littered with any number of catastrophes that resulted from leaving industry insufficiently supervised.
When oversight falters, terrible things happen. Surely we’ve devastated enough fisheries, forests, mines and pristine wilderness in B.C. alone to have seen that for ourselves, and that’s not even counting things like the leaky-condo debacle, toxic prescription drugs, corporate fraud and numerous other examples of industry malfeasance.
I don’t mean to suggest that anything like that is going on in B.C.’s hunting industry. No doubt most folks in the industry are abiding by the rules, even in the absence of significant enforcement on the ground.
Yet we still need to think long and hard about what it would mean to shift to “outcome-based” oversight of the industry, as detailed in the ministry’s service plan.
For those not used to the jargon, achieving an outcome simply means you accomplished a specific goal. You made more money. Found more customers. Saved more lives. Gave better service.
But when it comes to natural resources, outcomes are a tricky business. On the one hand, industry could turn out to be better stewards of the resource than government itself. On the other, maybe not - and the damage could be irreparable by the time we realize that under an outcome-based regulatory system.
The challenge lies in balancing the needs of today against those of tomorrow. The reason B.C.’s rural economies are floundering right now is because previous generations didn’t get that balance right. We’ll be picking up the pieces from our shattered forest and fishing industries for a long time to come.
In terms of managing B.C. wildlife for the future, 20,000 more hunters isn’t likely to be the tipping point that brings things crashing down. The same can’t be said for handing over to industry the bulk of regulatory control for this precious resource.
Aug. 3, 2007
Hunting isn’t my thing, but I recognize it as a genuine B.C. activity beloved by tens of thousands.
So I’ve worked hard at staving off any kneejerk reaction to recent news that the Environment Ministry hopes to get another 20,000 hunters out into the woods over the next few years.
Six per cent of British Columbians hunted 25 years ago. Nowadays, just two per cent of us do. In real numbers, that’s a 50 per cent drop - from 168,000 active B.C. hunters in 1981, to 84,000 today.
I can see why hunters might want to bolster their ranks. I can also see why the government is on side, given the potential boost to the economy of B.C.’s struggling rural communities that could result from increased hunting activity.
But look beyond the headlines about the push for more hunters, and you’ll find more substantial things to worry about. While a few more hunters likely won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, other proposed changes to the provincial Wildlife Act are potentially less benign.
Whatever you or I might think about hunting, the reality is that it’s a traditional B.C. industry and a pleasant seasonal past-time for resident hunters.
The various aspects of hunting generate roughly $50 million a year in B.C. The money flows from a number of sources - from the sale of hunting licences to recreational local hunters wanting a freezerful of venison, to the big-ticket extravaganzas booked by rich U.S. hunters in search of big game.
Hunting revenues are a drop in the bucket compared to tourism overall. They represent a mere one per cent of the $5-billion tourist industry, and a fraction of the $900 million generated every year by the wildlife-viewing industry.
A thoughtful, well-enforced Wildlife Act is obviously key to keeping all those industries healthy while also protecting the wonderful birds, fish and animals we’ve been blessed with in this province. A series of public consultations around the act has just wrapped up, and the Environment Ministry’s 2007-2010 service plan has also put forward several major operational changes for consideration.
Boosting the number of hunters is part of that plan. But there’s also a proposal to deregulate many aspects of the commercial hunting industry, and to hand off oversight to an industry-led board that would take over much of the supervisory functions currently done by government.
That’s considerably more scary than a campaign to find more hunters.
The Liberals’ viewpoint - leaving aside their ideological drive toward smaller government - is that those making money from a resource are the most motivated to look after it into the future. If you’re a guide-outfitter making a good living at helping U.S. hunters bag mountain sheep, you’re presumed to have more of an interest than most of us in making sure that B.C. doesn’t run out of them.
I get the theory, and appreciate that self-interest very often creates positive change in surprising ways. B.C. guide-outfitters, for instance, often end up as passionate advocates of saving old-growth forest, because logging disrupts grizzly-bear habitat.
Unfortunately, history is littered with any number of catastrophes that resulted from leaving industry insufficiently supervised.
When oversight falters, terrible things happen. Surely we’ve devastated enough fisheries, forests, mines and pristine wilderness in B.C. alone to have seen that for ourselves, and that’s not even counting things like the leaky-condo debacle, toxic prescription drugs, corporate fraud and numerous other examples of industry malfeasance.
I don’t mean to suggest that anything like that is going on in B.C.’s hunting industry. No doubt most folks in the industry are abiding by the rules, even in the absence of significant enforcement on the ground.
Yet we still need to think long and hard about what it would mean to shift to “outcome-based” oversight of the industry, as detailed in the ministry’s service plan.
For those not used to the jargon, achieving an outcome simply means you accomplished a specific goal. You made more money. Found more customers. Saved more lives. Gave better service.
But when it comes to natural resources, outcomes are a tricky business. On the one hand, industry could turn out to be better stewards of the resource than government itself. On the other, maybe not - and the damage could be irreparable by the time we realize that under an outcome-based regulatory system.
The challenge lies in balancing the needs of today against those of tomorrow. The reason B.C.’s rural economies are floundering right now is because previous generations didn’t get that balance right. We’ll be picking up the pieces from our shattered forest and fishing industries for a long time to come.
In terms of managing B.C. wildlife for the future, 20,000 more hunters isn’t likely to be the tipping point that brings things crashing down. The same can’t be said for handing over to industry the bulk of regulatory control for this precious resource.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Lured into the Facebook vortex
July 20, 2007
I try to be discerning in my choice of trends, and certainly didn’t expect to like Facebook. The idea of becoming somebody’s on-line “friend” was just a little too high-school for me.
But the e-mails kept coming, most often from people who I hadn’t heard from in ages. They’d invite me to be their “friend” and post happy little pictures of themselves to lure me in.
The requests piled up unanswered in my inbox. But then my cousin’s wife in Kuwait sent me an invitation. With all that distance between us, it just seemed downright rude to refuse to be her Facebook friend.
And things just kind of went crazy from there.
For those unfamiliar with Facebook, it’s the invention of California computer programmer Mark Zuckerberg, who was just 19 when he launched the “social utility” Web site in February 2004.
He and a group of Harvard classmates (some of whom are now suing Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea) took a few stabs at different kinds of on-line networking before finding one that really clicked.
First came Coursematch, which let Harvard students see who else was taking the same classes. Then came Facemash, one of those “hot or not” Web sites.
That last idea got Zuckerberg in big trouble with Harvard’s administration, as he’d taken student images from the university’s Web site without seeking permission. He quit Harvard shortly after and launched Facebook.
Membership was initially restricted to Harvard students. But within months, it opened up to include the seven other “Ivy League” post-secondaries in the northeastern U.S.
Soon after, anyone with a college or university connection was eligible. By 2006, all you needed to qualify for Facebook membership was an e-mail address.
The Web site is essentially an electronic meet-and-greet - a combination of blog, chatroom and electronic photo album. Given that I can barely make it through all the electronic communications I’m already getting in a typical day, I wasn’t planning on finding anything about Facebook enjoyable.
But it got to me. I started out a skeptic just trying to be nice to a relative living abroad, and in no time at all had transformed into an enthusiastic Facebook user. I still don’t really know how that happened.
I suspect it started with the picture.
Posting a photo isn’t a Facebook requirement or anything like that. But once you give in to that first invitation to be somebody’s “friend,” how long are you going to be content with having a big question mark come up instead of your picture every time you send them a message?
So you upload. And then you go to your site to see how the picture looks and discover that somebody you went to junior high with has written a message on your “wall.” Somebody else has sent you a “gift” - some teeny little electronic image of a birthday cake or a cheery glass of bubbly (Choose gifts with care - a puppy in a basket will set you back $1 US).
Next, your eyes stray to the status section of your page, where various Facebook friends have posted brief comments about their activities of the moment. “Rebecca is hung over,” says one, which tells you all you need to know about whether the birthday bash you’d heard about earlier had gone off successfully.
Further down the page, a new friend - who’s in fact a long-lost one, from grade school - posts a dozen photos from Calgary of a party she was at, and writes nice comments beside your own photos. Pretty soon, you’re sharing memories that you forgot you even had in common.
The young have embraced Facebook most fervently. Of the almost 350,000 Facebook users who belong to the Vancouver network (which includes the Island), only 500 of us are ages 48-55. The numbers only get skimpier from there.
Older people will love the concept once they give it a try, and I’m already cooking up plans to lure a few Web-savvy seniors out for a Facebook test drive. In the short term, however, membership does skew a little young.
But there are benefits to that, too. I’m now hearing from some of my kids’ friends, who were regulars at our house back in the days before everybody grew up and set off to see the world. I’m stumbling onto people who I’d completely forgotten about, sharing life’s small details with people I didn’t even conceive of ever talking to again.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. I haven’t yet fully grasped the very public nature of Facebook for those who choose to leave their sites open to all Facebook members, and am occasionally indiscreet.
Last week, I inadvertently broadcast to the Facebook masses that my daughter was sick with terrible diarrhea and camping out on our couch. A few days later, I loudly proclaimed that my mother looks much better for having lost some weight. (Note to self: The Wall is public. The Wall is public.)
But hey, we’re all friends here. And as it turns out, I’m not minding that at all.
July 20, 2007
I try to be discerning in my choice of trends, and certainly didn’t expect to like Facebook. The idea of becoming somebody’s on-line “friend” was just a little too high-school for me.
But the e-mails kept coming, most often from people who I hadn’t heard from in ages. They’d invite me to be their “friend” and post happy little pictures of themselves to lure me in.
The requests piled up unanswered in my inbox. But then my cousin’s wife in Kuwait sent me an invitation. With all that distance between us, it just seemed downright rude to refuse to be her Facebook friend.
And things just kind of went crazy from there.
For those unfamiliar with Facebook, it’s the invention of California computer programmer Mark Zuckerberg, who was just 19 when he launched the “social utility” Web site in February 2004.
He and a group of Harvard classmates (some of whom are now suing Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea) took a few stabs at different kinds of on-line networking before finding one that really clicked.
First came Coursematch, which let Harvard students see who else was taking the same classes. Then came Facemash, one of those “hot or not” Web sites.
That last idea got Zuckerberg in big trouble with Harvard’s administration, as he’d taken student images from the university’s Web site without seeking permission. He quit Harvard shortly after and launched Facebook.
Membership was initially restricted to Harvard students. But within months, it opened up to include the seven other “Ivy League” post-secondaries in the northeastern U.S.
Soon after, anyone with a college or university connection was eligible. By 2006, all you needed to qualify for Facebook membership was an e-mail address.
The Web site is essentially an electronic meet-and-greet - a combination of blog, chatroom and electronic photo album. Given that I can barely make it through all the electronic communications I’m already getting in a typical day, I wasn’t planning on finding anything about Facebook enjoyable.
But it got to me. I started out a skeptic just trying to be nice to a relative living abroad, and in no time at all had transformed into an enthusiastic Facebook user. I still don’t really know how that happened.
I suspect it started with the picture.
Posting a photo isn’t a Facebook requirement or anything like that. But once you give in to that first invitation to be somebody’s “friend,” how long are you going to be content with having a big question mark come up instead of your picture every time you send them a message?
So you upload. And then you go to your site to see how the picture looks and discover that somebody you went to junior high with has written a message on your “wall.” Somebody else has sent you a “gift” - some teeny little electronic image of a birthday cake or a cheery glass of bubbly (Choose gifts with care - a puppy in a basket will set you back $1 US).
Next, your eyes stray to the status section of your page, where various Facebook friends have posted brief comments about their activities of the moment. “Rebecca is hung over,” says one, which tells you all you need to know about whether the birthday bash you’d heard about earlier had gone off successfully.
