If you see this Vancouver Sun article in YOUR local paper, please write a letter to the editor!

I'm an advocate for the rights of sex workers, and one of the biggest problems out there is that all the study, research and reporting is almost exclusively about the experiences of marginalized "survival" sex workers - who make up just 10-20 per cent of all sex workers - yet is presumed to be the experience of all sex workers.

Case in point: an article from the March 4 Vancouver Sun, a shorter version of which ran in the Victoria Times Colonist and Edmonton Journal today (and perhaps other publications - those are just the ones I'm aware of) on HIV/AIDS prevalence among "female sex workers" in Vancouver. I tracked down the original study and the error begins there, as the information they wrote about came from three studies of survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside, yet the language they use makes it sound as though the findings are representative of Vancouver sex workers overall.

So here's my letter to the editor that I've fired off in various directions this morning, followed by the Sun article. I've got the original study as well if anyone wants me to send them a copy - e-mail me at patersoncommunications@gmail.com. Thanks for caring.

Letter to the editor
Re: “One quarter of female prostitutes HIV-positive,” March 5
I’m writing to correct a blatant error in the reporting of findings from a B.C. Excellence in HIV/AIDS study.
This study was essentially a review of existing literature around HIV/AIDS prevalence among high-risk populations in Vancouver, including survival sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. However, the reporting of it wrongly extrapolated its findings to include all sex workers - the vast majority of whom are indoor workers (escorts, erotic massage, independents) who were never among the groups studied.
One of the primary myths around sex work is that those who do the work are vectors of disease. For those who work in the frequently miserable conditions of outdoor survival sex work, HIV/AIDS is obviously a risk due to high addiction rates and perhaps more unwillingness to turn away customers who refuse to use a condom.
Indoor sex work is a very different industry, however - one that has gone virtually unstudied and unreported on in Canada.
An estimated 80-90 per cent of Canadian sex workers are indoor workers. The limited studies that have been done on the tens of thousands of Canadians who work in the indoor industry have found dramatically lower rates of HIV/AIDS, violence, coercion and misery. Yet this group of workers is routinely lumped in with survival street workers for the purpose of sweeping statements on the fate and health of sex workers overall.
Sex workers are extremely stigmatized as it is, and feel the tremendous impact of that on their lives every single day. Research and reporting that overlooks the numerous differences between indoor and outdoor sex work can only perpetuate that.

Jody Paterson
Victoria, B.C.

Original article from Vancouver Sun, March 4

One-quarter of Vancouver’s female sex trade workers infected with HIV
Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, March 04, 2009
VANCOUVER - Twenty-six per cent of Vancouver's female sex trade workers are infected with HIV, as are 17 per cent of the city's injection-drug users, a new B.C. study shows.
The study, by researchers at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and published in the Harm Reduction Journal, is the first in Canada to estimate the per-capita prevalence ranges for high risk groups, using United Nations/World Health Organization software, 2006 Statistics Canada data and other sources such as population surveys.
Gay men, the local population of which is said to be 20,000, including male sex trade workers, have an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 15 per cent.
The overall prevalence of HIV in Vancouver is about 1.21 per cent, six times higher than the national rate.
"Drugs and sex are the preferred routes for transmission. Female sex trade workers get paid more money for having unprotected sex with johns," explained co-author Dr. Julio Montaner, who is president of the International AIDS Society and head of the division of HIV/AIDS at the University of B.C.
There are up to 520 female sex trade workers in Vancouver. Montaner, asked if the high HIV prevalence among prostitutes should trigger a warning to visitors during the 2010 Olympics, said:
"I don't want to jump on the Olympics bandwagon with this. There should be public advisories everywhere about this, not just because of the Olympics. People who avail themselves to this industry should know you better watch out.
"At home, tourists and transients may behave like star citizens and then, when people go to places like Vancouver, Vegas or Thailand, they party it up," he said.
Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, said she had not yet read the report, so she couldn't say whether a targeted public health campaign for those who pay or trade for sex is required.
"Our message has always been that you should assume sex trade workers are HIV positive," Daly said.
"It is a high-risk activity for all kinds of infections and therefore you need to practise safe sex.
"During the Olympics, we are going to be distributing 100,000 condoms to athletes and hotels along with educational information. Whether it will specifically mention the sex trade I cannot say at this point," she said.
The high prevalence of HIV among female sex-trade workers is an emerging trend, given that in the 1980s, most infections were among gay men and in the second wave of the epidemic, injection drug users were hit hard.
"We always knew we had a significant problem, because of factors like our benign climate causing people to drift here, being a port city, and having so much poverty and so many homeless people on the Downtown Eastside," Montaner said, adding that it is difficult to know if men who buy sex from infected prostitutes are also getting infected.
"We don't have any way of accessing the johns to ask them those questions," he said. "And if we see them in our clinics, it's not like they volunteer if they got it that way. They would be more likely to report that they got it through having casual sex, or with multiple partners."
Montaner said HIV experts have made a pitch to the provincial government to "seek out and treat" HIV-infected individuals who are not on medications. It's estimated there are about 13,000 B.C. residents infected with HIV - 11,000 males and 2,000 females - but fewer than a third of them are taking such medications.
Montaner believes the number on medications should be more like 7,500. He said that would reduce the number of new infections each year from 400 to 300.
"The premier, the health minister and other government officials have been very supportive about this kind of progressive approach.
"But now with the economic downturn, we are in a waiting mode. We need an outreach program that brings treatment to the people, to make it more accessible," he said, referring to his vision of clinics in high-risk neighborhoods where such medications would be distributed.
Currently, the drugs are not taken by HIV-infected patients until their immune systems have deteriorated to a certain level. The delay-until-you-can-no-longer-delay approach is intended to save money and stall the potentially unpleasant side effects of medications. But it also means that untreated HIV patients can transmit infections.
Under another proposed strategy by Montaner's group, the "highly active antiretroviral therapy" (HAART) medications would be taken by infected patients far earlier in their disease process, so they wouldn't get the opportunity to transmit the disease.
HAART is said to be nearly 100-per-cent effective at preventing HIV by suppressing viral loads to undetectable levels and preventing people from developing full-blown AIDS by boosting the immune system. A report from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control shows that in 2007, there were only 61 full-blown AIDS cases in B.C, the lowest number since 1994, largely because of the availability of such lifesaving medications.
Sun Health Issues Reporter
pfayerman@vancouversun.com

Health authority's detox rules block access for street users

We met over coffee last week, each with our own reasons for being there.
I was there to find out why the region’s new 14-bed detox unit is virtually unavailable to people from the street community. He wanted to know why the media always fixate on the negative.
We talked for an hour and a half. I’m not sure that either of us fully understood the other one’s points by the end of it all. But at least we heard each other out, and I appreciated his frankness.
As the director of addiction services for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, Dr. Laurence Bosley is an important man when it comes to addressing some of the immense problems on our streets.
Addiction certainly isn’t the only reason why people end up homelessness. But it’s a major reason for why they get stuck out there. So when the health authority opens a new detox with policies that essentially exclude most of the several hundred people with addictions on our streets, I’d like to understand why.
But first to Dr. Bosley’s point about the media, because I do get what he means. We desperately needed the new detox and seven “stabilization” beds that opened this month, and it’s a beautiful facility in a time of scarce resource.
So I understand Bosley’s unhappiness at having media hone in on two “negative” angles on the story: That the facility isn’t available for stimulant users (people addicted to cocaine or crystal meth); and that it goes against the health authority’s own addiction-treatment policy by prohibiting smoking anywhere on site.
But like I told an audience of young activists at the youth-organized Change Conference this past weekend, you don’t fix a hole in the roof by talking about the 90 per cent of it that isn’t leaking. We won’t address what’s wrong in this world without talking about the problems.
Detox is the first step in getting out from under an addiction. It’s essentially five to seven days of care and prescription-drug therapy to help people through the most immediate withdrawal effects of whatever drug they were using.
Bosley rightly notes that it’s a pretty minor step, all things considered. But it’s the first one nonetheless. None of the steps that come after - treatment; spiritual healing; finding new ways to cope; drug-free housing; new friends and places to go; the hard, hard work of staying sober - can begin without detox.
So when policies at the new detox shut out the most prominently addicted people in our region, that’s one heck of a leak in the roof. The dominant drugs on the street right now are crack cocaine and crystal meth, so the no-stimulants rule alone has huge implications. But add in the no-smoking policy for a population for whom tobacco is the sole saving grace of life, and you’ve shut out the people who most need the help.
Bosley applies a cost-benefit analysis to the issue. The health authority has a limited amount of money to spend, and unrelenting demand for all its services. It’s making choices all the time in terms of who’s getting care.
On the detox front, Bosley points out that withdrawing from heroin or alcohol can kill you, and must be done under medical supervision. Withdrawing from cocaine or crystal meth is unpleasant, but not life-threatening. VIHA’s mandate is to provide medical care, not to give away expensive beds to people who really just need a place to lie down and sweat it out.
Except people on the street don’t have a place to lie down. No bed to sleep in for five straight days, that’s for sure. No way to get away from the sellers and the users. No place to detox, and thus no way to even begin the long journey out of addiction.
Bosley also notes that it makes little sense to give someone who’s homeless a detox bed for five nights and then just release them back to the streets. On that point we definitely agree. He wonders if we try too hard to “cure” everyone, when some people’s problems simply may not be curable.
I would argue that we’ve barely tried at all in terms of the street community. The significant successes of the three VIHA-led integrated outreach teams in keeping people supported and housed this past year underline how much can be accomplished when we do get down to the business of dealing with people’s real needs.
As for smoking, Bosley says he can’t believe anyone is surprised at that decision: “That’s just good clinical care.” I guess I see it as picking your battles. What good can come of denying people care for their addiction just because they can’t quit smoking?

