We shine at solving non-problems
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness"
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Redirect bottles and cans to binners
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Problems are fixed when people have a place to live
April 11, 2008
They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son.
He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was.
He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above).
The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but Ishmael figures it was actually about 80. The campers lived on the Toronto lakefront for three years on vacant property owned by Home Depot before being evicted in 2002.
Ishmael had moved in after finding himself out of rent money and in between jobs, and stayed for a year and a half. For him, it was the perfect situation, and in his opinion far more cost-effective than the “current idiocy” of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of homelessness without ever solving the problems.
“When I was in Toronto, it cost $80 a night to keep me at the Salvation Army for two and a half years. That’s 1,000 nights - $80,000 in all - yet I was still as homeless on the day I left as when I arrived,” he says. “Here in Victoria, they’ve got a van that goes around at night handing out soup and sandwiches. But it costs [taxpayers] $12 a head for that soup and sandwich. I could buy the same thing at Quizno’s for half the price.”
These days, Ishmael spends virtually all of his daytime hours at the UVic library. He’s found a place to sleep in the Western Communities, but needs to keep a low profile so the property owner doesn’t spot him. So every day he hops a bus to the university and spends long hours browsing the library stacks.
“I don’t smoke, don’t do dope, don’t drink. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow, so I’m doing this. And I am a bookworm, so it suits me,” says Ishmael, whose favourite writer is Thomas Jefferson. “I’ve got quite a book collection that I drag around with me, including some rare and hard-to-find volumes.”
He’s not sure why he lives like he does, but recognized years ago that he could no longer count on holding down a job long enough to pay his rent.
It wasn’t always that way. After immigrating to Canada from Germany in 1983, he landed a job quickly and was able to buy himself a house within a couple of years.
“But in 1990, I just kind of died,” he says. “They tell me I’m somebody who fell between the cracks. There’s a reason for every one of us to be on the street. A lot of us are really 12-year-old children in adult bodies.”
Ishmael jokes that he was a drifter throughout the 1990s, “then a new century started and I became a vagrant.” But he works when he can, and is currently making do on savings from the $7,000 he earned last year doing odd jobs. He refuses to go on welfare; socialism is “the philosophy of the parasite,” he tells me emphatically.
He’s 51 now, and no longer sure that his 2005 move to B.C. was a good idea. He’d ridden his bicycle from Toronto to Vancouver - a 44-day sojourn - after seeing televised images of the city and finding himself drawn to it.
But things haven’t worked out as planned. He built another tiny house in the woods of Metchosin, but that’s lost to him now. He swapped farm labour for a small wage and a place to live on the Peninsula for a time, but then he and the owner got into an argument and that was that. He’s thinking he might end up back in Toronto if he can find the bus fare, and get a room again at the Salvation Army.
I ask him what he’d suggest for readers wanting to know what part they can play in ending homelessness. Hire people, he says. (Call Cool Aid’s Community Casual Labour Pool at 388-9296 for more information.)
And if you’ve got a little bit of land where a wanderer might settle for a while, he’s all ears.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Thanks for the great feedback on homeless issues!
April 4, 2008
Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness.
All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening.
Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still are would even know to take part!)
It was wonderful to hear what people in our community are already doing to bring an end to this heap of problems we call homelessness.
They’re organizing study groups. Launching church initiatives. Volunteering at street-serving agencies. Giving money. Writing letters to government. Renting their suites to somebody who really needs it, even if the new tenant is a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes. Reading up on the issues, and raising the consciousness of friends and family.
They passed along terrific suggestions on ways for me to keep writing about the issues without turning readers off. Here are a few key ones, all of which I’ll be heeding:
Keep up the stories, but give us some successes once in a while. I hadn’t intended to be a downer every week, but somehow it happened. I’ve always been a bit of a gloomy thing in terms of what attracts me as a writer, and that has understandably turned out to be a bit of a bummer for readers.
So I’m going to work harder at including more columns on what’s working out there, as opposed to what’s not.
Don’t expect typical success stories - ones in which the person finds a great place to live, recovers fully from an addiction, stabilizes in his mental illness, gets a job, reconnects with his family and lives happily ever after. But at the very least I’ll bring you more happy-for-now stories.
I also want to be more attentive to all sides of the issue, and include the stories of people like the frustrated downtown merchant who’s replacing her store’s plate-glass window for the third time in four months.
Mix it up a little. People encouraged me to keep a focus on street issues, but to write about other things from time to time - maybe even something light-hearted once in a while. Great advice. More variety in my topics will keep things fresh, both for readers and me.
One reader suggested I’d gotten too close to the issue to maintain journalistic objectivity. Could be, as the issues dominate my volunteer life as well and I sometimes feel like all I ever talk about is homelessness, addiction and the sex trade. It’s probably not healthy.
Dump the “homeless” label. Readers rightly noted that “homelessness” is in fact just one characteristic of a wide variety of problems, the vast majority of which are much more complex than the mere need to house people (although that would certainly be a heck of a good start).
The streets are Ground Zero for problems as diverse as mental health, cognitive ability, criminal behaviour, physical injury, work injury, trauma, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, hippie-kid syndrome, and bad luck. Solutions need to fit the problems, and that requires knowing exactly what those problems are.
Tell us how to help. This was hands-down the most common request. There’s clearly a lot of energy and urgency in our community for making things happen, but people need help in figuring out how to connect to the issue.
I’ll put some serious thought into that in the next while. And if you’ve already found a meaningful way to make a difference, please feel free to pass along what you’re doing so I can share those ideas with other readers. But do remember that while individual effort is a powerful thing, we still need to keep the pressure on all levels of government to restore public health, civil order and human dignity in our communities.
I was particularly touched by readers’ concern for me, and whether I was losing heart. One elderly woman unfamiliar with e-mail got her daughter in Vancouver to send me a message on her behalf to cheer me up.
Believe me, I’m cheered. Thanks so much for your kind words and big hearts.
April 4, 2008
Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness.
All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening.
Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still are would even know to take part!)
It was wonderful to hear what people in our community are already doing to bring an end to this heap of problems we call homelessness.
They’re organizing study groups. Launching church initiatives. Volunteering at street-serving agencies. Giving money. Writing letters to government. Renting their suites to somebody who really needs it, even if the new tenant is a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes. Reading up on the issues, and raising the consciousness of friends and family.
They passed along terrific suggestions on ways for me to keep writing about the issues without turning readers off. Here are a few key ones, all of which I’ll be heeding:
Keep up the stories, but give us some successes once in a while. I hadn’t intended to be a downer every week, but somehow it happened. I’ve always been a bit of a gloomy thing in terms of what attracts me as a writer, and that has understandably turned out to be a bit of a bummer for readers.
So I’m going to work harder at including more columns on what’s working out there, as opposed to what’s not.
Don’t expect typical success stories - ones in which the person finds a great place to live, recovers fully from an addiction, stabilizes in his mental illness, gets a job, reconnects with his family and lives happily ever after. But at the very least I’ll bring you more happy-for-now stories.
I also want to be more attentive to all sides of the issue, and include the stories of people like the frustrated downtown merchant who’s replacing her store’s plate-glass window for the third time in four months.
Mix it up a little. People encouraged me to keep a focus on street issues, but to write about other things from time to time - maybe even something light-hearted once in a while. Great advice. More variety in my topics will keep things fresh, both for readers and me.
One reader suggested I’d gotten too close to the issue to maintain journalistic objectivity. Could be, as the issues dominate my volunteer life as well and I sometimes feel like all I ever talk about is homelessness, addiction and the sex trade. It’s probably not healthy.
Dump the “homeless” label. Readers rightly noted that “homelessness” is in fact just one characteristic of a wide variety of problems, the vast majority of which are much more complex than the mere need to house people (although that would certainly be a heck of a good start).
The streets are Ground Zero for problems as diverse as mental health, cognitive ability, criminal behaviour, physical injury, work injury, trauma, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, hippie-kid syndrome, and bad luck. Solutions need to fit the problems, and that requires knowing exactly what those problems are.
Tell us how to help. This was hands-down the most common request. There’s clearly a lot of energy and urgency in our community for making things happen, but people need help in figuring out how to connect to the issue.
I’ll put some serious thought into that in the next while. And if you’ve already found a meaningful way to make a difference, please feel free to pass along what you’re doing so I can share those ideas with other readers. But do remember that while individual effort is a powerful thing, we still need to keep the pressure on all levels of government to restore public health, civil order and human dignity in our communities.
I was particularly touched by readers’ concern for me, and whether I was losing heart. One elderly woman unfamiliar with e-mail got her daughter in Vancouver to send me a message on her behalf to cheer me up.
Believe me, I’m cheered. Thanks so much for your kind words and big hearts.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Banging my head on the homeless wall
March 28, 2008
For the 12 years I’ve been a columnist, I’ve worked at trying to keep my topics diverse. I put a lot of importance on variety, having always figured readers tire quickly of a one-trick pony.
So it hasn’t been an easy choice to settle exclusively on homelessness these past five months. I’m still not sure what I hoped to accomplish by doing it, or whether anything will change as a result. That last part is probably what worries me the most.
What I hoped would happen was that the stories I told would somehow play a part in moving things along around street issues - that people would read them and come to understand how 1,500 people have ended up living on our streets, and how little of it has to do with them being too lazy to get a job.
But are people reading? Are the unconvinced being swayed? Has anything changed? Such are the questions that keep a columnist up at night.
Those who share my passion for the issue would presumably agree with my current column focus. But if you’re writing about an issue as an activist, the real challenge is to convince the unconvinced. That hinges on getting people to read what you have to say - no small feat when you’re writing regularly about something they didn’t want to hear about in the first place.
I figured I’d try to write about homelessness for a year, starting with the series I did for the Times-Colonist last November. But I’ve already heard from some readers that I’ve become “boring.” Feedback is dwindling, and so are the hits to my blog. If readers are shutting down around me, what is that telling me?
And yet I really am completely on fire about the issues. I continue to believe that in Victoria and any number of other B.C. communities grappling with the same issues, we’re dangerously close to losing the fight. I’m heartened by the work coming out of the mayor’s task force on homelessness, but by God, these are disturbing times.
If you saw disaster coming, wouldn’t you want to get the word out? As someone blessed with the privilege of a high-profile weekly platform in the daily paper, shouldn’t I be doing what I can do to keep homelessness in the public eye?
But it all comes back to whether anyone’s listening. If they’re not, then it’s all just words into the wind.
A journalist friend of mine tells a haunting light-bulb joke that plays into one of my great fears:
Q. How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. Journalists have never changed anything.
Ouch. It’s not really true, of course: I’ve seen any number of stories featured in the media that brought about positive change. And when the media decide to focus their intense gaze on an issue, the impact can be dramatic. Just look at what CanWest Global Communications’ national focus on literacy these past six years has done to raise awareness and funds for that issue.
But can you sustain change around less appealing social causes just by keeping them in the news? With many years invested to trying to effect change through the media, I’d obviously like to think it’s possible.
But then a hot potato surfaces - the relocation of the needle exchange being a recent example - and it’s all out the window. And it gets me wondering what’s gained by years of sophisticated discussions around the importance of, say, needle exchanges, if we still fall apart the moment we try to figure out where to put one.
So here I sit, betwixt and between on whether writing about homelessness every week is actually enlightening readers and advancing the cause, or just pushing me and my pet issue into the land of the never-read.
I even got into a big argument with a homeless guy a while ago over this issue. He stopped me on the street and told me I was just another cog in the “big machine” making money off the homeless without doing anything to actually change things.
I was wounded, and asked what he thought would happen if everybody just quit writing about homelessness. “Nothing ,” he said, “which is exactly what’s happening anyway.” Point taken.
My passion for the issue will keep me active behind the scenes no matter what, but I’d like to have a better sense of whether my writing about it every week is helping or hurting the cause. I’d love to hear from you either way - send me an e-mail at patersoncommunications@gmail.com.
Setting the record straight: I made a mistake in my column last week about a family grappling with addiction. The cost for a month of addiction treatment at a private facility here on the Island was $10,000, not $37,000. My apologies - I misheard the number.
March 28, 2008
For the 12 years I’ve been a columnist, I’ve worked at trying to keep my topics diverse. I put a lot of importance on variety, having always figured readers tire quickly of a one-trick pony.
So it hasn’t been an easy choice to settle exclusively on homelessness these past five months. I’m still not sure what I hoped to accomplish by doing it, or whether anything will change as a result. That last part is probably what worries me the most.