Further down the page, a new friend - who’s in fact a long-lost one, from grade school - posts a dozen photos from Calgary of a party she was at, and writes nice comments beside your own photos. Pretty soon, you’re sharing memories that you forgot you even had in common.
The young have embraced Facebook most fervently. Of the almost 350,000 Facebook users who belong to the Vancouver network (which includes the Island), only 500 of us are ages 48-55. The numbers only get skimpier from there.
Older people will love the concept once they give it a try, and I’m already cooking up plans to lure a few Web-savvy seniors out for a Facebook test drive. In the short term, however, membership does skew a little young.
But there are benefits to that, too. I’m now hearing from some of my kids’ friends, who were regulars at our house back in the days before everybody grew up and set off to see the world. I’m stumbling onto people who I’d completely forgotten about, sharing life’s small details with people I didn’t even conceive of ever talking to again.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. I haven’t yet fully grasped the very public nature of Facebook for those who choose to leave their sites open to all Facebook members, and am occasionally indiscreet.
Last week, I inadvertently broadcast to the Facebook masses that my daughter was sick with terrible diarrhea and camping out on our couch. A few days later, I loudly proclaimed that my mother looks much better for having lost some weight. (Note to self: The Wall is public. The Wall is public.)
But hey, we’re all friends here. And as it turns out, I’m not minding that at all.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Victoria street issues are everybody's problem to deal with
July 13, 2007
Being part of the mayor’s task force that’s trying to figure out the street problems in Victoria’s downtown has given me the opportunity to hear about the issues from every viewpoint.
I’ve been heartened to learn that virtually everybody is worried. We need to be.
But it’s also been discouraging to realize how many of us feel powerless to do anything about it.
My most recent conversation as a member of the task force steering committee was with a group of downtown landlords. They gave me one disturbing anecdote after another when asked about the problems they were experiencing.
One had recently seen a woman raped in an alley off Johnson Street, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon. The woman was screaming as her attacker beat her with a hammer.
Police were called. The woman, who lived on the streets, refused to press charges, fearing “street justice” if word got out she’d brought charges against her attacker. End of story.
Other landlords chimed in with more disturbing tales - stories about installing yet another iron gate across yet another entry way, and of the relentless accumulation of discarded needles around their property.
Once blessedly rare events, hunting for needles and hosing down urine puddles are now just part of the daily routine for merchants on some blocks.
Prime commercial leasing space in a few critical areas is sitting empty for months - even years - because potential tenants don’t want to risk doing business amid the street problems, say the landlords.
They talked of parking lots where a car break-in is now virtually a given, and how the sight of sick, crazy people setting up camp on your building roof has grown so common that it’s lost its shock power.
And of course, they all had a story about some baffled, angry customer wondering what the hell was going on. It’s tough to sign up a new leaseholder for the empty building down the way when she has to step over used needles and a big splash of reeking urine just to view the place.
For those who don’t live, work or shop in the downtown, it probably all seems a little theoretical.
Indeed, that’s a major reason for the problem. With only a small percentage of the region’s population experiencing the misery, most people seem quite content to sit back and wait for the City of Victoria to sort things out. Their mayors and councils are more than happy to do the same.
But what we’re seeing in the downtown is the ugly face of 20-plus years of flawed decision-making at the provincial and federal level, with a little globalization and international drug trafficking thrown in. Victoria simply can’t set all of that right on its own.
We have a growing street problem in our urban centres because we unthinkingly created the conditions for an underclass. Blame a deadly combination of policy paralysis, social-welfare cuts and ideologically driven health-care “strategy,” and a world that changed too fast for some people to ever catch up.
Even if the City of Victoria could find the money to fix such massive challenges by itself, it doesn’t have the authority. Issues of health, social welfare, crime and child protection are all responsibilities of the provincial and federal governments.
Righting the many wrongs that have created the problems in the downtown won’t be easy, or fast. It will take significant amounts of planning, strategizing, innovation, political action and luck. It will require that we put aside political differences once and for all around social health, and embark on a well-considered strategy that spans at least the next decade.
A big job. But if everyone in this fractured region of ours would engage, it’s possible. Because as powerless as we tend to feel, the fact is that we have all the power we need to make a difference.
The mayor’s task force is an excellent beginning. The people sitting around that table are thinkers, movers and shakers - powerful folks in their own right. Put them in the same room with the people who know what’s happening on the front lines, and you’ve got a 360-degree view of the problems and all the knowledge you need to figure them out.
But the task force doesn’t have the money to fund whatever solutions are identified. Nor does it have the authority to override political stances - for instance, the federal government’s objection to a supervised site for street-level drug addicts to inject - or the ability to reshape provincial and federal policy.
Fortunately, we citizens have that power. Our political process is far from perfect, but it still responds well to pressure.
Money must be found. Flawed policy must be addressed. Sick people bouncing around our streets deserve to get the help they need, and landlords deserve to be spared bearing grim witness to violent rapes on otherwise sunny Saturdays in the region’s most popular shopping district.
Make it happen, people. We’re the only ones who can.
.
July 13, 2007
Being part of the mayor’s task force that’s trying to figure out the street problems in Victoria’s downtown has given me the opportunity to hear about the issues from every viewpoint.
I’ve been heartened to learn that virtually everybody is worried. We need to be.
But it’s also been discouraging to realize how many of us feel powerless to do anything about it.
My most recent conversation as a member of the task force steering committee was with a group of downtown landlords. They gave me one disturbing anecdote after another when asked about the problems they were experiencing.
One had recently seen a woman raped in an alley off Johnson Street, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon. The woman was screaming as her attacker beat her with a hammer.
Police were called. The woman, who lived on the streets, refused to press charges, fearing “street justice” if word got out she’d brought charges against her attacker. End of story.
Other landlords chimed in with more disturbing tales - stories about installing yet another iron gate across yet another entry way, and of the relentless accumulation of discarded needles around their property.
Once blessedly rare events, hunting for needles and hosing down urine puddles are now just part of the daily routine for merchants on some blocks.
Prime commercial leasing space in a few critical areas is sitting empty for months - even years - because potential tenants don’t want to risk doing business amid the street problems, say the landlords.
They talked of parking lots where a car break-in is now virtually a given, and how the sight of sick, crazy people setting up camp on your building roof has grown so common that it’s lost its shock power.
And of course, they all had a story about some baffled, angry customer wondering what the hell was going on. It’s tough to sign up a new leaseholder for the empty building down the way when she has to step over used needles and a big splash of reeking urine just to view the place.
For those who don’t live, work or shop in the downtown, it probably all seems a little theoretical.
Indeed, that’s a major reason for the problem. With only a small percentage of the region’s population experiencing the misery, most people seem quite content to sit back and wait for the City of Victoria to sort things out. Their mayors and councils are more than happy to do the same.
But what we’re seeing in the downtown is the ugly face of 20-plus years of flawed decision-making at the provincial and federal level, with a little globalization and international drug trafficking thrown in. Victoria simply can’t set all of that right on its own.
We have a growing street problem in our urban centres because we unthinkingly created the conditions for an underclass. Blame a deadly combination of policy paralysis, social-welfare cuts and ideologically driven health-care “strategy,” and a world that changed too fast for some people to ever catch up.
Even if the City of Victoria could find the money to fix such massive challenges by itself, it doesn’t have the authority. Issues of health, social welfare, crime and child protection are all responsibilities of the provincial and federal governments.
Righting the many wrongs that have created the problems in the downtown won’t be easy, or fast. It will take significant amounts of planning, strategizing, innovation, political action and luck. It will require that we put aside political differences once and for all around social health, and embark on a well-considered strategy that spans at least the next decade.
A big job. But if everyone in this fractured region of ours would engage, it’s possible. Because as powerless as we tend to feel, the fact is that we have all the power we need to make a difference.
The mayor’s task force is an excellent beginning. The people sitting around that table are thinkers, movers and shakers - powerful folks in their own right. Put them in the same room with the people who know what’s happening on the front lines, and you’ve got a 360-degree view of the problems and all the knowledge you need to figure them out.
But the task force doesn’t have the money to fund whatever solutions are identified. Nor does it have the authority to override political stances - for instance, the federal government’s objection to a supervised site for street-level drug addicts to inject - or the ability to reshape provincial and federal policy.
Fortunately, we citizens have that power. Our political process is far from perfect, but it still responds well to pressure.
Money must be found. Flawed policy must be addressed. Sick people bouncing around our streets deserve to get the help they need, and landlords deserve to be spared bearing grim witness to violent rapes on otherwise sunny Saturdays in the region’s most popular shopping district.
Make it happen, people. We’re the only ones who can.
.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Love the work. Hate the money-grubbing
July 6, 2007
Three years ago, I stepped into the unknown on the work front. I went from being a full-time newspaper columnist to the executive director of a grassroots social agency that helps sex workers.
It’s been hard, good work. But the time has come to pass the torch. PEERS Victoria will soon be in the hands of a new executive director, Chris Leischner, and I’m glad to feel in her the heart, energy and experience for the challenges ahead.
When I tell people I’m leaving PEERS, they generally assume it’s the problems of the people we help that has worn me out.
Yes, it’s fairly stressful to work with people struggling to keep it together. Their problems are ultimately the problems of PEERS if we’re the ones trying to help them figure things out.
But on all but the worst days, I didn’t mind any of that. The far more stressful aspect of the job was the constant need to look for money to do the work.
I hadn’t thought much about the nature of non-profit work before I took the job at PEERS in the summer of 2004. Believe me, it was a steep learning curve.
A non-profit agency shares much in common with private business.
Revenues and expenses. Marketing plans. Human-resource issues. Government regulation. We both grapple with customers and competitors, and better ways to maximize profit while minimizing cost.
But there are significant differences, too.
Joe’s Shoe Store, for instance, succeeds because Joe runs the kind of business that customers love. Once he’s figured out how to please customers, all is well.
The typical non-profit, however, is doing the equivalent of handing out free shoes to anyone who needs them. It can’t count on revenue from its customers, and instead must find another way to cover the cost of all those shoes.
My five previous years in management at the Times-Colonist stood me in good stead at PEERS. The basic management functions are the same.
The endless search for money, however - that was new. I just had no idea that the work of non-profit was funded so precariously.
I understand the dilemma. The taxpayers and donors whose funds fuel the work of non-profits dislike being tied up for the long term, and there are thousands of worthwhile, hungry agencies out there.
But the constant trolling for money is soul-destroying. And to then see people trapped in miserable circumstance because the services aren’t there - well, that gets pretty hard to take.
Non-profits aren’t the only ones living with uncertainty, of course. Back at the shoe shop, Joe may not know whether his store will be around next year any more than a non-profit knows whether its funding will continue.
Joe, however, has the option of trying to be the best darn shoe shop on the block. For a non-profit, doing good work doesn’t guarantee anything.
You could have plenty of satisfied customers walking through your door in the non-profit sector. But that’s not the same thing as having the money to help them.
I found that awfully discouraging.
What could be done about it? A shift to contracts, perhaps.
Whoever is putting up the money for social services deserves to know what they’re paying for, and what societal changes to expect at the end of the day. Contracts provide an opportunity to map out such goals.
More importantly for non-profits, contracts offer stability - five years, maybe even 10 in some distant dream world. For agencies that for the most part live year-to-year, that would be a wonderful thing.
Helping people to their feet is a slow, hard process. It takes time, and no amount of wishing that it were otherwise is going to change that. Oh, the hours I could have given to other PEERS pursuits had I had the luxury of relaxing even for a moment around whether the money for the work would continue to be there.
Granted, a stabilized non-profit sector would require putting an end to using social issues as political fodder. A 10-year contract could conceivably span two or even three governments.
Fortunately, nothing but good would come from moving social issues out of the political realm.
No government ever contemplates eliminating cancer services, or leaving people with broken bones to tough it out. Such matters are by and large beyond the scope of politics.