Best bet for ending gang violence is to remove the profit

A UVic student I met last fall when I was teaching a journalism course let me read an interview he’d done with a Vancouver gang member - a childhood friend of his.
It was an extraordinary read. Everybody’s got an opinion on why gangs have become such a deadly problem in B.C. and how we’ll get a handle on things, but it was fascinating to get a take on the issue from the point of view of a former gang member.
Like a lot of the young people caught up in Vancouver’s gang scene right now, this kid had grown up as a generally happy and well-cared-for child in a financially comfortable family. Boys emerging from impoverished, troubled childhoods are still the primary recruits for a lot of Canadian gangs, but the rise of a new kind of gang culture in Vancouver points to more complicated risk factors that we’ve barely begun to understand.
This particular young man was drawn into gang life after meeting another teen a couple years older than him who had it all going on: Money; cars; girls; drugs; stature among his peers. The older teen asked the boy if he wanted to earn a little money selling marijuana to his secondary-school classmates.
Within months, he was making more money than he’d ever imagined. He’d also undergone a transformation among his peers: From the quiet kid at school who nobody noticed, to the one whom everybody wanted to hang out with.
He had a cool car, lots of girls interested in him, and access to the best drugs. Heady stuff when you’re an invincible 16-year-old.
Neither this boy nor anyone he worked with in the gang seemed to worry too much about running afoul of the law. So I’d counsel that we think twice before assuming that more policing and tougher jail sentences will solve Vancouver’s escalating problems. Things are always much more complex than that.
The boy was eventually invited to be a truck driver for the gang, moving drugs back and forth over the Canada-U.S. border. The older teen he’d first met continued to be a mentor of sorts, even inviting the boy to room with him for a while after he fought with his parents over the source of his lavish new lifestyle. The parties at the new place were non-stop.
In his eight years in the business, he never got caught. He made a ton of money. The only reason he even left gang life was because guys above him in the hierarchy started getting killed by rival gangs, and he knew his time would be coming soon if he didn’t get out. He’s back at university now, studying to be a pharmacist.
A word like “gang” has a great deal of emotional charge, but at its essence a gang is an organization that’s in the business of buying, selling or producing something that’s illegal.
The product can be just about anything; I remember reading a few years ago about U.S. gangs who specialized in hazardous waste, because there was a lucrative business at that time in illegal dumping. Here in B.C., it’s mostly drugs, the trade of which we are superbly placed to handle due to our long coastline, proximity to the U.S., and sophisticated network of marijuana operations.
Were the product anything but illegal drugs, the B.C. government would be bragging about the runaway success of a local industry. Like it or not, it’s an immensely successful industry, albeit one in which murder is an acceptable corporate strategy for resolving rivalries and personal slights.
Gangs exist because many, many people in the mainstream community want to do illegal things, and go looking for someone to provide it. So either we’re going to have to stop buying anything illegal, or we’re going have to make more things legal in hopes of cutting into gang profits.
We obviously don’t want to be legalizing every criminal activity. But it seems to me we could make significant progress by starting with drugs and sex. Decades of bad law haven’t done a thing to curb demand or supply of either of those products, so it’s not like we’d be abandoning a winning strategy.
It’s the buying habits of the mainstream community that fuels gang activity. Any real solution has to involve making gang life less profitable.
Yes, we also need enforcement, and meaningful tools for understanding the small segment of privileged, middle-class boys who end up attracted to the egocentric and anti-social world of gangs. But we’ll get to the root of the problem only by taking the money out of it.

Any more lean years for non-profits a potential disaster

The lesson that lingers the most for me from my three years of heading up a non-profit is how very hard you have to work just to keep the doors open.
Whatever else may be happening on a given day, the one constant for anyone running a non-profit is the endless hustle for money. Barely a moment went by in my time at PEERS Victoria when I wasn’t working at least a dozen different angles to make sure we’d have enough money to keep going.
And that was in the good times. In bad times - well, I guess we’ll see. Nationally, expectations are that as many as a fifth of Canada’s 60,000 non-profits will close as a result of the economic downturn. Small non-profits walk a razor edge when it comes to survival, so that number sounds frighteningly accurate to me.
Non-profits rely almost exclusively on governments, investment-rich foundations and generous citizens for their funding. None of those groups have much interest in spending at the moment.
That’s a scary development for a sector that generally lives by the seat of its pants even in boom years. It’s an equally scary development for what it will mean for the tens of thousands of British Columbians who rely on the myriad services and programs run by non-profits. B.C. agencies are awaiting Tuesday’s provincial budget with particular trepidation, as the province provides the bulk of their funding.
“How do you do the work you do if you don’t have any profit?” a UVic student once asked me after I’d told her PEERS was a “non-profit.” The label is fairly baffling, I agree, and “not-for-profit” no better.
What’s possibly worse for the sector is that both terms call to mind a kind of begging state, a place where there’s never any money to be had . That’s certainly how it is for a lot of small non-profits, but you know what they say about how a label can hold you down.
Essentially, the sector does the work of government - most importantly, the human-service work essential to a civil society. The private sector doesn’t set up shop unless it can turn a profit, so a typical western democracy like Canada turns to non-profits to do all the other work that would otherwise go undone.
That’s the reason why it’s PEERS and not a private business providing outreach on the local prostitution stroll. It’s the reason why poor people in the downtown are fed and cared for by non-profits, and why the work of holding families together is mostly done by neighbourhood houses and other small agencies.
The people who need those services don’t have the money to pay for them, which means the work is all cost and no revenue. That’s the kind of service that’s either going to be provided by the non-profit sector or not at all.
British Columbians count on a very long list of non-profit-run services to be there when they’re needed. Sexual-assault counselling; programs for children with disabilities; job training and placement; legal advice; support for troubled teenagers; seniors’ care; on and on - were it not for all the work done by B.C. non-profits, this province would be a much sicker, sadder and less productive place.
But it’s one thing to be thankful for the work of non-profits, and quite another to fund them with any kind of consistency. Unstable funding that rarely keeps up with cost-of-living increases has been the norm even under governments professing interest in looking after vulnerable citizens, but has become much more of a problem in the past decade as governments moved to reject responsibility for the social health of citizens.
In B.C., those shifting ideologies placed the non-profit sector firmly on the outside looking in during the economic boom. Having gone hungry for several years now, many are in poor shape to withstand whatever might be coming now that the economy has collapsed.
Obviously, we need to be worried in B.C. about lost construction jobs and dried-up industrial contracts, because that’s where the recession has shown its face first. But there’s big trouble on the horizon that will rock the non-profit sector as well, at a time when it’s weak from years of underfunding and facing even greater demand for services due to the crashing economy.
Perhaps it’s the nature of the work - not nearly as visible as a broken arm or a cancerous lung, not nearly so easily measured as a graduation certificate or an overcrowded classroom. But it will be our grand mistake if we underestimate the importance of keeping our non-profits in fighting shape for the hard work that lies ahead.

Nothing equal about treatment of men, women in 2009 federal budget

In theory, we’re all equals in Canada. But just follow the money in the 2009 federal budget for proof of the flaws in that argument, notes an Ontario academic.
Equality looks great on paper, which is why Canada has a Charter of Rights, wide-reaching human rights law, and its signature on just about every feel-good global declaration of oneness that’s out there. We’ve been particularly passionate in our calls for equality between men and women.
But there are the warm and fuzzy things that we tell each other, and then there’s reality. A gender analysis out of Queen’s University of the most recent federal budget is a sobering reminder of just how far Canadian women continue to lag behind men economically.
The analysis was done by Prof. Kathleen Lahey, a law professor with a speciality in tax. Twenty years ago when she took her first look at whether tax laws affect men and women differently, she was stunned to discover that women were routinely “overtaxed and underbenefited.” Virtually every tax analysis she’s done since then has reaffirmed that for her.
Canada’s 2009 budget demonstrates the problem. With its emphasis on tax cuts and rate improvements for those at the higher end of the income scale, its “stimulus” measures bypass 40 per cent of Canadian women, says Lahey. They simply don’t earn enough to benefit.
Women will also miss out on much of the new money for infrastructure projects earmarked to help Canadians weather the recession, adds Lahey. The industries that will benefit primarily employ men; just seven per cent of Canada’s construction and trades workers are female. (Read Lahey’s analysis at http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/01/31/gender-analysis-of-budget-2009/)
Many of the issues Lahey identifies in her analysis are applicable to anyone in a lower income bracket. But women are more likely to be in that category than men, and so end up disproportionately affected.
The average income for women in Canada is just $27,000 a year, compared to $45,000 for men. The disparity is even more noticeable among single-parent families, with single moms and their children living on little more than half the income that single dads earn ($30,900 versus $58,300).
The budget made improvements to Employment Insurance benefits, but not in a way that helps women, says Lahey. Since 1996, people working less than 35 hours a week don’t qualify for benefits. That shift hit women significantly harder than men, because women do more part-time and seasonal work. The most recent enhancements improve things for those who qualify for EI - three-quarters of whom are men - but do nothing to help more people get benefits.
Flat taxes like the new carbon tax and provincial sales taxes also hit women harder, notes Lahey. A five per cent goods and services tax may sound like equal treatment for all, but such taxes in fact have a much greater impact on people with less spending power.
Why do women consistently earn less than men in Canada? We must have dissected that issue at least a thousand different ways by now, and once believed the answer was simply to push enough women through the various glass ceilings and discriminatory hiring practises getting in their way.
But the issue is more complex than that. Women are the ones who bear children, and are most likely to be the primary caregiver when children are small. We make different choices around the kind of work we do.
The jobs that women do also tend to pay less than traditional male jobs.
We could argue for years about why that’s so - and we have. But none of it has brought us closer to rectifying the situation. We may talk a good game about getting down to the business of “equal pay for work of equal value,” but the concept terrifies government and employers.
As for encouraging women to do more of the kind of work that pays well - men’s work, in other words - well, it’s good to try. We certainly need more women at the top. But all our efforts to get them there are for naught unless we can do something about the many women who crack the glass ceiling only to realize they hate everything about their new life.
Sexist tax policy can only make things worse, says Lahey. She thinks it’s time for women to “get over their dislike of tax policy” and learn enough to fight back.
“This is systemic,” Lahey says. “The direct spending and tax cuts in the federal budget simply reinforce inequalities between men and women.”

