Text of a speech I gave at the University of Victoria Oct. 7 as the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer:

Thank you so much for coming tonight, and I’d especially like to thank the Southam family, both for giving me the opportunity to speak this evening and to teach a journalism course this fall at the University of Victoria. Both are pleasures I never expected to have, and that I’m enjoying very much.

What I’ll be talking about this evening is this thing we call “media, ” and the role I think it needs to play in leading change in our communities. Seeing as some of what I’m going to be talking about will be about understanding the difference between being passionate versus being biased, I guess I’ll identify myself right off as being biased in terms of believing that change DOES need to come in our communities, on many front, but at the same time I work very hard to keep myself completely open-minded around the ways that we might go about achieving that change.

Of course, I want to use the sweeping label “media” carefully when talking about the shortcomings of the industry, because there are any number of exceptional journalists in Canada and around the world who are already leading change and doing exactly the things I’ll be talking about tonight. Nor would I want my criticisms to be misconstrued as focusing on solely about our local media, as there are some exceptional journalists right here in our town. But I still see plenty of room for improvement in this community and across the country in terms of local journalists participating in powerful, informed and relevant story-telling that helps bring about real change.

I think that’s what all of us in this business actually set out to do, and what we desperately need to get back to both for the good of our communities and of our profession.

I suppose that’s what I’m really talking about: The need for individual journalists to think about the work they’re doing, and the part they’re playing - or not playing - in making things better or worse in their community. Are they comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, as the late journalist Finlay Peter Dunne once said ought to be the goal for all of us? Or are they succumbing to what I’ve come to think of as ‘drive-by journalism’ - in, out, and gone in a flash to the next story, and the next, and the next? Are they bringing their own passion for issues into their writing?

It’s funny, whenever I bring that up to a journalist, they immediately assume that it would mean showing bias in their writing, and that’s just not allowed. They think that caring about an issue is the same thing as being biased about it - a journalism no-no from way back.

But the truth is, you can care about something - you can have real passion for it - without being biased. Bias means deliberately leaving out aspects of the story that you disagree with or fear will undermine your own position. Passion means writing about ALL the aspects of an issue - the good, the bad and the ugly - and caring enough to bring all of it to the reader with clarity, context, historic relevance and honesty.

I’ve been a journalist since 1982, and still consider myself one despite having more or less left the profession four years ago.

I can’t claim to be an expert on anything that I’m saying tonight, except in the sense of having seen it all and done it all for myself these past 26 years, both as a writer and manager in the media , and as an avid reader of the particular stream of information known as “news.”

The world is a very different place than it was when I first went into journalism, but you can say that about just about any industry these days. In truth, the basic job has by and large stayed the same: Go out and find the news and bring it back for your readers and viewers - making money for your owners in the process by creating a product that’s good enough to buy, and good enough for advertisers to want to be part of.

I’ve never had a problem with the idea that a good paper can also be a profitable one.

So it’s that part about being “good” that I’d like to focus on for now. Do we have “good” media in Canada right now? Are journalists producing good stories? And what IS a good story, anyway - one that sells the most newspapers? Gets the biggest play on the front page? Scandalizes the most people? Provides the most useful and relevant information to the people who most need it? Gets read and talked about by the most number of people? Solves the problem? Embarrasses the most politicians? Galvanizes the community?

All of the above on any given day, of course, and depending on the story. In a dream world, readers and viewers would take in their daily media knowing absolutely that they were getting the most important, useful and relevant news of the day,
and that it was being provided by journalists who they completely trusted to make the right decisions in terms of which news to select for them.

The individual journalist has a lot of power in making that decision. While there may be a few newsrooms out there where one of those tough-as-nails Hollywood style city editors are still barking out the story assignments, I can tell you that by and large it’s the individual journalist who will be selecting the stories that he or she will be working on, interviewing the people who they think will tell that story best, choosing the angle that the story will be told from, and digging up the relevant details and statistics that will help them tell the story better.

It’s far from a perfect science. Great stories go untold, and ridiculous ones get into the media all the time.

Easy stories are chosen over more complex ones, because they lend themselves nicely to two phone calls and who’s got the time for more than that, anyway? Stories that take a long time to tell are passed over in favour of ones that can be told right now and then forgotten. That’s the essence of drive-by journalism - important and multi-faceted community issues reduced to two sound bytes, one for and one against, destined to be forgotten by the next day as another day of drive-by stories stacks up on top of it.

I won’t tell you for a minute that all of this was “better in the old days” or anything like that - we have long been a profession enamoured of the drive-by, albeit with some wonderful exceptions from time to time.

But notable exceptions aside, the media as a rule have not been leaders of the public conversation at any given point in time, but more like the documenters of the status quo. When it was politically acceptable to refer to Chinese people as chinks and the “yellow peril” back at the turn of the last century, journalists were right in there calling them those names.

But there’s no reason for us to follow rather than lead. The great journalists - Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and people like Stephanie Nolen in more recent times - were always taking risks in their writing, and approaching subjects from then-controversial points of view.

I just reread an old Hunter Thompson piece from the 1960s that I’m using in my university class this term, one that he wrote about the Hell’s Angels back when no one had ever heard of the biker gang.

More than 40 years have passed since he wrote it, and yet it’s still every bit as relevant today for what it says about the way to write about people from the margins. Thompson nailed down all the myths and the rumours that were swirling around California in those days about the motorcycle gang. He snuck into a Hell’s Angels meeting, then worked his charm sufficiently when caught out that they actually invited him back to party with them. What came out of all of it was a story that laid to rest some of the hysterical statements being made about the Angels in the broader community.

At the same time, it revealed the dark nature of the bike gang’s style of revenge that was in fact much more frightening than any of the uninformed bogey-man type tales that had been swirling around in the mainstream press.

A different time, a different place, yes. Hunter Thompson was writing a piece for Esquire magazine, and was no doubt given much more leeway from his editors and time to craft his piece. He was no joe-average newspaper journalist caught up in the daily grind, with a deadline looming over him. And covering the Hell’s Angels is obviously a hell of an assignment - gosh, who COULDN’T get a great piece out of that?
OK, so a daily reporter isn’t going to churn out an Esquire-ready masterpiece most days.

But nothing stops a journalist from at least borrowing some of the strategies and techniques of the masters of engaged journalism. Nothing stops us from seeing - doing - FEELING a story, with all due respect to the obvious constraints of time and resources. And that’s ultimately where I think we need to change - as individual journalists -- - both for reasons of staying relevant in this Age of Information but also to be the powerful story tellers who can identify problems and lead change in our communities.

For an example, let’s take a look at a subject near and dear to my heart: Homelessness. My career in journalism has coincidentally exactly tracked the growth of homelessness in B.C.

So this issue has become a real obsession for me primarily because I’ve actually witnessed the series of mistakes we’ve made at the political and policy levels that have created the disaster on our streets. I’ve seen us manufacture homelessness in our communities.

I’ve also seen the media - in the broad sense of the word, because of course there were individual journalists who were doing what they could to cover the issue well - be completely unable to get underneath the very complex issues of homelessness, or to bring any real understanding to it. They cover it enough to be able to say that they’re paying attention to it over the course of any given year, but never enough to actually inform their readers or viewers how to go about doing something to address the problems showing up on their streets.

That’s because it’s simply too complex to be dealt with as headline news, or even as “Homelessness: The Six-Part Series.” It’s not a story that can be told easily, or quickly. It needs deep, meaningful reporting done day after day - by a committed, informed reporter who has the full support of a committed, informed editor and publisher.

But meanwhile, the numbers on our street just keep rising, and all we’re doing is continuing to tell that great big grey and frightening story as a black-and-white, right-and-wrong, your side/my side piece. We write about it when some horrific or particularly outrageous detail surfaces, or when the shopping carts or the drug addicts or the sleeping bags pile up particularly deep in some part of town, but it’s soon forgotten beneath a tide of whatever else is coming our way as news.

Is it biased for a journalist to care passionately about homelessness? Of course not. Who’s in FAVOUR of homelessness, after all?? Were the writer to deliberately ignore the impact of homelessness on, say, downtown residents, or to write about all 1,500 people living on our streets right now as if they were freeloaders who needed to get a job - well, THAT’S showing bias.

But to write deeply and well about the many issues and sides of homelessness - to care enough about the issue to engage over the long time, and to learn enough about it that you become an informed source for a baffled community - there’s nothing biased about that. That’s about picking an issue that’s obviously critically important to our community, and writing about it creatively, fairly and thoroughly until something is done about it.

Think about the other issues that could benefit from a similar approach. Child welfare. Poverty. The roots of crime. Our environment. Effective political representation. Quality education. Health issues and disease. Within each topic, there are obviously a variety of positions that need to be explored fairly if the coverage is to remain objective, but that’s not to say the issue can’t be passionately addressed - and in fact, MUST be to maintain a healthy, vibrant community. As a reader or viewer, I WANT the journalist writing about those subjects to care passionately about the issue. I want them to help me understand what I need to do to bring about an end to poverty - to reduce crime in our community - to bring about better child welfare policies - to build a better world for my children and grandchildren - to take care of my health.

That last issue in particular, health, is an excellent example of something that tends to be covered in the disjointed way that disempowers us as communities rather than empowers us. Think back on a typical year’s worth of health coverage in the mainstream media and you’ll see what I mean. Coffee is bad for you one day, good for you the next. Wine, the same. Vitamins are pointless placebos, and the next day they’re the shining light that will save us all from cancer.

I took a three-day course at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland four years ago that was expressly put together for journalists to try to counter the uninformed, superficial writing that passes for health coverage in most of our newspapers.

With the notable exception of the very skilled health writer Andre Picard, of the Globe and Mail, we simply don’t know enough as journalists about interpreting scientific studies to be writing about this stuff, and as a result we leave ourselves wide open to promoting blatantly false information as if it were scientific truth. Nor do we ask the big question - of health studies, of political polls, of any number of surveys that we put forward as “truth:” Who paid for this study? Even a quick glimpse below the surface reveals that a great deal of what we pass along to our readers as health-research findings is really much closer to propaganda dressed up like a study - one that has been funded by a special-interest group or pharmaceutical company in line to benefit from the publicity we give them.

How does a community know whether to trust the information we give them if we aren’t putting the necessary thought into deciding the accuracy and depth of that information? How do readers judge the worth of an issue - how much they need to worry about it, or act on it - if the story of the day ends up being just one more in a long line of formulaic pieces that never gets beyond telling readers one viewpoint on the issue and then the opposite view to negate it? Another “six of one, half dozen of another” story? You hear talk of the need to tell “both” sides of a story, but in fact a story usually has at least half a dozen sides, if not more. Are we journalists doing anybody any favours by simplifying virtually every story down to a he-said/she-said exchange that leaves readers with great, gaping holes in the information they need to make their own decisions about the importance of a particular issue?

Or if the type of stories we write essentially encourage people to pick sides on issues that are far too complex to be handled that way?