Extend the same courtesy to health issues like addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse and brain injury, and life will get a whole lot easier for non-profits and the people they serve. Meanwhile, the community would benefit from having problems dealt with rather than merely pushed from one neighbourhood to another.
But we’re a long way from anything like that, and it’s time for me to step aside before I get frustrated to the point of forgetting the many good parts of my time at PEERS.
I’ve loved the work, and will really miss the people. But looking for money all the time just kind of wears a person down.
July 6, 2007
Three years ago, I stepped into the unknown on the work front. I went from being a full-time newspaper columnist to the executive director of a grassroots social agency that helps sex workers.
It’s been hard, good work. But the time has come to pass the torch. PEERS Victoria will soon be in the hands of a new executive director, Chris Leischner, and I’m glad to feel in her the heart, energy and experience for the challenges ahead.
When I tell people I’m leaving PEERS, they generally assume it’s the problems of the people we help that has worn me out.
Yes, it’s fairly stressful to work with people struggling to keep it together. Their problems are ultimately the problems of PEERS if we’re the ones trying to help them figure things out.
But on all but the worst days, I didn’t mind any of that. The far more stressful aspect of the job was the constant need to look for money to do the work.
I hadn’t thought much about the nature of non-profit work before I took the job at PEERS in the summer of 2004. Believe me, it was a steep learning curve.
A non-profit agency shares much in common with private business.
Revenues and expenses. Marketing plans. Human-resource issues. Government regulation. We both grapple with customers and competitors, and better ways to maximize profit while minimizing cost.
But there are significant differences, too.
Joe’s Shoe Store, for instance, succeeds because Joe runs the kind of business that customers love. Once he’s figured out how to please customers, all is well.
The typical non-profit, however, is doing the equivalent of handing out free shoes to anyone who needs them. It can’t count on revenue from its customers, and instead must find another way to cover the cost of all those shoes.
My five previous years in management at the Times-Colonist stood me in good stead at PEERS. The basic management functions are the same.
The endless search for money, however - that was new. I just had no idea that the work of non-profit was funded so precariously.
I understand the dilemma. The taxpayers and donors whose funds fuel the work of non-profits dislike being tied up for the long term, and there are thousands of worthwhile, hungry agencies out there.
But the constant trolling for money is soul-destroying. And to then see people trapped in miserable circumstance because the services aren’t there - well, that gets pretty hard to take.
Non-profits aren’t the only ones living with uncertainty, of course. Back at the shoe shop, Joe may not know whether his store will be around next year any more than a non-profit knows whether its funding will continue.
Joe, however, has the option of trying to be the best darn shoe shop on the block. For a non-profit, doing good work doesn’t guarantee anything.
You could have plenty of satisfied customers walking through your door in the non-profit sector. But that’s not the same thing as having the money to help them.
I found that awfully discouraging.
What could be done about it? A shift to contracts, perhaps.
Whoever is putting up the money for social services deserves to know what they’re paying for, and what societal changes to expect at the end of the day. Contracts provide an opportunity to map out such goals.
More importantly for non-profits, contracts offer stability - five years, maybe even 10 in some distant dream world. For agencies that for the most part live year-to-year, that would be a wonderful thing.
Helping people to their feet is a slow, hard process. It takes time, and no amount of wishing that it were otherwise is going to change that. Oh, the hours I could have given to other PEERS pursuits had I had the luxury of relaxing even for a moment around whether the money for the work would continue to be there.
Granted, a stabilized non-profit sector would require putting an end to using social issues as political fodder. A 10-year contract could conceivably span two or even three governments.
Fortunately, nothing but good would come from moving social issues out of the political realm.
No government ever contemplates eliminating cancer services, or leaving people with broken bones to tough it out. Such matters are by and large beyond the scope of politics.
Extend the same courtesy to health issues like addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse and brain injury, and life will get a whole lot easier for non-profits and the people they serve. Meanwhile, the community would benefit from having problems dealt with rather than merely pushed from one neighbourhood to another.
But we’re a long way from anything like that, and it’s time for me to step aside before I get frustrated to the point of forgetting the many good parts of my time at PEERS.
I’ve loved the work, and will really miss the people. But looking for money all the time just kind of wears a person down.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Kieran King: My Kind of Canadian
June 29, 2007
Presumably there are people out there who agree that Saskatchewan teen Kieran King deserved a school suspension for daring to talk about marijuana. I’m not one of them.
In fact, I’m hoping the kid sues somebody over the whole misadventure, and wins. What happened to the 15-year-old boy was a flagrant abuse of power.
The news in brief: A Grade 10 student at Wawota Parkland School feels unconvinced after an anti-drug presentation at his school. He decides to do some research of his own before making up his mind.
He goes deep. His mom says King loves a good research project. The boy eventually reaches the conclusion that compared to both alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is less harmful.
He’s right, but let’s leave that debate for a moment. For now, let’s just focus on the actual series of events that then unfolded for Kieran King.
Having finished up his research, the teen tells a few friends what he’s learned. One complains to the principal that King is advocating marijuana use.
The principal tells him to keep a lid on it. She calls his mom and tells her that if King talks about marijuana again, “I’m calling the police.”
King organizes a small and peaceful protest outside the school in the name of free speech. True to her word, the principal calls the police.
RCMP and school counsellors gather soon after to do a “threat assessment” on the teenager, finding that he has talked about marijuana at least four or five times in the past. (He’s never actually used it however.)
King gets a three-day suspension that shuts him out of school just as final exams are beginning. That destroys his year-end marks, as he gets zero on the exams that the ban prevented him from writing.
You can imagine the lessons the teenager will likely take away from the whole sorry experience.
That it’s wrong to seek insight, for one, or to share new knowledge with others. That it’s wrong to question what you’re being told, even when you don’t feel convinced.
And of course, that it’s wrong to question authority.
That point is underlined nicely in this particular case by the fact that for no other reason than he organized a little free-speech protest, King ended up the subject of an RCMP “threat assessment.”
Anyone who cherishes the right to challenge prevailing wisdom without having the police called out to arrest them will recognize this turn of events for the truly alarming development that it is. Sure, it’s just one kid and a tiny school in Wawota that we’re talking about at the moment, but we can’t take any infringement lightly.
As for the subject being marijuana, that has barely a thing to do with anything. The subject that day could have been abortion, religious belief, euthanasia - any number of things we’re loath to acknowledge yet do all the time. The subject isn’t the point.
What matters is that Kieran King got curious. He looked into a subject more thoroughly, and along the way reached an informed conclusion that was different than what the school was telling him. He told a few classmates what he’d learned, and the response of one of them was to report him to the school authorities.
But even when you do factor in the subject, none of it makes sense.
Is talking about marijuana at school really something that warrants a three-day suspension?
And if marijuana’s on the no-speak list, what other subjects are considered taboo for students to raise? Who decides what’s on the list - and where can I get a copy?
Like any drug, marijuana has its downsides. And yes, it’s illegal, although King’s interest was confined to its potential health risks.
What he concluded at the end of his research was that marijuana use didn’t have as many health risks as did alcohol or tobacco use.
He’s got a fair amount of science on his side. No drug can be considered safe, but alcohol and tobacco are particularly damaging to people’s health. That doesn’t change just because they’re legal and other drugs aren’t.
King also has a lot of potential converts to his way of thinking. In B.C. alone, 1.8 million B.C. adults report having used marijuana at some point in their lives. A third of that group used it in the past year.
But for King’s sake, I hope people don’t get too caught up in turning his story into one about marijuana. We can’t be getting sidetracked with more marijuana debate when what’s actually on the line in the King case is a valued Canadian right.
King questioned what he heard. He was reluctant to just accept what he was being told. When his school tried to silence him because it didn’t like what he had to say, he didn’t go along with it. He fought back, because he knew it mattered.
Good on you, kid. That’s exactly what I like to see in a good Canadian.
June 29, 2007
Presumably there are people out there who agree that Saskatchewan teen Kieran King deserved a school suspension for daring to talk about marijuana. I’m not one of them.
In fact, I’m hoping the kid sues somebody over the whole misadventure, and wins. What happened to the 15-year-old boy was a flagrant abuse of power.
The news in brief: A Grade 10 student at Wawota Parkland School feels unconvinced after an anti-drug presentation at his school. He decides to do some research of his own before making up his mind.
He goes deep. His mom says King loves a good research project. The boy eventually reaches the conclusion that compared to both alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is less harmful.
He’s right, but let’s leave that debate for a moment. For now, let’s just focus on the actual series of events that then unfolded for Kieran King.
Having finished up his research, the teen tells a few friends what he’s learned. One complains to the principal that King is advocating marijuana use.
The principal tells him to keep a lid on it. She calls his mom and tells her that if King talks about marijuana again, “I’m calling the police.”
King organizes a small and peaceful protest outside the school in the name of free speech. True to her word, the principal calls the police.
RCMP and school counsellors gather soon after to do a “threat assessment” on the teenager, finding that he has talked about marijuana at least four or five times in the past. (He’s never actually used it however.)
King gets a three-day suspension that shuts him out of school just as final exams are beginning. That destroys his year-end marks, as he gets zero on the exams that the ban prevented him from writing.
You can imagine the lessons the teenager will likely take away from the whole sorry experience.
That it’s wrong to seek insight, for one, or to share new knowledge with others. That it’s wrong to question what you’re being told, even when you don’t feel convinced.
And of course, that it’s wrong to question authority.
That point is underlined nicely in this particular case by the fact that for no other reason than he organized a little free-speech protest, King ended up the subject of an RCMP “threat assessment.”
Anyone who cherishes the right to challenge prevailing wisdom without having the police called out to arrest them will recognize this turn of events for the truly alarming development that it is. Sure, it’s just one kid and a tiny school in Wawota that we’re talking about at the moment, but we can’t take any infringement lightly.
As for the subject being marijuana, that has barely a thing to do with anything. The subject that day could have been abortion, religious belief, euthanasia - any number of things we’re loath to acknowledge yet do all the time. The subject isn’t the point.
What matters is that Kieran King got curious. He looked into a subject more thoroughly, and along the way reached an informed conclusion that was different than what the school was telling him. He told a few classmates what he’d learned, and the response of one of them was to report him to the school authorities.
But even when you do factor in the subject, none of it makes sense.
Is talking about marijuana at school really something that warrants a three-day suspension?
And if marijuana’s on the no-speak list, what other subjects are considered taboo for students to raise? Who decides what’s on the list - and where can I get a copy?
Like any drug, marijuana has its downsides. And yes, it’s illegal, although King’s interest was confined to its potential health risks.
What he concluded at the end of his research was that marijuana use didn’t have as many health risks as did alcohol or tobacco use.
He’s got a fair amount of science on his side. No drug can be considered safe, but alcohol and tobacco are particularly damaging to people’s health. That doesn’t change just because they’re legal and other drugs aren’t.
King also has a lot of potential converts to his way of thinking. In B.C. alone, 1.8 million B.C. adults report having used marijuana at some point in their lives. A third of that group used it in the past year.
But for King’s sake, I hope people don’t get too caught up in turning his story into one about marijuana. We can’t be getting sidetracked with more marijuana debate when what’s actually on the line in the King case is a valued Canadian right.
King questioned what he heard. He was reluctant to just accept what he was being told. When his school tried to silence him because it didn’t like what he had to say, he didn’t go along with it. He fought back, because he knew it mattered.
Good on you, kid. That’s exactly what I like to see in a good Canadian.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Manitoba chief's blockade threats may be best strategy
June 22, 2007
Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian.
We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it.
The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population.
And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now.
“There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview.
In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterated his hope that aboriginals use the June 29 day of action as an opportunity to disrupt Canadian National railway shipments across the country.
On first blush, there’s no way to defend a guy like Nelson. What do racist comments and blockaded trains have to do with the problems of Canadian First Nations?