When the telemarketers call, let it ring

In the recent furor over telemarketing and the use of the new do-not-call list for nefarious purposes, I’ve yet to see mention of the most obvious solution to the problem: Quit buying from random strangers who call you up uninvited.
There’s nothing wrong with doing business over the phone. It’s handy to be able to use the phone to bank, order products, report your stolen credit card, start and stop subscriptions, or any number of other useful services that have become part of the consumer landscape.
But an out-of-the-blue sales pitch from a stranger who bought a list somewhere with your home phone number on it - well, that’s a whole other thing. I hate being rude to people, but I’ll hang up on a telemarketer without hesitation. A particular pox on the companies who think I’m stupid enough to stay on the line for their taped sales pitch.
If they’re motivated to keep calling, though, that has to mean that at least some of the people they’re calling are buying. No company would run a telemarketing operation if they didn’t think they could make money at it.
So it’s us consumers who actually have all the power when it comes to doing something to stop telemarketing. As the potential buyers - “prospects,” as we’re known in the industry - we could wipe out the whole ugly business simply by refusing to be part of it anymore.
Telemarketing is part of the “telephone call centre” industry, which has exploded in the past decade in Canada and around the world. That’s the result of a deregulated telecommunications industry and a massive expansion in cheap data-transmission capability.
Most of the work of the sector takes place in call centres, like the xxx West Corp. facility in Central Saanich. Canada has become something of a global hub for call centres, in fact. A 2007 research report into international call-centre trends found that three countries had a disproportionate number of them: Canada; India; and South Africa.
Borders don’t matter when business is done by phone, and up until recently Canada’s favourable dollar and weak regulation made it a choice location for call centres under contract with U.S. companies. Provinces with chronically high unemployment have been more than happy to welcome American-owned call centres to their communities.
Twenty years ago, 20,000 Canadians worked in call centres. Today, there are 155,000, including untold thousands calling up people like you and me in every corner of the world.
Most of that commerce doesn’t have anything to do with unwanted phone solicitations, of course. Typically, only 20 per cent of a call centre’s phone work involves “outbound” calls - the ones that drive us nuts (22 per cent in Canada). Still, that’s a whole lot of unwanted phone calls when you consider they can come into your home from any call centre in the world.
Polls into how we feel about telemarketing typically find 90 per cent of those surveyed ranting about the practise. In the weeks leading up to the introduction of tougher telemarketing laws last fall, two-thirds of the Canadians polled said they were planning to register their phone numbers on the federal do-not-call list.
The Canadian Marketing Association, a staunch defender of telemarketing, admitted to the CBC last year that the practice is “by far and away the leading source of calls and complaints” the organization receives. The CMA has even had to step up security at its front entrance.
Canada’s new legislation adds some additional layers to the discussion, starting with a number of exemptions that let certain groups - political parties, charities, opinion pollsters - keep phoning even if someone is on the do-not-call list.
Then there’s the problem of the list itself, as reported in the news last week. Telemarketing firms need access to the no-call list to know who not to call, but that means they’ve now got your number. How handy.
Companies risk a $15,000 fine for calling people on the list. But how will Canada enforce that when calls can originate from anywhere in the world? How long before a “listings broker” gets their hands on all those verified phone numbers - a golden find in the telemarketing industry?
And yet the solution is so simple. If we refuse to buy from telemarketers, they’ll quit trying to sell that way.
Yes, it makes things a little tougher for the charities and businesses that rely on phone solicitation, as it tars everybody with the same brush regardless of whether they deserve. But so it goes.
Don’t feed the beast. Flex your muscle as a consumer and just hang up.

Progress Board /08 report highlights B.C.'s chronic challenges

Left to my own devices, I’d have a heck of a time trying to take the measure of B.C.’s economic performance. I get that it’s a really important thing to pay attention to, but my brain just doesn’t go there easily.
So I’m grateful for the yearly analysis done by the B.C. Progress Board, a non-profit entity set up eight years ago by the Liberals specifically to track key performance measures in the province.
The annual report certainly doesn’t give you everything you need to know to gauge whether things are improving in B.C. But the economic and social measures it gathers at least provide a partial picture of how B.C. is performing, both over time and compared to other provinces and countries.
The 18 business leaders and academics who form the Progress Board piece together things like hourly wage rates, exports, tax levels, productivity, and long-term employment, then work in social/health indicators like air quality, land preservation, people living below the low-income cutoff, and life expectancy. (Find the 2008 report at http://www.bcprogressboard.com/2008docs.html)
The reports are valuable for what they tell us about B.C., including the challenges that continue to elude us. The 2008 edition finds the Liberals enjoying considerable success on some fronts and spinning their wheels on others, most often on issues that have gotten the best of B.C. for many years now.
The Liberals were elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, and have seen success on both those fronts. We’ve had four consecutive years of budget surpluses, ending a nearly 13-year stretch of deficits.
If you’re well-paid, you’ll also appreciate that B.C. now has the second-lowest income tax rate (14.7 per cent) in the country for people in the top income bracket. We’re also top of the charts when it comes to producing university graduates.
But the progress report also reveals that some of the tough issues dogging B.C. when the Liberals took office continue to bedevil the province today.
A couple examples: B.C. had one of the lowest productivity rates in Canada when the Liberals formed government in 2001, and some of the highest rates per capita of people living below the national low-income cutoff. We still do. We also have one of the highest crime rates in Canada.
Productivity is essentially a measurement of how many hours of work it takes to produce all of B.C.’s goods and services. It’s important because higher productivity rates mean better wages, a more competitive workforce, and increased revenue for government to fund health care, education, infrastructure, and so on.
But it’s clearly something we struggle with in B.C., and not only because we’re laid-back West Coasters.
“While we are concerned about whether employees in British Columbia are reaching their full potential,” writes the Progress Board in its 2008 report, “of equal importance is the need for governments and private industry to create ‘winning conditions.’ Are we making sufficient investments in infrastructure and innovation? Our benchmark results suggest the answer has consistently been no.”
In terms of people living below the low-income cutoff (a somewhat flawed standard used to estimate poverty), the 2008 report wonders whether there’s something unique about B.C. that explains why it has a high number of “less well-off” people even when the economy is booming. The board promises more study into B.C.’s consistently poor ranking on this front for more than a decade.
Social conditions in B.C. get a “middling” ranking of six from the Progress Board, which came to that conclusion after factoring in things like life expectancy, long-term employment, low-income households and number of income-assistance recipients.
A six isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s still an improvement over the nines and 10s that predominated from 1999-2005. However, I wonder whether the higher welfare caseloads in those years skewed those figures, and disagree with the board’s assumption that any decline in welfare rolls is automatically “good.”
As for crime rates, they’ve fallen dramatically right across the country in the last decade or so, including in B.C. But we’ve still got one of the worst rates in Canada. Yes, the incidence of reported crimes has dropped 14 per cent in B.C. since 1998, but rates have dropped even faster in other provinces.
What does it all mean? That B.C. has seen some successes but still has significant work to do if it really wants to be “the best place on Earth.” Whoever forms government after the May election needs to put aside ideology-based theories of governance and just get the job done.

Goodbye, Stan - you'll be missed

Twenty-eight years ago, on one of the worst nights of my life, Stan Hagen was there for me.
I’ve never forgotten his random act of kindness that April evening at the Nanaimo White Spot, and only wish I’d told him that before he died this week.
We ran into each other fairly regularly over the years, and the first thought in my head every time was of the night at the White Spot. I always wanted to tell him that there was a special place in my heart for him, because he was so kind to me at a time when I was utterly devastated. But wouldn’t you know it, I never did.
We were different people in those days. I was a young piano teacher in Courtenay, in what turned out to be the dying days of my first marriage. He owned a cement plant in town and was raising a happy, clamorous young family of five with his wife Judy.
I knew Stan and Judy because I taught piano to two of their children. We weren’t close pals by any means, but we exchanged pleasantries at the door whenever they brought their kids for piano lessons, and they were regulars at the twice-yearly piano recitals I held in my living room for my little clutch of students.
That night at the White Spot, I was on the run: from my marriage; from the Comox Valley; from the terrible question of whether I should leave my kids behind. I had driven down Island that April evening in a wild and grief-filled panic, knowing only that I needed to get out of town for a night and think.
For reasons I can no longer remember, I’d checked into an unpleasant little motel in an industrial part of Parksville. (It’s still there, and I still can’t drive past it without cringing.) I can’t imagine why I decided to go to the Nanaimo White Spot for dinner, but I suppose it was a familiar place, and God knows I needed comfort.
I walked in and there was Stan, eating by himself. He asked if I wanted to sit with him. If I’d been a bolder type, I probably would have said no, because just about the last thing I wanted at that moment was to have to make polite small talk with the dad of one of my piano students.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be so rude, so I joined him.
He was a religious man, and I was reluctant to answer the inevitable question about what brought me to Nanaimo that night. I was worried he’d judge me for leaving my marriage, let alone contemplating leaving my children, too.
But I was too young and wounded to be able to pull together a quick cover story, and pretty soon I’d told him what brought me there. The funny thing is, I don’t really remember anything of the conversation that followed, except that Stan listened without one shred of judgment.
I left the restaurant a couple hours later deeply grateful for his brief company, and feeling better equipped to deal with the painful decisions I faced.
I didn’t see Stan again for probably five years, by which time our lives had changed dramatically. It was 1986 and I was a reporter in Kamloops, covering the education beat for the Kamloops Sentinel. Stan was a provincial politician, and the minister of advanced education.
I’ll never forget the look on the faces of his aides on the day he and I met up again, during one of Stan’s first visits to Kamloops as a new cabinet minister. It’s not often you see a cabinet minister hugging a journalist, and we laughed at how our lives had ended up intersecting yet again.
As would become the pattern from that point on whenever we ran into each other, the conversation quickly turned to the years when I taught his girls piano, and the many musical adventures they’d embarked on since then. He loved to bring me up to speed on their accomplishments.
I don’t know what it is about certain people, but our paths continued to intersect in surprising ways. Piano dad when I was a piano teacher, cabinet minister when I was a journalist, minister of child and family development for much of the time when I was working in the non-profit sector - Stan was always cropping up in my life. After I moved to Victoria, we’d meet up maybe once a year to have lunch together, and almost never talked politics.
I never took Stan’s measure as a politician, and won’t now. What I do know is that he was a good man, and that I’ll miss him. Godspeed, Stan.