What I hoped would happen was that the stories I told would somehow play a part in moving things along around street issues - that people would read them and come to understand how 1,500 people have ended up living on our streets, and how little of it has to do with them being too lazy to get a job.
But are people reading? Are the unconvinced being swayed? Has anything changed? Such are the questions that keep a columnist up at night.
Those who share my passion for the issue would presumably agree with my current column focus. But if you’re writing about an issue as an activist, the real challenge is to convince the unconvinced. That hinges on getting people to read what you have to say - no small feat when you’re writing regularly about something they didn’t want to hear about in the first place.
I figured I’d try to write about homelessness for a year, starting with the series I did for the Times-Colonist last November. But I’ve already heard from some readers that I’ve become “boring.” Feedback is dwindling, and so are the hits to my blog. If readers are shutting down around me, what is that telling me?
And yet I really am completely on fire about the issues. I continue to believe that in Victoria and any number of other B.C. communities grappling with the same issues, we’re dangerously close to losing the fight. I’m heartened by the work coming out of the mayor’s task force on homelessness, but by God, these are disturbing times.
If you saw disaster coming, wouldn’t you want to get the word out? As someone blessed with the privilege of a high-profile weekly platform in the daily paper, shouldn’t I be doing what I can do to keep homelessness in the public eye?
But it all comes back to whether anyone’s listening. If they’re not, then it’s all just words into the wind.
A journalist friend of mine tells a haunting light-bulb joke that plays into one of my great fears:
Q. How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. Journalists have never changed anything.
Ouch. It’s not really true, of course: I’ve seen any number of stories featured in the media that brought about positive change. And when the media decide to focus their intense gaze on an issue, the impact can be dramatic. Just look at what CanWest Global Communications’ national focus on literacy these past six years has done to raise awareness and funds for that issue.
But can you sustain change around less appealing social causes just by keeping them in the news? With many years invested to trying to effect change through the media, I’d obviously like to think it’s possible.
But then a hot potato surfaces - the relocation of the needle exchange being a recent example - and it’s all out the window. And it gets me wondering what’s gained by years of sophisticated discussions around the importance of, say, needle exchanges, if we still fall apart the moment we try to figure out where to put one.
So here I sit, betwixt and between on whether writing about homelessness every week is actually enlightening readers and advancing the cause, or just pushing me and my pet issue into the land of the never-read.
I even got into a big argument with a homeless guy a while ago over this issue. He stopped me on the street and told me I was just another cog in the “big machine” making money off the homeless without doing anything to actually change things.
I was wounded, and asked what he thought would happen if everybody just quit writing about homelessness. “Nothing ,” he said, “which is exactly what’s happening anyway.” Point taken.
My passion for the issue will keep me active behind the scenes no matter what, but I’d like to have a better sense of whether my writing about it every week is helping or hurting the cause. I’d love to hear from you either way - send me an e-mail at patersoncommunications@gmail.com.
Setting the record straight: I made a mistake in my column last week about a family grappling with addiction. The cost for a month of addiction treatment at a private facility here on the Island was $10,000, not $37,000. My apologies - I misheard the number.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Family devastated by late-life addiction
March 21, 2008
We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It’s a tight fit for two in the tiny seniors’ apartment.
She’ll soon be 77, and up until a couple years ago believed that she’d reached a point in her life where things had more or less settled out. With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking forward to an uneventful old age.
Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family’s annual campout in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son told her the problem was cocaine.
She didn’t believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia to visit that same year, and her son showed up looking sick in a way that really alarmed her. “That’s when I started to wonder,” she acknowledges now.
As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addiction to crack cocaine. She doesn’t know when or why he started using the drug, but by that summer his problems were frighteningly obvious.
It’s been a hard ride down ever since. In short order, the man lost his wife, his four kids, and his job. He lost his house - sold off as part of the divorce - then blew every cent of his share of the proceeds on crack.
He hasn’t yet fallen to the streets. But that’s only because one of his sisters simply won’t let that happen, even if it means going down to Centennial Square herself time and again to bring her exhausted, sick brother home to her house.
Desperate to help him, the family scrounged up $37,000 for a month of treatment at a private addiction facility. He was a “star” participant while in the program, says his mom, but relapsed shortly after getting out.
She knows there has to be an explanation for how her otherwise straight-arrow son fell headlong into the abyss. He was working too hard, she suspects. He’s got some ghosts from childhood that she only recently found out about.
Still, she admits she didn’t see any of it coming.
“Of all of us, he’s always been the one who drinks the least,” she says. “I can’t understand why he ever would have tried crack - he doesn’t even smoke.”
“All his life, he’s held down a job, and sometimes another small job on the side, too. He’s a bright, intelligent man - even now, we’ll meet for lunch and I can’t believe how quick and bright he is. And he’s a wonderful father.”
She’s heard conflicting advice from friends and family about how to handle her son’s addiction. Some have told her that she’s “enabling” him by giving him money and rescuing him from the streets. Their theory is that addicts need to hit bottom before they get well, and that she’s preventing her son from doing that.
But she can’t imagine withdrawing her support. “You remember that old saying from the ‘70s about how if you loved someone, you’d set them free?” she asks. “I think for addicts, if you love them, you never set them free.”
Her other children are sharply divided over how much support their brother deserves, and upset at the chaos and stress his addiction has caused within the family. The annual family campout hasn’t happened since that fateful summer when her son lost his temper.
“Nobody can possibly understand how addiction impacts a family until it’s them,” says the woman, who has dipped heavily into her retirement savings in an attempt to help her son.
“You can’t imagine the sleepless nights I have. I’ll lie in bed thinking of all the things that could be happening to him. To know he’s out there, where bad things are happening all the time - I just don’t know what to do.”
So she holds on, hoping against hope that a mother’s full-on love will be enough.
She tells a story of her daughter going down to the streets one morning to rescue her brother yet again, and of how long it took to rouse him from his deep, dark sleep. The people he was with - all in the grips of their own addictions - watched in silence as his sister repeatedly called his name.
“Nobody said anything,” the mother recalls, “but my daughter was struck by the feeling that all of them wished they had somebody to come for them, too. All these men out there, so lost.”
March 21, 2008
We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It’s a tight fit for two in the tiny seniors’ apartment.
She’ll soon be 77, and up until a couple years ago believed that she’d reached a point in her life where things had more or less settled out. With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking forward to an uneventful old age.
Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family’s annual campout in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son told her the problem was cocaine.
She didn’t believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia to visit that same year, and her son showed up looking sick in a way that really alarmed her. “That’s when I started to wonder,” she acknowledges now.
As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addiction to crack cocaine. She doesn’t know when or why he started using the drug, but by that summer his problems were frighteningly obvious.
It’s been a hard ride down ever since. In short order, the man lost his wife, his four kids, and his job. He lost his house - sold off as part of the divorce - then blew every cent of his share of the proceeds on crack.
He hasn’t yet fallen to the streets. But that’s only because one of his sisters simply won’t let that happen, even if it means going down to Centennial Square herself time and again to bring her exhausted, sick brother home to her house.
Desperate to help him, the family scrounged up $37,000 for a month of treatment at a private addiction facility. He was a “star” participant while in the program, says his mom, but relapsed shortly after getting out.
She knows there has to be an explanation for how her otherwise straight-arrow son fell headlong into the abyss. He was working too hard, she suspects. He’s got some ghosts from childhood that she only recently found out about.
Still, she admits she didn’t see any of it coming.
“Of all of us, he’s always been the one who drinks the least,” she says. “I can’t understand why he ever would have tried crack - he doesn’t even smoke.”
“All his life, he’s held down a job, and sometimes another small job on the side, too. He’s a bright, intelligent man - even now, we’ll meet for lunch and I can’t believe how quick and bright he is. And he’s a wonderful father.”
She’s heard conflicting advice from friends and family about how to handle her son’s addiction. Some have told her that she’s “enabling” him by giving him money and rescuing him from the streets. Their theory is that addicts need to hit bottom before they get well, and that she’s preventing her son from doing that.
But she can’t imagine withdrawing her support. “You remember that old saying from the ‘70s about how if you loved someone, you’d set them free?” she asks. “I think for addicts, if you love them, you never set them free.”
Her other children are sharply divided over how much support their brother deserves, and upset at the chaos and stress his addiction has caused within the family. The annual family campout hasn’t happened since that fateful summer when her son lost his temper.
“Nobody can possibly understand how addiction impacts a family until it’s them,” says the woman, who has dipped heavily into her retirement savings in an attempt to help her son.
“You can’t imagine the sleepless nights I have. I’ll lie in bed thinking of all the things that could be happening to him. To know he’s out there, where bad things are happening all the time - I just don’t know what to do.”
So she holds on, hoping against hope that a mother’s full-on love will be enough.
She tells a story of her daughter going down to the streets one morning to rescue her brother yet again, and of how long it took to rouse him from his deep, dark sleep. The people he was with - all in the grips of their own addictions - watched in silence as his sister repeatedly called his name.
“Nobody said anything,” the mother recalls, “but my daughter was struck by the feeling that all of them wished they had somebody to come for them, too. All these men out there, so lost.”
Lessons from Mexico on homelessness
March 14, 2008
Mexico has had my heart for the better part of 10 years now, so I’m no longer surprised at a feeling of coming “home” any time I holiday there.
But given my current fascination with all things homeless, my most recent holiday down south also brought to my attention the dramatic differences in the way our two countries handle poverty issues.
Mexico is on its way up economically, but it’s got a long way to go before its citizens have it as good as a typical Canadian. While the babies aren’t dying as often and people are living much longer, Mexico remains a country with considerable problems.
Still, there are lessons to be learned from Mexico around managing homelessness. When a region as privileged as ours has more visible evidence of poverty than a developing nation like Mexico, that’s a sign that something’s seriously amiss.
Life is no holiday for a lot of Mexicans, so I want to be careful not to come across as a Pollyanna type waxing on about a “poor but happy” nation that cares deeply about its people.
The gross national income is a meagre $7,310 a year in Mexico, for instance, compared to $32,600 in Canada. Infant mortality rates are much improved over the last three decades, but Mexican children are still more than four times as likely to die before their fifth birthday as are Canadian children.
Child labour is common. I’ve seen kids as young as three trailing their moms along a hot tourist beach hawking jewellery to holidayers. In fact, UNICEF estimates that 16 per cent of Mexican kids age five to 14 are in the workforce.
The water supply is unstable, and often undrinkable. The roads are beautiful wherever the tourists and rich people are, and rough and unpredictable everywhere else. Poverty is so widespread that it’s essentially the rule rather than the exception; five per cent of Mexicans live on less than $1 a day.
And yet you can still walk down the street - any street - without seeing a single person sleeping in a doorway. Panhandlers are scarce, and their ranks generally limited to the most disabled. In terms of drugs and alcohol, it’s tourists rather than locals who you’re most likely to see intoxicated on the street.
There’d be any number of reasons for all of that, so I’ll avoid romanticizing on that front as well. But to me the primary difference is that in Mexico, poor people are at least given the freedom to figure their own way out of homelessness.
In Mexico, people living in the most extreme poverty can always find some wreck of a shed somewhere to squat in. If they can scratch up enough money for a few concrete blocks and a piece of tin for the roof, there’s always someplace in town where they’re able to set it up.
If they can figure out a way to make a few pesos, they’re free to do so. Some end up selling gum and bobble-headed toy turtles to tourists. Others hawk homemade tamales on local buses, with little fear of being turned in for a FoodSafe violation.
Here in Greater Victoria, we’ve taken the opposite approach. We’ve flushed everyone onto the streets where we can see them and left them to be beggars.
With the best of intentions, we’ve rid the city of disreputable rooming houses and slum motels. We’ve cracked down on shacks under the bridge and makeshift camps in our parks. We’ve torn down tired old apartments and replaced them with million-dollar condos.
We’ve rousted people from every cubbyhole. Shut down the beach campers. Gentrified the neighbourhoods. Torn apart every cardboard shack. Nobody in Victoria would ever get away with trying to make a few bucks selling sandwiches out of their sports bag; even the squeegee guy trying to clean a few car windows for change soon finds himself arrested.
The result: Our social failings have been laid bare for all to see, and street-level enterprise extinguished. Mexico is the truly poorer nation, but it’s our sparkling little city by the sea that wears its poverty most openly.
The court case over camping in our public parks speaks to the heart of the issue. Do we have the legal right to deny people a home in our parks when we aren’t offering them any alternatives? I’ve never seen people camping in Mexican parks, but I suspect that’s because they don’t have to.