But viewed as a strategy, Nelson’s call to action is more understandable. And while the whole thing may seem just a little too angry for Canada’s tastes, in fact he’s got history on his side in advocating economic protest.
Maybe Nelson has even read Poor People’s Movements, the 1979 book that identified economic protest as one of the most important factors in determining whether anything actually changed for a particular sub-class fighting for its rights.
Authors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Coward looked at movements like American civil rights, welfare reform and workers’ rights. The issues are different again for Canada’s aboriginals, but they’ve certainly been stymied by many of the same things that got in the way of those earlier movements.
The Piven/Coward book found self-interest to be one of the most powerful motivators in prompting social change.
The “elite” who control society tend not to respond to the needs of poor people until their own interests are compromised. Economic disruptions get their attention.
Of course, a whole lot of other factors have to be in place as well. The authors documented the efforts of countless hard-working believers who played vital roles on the front lines of each of the movements.
The twists and turns of history also set the stage for change. The high unemployment rates of the Depression, for instance, primed the public to accept the need for benefits for unemployed workers.
So change isn’t only about applying economic pressure. Nelson needs a plan that’s far broader than a single day of railway blockades if he hopes to help aboriginals see a brighter day.
But I’d have to concur with him that it’s time to quit waiting for the nice people in charge to set things right.
As Nelson knows all too well, everything that goes wrong in this country goes wrong way more often for aboriginals.
They live in far greater poverty. They die at a much younger age, and endure challenging health problems more often. They drop out of school at alarming rates from Grade 8 on.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On any social front, from homelessness to addiction to foster care, aboriginals lead the downward curve. They’ve been leading it for as long as I can remember, and for several decades before that.
“Look, I’m 53,” Nelson told the Globe in defending his call for a blockade. “We have done everything we can to wake up Canada. . .”
I suspect it must be hard to get aboriginals mad enough to rise up, because I would have expected rioting in the streets by this point.
You need only think of smallpox, land appropriation, cultural extermination, residential schools, the Indian Act and our complete inability to negotiate a treaty to know that history has not unfolded particularly well for Canada’s aboriginals.
At 53, Nelson has lived long enough to see any number of grand promises to Canada’s aboriginals wilt on the vine. Money changes hands and great wads of it seem to be spent in pursuit of a solution, but it never seems to trickle down to the people who need it most.
Can you get to the bottom of a problem like that by orchestrating a 24-hour national railway blockade? Probably not.
In fact, Assembly of First Nations leader Phil Fontaine is already playing down any suggestion of genuine confrontation, and is instead promoting June 29 as a day for Canada to educate itself about aboriginal issues.
That’s a nice Canadian-style compromise. But people like Nelson have figured out what that actually means: Nothing will change. In terms of really getting Canadians’ attention, a day of education doesn’t hold a candle to a day of railway blockades.
Peaceful, dignified solutions - yes, I still hope for that. But sometimes protest is all you’ve got left.
June 22, 2007
Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian.
We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it.
The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population.
And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now.
“There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview.
In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterated his hope that aboriginals use the June 29 day of action as an opportunity to disrupt Canadian National railway shipments across the country.
On first blush, there’s no way to defend a guy like Nelson. What do racist comments and blockaded trains have to do with the problems of Canadian First Nations?
But viewed as a strategy, Nelson’s call to action is more understandable. And while the whole thing may seem just a little too angry for Canada’s tastes, in fact he’s got history on his side in advocating economic protest.
Maybe Nelson has even read Poor People’s Movements, the 1979 book that identified economic protest as one of the most important factors in determining whether anything actually changed for a particular sub-class fighting for its rights.
Authors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Coward looked at movements like American civil rights, welfare reform and workers’ rights. The issues are different again for Canada’s aboriginals, but they’ve certainly been stymied by many of the same things that got in the way of those earlier movements.
The Piven/Coward book found self-interest to be one of the most powerful motivators in prompting social change.
The “elite” who control society tend not to respond to the needs of poor people until their own interests are compromised. Economic disruptions get their attention.
Of course, a whole lot of other factors have to be in place as well. The authors documented the efforts of countless hard-working believers who played vital roles on the front lines of each of the movements.
The twists and turns of history also set the stage for change. The high unemployment rates of the Depression, for instance, primed the public to accept the need for benefits for unemployed workers.
So change isn’t only about applying economic pressure. Nelson needs a plan that’s far broader than a single day of railway blockades if he hopes to help aboriginals see a brighter day.
But I’d have to concur with him that it’s time to quit waiting for the nice people in charge to set things right.
As Nelson knows all too well, everything that goes wrong in this country goes wrong way more often for aboriginals.
They live in far greater poverty. They die at a much younger age, and endure challenging health problems more often. They drop out of school at alarming rates from Grade 8 on.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On any social front, from homelessness to addiction to foster care, aboriginals lead the downward curve. They’ve been leading it for as long as I can remember, and for several decades before that.
“Look, I’m 53,” Nelson told the Globe in defending his call for a blockade. “We have done everything we can to wake up Canada. . .”
I suspect it must be hard to get aboriginals mad enough to rise up, because I would have expected rioting in the streets by this point.
You need only think of smallpox, land appropriation, cultural extermination, residential schools, the Indian Act and our complete inability to negotiate a treaty to know that history has not unfolded particularly well for Canada’s aboriginals.
At 53, Nelson has lived long enough to see any number of grand promises to Canada’s aboriginals wilt on the vine. Money changes hands and great wads of it seem to be spent in pursuit of a solution, but it never seems to trickle down to the people who need it most.
Can you get to the bottom of a problem like that by orchestrating a 24-hour national railway blockade? Probably not.
In fact, Assembly of First Nations leader Phil Fontaine is already playing down any suggestion of genuine confrontation, and is instead promoting June 29 as a day for Canada to educate itself about aboriginal issues.
That’s a nice Canadian-style compromise. But people like Nelson have figured out what that actually means: Nothing will change. In terms of really getting Canadians’ attention, a day of education doesn’t hold a candle to a day of railway blockades.
Peaceful, dignified solutions - yes, I still hope for that. But sometimes protest is all you’ve got left.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Choosing death ought to be our right
June 15, 2007
With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death.
I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another.
But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that.
I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest.
People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions.
I can live with that. What scares me is imagining being in the same position as the 93-year-old Vernon woman who made the news this week after her doctor was convicted of trying to help her commit suicide.
The woman managed to secure a lethal dose of pills for herself. But staff at facility where she stayed found out before she could take the pills. They stopped her.
I think we’re supposed to be happy that her life was saved. Instead, I find myself nervous at the reminder of how tough it still is for people to die with dignity.
If it were up to me, I would have a death like in the Dutch movie Antonia’s Line - holding court with one loved one after another in a long and final farewell.
My dad’s oldest sister had a death very much like that. I still remember her resplendent in her white negligee, inviting each of us into her bedroom in her final weeks for a last warm word. It seemed a perfect death, if there could be such a thing.
But here we are eight years later, convicting a doctor for trying to help another tired old lady die sooner rather than later. And I realize how tenuous it all is.
I can strive to die like my aunt. But I could just as easily end up stuck someplace where nobody knows how important it is for me to have some control over my death, and end up living long enough to see my doctor convicted of trying to help me out.
The laws needn’t be sweeping. We don’t need to get into abortion, or any actions that might lead to people dying who aren’t ready to die.
But an old person grown too tired and sick to live anymore - that’s a different matter. There has to be a way to create laws that maintain respect for the right to life overall while making exceptions for personal choice at the end of life.
In some cases, there’s nothing wrong with choosing death over life. We accept that in theory. More than seven out of 10 of Canadians polled last week by Ipsos-Reid came out in support of the right to die.
In practice, it all depends.
If your type of death involves a great deal of pain, your chances of getting enough legal medication to kill you is more of a possibility. If you’re dying of less dramatic causes and without much pain, you could linger for years.
You can do things like living wills, or pieces like this one so that nobody ever thinks for a moment that you’d choose to be kept alive at any cost.
But what kind of a guarantee is that? Until Canadian law enshrines some mechanism that gives people the right to die under certain circumstances, even the best-laid plans can go awry. Next thing you know, they’re “saving” your life and trying to send your doctor to jail.
Ultimately, the problem seems to be that we can’t shake the feeling that nobody sane would ever choose to die. In fact, we all die. We deserve the chance to exercise at least a modicum of control over how it goes.
We had a heck of a time registering gun owners, and I imagine that endorsing the right to die could be even more paralysing. But we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.
Not when three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say they support the right to die. Not when doctors still risk criminal records for giving their patients a helping hand.
When time ran out for my mom’s old dog Jake, the vet came by the house and shot him up with something that sent him into a gentle, happy stupor, and then deep sleep. When it came to the final needle, he didn’t even notice.
It was a great way to go. I can only hope for the same.
June 15, 2007
With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death.
I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another.
But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that.
I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest.
People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions.
I can live with that. What scares me is imagining being in the same position as the 93-year-old Vernon woman who made the news this week after her doctor was convicted of trying to help her commit suicide.
The woman managed to secure a lethal dose of pills for herself. But staff at facility where she stayed found out before she could take the pills. They stopped her.
I think we’re supposed to be happy that her life was saved. Instead, I find myself nervous at the reminder of how tough it still is for people to die with dignity.
If it were up to me, I would have a death like in the Dutch movie Antonia’s Line - holding court with one loved one after another in a long and final farewell.
My dad’s oldest sister had a death very much like that. I still remember her resplendent in her white negligee, inviting each of us into her bedroom in her final weeks for a last warm word. It seemed a perfect death, if there could be such a thing.
But here we are eight years later, convicting a doctor for trying to help another tired old lady die sooner rather than later. And I realize how tenuous it all is.
I can strive to die like my aunt. But I could just as easily end up stuck someplace where nobody knows how important it is for me to have some control over my death, and end up living long enough to see my doctor convicted of trying to help me out.
The laws needn’t be sweeping. We don’t need to get into abortion, or any actions that might lead to people dying who aren’t ready to die.
But an old person grown too tired and sick to live anymore - that’s a different matter. There has to be a way to create laws that maintain respect for the right to life overall while making exceptions for personal choice at the end of life.
In some cases, there’s nothing wrong with choosing death over life. We accept that in theory. More than seven out of 10 of Canadians polled last week by Ipsos-Reid came out in support of the right to die.
In practice, it all depends.
If your type of death involves a great deal of pain, your chances of getting enough legal medication to kill you is more of a possibility. If you’re dying of less dramatic causes and without much pain, you could linger for years.
You can do things like living wills, or pieces like this one so that nobody ever thinks for a moment that you’d choose to be kept alive at any cost.
But what kind of a guarantee is that? Until Canadian law enshrines some mechanism that gives people the right to die under certain circumstances, even the best-laid plans can go awry. Next thing you know, they’re “saving” your life and trying to send your doctor to jail.
Ultimately, the problem seems to be that we can’t shake the feeling that nobody sane would ever choose to die. In fact, we all die. We deserve the chance to exercise at least a modicum of control over how it goes.
We had a heck of a time registering gun owners, and I imagine that endorsing the right to die could be even more paralysing. But we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.
Not when three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say they support the right to die. Not when doctors still risk criminal records for giving their patients a helping hand.
When time ran out for my mom’s old dog Jake, the vet came by the house and shot him up with something that sent him into a gentle, happy stupor, and then deep sleep. When it came to the final needle, he didn’t even notice.
It was a great way to go. I can only hope for the same.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk
June 8, 2007
Vic Poleschuk had to go.
Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice.
But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top.
Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president.
During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective.
But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and the need for lottery operations to be above reproach.
Before a government can “ normalize” gambling in the minds of its citizens, it must first convince doubters that yesterday’s sin is today’s legitimate revenue stream. That can be a tough sell.
In terms of gambling, a government has to convince people that the system is honest. You may not win after a night of government-sanctioned gambling, but the theory is that at least you can rest assured that you lost fair and square.