Change of heart on BC welfare may be too little, too late

When Gordon Campbell’s Liberals were first elected in 2001, almost a quarter million British Columbians were living on welfare. Those numbers have fallen by almost 100,000 since then.
Good news or bad? That’s a profound question. The tremendous drop in B.C. welfare rates over the past 14 years is either a marvel of social strategy or a major reason why we’ve ended up with so many people living on our streets. So it’s not the kind of thing you want to get wrong.
The government’s own vision for its welfare programs establishes what we’re shooting for in the province: “Government is committed to helping those most in need and helping people who are able to work achieve sustainable employment.” Are we achieving that vision?
First, a brief welfare primer for B.C. newcomers. Welfare rates hit an historic high in 1995, with 367,387 British Columbians on assistance - 10 per cent of the population. An embarrassed New Democrat government promised a crackdown, and by the late 1990s had adopted a new “tough love” qualification process and welfare-to-work program that continues to this day.
By the time the Liberals took office, the NDP had reduced the number of welfare clients (which includes the children of people on welfare) to 245,000, six per cent of the population. The Liberals have since cut it further, to three per cent: 146,152. Subtract the people with permanent disabilities from that tally, and it turns out that less than one per cent of the population now receives temporary assistance.
Welfare is a mean existence. The money’s just enough to stay poor forever - $610 a month for a single person on temporary assistance, and only for those with a place to live ($235 otherwise). But it’s better than nothing, and a vital component of smart social planning.
Most of the reduction in client numbers was made during the Liberals’ first term in office, when their enthusiasm for slashing social programs knew no bounds. The party’s second term has been significantly different, at least in the last couple of years. Perhaps they just woke up and smelled the coffee, but at any rate the welfare caseload bottomed out in 2007 and has been rising ever so slowly ever since.
For the first time since 1995, the number of people qualifying for welfare is increasing rather than decreasing. This past year, the client load grew by more than 10,000 people.
The government has even begun to hire outreach workers to hit the streets specifically to find people who aren’t on welfare and sign them up - unthinkable in the Liberals’ early years. Welfare rates inched up a little. It could be the Liberals have come to see what many of us had already concluded: that the government had gone too far with its cuts to welfare.
Trying to measure government performance is a challenging task if only because the goal posts keep changing, and rarely more so than in the Ministry of Housing and Social Development, where the welfare program resides. The name of the ministry alone has changed three times since the Liberals took office, and trying to draw comparisons between then and now is a bit like comparing the fabled apple to the orange.
But two long-term trends clearly visible through the haze are an increase in the number of people receiving disability assistance, and a dramatic drop in those receiving temporary assistance.
The number of people receiving disability has almost tripled since 1995, to 81,000 from a low of 26,708. Disability provides a little bigger stipend than regular welfare and includes a cheap annual bus pass, so I’ll take the increase as a positive sign that more people who really need the help are now getting it.
At the same time, however, the number of British Columbians receiving temporary assistance has fallen by more than 80 per cent, from 340,679 to a mere 64,754.
Some people have found jobs through B.C.’s welfare training programs, of course, and others deserved to get dumped from the dole. But many more simply crashed through the gaping holes that developed in the system. In terms of cost-effectiveness, Andrew MacLeod reported in the Tyee in 2005 that we’d spent $31 million on welfare-to-work programs in the Liberals’ first term to save $18 million in welfare payments.
Good on the Liberals for trying harder these past couple years. But the suffering they inflicted to get to this point has been considerable. People lost housing, hope and dignity during the worst of the cutbacks, and problems on our streets skyrocketed.
I’ll be looking for smarter, better-informed welfare policy from the next B.C. government.

Watch the spin on your way to the facts

I wrote in last week’s column about doing my part for the next few months to take the measure of the B.C. government, in the interest of helping us all be better informed come the May election.
It’s only just sinking in this week what a complicated task that’s going to be. I’m neck-deep in fascinating statistics already, but no doubt you’re familiar with that Benjamin Disraeli warning about “lies, damn lies and statistics.” I love stats for their simplicity, but they spin like a dream and are rarely as black and white as they first appear.
What is good government, anyway? It strikes me that I’ll have to settle that point in my head if I’m to have any success with this exercise. The answer that comes quickest to my mind is that good government acts at all times in the best interests of British Columbians overall.
A big job. But would you want any less? No government in the world gets things right all the time, of course, but that’s not to say we don’t want them to try. I want a government that understands its job is to run every aspect of the province well, on behalf of everyone who lives here.
What that means at the individual level varies wildly, which is the point. British Columbians come from all walks of life, and differ substantially about what they want from their government. It’s up to government to take all of that into account, and to run the province in a way that everyone recognizes as fair and wise even when it isn’t exactly how they’d do it.
What that looks like in terms of actual government performance - well, that’s a tricky thing. In a tangled global economy, in a province weighted down by a deliberately distant federal government and frequent ineptitude at the municipal level, how DO you gauge provincial performance when so many other factors are at play?
To the Liberals’ great credit, they did come up with the concept of annual service plans for measuring government performance when first elected in 2001. The plans establish specific goals for every ministry, and each year report on progress toward those goals.
But are the goals in the service plans the right ones? Ah, that’s a whole other question. Some seem to merely measure the measurements, while others are vague enough to be interpreted any number of ways. (For instance, does reaching a goal of reducing the welfare caseload to a certain percentage of the B.C. population mean more people have been helped to find jobs, or simply cut off assistance?)
Still, the plans - on the government Web site at http://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/Annual_Reports/2007_2008/default.htm- are packed with information. Some of it is puzzling and some is downright useless, but it all helps when it comes to putting the pieces together on government performance.
Equally important are sources of information from outside government, based on the assumption that government plays down or buries things that cast it in a bad light. But it’s five months before an election, and the government isn’t the only one with an agenda. Reader, beware.
An example: I was digging around in homelessness statistics and came across a 2007 report from the New Democrats establishing the number of homeless British Columbians at almost 11,000. I’m sure the NDP didn’t just make the figure up, but can the numbers be trusted absolutely when they come from such a political source? (I guess the real test will be whether they act on those findings if elected.)
If you’re reading a report from the Fraser Institute, keep in mind that it’s probably leans a little too right. If it’s from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, it’s likely too left. If it’s from a business group, social issues will have been ignored; meanwhile, reports from social-justice groups ignore the business case. The remedy for that is to read ‘em all.
I’d love to see a flood of letters to the editor and opinion pieces over the next five months on the subject of good governance. What does that term mean to you? What do you know from your own experiences these past eight years in B.C. that might be useful to the rest of us in gauging the current government’s performance?
For once I want to go into an election feeling absolutely clear about my choices. Hope you’ll join me.

Now's the time for scrutiny of BC government

We’re heading into a big year for B.C. Faltering economy, provincial election looming, massively expensive sporting event on the horizon - if ever there was a time for us citizens to take the measure of our government, this is it.
The election will be upon us in five months. In the run-up to it, B.C. politicians’ eyes will be on us for a change. We get such a chance no more than two or three times a decade - a brief window of opportunity for the public to capture the attention of politicians at a time when they’re highly motivated to listen.
Most of the politicians I know are good people wanting to do the right thing. But good intention isn’t the same thing as effective governance, something that the citizenry needs to be much more mindful of when choosing its politicians.
Are B.C.’s Liberals running an effective government? Before you head to the polls in May for the provincial election, make a New Year’s resolution to determine the answer to that.
Whatever you care about most - the environment, social problems, health care, taxes, school support - make it a priority to seek out information that will tell you whether the Liberals have been effective (The government’s own comprehensive Web site at www.gov.bc.ca is a great place to start.)
I’m a political agnostic, so will make no recommendations as to who to vote for when the time comes. My own vote remains undecided, except for saying “Yes” to electoral reform in the referendum happening at the same time as the election. I’ve seen no evidence in my years observing B.C.’s political scene that any party has all the answers.
Accountability is the watch word in my mind. Close to home, I note that newly elected Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin is promising in a Globe and Mail interview that there will be a resolution to homelessness in the downtown within six months. The Globe lists Fortin on a prestigious list of “Ten to Watch” in 2009, which I assume means he’s going to be working miracles this year.
It’s a wonderful bit of politicking, but the test is whether he means it. We’ll know soon enough by Fortin’s actions whether he’s the visionary leader we’ve been waiting for in the city, or if it’s all just more empty words leading nowhere. What’s important in the case at hand and anytime a politician makes promises is to hold them to what they said.
That they’re being held accountable at all times by the public ought to be a constant reality of any politician’s tenure, of course, not just at election time. We can’t be waiting three more years to hold the new Victoria council accountable for what it achieves around homelessness.
But it’s in the months before an election that politicians listen most intently. The 2009 provincial election is particularly important , not only because of the financial uncertainties B.C. is heading into over the next few years but also because a major electoral-reform referendum is being conducted at the same time with the potential to dramatically change the face of politics in B.C.
So it’s the public’s time in the sun now - to think about what matters and get some answers from government about its priorities and past performance. If we don’t like what we hear, government has five months to adjust course or risk losing our votes. Nice and direct.
What’s essential to the process, however, is public engagement. Go looking for the evidence that tells you whether government is doing its job. Keep score. Demand better. Extract commitments from those vying to be your MLA, and let them know you’ll be holding them accountable.
Read any reports you can find. Search the Mansard records on the government Web site. Follow the money. Read media coverage, but never rely on it exclusively.
Whoever you choose to vote for, do what you can to establish the person’s performance record. Accountability is vital, but what’s even more important is to know before we elect somebody that they’re up to the challenge.
It’s more difficult to establish a candidate’s performance record if he or she isn’t in government right now or has never run for office before, but you can still learn a lot these days from a Google search and visiting a few good blog sites.
For my part, I’ll spend the next few months trying to take the measure of the government’s performance for my column. But the wisdom will come from all of us. Effective government starts with electing effective people, and we’ve got five precious months ahead of us to figure that out.