I’m counting on our community to end homelessness in coming years. But for the time being we need strategies for living with it, cardboard shacks and all.
March 14, 2008
Mexico has had my heart for the better part of 10 years now, so I’m no longer surprised at a feeling of coming “home” any time I holiday there.
But given my current fascination with all things homeless, my most recent holiday down south also brought to my attention the dramatic differences in the way our two countries handle poverty issues.
Mexico is on its way up economically, but it’s got a long way to go before its citizens have it as good as a typical Canadian. While the babies aren’t dying as often and people are living much longer, Mexico remains a country with considerable problems.
Still, there are lessons to be learned from Mexico around managing homelessness. When a region as privileged as ours has more visible evidence of poverty than a developing nation like Mexico, that’s a sign that something’s seriously amiss.
Life is no holiday for a lot of Mexicans, so I want to be careful not to come across as a Pollyanna type waxing on about a “poor but happy” nation that cares deeply about its people.
The gross national income is a meagre $7,310 a year in Mexico, for instance, compared to $32,600 in Canada. Infant mortality rates are much improved over the last three decades, but Mexican children are still more than four times as likely to die before their fifth birthday as are Canadian children.
Child labour is common. I’ve seen kids as young as three trailing their moms along a hot tourist beach hawking jewellery to holidayers. In fact, UNICEF estimates that 16 per cent of Mexican kids age five to 14 are in the workforce.
The water supply is unstable, and often undrinkable. The roads are beautiful wherever the tourists and rich people are, and rough and unpredictable everywhere else. Poverty is so widespread that it’s essentially the rule rather than the exception; five per cent of Mexicans live on less than $1 a day.
And yet you can still walk down the street - any street - without seeing a single person sleeping in a doorway. Panhandlers are scarce, and their ranks generally limited to the most disabled. In terms of drugs and alcohol, it’s tourists rather than locals who you’re most likely to see intoxicated on the street.
There’d be any number of reasons for all of that, so I’ll avoid romanticizing on that front as well. But to me the primary difference is that in Mexico, poor people are at least given the freedom to figure their own way out of homelessness.
In Mexico, people living in the most extreme poverty can always find some wreck of a shed somewhere to squat in. If they can scratch up enough money for a few concrete blocks and a piece of tin for the roof, there’s always someplace in town where they’re able to set it up.
If they can figure out a way to make a few pesos, they’re free to do so. Some end up selling gum and bobble-headed toy turtles to tourists. Others hawk homemade tamales on local buses, with little fear of being turned in for a FoodSafe violation.
Here in Greater Victoria, we’ve taken the opposite approach. We’ve flushed everyone onto the streets where we can see them and left them to be beggars.
With the best of intentions, we’ve rid the city of disreputable rooming houses and slum motels. We’ve cracked down on shacks under the bridge and makeshift camps in our parks. We’ve torn down tired old apartments and replaced them with million-dollar condos.
We’ve rousted people from every cubbyhole. Shut down the beach campers. Gentrified the neighbourhoods. Torn apart every cardboard shack. Nobody in Victoria would ever get away with trying to make a few bucks selling sandwiches out of their sports bag; even the squeegee guy trying to clean a few car windows for change soon finds himself arrested.
The result: Our social failings have been laid bare for all to see, and street-level enterprise extinguished. Mexico is the truly poorer nation, but it’s our sparkling little city by the sea that wears its poverty most openly.
The court case over camping in our public parks speaks to the heart of the issue. Do we have the legal right to deny people a home in our parks when we aren’t offering them any alternatives? I’ve never seen people camping in Mexican parks, but I suspect that’s because they don’t have to.
I’m counting on our community to end homelessness in coming years. But for the time being we need strategies for living with it, cardboard shacks and all.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
"Temporary" food bank sees no end in sight
March 7, 2008
Noon is approaching, and the lineups have slowed to a trickle. The little food bank at St. John the Divine Church closes at noon, so the regulars know to come early.
Anne Henderson is one of several St. John congregation members who volunteer at the church’s food bank every Tuesday and Friday. A 10-year veteran of the work, Henderson admits to feeling increasingly discouraged.
“Seeing the young people is hard,” says Henderson. “They come in looking like relatively nice kids, but they’ve obviously got pain in their lives. They can’t get any income assistance because they have no work history.
“Pretty soon, they’re into the drugs because of their pain. Six months later, you see them in here looking so lost.”
The food bank was intended as a temporary measure in a time of crisis when it first started. But 15 years on, the need has only grown. “We’ve all gotten a little older, a little more tired, and a little shorter of money,” says Henderson, whose church runs the program on donations.
Today has been slower than usual. Henderson suspects that’s because of a recent visit to the office of Employment and Income Assistance Minister Claude Richmond.
Church members were there to make a point about impossibly low welfare rates by bringing it to Richmond’s attention that his own ministry was handing out information sheets directing clients to go get food at the church. But all that did was prompt the ministry to quit telling people about the food bank.
People can come to the food bank once a month to pick 10 or 12 items from an eclectic list of 60 or so household goods the church keeps in stock.
Today’s list runs the gamut: green beans; dog food; coconut milk; toilet paper; artichoke hearts.
“We really try to respect choices, and to let people choose the food they want. They can let us know if they’re on a special diet and we’ll try to work with that,” says Henderson.
Henderson has met all kinds at the food bank. One client was a former government employee who couldn’t get her feet back under her after losing her job in the “purge” after the 2001 election.
“She was on Employment Insurance for a while, but that ran out and she ended up on welfare. In the end, she couldn’t afford to keep her apartment,” recalls Henderson. “She told me she never in her life imagined she’d get to this point.”
At the table where people check in, a 52-year-old window installer tells us of breaking his wrist helping a friend put up Christmas lights. He’s scratching by for now on “medical EI,” but wondering what will happen if his year of support comes to an end and his wrist still isn’t strong enough to go back to his old line of work.
I recognize another client from my time last fall gathering information on street issues for a Times-Colonist series. I have a haunting photo of him from that period, packing up his stuff in the dark of early morning after the police arrived to move him along from a Fort Street doorway.
He has since found a place to live, thanks to a stranger who spotted him a couple months ago at the Upper Room soup kitchen and offered help with getting on disability and finding an apartment.
“I’d been on the streets 10 years,” he tells me. “I’ve got a mental thing going on, and find it hard to deal with people. But this time I feel like I’ve got somebody backing me. The doctor put me on medication to settle my mind down, and that’s helped a lot, too.”
Henderson polled her fellow food-bank volunteers in anticipation of my visit, and hands me a sheet of their written comments.
One expressed surprise that the people who attend aren’t angrier at their desperate situations. Another recalled a grateful client who found a way to burn a few CDs of Christmas music to sell on the street as a way of raising money for the food bank. “I am touched by the support they offer each other,” noted another.
“We all know that people on social assistance can’t buy a nutritionally adequate diet,” one of the writers summed up.
“It is sad indeed to see pale, haggard faces and bad teeth, and know that we are only able to offer food for a day or two - and to know that these people will only get sicker.”
March 7, 2008
Noon is approaching, and the lineups have slowed to a trickle. The little food bank at St. John the Divine Church closes at noon, so the regulars know to come early.
Anne Henderson is one of several St. John congregation members who volunteer at the church’s food bank every Tuesday and Friday. A 10-year veteran of the work, Henderson admits to feeling increasingly discouraged.
“Seeing the young people is hard,” says Henderson. “They come in looking like relatively nice kids, but they’ve obviously got pain in their lives. They can’t get any income assistance because they have no work history.
“Pretty soon, they’re into the drugs because of their pain. Six months later, you see them in here looking so lost.”
The food bank was intended as a temporary measure in a time of crisis when it first started. But 15 years on, the need has only grown. “We’ve all gotten a little older, a little more tired, and a little shorter of money,” says Henderson, whose church runs the program on donations.
Today has been slower than usual. Henderson suspects that’s because of a recent visit to the office of Employment and Income Assistance Minister Claude Richmond.
Church members were there to make a point about impossibly low welfare rates by bringing it to Richmond’s attention that his own ministry was handing out information sheets directing clients to go get food at the church. But all that did was prompt the ministry to quit telling people about the food bank.
People can come to the food bank once a month to pick 10 or 12 items from an eclectic list of 60 or so household goods the church keeps in stock.
Today’s list runs the gamut: green beans; dog food; coconut milk; toilet paper; artichoke hearts.
“We really try to respect choices, and to let people choose the food they want. They can let us know if they’re on a special diet and we’ll try to work with that,” says Henderson.
Henderson has met all kinds at the food bank. One client was a former government employee who couldn’t get her feet back under her after losing her job in the “purge” after the 2001 election.
“She was on Employment Insurance for a while, but that ran out and she ended up on welfare. In the end, she couldn’t afford to keep her apartment,” recalls Henderson. “She told me she never in her life imagined she’d get to this point.”
At the table where people check in, a 52-year-old window installer tells us of breaking his wrist helping a friend put up Christmas lights. He’s scratching by for now on “medical EI,” but wondering what will happen if his year of support comes to an end and his wrist still isn’t strong enough to go back to his old line of work.
I recognize another client from my time last fall gathering information on street issues for a Times-Colonist series. I have a haunting photo of him from that period, packing up his stuff in the dark of early morning after the police arrived to move him along from a Fort Street doorway.
He has since found a place to live, thanks to a stranger who spotted him a couple months ago at the Upper Room soup kitchen and offered help with getting on disability and finding an apartment.
“I’d been on the streets 10 years,” he tells me. “I’ve got a mental thing going on, and find it hard to deal with people. But this time I feel like I’ve got somebody backing me. The doctor put me on medication to settle my mind down, and that’s helped a lot, too.”
Henderson polled her fellow food-bank volunteers in anticipation of my visit, and hands me a sheet of their written comments.
One expressed surprise that the people who attend aren’t angrier at their desperate situations. Another recalled a grateful client who found a way to burn a few CDs of Christmas music to sell on the street as a way of raising money for the food bank. “I am touched by the support they offer each other,” noted another.
“We all know that people on social assistance can’t buy a nutritionally adequate diet,” one of the writers summed up.
“It is sad indeed to see pale, haggard faces and bad teeth, and know that we are only able to offer food for a day or two - and to know that these people will only get sicker.”
Recovery sparks drive to do more for others
Feb. 29, 2008
By the time Thea dragged herself into the health authority’s drug and alcohol centre on Quadra Street in November, she was drinking so heavily that death was looking like a terrifying possibility.
The 35-year-old was knocking back a bottle of vodka, two bottles of wine, a six-pack of coolers and a bottle of Baby Duck every day by that point. “And using heroin and crack on top of that,” Thea recalls. “If that’s not a cry for help, what is?”
What she needed was a detox bed. What she got was an appointment for two months down the road to see a drug counsellor, who would then decide whether to refer her to one of the region’s scarce detox placements.
“I told the guy I didn’t have two months - hell, I didn’t have two hours,” says Thea. “But it didn’t change anything. I remember crying on the phone to my friend, telling her, ‘They can’t help me.’”
That night, Thea called her sister in Chilliwack and begged to use her address in order to fake her way into a detox bed at the Chilliwack hospital for a week. Four days later, she got one.
She’s been mostly clean and sober for a shaky eight weeks now, and is back in Victoria living with a friend. And she’s got a pressing new cause: More treatment services for people with addictions.
“Yes, we’ve made a choice to do dope. But shouldn’t we have the choice to get help?” she asks. “We don’t have that choice, so we end up choosing to keep doing dope. Choosing to vandalize to be able to pay for it. Choosing to work the streets.”
Addicted for 10 years and “hard core” for the past two, Thea has paid for her habit through sex work and petty crime. Recently sentenced to do community hours at Our Place street drop-in, she discovered that the work was igniting a passion in her to help people with addictions get treatment.
“I love it there, but I’m seeing so many people wasting away. It’s sad to see - all these young guys, early 20s, and they already look like shit,” says Thea. “I can’t imagine what they’re going to look like at my age.
“One day I started asking everyone I saw in there whether they’d go to residential treatment if it was available. Only one person said no. The reality is that there’s nowhere to get help. Nowhere. I can’t emphasize that enough.”
The streets have become significantly meaner in the last couple of years, says Thea. She worked a corner on the Rock Bay stroll during much of her time on the streets, but says she wouldn’t do it anymore now that the drug dealers have moved in.
“They took out the pay phones down there because they didn’t want people calling their dealers. But the girls aren’t going to walk five blocks to find another pay phone, so the dealers are now coming to the girls,” she says.