How do I, as a citizen, engage in a story about a problem in my community if the journalists themselves haven’t bothered to? Why should I even read it at all, if all it’s going to do is depress me and disempower me by not giving me a reason to hope for change - a way into the story, and at least a small glimmer of hope for a way out of the problem? How can citizens be making the smart decisions that are desperately needing to be made in this country of ours when they can’t depend on the information they’re getting from the media to help them do that?

Like I say, I’m no longer a journalist, so I’ve got no personal stake in whether the media takes to heart anything I have to say about all of this.

I like my morning paper, but if I had to, I could manage quite nicely without it. I’m just back from a week in New York City, where I found myself getting by quite well on a daily dose of one of those free, pre-packaged little tabs that are all the rage in newspaper giveaway boxes these days.

But the fact that I can even THINK I could get by without a daily paper is enough to send a chill through my own heart when I think about what that means to the future of journalism. And while I may be disenchanted with how it’s often practiced these days, I still continue to think it is as a powerful and necessary vehicle for telling the stories that matter in our communities. But I’ve seen our star as journalists plummet in my years in the business, and I suspect it’s because we have breached the public trust with our superficial and incomplete coverage of issues.

You know those surveys they do where they ask the public which kinds of people they trust most? Not so many years ago, journalists routinely scored among the top 10 in those surveys. Now, they’re barely above politicians at the very bottom of the list. What’s that telling us?

I see so much potential from a more engaged journalism style, and in a newsroom team that puts constant thought and effort into the stories that they tell. There are a number of reasons for that that go beyond me just feeling protectionist over my chosen career.

For one thing, I’m an activist, which I suspect is what can happen over time when you’ve been a journalist long enough to see how truly spectacular this old world is at screwing things up, and how desperately change is needed on so many fronts.
I’ve spent the last 26 years watching well-intentioned communities blunder into the same problems over and over again, to the point that I would really hesitate to apply the term “progress” to what I’ve seen unfold in the world so far.

In terms of homelessness alone, I’ve seen the City of Victoria go in less than 20 years from having a quiet community of maybe 50 homeless men with drinking problems to a sprawling, unmanageable mass of humanity 30 times that size, their problems now grown to encompass profound mental illness, all ages, genders and race, vast drug issues, and truly alarming public-health concerns. Then and now, we seem completely incapable of understanding how it happened or taking even the most basic steps to rectify the problems. And yet it’s all there in the stories of the past.

Search Canadian newspapers through the Infomart database for their stories about homelessness over the past two decades, and you can see the entire tragedy playing out before our very eyes.

But in the day by day coverage, the stories are inevitably simplified and conflict-oriented. People in favour of a needle exchange are pitted against those who aren’t. People who hate shopping carts on their downtown streets battle people who see them as a survival tool for a desperate population. People who don’t want a beggar sleeping in their doorway face off against beggars who simply have no other options. Every year, a new homeless count and the inevitable comparisons with the homeless count of the year before, and that’s the end of that for another year.

Problems on Cormorant Street become problems near the welfare office become problems in Centennial Square, and nobody connects the dots that the PROBLEM is that nothing ever happens to change any of it.

And it’s obviously not just homelessness that ends up getting that treatment. Everything happens in the moment, and the context that will help us see the patterns in all of it is rarely brought to bear. It’s a massive waste of time, energy, passion and money. Meanwhile, the problem, whether that’s frail seniors stuck in badly needed hospital beds or sick, desperate people using drugs in plain sight on the street, children being abused by their parents and then abused again by a troubled child-welfare system - is never acted upon beyond the name-calling and blame-laying that passes for community news most days.

Sure, we fill the white space with new words and photos every day, but that DOESN’T mean we’re serving up the most important stories. Nor are we necessarily telling those stories in ways that engage readers and viewers - who quite rightly will just pass traditional media by if we can’t give them information in a way that has meaning and relevance to their own lives. Nor are we taking on what I think is an unwritten yet vital aspect of being a journalist - to bring context and history to what we’re writing about, and do it in a way that makes for a compelling read. I teach writing every now and then and always like to remind my students that getting the words into print is only the first step - the REAL challenge is getting people to read those words.

Another reason for me wishing for a journalism renaissance is that I’m someone who loves newspapers. But I see before me a dying industry, cast into deep shadow by the Internet monolith and completely unprepared for a new reality. News of the day, analysis, points of view, classified ads, theatre listings - all of it is one Google search away nowadays, This should be a time of dramatic reinvention in the newspaper industry, but it’s obvious to me that barely any thought has gone into how the industry will stay relevant in people’s lives now that all the select information media once provided is available in abundance - and free - elsewhere. I’ve seen tremendous changes in readership in my own time in the profession, and the only trend has been down, down, down. Ten years ago when I was in newspaper management, some 67 per cent of adult Canadians had read a newspaper the day before; today, barely half have.

Will our industry be the metaphorical frog that stays in the water as the temperature slowly rises, never noticing that it’s reaching the boiling point until it’s too late?

And for all their flaws and challenges, I see mainstream media as an essential component of democracy and a well-informed public. Without community newspapers, how WILL our communities come together to understand and rally around common problems? Who will be the keeper of our community history? Who will remind us that yes, we’ve made these mistakes before, and that’s why we need to do things differently this time?

Yes, more information is available to any of us than ever before due to the Internet. I marvel at the immense amount of information from around the world that’s now at my fingertips through a single Google search.

And certainly blogging is one of the most democratic developments to come along in a long while, because now there’s suddenly a way for ANYONE to be a journalist, and to break free of the constraints of traditional media.

But while I love the World Wide Web for the many wonders it has opened up to me, one tremendous drawback is that it’s primarily a vehicle for self-selected information. Nobody presents you with the information - you have to go looking for it. Another real concern is that all those bloggers whose sites you’re reading may or may not be know anything about what they’re writing about, and you the reader either have to put time into cross-checking their facts or - more worryingly - presume that what you’re getting is truth when in fact it could be nothing but hot air, uninformed opinion and lies.

If you think back to a time when a community got its information mostly from a single source - the daily newspaper, the radio, the local television channel - people were participants in a common conversation. They all knew what was happening on that stretch of highway a couple miles away, or what pet project the mayor was pushing. They all knew when trouble was brewing in the bad side of town, and which police department was trying to do something about it. They had the ability to come together to solve common problems in their community, because they were all well aware of what those problems were.

Sure, they were still having to read too many of those overly simplified stories pitting Person A against Person B. That has always been a problem in the media.
But at least they knew there WERE a couple different ways to think about the issue, and had a slightly broader sense of there being more than one viewpoint to take into account when making up their own minds.

Fast-forward to 2008, and the tremendous changes brought about by the Internet, blogging, chat and instant messaging. People now do much of their reading on-line, and their sense of community is in many cases an on-line one. That’s not necessarily a problem if those people are aware of that and are taking steps to be sure to expose themselves to a broad array of informed opinions to make up for the narrowing of their world, but it’s potentially quite disastrous if they fall into the trap of getting their information from fewer and fewer sources - especially sources who share their same world view.

And with fewer people in the community tied into a single source of information, how DO communities come together to solve common problems? What communications vehicle tells them what those problems are, given that yesterday’s newspaper readers have dispersed into all kinds of alternate forms of communication? We no longer have an easy means to rally large numbers of citizens around a single cause, or to ensure that important information gets to them quickly. At the very time when there are more ways to talk to each other than ever before, we are losing the ability to talk to each other as a community.

The Internet has all the potential in the world to be the BEST place to seek out a variety of viewpoints and angles.

I can’t even imagine how I got by without the Internet in my early reporting days, and thank my lucky stars every day for the astounding array of fabulous information, studies, reports, contacts, analysis and deep thinkers it puts into my reach for use in my own writing.

But as I mentioned a moment ago, depending on search engines to take you to the information you need also makes it very easy for people to self-select for information that already fits with their own views. They go to the blog sites of people who think like they do. They join Facebook groups with people who share the same world view about the issue of the moment. They seek out stories and viewpoints that reinforce their view of why things are the way they are.

They seek information on the issues that they’re already interested in, and thus shut themselves away from the issues that they NEED to be thinking about if our communities are to survive these challenging times.

No longer do they find themselves drifting through page 3 of that day’s paper and accidentally discovering a viewpoint that they hadn’t considered. They’re not reading the letters page and coming across a fresh way of thinking of about an issue. One of the things I love best about great media writing - the New Yorker magazine is a wonderful example of this - is how terrific writing can draw you into reading about something that up to that point, you had no idea you were even interested in.

But in the age of electronic searches of your favourite pre-selected news sources, I suspect there’s far less accidental reading going on.

Now, unless you deliberately go looking for alternative views, everything you ‘find out’ will merely reinforce whatever it is that you already think you know.
So now our increasingly fragmented communities are made up of individuals seeking individual sources of information. They’re not getting the whole story, or even most of it. They’re not being challenged to think differently. They’re not being exposed to different ways of thinking, and instead are immersing themselves in a broad global community that thinks exactly like they do. They’re getting only the parts of the story that they choose to pay attention to. They’re forming their opinions based on the stories of a new breed of self-declared journalist - some of whom are absolutely great, but others who are little more than rambling, ranting proponents of rumour, stereotype and unfounded statements.

The Internet, a tool with the potential to widen your world to unbelievable proportions, suddenly becomes the vehicle that shrinks it.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s great being among a group of like-minded people - everybody waving their fists in the air in solidarity, agreeing with each other, patting each other on the back for thinking the right thoughts. But in terms of creating an atmosphere for change, it’s the wrong place to be. The more our communities splinter into small groups of people who all think the same way, the less we can come together to solve community problems.

The more we break apart into special interest groups, the more we shut out the issues and the people that need our attention. The more we find “community” on-line and among those who think just like us, the less we go looking for it right here in our real-live community, where our service clubs and our churches and our community organizations are dying for lack of participants as a result.

It’s an atmosphere that breeds narrow-mindedness and judgment - two things that are truly the enemy when you’re talking about cohesive and functioning communities. It prevents us from coming together by setting us apart in our individualness.
Obviously, these are enormous issues that go well beyond how the media choose to cover stories.

We are in the midst of great change globally in the way we interact with each other, and I don’t know where it’s going. But I do think that it’s in our interests to maintain a lively and compelling free press in the midst of all of it - one that works hard to keep itself relevant in changing times. I used to argue quite passionately that there would always be a place for newspapers in people’s lives no matter how much the Internet changed things, but I admit that I now see the industry walking straight into obsolescence due to its seeming inability to grasp that it must - simply must - start to do things very differently, both for the sake of its balance sheet and for the benefit of our communities, which NEED media coverage that is thoughtful, contextual, fully informed and absolutely engaged.

As I’ve said repeatedly, we do have some excellent journalists in Canada who are doing this kind of work right now. I know because I remain an avid reader of newspapers, and a believer in the important role they play in our communities. But that said, far too many of my morning reads leave me so infuriated that I regularly contemplate giving up the whole habit. Too often, I see disengaged journalists filling the white space between the ads, and disengaged editors who have long given up the important work of trying to tell the stories that their communities want and need to hear. I quit the media in 2004 because I couldn’t take the state of the industry, and I’ve seen very little since then that has given me any reason to doubt my decision.