We've shopped 'til we dropped - then shopped some more

I’m not certain when it was that shopping became a question of patriotic duty, but I’m guessing it was when U.S. President George Bush made it an imperative in the days after 9/11.
“Get on board,” he urged a devastated American public struggling to come to grips with the bombing of the World Trade Centre.
“Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Fast-forward seven years and the bombs are more metaphorical, this time tearing apart the world’s financial markets instead of New York City’s twin towers. But shopping is still the “cure,” apparently, as evidenced by our own federal government’s recent fit of pique with the country’s big banks over whether they’re doing enough to provide Canadians with easy credit.
I get the theory of it - that everything depends on everything at times like these, and that economic stability hinges on us all just sticking to what we’ve always done and continuing to spend. But is that really a solution anymore now that we know where such habits get us?
I lost track of the endless times this Christmas season that the media featured stories speculating on whether all of us would/wouldn’t be shopping in our usual excessive way this season.
The shopping theme is always popular this time of year. But the level of coverage was truly extraordinary this season, given the natural tie-in with the global recession. Radio and on-line polls jumped in with the tough questions: Are you shopping yet? How much do you think you’ll spend? Is that more or less than usual?
I doubt the media intended their scrutiny to effectively come across as an exhortation to shop. But that’s what it ended up feeling like to me. Was I going to be letting down the national economy if I didn’t get out there and do more spending?
I’ve got nothing against shopping. I did my share this Christmas, albeit not always happily. (I like the idea of exchanging gifts with people you love, but find the current tradition has morphed into some kind of nutso mutant that burns through a ton of money and stresses everybody out.)
But shouldn’t we be reconsidering everything to do with the way we manage money right now in light of what’s going on with the world economy? Not to oversimplify a complex situation, but the lesson I’ll be taking away from this period in history is about what happens on a global level when we all get used to spending money we don’t have.
Bring the big concepts down to the individual level, and it’s not far off of a typical North American Christmas shopping experience.
I understand the potential for economic disaster were we to ever stop shopping. Our spending habits drive business and industry in Canada and around the globe, and employ legions of people whose jobs depend on our willingness to continue to shop, shop, shop.
In Canada, we keep almost as many people working through a single month of crazy Christmas spending as the country’s manufacturing industry provides in an entire year. We spend close to $30 billion annually just in December.
But do we want to? Can we afford to? Those are important questions to ask.
Every January I talk a good game about spending less on the next Christmas, but inevitably find myself jammed into the stores 11 months later spending more than I wanted to. Judging by the number of grim-faced shoppers on auto-pilot I passed by in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I’m not alone with this problem.
Those who long for a return to the true meaning of Christmas lament the shopping frenzy that surrounds the season. A pleasant tradition of sharing small gifts has grown into six weeks of frantic buying, little of which has anything to do with Jesus.
My complaints are more secular. I just think we’re losing touch with the fact that the bill always comes due, whether we’re talking about our Christmas spending or the global financial crisis.
Lenders, investors, traders, venture capitalists, regulators - they all have had a hand in the crisis that’s rocking world markets. But at the root of the sub-prime collapse that triggered much of the economic mayhem are individual consumers who were in over their heads. They shopped when they should have been saving.
A tip for surviving economic downturns: Learn to live within your means, whatever the season. The only thing mindless spending gets you is more of the same.

It's good news week

Even a doomsayer like me has to let up once in a while, and the Christmas season generally feels like the time to do it. Maybe it’s all those songs about peace and goodwill.
At any rate, I’ve dug up some nuggets of good news to share with you this festive season.
I admit, my initial instinct was to add a “but” to every one of them, because it seems that every upside has a downside in these problematic times. But for the sake of a holly, jolly column, I’m going to try to keep my gloomy inner voice in check for a change and tell you about what’s working.

The B.C. government is awakening to the problems of homelessness. Four of the six news releases on the Ministry of Housing and Social Development Web site this week detail actions being taken to house or shelter people living on B.C. streets.
Better still, work is underway on 19 old hotels in the Vancouver area to turn them into better housing for the impoverished people who already live there, plus add new units for some of the thousands still living on Vancouver’s streets. Sure, it’s probably because of the Olympics, but who cares?

Four “StrongStart” preschool programs launched this week in B.C. The new programs, available to any B.C. school district that wants to give them a try, are designed to help children get off to a better start when they begin kindergarten.
All the studies point to the importance of those early years in determining a child’s future well-being, so it’s great to hear that we’re paying more attention to that vital period of development. Parents and children attend the free drop-ins together.

We’re trying to be more effective at preventing youth crime. We’ve been talking about this issue like we meant it for a very long time. But what’s different about the latest initiative in B.C. is that it’s evidence-based.
In other words, researchers have actually evaluated the new strategies that will be piloted in six communities and deemed that they really do work when it comes to keeping kids away from a life of crime. The first pilot targets Vancouver children ages 10 to 15 who tend to take their first steps into crime after long hours hanging out with other youth at the city’s SkyTrain stations.
Too often, we tend to take people’s word for it when they seek public funding for “prevention” programs. We don’t ask whether the methods are actually effective, or require those running the programs to produce meaningful evidence that show their approach is working. If we really want to prevent B.C. children from getting involved in crime, that has to change.

Fewer Canadian children are going to jail. Credit the five-year-old Youth Criminal Justice Act for that positive change. Studies have repeatedly shown that jailing young people sets them up for criminal involvement as adults, but it wasn’t until revamped young-offender laws were enacted in 2003 that Canada’s courts started changing their sentencing patterns.
The number of youth doing jail sentences has dropped by 36 per cent since the act was passed into law. The past year alone saw a five per cent drop.

Almost half of Canadians are leading a “very” environmentally active lifestyle. Some 45 per cent of us routinely adhere to at least four of six indicators around good environmental practise, and another 45 per cent manage two or three. We’re turning down our thermostats, using low-flow toilets and showerheads, switching to fluorescent bulbs, composting and recycling.
Unfortunately, we’ve got ways to go. Canada’s household greenhouse gas emissions are up 13 per cent since 1990, with motor-fuel use alone contributing to almost a third of that increase. Oops.

Speaking of gas, it’s cheaper. These are happy days for drivers, if not for the environment. Gas prices in October were almost 12 per cent lower than they were in September, and they’ve fallen even more since then. Granted, energy costs are still 14 per cent higher than they were a year ago, but hey, enjoy the “savings” while you can.
Overall, it’s costing you 10.5 per cent more to run your car now than a year ago. But at least the cost of buying a new one is down nine per cent.
B.C. leads the nation in the growth of small business. Economic diversity is what minimizes the ravages of a downturn, so let’s be grateful for the more than 385,000 small businesses that together account for a third of B.C.’s gross domestic product. Show them that you care by doing business with them.

Merry Christmas, folks. May all your news be good.