It’s an issue that the Canadian gambling industry has worked hard on. And so it should. It’s an industry that very readily lends itself to corruption.
Poleschuk - a lottery man ever since stepping out of the University of Manitoba back in 1978 - knew that keeping the trust of British Columbians was paramount. He wanted to see gambling “normalized” as a regular and acceptable activity, as did others at a national industry conference in Vancouver last year.
“Why do we have so much anti-gambling (sentiment) rather than focus on what we do and how we should support our customers?” asked Ontario Lottery chief Duncan Brown at the summit. “Until we can better frame that policy debate, we’re never going to be accepted in the same way as alcohol.”
A little disturbing, but probably true. The transformation of gambling’s image from sinful and bad to a fun thing for the whole family will be complete when gambling and alcohol are equally acceptable in our culture.
Given the ongoing challenges around gambling’s image, how did BC Lottery Corp. miss the signs that a handful of retailers might be cheating people out of their winnings? Whatever the answer, it’s much bigger than Vic Poleschuk.
B.C. Ombudsman Kim Carter dug deeper after lottery customers complained to her, and found a retailer who won more than $300,000 in small batches over five years. A second retailer won $10,000 annually for four consecutive years. Two others collected $8,000-plus for three out of four years.
Every penny might have been legitimately won, of course. The lottery corporation contends that a high win rate among its retailers merely reflects that they buy more tickets.
That’s undoubtedly true. Most retailers aren’t cheating anyone. Carter’s findings overall are heartening proof that the vast majority of lottery retailers are honest folks.
But the bigger problem identified in the ombudsman’s report is that there’s no way to say for sure.
Insubstantial to begin with, the various systems and processes the lottery corporation uses to prevent retailer fraud appear to be just plain missing in action.
For instance, customers are supposed to know to listen for a certain song whenever a winning ticket is presented to a retailer for verification. If you hear that song - You’re In the Money - I guess you’re supposed to challenge the clerk if he tries to tell you you’re not a winner.
I’d have my doubts about any security strategy that boils down to leaving it to customers to listen for a song. But it’s truly pointless when retailers merely have to turn off the sound of the computer to thwart the process.
Should customers grow suspicious of a retailer and complain to BC Lottery, the worst that can happen is a retailer no longer having the right to sell lottery products. No further investigations are done unless the customer can convince the police to do it. No word on how often police say yes.
Part of Poleschuk’s job was to see the inadequacies in such policies. In the wake of the current scandal, he had to be jettisoned as evidence of a corporation dedicated to maintaining system integrity and public trust.
But where was everybody else as the ? We have an entire branch of government devoted to gaming enforcement, and a billion-dollar-a-year need for its profits. If a problem as obvious as retailers being tempted to cheat slides under the radar, what else goes unnoticed?
Possibly nothing at all. But with an audit soon to come, now’s the time to be sure about that.
June 8, 2007
Vic Poleschuk had to go.
Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice.
But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top.
Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president.
During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective.
But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and the need for lottery operations to be above reproach.
Before a government can “ normalize” gambling in the minds of its citizens, it must first convince doubters that yesterday’s sin is today’s legitimate revenue stream. That can be a tough sell.
In terms of gambling, a government has to convince people that the system is honest. You may not win after a night of government-sanctioned gambling, but the theory is that at least you can rest assured that you lost fair and square.
It’s an issue that the Canadian gambling industry has worked hard on. And so it should. It’s an industry that very readily lends itself to corruption.
Poleschuk - a lottery man ever since stepping out of the University of Manitoba back in 1978 - knew that keeping the trust of British Columbians was paramount. He wanted to see gambling “normalized” as a regular and acceptable activity, as did others at a national industry conference in Vancouver last year.
“Why do we have so much anti-gambling (sentiment) rather than focus on what we do and how we should support our customers?” asked Ontario Lottery chief Duncan Brown at the summit. “Until we can better frame that policy debate, we’re never going to be accepted in the same way as alcohol.”
A little disturbing, but probably true. The transformation of gambling’s image from sinful and bad to a fun thing for the whole family will be complete when gambling and alcohol are equally acceptable in our culture.
Given the ongoing challenges around gambling’s image, how did BC Lottery Corp. miss the signs that a handful of retailers might be cheating people out of their winnings? Whatever the answer, it’s much bigger than Vic Poleschuk.
B.C. Ombudsman Kim Carter dug deeper after lottery customers complained to her, and found a retailer who won more than $300,000 in small batches over five years. A second retailer won $10,000 annually for four consecutive years. Two others collected $8,000-plus for three out of four years.
Every penny might have been legitimately won, of course. The lottery corporation contends that a high win rate among its retailers merely reflects that they buy more tickets.
That’s undoubtedly true. Most retailers aren’t cheating anyone. Carter’s findings overall are heartening proof that the vast majority of lottery retailers are honest folks.
But the bigger problem identified in the ombudsman’s report is that there’s no way to say for sure.
Insubstantial to begin with, the various systems and processes the lottery corporation uses to prevent retailer fraud appear to be just plain missing in action.
For instance, customers are supposed to know to listen for a certain song whenever a winning ticket is presented to a retailer for verification. If you hear that song - You’re In the Money - I guess you’re supposed to challenge the clerk if he tries to tell you you’re not a winner.
I’d have my doubts about any security strategy that boils down to leaving it to customers to listen for a song. But it’s truly pointless when retailers merely have to turn off the sound of the computer to thwart the process.
Should customers grow suspicious of a retailer and complain to BC Lottery, the worst that can happen is a retailer no longer having the right to sell lottery products. No further investigations are done unless the customer can convince the police to do it. No word on how often police say yes.
Part of Poleschuk’s job was to see the inadequacies in such policies. In the wake of the current scandal, he had to be jettisoned as evidence of a corporation dedicated to maintaining system integrity and public trust.
But where was everybody else as the ? We have an entire branch of government devoted to gaming enforcement, and a billion-dollar-a-year need for its profits. If a problem as obvious as retailers being tempted to cheat slides under the radar, what else goes unnoticed?
Possibly nothing at all. But with an audit soon to come, now’s the time to be sure about that.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care
June 1, 2007
I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was.
They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist.
On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process.
Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking.
We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to more people needing help.
Few documents provide more heartwrenching proof of that than this week’s release from Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-LaFond.
Written with provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, the report examined how B.C.’s kids in care are faring in school. Its grim findings answer a lot of questions about the roots of our growing social problems.
The study looked at 32,186 B.C. youngsters who had been in government care between 1997 and 2005. They were compared to 1.5 million other B.C. kids, to see what differences came up in terms of their education.
The differences are massive.
For starters, the high school dropout rate among kids in care is 79 per cent, versus 22 per cent for other students.
What do we know about a lack of education? Among other things, that it correlates with poorer health, lower income, more family problems and the likelihood of jail time.
People who drop out of high school are five times as likely as graduates to end up on income assistance, notes the study. They’re twice as likely to go to jail. Their physical health is poorer.
In other words, a high-school education goes a long way to predicting how the rest of your life turns out.
But the story gets worse for B.C.’s children in care. More than half of those in the study were designated “special needs,” compared to a scant 8.4 per cent of the other students. By age 16, fully three-quarters of boys in care were considered to have special needs.
Most of those special needs related to behaviour problems and mental illness. That was sharply different than other children in the study, who were most likely to be designated as having “special needs” because they were gifted.
The study found a disturbing pattern: Children in care came to kindergarten less prepared to learn, started falling behind the other students almost immediately, and continued stumbling until they finally dropped out.
True, children who need to be taken away from their families can be presumed to already have the deck stacked against them.
Indeed, even in kindergarten, these children were three times as likely as their peers to have poor physical health, language and cognitive barriers, and less social competence.
But the really sad story revealed by the report is that they stayed that way. They arrived at school already struggling, and never really caught up.
Many of those kids will nonetheless live out their lives in honest and hard-working fashion, because what happens in high school doesn’t tell the full story of a person’s life.
But no doubt some of those children from the early period of the study have already drifted to the streets by now. Bad things can happen to anyone, it’s true, but they’re way more likely to happen to a poor kid who starts out life disadvantaged and never does get his feet underneath him.
That must have always been so, of course. I have no definitive answers for why the disadvantages of today seem to have a far greater impact on a person’s life than seemed the case 50 years ago - when the dropout rates were far higher and social supports even less.
But whatever the reasons, things are different now. Proof of that is all around us. The way it used to be is no longer the way it is, nor will change happen just by wishing for it.
On the streets, we’ll begin the transformation when we recognize the problems for what they are and start building housing, more comprehensive supports and a disease-management plan for addiction.
But the future is in our schools. The problems of tomorrow will be avoided in large part by meeting kids’ needs today. We’ve just been given a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go.
June 1, 2007
I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was.
They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist.
On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process.
Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking.
We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to more people needing help.
Few documents provide more heartwrenching proof of that than this week’s release from Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-LaFond.
Written with provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, the report examined how B.C.’s kids in care are faring in school. Its grim findings answer a lot of questions about the roots of our growing social problems.
The study looked at 32,186 B.C. youngsters who had been in government care between 1997 and 2005. They were compared to 1.5 million other B.C. kids, to see what differences came up in terms of their education.
The differences are massive.
For starters, the high school dropout rate among kids in care is 79 per cent, versus 22 per cent for other students.
What do we know about a lack of education? Among other things, that it correlates with poorer health, lower income, more family problems and the likelihood of jail time.
People who drop out of high school are five times as likely as graduates to end up on income assistance, notes the study. They’re twice as likely to go to jail. Their physical health is poorer.
In other words, a high-school education goes a long way to predicting how the rest of your life turns out.
But the story gets worse for B.C.’s children in care. More than half of those in the study were designated “special needs,” compared to a scant 8.4 per cent of the other students. By age 16, fully three-quarters of boys in care were considered to have special needs.
Most of those special needs related to behaviour problems and mental illness. That was sharply different than other children in the study, who were most likely to be designated as having “special needs” because they were gifted.
The study found a disturbing pattern: Children in care came to kindergarten less prepared to learn, started falling behind the other students almost immediately, and continued stumbling until they finally dropped out.
True, children who need to be taken away from their families can be presumed to already have the deck stacked against them.
Indeed, even in kindergarten, these children were three times as likely as their peers to have poor physical health, language and cognitive barriers, and less social competence.
But the really sad story revealed by the report is that they stayed that way. They arrived at school already struggling, and never really caught up.
Many of those kids will nonetheless live out their lives in honest and hard-working fashion, because what happens in high school doesn’t tell the full story of a person’s life.
But no doubt some of those children from the early period of the study have already drifted to the streets by now. Bad things can happen to anyone, it’s true, but they’re way more likely to happen to a poor kid who starts out life disadvantaged and never does get his feet underneath him.
That must have always been so, of course. I have no definitive answers for why the disadvantages of today seem to have a far greater impact on a person’s life than seemed the case 50 years ago - when the dropout rates were far higher and social supports even less.
But whatever the reasons, things are different now. Proof of that is all around us. The way it used to be is no longer the way it is, nor will change happen just by wishing for it.
On the streets, we’ll begin the transformation when we recognize the problems for what they are and start building housing, more comprehensive supports and a disease-management plan for addiction.
But the future is in our schools. The problems of tomorrow will be avoided in large part by meeting kids’ needs today. We’ve just been given a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Fraser Institute findings ought to worry us
May 25, 2007
The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day.
Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue.
Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools.
But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools.
In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did when tested in Grade 4 and again in Grade 7 on their reading and numeracy skills.
Once upon a time, the institute’s report didn’t tell you much more than the test scores. But the information now being gathered includes more detail, like the percentage of a school’s students who are categorized as special needs, or are learning English as a second language.
Not surprisingly, the Fraser Institute report reveals that higher numbers of students with those additional challenges generally correlates with a school’s poorer academic performance.