“That means that crime’s going up down there and the cops are around all the time, which jeopardizes everything for the girls. You’ve got guys on bikes selling $5 rocks (of crack cocaine). The johns think the dealers are pimps, so they’re not happy, either. And now I’m hearing of guys from Vancouver coming over to try to run things.”
Like many people with addictions, Thea ended up disconnected from her family during her ride to the bottom. She’s working hard to turn things around, but notes that it took her father being in a serious motor-vehicle accident in Vancouver to bring her back in touch with her family, including her 14-year-old daughter.
“I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to lose contact with my daughter again,” says Thea. “I did my rock-bottom. I’m not totally cured, but I’m OK, and I want to make a difference.”
Her immediate plans are for a petition calling for residential treatment and more detox beds. She’s also getting involved with the Greater Victoria Commission on Homelessness, which has a working group of people with personal experience on the streets.
“I used to be so proud of Victoria. But when I think of it at night now, I don’t think of those 3,333 lights on the parliament building, I think of drugs and crime,” says Thea.
“It’s like a lifestyle is starting to happen out there. It reminds me of Hastings Street. We’ve really got to do something to help people get out of this.”
Respite from the streets
Feb. 22, 2008
We’re an unusual group of travellers assembling on this rainy morning outside Our Place street drop-in, and we’re bound for an unlikely destination: A nun’s retreat in East Sooke.
We load into the rental van with our morning faces on, some of us just waking up and others so worn out from being up all night that they’re practically asleep in their seats before the van even gets moving.
In the driver’s seat: Margaret O’Donnell, the good-hearted woman who is leading us on this adventure. O’Donnell worked with Our Place to launch the monthly retreats to Glenairley last April, moved to action by findings of a regional spiritual-health survey that identified spirituality as the missing piece in the recovery process for people living on or near the streets.
Beside her sits Lynn, a newcomer who is clearly anxious about being there. Margaret pats her hand and keeps her close. Fred and Ginette cuddle up in the next row of seats, having become a couple since the last time I ran into them at November’s retreat.
Then there’s me and Dave, and Kenny and Annie behind us. Annie’s a newcomer, too, and for a while gets on a few people’s nerves with her random and somewhat relentless conversational style. But her stories - one moment about the actress Fran Drexler, the next about her dream of a world where the ice cream never stops - are too humorous to resist for long, and she soon has us laughing.
Tyson and Marco sit in the far back. They’re the youngsters in the crowd - Tyson is just 22. He was breaking horses at a girlfriend’s family ranch in Alberta not too long ago, and Marco was making a good buck driving trucks. But things change fast once addiction takes hold.
The drive takes the better part of an hour. Conversation bounces from RV parks to lottery wins to favourite radio stations, and then to epic tales of hitchhiking across the country. Marco says he made it from St. John’s, Nfld. to Port Hardy in just four days.
Annie, 62, talks of trying to survive the next three years so she can start collecting a pension and maybe afford a place to live. “There’s no place for old women,” she says.
Fifteen of us eventually converge on Glenairley, a 24-hectare jewel of a property owned by the Sisters of St. Ann. Aging nuns used to retire to the big house on the Glenairley site, but these days the property is leased by the Centre for Earth and Spirituality, which has kindly provided access to O’Donnell since the retreats began.
Group leaders Karl and Tim greet us at the door as we arrive. Inside, the fire is already crackling, and the smells of breakfast are in the air. Later, we’ll tuck into a mountain of sweet-and-sour meatballs and homemade fruit pies for lunch, prepared the day before by two hard-working volunteers who are friends of O’Donnell.
How the day unfolds for people is ultimately up to them. Some head outside, to walk the trails or marvel at the little brook bustling through the forest behind the house. Others look for a warm chair to curl up in and get some badly needed sleep, or someone to play a round of crib with.
The loose structure of the day lets people find their own way through the quiet to a spiritual place. But O’Donnell does have a couple requirements of the group.
Chores, for one. Everyone attending the retreat is assigned two chores, whether to hustle food to the table, wash the kitchen floor after a meal, or whatever else might be needed to ensure the beautiful old house is restored to spotlessness by day’s end at 3 p.m. O’Donnell also asks people to gather in the dining room in mid- morning and again in the afternoon, to share and reflect on what the day has brought them.
Today, conversation turns to whether a CBC reporter should be allowed to come to the March retreat. Yes, the group decides. United Way funding for the retreats runs out in April, and media attention might attract other funders. The dream is for an overnight retreat: “This is a wonderful place to be,” says Kenny, “but the time’s too short.”
As the day winds down, we gather one last time on the front porch before the drive back into the city. Annie asks for a hymn, and we sing Amazing Grace. I’m still humming it as the van pulls up downtown and its passengers disperse to the streets.
.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
It's a hard, lonely life when you're different
Feb. 15, 2008
He lives like a recluse, holed up with his snakes and lizards in his mother’s basement. Besides his brother and an outreach worker who knew him as a kid, nobody ever comes by, and that’s just fine with him: “No one can hurt me if I don’t know anyone.”
His name is Brandon and he’s 21, but that’s just a number. He’s lived way more life than that.
His story is achingly familiar to anyone working with youth on the streets. Abusive and violent childhood. Lots of problems in school. Bumped around from place to place while growing up, then handed a welfare cheque and thrust into the world at the age of 16.
He managed to hold onto an apartment for three years in spite of it all - until the landlord evicted the whole floor he lived on. Brandon couldn’t get a grip after that, and spent a miserable year on Victoria’s streets when he was 19.
He’d do just about anything not to go back - like living in his mother’s basement until he can find the money for a place where he’d maybe stand a chance of being happy. After two months of nothing, he’s at least back on disability, but it won’t be easy finding a place even so.
“There’s a lot of discrimination in rental situations,” says Brandon. “No one wants to rent to anyone under 25 if they have any options.”
He doesn’t use drugs or alcohol, but gets in fights sometimes. Outreach worker and friend Gerry Karagiannis recalls first meeting Brandon after a vicious fight between Brandon and his younger brother landed him in court.
“I developed something of a pre-emptive way of dealing with problems,” explains Brandon. “I wouldn’t be hurt if I hurt people first. It never really gets any easier not to get angry with people, so now I just don’t align myself with people anymore.”
There’s something else about Brandon that’s less tangible than his troubled childhood. Lately the doctors have taken to calling it a “non-verbal learning disorder,” but before that they used to tell Brandon he was mentally ill. A less descriptive era might have called him “different” and left it at that.
Whatever the label, it adds a whole other layer of complexity to his life - and rarely a positive one.
Take his work life, for instance. Hopelessly slow on the job, he’s got “a bit of an obsessive-compulsive thing” that often gets in his way - like the time he got bogged down at a fast-food job trying to get the lettuce exactly in the centre of each burger. “For some reason, I can’t turn a blind eye to that.”
He speaks articulately and intelligently, but can barely read. He struggles to make eye contact, and says it’s only been in the past year that he’s been able to do it at all.
The longest he’s ever held a job is three months.
“It’s discouraging to lose so many jobs consecutively. It’s hard to get up the initiative to get another one that I know I won’t keep,” says Brandon. “It’s humiliating, really.”
His dream is to own a pet store. I ask if he’d settle for working in one, but he says he tried that already, and got fired. “I’d like my own place so I could go at things in my own way.”
He’s got two pet snakes and a five-foot iguana, and there are days when they’re the only thing that keeps Brandon going: “I tell you, people won’t give THEM the time of day, either.”
Brandon appreciates that his pets never judge him. “My python is a bit of a bitter type, and I feel good that even though he’s a difficult animal to please, he likes me.”
Karagiannis works for the Child and Family Counselling Association, and officially quit working with Brandon when he turned 19. But he stayed in the young man’s life anyway. Brandon is certain he wouldn’t have gotten on disability this month without his help.
Life is not yet coming up roses, but at least it’s not quite as bad as it was. “A year ago, I was out of my mind with grief - on the street, suicidal, thinking of getting into crime for money,” Brandon notes. He’s even letting himself dream again about finding a job that lasts.
“Sometimes it’s tempting to just give up on it all and not bother, but I haven’t done that yet,” he says. “There’s got to be something I’m good at.”
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Wrong thinking on addiction stops us from solving street problems
Feb. 8, 2008
If you read my column with any regularity, you might be starting to see a theme emerging these past couple of months. As my mother has noted more than once, “All you ever write about is homelessness!”
That pretty much sums it up. With the indulgence of the good folks at the Times-Colonist, I hope to use my weekly platform to write about street issues almost exclusively for the next while.
Homelessness is one of the great tragedies of modern times. To tackle it successfully requires understanding where it comes from. I think I can play a small role in setting things right by telling the stories of the people out there.
I like to think the stories are having an effect. One woman saw her own daughter in the sad tale of my young friend Chantal. Another fellow read the story of Blaine and felt sufficiently moved to buy him a bus pass for the next three months (which, let me tell you, cheered Blaine up immensely).
But what I’m picking up in some of the reader feedback is confusion about what I’m trying to accomplish with the pieces. So allow me to set the record straight, particularly around any assumptions that my focus will be solely on “good” homeless people who don’t deserve to be on the streets.
In my opinion, nobody deserves to be on the streets. So I’m not about to sort people into “good” and “bad” categories of homelessness before deciding whether to write about them. The last thing I want to do is be yet another person sitting in judgment of people who have been judged quite enough.
The big sticking point for readers tends to be drug use. People with severe addiction are seen as “choosing” homelessness because they chose to use drugs. Living on the streets is their punishment (and ours as well in the end, although we sure have a hard time getting that).
So when I write about somebody like Blaine, he elicits sympathy because he doesn’t use drugs or alcohol. Readers liked Chantal, too, because she had Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder caused by her mother drinking during pregnancy, and could therefore be deemed blameless for her many problems.
But writing about Guy Grolway and his addiction to crack cocaine brought me several admonishments from readers not to be “taken in” by his kind - that is, people who chose to use drugs and therefore deserve whatever happens to them.
Moving beyond that simplistic view of addiction is absolutely essential if we’re ever going to get a handle on what’s happening on our streets. If there’s one fundamental thing that has to change in solving the problems of homelessness, it’s the way we think about addiction.
I haven’t met an addict yet who wanted to be addicted. That others believe these poor, sick souls are choosing to remain addicted adds insult to injury, particularly given that such uninformed thinking too often governs the way we provide care for people with addictions.
You may not share my opinion on that. But here’s the thing: It’s not just my opinion. With more than a half-century of research and study under our belts, we know full well that addiction is what happens when you mix genetic predisposition, childhood circumstance, loss, pain, and readily available drugs. So why do we spare any time for the argument that it’s a moral failing?
We’re going to have to let this “choice” business go if we’re to tackle the issues of the street, because it’s tripping us up at every turn. The reason we’ve got 1,500 people on our streets in the first place is because we judged them unworthy of our help the first time round due to their “bad choices.” Just about the worst thing we can do is repeat that colossal mistake.
Getting out from under an addiction is the struggle of a lifetime. The people trying to make that tough journey need prompt and sustained help, not another pointless guilt trip about bad choices and just desserts. That kind of thinking was exactly what got us into this mess.
And what a Pyrrhic victory we’ve won. Sure, a hard lesson has been taught to all those “bad” drug users denied help, but the cost to us has been streets filled with broken people, petty crime, garbage and despair. Add up the health-care and policing costs, the crime, the mess and the lost potential of 1,500 people, and we’re throwing away $75 million a year just to maintain the disaster on our streets.
I hope you’ll keep reading my stories, but please let the judgment go. The only way to fix a problem is to see it for what it is.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Response to Janet Bagnall on prostitution
This piece of mine ran Monday, Feb. 4/08 in the Montreal Gazette. I wrote it in response to a piece by Janet Bagnall that had appeared in the Gazette the previous week. I've posted Bagnall's piece here as well, right after mine:
There was a time when I wouldn’t have questioned columnist Janet Bagnall’s recent declaration that 90 per cent of prostitutes have been forced into the work.
That’s more or less what I’d been told over the years by those who considered themselves expert in such matters. I, too, presumed most sex workers were victimized and exploited women manipulated by pimps, bad boyfriends and shady customers. Back then, news of a Vancouver sex worker’s campaign to build brothels for the Olympics likely would have incensed me as much as it did Ms. Bagnall last week.
But then I got out of the newsroom and met a few sex workers - maybe a couple of hundred all told. And I realized I had it all wrong. That 90-per-cent claim is neither true nor supported by any research.