In all my years as a journalist, I heard the same excuses for why this is so. “There’s just no time to do anything in-depth. Newsroom resources have been cut to the bone. Who has the time to devote to a big story when your editor is barking for you to hit deadline right now?”

There’s truth to all of that, of course, particularly the cutting of newsroom resources this past decade, which has included a drying-up of virtually all mid-career training courses that once at least gave a few journalists the regular opportunity to try to stay current and fresh.

But they’re excuses just the same. It’s harder to do a job well when you’re in a hurry, but it’s certainly not impossible. It takes a little more energy and drive to engage in a story enough that you bother to learn the history and context of what you’re writing about, but not much.

The same tool that may one day be the death of the traditional media - the Internet - is also the tool that gives every journalist instant and easy access to all the information of the world - information that can help them tell a far more meaningful story.

More recently, blaming the “corporate media” has come into vogue. I’ve never worked for a paper that wasn’t owned by a very large corporation, so I haven’t experienced the difference between an independent paper and a corporately owned one. Having worked for Thomson, Southam, Hollinger and CanWest at one time or the other, I CAN assure you that with a few notable exceptions, there’s not much to this paranoia around corporate interference in editorial product, and I for one don’t see corporate ownership as the main reason for the decline in readership.

But I do see a bland sameness settling over our country’s papers. I do see a lack of community focus and engagement, or even an understanding of the changing needs of the communities we’re writing for. It would be so much easier to blame that on evil corporate bosses, but I suspect it’s really because as journalists and editors in a time of economic decline in our industry, we have become a profession of largely white, largely middle-aged, middle-class, comfortably cynical people who don’t often look too far beyond the edges of our own lives when coming up with story ideas and approaches.

And while I wouldn’t want to be seen to bite the hand that is feeding me at this very moment, I do think universities also have to ask themselves what role they have played in all of this.

I see journalism as more of a craft, a trade, rather than a university degree, and one that has to be worked on with an eye to improvement for the rest of your career. But these days it’d be tough for a young person to land a media job without a degree, and masters’ in journalism aren’t uncommon in the newsrooms of the nations nowadays. So what ARE they learning at university about how to be an engaged journalist?

I asked a professor at Ryerson Polytechnique a few years back whether anybody was teaching a course in passion and curiosity, and he just laughed and shook his head. But why not? Obviously it’s important to learn the structure of a news story, and how to put together an effective sentence, and how to avoid being sued or acting unethically. It’s important to know how to do an interview.

But if we aren’t teaching the heart and soul of journalism to tomorrow’s journalists - if we’re not teaching them to engage and connect and to care about the people and the issues they’re writing about - then it’s all just more words on paper.
I hope that I don’t sound bitter, or like one of those people aging into a rosy memory of how things used to be so much better in the old days. In fact, they weren’t, but perhaps it didn’t matter so much when the daily paper had everyone’s ear no matter what. Now, it matters a great deal, both for the survival of an industry and a profession that I still love a lot, and for communities that are losing the glue that binds them together.

Thank you for this opportunity to sound off - and hopefully to stir the pot a bit as to what constitutes meaningful journalism in an age when we’re drowning in information. I’m told there will be plenty of time for questions tonight and I’m looking forward to that, because the engagement and connection needs to start right here, right now. Fire away, please, and thanks again for the chance to speak to all of you.

Donations most welcome for Oct. 16 event for street community
Oct. 3, 2008

Winter approaches, and my friends on the street are still mostly out in the cold. Our region is trying much harder than it was a year ago to do something about homelessness, but little has changed in the short term for the majority of people living out there.
The good news: Our community now knows what needs to be done, and has the right people in place to do it. As one of the volunteers who sits on the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness - the group that grew out of last year’s Mayor’s Task Force - I can assure you that some of the best-connected people with the biggest hearts are getting together regularly to try to work this crisis out.
But all that effort doesn’t mean much in the here and now to the 1,200 or so people heading into another long, wet winter. For them, it’s bundle up and wait, because another year has come and gone and they’re still stuck out there.
I’ve written a lot about homelessness this past year, and heard from many readers who wanted to help. OK, here’s an opportunity. I’m organizing an event for the street community Oct. 16 on behalf of the coalition, and we’d like your help in making it a great day for people.
We’re calling the day Project Connect. Partly it’s about drawing in people from the street community to share their frustrations and ideas for change with coalition members, and partly it’s about just putting on a really nice service day for a group of folks who don’t get many breaks. In bigger cities like San Francisco, similar “connect” events are held as often as every other month.
This is the coalition’s first such event, and it’s looking like we’ll have at least a couple dozen different services available to people that day. They run the gamut: haircuts, acupuncture, dental care, help with ID and income assistance, free pet food, outreach nursing, dog licences, job information. We’ll have a whole lot of good food happening as well, and hope to be handing out “survival pack” of socks, gloves and other essentials to everyone who participates.
It’s not even close to a solution for homelessness, of course. A pair of dry socks provides little more than a few hours of reduced discomfort on a rainy fall night.
But here we are on the edge of another winter, and socks are better than nothing. Until we figure out how to give people homes, we’ll have to settle for giving them a heck of a day, including a bag of stuff to take away that might at least knock the edge off their misery for a little while.
Rev. Al Tysick has told me to brace for as many as 500 people at Project Connect. The coalition would like every one of them to leave feeling listened to, well-fed, hooked up to services, and perhaps just the smallest bit better prepared to face down another hard winter.
We’ve got some money for the event, thanks to the support of partners like the United Way. We need it to cover our food and venue costs that day.
But putting together 500 survival packs is simply too big an order for our small budget. So I’m asking readers to consider sharing the load by buying some of the items needed for those packs.
What are we looking for? Things to meet people’s immediate needs: new socks, gloves and scarves; rain ponchos, grooming and personal hygiene products (tampons!); cosmetics; hand sanitizer; treats such as candy and chocolate.
We’re asking for new items only, because new would be a lovely surprise for a group of people who get by exclusively on castoffs. If you’re willing to buy items for donation, please contact Lynn Driver at the coalition at lynndriver@solvehomelessness.com (or 370-1512) for dropoff details. I’m hoping you can help but am acutely aware of the many fine charities out there that also need you, so please consider this request as an “add on” rather than a replacement for any of your regular causes.
We also need volunteers, not just to share in the work of that day but to make the kind of person-to-person connections that close the gap between “us” and “them.” If you’ve got time to give on Oct. 16 or in the days leading up to the event, send me an e-mail and I’ll happily sign you up.
Sure, it’s a band-aid solution. But while we wait for something more meaningful, it will have to do.

Bad thinking all round in Battershill story
Sept. 26, 2008

What’s done is done, so there’s little point in getting too worked up over the many missteps in the Paul Battershill saga.
But boy, there was some flawed thinking going on there at a whole lot of levels. And what’s most disturbing is that if it weren’t for a Victoria businessman inadvertently bringing the messy business to light in the first place, we might never have heard a word about any of it.
If you haven’t yet read Times Colonist reporter Rob Shaw’s excellent piece this past Sunday on Battershill’s hard, fast fall from grace as Victoria’s police chief, add it to your must-read list.
It chronicles an alarming amount of seriously bad decision-making leading up to Battershill’s forced resignation last month - on the part of Battershill, Mayor Alan Lowe and Victoria’s civilian police board. That the story took almost a full year to come out also tells you how badly those at the centre of the tale didn’t want you to know any of it.
The short version of the saga is that Battershill got rid of five senior managers and a long-time executive assistant during his nine years as chief, paying each of them handsomely to go away. The severance agreements totalled more than $600,000, with at least some of them negotiated by a lawyer who Battershill was having an affair with.
That he chose to have an affair with someone the police department was paying to help him fire some of his managers - well, that’s a stellar example of wrong thinking all on its own. But as Shaw’s story noted, Battershill also chose to brag about the affair with Marli Rusen to his employees, in explicit detail. By the time Victoria businessman Gerald Hartwig started stirring up trouble for Battershill last October, the affair was common knowledge in the department.
Hartwig hadn’t gone looking for an affair. When he filed a Freedom of Information request for Battershill’s expense accounts last fall, he was merely looking for answers as to why the police department couldn’t afford more downtown foot patrols. But when the law firm that employed Battershill’s paramour suddenly got antsy over Hartwig’s request, events took an interesting turn.
Enter Mayor Alan Lowe. He found out about the situation over an Oct. 7 coffee with Hartwig. But instead of bringing the matter to the immediate attention of the Victoria police board at its meeting two days later, Lowe - who chairs the board - inexplicably decided he’d wait to tell directors at some future meeting when there were more of them in attendance.
The Battershill story broke in the media less than 24 hours later. The blindsided police board was left looking inept and ill-informed, a perception that I would have to say has only been strengthened by the events that have followed.
What we now know is that the police board simply wasn’t paying attention to the major personnel problems that were developing inside the police department under Battershill’s leadership. They weren’t questioning the decisions he was making - to the point that directors signed off on a $125,000 severance agreement for Battershill’s former executive assistant that only Lowe had actually read.
The board didn’t question the unusual clause in the agreement forbidding the assistant from talking to them. Other than Lowe, none of them even knew it was in there.
Then came the RCMP report on the Battershill case a few months later. In yet another lapse of judgment, Lowe refused to provide a copy of the report to members of the police board and instead chose to give them his own personal summary of events at an oral presentation. And they let him get away with it.
Neither Lowe nor the police board have done anything illegal, of course. Under the provisions of B.C.’s Police Act, all the power for disciplining a police chief rests exclusively with the mayor of the municipality in question.
I don’t know who thought that was a good idea. But even if that’s the law - and hopefully it won’t be for much longer - it’s still clear in the Battershill saga that the police board was asleep at the switch. Long after that embarrassing media leak brought about by Lowe’s decision to keep them in the dark a while longer, the police board was still on auto-cruise.
Battershill did much good for the city, which shouldn’t be overlooked just because things ended so scandalously. But what was bad about Paul Battershill was made much worse by the actions of Victoria’s mayor and police board, and we’re owed some answers before the next chief is hired.