But not always, which is why the school-by-school analysis ought to be mandatory reading for every parent in the province.
What the figures show is that throughout the province, things are not going well in some of our schools.
Of the 154 Vancouver Island schools surveyed, very nearly half now have 20 per cent or more of their students performing below Ministry of Education expectations. At one Nanaimo school, the majority of students scored below expectations.
That ought to worry us.
Schools can be measured any number of ways, and tests aren’t even necessarily the best way. But the percentage of students performing below expectations in provincial tests is still a significant indicator of overall school performance.
If scores are low in B.C. because there are an abundance of young students needing special-needs support or help learning English as a second language (ESL), then more of that kind of support will be needed to fix the problem.
But those challenges alone don’t explain everything about why some Island schools do poorly.
At Nanaimo’s North Oyster school, for instance, some of the poor test performance can likely be attributed to having 23.6 per cent ESL students, let alone another 8.3 per cent with special needs. It’s the obvious explanation for why more than half of the North Oyster students are scoring below provincial expectations.
Except that at Torquay Elementary here in Victoria, the percentage of ESL students is 30 per cent, and 8.7 per cent of the students have special needs. Yet only three per cent of their students scored below expectations.
Why such a gap? I hope we would want to know. We need to know, if only for the sake of every little kid who’s trusting us to provide a useful education.
At 14 Island elementaries, at least 30 per cent of the students are performing below expectations. The problem seems particularly alarming in the Nanaimo school district, which has eight of those 14 schools.
The rates of ESL and special-needs students fluctuate dramatically at those poorly performing schools. The level of challenge is definitely a factor in overall school performance, but clearly not the only one.
In the Comox Valley, Cumberland Elementary has just 3.1 per cent ESL students, and 7.9 per cent special needs. Over at Glacier View Elementary, there are twice as many ESL students, and almost twice as many special-needs students.
But when it comes to student performance, Glacier View scores notably higher. Twenty per cent of its students scored below provincial expectations, compared to almost 33 per cent at the Cumberland school.
That’s not to suggest we leap to the conclusion that the problem is about teaching quality. Still, something’s obviously up. Whatever the reasons behind our schools’ failings, we need to take them very seriously. We need to know why they’re happening.
Statistics have to be handled with care, of course. It just might turn out that the real problem is the Grades 4 and 7 assessments themselves, or that the student populations being looked at for the study are too small to be translated into meaningful percentages.
But we owe it to B.C.’s kids to figure that out. Maintaining an effective public system means addressing the inexplicable differences in performance at our schools before the gaps grow any larger.
Visit www.fraserinstitute.ca/reportcards/index.asp?snav=rc for school-by-school results. And if it looks like your child’s school is struggling to meet standards, ask why.
May 25, 2007
The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day.
Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue.
Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools.
But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools.
In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did when tested in Grade 4 and again in Grade 7 on their reading and numeracy skills.
Once upon a time, the institute’s report didn’t tell you much more than the test scores. But the information now being gathered includes more detail, like the percentage of a school’s students who are categorized as special needs, or are learning English as a second language.
Not surprisingly, the Fraser Institute report reveals that higher numbers of students with those additional challenges generally correlates with a school’s poorer academic performance.
But not always, which is why the school-by-school analysis ought to be mandatory reading for every parent in the province.
What the figures show is that throughout the province, things are not going well in some of our schools.
Of the 154 Vancouver Island schools surveyed, very nearly half now have 20 per cent or more of their students performing below Ministry of Education expectations. At one Nanaimo school, the majority of students scored below expectations.
That ought to worry us.
Schools can be measured any number of ways, and tests aren’t even necessarily the best way. But the percentage of students performing below expectations in provincial tests is still a significant indicator of overall school performance.
If scores are low in B.C. because there are an abundance of young students needing special-needs support or help learning English as a second language (ESL), then more of that kind of support will be needed to fix the problem.
But those challenges alone don’t explain everything about why some Island schools do poorly.
At Nanaimo’s North Oyster school, for instance, some of the poor test performance can likely be attributed to having 23.6 per cent ESL students, let alone another 8.3 per cent with special needs. It’s the obvious explanation for why more than half of the North Oyster students are scoring below provincial expectations.
Except that at Torquay Elementary here in Victoria, the percentage of ESL students is 30 per cent, and 8.7 per cent of the students have special needs. Yet only three per cent of their students scored below expectations.
Why such a gap? I hope we would want to know. We need to know, if only for the sake of every little kid who’s trusting us to provide a useful education.
At 14 Island elementaries, at least 30 per cent of the students are performing below expectations. The problem seems particularly alarming in the Nanaimo school district, which has eight of those 14 schools.
The rates of ESL and special-needs students fluctuate dramatically at those poorly performing schools. The level of challenge is definitely a factor in overall school performance, but clearly not the only one.
In the Comox Valley, Cumberland Elementary has just 3.1 per cent ESL students, and 7.9 per cent special needs. Over at Glacier View Elementary, there are twice as many ESL students, and almost twice as many special-needs students.
But when it comes to student performance, Glacier View scores notably higher. Twenty per cent of its students scored below provincial expectations, compared to almost 33 per cent at the Cumberland school.
That’s not to suggest we leap to the conclusion that the problem is about teaching quality. Still, something’s obviously up. Whatever the reasons behind our schools’ failings, we need to take them very seriously. We need to know why they’re happening.
Statistics have to be handled with care, of course. It just might turn out that the real problem is the Grades 4 and 7 assessments themselves, or that the student populations being looked at for the study are too small to be translated into meaningful percentages.
But we owe it to B.C.’s kids to figure that out. Maintaining an effective public system means addressing the inexplicable differences in performance at our schools before the gaps grow any larger.
Visit www.fraserinstitute.ca/reportcards/index.asp?snav=rc for school-by-school results. And if it looks like your child’s school is struggling to meet standards, ask why.
Peace in a kayak
May 18, 2007
Being a woman of many enthusiasms, I was bound to stumble upon kayaking sooner or later.
I’d been curious about it for years. How can you grow up on an island without feeling the pull of being out on the water?
Boats had figured more prominently in my life in my younger years - the benefit of growing up in an era when Vancouver Island’s then-thriving logging and fishing industries put real money in people’s pockets.
But except for a canoe or two, it had never been me who’d owned those boats. Eventually there came a time when the only boating I was regularly experiencing was aboard a BC ferry, on a routine journey so familiar to me that it barely felt like being on the water at all.
Kayakers caught my eye throughout the Ferry Years, but I tended to write the sport off as something that would require more skill, knowledge and money than I was prepared to invest.
I guess they just looked so sleek and expert out there in their beautiful boats that I assumed I couldn’t easily become one of them.
Then came a sunny, warm weekend last September, when my partner and I finally acted on our much talked-about plans to rent kayaks for a couple hours. We launched into the Gorge with only the briefest of instructions around how to hold our paddles.
The love affair was on.
September turned out to be an ideal time to fall in love, what with it being the season of the sell-off in the world of rental kayaks. By the next weekend, we were the proud owners of two slightly used kayaks, paddles and life jackets, for less than $1,500 all in.
I’ve kayaked almost every weekend since then. It’s been a transforming experience.
My little plastic kayak is light enough for me to sling easily into the back of my pickup truck, and to lug from the parking lot to whatever small beach I’ve found for my launch.
I assumed initially that I’d put my kayaking on hold when the winter cold set in, but I never did.
It turns out there’s a miraculous invention known as the “pogey” - a big neoprene mitt that fits over your hand and paddle - that keeps your hands toasty no matter the weather. A half-decent waterproof jacket and pants take care of the rest.
As for gentle ocean waters for a beginner to learn on, a Capital Region kayaker couldn’t be more blessed.
The Gorge. Portage Inlet. The Inner Harbour. Esquimalt Harbour. Saanich Inlet. Esquimalt Lagoon. Sooke basin. With basic paddling knowledge and even a rudimentary understanding of tides and weather, there are easily a couple dozen two- or three-hour paddles in our region suitable for a beginner.
I’ve made some bad calls, mind you. One particularly cold December day in Portage Inlet, I got stuck on the wrong side of surface ice blocking my route home, and then trapped in the middle of it. (No rescue necessary - I managed to hack my way through.)
Another time, I found myself paddling feverishly but barely moving while fighting a strong current near Sooke Harbour, after what had already been an exhausting couple of hours in choppy water.
But a tubby little plastic kayak turns out to be quite a stable fellow. Coupled with my healthy fear of the power of the ocean, that has made for very few scary moments.
If ducks are your thing, kayaking in the winter is a bird bonanza. Having limited most of my previous boating to summer months, I’d had no idea of the vast varieties of ducks that winter in our waters.
With summer now approaching, the scene has changed: the ducks largely gone, but ospreys, eagles and hawks now everywhere. Seals and otters are common viewing fare on every trip.
Even if nature isn’t your thing, kayaking has other pleasures. For one, you can’t believe the spectacular, over-the-top waterfront homes going up around our region.
A paddle from Brentwood Bay to Patricia Bay one day this week left me agog at the massive new houses along that route. There’s a kayak-based real estate service just waiting to be discovered, because there’s no more appealing way to view a waterfront mansion than from the water.
On the night of the winter solstice, Dec. 21, my partner and I slipped our kayaks into the Gorge to look at Christmas lights. I could see that short trip developing into an annual event if we could figure out a way to lure more waterfront homeowners into lighting up for the season.
So if you’ve wondered even a little about whether you might like kayaking, make this the year to test your theory. Serenity is a rare commodity in these clamorous times, and for me to have found it so close at hand has been a most wonderful gift.
See you on the water.
May 18, 2007
Being a woman of many enthusiasms, I was bound to stumble upon kayaking sooner or later.
I’d been curious about it for years. How can you grow up on an island without feeling the pull of being out on the water?
Boats had figured more prominently in my life in my younger years - the benefit of growing up in an era when Vancouver Island’s then-thriving logging and fishing industries put real money in people’s pockets.
But except for a canoe or two, it had never been me who’d owned those boats. Eventually there came a time when the only boating I was regularly experiencing was aboard a BC ferry, on a routine journey so familiar to me that it barely felt like being on the water at all.
Kayakers caught my eye throughout the Ferry Years, but I tended to write the sport off as something that would require more skill, knowledge and money than I was prepared to invest.
I guess they just looked so sleek and expert out there in their beautiful boats that I assumed I couldn’t easily become one of them.
Then came a sunny, warm weekend last September, when my partner and I finally acted on our much talked-about plans to rent kayaks for a couple hours. We launched into the Gorge with only the briefest of instructions around how to hold our paddles.
The love affair was on.
September turned out to be an ideal time to fall in love, what with it being the season of the sell-off in the world of rental kayaks. By the next weekend, we were the proud owners of two slightly used kayaks, paddles and life jackets, for less than $1,500 all in.
I’ve kayaked almost every weekend since then. It’s been a transforming experience.
My little plastic kayak is light enough for me to sling easily into the back of my pickup truck, and to lug from the parking lot to whatever small beach I’ve found for my launch.
I assumed initially that I’d put my kayaking on hold when the winter cold set in, but I never did.
It turns out there’s a miraculous invention known as the “pogey” - a big neoprene mitt that fits over your hand and paddle - that keeps your hands toasty no matter the weather. A half-decent waterproof jacket and pants take care of the rest.
As for gentle ocean waters for a beginner to learn on, a Capital Region kayaker couldn’t be more blessed.
The Gorge. Portage Inlet. The Inner Harbour. Esquimalt Harbour. Saanich Inlet. Esquimalt Lagoon. Sooke basin. With basic paddling knowledge and even a rudimentary understanding of tides and weather, there are easily a couple dozen two- or three-hour paddles in our region suitable for a beginner.