Sheer madness and massive waste of money to release BC prisoners to homelessness

What I’d planned for today’s column was a look at what happens when somebody without housing is released from a provincial jail in B.C.
I’d run into an interesting fellow named Reg in my downtown travels, who’d wanted to talk about the practise of releasing prisoners straight onto the streets after they’ve served their time at the jail on Wilkinson Road. He told me it had happened to him more times than he could count.
But sometimes a column ends up becoming the story of what happened on the way to the story, and this is one of those.
First, a few statistics to give you a sense of the issue at hand. B.C. has nine jails, which at any given point in time are housing close to 2,800 prisoners serving sentences of less than two years. The average stay is 55 days, so that means as many as 18,500 people moving in and out of B.C. jails in any given year, at a cost of almost $160 million.
That’s just the cost to lock them up, of course. On top of that are the far larger costs of crime itself - obvious things like policing and courts, but also the incalculable costs borne by the 300,000 British Columbians who are victims of crime in a typical year.
Big stuff. You’d presume somebody in the provincial government would be keeping a careful eye on all of that, wouldn’t you? You’d presume somebody would have realized that releasing prisoners to the street is a recipe for more crime, more street problems and more cost.
But you’d be wrong. It turns out the government doesn’t even keep records of how many prisoners are being released into homelessness, let alone question the practise.
Nor is anyone monitoring the number of repeat offenders cycling through B.C. jails. BC Corrections spokesman Bruce Bannerman tells me the provinces have never been able to reach agreement on a single definition of “recidivism,” so nobody tracks it anymore.
I’d initially set out to try to talk to somebody at Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre about the problem, but that turned out to be a wild fantasy. I was diverted to BC Corrections first, then made my own way to the Public Safety Ministry four days later when my calls still hadn’t been returned.
Six days after my first inquiry and half an hour past the time I’d given as my absolute deadline, I got a call from Bannerman.
Corrections worries about corrections issues, he told me. Once a prisoner’s sentence is done, it’s up to “community partners” and other government agencies to take it from there.
Considering that there is no government agency that actually finds people housing - and no housing to be found by the weary, underfunded “community partners” who are out there looking - I guess that answers my question about whether prisoners are being released straight to the streets.
Bannerman says that at least these days, everyone coming out of B.C. prisons gets $200 or so from the welfare ministry as they leave. That’s a change from a few years ago when they walked out the door with nothing. Reg says it’s hard not to want to buy drugs or alcohol with the money, especially given how many prisoners these days have addictions.
BC Corrections wants me and you to believe that we can leave it to “community partners” to take care of things on the other side of the prison wall. But it’s just not true. Agencies are doing what they can to find housing, but there’s very little housing to be found. The new Victoria Integrated Community Outreach Team (VICOT) is showing some early successes in housing 50 chronic offenders with diagnosed mental illness, but there are far more people than that who need the help and VICOT already seems to be at capacity.
Reg says he can always tell during a stint at “Wilkie” when a fellow prisoner is due for release, because all they’ll be talking about is whether anyone knows a place where they can stay.
When Reg got out of jail three weeks ago, he was under a court order stipulating he stay at a recovery house as a condition of being released. Yet he still ended up released to the streets. He dreams of opening a transition house specifically for men coming out of prison and trying to stay out of trouble - men like him.
“Right now, people are getting out of Wilkie and are back there almost immediately,” he says. “How long’s it going to take once you’re out on the street before you get some crack and booze in you and kick in somebody’s door?”

Stigma one of the worst 'symptoms' of HIV

It’s a rainy Tuesday, and the group of women who put on this year’s Viral Monologues are debriefing over bowls of moose-meat stew about their performance the previous weekend.
There were some challenging moments. One of the six performers backed out at the last minute, unable to bear the thought of putting her HIV status out there for all the world to see. That left an empty chair on stage.
But the group decided to leave the chair there anyway, as a reminder of the stigma that still lingers when it comes to HIV. The effect was powerful.
The Viral Monologues models itself after Eve Ensler’s popular Vagina Monologues. The “viral” version of the play was launched in 2002 by the Voice Collective, the AIDS Vancouver Island women’s group who is meeting on this day to dissect its sixth and most recent production.
The “monologue” premise a la Ensler is simple enough: Women sit on stage and tell personal stories from their lives - from the point of view of their vaginas in Ensler’s case, or through the lens of HIV in the case of the Viral Monologues.
Ensler’s stories are real-life, but presented by actors. What distinguishes the Viral Monologues is that the stories are told by the women who are actually living them. Today at the debrief, talk turns to how challenging that can be.
Revealing the intimate details of your life to an audience of strangers would be difficult at the best of times. But when the story is about HIV, anything can happen. One member of the Voice Collective is learning that the hard way, having been ordered out of Canada after years of living here with her Canadian husband when word got out that she was HIV-positive.
A shift on AVI’s information line is a painful reminder of the stigma that continues to cling to HIV, says AVI manager Heidi Exner.
“I’ve had people ask me whether they should bleach their dishes now that they’ve found out their friend has HIV,” she says. “It’s not the people with HIV who change. We change the people.”
Media attention is a mixed blessing, the women agree. The stories need to get out there, because they put a face on HIV. Those who still envision HIV as the quick and brutish killer it once was need to meet the new generation of people who are living into old age with the virus due to major advances in treatment.
But the risk to those who go public shouldn’t be underestimated, because there’s just no predicting what might happen once the story of you and your HIV hits the daily paper. Even when things go as well as they possibly could, there’s a potential for something to go very wrong when it comes to a disease as stigmatized as HIV.
An uninformed and fearful landlord could see your name in the paper, for instance, and start working on ways to evict you. A potential employer could see the story and choose somebody else for the job. The guy at your bank, or your kid’s teacher, might start looking at you funny. The pity in people’s eyes might drive you mad.
Once you and your disease are featured in the media, you’re “out” wherever you go. There’s no taking your privacy back.
If it’s a story about living with asthma or cancer, no problem. Nobody gets judged for having asthma or cancer, or a whole roster of other diseases. But the same can’t be said for HIV.
Even the way a person gets HIV determines whether they’ll be more or less stigmatized . There’s one kind of stigma for those who catch HIV through a blood transfusion, and quite another for those infected through injection drug use. As for sex, better to have contracted HIV through your unfaithful spouse than to have gotten it through a promiscuous lifestyle.
Exner tells a funny/tragic story of a hospital doctor relentlessly questioning her one time about the source of a friend’s HIV, as if her answer would make all the difference as to how the patient was treated. The sad thing is, it might have.
With new medications turning HIV into a chronic health condition rather than a death sentence, it’s stigma that often gives the disease its sharpest edge these days. The women around the table agree it’s tough to go public with your story in the face of such judgment, but recognize that staying silent just feeds the sense of shame.
“It’s part of our life,” says one. “We’ve grown a lot by telling our stories.”

Local police officer takes a stand against drug prohibition

David Bratzer and I share at least one opinion in common: That it costs us a pointless fortune to maintain the charade of having effective drug laws in Canada.
Me holding that opinion: No big deal. Anyone who knows the kind of things I write about wouldn’t be too surprised to discover I’m of the belief that Canada and the U.S. have made a complete hash of things by treating a health and social issue like a criminal matter.
But Bratzer holding that opinion: That’s just a little different. He’s a Victoria police officer - the one tasked with enforcing those laws.
I suspect there are many more who think like Const. Bratzer inside the department, as you’d expect would happen to anyone tasked with patrolling Victoria’s ridiculous streets for any length of time. But it’s still not a view that’s expressed publicly by police very often.
In fact, Bratzer is one of only two active police officers in Canada who does public speaking on behalf of the U.S.-based non-profit, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He signed on three months ago after clearing it with his boss, and now aims to put some of his off-hours to use speaking to people about why drug prohibition doesn’t work.
“LEAP’s position is that a lot of the problems we’re seeing aren’t caused by drugs, but rather the unintended consequences of drug prohibition,” says Bratzer, citing public-health problems, violence and a gang-controlled drug market as examples of that.
Bratzer came to the same conclusion after three years of policing the streets of Victoria.
“The effort that we put into chasing drugs - it’s bottomless,” he says. “Canadians have put billions and billions into fighting the war on drugs, but at the end of the day they’re cheaper, more potent and more available than ever before.”
Wanting an end to prohibition has nothing to do with liking drug abuse, notes Bratzer. But ceding control of an arbitrary assortment of drugs to gangs and criminals simply isn’t working as a strategy. The LEAP Web site (www.leap.cc) tracks U.S. “drug war” spending by the minute; at $2,000 every 60 seconds, spending for 2008 is already more than $46 billion.
Canada doesn’t officially have a war on drugs, with federal authorities preferring to describe our efforts as “demand and availability reduction.” We’re not quite so jail-crazy, nor so prone to lock up people indefinitely at great cost and to little effect.
But we still spend a heck of a lot on drug enforcement in Canada - more than half a billion dollars a year. And if the goal of all that spending is to wipe out trafficking and the use of illegal drugs, then anyone with eyes and 15 minutes to hang out in the downtown can see that it’s not working.
“The LEAP strategy is to build a bureau of speakers modelled on ‘Vietnam Vets Against the War.’ That group was effective because they had the credibility of having been there,” says Bratzer. “What LEAP believes is that once people hear from those in law enforcement about the multiple harms caused by drug prohibition, they’ll change their minds.”
Bratzer is careful to point out that his views are his own, and not those of the Victoria Police Department. He also stresses that the solutions lie in slow, measured steps that remove drug laws and replace them with good public policy.
“I don’t support drug abuse, and I don’t support breaking the law. I know it all has to be about baby steps,” says Bratzer. “My message to the marijuana lobby is to aim higher, because if marijuana becomes legal but all the others remain the way they are, there’s still a lot of harm being done.”
Bratzer’s view is that “soft” drugs should be taxed and sold, similar to alcohol and tobacco. Harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin would be available as prescription drugs, and “consumed in a monitored site” as part of a harm-reduction program.
“I think every doctors’ office should be a needle exchange,” he adds.
Bratzer knows his decision to go public with his views might not sit well with some of his co-workers at the department. As of this week, he’s also got a new boss to consider: Chief Jamie Graham.
“I’m not saying police should stop being police,” says Bratzer. “I have a lot of respect for my fellow police officers, and am not trying to shove this down their throat.
“But at the end of the day, I didn’t want to work as a police officer for 30 years and end up feeling like this was an issue I should have spoken up about sooner.”