Long-ago tax return proves a dollar really does buy less now

published Sept. 19, 2008

I’ve recently been reunited with my “hope chest” from a long-past marriage, and cracked open the lid this summer for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Tucked in between the baby clothes and the wedding memorabilia were four years of my ex-husband’s tax returns. I find those returns coming to mind a lot these days amid the torrent of grim news about the economic meltdown in the U.S.
For those too young to know, a hope chest is a relic from a time when teenage girls were given cedar chests for accumulating the household goods and treasures that they’d need to set up their house once they became somebody’s wife. After marriage, the wife was free to fill the chest with whatever she chose, which in my case turned out to be a random collection of keepsakes, photo albums, greeting cards, and my ex’s 1976-80 income tax returns.
We were a typical young Courtenay couple of our day. My ex worked at the Campbell River mill. I taught piano for a few hours a week, but was primarily a stay-at-home mom with two small children.
In 1980, I was 24 and he was 28, and we’d been married for six years. I never would have imagined at that time that we were leading lives of privilege, but by today’s standards I guess we were. We owned our own home, had two vehicles, took a vacation somewhere nice every year, and generally didn’t want for much.
Looking back on those years, I’ve long suspected that my ex and I - and all the young Island families we knew in those years with jobs in forestry and fishing - enjoyed a much more comfortable life than most young couples raising children these days can count on.
But economic analysis isn’t my forte, so I never got around to nailing my hunch down. I was also wary of the possibility of turning into one of those old coots prone to remembering the past in rosier terms than was actually the case.
Then I took a look at that 1980 tax return. My ex earned almost $28,000 that year, a sum that even three decades later is still what 20 per cent of Canadian families are living on.
The median income in Canada nowadays for a family like ours - one wage earner, kids still at home - is more than double what our household was getting by on in 1980. But prices have done a lot more than doubled over that same period.
A small example: I found an old diary among my hope-chest treasures that I’d used to track our gas costs on a road trip to Disneyland in the late 1970s.
Back then, gas was about 30 cents a litre. It’s almost five times that much now. But what’s even more telling in terms of purchasing power is how gas prices then and now compare as a percentage of household earnings.
If in 1980 you were earning $28,000 and filling up your tank twice a month, your gas costs for the year amounted to less than three days’ pay. For argument’s sake, let’s presume an equivalent modern-day income of $75,000. Filling up at the same twice-a-month rate now eats up eight days’ wages.
In terms of housing, the change is even more dramatic.
We bought a little cabin on the beach in Royston in 1974 for $10,000. We sold it two years later to buy an unfinished two-bedroom house on a much bigger property. By the time we’d borrowed the money to finish it off, we had a $20,000 mortgage and monthly payments of just over $140.
So for starters, the cost of the house was less than what my ex made in a year. Only the wealthiest home buyers can say that anymore. We spent roughly six per cent of our annual household income on mortgage payments. Fast-forward to modern times and a household income of $75,000, and that would translate to a mortgage payment of about $375 a month.
If only. The truth is you can’t even find a rooming-house bed for that price anymore. The average Canadian currently spends more than 20 per cent of their total income on mortgage payments or rent. In constant dollars, median earnings in fact fell more than 11 per cent in B.C. between 1980 and 2005.
Is this “progress,” then? Not by a long shot. And we’d best brace for worse to come, what with America’s impossibly wealthy capitalist kings now fleeing the scene of the disaster they’ve created in the mortgage and investment industries.
As always, the rich get richer. The rest of us just keep losing ground.

Put Langford 'vision' to work on homelessness
Sept. 12, 2008

Mayor Stew Young and his council have much to be proud of in the transformation of Langford over the years. They’ve helped create an attractive, well-serviced town out of a place that not so long ago was more likely to be the punch line of a bad trailer-trash joke.
Councillors, take a bow. Municipal staff, you too, because you’ve proven the worth of a fast and efficient civic bureaucracy that knows how to get things done.
But the greatest test of Langford’s visionary capability is still to come. As the City of Victoria can woefully attest, the gentrification of a community inevitably strips away its ability to hide its social problems. Once you’ve torn down the bad part of town, there’s no hiding anything anymore.
Can we anticipate that Langford will be ahead of the curve in dealing with those coming challenges, too? So far, the verdict is still very much out on that front.
On the one hand, Langford has established civic policy that has already led to the creation of 30 affordable new homes that are selling at half the market price. That’s a brilliant move.
On the other, the municipality appears to be walking into emerging street problems with the same tired strategies that have been tried to no avail in one Canadian city after another.
Those cities can attest through painful first experience that Langford’s attempts to crack down on urban “campers” and sue the family of some kid with a prolific graffiti record simply aren’t strategic actions in terms of preventing social decay.
We’ve got two decades of experience right here in B.C. as to what happens when you try to deal with social problems solely by getting tough. Short answer: You spend a lot of money to little effect, and your problems multiply exponentially in the meantime.
Leave the whole mess long enough, as has happened in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and you end up with a tragic wasteland where a lively downtown used to be. The situation isn’t quite so grim in downtown Victoria, but it’s still a pretty telling example of what can happen when a city gets things wrong around homelessness.
I would have thought a guy as clever as Stew Young would know that you can’t police social problems out of existence. Cities have been testing that strategy for well over two decades now. You only have to look at the significant rise in homelessness during that same period - at least tenfold in our region alone - for proof that the strategy doesn’t work.
The gentrification of a community is obviously a noble undertaking. Seedy crack shacks and a string of dilapidated rental properties aren’t anybody’s idea of pretty.
But with gentrification comes the razing of the last remnants of housing that poor people can still afford. Rough-looking streets of neglected duplexes and sagging houses give way to high-end condos and snazzy townhouses, with nary an impoverished renter in sight.
You can see where that practice inevitably leads, especially when nobody’s making any effort to replace the cheap and easy housing that’s being lost. Add in the damage done to the social-safety net by years of cuts and offloading at the provincial and federal level, and you’ve got the recipe for social mayhem.
What’s a municipality to do? First and foremost, see it coming and plan for it.
Countless U.S. cities have walked themselves into major street problems in decades past. Their well-documented failures stand as stark warning to modern-day communities hoping to avoid the same mistakes. OK, Langford is no New York City, but the determinants of homelessness are the same all over the world, and here’s simply no excuse for a community to stumble blindly into urban decay anymore.
I would have expected Langford to be watching and learning from Victoria as the mistakes piled up into an outright homeless crisis in the capital’s downtown. Stew Young needn’t look far afield for a reminder of what can happen when a city tries to deal with homelessness as an offence rather than a troubling social phenomenon.
Were I the undisputed king of Langford, I’d be working on having at least 10 permanently subsidized and supported units of housing built into every new development. I’d be trying to engage the town youth in something more fun than spray-painting other people’s property. I’d be out there with the same kind of innovation that Langford has shown on so many other fronts, building homes for the homeless without a minute wasted on chasing them from place to place.
Come on, Stew. You’re the man with the plan. Show us you know how to build a great community as well as a town.

Deli-meat sandwiches should be no-go for elderly patients
Sept. 5, 2008

So I’ve done my due diligence this week and read through several dozen news items, reports and public-health warnings about the listeriosis outbreak that’s killing Canadians. I’m afraid I have to fall back on that old cliché about being left with more questions than answers, particularly around why old, sick people are still being fed deli meats.
Like most of the bacteria that cause food poisoning, listeria monocytogenes is found everywhere: In our soil and water; in almost 40 species of mammals (including humans); in fish; crustaceans; ticks; sewage waste; sickrooms. Healthy farm animals and humans alike can harbour it quite comfortably with no symptoms.
For a healthy adult under age 50, a bout of listeriosis is unpleasant but generally manageable. Still, the overall fatality rate is 20 to 30 per cent. And for those whose health issues put them at greater risk, the fatality rate is 40 per cent or more.
Pregnant women and their fetuses have a 20-fold higher risk of developing listeriosis. Almost all of the victims in Canada’s only other major listeria outbreak 27 years ago were unborn and newborn babies. Fatality rates are extremely high for fetuses infected in the womb.
People with AIDS are 300 times more at risk of infection. Anyone with suppressed immune systems - whether from chemotherapy, chronic illness, alcoholism or old age - is at significantly higher risk.
The health recommendations for those high-risk groups have been clear for years: Those who are elderly, seriously ill or pregnant should avoid eating foods known to carry the risk of listeria contamination - particularly soft, unpasteurized cheeses and “non-dry” deli meats (sliced ham, roast beef, chicken and turkey, for instance, as opposed to dried meats like salami and pepperoni).
Personal details aren’t available yet on the 13 deaths so far in this latest outbreak, or on another 25 confirmed cases of illness. But it’s known that most of the fatalities so far involved elderly patients at hospitals and seniors’ care facilities.
They died from eating infected sandwich meats from a single Toronto meat-processing plant, which produces some of Canada’s most popular brands. What has yet to be ascertained is whether anyone in authority gave even a second thought to the wisdom of serving frail seniors food that isn’t recommended for them.
I get that we consume untold tonnes of deli meat in Canada every year without incident - $1.2 billion worth, in fact. I get that most people will spend a lifetime eating deli meats and never get listeriosis. Coleslaw was the culprit in the 1981 listeriosis outbreak in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that killed 18 people, so it’s not like it’s all about sandwich meats anyway.
But my research this week nonetheless turned up U.S. health warnings dating back 16 years that advised people in high-risk groups to avoid soft cheeses and deli meats that hadn’t been dried. Health Canada made a similar recommendation in 2005. BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital quit serving deli meats to its patients last year.
But the deli-meat sandwiches clearly never stopped coming in facilities serving old, sick people.
How does contamination happen? In the 1981 outbreak, the problem turned out to be a farm that used contaminated sheep manure on its cabbage patch. A small outbreak on Vancouver Island six years ago was traced to problems with decontamination measures at a Parksville plant making soft cheese with unpasteurized milk.
For the latest outbreak, we know the contamination occurred at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto, but are still waiting for the rest of the story. It will likely involve the waste of one animal or another, as that’s the primary way listeria is spread.
Health professionals are not of one mind around dealing with listeriosis. Canada records some 13 million cases of food poisoning of one kind or another every year, and the incidence of listeriosis remains blessedly rare. A nationwide ban of listeria-prone foods in all hospitals and care homes has perhaps seemed unnecessarily extreme.
But the world is changing. The sheer coast-to-coast, shelf-emptying scope of a modern-day food recall is proof of that, and the latest incident yet another telling example of the downside of a consolidated, mechanized, multi-national food industry that’s about as far from the farm gate as you can get.
Miraculously, most foods we eat will continue to be safe even so. Most of us will neither fall ill nor die from listeriosis. But if all it takes to save a few more lives is to switch the sandwich fixings in our care facilities, surely we can take that one small step.