I’ve made some bad calls, mind you. One particularly cold December day in Portage Inlet, I got stuck on the wrong side of surface ice blocking my route home, and then trapped in the middle of it. (No rescue necessary - I managed to hack my way through.)
Another time, I found myself paddling feverishly but barely moving while fighting a strong current near Sooke Harbour, after what had already been an exhausting couple of hours in choppy water.
But a tubby little plastic kayak turns out to be quite a stable fellow. Coupled with my healthy fear of the power of the ocean, that has made for very few scary moments.
If ducks are your thing, kayaking in the winter is a bird bonanza. Having limited most of my previous boating to summer months, I’d had no idea of the vast varieties of ducks that winter in our waters.
With summer now approaching, the scene has changed: the ducks largely gone, but ospreys, eagles and hawks now everywhere. Seals and otters are common viewing fare on every trip.
Even if nature isn’t your thing, kayaking has other pleasures. For one, you can’t believe the spectacular, over-the-top waterfront homes going up around our region.
A paddle from Brentwood Bay to Patricia Bay one day this week left me agog at the massive new houses along that route. There’s a kayak-based real estate service just waiting to be discovered, because there’s no more appealing way to view a waterfront mansion than from the water.
On the night of the winter solstice, Dec. 21, my partner and I slipped our kayaks into the Gorge to look at Christmas lights. I could see that short trip developing into an annual event if we could figure out a way to lure more waterfront homeowners into lighting up for the season.
So if you’ve wondered even a little about whether you might like kayaking, make this the year to test your theory. Serenity is a rare commodity in these clamorous times, and for me to have found it so close at hand has been a most wonderful gift.
See you on the water.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Beware the spin
May 11, 2007
News flash: Vancouver’s safe-injection site causes more harm than good.
So says the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which last week reported “serious problems in the interpretation of findings” in a review of 10 studies about the site.
Research on the three-year-old site has to this point mostly been positive. Among other things, there’s been a drop in social disorder in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, an increase in the number of drug users wanting treatment, and successful interventions in 400-plus potentially fatal overdoses.
But prevention-network research director Colin Mangham contends the real picture is not nearly so rosy. He reviewed some of the studies and found that while they “give the impression the facility is successful. . . the research clearly shows a lack of progress, impact and success.”
Mangham’s findings were reported straight up by Canadian Press last week. They also made their way unchallenged into the on-line edition of Maclean’s magazine, CBC Radio, and some Canadian newspapers.
But as a number of intrepid bloggers have pointed out, the mainstream media outlets that took the CP story at its word did a disservice to anyone looking for all the facts.
A couple of rudimentary Google searches are all it takes to flush out some interesting details, as proven by the bloggers who looked a little deeper into the Mangham report.
Searching on the name of the group that wrote it, for instance, reveals that the organization is privately funded, abstinence-based, and headed by former Reform/Alliance MP Randy White. The vice-president of REAL Women Canada sits on the network’s board, as do representatives from a number of Christian groups.
Search on Mangham’s name and you’ll find that while he’s a genuine drug-policy researcher, his primary focus is abstinence.
His particular knowledge is around tobacco. Mangham runs the provincially funded Prevention Source BC, which aims to stop people from smoking.
Search on the name of the publication where Mangham’s report first ran, the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, and you’ll learn that it’s funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sitting on its editorial board are U.S. groups such as the Drug-Free Schools Coalition, the Drug Free America Foundation, and the National Drug Prevention Alliance.
The journal has published just two issues.
The first featured critiques of liberal marijuana policies. The second focused on harm-reduction programs like the safe-injection site, with headlines including “The Lure and Loss of Harm Reduction in UK Drug Policy and Practice,” and “Is it Harm Reduction or Harm Continuation?”
Nothing wrong with differing viewpoints on drug use and harm reduction, of course. A safe injection site is, after all, just a tiny piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing the harms of addiction.
Ultimately, the Manghams of the world want to prevent the many miseries caused by drugs. I can’t fault them for that.
But being able to weight the findings of those with something to say on this most vital issue is of critical importance. We can’t afford to keep on making wrong moves in our drug policy.
Health care. Justice. Human rights. Urban renewal. Personal safety. Child welfare. On all fronts, we’re feeling the impact of drug addiction. Add in the exponential effect of leaving a growing problem to fester unattended, and the future looks downright ugly.
So if we hope to do something about that, we need to be informed as never before. We need the facts, presented as often as possible without the spin of a special-interest group in the background.
We don’t need this forces-of-good/evil approach anymore when it comes to our drug policy. It’s not working. We need clear-eyed thinking and well-reasoned approaches, all of it based on proven, efficient strategies.
Hearing what people like Mangham have to say is part of that process. I’ve got no quarrel with some of his or Randy White’s thoughts on dealing with addiction, particularly around providing easy access to treatment for anyone who wants it.
But knowing how to weight the blizzard of “facts” we’re presented with on any given day requires knowing more about whose facts they are, and what’s the context.
So no problem with the mainstream media running a story about a literature review published in a fledgling anti-harm-reduction publication funded by U.S. anti-drug interests. Or that the author of the review is a long-time foe of harm-reduction strategies with the support of some of the most conservative groups in Canada.
But we really need to know all that going in. In this case, the bloggers made sure that we did. The mainstream media didn’t.
The lessons learned? Trust no one, me included. Verify your own facts. Know the sources of the information you’re using to form your opinion.
And in the interests of better Canadian drug policy, do it soon.
May 11, 2007
News flash: Vancouver’s safe-injection site causes more harm than good.
So says the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which last week reported “serious problems in the interpretation of findings” in a review of 10 studies about the site.
Research on the three-year-old site has to this point mostly been positive. Among other things, there’s been a drop in social disorder in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, an increase in the number of drug users wanting treatment, and successful interventions in 400-plus potentially fatal overdoses.
But prevention-network research director Colin Mangham contends the real picture is not nearly so rosy. He reviewed some of the studies and found that while they “give the impression the facility is successful. . . the research clearly shows a lack of progress, impact and success.”
Mangham’s findings were reported straight up by Canadian Press last week. They also made their way unchallenged into the on-line edition of Maclean’s magazine, CBC Radio, and some Canadian newspapers.
But as a number of intrepid bloggers have pointed out, the mainstream media outlets that took the CP story at its word did a disservice to anyone looking for all the facts.
A couple of rudimentary Google searches are all it takes to flush out some interesting details, as proven by the bloggers who looked a little deeper into the Mangham report.
Searching on the name of the group that wrote it, for instance, reveals that the organization is privately funded, abstinence-based, and headed by former Reform/Alliance MP Randy White. The vice-president of REAL Women Canada sits on the network’s board, as do representatives from a number of Christian groups.
Search on Mangham’s name and you’ll find that while he’s a genuine drug-policy researcher, his primary focus is abstinence.
His particular knowledge is around tobacco. Mangham runs the provincially funded Prevention Source BC, which aims to stop people from smoking.
Search on the name of the publication where Mangham’s report first ran, the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, and you’ll learn that it’s funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sitting on its editorial board are U.S. groups such as the Drug-Free Schools Coalition, the Drug Free America Foundation, and the National Drug Prevention Alliance.
The journal has published just two issues.
The first featured critiques of liberal marijuana policies. The second focused on harm-reduction programs like the safe-injection site, with headlines including “The Lure and Loss of Harm Reduction in UK Drug Policy and Practice,” and “Is it Harm Reduction or Harm Continuation?”
Nothing wrong with differing viewpoints on drug use and harm reduction, of course. A safe injection site is, after all, just a tiny piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing the harms of addiction.
Ultimately, the Manghams of the world want to prevent the many miseries caused by drugs. I can’t fault them for that.
But being able to weight the findings of those with something to say on this most vital issue is of critical importance. We can’t afford to keep on making wrong moves in our drug policy.
Health care. Justice. Human rights. Urban renewal. Personal safety. Child welfare. On all fronts, we’re feeling the impact of drug addiction. Add in the exponential effect of leaving a growing problem to fester unattended, and the future looks downright ugly.
So if we hope to do something about that, we need to be informed as never before. We need the facts, presented as often as possible without the spin of a special-interest group in the background.
We don’t need this forces-of-good/evil approach anymore when it comes to our drug policy. It’s not working. We need clear-eyed thinking and well-reasoned approaches, all of it based on proven, efficient strategies.
Hearing what people like Mangham have to say is part of that process. I’ve got no quarrel with some of his or Randy White’s thoughts on dealing with addiction, particularly around providing easy access to treatment for anyone who wants it.
But knowing how to weight the blizzard of “facts” we’re presented with on any given day requires knowing more about whose facts they are, and what’s the context.
So no problem with the mainstream media running a story about a literature review published in a fledgling anti-harm-reduction publication funded by U.S. anti-drug interests. Or that the author of the review is a long-time foe of harm-reduction strategies with the support of some of the most conservative groups in Canada.
But we really need to know all that going in. In this case, the bloggers made sure that we did. The mainstream media didn’t.
The lessons learned? Trust no one, me included. Verify your own facts. Know the sources of the information you’re using to form your opinion.
And in the interests of better Canadian drug policy, do it soon.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Don't tear down the Kinsol Trestle
May 5, 2007
People have been debating the future of the Kinsol Trestle for a year now. I admit to barely paying attention to a word of it.
I guess it just didn’t seem like something I needed to care about. But then my partner and I went to see the trestle for ourselves last Sunday.
It’s spectacular. Tearing it down would be a terrible thing. Count me an instant convert to the “save the Kinsol” movement.
Perhaps it’s a recent trip to Europe that has me thinking about the importance of preserving history.
Had our global ancestors been even a fraction as hasty as us in tearing down history, I’d have missed out on the amazing feeling of stepping into the past. Deep thanks to several millennia’s worth of taxpayers who have willingly borne the cost of history’s upkeep.
The pyramids of Mexico and Egypt. Greek ruins. Ancient churches. England’s Roman baths. Nothing you can read about them, or watch on television, can ever come close to experiencing them first-hand. There’s nothing like it.
Even the places where great ugliness has happened are spellbinding. They can be unbearably hard to look at - a concentration camp, the Ghanian slave prisons - but we need them to remind us of times when we did the unthinkable.
Like so many of the wonders of the world, the Kinsol Trestle is both marvel and tragedy.
The trestle is a beauty, and a wonderful reminder of B.C.’s past. On the day we visited, the tight little river valley that the trestle spans was sunny and inviting. We walked up and down, to see the trestle from all angles, and I could feel the tremendous vision and hard work that must have gone in to getting it built.
But men died building the massive structure. On that front, the trestle also serves as a reminder of the immense challenge it would have been in 1921 to build a structure so grand, high above the valley floor.
The trestle has been through a heck of a lot since being brought to life, the last 28 years of which have been quite ignominious. Abandoned by its former railway owners in 1979 and already in a state of disrepair, the trestle has been profoundly neglected in intervening years.
Its fate was sealed in a report last year that concluded it was too wrecked to fix. The province is planning to spend $1.5 million to tear it down, and another $1.6 million through the B.C. pathway program Local Motion to build a different bridge.
I’m no engineer, but even my untrained eye could see that parts of the trestle are in rough shape. I don’t know whether it’s realistic to restore it to working shape again.
But that doesn’t mean we have to tear it down. If it simply isn’t feasible to restore the Kinsol Trestle as a working pathway, then by all means, let’s build a different bridge.
But why does the trestle need to be torn down to accomplish that? We might just change our minds one day about a full restoration, or find other ways to fund the work. Why not repair the worst of the damage right now and leave the trestle standing?
New Democrat MLA John Horgan was quoted a year ago saying that getting across the river is “more important than preserving rotting timber.”
It needn’t be either/or. We can choose to get people across the river and preserve history at the same time. Building a new bridge for cyclists and pedestrians would, in fact, provide incomparable views of a preserved Kinsol Trestle.