I wrapped up a three-year stint this past summer as executive director of the Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society, a grassroots non-profit in Victoria, B.C. Of the many insights I gained while running PEERS, the most powerful was that sex workers were making their own choices.
Most of the women who come to PEERS are survival sex workers, and work outdoors. Their life stories were often heartbreaking and their ongoing challenges considerable, but none would have categorized themselves as broken victims forced into the trade. Their problems tended to be the problems of any disadvantaged woman; the sex trade was simply how they paid the bills.
Why do women work as prostitutes? For the money. It’s a job, and a legal one in Canada, employing tens of thousands nationwide. But our prudish inability to come to grips with that reality is exactly what has made some aspects of the industry so dangerous.
We like to paint the sex trade as a place of violence and despair. Certainly at the street level, the nightly litany of assaults, rapes, robberies and murders noted on “bad date sheets” shared among outdoor workers in Canada’s urban centres is grim affirmation of the risks under today’s conditions.
But it’s our laws and attitudes that have created those working conditions. Women are dying and suffering out there because we’ve chased them into the shadows with our anti-solicitation laws, criminalized their incomes, and denied them a legal indoor workplace.
We categorize them as victims, but treat them like lepers. Pushed into places where we don’t have to look at them, the shunned women who end up working Canada’s outdoor strolls end up as easy pickings for predators.
Like all free markets, the sex industry exists because of demand. In Canada, our mediocre efforts to stop prostitution have focused on trying to prevent girls from entering the sex trade, but in fact we’d need to channel all our energies toward stopping the buyers if we genuinely hoped to eliminate the industry.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen little evidence of that. A street-level “shame the john” campaign surfaces now and again, but generally serves only to move the trade out of a particular neighbourhood to somewhere even more dangerous for the workers.
Most people don’t buy sex on the outdoor strolls anyway. With 80 per cent or more of prostitution in Canada taking place indoors in brothels, bars, massage parlours and dance clubs, an occasional bust on the street has little effect on anything.
Ms. Bagnall contends that “prostitution is not a job like any other.” Perhaps, but what does that have to do with a sex worker’s right to a safe workplace?
You don’t have to like the industry to see the need to make things better for those who work in it. I wish we didn’t have a weapons industry, but I’d never deny a decent workplace to people working in the munitions factories. Surely we don’t want the provision of safe, regulated workplaces for all Canadians to hinge on our opinion of their line of work.
Parts of the sex industry are truly horrendous, and must be eliminated. Trafficking, pimping, coercion, the sexual exploitation of youth - none have any place in a civil society. Those who want out of the trade should be given whatever support they need to do that.
But for the adults who choose to work in the industry, what could possibly be valid rationale for continuing to deny them a proper workplace? Like it or not, sex sells, and the real crime is that we’d rather leave women to be beaten and murdered on the streets than acknowledge that.
Jody Paterson is a columnist and communications strategist working with Victoria sex workers to develop a brothel that funds social programs for disadvantaged women in the trade.
And here's the piece that sparked my response, written by Janet Bagnall, a regular columnist with The Montreal Gazette
Published: Jan. 30, 2008
Preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics are well in hand: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is getting ready for violence. The province of British Columbia is keeping to its tight construction schedule. And Vancouver's mayor is preparing to meet the sexual needs of tourists attending the Games.
Sam Sullivan, the mayor, has said he is keeping an open mind to a proposal by Vancouver prostitutes who want to set up several co-operative brothels in time for the Olympics. Susan Davis, a prostitute, argued last fall that the city, provincial and federal government should provide a safe working environment for prostitutes in 2010 when, she is quoted as saying, tens of thousands of visitors to the Games will be looking for sex.
This bizarre notion that laws on prostitution should be altered, even temporarily, to accommodate the sexual desires of fans at large sporting events is not unique to British Columbia.
In South Africa, the former national police commissioner proposed liberalizing the country's prostitution laws for the World Cup 2010, soccer's biggest event. The commissioner is reported to have said he wanted to follow Germany's successful -- to his mind, at least -- path.
Germany, host of the 2006 World Cup, campaigned against "forced" prostitution, based on trafficked women and children, and the head of FIFA, soccer's world body, urged soccer fans to use only prostitutes who were "voluntarily" in the business. But voluntary was hardly the order of the day, with reports that as many as 40,000 women and children were trafficked into Germany to service the tens of thousands of fans at the soccer championship.
Already in South Africa, anti-trafficking activists say there are reports of street children being gathered up in readiness for the World Cup.
Sports events like Formula 1 racing, soccer championships or the Olympic Games are a magnet for human traffickers and their customers, writes University of Ottawa sociologist Richard Poulin.
In an essay this year, Poulin criticized proposals to relax prostitution laws for sports events, whether in South Africa or Canada. (In Canada, paying for sex between consenting adults is legal, although other activities such as soliciting in a public place, being in a bawdy house or forcing a person to prostitute herself are not.)
Poulin argued that simply removing prostitution from the streets, as Vancouver's Susan Davis suggests, does not turn prostitution, the business of selling one's body to strangers, into a safe activity. In Quebec, Poulin pointed out in his essay, at least five of 14 prostitutes killed in the past decade were "call girls," working in the presumed safety of a known, private environment.
And if it's true that prostitutes are a target for serial killers, Poulin wrote, it's also true for other marginalized groups such as young gay men. Representatives of one of the most vulnerable of all groups in Vancouver, native women, are adamantly against legalizing prostitution. The Aboriginal Women's Action Network in B.C. has said that legalizing brothels will only increase the number of prostitutes.
With an estimated 90 per cent of prostitutes having been forced into the sex trade, increasing the number of prostitutes is not a good idea. Research shows that the vast majority of prostitutes have been trafficked or been sexually victimized in their homes or suffer from drug addiction.
In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, Daisy Kler, a social worker with Vancouver Rape Relief, said the proposal for a network of legal brothels "entrenches prostitution as legitimate, and therefore legitimatizes pimps and traffickers." Kler added, "I do not believe the public would agree that this is a good idea, to have some disposable women available for the Olympics."
Prostitution is not a job like any other. It can't possibly be: One person pays to use another's body for his own gratification.
Allowing, never mind endorsing, this activity poses, as Poulin writes, "serious ethical questions in a country that pretends to encourage equality between men and women."
That country should be ours.
Janet Bagnall writes for the Montreal Gazette.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have questioned columnist Janet Bagnall’s recent declaration that 90 per cent of prostitutes have been forced into the work.
That’s more or less what I’d been told over the years by those who considered themselves expert in such matters. I, too, presumed most sex workers were victimized and exploited women manipulated by pimps, bad boyfriends and shady customers. Back then, news of a Vancouver sex worker’s campaign to build brothels for the Olympics likely would have incensed me as much as it did Ms. Bagnall last week.
But then I got out of the newsroom and met a few sex workers - maybe a couple of hundred all told. And I realized I had it all wrong. That 90-per-cent claim is neither true nor supported by any research.
I wrapped up a three-year stint this past summer as executive director of the Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society, a grassroots non-profit in Victoria, B.C. Of the many insights I gained while running PEERS, the most powerful was that sex workers were making their own choices.
Most of the women who come to PEERS are survival sex workers, and work outdoors. Their life stories were often heartbreaking and their ongoing challenges considerable, but none would have categorized themselves as broken victims forced into the trade. Their problems tended to be the problems of any disadvantaged woman; the sex trade was simply how they paid the bills.
Why do women work as prostitutes? For the money. It’s a job, and a legal one in Canada, employing tens of thousands nationwide. But our prudish inability to come to grips with that reality is exactly what has made some aspects of the industry so dangerous.
We like to paint the sex trade as a place of violence and despair. Certainly at the street level, the nightly litany of assaults, rapes, robberies and murders noted on “bad date sheets” shared among outdoor workers in Canada’s urban centres is grim affirmation of the risks under today’s conditions.
But it’s our laws and attitudes that have created those working conditions. Women are dying and suffering out there because we’ve chased them into the shadows with our anti-solicitation laws, criminalized their incomes, and denied them a legal indoor workplace.
We categorize them as victims, but treat them like lepers. Pushed into places where we don’t have to look at them, the shunned women who end up working Canada’s outdoor strolls end up as easy pickings for predators.
Like all free markets, the sex industry exists because of demand. In Canada, our mediocre efforts to stop prostitution have focused on trying to prevent girls from entering the sex trade, but in fact we’d need to channel all our energies toward stopping the buyers if we genuinely hoped to eliminate the industry.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen little evidence of that. A street-level “shame the john” campaign surfaces now and again, but generally serves only to move the trade out of a particular neighbourhood to somewhere even more dangerous for the workers.
Most people don’t buy sex on the outdoor strolls anyway. With 80 per cent or more of prostitution in Canada taking place indoors in brothels, bars, massage parlours and dance clubs, an occasional bust on the street has little effect on anything.
Ms. Bagnall contends that “prostitution is not a job like any other.” Perhaps, but what does that have to do with a sex worker’s right to a safe workplace?
You don’t have to like the industry to see the need to make things better for those who work in it. I wish we didn’t have a weapons industry, but I’d never deny a decent workplace to people working in the munitions factories. Surely we don’t want the provision of safe, regulated workplaces for all Canadians to hinge on our opinion of their line of work.
Parts of the sex industry are truly horrendous, and must be eliminated. Trafficking, pimping, coercion, the sexual exploitation of youth - none have any place in a civil society. Those who want out of the trade should be given whatever support they need to do that.
But for the adults who choose to work in the industry, what could possibly be valid rationale for continuing to deny them a proper workplace? Like it or not, sex sells, and the real crime is that we’d rather leave women to be beaten and murdered on the streets than acknowledge that.
Jody Paterson is a columnist and communications strategist working with Victoria sex workers to develop a brothel that funds social programs for disadvantaged women in the trade.
And here's the piece that sparked my response, written by Janet Bagnall, a regular columnist with The Montreal Gazette
Published: Jan. 30, 2008
Preparations for the 2010 Winter Olympics are well in hand: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is getting ready for violence. The province of British Columbia is keeping to its tight construction schedule. And Vancouver's mayor is preparing to meet the sexual needs of tourists attending the Games.
Sam Sullivan, the mayor, has said he is keeping an open mind to a proposal by Vancouver prostitutes who want to set up several co-operative brothels in time for the Olympics. Susan Davis, a prostitute, argued last fall that the city, provincial and federal government should provide a safe working environment for prostitutes in 2010 when, she is quoted as saying, tens of thousands of visitors to the Games will be looking for sex.
This bizarre notion that laws on prostitution should be altered, even temporarily, to accommodate the sexual desires of fans at large sporting events is not unique to British Columbia.
In South Africa, the former national police commissioner proposed liberalizing the country's prostitution laws for the World Cup 2010, soccer's biggest event. The commissioner is reported to have said he wanted to follow Germany's successful -- to his mind, at least -- path.
Germany, host of the 2006 World Cup, campaigned against "forced" prostitution, based on trafficked women and children, and the head of FIFA, soccer's world body, urged soccer fans to use only prostitutes who were "voluntarily" in the business. But voluntary was hardly the order of the day, with reports that as many as 40,000 women and children were trafficked into Germany to service the tens of thousands of fans at the soccer championship.
Already in South Africa, anti-trafficking activists say there are reports of street children being gathered up in readiness for the World Cup.
Sports events like Formula 1 racing, soccer championships or the Olympic Games are a magnet for human traffickers and their customers, writes University of Ottawa sociologist Richard Poulin.
In an essay this year, Poulin criticized proposals to relax prostitution laws for sports events, whether in South Africa or Canada. (In Canada, paying for sex between consenting adults is legal, although other activities such as soliciting in a public place, being in a bawdy house or forcing a person to prostitute herself are not.)
Poulin argued that simply removing prostitution from the streets, as Vancouver's Susan Davis suggests, does not turn prostitution, the business of selling one's body to strangers, into a safe activity. In Quebec, Poulin pointed out in his essay, at least five of 14 prostitutes killed in the past decade were "call girls," working in the presumed safety of a known, private environment.
And if it's true that prostitutes are a target for serial killers, Poulin wrote, it's also true for other marginalized groups such as young gay men. Representatives of one of the most vulnerable of all groups in Vancouver, native women, are adamantly against legalizing prostitution. The Aboriginal Women's Action Network in B.C. has said that legalizing brothels will only increase the number of prostitutes.