VIHA's problems go much deeper than communications department
Aug. 29, 2008

It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff.
That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA.
I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time.
When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the tightly controlled direction of a former deputy health minister from Saskatchewan, Ken Fyke. Then came Capital Health (subsequently renamed Capital Health Region) to swallow GVHS and other community-based health services in the region, and finally VIHA to engulf everything health-related on the Island.
The GVHS was born from conflict, as local hospitals and their medical staff didn’t go willingly into a top-down amalgamation of regional hospital services. Lots of leaks and brown envelopes from disgruntled hospital staff came my way in those years, evidence of much mistrust in the system.
Is that bad beginning partly to blame for the “communication problems” that have stuck like burrs to every version of the health authority ever since? Tough to say, but I do know that bad communication by the local health authority dates back at least 19 years, and that no overhaul of the communications department is going to touch it.
What I know of health-authority communications staff from my dealings with them over the years is that they’re by and large skilled, professional people doing their best in trying circumstance.
I suspect the current batch know all about good communications. I bet there are times when they’re watching in quiet horror as VIHA walks head-on into yet another populist community uprising led by whatever vulnerable, underdog group is losing services. (Frail seniors, people with severe mental illness, children with disabilities, the sickest addicts - oh, it’s quite a list.)
But what’s a department to do if the bosses have a completely different take on what it means to communicate effectively? With a few notable exceptions (the Victoria Health Project, for instance), the standard communications strategy employed by local health authorities over the years boils down to this: “We dictate, you accept.” I’d like to meet the communications department that could do a bang-up job with a message like that.
A story by Cindy Harnett in this week’s TC gave me new insight into why VIHA so often misses the mark in its communications. In an interview about the pending audit of the communications department, VIHA president Howard Waldner described the closure of Cowichan Lodge as a “good news” story that went bad only because the issue was hijacked by special interest groups and political agendas.
Wow. Does he really believe that? Anyone with their head even partially out of the rabbit hole would have seen that one coming, especially when the lodge’s aging residents were initially given just two months’ notice instead of the one year required under B.C. law.
In VIHA’s defence, there’s no way to come out looking like the good guy when you’re the one ordering old, sick Grandpa to pack up for another move just when he’d finally settled in. But the health authority has a knack for making bad news just a little bit worse as a “communications event” - first by never telling communities what’s up until it’s too late, and then by being completely unprepared for the negative fallout.
There are better ways to do it. The first option, and the one I’d root for: Mitigate disaster from the outset by genuinely consulting with people before making major changes that will affect their lives forever. Adjust plans accordingly.
Option two: At least have the common sense to understand that autocratic, secretive decision-making is a recipe for communications problems. Have a plan for dealing with the backlash that goes beyond blaming special interest groups for raining on your parade. Thin-skinned, defensive responses that deflect blame elsewhere are just so yesterday.
As for your communications department, let ‘em live. You know what they say about shooting the messenger.

The secret "chill pill" for outrage: Grandkids
Aug. 22, 2008

Outrage is an opinion writer’s stock in trade. So at one level I’m grateful for having a deep vein of wide-ranging indignation inside me to mine as needed.
But just back from a holiday with the grandchildren, I’m also grateful for the things that allow me to let go for a while. Tending to the basic needs of young children is the best therapy I’ve found as a break from chronic outrage.
As any parent well knows, looking after young children is a full mind-body activity. I’m a superb multi-tasker in most areas of my life, but I can barely make it all the way through a single magazine article over the course of a long summer day if also charged with the care and feeding of three engaged and energetic little boys.
It’s a blessing that I didn’t appreciate the first time round, when I was a young woman fearful that my full-time life of raising children was turning me into the worst kind of bore.
In those days of endless skinned knees, playground visits and Kraft dinner lunches, I fantasized about having the time to think bigger thoughts. Now, I seek relief among my grandchildren from too much time spent doing that very thing, once again proving the old adage about grass looking greener from the other side.
We live in times that call for outrage, and I don’t much regret being born with lots of it at the ready for all the grand problems of the world. Still, I’m happy to have grown old enough to comprehend the world-changing potential of just looking out for the needs of young children, which obviously plays a key role anyway in the building of a better future.
When I’m in full grandmother mode - which is to say, returned temporarily to being a mother of young children, only with much more patience and sang-froid - I live happily in the moment. “Tomorrow” really means tomorrow, and the only thing about it that causes concern is how you’re going to keep the sandwiches cool enough to survive a hot couple hours at the beach.
Of course, even the best picnic lunch can never negate all of the woes of the world, particularly for a journalist couple who can’t resist buying at least the occasional newspaper in their grandparently travels.
So I won’t pretend we went indignation-free for the entire 10-day holiday. I won’t deny the occasional outburst over some bit of news that made its way to us (although not nearly so often as happens during our regular life, when we begin every morning with a coffee-and-newspaper routine that walks a fine line between beloved ritual and grim start to the day). Sad, bad and gloomy events continued to unfold around the globe regardless of whether we were on a road trip.
But the bad stuff just can’t take the same hold on you when you’re charged with looking after young children. Yes, things appear to be heating up worryingly between Russia and Georgia, but you’ve got three dripping popsicles to deal with right now and it’s just going to have to wait.
And should you manage against all odds to start into a rant anyway about some crazy development somewhere on this crazy planet, a young child will simply shut you down - either by falling headfirst from the monkey bars at that very moment or with a long, long anecdote about making it through to the sixth level of the new video game he’s trying to master.
Kids also knock the stuffing out of would-be outrage by cutting to the chase.
An example from this most recent trip: Having spotted one of those awful and arrogant “Best Place on Earth” licence plates that British Columbians have been saddled with, I was working up a head of steam on the subject when my five-year-old grandson interjected with a question. “Who’s second?” he asked. I couldn’t have made the point more effectively.
Re-entry into the workaday world is admittedly difficult after a holiday with the grandchildren. The descent is fierce and fast, usually starting with that first frightful peek into the e-mail inbox.
I’m always ready for the break from the rigours of full-time parenting when we get back, and curious to catch up on the news. But I still dread the first tingles of indignation returning (thanks, Tony Clements). I’d probably give the whole thing a miss if it weren’t for the fact that railing against the injustices of this world is another vital way we care for our grandchildren.
They give us the gift of living for today. I figure we owe it to them to worry about tomorrow.

Oldest profession much like any business
Aug. 8, 2008

The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand.
Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business.
The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country.
Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers.
The naysayers - and there were many of them - predicted the worst in the heated debate preceding legalization: Dramatic expansion of the industry; a flood of new “victims” forced into the work; a rise in trafficking and organized crime.
Fortunately, New Zealand academics had the foresight to launch thorough studies of the industry before and after changes to the laws. That virtually none of the dire predictions have come true five years on has done much to shift attitudes here about the industry. We’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone in our travels who has lingering concerns beyond the usual zoning and location issues.
“For the five-year anniversary, we had a little celebration in parliament and even the prime minister dropped in to congratulate us,” notes Catherine Healey, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective that played a pivotal role in the long battle for legal workplaces.
As you might expect, the most significant change since legalization has been for sex workers.
“Sex workers throughout the world can tell you how it feels to have to talk to the police when the work they’re doing is illegal,” says Healey. “They can tell you about that phone call from the school and the fear of losing their child because someone has found out what they do for a living. They live with the knowledge that they can be picked up by the police at any time.
“Since the changes in New Zealand, all of those feelings have started to dissipate. Sex workers now know they have rights, and that they’re not lawbreakers. They’re finally able to be honest about what they do.”
With everything about the industry now wide open, new regulations requiring “all reasonable effort” be taken to practise safe sex make it easier for workers to convince reluctant clients to use condoms. (One such client has already been prosecuted for refusing to do so.) Brothel managers can talk openly with workers about safe-sex practices rather than in the veiled and coded language previously used to guard against a new hire turning out to be an undercover police officer.
Workers are far more willing to go to police with concerns or with information about violent customers, a change particularly noticeable among those working the streets. One of Healey’s favourite stories of late is of the police officer who inadvertently blocked a street worker’s line of sight to potential customers when he pulled his car up one evening. Suddenly realizing his mistake, the officer apologized and moved the vehicle.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. A simple law change doesn’t eradicate every bad brothel owner or end exploitation.
Immigrant sex work remains illegal, an attempt to prevent cross-border trafficking that has instead trapped some workers in the shadows. Municipalities aren’t uniformally happy about having to govern the adult sex industry by the same rules as any other business, particularly around location. Abuse still occurs, and disadvantaged children remain at risk.
But what was bad about the industry was even worse when it was illegal, note sex workers. They now have the same rights as any other worker, including the ability to take a bad boss to court for sexual harassment or breach of contract. Like any other citizen, they’re finally able to turn to the police for help.
And with workers newly free to talk openly about their profession, they’re comparing notes more often and making different choices about where they work. The single biggest change with the legalization of the adult industry has been a shift away from brothels into small “solo” operations of three or four workers.
“It’s not like we’ve done away with all the problems,” acknowledges Healey. “But when it was illegal, the laws were always there to compound whatever problems a person already had.”

Five years of fair treatment for sex workers in New Zealand

 Aug. 1, 2008
As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself.
New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals.
Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen.
It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspects of consenting adult prostitution are now legal, while the “genuine harms” of prostitution have been separated out to be managed in different ways.
Like Canada, New Zealand’s laws up to that point made it a crime for an adult to solicit sex for money in a public place, keep or manage a brothel, or live on the earnings of sex work. Like us, the country tolerated a bustling sex industry while maintaining pretence of trying to eliminate it, trapping sex workers in a grey zone of quasi-legality. (Also like us, they had laws and policies prohibiting children from working in the industry and preventing exploitation and violence, and those laws have rightfully remained in place.)
If you’ve watched the creeping progress through government of any issue of significance, let alone one as controversial as this, you recognize how amazing it is that in just three years, New Zealand made it all the way to decriminalization. How did that happen?
That’s an important question for people like me, who want to be part of making something happen sooner rather than later on the same front here in Canada. Here’s how it unfolded in New Zealand:
Barnett had been a long-time advocate of sex workers’ rights, and it was his bill that ultimately got the attention of New Zealand’s House of Parliament. But many other organizations had been pressing for reform as well, including the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Council of Women, the national YWCA, and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.
Not all of the groups condoned prostitution. But they came together in recognition that continuing to pretend the industry didn’t exist was simply making things much worse for the people working in it.
Barnett’s bill was sent to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee for a hard look, and the committee drafted a four-stage process for reform.
• First, identify the risks from the activity. Coercion, sexually transmitted infections, and being trapped in the industry were all seen as examples of risk associated with prostitution.
• Next, identify which risks could realistically be dealt with by law, and which required public education, better community services, etc.
• Third, separate the risks that do need a special legal solution from those that could be covered by current law. Thus the issue of sex workers ages 16 to 18 was to be dealt with differently than the regular employment policies that would apply to adult sex workers.
• Lastly, create new prostitution law.

It all came to be, but not without considerable dissent. The law squeaked by in a vote of 60 to 59, ultimately helped along by a passionate speech to parliament from a fellow MP who was a former sex worker. “It is about accepting that which occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights,” Georgina Beyer told her peers.
Those opposing the law cited a number of concerns going into the reform: growth of the sex industry; more visibility of street prostitution; an increase in violence against sex workers; the spread of disease and organized crime; the exploitation of children.
Research before and after the new law took effect found that hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, the the newly regulated industry could now be brought to task for the first time around health and safety issues, workers’ rights and contractual obligations.
That’s not to suggest that everything problematic about the sex industry vanishes when you decriminalize. But if the worst didn’t happen when New Zealand sex workers were finally given the right to earn a living, what’s our excuse for continuing to do nothing?