Early-morning street tour speaks volumes for what hasn't changed

Giant box of day-old doughnuts: Check. Three big jugs of coffee and a whole lot of sugar and cream: Check. Final essential item: Two packs of cigarettes, enough for one smoke each for the first 40 people Rev. Al Tysick sees on his regular morning rounds.
He goes out every weekday morning at 5:45 a.m. to wake up people sleeping on Victoria’s streets. He started doing it seven months ago, after funding changes at the rebuilt Our Place street drop-in resulted in shorter opening hours. He buys the cigarettes with his own money, because getting a free smoke in the morning means a lot to people.
“It’s like taking a bottle of wine to a friend’s house,” says Tysick as he parks the Our Place van at our first top on 800-block Fort Street. “That’s what we’re doing this morning: We’re going to their house.”
Tysick’ wake-up call is a kinder, gentler version of the one that people will get an hour later, when police do their own morning rounds to flush the homeless from the downtown alcoves and hidey-holes where they sleep. It’s a doomed exercise: No shelter or drop-in is open anywhere in the city at 7 a.m., so there’s no place for people to go.
I’ve offered to be Tysick’ assistant on this particular morning, which entails keeping the coffee flowing and the doughnut box replenished. His rounds barely stretch over three square blocks, but he knows he’ll see at least 40 people even so. He knows, because the cigarettes always run out.
It used to be he could find a lot of people on Cormorant Street, but nobody goes there anymore after the heat came on this spring and the needle exchange was ordered out. Now, they go half a block further east, to the steps of the Ministry of Housing and Social Development building - the “Ministry of Love,” as it’s wryly referred to on the streets.
A year ago, I spent several weeks looking into street issues for the Times Colonist, and came out of it hoping against hope that what I’d seen was one of those “darkest before the dawn” periods. There was nowhere to go but up, I figured.
But in the morning dark outside the welfare ministry this week, handing out coffee to a growing line of people emerging from the shadows, I saw it wasn’t so. Yes, some positive things have happened this past year - more mats on the floor, more support and outreach, even a little bit of housing. But you’d never know it by the way things look on the street.
I’ve met many good people through my involvement with the Mayor’s Task Force and the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. Some very smart, caring minds are hard at work right now unravelling the issues tangling up people on the street. One day down the line, the efforts of the coalition are going to bring about real change in terms of how we manage street issues.
But what’s to be done until then? Even if we could start 20 new housing projects tomorrow, they’re years away, and the current downturn in the economy certainly won’t speed that process. What’s the plan for the short term?
If there was an earthquake this week and 1,500 people were left homeless, you know how our community would respond. We’d blow right through whatever policy, zoning bylaw or jurisdictional issue was in our way, and get every one of those people indoors by nightfall. Done.
We need that same kind of response around homelessness. We need an emergency plan in place at the provincial level that puts people indoors immediately. We need something like a refugee camp, where people can live indoors and be connected with support services until something better can be worked out.
Not more shelter beds, but a place where people can live indefinitely until something more permanent is available. A place where the police aren’t always gunning for you, and there’s room to store your stuff. To get out of the weather. To stay out of harm’s way.
Admittedly, any place where several hundred distinctly different people had to co-exist under one roof would almost certainly be chaotic and challenging. In any kind of sane world, no one would consider the temporary warehousing of masses of complex and impoverished people.
But this isn’t a sane world. And a refugee camp for those on the street isn’t nearly as crazy an idea as just leaving them out there. One early morning outside the Ministry of Love is all it takes to remind me of that.

Media wrong to conspire in hiding kidnapping news

Best wishes to Mellisa Fung, the intrepid CBC reporter who was released last week from what must have been a horrific and traumatic month imprisoned in a cave in Afghanistan.
She’s safe, and I’m very glad to hear that. But what are we to make of recent word that the world’s media reached a private agreement to keep her kidnapping a secret until now? With no disrespect to Fung or those who wanted to keep her safe, I’m stunned by the news.
As happy as we are to have Fung back, the truth is that most of us didn’t even know she was missing. That’s because in a most unusual development, the global media agreed from the outset not to report on her high-profile kidnapping.
It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment and see the media’s decision as evidence of the industry finally thinking about whether it’s helping or hurting with the way it covers the news. “We must put the safety of the victim ahead of our normal instinct for full transparency and disclosure,” CBC News publisher John Cruikshank said of the international decision to keep Fung’s kidnapping secret.
But why now? Why just this once? If we keep people safer by suppressing the news of their kidnappings, then why the wide-open, no-holds-barred coverage of all the other cases of kidnapping that have taken place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan in recent years? What made the media act differently this time out?
On first blush, you might presume that what’s different this time around is that a journalist is the victim. A quick search through five years of electronic newspaper archives puts that one to rest, however. Media outlets around the world continue to report all the details of the many kidnappings going on these days, including of journalists such as Alberta’s Amanda Lindhout, missing in Somalia since August.
So what’s special about the Fung case? Was it that she worked for the CBC? That she had friends in high places? That the federal government was two days away from an election at the time of her kidnapping?
The Globe and Mail wrote several thousand interesting words on the subject in Monday’s paper, but I never did find the answer.
Media bosses interviewed in the Globe piece were clearly aware that they’d done something very unusual in maintaining silence for a month about Fung’s kidnapping. They argued that they chose that course out of fear that Fung would be killed. Canadian Press policy on news about kidnapping and terrorism states “no news story is worth someone’s life,” CP editor-in-chief Scott White noted.
Absolutely. But how often has the same courtesy been extended to other kidnap victims? From my experience, virtually never. Poor Amanda Lindhout’s kidnapping was being loudly reported around the world within hours of her disappearance four months ago. What’s different this time?
“Editors exist to exercise their discretion about what should be published and in what way,” comments Globe editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon in his paper’s piece.
Fair enough. But with such power comes the responsibility to do so with excruciating fairness. Media integrity hinges on the public’s perception that news is reported with more or less of an even hand.
That’s a vital principle. The industry earns the public’s trust by treating every person at the centre of a news story in identical fashion. The idea is that we’re all equal before the media, for better or worse.
If the decision to keep Fung’s kidnapping a secret is the start of a more self-aware media recognizing the impact that thoughtless coverage can have, count me in. But I sense a one-off, available only to national CBC journalists kidnapped on the eve of federal elections. Numerous kidnappings happened while Fung was missing, the vast majority reported in the usual way by the world’s media.
I can’t imagine how Lindhout’s parents must feel right now, having experienced a dramatically different news curve when their own daughter was kidnapped. Revelations that the media cared enough to remain silent about Fung must have left them concluding that Lindhout’s safety simply didn’t matter as much.
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From Nov. 14: Thanks to readers for passing along a few Web sites where people can find candidate information heading into Saturday’s municipal elections.
For West Shore residents, the West Shore Chamber of Commerce features candidate profiles at http://westshore.bc.ca/elections/. The Saanich Civic League has put together a very comprehensive site for Saanich residents at http://www.saanichcivicleague.ca/. Then there’s www.victoriavotes.ca, and blogger Bernard von Schulmann’s http://victoriavision.blogspot.com/.
See you at the polls.

Voting a crap shoot at municipal elections

In just over a week, we’ll pick the mayors and councillors who will lead B.C. communities for the next three years.
It’s an incredibly important job. We “hire” municipal councils to tend to dozens of vital tasks in our communities - from dog-catching and parking tickets to policing, planning, roadwork and economic development. A single term of bad council can turn a community on its ear for years to come.
Councils also play an important role in representing our interests at the provincial and federal levels. Municipalities generate a scant eight per cent of the total tax base in the province, so we all want councils that are strategic and clued-in to ensure they’re effective at “managing up.”
You’d think that the hiring process for a big job like that would be done with the utmost care. You’d think we’d be really conscious of wanting to pick the right people to lead our communities.
But you’d be wrong. In truth, 70 per cent of us won’t even show up to vote in many B.C. communities, based on voter turnout from the 2005 municipal elections. Even those of us who do will often have no real sense of who we’re voting for.
Just 27 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls last time out in the City of Victoria. In Saanich, where the mayor was acclaimed in 2005, turnout was 19 per cent. Only Metchosin and North Saanich saw anything approaching a respectable voter turnout in our region, and even that was a minimal 50 per cent.
Turnouts in the 2005 municipal/regional elections throughout B.C. were 25 to 35 per cent in most communities. (Go to http://www.ubcmsurveys.com/election2005/turnout.asp for individual results).
Voter turnout on much of Vancouver Island was below 30 per cent. Tahsis and Alert Bay saw remarkable turnouts that topped 90 per cent, but those communities were notable exceptions in an otherwise dismal year.
As for whether those scant voters made the right picks in 2005, all we have is our councils’ accomplishments these past three years to help us come to a conclusion about that.
That’s never an easy thing to measure. We don’t ask our incumbent politicians for proof that they did a good job. Nor do we often have enough information to gauge whether the newcomers clamouring for our votes will make things better or worse. I suspect I’m not alone in heading into next Saturday’s election with much uncertainty as to who to vote for.
It’s up to each of us to get informed, of course. In Esquimalt, where I live, nothing is stopping me from contacting each of the candidates myself to see what I can ascertain, because at least I’ve managed to find all their e-mail addresses on the Township of Esquimalt Web site. But that’s hardly an efficient way to inform the most number of voters.
The Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce has a helpful “meet your candidate” feature on its Web site for the four core communities, at http://www.victoriachamber.ca/elections/
There’s a brief resume-style summary of each candidate, followed by their answers to five questions on topics including economic development, tax rates and top priorities. A sixth question asks about an issue specific to a particular community (sewage in Oak Bay, homelessness in Victoria, etc.).
But the Chamber can’t insist candidates take part, so the listings are incomplete. Only one Oak Bay candidate has bothered to post a response. Half of the City of Victoria’s eight mayoral candidates haven’t posted responses. And with only four municipalities included on the site, two-thirds of the region’s electorate are out in the cold at any rate.
The Times Colonist has begun community profiles, but can’t devote the space and resources required to feature each of the 100-plus candidates running for a seat in our region. As for all-candidates forums, most are unsatisfying affairs unable to give candidates more than a minute or two to state their case.
Small wonder, then, that local candidates have been inundated with questionnaires from people trying to figure out how they’ll vote. How else to determine who to pick?
The lack of meaningful engagement goes a long way to explaining why so many of us just give the whole process a pass. Yet to think we’re now electing our local governments based on the largely uninformed choices of a quarter of the eligible voters - well, that’s kind of scary.
There has to be a better way. But until we figure it out, it’s head-first into another crap shoot. I’ll see you at the polls Nov. 15, and we’ll just have to count on luck to take it from there.