With an estimated 90 per cent of prostitutes having been forced into the sex trade, increasing the number of prostitutes is not a good idea. Research shows that the vast majority of prostitutes have been trafficked or been sexually victimized in their homes or suffer from drug addiction.
In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, Daisy Kler, a social worker with Vancouver Rape Relief, said the proposal for a network of legal brothels "entrenches prostitution as legitimate, and therefore legitimatizes pimps and traffickers." Kler added, "I do not believe the public would agree that this is a good idea, to have some disposable women available for the Olympics."
Prostitution is not a job like any other. It can't possibly be: One person pays to use another's body for his own gratification.
Allowing, never mind endorsing, this activity poses, as Poulin writes, "serious ethical questions in a country that pretends to encourage equality between men and women."
That country should be ours.
Janet Bagnall writes for the Montreal Gazette.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Crack cocaine a fast ride down
Feb. 1, 2008
Guy Grolway and I came across each other at a bus stop near City Hall one morning a couple weeks ago - me looking for someone out there who felt like talking, him taking in the morning before another day on the streets set in.
He’s 57, and up until a couple years ago was making good money as a heavy-equipment operator in Fort McMurray. But then he met a woman - and soon after, crack cocaine. And wouldn’t you know it, crack cocaine was the one that stuck around.
“I came to this city from the Ottawa valley 35 years ago with nothing, and two years ago found myself like I started,” says Grolway. “There’s a lesson to be taught from all of this: Never get involved in crack.”
Grolway has been a drug user all his life. Marijuana first, starting at age 11. Cigarettes at 12. Crystal meth at 13: “My best friend put a needle in my arm and I woke up seven years later.” Then cocaine, for most of his adult life, but never so much that he couldn’t hold down a good job and keep a roof over his head.
Cocaine can be injected, snorted, or smoked as “crack” - a diluted but more addictive form of the drug. You wouldn’t think method would matter in terms of the impact on someone’s life.
But when Grolway switched from snorting powdered cocaine to smoking crack a couple years ago - mostly out of curiosity after seeing his new girlfriend do it - he ruefully discovered that at least for him, it mattered a lot.
“I started recreational use of crack, and within three or four months knew that THIS wasn’t recreation,” recalls Grolway. “I was totally out of control and spending every last time dime, including the rent money.”
He lost his house five months ago, and his girlfriend soon after. Like him, she’s now on the streets, passing the time chasing crack cocaine.
There’s only one day a month - Welfare Wednesday - when Grolway actually has the $1,000 he’s capable of spending on a single jag. But not a day goes by when he isn’t on the hunt for crack, even just a “hoot” from a friend.
“The thing with crack is that you’re never, ever going to get what you want. It’s not there,” says Grolway. “All that’s there is heavy addiction, paranoia, flailing, loss of control of your body.
“You’ll be up 10 or 12 days without sleep, and then you’ll finally crash and sleep for three days. But to shake that hangover - it takes the life right out of you - you’re going to go looking for more. Then it just spirals into this cycle: Buy it, sell it, middle it - whatever you need to do to be able to afford at least some of your habit.”
I ask Grolway what prevents him from turning his life around. There are some obvious ones: No place to detox. No place to live while he tries to clean up. No ability to find and keep work in the meantime.
“But there’s something else. I can’t get something straight up here,” he says, pointing to his head. “Something has happened, like a short circuit.
“A lot of us out here have hepatitis-C, and that alone can cause confusion. But then you add in the stress of no money, the police always harassing you, the drugs you’re using - there’s just so many issues to deal with. It’s almost like we missed the train, and it’s not coming back.”
Like most people on the streets, Grolway doesn’t like all his problems being on display in the busy downtown. But every “hidey hole” has been locked up, gated, mowed down or otherwise done away with by fed-up merchants and city cleanup crews trying to get a grip on the mess of homelessness.
“They’re only making the problems worse,” he says. “There’s nowhere to go anymore. We’re living where rats wouldn’t live.”
Grolway suspects people on the streets will eventually band together in their misery, and some will turn to violence. Politicians may be “hoping the problem just goes away,” but he sees new faces arriving every day.
“I just hope they come up with some kind of resolve soon,” he says. “If you were to go down a dead-end road 20 or 30 times, you would think that you’d start to see by this point that it was time to go down a different road.”
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Jan. 25, 2008
Now's time to push door wide open on homelessness
They say that the darkest hours are just before the dawn. Boy, I hope so.
I’m essentially an optimist. But 26 years in journalism has also immersed me in the real world, where happy endings are far from a given. I now consider myself a pessimistic optimist - still hopeful, but all too aware of this world’s frailties.
In terms of homelessness, I admit to having wondered in the last couple of years just how dark things would have to get before something finally happened. Pretty damn dark, as it turns out.
But is that a sliver of light I see on the horizon? This week, for instance, the province announced new money to house and shelter 170 people living on or near the streets in Victoria. I’m also hearing good things about BC Housing - that the Crown corporation is working hard to get some action going around new housing.
Not that it’s the dawn of a new day or anything quite so dramatic as that. But I do get the feeling we’re starting to notice we’ve got a full-blown provincial emergency on our hands, and that maybe it’s time to start treating homelessness like the disaster that it is.
News of more housing is a welcome development. So is word that the Vancouver Island Health Authority has created specialized outreach teams, which have proven their worth several times over in cities that have launched them.
Money from the business sector is flowing into a number of important social initiatives in the downtown. Other municipalities in the region are joining the struggle, an acknowledgement that the crisis simply can’t be borne by the City of Victoria alone. I’m hearing talk of a few more detox beds.
Still, without raining on anyone’s parade, it’s vital to recognize that we’ve barely begun.
This week’s housing announcement provides roughly a tenth of what’s actually needed to put a roof over the heads of all 1,500 people on our streets. It does nothing to stem the flow of a couple hundred or more new adults and children to the streets every year, because what fixes that is more help and support for people long before they make that final fall to the street.
Some have tried to frame homelessness as a political issue, but in fact B.C.’s problems exemplify that homelessness can happen under any party’s watch. Here in B.C., it took root under the Socreds, gained ground under the New Democrats, and blossomed like a bad weed under the Liberals.
So we needn’t waste any more time pointing fingers, and we certainly shouldn’t be waiting for an election to solve anything. What we need to do now is get on with it.
Hospitals were closed. Cheap housing was no longer built. Welfare benefits were slashed to the bone. Children with a lifetime of problems were pushed out into the world with no support. Governments got out of the business of helping citizens without even considering the long-term impact of withdrawing care from those who needed it.
In short, the country got leaner and meaner, and the gaps got wider for people who weren’t able to keep up. Now, we’re in a very bad way. We’re going to have to act boldly - like we would if 1,500 people in our community suddenly ended up homeless.
If an earthquake were to put that many people out of their homes, we’d be opening up the schools and filling up the empty buildings in a heartbeat. Why aren’t we? How is it we can contemplate a string of Atco trailers as temporary housing for Whistler employees during the Olympics, yet be unwilling to do the same just as readily for people living on our streets?
Announcements like the one this week would have to be happening weekly for the next two months just to house the people who are currently living on our streets. So we also need to go big. Our actions need to match the size of the problem - and it’s significant.
The time is now. We’ve got a city mayor on his way out who will want to leave a legacy. We’ve got a buzz coming out of the ongoing efforts of the Mayor’s Task Force, and a lot of smart business types moving in on the scene.
The provincial government wants things to be nice for the Olympics. The feds are way overdue to do something great for B.C. In short, the stars have aligned.
Push, people. I’ve put together contact information on this issue for all levels of government that makes for easy letter-writing - you can find it here on my blog in the post just below this one.
Now's time to push door wide open on homelessness
They say that the darkest hours are just before the dawn. Boy, I hope so.
I’m essentially an optimist. But 26 years in journalism has also immersed me in the real world, where happy endings are far from a given. I now consider myself a pessimistic optimist - still hopeful, but all too aware of this world’s frailties.
In terms of homelessness, I admit to having wondered in the last couple of years just how dark things would have to get before something finally happened. Pretty damn dark, as it turns out.
But is that a sliver of light I see on the horizon? This week, for instance, the province announced new money to house and shelter 170 people living on or near the streets in Victoria. I’m also hearing good things about BC Housing - that the Crown corporation is working hard to get some action going around new housing.
Not that it’s the dawn of a new day or anything quite so dramatic as that. But I do get the feeling we’re starting to notice we’ve got a full-blown provincial emergency on our hands, and that maybe it’s time to start treating homelessness like the disaster that it is.
News of more housing is a welcome development. So is word that the Vancouver Island Health Authority has created specialized outreach teams, which have proven their worth several times over in cities that have launched them.
Money from the business sector is flowing into a number of important social initiatives in the downtown. Other municipalities in the region are joining the struggle, an acknowledgement that the crisis simply can’t be borne by the City of Victoria alone. I’m hearing talk of a few more detox beds.
Still, without raining on anyone’s parade, it’s vital to recognize that we’ve barely begun.
This week’s housing announcement provides roughly a tenth of what’s actually needed to put a roof over the heads of all 1,500 people on our streets. It does nothing to stem the flow of a couple hundred or more new adults and children to the streets every year, because what fixes that is more help and support for people long before they make that final fall to the street.
Some have tried to frame homelessness as a political issue, but in fact B.C.’s problems exemplify that homelessness can happen under any party’s watch. Here in B.C., it took root under the Socreds, gained ground under the New Democrats, and blossomed like a bad weed under the Liberals.
So we needn’t waste any more time pointing fingers, and we certainly shouldn’t be waiting for an election to solve anything. What we need to do now is get on with it.
Hospitals were closed. Cheap housing was no longer built. Welfare benefits were slashed to the bone. Children with a lifetime of problems were pushed out into the world with no support. Governments got out of the business of helping citizens without even considering the long-term impact of withdrawing care from those who needed it.
In short, the country got leaner and meaner, and the gaps got wider for people who weren’t able to keep up. Now, we’re in a very bad way. We’re going to have to act boldly - like we would if 1,500 people in our community suddenly ended up homeless.
If an earthquake were to put that many people out of their homes, we’d be opening up the schools and filling up the empty buildings in a heartbeat. Why aren’t we? How is it we can contemplate a string of Atco trailers as temporary housing for Whistler employees during the Olympics, yet be unwilling to do the same just as readily for people living on our streets?
Announcements like the one this week would have to be happening weekly for the next two months just to house the people who are currently living on our streets. So we also need to go big. Our actions need to match the size of the problem - and it’s significant.
The time is now. We’ve got a city mayor on his way out who will want to leave a legacy. We’ve got a buzz coming out of the ongoing efforts of the Mayor’s Task Force, and a lot of smart business types moving in on the scene.
The provincial government wants things to be nice for the Olympics. The feds are way overdue to do something great for B.C. In short, the stars have aligned.
Push, people. I’ve put together contact information on this issue for all levels of government that makes for easy letter-writing - you can find it here on my blog in the post just below this one.
Jan. 27, 2008 - Contact information for government officials
Want to get something happening around homelessness? Here's a whole lot of contact information that will direct you to the right government officials to receive a letter at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. Letters still count for a lot in the world of politics, and we're sure to get noticed if lots of people write lots of letters on this issue. '
All info in the list is current as of today's date, but keep in mind that cabinet shuffles and elections can change things in the months to come.
Write on!
PROVINCIAL:
You’ll want to target your letters about homelessness - if the issue you are pressing in a particular letter is housing, write to the housing minister; if mental illness and addiction, write to the health minister; if welfare, to Employment and Income Assistance, etc.
You can also write letters directly to the premier and his deputy minister. But even when your letters are directed to a different minister, be sure to CC the premier and his DM every time. This will ensure that the premier’s office sees every letter on the subject, while allowing you to direct them to other ministers at the same time.
Keep letters short - I’d suggest one page maximum - and respectful, but relentless. Use facts whenever you can find them - the mayor’s report has a ton and is on-line at www.victoria.ca, under “What’s New.” Hard copies are also available at City Hall. Let’s do it!
premier@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9041 STN PROV GOVT
Victoria BC
V8W9E1
Jessica McDonald, Deputy Minister to the Premier (assistant’s e-mail)
angela.koutougos@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9041 STN PROV GOVT
Victoria BC
V8W9E1
** If Murray Coell or Ida Chong is the MLA for your riding, write letters directly to them as a constituent and CC them on all letters. They are cabinet ministers in the current government:
Murray Coell
AVED.Minister@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9059, Stn Prov Govt,
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Ida Chong
CS.minister@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9056, STN PROV GOVT.