Lessons learned from the brothel project
July 25, 2008

It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life.
Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers.
As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair and friendly place to work.
Next thing you know, things were happening - at warp speed, of course, which I’ve learned is the standard operating speed for those working in the industry.
By June, the two young women had the licensing and business requirements in hand for a Victoria agency. By July, the Web site was up and eight independent workers had signed on give the new model a try. My head’s still spinning at how quickly things came together.
Like any fledgling business, it’s still very much a work in progress. The indoor sex industry has much in common with any industry, but some significant differences as well, including finding investors willing to put their money into an enterprise that at best can be categorized as “kind of legal.”
Developing workplace policy also isn’t as simple as just following standard business practice. As just a small for-instance, consider the delicacies of a workplace drug and alcohol policy when having a drink or two with a customer is often part of the job. Given the nature of the work, it’s a fine line as well that has to be walked to ensure that no worker ever feels exploited or forced to work, yet at the same time can be counted on to show up for her shifts.
Nor is our little business donating any profits yet, or firm on when the point will come when that’s financially possible. We’re not yet a brothel, either, as that really requires either buying a place or having an open-minded landlord in terms of maintaining the discretion required to operate in the land of the quasi-legal. Independent workers generally work out of their homes anyway, and that might work better with the coalition of independents with a centralized administrative core that’s taking shape.
I could fill a book with what I’ve learned about the sex industry in recent years, and in fact think I’ll do that one day soon. Perhaps the most surprising thing has been my own shift in thinking in the past decade - from a decidedly anti-industry position to someone helping to launch a new escort service. Much to my amazement, I’m even starting to understand why men buy sex.
I know I’ve baffled some people with my newfound embrace of the industry, a position that has cost me two friends in the past year alone due to irreconcilable differences in our opinions. I’m uncomfortable and sad to find myself pitted in the media against dedicated, caring feminists for whom I’m now the enemy. Sex work is almost as notable as abortion as a polarizing issue among people who thought they knew each other.
But at the same time, I cherish the memory of a former Catholic nun who took my hand and told me that if I was taking this brothel project on, then she had to presume it was worthy. I’ve been deeply touched by the support of people from all walks of life who, regardless of whether they like that the sex industry exists, share my view that as long as it does, we might as well try to make it as safe and healthy as possible for the tens of thousands of Canadian adults who work in it.
Lauren and I have had a documentary crew following us for a year now as we worked on our project (watch for us on Global TV’s Global Currents show sometime in the spring of 2009). We’re leaving Monday to tour the brothels of New Zealand with documentary director April Parry and the Force Four production crew to see how that country is coping since legalizing brothels five years ago.
Stay tuned for my updates from afar over the next couple Fridays. I’m counting on a very interesting experience.

Drunkenness at Music Fest puts teens at major risk
July 18, 2008

As always, I had a wonderful time at Courtenay’s Island Music Fest this past weekend, and I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken as criticism of what is truly a summer highlight for my family.
But holy moly, there was some out-of-control drinking going on up there.
There were kids drinking so hard that I suspect some of them were putting their lives at risk. They were falling-down, glassy-eyed, fumble-footed drunks. I can’t imagine the drunken coupling that went on in the teens’ sprawling, bottle-strewn campsites that wouldn’t have met the legal test of consent.
I like young people, and saw a whole lot of them at Music Fest who were there for all the right reasons and not just to drink themselves blotto in the campground. So I definitely wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I’m pointing the finger at young people in general - or even underage drinking. What actually disturbed me was not that some teens were drinking, but that they were drinking so heavily.
I saw one girl, maybe 15 or 16 years old, staggering around between the tents absolutely blasted, wearing an itsy, bitsy bikini and carrying a beer. It was 10 a.m. I couldn’t help but wonder at all the bad things that might have happened to her already.
One worried camper started bringing water to the drunken teens camped near his site, trying to help them stay hydrated as they sat drinking fearlessly for hour after hour in the hot sun.
The studies call it “binge drinking.” It’s defined as any single drinking session where you consume four or more alcoholic drinks (four for females, six for males). Not surprisingly, it’s the riskiest way to drink, and the most likely to lead to something bad happening.
Binge drinkers are five times more likely to have unprotected sex. They’re more likely to drive drunk - and cause accidents that kill people. They’re at significantly more risk of getting in trouble with police, and much more likely to get in fights. Gender matters: men are three to six times more likely than women to binge-drink.
Should a binge drinker develop hard-drinking habits that last - another known risk - he or she is looking at higher risk of more than 60 health conditions down the line: heart disease, brain damage, liver failure, cancer. Hard drinkers also risk chronic problems with sexual performance and fertility.
In other words, nothing good comes from binge-drinking. But the health stats still don’t really get at the issue that scares me most when I see kids drinking hard, which is how completely vulnerable they are at that moment to unforeseen events that could change the course of their life forever.
I drank to get drunk myself as a young teen, although I can’t recall ever being quite as blasted as some of the girls I saw last weekend. I’d put the age range of those drinking hardest at 14 to early 20s, but that’s not to say there weren’t a number of older festival-goers hammering it back as well.
Drinking is more or less sanctioned at the festival, what with a beer garden on site and a liberal alcohol policy in the campsite. Perhaps that’s something organizers will want to reflect on.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you have to, and it’s that point that requires the most thought going forward.
More than a fifth of British Columbians are occasional binge-drinkers. In terms of consumption - which is rising - Vancouver Island is second only to the Interior as the B.C. region that drinks the most. In Europe, where binge-drinking is a growing concern, a 2006 study found that 80 million Europeans were drinking at harmful levels once a week or more.
Hopefully we all know the drill on alcohol: That it slows the functions of the central nervous system; affects parts of the brain that control emotion, movement, balance, judgment and impulse; lowers people’s pain thresholds; fogs all five senses. If you’re pregnant, it wreaks havoc on the developing fetus. Too much of it and you’re dead, as a group of California teens were reminded in March when a 16-year-old pal drank herself to death at their party.
The message: Don’t binge-drink, both for your sake and for that of whatever young kid is noticing how you knock them back and concluding that’s the way it’s done.
And one for the parents: What the heck are you doing blithely dropping off young teens at the festival campground for three days as if somebody’s looking out for them? Teens need their parents to help them learn when to draw the line.

Traumatic brain injury a common and life-altering experience
July 11, 2008

One hard fall is all it takes. One punch. One smashup. One bolt out of the blue - a stroke, a case of meningitis.
The official name for what results is “traumatic brain injury,” but that little label barely touches on what it means to have to live with one. Life will never be the same for those whose brains sustain a severe injury. People sometimes feel so dramatically altered that they come to consider the date of their injury as their new birthday.
For Victoria man Des Christie, the injury was from a car accident at the age of 14. For the other 10,000 to 14,000 British Columbians who incur a traumatic brain injury in any given year, it might be a workplace accident, fall around the home, sports injury, medical problem, or any number of weird and unpredictable twists of fate.
“In this organization alone, we’ve got a staff member, my younger brother, another staff member’s daughter and another staff member’s husband - all of them with an acquired brain injury,” says Cridge Centre CEO Shelley Morris. “It’s much more common than people realize.”
The Cridge - more commonly known for its work with children and seniors - operates the region’s sole group home for people with traumatic brain injury. It’s for men only, but then again, men are twice as likely to experience a brain injury. The most common cause is a car accident, and the most common victim is a young man between the age of 19 and 25 injured while taking part in a risky activity.
McDonald House provides housing for 10 men. Christie has been living there for 14 years, but first had to put in a hard and trouble-ridden 22 years trying to make it on his own before finding a place that understood his challenges. Geoff Sing, the Cridge’s manager of brain-injury services and a brain-injury survivor himself, figures he could easily fill “three more McDonald Houses” if the resources were there.
One of the many little cruelties of brain injury is that it’s frequently invisible. The person looks unchanged to outward appearances, but no longer acts the same. They might not be able to hold their emotions in check. They’ll have memory problems. They tire much more easily. They may have suffered a permanent loss of motor control and brain function, and are unable to keep work or sustain a happy family life.
“The divorce rates after a brain injury are 85 per cent,” notes Sing.
Anecdotally, traumatic brain injury is presumed to be a major contributor to problems on Victoria’s streets. For some, the brain injury came first and resulted in a fall to the streets. For others, the street came first and the brain injury followed. Beatings, accidents and drug-induced disasters are daily possibilities for many of those on the streets, and injury rates overall are high.
The Cridge Centre wants to get a survey off the ground in the next few months to ascertain the level of brain injury on the street in a more formal fashion, in hopes of making a case for more resources.
“If we can get some specific numbers in the homeless community, my hope is that it will arm us - and the Vancouver Island Health Authority - with what we need to put more money into this,” says Morris. “I think it would be staggering to see the stats on this.”
As with any chronic and complex health condition, what’s needed for those with traumatic brain injury is a continuum of services. People typically start out in an acute-care hospital after their injury, then transfer to a rehabilitative facility. But what happens after that - or along the way - varies wildly. Without advocacy and support, life gets dicey quickly for those with brain injuries, and problems pile up fast.
Real work for real wages figures prominently in maintaining quality of life for those with a brain injury, says Morris. For the past two years, the Cridge has partnered with Camosun College to provide work training and on-the-job support for 36 people; Thrifty Foods, Carmanah Technologies and Rogers Chocolates are among the employers hiring from the program.
It’s not about lowering standards to suit people with brain injuries, stresses Sing, but rather about building flexibility and training into the work. Christie hadn’t worked for years before landing a job at Carmanah through the program, and is delighted with the boost to his disability income and his self-esteem: “I feel happier when I’m working. Otherwise, I just feel useless.”
Like the saying goes, it’s not exactly rocket science. “We want to grow residential housing and a job for people,” says Morris. “Can it get any more basic than that?”

Little things mean a lot in halting a fall
July 4, 2008

Everybody stumbles in their life. Most of us will bounce through any number of ups and downs over the course of a lifetime, some of it the result of bad choices and a lot of it for no obvious explanation other than bad luck and lousy circumstance.
I suspect that’s why I’ve got a thing for issues like homelessness. I’ve seen my share of bad luck and lousy circumstance - nothing on a grand scale, but enough to help me see from an early age that life can hold some rough surprises. As the late John Lennon so eloquently penned, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
Fortunately, every object nudged over the brink of the abyss is not destined to plunge non-stop to the bottom. Any number of things along the way can break the fall. The researchers call them “protective factors,” but what they ultimately come down to is having people in your life to catch you before you fall any farther.
It’s a role that family is intended to play, and certainly did in my life. But what if they don’t - or won’t? That’s where community service agencies shine as a kind of substitute family, breaking people’s falls with any number of small interventions before they plunge any further.
Consider the potentially disastrous fall of a young man named Jason, a 30-year-old dad who got injured on the job. Partway through his claim, he had his compensation cut in half to $400 a month, and suddenly found himself unable to make the rent. Poised to get joint-custody rights of his two-year-old son, Jason faced losing it all if he lost his housing.
Enter the Burnside-Gorge Community Association, one of a number of family-serving agencies in the region that play a vital role in catching people on the way down.
In Jason’s case, they gave him a crisis grant for the balance of April’s rent and walked him through all the papers needed for subsidized housing. Then they got him a place he could actually afford in just a week. They gave him a $2 lunch whenever he felt like dropping by. And in no time flat, Jason got things together again.
“If I’d have lost my house, I’d have lost my son - and I’d just gotten him back,” says Jason, who describes his Burnside-Gorge outreach worker as “a little angel on my shoulder through the whole thing.”
For a former Hamilton woman, the descent began with a cancer scare and the growing needs of her two children. The woman - we’ll call her Charlotte - was worried about her health and exhausted from being a single, working parent of two special-needs children. She figured she’d wrap up her seven years in Victoria and return to Hamilton to get more family support, including from the children’s father.
Things didn’t work out. The children hated their school, and were routinely teased and bullied. The family was unprepared for the behavioural problems in Charlotte’s children.
But she had spent every last dime of her savings getting to Hamilton, and couldn’t afford a second cross-country move to get back to Victoria. For 18 months, she and her kids toughed it out in Ontario. Then she and her ex-husband struck a deal: She’d return to Victoria, stay with a friend, and then put in four months at whatever job she could find to get back on her feet. He’d keep the kids in Hamilton until then.
Three weeks after her return to Victoria, however, her ex had given up and the children were back with Charlotte. Sharing a tiny basement suite with a friend up to that point, Charlotte and her children suddenly had nowhere to live. The three of them ended up spending a month in a Victoria transition house, with no clear plans for where they’d go after that.
Enter Burnside-Gorge once more, this time with a damage deposit for a rental house for Charlotte and the kids. She’d gotten her old job back by then and had money to cover the rent, but wouldn’t have been able to get the place without that damage deposit.
“I really didn’t know how I was going to come up with it,” says Charlotte. “Getting the damage deposit was a real turning point for me. I had no idea the Burnside-Gorge program even existed before that. Now that the kids and I are in a more stable situation, I want to find a way to give back.”
Score two for little miracles.