And it might even save money. The Cowichan Valley Regional District figures it would cost $6.2 million to restore the existing trestle to working order, and $4.2 million if you started from scratch and built a two-thirds replica of the trestle instead.
We could save at least $1.5 million right off by not tearing the trestle down. Meanwhile, if the trestle remains in place where everyone can continue to gaze at it as they cross the valley on the new bridge, you can opt for a cheaper, functional bridge style rather than a costlier replica.
In the end, though, it isn’t really be about the money. It’s about respecting that a massive 86-year-old trestle is a sight to see, and living testimony to a time when B.C. had big trees, big dreams and endless amounts of crazy ambition. We owe a duty to the future to look after the legacies of the past.
Don’t take my word for it. Go see the trestle for yourself - it’s just past Shawnigan Lake, and easy to get to (www.kinsoltrestle.ca; click on “Map”).
The pictures don’t do it justice. Neither will a pile of rubble and a fancy new bridge marking the spot where the old trestle was torn down.
May 5, 2007
People have been debating the future of the Kinsol Trestle for a year now. I admit to barely paying attention to a word of it.
I guess it just didn’t seem like something I needed to care about. But then my partner and I went to see the trestle for ourselves last Sunday.
It’s spectacular. Tearing it down would be a terrible thing. Count me an instant convert to the “save the Kinsol” movement.
Perhaps it’s a recent trip to Europe that has me thinking about the importance of preserving history.
Had our global ancestors been even a fraction as hasty as us in tearing down history, I’d have missed out on the amazing feeling of stepping into the past. Deep thanks to several millennia’s worth of taxpayers who have willingly borne the cost of history’s upkeep.
The pyramids of Mexico and Egypt. Greek ruins. Ancient churches. England’s Roman baths. Nothing you can read about them, or watch on television, can ever come close to experiencing them first-hand. There’s nothing like it.
Even the places where great ugliness has happened are spellbinding. They can be unbearably hard to look at - a concentration camp, the Ghanian slave prisons - but we need them to remind us of times when we did the unthinkable.
Like so many of the wonders of the world, the Kinsol Trestle is both marvel and tragedy.
The trestle is a beauty, and a wonderful reminder of B.C.’s past. On the day we visited, the tight little river valley that the trestle spans was sunny and inviting. We walked up and down, to see the trestle from all angles, and I could feel the tremendous vision and hard work that must have gone in to getting it built.
But men died building the massive structure. On that front, the trestle also serves as a reminder of the immense challenge it would have been in 1921 to build a structure so grand, high above the valley floor.
The trestle has been through a heck of a lot since being brought to life, the last 28 years of which have been quite ignominious. Abandoned by its former railway owners in 1979 and already in a state of disrepair, the trestle has been profoundly neglected in intervening years.
Its fate was sealed in a report last year that concluded it was too wrecked to fix. The province is planning to spend $1.5 million to tear it down, and another $1.6 million through the B.C. pathway program Local Motion to build a different bridge.
I’m no engineer, but even my untrained eye could see that parts of the trestle are in rough shape. I don’t know whether it’s realistic to restore it to working shape again.
But that doesn’t mean we have to tear it down. If it simply isn’t feasible to restore the Kinsol Trestle as a working pathway, then by all means, let’s build a different bridge.
But why does the trestle need to be torn down to accomplish that? We might just change our minds one day about a full restoration, or find other ways to fund the work. Why not repair the worst of the damage right now and leave the trestle standing?
New Democrat MLA John Horgan was quoted a year ago saying that getting across the river is “more important than preserving rotting timber.”
It needn’t be either/or. We can choose to get people across the river and preserve history at the same time. Building a new bridge for cyclists and pedestrians would, in fact, provide incomparable views of a preserved Kinsol Trestle.
And it might even save money. The Cowichan Valley Regional District figures it would cost $6.2 million to restore the existing trestle to working order, and $4.2 million if you started from scratch and built a two-thirds replica of the trestle instead.
We could save at least $1.5 million right off by not tearing the trestle down. Meanwhile, if the trestle remains in place where everyone can continue to gaze at it as they cross the valley on the new bridge, you can opt for a cheaper, functional bridge style rather than a costlier replica.
In the end, though, it isn’t really be about the money. It’s about respecting that a massive 86-year-old trestle is a sight to see, and living testimony to a time when B.C. had big trees, big dreams and endless amounts of crazy ambition. We owe a duty to the future to look after the legacies of the past.
Don’t take my word for it. Go see the trestle for yourself - it’s just past Shawnigan Lake, and easy to get to (www.kinsoltrestle.ca; click on “Map”).
The pictures don’t do it justice. Neither will a pile of rubble and a fancy new bridge marking the spot where the old trestle was torn down.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Change the system to get more women into politics
Apr. 27, 2007
So the debate around how to get more women into politics is back in the news again. I have to admit, it’s much harder to feel enthusiasm for the fight this time around, having already seen how the story ended last time.
I note that we’re currently at the point in the discussion where we’re trying to decide whether it’s worth it to infringe on the democratic election process in order to jump-start the number of women elected to government.
I remember the previous discussion well - what was it, 10 or 15 years ago now? Oh, we had a good go at it, to the point that the federal Liberals did eventually bypass the nomination process to hand-pick female candidates in a few ridings.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s a vital discussion to have.
After all, what could be more vital to fair and democratic governance than political representation that mirrored the mix of the Canadian population? I’d love it if our politicians looked more like us on all fronts.
But like I said, enough years have gone by since then that I know how the story ends - right back here, with all of us talking about the same issues like none of it ever happened.
Our typical pattern is to toss the issue around for a few years and then forget all about it. A brief flurry of activity pops up the rate of female candidacy for one election, but efforts aren’t sustained enough to create genuine change.
Theories abound as to why female politicians are so scarce in Canada, particularly at the federal level. Take your pick of opinions: That it’s because the electorate doesn’t vote for them; or the political parties don’t support them; or that they hate the life; or are preoccupied with child-rearing.
Likely there’s some truth in all of those. But I think the bigger problem is the political system itself. It’s not only built to thwart any attempts to change it, but fewer and fewer Canadians are paying attention to begin with. If we actually want change, that has to end.
So if our country truly wanted to get more women involved in politics, the first step in my mind would be electoral reform. As B.C. already knows from dabbling with the concept, there are any number of voting systems around the world that yield more gender diversity than ours.
Strategies like fixing nomination meetings can be another way of getting at the problem. But they’re short-term fixes, and justifiably controversial. Unless we still want to be fussing about this in 2020, maybe it would be better to strive for more fundamental changes - ones that would increase the odds for any number of underrepresented groups.
Somewhere out there is a democratic electoral system that’s just right for us. And here’s a bonus: We already know a heck of a lot about the options, thanks to the brilliant work of the citizens’ commission on electoral reform in 2004.
But time’s a-wasting. We can’t afford to fritter it away on tired old 15-year-old arguments as to the rights and wrongs of leveraging women into politics.
Do we need more women in politics? Absolutely.
Had there been more women in politics from the start, I’m guessing it never would have been legal in Canada for a husband to rape his wife. Instead, it took until 1984 to make that happen.
And women obviously wouldn’t have been shut out of the voting process in Canada’s early years if we’d actually been part of it in the beginning. We’d likely have assumed control over our own bodies much sooner.
Wage inequities? Wouldn’t have happened. Nurses being fired if they chose to marry? Nope. Decades of problems with sexual harassment in the workplace? Probably not.
In defence of the existing political process, those changes did eventually come about. Just because men rule the world doesn’t mean that everything turns out badly.
But each victory is pretty hollow when you consider that all we’re trying to do is catch up to men. We started at the bottom and think it’s heavenly to be halfway up, when what we ought to be doing is claiming our place as equals. Enough with this wishful thinking that such transformation is possible within our current political and voting processes.
Women could, of course, continue to try to slug it out with the boys. Take it like a man. Look at the inroads that gays and ethnic minorities made into politics in the last couple of decades - what’s stopping women?
Clearly, something is. Gays and minorities fought hard for their gains, but at least they saw some. Women are still lost in the trenches. Despite decades of effort, we still account for just 20 to 25 per cent of provincial and federal elected seats, and are even rarer in cabinet.
Maybe that really is a sign that the female sex isn’t compatible with the rigours of the Canadian political scene. So let’s change the scene.
Apr. 27, 2007
So the debate around how to get more women into politics is back in the news again. I have to admit, it’s much harder to feel enthusiasm for the fight this time around, having already seen how the story ended last time.
I note that we’re currently at the point in the discussion where we’re trying to decide whether it’s worth it to infringe on the democratic election process in order to jump-start the number of women elected to government.
I remember the previous discussion well - what was it, 10 or 15 years ago now? Oh, we had a good go at it, to the point that the federal Liberals did eventually bypass the nomination process to hand-pick female candidates in a few ridings.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s a vital discussion to have.
After all, what could be more vital to fair and democratic governance than political representation that mirrored the mix of the Canadian population? I’d love it if our politicians looked more like us on all fronts.
But like I said, enough years have gone by since then that I know how the story ends - right back here, with all of us talking about the same issues like none of it ever happened.
Our typical pattern is to toss the issue around for a few years and then forget all about it. A brief flurry of activity pops up the rate of female candidacy for one election, but efforts aren’t sustained enough to create genuine change.
Theories abound as to why female politicians are so scarce in Canada, particularly at the federal level. Take your pick of opinions: That it’s because the electorate doesn’t vote for them; or the political parties don’t support them; or that they hate the life; or are preoccupied with child-rearing.
Likely there’s some truth in all of those. But I think the bigger problem is the political system itself. It’s not only built to thwart any attempts to change it, but fewer and fewer Canadians are paying attention to begin with. If we actually want change, that has to end.
So if our country truly wanted to get more women involved in politics, the first step in my mind would be electoral reform. As B.C. already knows from dabbling with the concept, there are any number of voting systems around the world that yield more gender diversity than ours.
Strategies like fixing nomination meetings can be another way of getting at the problem. But they’re short-term fixes, and justifiably controversial. Unless we still want to be fussing about this in 2020, maybe it would be better to strive for more fundamental changes - ones that would increase the odds for any number of underrepresented groups.
Somewhere out there is a democratic electoral system that’s just right for us. And here’s a bonus: We already know a heck of a lot about the options, thanks to the brilliant work of the citizens’ commission on electoral reform in 2004.
But time’s a-wasting. We can’t afford to fritter it away on tired old 15-year-old arguments as to the rights and wrongs of leveraging women into politics.
Do we need more women in politics? Absolutely.
Had there been more women in politics from the start, I’m guessing it never would have been legal in Canada for a husband to rape his wife. Instead, it took until 1984 to make that happen.
And women obviously wouldn’t have been shut out of the voting process in Canada’s early years if we’d actually been part of it in the beginning. We’d likely have assumed control over our own bodies much sooner.
Wage inequities? Wouldn’t have happened. Nurses being fired if they chose to marry? Nope. Decades of problems with sexual harassment in the workplace? Probably not.
In defence of the existing political process, those changes did eventually come about. Just because men rule the world doesn’t mean that everything turns out badly.
But each victory is pretty hollow when you consider that all we’re trying to do is catch up to men. We started at the bottom and think it’s heavenly to be halfway up, when what we ought to be doing is claiming our place as equals. Enough with this wishful thinking that such transformation is possible within our current political and voting processes.
Women could, of course, continue to try to slug it out with the boys. Take it like a man. Look at the inroads that gays and ethnic minorities made into politics in the last couple of decades - what’s stopping women?
Clearly, something is. Gays and minorities fought hard for their gains, but at least they saw some. Women are still lost in the trenches. Despite decades of effort, we still account for just 20 to 25 per cent of provincial and federal elected seats, and are even rarer in cabinet.
Maybe that really is a sign that the female sex isn’t compatible with the rigours of the Canadian political scene. So let’s change the scene.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)