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
HOUSING ISSUES -
Minister of Housing - Rich Coleman
For.minister@gov.bc.ca
P.O. Box 9049
Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Doug Konkin (Housing is in the Forests portfolio)
Forests.DeputyMinistersOffice@gov.bc.ca
BC Housing (Crown Corporation)
Vancouver Island Region
Regional Director Roger Butcher
Suite 301 - 3440 Douglas Street
Victoria BC V8Z 3L5
Email: VanIslandRegion@bchousing.org
WELFARE ISSUES
Minister of Employment and Income Assistance- Claude Richmond
EIA.Minister@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9058 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Cairine MacDonald (no e-mail available)
PO Box 9934 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
ISSUES RELATED TO FOSTER CHILDREN, FAMILIES OR PEOPLE WITH
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITY
Minister of Children and Family Development - Tom Christiansen
Minister.MCF@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9057 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Lesley Du Toit (pronounced dew-toy)
mcf.deputyministersoffice@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9721 STN PROV GOVT
VICTORIA BC
V8W9S2
Minister of State for Child Care - Linda Reid
Minister.Childcare@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9062 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Issues of law and order (e.g. safe streets, policing)
Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General - John Les
SG.Minister@gov.bc.ca
P.O. Box 9053, Stn Prov Govt
Victoria
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister David Morhart (no e-mail available)
PO Box 9290
STN PROV GOVT
Victoria
V8W9J7
Municipal:
Write frequently to the mayor and council of the municipality you live in to ask them to report to you specific actions they’ve undertaken that month to reduce homelessness and related issues in our region - affordable and subsidized housing, addiction, mental health support, family well-being. If they tell you that x will be done within y time frame, monitor and hold them to it.
Find your municipal contacts here:
http://www.civicnet.bc.ca/siteengine/ActivePage.asp?PageID=88
Federal
When writing federally, you are writing as a constituent, so first find out which of the following three MPs represent your riding and then direct letters to that one:
Gary Lunn
lunnmp@garylunn.com
9843 Second Street
Sidney, British Columbia
V8L 3C7
Keith Martin
Martin.K@parl.gc.ca or martik1@parl.gc.ca
666 Granderson Road
Victoria, British Columbia
V9B 2R8
Denise Savoie:
savoid@parl.gc.ca
970 Blanshard Street
Victoria, British Columbia
V8W 2H3
CC all federal letters to the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper
Harper.S@parl.gc.ca
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Want to get something happening around homelessness? Here's a whole lot of contact information that will direct you to the right government officials to receive a letter at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. Letters still count for a lot in the world of politics, and we're sure to get noticed if lots of people write lots of letters on this issue. '
All info in the list is current as of today's date, but keep in mind that cabinet shuffles and elections can change things in the months to come.
Write on!
PROVINCIAL:
You’ll want to target your letters about homelessness - if the issue you are pressing in a particular letter is housing, write to the housing minister; if mental illness and addiction, write to the health minister; if welfare, to Employment and Income Assistance, etc.
You can also write letters directly to the premier and his deputy minister. But even when your letters are directed to a different minister, be sure to CC the premier and his DM every time. This will ensure that the premier’s office sees every letter on the subject, while allowing you to direct them to other ministers at the same time.
Keep letters short - I’d suggest one page maximum - and respectful, but relentless. Use facts whenever you can find them - the mayor’s report has a ton and is on-line at www.victoria.ca, under “What’s New.” Hard copies are also available at City Hall. Let’s do it!
premier@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9041 STN PROV GOVT
Victoria BC
V8W9E1
Jessica McDonald, Deputy Minister to the Premier (assistant’s e-mail)
angela.koutougos@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9041 STN PROV GOVT
Victoria BC
V8W9E1
** If Murray Coell or Ida Chong is the MLA for your riding, write letters directly to them as a constituent and CC them on all letters. They are cabinet ministers in the current government:
Murray Coell
AVED.Minister@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9059, Stn Prov Govt,
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Ida Chong
CS.minister@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9056, STN PROV GOVT.
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
HOUSING ISSUES -
Minister of Housing - Rich Coleman
For.minister@gov.bc.ca
P.O. Box 9049
Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Doug Konkin (Housing is in the Forests portfolio)
Forests.DeputyMinistersOffice@gov.bc.ca
BC Housing (Crown Corporation)
Vancouver Island Region
Regional Director Roger Butcher
Suite 301 - 3440 Douglas Street
Victoria BC V8Z 3L5
Email: VanIslandRegion@bchousing.org
WELFARE ISSUES
Minister of Employment and Income Assistance- Claude Richmond
EIA.Minister@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9058 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Cairine MacDonald (no e-mail available)
PO Box 9934 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
ISSUES RELATED TO FOSTER CHILDREN, FAMILIES OR PEOPLE WITH
DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITY
Minister of Children and Family Development - Tom Christiansen
Minister.MCF@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9057 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister Lesley Du Toit (pronounced dew-toy)
mcf.deputyministersoffice@gov.bc.ca
PO BOX 9721 STN PROV GOVT
VICTORIA BC
V8W9S2
Minister of State for Child Care - Linda Reid
Minister.Childcare@gov.bc.ca
PO Box 9062 Stn Prov Govt
Victoria BC
V8W9E2
Issues of law and order (e.g. safe streets, policing)
Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General - John Les
SG.Minister@gov.bc.ca
P.O. Box 9053, Stn Prov Govt
Victoria
V8W9E2
Deputy Minister David Morhart (no e-mail available)
PO Box 9290
STN PROV GOVT
Victoria
V8W9J7
Municipal:
Write frequently to the mayor and council of the municipality you live in to ask them to report to you specific actions they’ve undertaken that month to reduce homelessness and related issues in our region - affordable and subsidized housing, addiction, mental health support, family well-being. If they tell you that x will be done within y time frame, monitor and hold them to it.
Find your municipal contacts here:
http://www.civicnet.bc.ca/siteengine/ActivePage.asp?PageID=88
Federal
When writing federally, you are writing as a constituent, so first find out which of the following three MPs represent your riding and then direct letters to that one:
Gary Lunn
lunnmp@garylunn.com
9843 Second Street
Sidney, British Columbia
V8L 3C7
Keith Martin
Martin.K@parl.gc.ca or martik1@parl.gc.ca
666 Granderson Road
Victoria, British Columbia
V9B 2R8
Denise Savoie:
savoid@parl.gc.ca
970 Blanshard Street
Victoria, British Columbia
V8W 2H3
CC all federal letters to the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper
Harper.S@parl.gc.ca
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Hard fall to streets after lifetime of working
Jan. 18, 2008
Not even 18 months ago, all of this would have been unimaginable. He’d been 10 years at the same job, and 10 years in the same apartment. He’d never had problems finding work.
But then came the fateful day in October 2006, when Blaine got into a heated discussion with his boss over whether he deserved a raise. It turned into a fight, and Blaine got fired.
It took him a scant six months to blow through what little savings he had. Six months to wear out the patience of his long-time landlord. Six months to discover that nobody wanted to hire him anymore, and to end up homeless for the first time in his life.
It’s been a humiliating and hard ride down. He’s found a little work here and there, but a 52-year-old guy with health problems just isn’t the first pick for the kind of jobs he’s experienced in: truck-driving for the most part, and jobs with moving companies. He recently found out he’s got diabetes and vascular problems, which are causing so many problems with his legs that he can barely walk a block.
“Who’s going to hire me when they see me come in limping?” asks Blaine. “They take one look at me and say, ‘HOW old are you?’ Ninety per cent of the time, that’s what happens. It’s discrimination, but what can I do about it?”
Add in a home address at the Salvation Army shelter, and things go from bad to worse. “People see 525 Johnson St. on your application, and they immediately figure there must be something wrong with you.”
Blaine fought hard to collect unemployment insurance after he got fired, but lost that battle. So he spent what savings he had and got himself on income assistance. His monthly cheque is $610, with $550 of it paid to the Salvation Army for room and board.
That leaves him $60 for the month. That won’t even buy a bus pass, so Blaine doesn’t roam too far afield anymore, especially with his poor circulation. I come across him standing on the sidewalk outside the Salvation Army, and he later tells me that’s where he passes most of his time.
“I wander back and forth in front of the place, maybe lie down in my room for a while. There ain’t much else I can do, because the farther I walk the more my leg aches,” says Blaine. “I don’t really want to be here, but I’ve got no choice.”
He’s grateful for his room at the Salvation Army, but it’s not exactly home. If he stretches out both arms, he can almost reach from one side of his room to the other, and the length of it can’t be much more than five metres. There’s no room for any of his stuff - stashed at a friend’s house and in danger of being tossed if he can’t find somewhere else for it soon.
Still, it’s a roof over his head, and beats the dorm rooms with 20 other guys where he first found shelter after losing his apartment. Those early days were rough for Blaine: “It was hard to adjust. You’re so scared that you don’t know what to think, and in those dorm rooms you’re pretty much on your own to work things out with whoever else is in there.”
He learned to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. Things have been better since he got his own room, but he feels guilty knowing that the reason that happened so quickly is because the man who used to have his room got kicked out for using drugs. “I know the guy, and things aren’t going good for him.”
Every now and then Blaine lands some work, but even that just seems to complicate things. For instance, he earned $60 a few months back, so now his welfare cheque is being cut by $20 for the next three months. It’s killing him.
His goal at the moment is to get himself on disability, which would at least let him earn up to $500 a month without any government clawbacks. It would also qualify him for subsidized housing, or at least a place on the wait list.
I ask him about his family, and he says he has two grown sons living in Alberta. They come to the Island once in a while to snowboard, but don’t visit him often. “I’m proud of both of them, but I don’t see them much,” he says.
When I ask about his efforts to find work, he starts to cry. He says the staff at Spectrum Job Search Centre know him as the guy who’s “always coming in” to see what jobs are available.
But the work he gets never seems to last for long, and the phone doesn’t ring very often. And so he logs another day on the sidewalk outside the Salvation Army, watching the world go by.
“It’s real weird to find myself in this situation, real weird,” says Blaine. “But I can’t do nothing about it except try to move on. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
Monday, January 14, 2008
Why won't we help sex workers before they're dead?
Jan. 11, 2008
We spent $20 million to gather enough evidence to charge Willy Pickton with murder. We spent another $46 million to convict him.
And I guess we’ll just have to take Attorney General Wally Oppal’s word that we may need to spend many millions more to try Pickton all over again - for zero gain, seeing as the mass murderer has already been handed the maximum sentence for his crimes against B.C. women.
But what a difference the smallest fraction of all that money could have made in changing the lives of the broken women Pickton preyed upon. Why is it we have money for the desperate women working our streets only after they’re dead?
With the prison gates barely closed on Pickton, another serial killer has already emerged in the Lower Mainland. In Edmonton, where 20 survival sex workers have been murdered in the past two decades, police have begun collecting DNA samples from other street workers to make it easier to identify them should they, too, turn up dead.
While Pickton was on trial this summer and media were feasting on the sad stories of his victims, two of the three non-profits that help Vancouver’s survival sex workers nearly went under due to a lack of funding.
During the 10 years it took us to decide whether we should even worry about scores of missing women on our streets, and on through three years of investigations and court proceedings, countless women working B.C.’s rough streets continued to be beaten, raped and killed.
With all due respect to the families of Pickton’s victims, what has been gained? One man is behind bars for the rest of his life, but virtually nothing has changed for hundreds - maybe thousands - of survival sex workers in B.C. And the best our attorney general can come up with is a plan to retry the same guy.
“Will the Pickton case change things for sex workers?” I lost track of the number of times media asked me that last year when the trial was on, and I was executive director of Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
A few asked if I thought women would “be more careful” now, perhaps even quit working the streets. That they could even ask that underlined for me how little they understood about why those women were out there.
It should be no mystery by now, not after all these years of talk, talk and more talk about the dangerous lives of street-level sex workers.
The bottom line is that they need money, and it’s available on the streets. In Victoria alone, 300 or so different women and children will work our streets in a typical year; on any given night, as many as 30 women work the strolls along Rock Bay and Government streets. They wouldn’t be out there if no one was buying them.
That was one of the most gut-wrenching realizations I had in my time at PEERS: that there’s so much demand for paid sex that no level of disability, poor health or tragic circumstance is enough to render a woman unfit for the sex trade from the buyer’s point of view.
What might be done to bring about real change? In the grand scheme of things, not much - which is what makes the whole matter that much more tragic.