Coleman's autocratic style could be problem in new ministry
June 27, 2008

Dare we hope that a new day is dawning with news this week that B.C.’s most pressing social issues are now the responsibility of a single provincial ministry?
The new Housing and Social Development Ministry is an amalgam of various challenging bits pulled from other ministries, and on that front reminds me of the old “Ministry of Lost Causes” - the wink-wink nudge-nudge name for the now-defunct Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Ministry, which seemed more than anything to be a place where unpopular issues went to die.
The rebundled housing ministry has responsibility for virtually everything that relates to poverty: welfare; subsidized housing and homelessness; addiction and mental health strategy; landlord-tenant disputes; transition houses. It’s also got responsibility for anyone with a disability, including those with mental handicaps. Every impoverished and disadvantaged person in the province will be a client of the new ministry in one way or the other.
But at the same time, the ministry also manages two major B.C. revenue streams: alcohol sales and gaming. That’s not to say it’s able to spend the almost $2 billion in net revenues that drinking and gambling generate every year in B.C., but surely it can’t hurt to be in the room whenever that much money is flying around.
MLA Rich Coleman will preside over the new creation. He’s familiar with at least some of the issues, having had responsibility for gaming in a previous cabinet job and more recently, for social housing as part of his Forests Ministry portfolio. Whether he’s up for a considerably more intense portfolio at a point in time when B.C.’s social problems have never been worse - well, I guess we’ll see.
I generally take the measure of a politician from their time in Opposition, when they haven’t yet been brought to heel by “party discipline.” So I browsed old newspaper files this week for stories from Coleman’s five years in Opposition under Glen Clark’s New Democrat government (1996-2001).
Coleman was new to politics then, having previously been a real estate developer, security adviser, and RCMP officer. Given that he was the housing critic at the time, the strategies he was promoting then have real relevance to his current position.
The good news: He’s clearly an engaged, caring kind of guy. The Fort Langley-Aldergrove MLA has an active history with Kinsmen and Rotary clubs and his local Chamber of Commerce, and has won three awards over the years for his community involvement. As a new MLA, he personally advocated on behalf of a family fighting to keep their children from being apprehended by the province.
The bad news: He’s a long-time believer in leaving it to the private sector to sort out housing issues. He’s on record opposing government construction of social housing, contending instead that the province’s role in the issue should be limited to providing individual rent subsidies. Coleman was so adamant on that point that a worried Co-operative Housing Federation formed a special committee in 2000 just to combat his take on the subject.
People change, of course, and Coleman’s tack these past two years as minister responsible for housing certainly seems to indicate some changed thinking.
Under his leadership these past two years, the province has bought a total of 32 building sites and old hotels in Vancouver for conversion into social housing, which will house 1,800 people all told when built out sometime around 2010. Purse strings are loosening in our region as well.
What’s perhaps more of a concern in the new gig, then, is Coleman’s style. As we’ve learned the hard way from the appalling handoff of forestry lands to private developers in Port Alberni and now Sooke, Coleman feels no need to consult with anyone outside of government before doing whatever he wants.
And while nobody likes hearing that they’re making mistakes, Coleman really seems to dislike criticism. In the past few months alone, he has challenged the findings of the forest-safety ombudsman, a team of Simon Fraser University researchers looking into homelessness, and planners working on a massive mixed-housing development at the Riverview psychiatric hospital site. As forests minister, his autocratic ways managed to unite industry workers and environmentalists in a call for his resignation.
That doesn’t bode well for his new position. Addressing the complex problems of poor and disadvantaged citizens simply can’t be done in the absence of genuine community consultation. We need a minister who knows how to listen, and Coleman doesn’t come across as someone who gets that.
But hey, maybe this time will be different. With a deepening social crisis hanging in the balance, we’ll know soon enough.

Don't let Scotch broom's pretty flowers fool you
June 20, 2008

I drove up-Island to Courtenay one night last week and was treated to a spectacular sight. The normally drab stretch of the Inland Highway north of Parksville had been transformed into a twinkling sea of blue lupines and yellow broom, which dazzled me all the way to my destination.
Unfortunately, I knew too much about broom to be able to give in fully to the pleasure of the moment. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but hard to ignore what it meant to be passing through dense thickets of broom on both sides of the road for well over an hour.
Scotch broom is native to Africa and the Mediterranean, but made its way here after Capt. Walter Grant brought a handful of seeds to the Island in 1850 from his travels in Hawaii. Three plants grew from the seeds he planted in Sooke. Within 50 years, the plant had naturalized on the Island.
In simpler times, B.C.’s Highways Ministry used to plant Scotch broom along our highways for its cheery colour. That stopped after everyone figured out that the tenacious plant takes over in every sunny spot where it gains a foothold, squeezing out native species and producing an alarming 18,000 seeds per plant each year.
We also came to see over the years that broom was tough to poison, difficult to plough under, resistant to seemingly all insect predation, and too woody and unpleasant for any animal to consider eating. It wreaked havoc with reforestation. It drove up the cost of road and power-line maintenance.
Still, we let it get away from us just the same. Here on the Island, Scotch broom now covers more than 300,000 hectares - 10 per cent of the total land mass.
Oh, it’s a pretty plant, all right. But it’s bad news on just about every other front.
Scotch broom has yet to make the province’s official “bad weed” list, but it’s the source of much concern. It’s a particular problem on southeastern Vancouver Island due to its disruptive impact on two tree species that thrive in our region and few other places: Garry oak and Douglas fir.
Broom certainly isn’t the only problem facing those trees in these wild days of Island development. But its aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of growth blocks sun to new seedlings. Broom also wipes out plants that Island deer depend on for food, and creates such dense thickets in open, sunny spaces that resident quail are forced out of their habitat.
The time to do something about broom is right now, when the bloom is on. Waiting any longer allows the seeds to develop, and ultimately to be spread even farther afield through our fruitless attempts to burn, bury or otherwise destroy the resilient seed pods.
But whose job is it to curb the spread of bad plants? That there’s no real answer to that question perhaps explains why Scotch broom has flourished in B.C.
The Invasive Plant Council of B.C. identified the problem nicely in the title of a symposium on the issue a few years back: “Weeds Know No Boundaries.” Controlling the spread of invasive plants requires, at a minimum, the co-operation and commitment of all surrounding landowners. With B.C.’s mishmash of Crown land, aboriginal reserve, federal land, forest reserve and private property, it’s a major challenge just to accomplish that initial step.
Small wonder, then, that topping the plant council’s list of 10 biggest challenges around tackling invasive species is the task of “improving co-operation” between B.C. landowners. It has to be all for one and one for all when you’re talking about plant control, because nobody’s going to put in the hard work of wiping out broom on their property only to have a few hundred thousand seeds drift down from neighbouring lands where the owner didn’t bother.
Loss of habitat is the major reason for the extinction of native flora and fauna in B.C. But the spread of invasive species comes a close second. On the heavily developed southern Island, that’s a one-two punch for native species.
A 1997 inventory of B.C.’s sensitive ecosystems found only eight per cent of our Coastal Douglas fir region remained in a “relatively natural state.” By 2002, a further 8,800 hectares had been negatively affected. The losses are heaviest in second-growth forest, and you can bet that Scotch broom is doing its part to make matters worse.
Want to join the battle against broom? Visit www.broombusters.org for tips on how to take action.
As for those lovely lupines, enjoy. They’re native.

Teen finds hope amid the traumas of her life
June 13, 2008

These days, Karlie passes her time in an old Victoria restaurant, where she’s working on getting past all the bad things that came her way in the last two years.
She’s 15, and already a veteran of crystal-meth addiction, alcoholism, sexual assault and homelessness. It’s been quite an adolescence.
But clean and sober for a year now, she’s back living with her parents. She’s enrolled in the brand-new Youth Hospitality Training Centre run out of the former Taj Mahal restaurant, and liking it a lot. And she’s dreaming of the day when it’s just her and her dog in their own place - after all, it was the dog that got her through.
Karlie (not her real name) now knows that addiction runs in her family. But at the tender age of 10 - her age when she first started babysitting the children of an addicted neighbour - she had no idea of the trouble she was walking into.
The neighbour used drugs in front of her from the time she was 11, and got her drinking before she was 13. As things took a turn for the worse and Karlie hit Victoria’s streets for a year at age 14, she worked her way in short order through ecstasy, powder cocaine and crack. Then came crystal meth, and she knew from the first hit that she was lost. “I went down pretty fast,” Karlie recalls.
Her father never could stand the neighbour. And for good reason, as it turns out. Karlie was a little girl and the neighbour was 12 years older than her, but that didn’t stop him from pouring her drinks and eventually talking her into having sex with him when she was 13.
She didn’t put the words “statutory rape” to what happened, but her mom did when she snooped in Karlie’s diary and saw what the teen had written about the event. The mother called police. When Karlie told the neighbour, his harsh response set her on the fast track to the streets.
“He wanted me to lie and say it was all a fantasy. But I wouldn’t ,” says Karlie. “So he said he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and that I couldn’t see his kids either. He’d been my best friend, my brother, my boyfriend, even my dad in a way. It was like I lost everything. Not even a week later, I was on the streets.”
Police picked her up regularly during the year she was out there, but just as regularly she ran back to the streets. She found a “street grandpa” who looked out for her, and a 13-year-old “street sister” to curl up with on cold nights. Drugs ruled both of their young lives.
Change comes in unexpected ways, and Karlie certainly wouldn’t have pegged a squabble outside Pacific Christian School as a turning point at the time. She’d yelled at a kid who wouldn’t stop throwing snowballs at her, and told him she’d stab him if she saw him downtown. He told his parents; Karlie ended up charged with uttering threats.
She got six months probation, and then another nine months when she breached one of her conditions. (Her total sentence was several months longer than the house arrest the neighbour got for having sex with her, but she’s trying to let that go.) Ordered by the court into youth detox, Karlie started the hard climb out of her addiction.
Karlie’s got a new dream now: An animal shelter for youth on the streets, one that understands that sometimes a dog or cat is literally the only friend a kid has. Nothing in the bylaws stops a youth on the street from having a dog as long as it’s licensed and on a leash, but Karlie says the reality is that dogs are seized all the time regardless of whether their owners are in compliance.
She was so angry at the loss of two pitbull puppies she and her street sister had that she tried to take Victoria Animal Control to court. But only adults have that right, she discovered.
Karlie has another dog safely stashed at home these days, and credits her pet as the primary motivator for her getting clear of crystal meth. When it seemed like all the world had turned against her, the dog never left her side.
“My shelter will let people drop their dogs off if they need to go to rehab, because that’s a big problem out there,” says Karlie. “I want to change the way homeless people are treated with their dogs. I want to help.”

Insite not the answer, but it helps
June 6, 2008

Perhaps you’re already familiar with that ancient fable about the six blind men and the elephant. I find it coming to mind a lot these days in the fight over Canada’s only supervised injection site.
The Indian fable, put into charming verse in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe, tells the story of how the six men interpreted what an elephant looked like based on whatever part of the elephant’s anatomy they touched first. One touches the animal’s massive side and concludes it must resemble a wall; another grabs the trunk and presumes that elephants are shaped like snakes; and so on. (http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html if you’re curious).
The point I’ve always taken from the fable is that it’s impossible to reach the right conclusion if you presume that what you know is all there is to know. Problems are solved not by bickering over six different versions of an elephant but by bringing those viewpoints together to understand the whole.
It’s pretty clear from the battle shaping up around Vancouver’s supervised injection site that we’ve got an elephant on our hands. Blinkered by an ideological viewpoint that simply doesn’t allow for a fuller picture to emerge, the federal government has a tight grasp of the elephant’s tail and an equally firm conviction that its version is the only one that matters.
We can fight it out in court, I suppose, and that appears to be what we’re headed for. A win in B.C. Supreme Court last week that deemed the pending closure of Insite unconstitutional is headed for appeals court and no doubt the Supreme Court of Canada now that Ottawa has made it clear that its sole goal is to shut Insite down.
I suspect last week’s ruling will ultimately be upheld. But for the 8,000 users of Insite who face being hung out to dry for the next decade while we argue about what constitutes an elephant - not to mention tens of thousands of other Canadians who could benefit from similar sites in their own communities - I can only hope for a much quicker resolution than a court fight will ever bring us.
My personal view of places like Insite is that they’re a small but important component of an overall strategy for reducing the harms of drug and alcohol use.
They certainly don’t solve all of the problems around addiction, or even most of them. Nor are they universally supported by people with addictions in their own background, some of whom are every bit as adamantly opposed to injection sites as the Conservative government.
But supervised injection sites do keep people alive to fight another day. They bring a desperate and isolated population into contact with professionals who want to help them. They provide health care to a group of people who otherwise receive very little due to widespread stigmatization of their particular illness.
They reduce the spread of costly and difficult diseases. They provide a badly needed alternative to open drug use on our streets by those too addicted to hide their problems any more. Meanwhile, as has been proven at Insite, they don’t lead to increased street problems or higher rates of crime. That’s good enough for me.
The government questions whether the dire situation in the Downtown Eastside has improved at all since the site opened four years ago, and contends that Insite’s $3 million annual budget would be better spent on “treatment.”
Federal Health Minister Tony Clement is absolutely right when he says much more money needs to be put toward treatment for addictions. But for many of Vancouver’s most disadvantaged users, Insite is where treatment starts.
For some, a visit to the supervised site will be a first step toward recovery. I don’t know how Clement envisages people with severe addictions finding the help they need to begin that journey, but in my experience it starts with them getting support in a place where they’re accepted just as they are.
For others, recovery will be years in the making, perhaps even unachievable. But at the very least they will benefit from a safe, clean place to inject, and our communities will benefit from a reduction in the ferocious bacterial and viral infections spread through street-level injection drug use.
As for fears we’re sending a “poor message” to youth about drug use by allowing supervised injection sites, that’s just one of those fictions that lazy people dream up to create emotional heat around an unsound argument. Nothing says “Kids, don’t do drugs” better than the haunted visage of someone in late-stage addiction.
With as many as 125,000 Canadians thought to be injecting illicit drugs, the elephant is upon us. Time to open our eyes and see the beast for what it is.

The problem is doing nothing about the problem
May 31, 2008

I have no particular stake in what Richard LeBlanc is trying to accomplish on Woodwynn Farm, other than a broad interest in anything that aims to tackle the problems on our streets. I don’t know how big a dent his project will make on the most obvious challenges facing the downtown.
But word last week that a citizens’ group had formed to try to buy the farm before he does was still some of the most discouraging news I’d heard in a while. That people would rally to raise more than $6 million just to stop a guy from trying to do a good thing - well, that’s just such a sad statement of where we’re at in this region.
What’s to be done in a community where the biggest problem is an inability to address the problem?
At least we’re no longer debating whether we have social problems. We’ve even reached some consensus on the work that needs to be done: housing (and more housing), outreach, better mental health care, accessible and integrated services, job opportunities, reconnection to community.
Ah, but where will we build those services? That’s the issue that’s stopping us dead right now. We talk a good game about wanting problems solved, but only if it all takes place in someone else’s neighbourhood.
An acronym has already been coined, of course: YITBY, for “Yes, in Their Backyard.”
The group opposing LeBlanc’s project offers a timely example. Farm Trust chair Barbara Souther, a long-time neighbour of Woodwynn Farm, mentioned in media coverage this week that she’s all in favour of helping the homeless, but thinks an empty school a few kilometres away would be a much better location. I wonder what neighbours of the school would say about that.
Similarly, tensions are said to be running high within the Downtown Residents Association between those who live near the now-defunct needle exchange on Cormorant Street - which is permanently closed as of tomorrow - and those who live in the neighbourhoods where the new mobile exchange will operate.
One neighbourhood wins, another loses. Whoever mounts the loudest campaign wins the right to dump the problem into somebody else’s lap for a while, at least until that group can mount their own campaign to push it elsewhere.
But isn’t the challenge, then, to strive for one of those “win-win” solutions we like to talk about? We need to get past the surface hostilities and figure out what it would take for a neighbourhood to feel comfortable enough to say “yes” for a change.
There are many ways to make an unpalatable idea more palatable. Resistant B.C. communities quickly changed their tune about hosting provincial casinos, for example, after they were given a cut of the profits.
What’s the carrot we could use to appease neighbourhoods asked to host projects tackling street issues? Would a tax break help? More community amenities? What are people actually afraid of, and what could be done to convince them that their concerns will be addressed?
I’m anticipating several angry e-mails in response to this column along the line of, “Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a bunch of homeless people living next door to you? Let’s see if you’re so damn supportive once they’re breaking into YOUR house.”
If that’s how things played out, then yes, I’d be unhappy. But as we know from any number of potentially controversial services operating below the radar in their particular neighbourhoods - detox, halfway houses, women’s shelters, recovery houses - a well-run and properly resourced service doesn’t draw problems.
It’s understandable why people fear the worst, mind you. The reason things blew up on Cormorant Street wasn’t because a needle exchange was located there, but because it could no longer cope with changing client demographics and a caseload that had tripled since 2002 with no corresponding rise in funding. We taught people to expect a mess should the needle exchange ever come to their neighbourhood, and the challenge in that case is to be absolutely sure we do it right the next time round.
The situation is different in the case of LeBlanc’s farm. His opponents are anticipating problems that I doubt will even materialize. Therapeutic communities like the one he’s proposing hinge on a careful selection process to ensure a good fit with people ready for change. Neighbours need not fear the arrival of busloads of struggling, addicted people plucked fresh from the streets (nor will LeBlanc’s proposal fix all our problems downtown).
We need new ways of resolving an old problem - not homelessness, but our community’s inability to act. Until then, we’re just putting a whole lot of energy into standing still.

Welfare outreach puts workers where the homeless are
May 23, 2008

Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job.
She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times.
An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago.
Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is to find people living on the streets who ought to be on income assistance, and make it happen.
Most of the people she’s dealing with have mental illness. Many have a deep and long-standing distrust of government. The major challenge is in developing that trust, says Sinke.
“I definitely don’t go around announcing, ‘Hi, I’m Wendy from the government,’” says Sinke. “Even when I get them on income assistance, they may not always know I’m with MEIA.”
MEIA has had outreach offices for 12 years, including the Downtown Outreach Service on Cormorant Street. But what’s new about Sinke and her co-workers is that they’re now going out to find people rather than just waiting to be found, and speeding them through the process.
The ministry’s outreach workers have also been given more flexibility around policy - an essential change in terms of working successfully with folks who wouldn’t be able to make their way through the system otherwise.
If somebody doesn’t have identification, for instance - a universal problem for those living in the chaos of the streets - Sinke can not only help them fill out the application forms, but offers to keep their ID safe at her office if they want. She can even skip the ID requirement altogether if a street-serving agency can verify who the person is.
“A group of outreach workers meet every Monday morning, and everybody there knows the street clients,” says Sinke. “So if someone from that group calls to tell me that John Smith is in their office right now and could I come down, I’ll be pretty darn sure that’s John Smith.”
B.C. income assistance is divided into two portions, one for shelter and the other for support. Until they find housing, people living on the streets can’t qualify for the shelter portion - currently $375 a month for a single person. But they can collect $235 a month in support, and up to $532 if they’re considered disabled.
Sinke divvies up her clients’ monthly stipends into weekly payments if they request it, which helps them make their money last while also avoiding the month-end welfare spending splurge known on the streets as “Mardi Gras.”
Sinke’s previous job was working at the Victoria Transition House. That gave her an understanding of societal prejudices as relevant for people on the streets as they are for women fleeing domestic violence. Why a person can’t find their own way off the street is as complex a problem as why a woman stays with an abusive spouse, she notes.
With people on the streets slowly becoming more aware of MEIA’s outreach program, the next big challenge is to make sure service providers know about it, says Sinke.
Under pressure from two consecutive governments, B.C.’s income-assistance caseload as a percentage of the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1995 - from nine per cent of British Columbians to three per cent. Service providers have understandably come to believe that many clients don’t stand much chance of qualifying.
But things have changed, says Sinke: “Unless you’re 18 and fresh out of high school, there are enough exemptions now that nobody needs to be denied.”
The changes are small but significant, and urgently needed as part of the strategy for ending homelessness. Sinke sees the proof of that in her caseload files: In the last five months alone, she’s helped find housing for 12 of her clients.
“These were absolute street people, with long histories of living on the streets. Many of them didn’t even want housing when I first met them,” says Sinke. “That just shows how well this program works.”

Do you know where your laws are?
May 16, 2008


By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.

Homeless needle exchange hits road for better or worse
May 9, 2008

We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
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Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.