For the women out there right now: supported housing; addiction treatment; care that meets their needs; a safer place to work. I can’t fathom why we deny them that.
For the women and children still to come: loving, healthy families; help with life’s challenges; educational support. The child at risk of becoming a survival sex worker - or one of the twisted men who prey on them - needs only what anyone needs to grow into a happy, healthy adult.
To stop men from buying sex outdoors on the streets - and it does need to stop - the answer will ultimately be increased police enforcement.
But all the other details must be attended to first. Enforcement alone will never get to the root of the problem, and in fact can make things considerably worse for outdoor sex workers by forcing them into ever-more isolated neighbourhoods.
PEERS Vancouver - the agency that lost eight of its 11 staff members in the summer after Ottawa pulled the plug on two of its key programs - is seeing that scenario play out right now on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. A police crackdown on the street trade is pushing sex workers even deeper into the shadows, where they’re that much more vulnerable to men like Willy Pickton.
Obviously we need to continue to chase down killers, even at great cost. But surely we should first and foremost be trying to help women while they’re still alive. The families of Pickton’s victims would undoubtedly trade retribution in a heartbeat for the services and support that might have saved their loved ones in the first place.
In the grim little news segment this week about the two Abbotsford murders, the news anchor commented that “advocates are hoping their deaths will spur change.” Unfortunately, hope alone just won’t cut it.
Jan. 11, 2008
We spent $20 million to gather enough evidence to charge Willy Pickton with murder. We spent another $46 million to convict him.
And I guess we’ll just have to take Attorney General Wally Oppal’s word that we may need to spend many millions more to try Pickton all over again - for zero gain, seeing as the mass murderer has already been handed the maximum sentence for his crimes against B.C. women.
But what a difference the smallest fraction of all that money could have made in changing the lives of the broken women Pickton preyed upon. Why is it we have money for the desperate women working our streets only after they’re dead?
With the prison gates barely closed on Pickton, another serial killer has already emerged in the Lower Mainland. In Edmonton, where 20 survival sex workers have been murdered in the past two decades, police have begun collecting DNA samples from other street workers to make it easier to identify them should they, too, turn up dead.
While Pickton was on trial this summer and media were feasting on the sad stories of his victims, two of the three non-profits that help Vancouver’s survival sex workers nearly went under due to a lack of funding.
During the 10 years it took us to decide whether we should even worry about scores of missing women on our streets, and on through three years of investigations and court proceedings, countless women working B.C.’s rough streets continued to be beaten, raped and killed.
With all due respect to the families of Pickton’s victims, what has been gained? One man is behind bars for the rest of his life, but virtually nothing has changed for hundreds - maybe thousands - of survival sex workers in B.C. And the best our attorney general can come up with is a plan to retry the same guy.
“Will the Pickton case change things for sex workers?” I lost track of the number of times media asked me that last year when the trial was on, and I was executive director of Victoria’s Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society.
A few asked if I thought women would “be more careful” now, perhaps even quit working the streets. That they could even ask that underlined for me how little they understood about why those women were out there.
It should be no mystery by now, not after all these years of talk, talk and more talk about the dangerous lives of street-level sex workers.
The bottom line is that they need money, and it’s available on the streets. In Victoria alone, 300 or so different women and children will work our streets in a typical year; on any given night, as many as 30 women work the strolls along Rock Bay and Government streets. They wouldn’t be out there if no one was buying them.
That was one of the most gut-wrenching realizations I had in my time at PEERS: that there’s so much demand for paid sex that no level of disability, poor health or tragic circumstance is enough to render a woman unfit for the sex trade from the buyer’s point of view.
What might be done to bring about real change? In the grand scheme of things, not much - which is what makes the whole matter that much more tragic.
For the women out there right now: supported housing; addiction treatment; care that meets their needs; a safer place to work. I can’t fathom why we deny them that.
For the women and children still to come: loving, healthy families; help with life’s challenges; educational support. The child at risk of becoming a survival sex worker - or one of the twisted men who prey on them - needs only what anyone needs to grow into a happy, healthy adult.
To stop men from buying sex outdoors on the streets - and it does need to stop - the answer will ultimately be increased police enforcement.
But all the other details must be attended to first. Enforcement alone will never get to the root of the problem, and in fact can make things considerably worse for outdoor sex workers by forcing them into ever-more isolated neighbourhoods.
PEERS Vancouver - the agency that lost eight of its 11 staff members in the summer after Ottawa pulled the plug on two of its key programs - is seeing that scenario play out right now on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. A police crackdown on the street trade is pushing sex workers even deeper into the shadows, where they’re that much more vulnerable to men like Willy Pickton.
Obviously we need to continue to chase down killers, even at great cost. But surely we should first and foremost be trying to help women while they’re still alive. The families of Pickton’s victims would undoubtedly trade retribution in a heartbeat for the services and support that might have saved their loved ones in the first place.
In the grim little news segment this week about the two Abbotsford murders, the news anchor commented that “advocates are hoping their deaths will spur change.” Unfortunately, hope alone just won’t cut it.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Life can be lonely for people with mental illness
Jan. 4, 2008
I have a layman’s understanding at best about mental illness as a medical condition, but years of experience in how it plays out in real life.
You meet a lot of people living with mental illness when you work in the media. Those in the throes of an acute stage of illness often think their only hope is to get their story out there. So I’ve had many conversations with people carrying that label, and made a lot of shifts in my thinking as a result.
The more I’ve seen of mental illness, the less certain I am of what it is. But I do know it’s a damn difficult thing to live with, particularly in a world with little time for anyone who can’t keep up. It can also mean a life of terrible loneliness.
I’ve had a dear friend for about six years now who has been a remarkable tutor for me, including waiting patiently for probably the first two years of our acquaintanceship while I worked my way clear of defining her only by her illness.
With five decades of personal experience with the local mental-health system, she’s also a fount of knowledge, having lived through the gamut - from the locked-up, drugged-up days through to the group hugs of the 1970s, then on into the lean, mean 1990s and beyond. Her stories captivate me.
You’ll hear people tossing around that line about how we’re all one paycheque away from homelessness, but that really is true for people with major mental illness. However much effort they put into being well, it’s never going to be easy, and many will struggle for a lifetime to find the love and friendships that sustain the rest of us.
Worse still, anyone with serious and chronic illness has no choice but to rely on governmen to help keep their head above water. That’s a risky proposition at the best of times, but especially challenging in a period when governments are eager to shirk the responsibilities of caring for people.
Well over half of the people living on Victoria’s streets are mentally ill, and thousands more are living so close to the streets that one more bad break is all it’s going to take. My friend was in that latter group once and still would be were it not for all the hard-won things in her life that keep her well - good housing, good care, good friends.
But it’s a tough life just the same. Just ask Sharon Johnston, another woman with bipolar disorder who recently vented to me over a cup of coffee.
Like my friend, Johnston has an affordable place to live thanks to a mental-health rent subsidy. But the subsidy is slowly being whittled down - from $270 a month once upon a time to $225 now, and soon to $200. Those are big changes for someone on a disability cheque, and she’s scared and angry about them.
On and off a laundry list of medications through her 20-plus years of mental illness, she’s frustrated at not being able to afford the nutritional supplements she’d rather be taking. She’s worn out from counting every dime.
But Johnston’s real complaint on this day is not so much about shrinking subsidies and medical merry-go-rounds, but about a community that just won’t let her in. She feels it most poignantly at times like Christmas, when her acquaintances retreat into the comfort of their own families and she’s reminded of how very alone she really is.
“I may be warm and comfortable in a restaurant right now, but in society I’ve been homeless and out in the cold just the same,” says Johnston, 45.
We all need to feel connected, and for people with mental illness I think that is often the critical difference between who falls to the streets and who doesn’t. But a sense of self-worth - of purpose - is also vital.
For my friend, it comes through art, which has helped her through some of the most chaotic periods of her life. It feeds her soul even when everything else is going sideways.
Johnston uses music to manage, having played trombone for many years and studied music at university. “At this time of year, I always make sure I’ve got my guitar and trombone close at hand,” she says.
On this particular day, Johnston is angry at the world, but acknowledges that’s part of her illness. She knows her intensity tends to scare people away, which in turn just leaves her feeling even more isolated and angry.
She’s working on a gentler persona. “I’m telling myself that the trombone doesn’t always have to play double forte,” she jokes. “It can also play quietly and sensitively.”
She’s grateful for the Friends of Music, a non-profit that brings together people with mental illness to make music, and for friends at church. One of them gave her a necklace of tiny Christmas lights, which she shows me with pride. But she desperately wants friendships that extend beyond “a quick hi-bye” at the Sunday morning service.
“I do have some good people in my life, but they go away. I need people who could take me out for coffee now and then, or just pass some time,” says Johnston. “I feel like I always have to be working so hard just to stay happy.”
Jan. 4, 2008
I have a layman’s understanding at best about mental illness as a medical condition, but years of experience in how it plays out in real life.
You meet a lot of people living with mental illness when you work in the media. Those in the throes of an acute stage of illness often think their only hope is to get their story out there. So I’ve had many conversations with people carrying that label, and made a lot of shifts in my thinking as a result.
The more I’ve seen of mental illness, the less certain I am of what it is. But I do know it’s a damn difficult thing to live with, particularly in a world with little time for anyone who can’t keep up. It can also mean a life of terrible loneliness.
I’ve had a dear friend for about six years now who has been a remarkable tutor for me, including waiting patiently for probably the first two years of our acquaintanceship while I worked my way clear of defining her only by her illness.
With five decades of personal experience with the local mental-health system, she’s also a fount of knowledge, having lived through the gamut - from the locked-up, drugged-up days through to the group hugs of the 1970s, then on into the lean, mean 1990s and beyond. Her stories captivate me.
You’ll hear people tossing around that line about how we’re all one paycheque away from homelessness, but that really is true for people with major mental illness. However much effort they put into being well, it’s never going to be easy, and many will struggle for a lifetime to find the love and friendships that sustain the rest of us.
Worse still, anyone with serious and chronic illness has no choice but to rely on governmen to help keep their head above water. That’s a risky proposition at the best of times, but especially challenging in a period when governments are eager to shirk the responsibilities of caring for people.
Well over half of the people living on Victoria’s streets are mentally ill, and thousands more are living so close to the streets that one more bad break is all it’s going to take. My friend was in that latter group once and still would be were it not for all the hard-won things in her life that keep her well - good housing, good care, good friends.
But it’s a tough life just the same. Just ask Sharon Johnston, another woman with bipolar disorder who recently vented to me over a cup of coffee.
Like my friend, Johnston has an affordable place to live thanks to a mental-health rent subsidy. But the subsidy is slowly being whittled down - from $270 a month once upon a time to $225 now, and soon to $200. Those are big changes for someone on a disability cheque, and she’s scared and angry about them.
On and off a laundry list of medications through her 20-plus years of mental illness, she’s frustrated at not being able to afford the nutritional supplements she’d rather be taking. She’s worn out from counting every dime.
But Johnston’s real complaint on this day is not so much about shrinking subsidies and medical merry-go-rounds, but about a community that just won’t let her in. She feels it most poignantly at times like Christmas, when her acquaintances retreat into the comfort of their own families and she’s reminded of how very alone she really is.
“I may be warm and comfortable in a restaurant right now, but in society I’ve been homeless and out in the cold just the same,” says Johnston, 45.
We all need to feel connected, and for people with mental illness I think that is often the critical difference between who falls to the streets and who doesn’t. But a sense of self-worth - of purpose - is also vital.
For my friend, it comes through art, which has helped her through some of the most chaotic periods of her life. It feeds her soul even when everything else is going sideways.
Johnston uses music to manage, having played trombone for many years and studied music at university. “At this time of year, I always make sure I’ve got my guitar and trombone close at hand,” she says.
On this particular day, Johnston is angry at the world, but acknowledges that’s part of her illness. She knows her intensity tends to scare people away, which in turn just leaves her feeling even more isolated and angry.
She’s working on a gentler persona. “I’m telling myself that the trombone doesn’t always have to play double forte,” she jokes. “It can also play quietly and sensitively.”
She’s grateful for the Friends of Music, a non-profit that brings together people with mental illness to make music, and for friends at church. One of them gave her a necklace of tiny Christmas lights, which she shows me with pride. But she desperately wants friendships that extend beyond “a quick hi-bye” at the Sunday morning service.
“I do have some good people in my life, but they go away. I need people who could take me out for coffee now and then, or just pass some time,” says Johnston. “I feel like I always have to be working so hard just to stay happy.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)