Silence is golden, and frighteningly rare

I look at birds differently these days than I used to, ever since getting a great pair of binoculars a couple years ago that opened my eyes to the incredible variety of birds out there.
But I quickly learned that if you really want to see birds, the trick is to stand still for a few minutes and listen. In the stillness, life goes back to normal in the spot you were just about to rush past, and you hear a whole lot of bird talk that you’d never have heard otherwise.
That there’s meaning and purpose in silence is hardly a new philosophy. But it took birds for me to find it, and to remind me of how much of the world we no longer hear simply because we’re drowning it out with our own noise. What will the future hold for this cranked-up, hyper-communicating world of ours if we forget that?
There are days at the bird marsh when the sounds of loud cell phone conversations are just about as common as those of the song sparrow. We’re living in a time when “staying in touch” has morphed from a sweet sentiment about human connection into a jangly way of life that smothers the silences under a din of ringing phones and buzzing Blackberries.
I made the mistake of taking my cell phone with me once on a bird walk - once and never again. I hadn’t expected it to ring, but it did, and I was mortified to be the one disrupting other people’s nature walks.
Choosing not to answer, I then wondered for the entire walk back who it was who had called, as if it made one whit of difference. The only thing that being available for constant communication does is ensure that no time is ever really your own.
I regularly see people interrupting their lunch dates - important ones, romantic ones, it makes no difference - to take a call. I see them digging wildly through their purses and pockets to answer the ceaseless calls of people who simply have to talk RIGHT NOW.
I overhear the most personal conversations everywhere I go, conducted at top volume by someone who I’m quite sure has no idea of how widely they’re disseminating the news of their breakup, medical problem or weight gain. I’ve been in the midst of what I thought was a genuinely engaged discussion with someone only to realize that in fact, they’re sneaking in text messages to someone else.
Until Jack Knox got his Blackberry (why, Jack, why??), I hadn’t realized that the cursed devices buzz every time an e-mail arrives, prodding you into thinking that yes, you’d better answer right now.
Sounds like a genuine nightmare to me. But researchers say they’re finding that wired-up Canadians have actually begun to “crave the idea of access to a world of information,” and to associate their ringing phones and Blackberries with feelings of importance. “Being plugged in validates your importance,” noted Solutions Research Group in a report last March.
The private consumer-research and consulting firm, which conducts surveys four times a year on the communication and technology habits of Canadians, noted rising levels of anxiety in its spring report when people were asked about being unable to use the Internet or their cell phones.
Almost 60 per cent of the 3,100 people SRG surveyed reported experiencing “disconnection anxiety” at the thought of being left out of the communications loop, even temporarily.
“It’s almost like you lose your sense of freedom because you can’t just call someone,” explained one respondent in the Fast Forward survey.
“It’s like you are cut off. You’re just a little person walking around. You might as well be in the 1800s, like you don’t have contact. We are so used to having that with us nowadays, it is like security.”
Just 10 years ago, less than a third of Canadian teens and adults had cell phones. Now, almost 70 per cent of us do - 19 million people. In just four short years, Blackberries and other “smart phones” have emerged from obscurity to rule the lives of more than two million Canadians.
That the din from all that communicating renders us deaf to the small pleasures of life that are audible only in the silences - well, that’s a given. But what else are we no longer able to hear over the din of our constant chatter? How is it possible to think deeply about anything amid all this noise?
The lesson of the birds: Take in the silences once in a while. You’ll be amazed at how much you can hear.

Court decision on homeless 'camping' is ticket to real change

So now people can sleep in our city parks, but have to be gone first thing in the morning. Hope somebody at city hall is developing a Plan B, because I sure don’t see that 7 a.m.-curfew stuff working out to anybody’s satisfaction for very long.
Here’s the thing about last week’s B.C. Supreme Court judgment that brought us to this point: It’s one of the most powerful tools to emerge so far as a means of ending homelessness.
Dealing with our problems requires political will, which in turn requires community outrage. The spectre of hundreds of people sleeping in our parks every night - even if rousted by 7 a.m. - will quickly generate all the outrage we need to get this ball rolling at long last. In fact, it has already wrested 85 new beds out of the province, none of which had even been hinted at until the judgment came down.
B.C.’s highest court essentially ruled that because there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds for everyone on our streets, the people who have to spend the night outside have the right to put a tarp over their heads while they’re sleeping. Hardly an extreme position to take.
A smart city would respond to such a ruling by using it to bully and push other levels of government into compliance around making things happen on the homeless front. A stop-gap bylaw that misses the point of the judgment won’t get us far.
With municipal elections coming up next month and a provincial election in the spring, hold your representatives accountable for what they’re going to do about homelessness. I’ve put a few questions on my blog at http://closer-look.blogspot.com that I think are important to ask.
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An enormous thanks to all the people who responded to my Oct. 3 column by donating goods and volunteer time to a big gathering we put on for the street community last week.
We saw more than 500 people through the door at the region’s first-ever Project Connect, which I organized on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. In my column I’d asked readers to help us by volunteering their time and buying some of the goods for the 500 “survival packs” we wanted to hand out at the end of the day.
You came through in every possible way. We ended up with an abundance of everything, including that most precious of commodities: People’s time. You donated socks, gloves, personal products, rain ponchos, blankets, thermal shirts, hats and more, but more importantly you gave us your time to ensure we’d be able to pull the whole thing off.
More than 120 people volunteered that day and in the intense week leading up to the event. I can’t thank them enough for their help, and hope in turn that the gift the event gave them was the chance to meet - with open hearts - the very interesting and often heartwrenching people stuck in the middle of this thing we call “homelessness.”
(Visit http://streetstories.blip.tv for Christopher Bower’s moving video vignettes of some of the people on hand that day.)
Thanks as well to the two dozen-plus service agencies and professionals who showed up that day to help people in whatever way they could. We saw an impressive array of services delivered in a single room on a single day. A standing ovation to Gordon Fry and the Capital Lions Club in particular, who served up 1,000 burgers and 500 dogs with astounding efficiency.
It was still just one day, of course, and one day does not a solution make. But what I witnessed that day was a new way of doing business in terms of service delivery, and a powerful way to bring together the mainstream and street communities to work together on addressing the many problems at the root of modern-day homelessness.
We’ll do it again sometime soon, and hopefully again and again. When the day comes that we actually have housing to offer people, a Connect event will be a great way to make that happen. In the meantime, we’re really going to have to build, renovate and hang onto any and all cheap forms of housing, because we simply don’t have anywhere near enough of it to meet the need.
For those who made it happen last week, thanks for a magical day. A special thanks to the street community for their respectful participation, and willingness to share their stories one more time in the hope of bringing about real change.

With a municipal vote coming up in the Capital Region in November, here's a few questions that might help you quiz your municipal candidates as to what they plan to do about homelessness in the region if elected:


CANDIDATE QUESTIONS

What do you think are the reasons Victoria has such visible problems around homelessness and street issues?

How do you think those problems should be handled?

Where do homelessness and street issues rate in your list of priorities for the city?

How would you describe your own level of knowledge on this subject? How did you come by that knowledge?

Please describe an “ideal world” around homelessness in terms of which levels of government would assume most responsibility for dealing with the issue. What are the responsibilities of:
the federal government?
The provincial government?
Municipal and regional government?
The business community?
Individual citizens?

If elected, how would you demonstrate leadership in tackling the issues in Victoria and holding other levels of government accountable for their own areas of responsibility?

How would you get around the many challenges that other politicians have faced on this issue? Please tell us what you’d do to manage each of the following challenges:
-lack of regional buy-in,
-no certainty around funding for new construction, land, operating costs,
concentration of street services in the downtown core
-"silos" of service and a lack of co-ordination in service delivery
-NIMBYism,
-lack of addiction services,
-tight vacancy rate,
-lack of affordable, supported housing,
-mental illness on the street
-open selling and using of drugs
-crime and vandalism affecting people who live, work and shop in the downtown

1860s-era NYC tenement brings modern times to mind
Oct. 10, 2008

Children falling sick - even dying - from milk contaminated by unscrupulous suppliers. Families struggling in substandard, overcrowded housing.
Sound familiar? It could easily be a story ripped from today’s headlines. But in fact it was 1860s New York City, in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side.
I heard the story last week on a visit to NYC. Tipped off by a Victoria acquaintance we ran into on the ferry to Ellis Island, we took her advice and visited the New York Tenement Museum, where I found myself in a small, dark apartment that in 1869 had been the home of an Irish immigrant family.
The Moores had four children, one of whom died that year at the tender age of four months from the “swill milk” commonly sold to impoverished families. As has just happened in modern-day China, the milk was being diluted to increase profit, in this case with water, chalk and ammonia.
Hard to escape a certain sense of déjà vu when you hear a story like that. It wasn’t the only one I heard that day with troubling parallels to modern times.
The museum constructs its program around a tenement built in 1863 on Orchard Street by an immigrant tailor from Germany. More than 7,000 people subsequently lived in the five-storey building over the next 70 years, until tougher health codes finally shut the place down.
The museum’s tours are built around the lives of the actual families who lived in the apartments, their stories painstakingly stitched together from census data and genealogical research.
Those were tough times. The Lower East Side was awash in poverty and people, and the city was struggling to develop health standards as a new understanding developed of how disease spread.
It’s interesting to compare the way things were handled then and now. Back then, the public health authorities dealt with the problems of inadequate housing by demanding improvements - in the case of the Moores’ building, a minimum of two indoor toilets per floor and running cold water to every flat.
I’m sure the landlords didn’t like it. But they lived with it, and held the rents at about 30 per cent of the typical family income. Today, the more likely action would be to condemn the building and order the tenants out, with no other place for them to live. It’s not exactly what you’d call progress.
Life was pretty miserable for the Moores and their neighbours, and I don’t mean to suggest that there haven’t been improvements since those bleak days.
But as awful as it was for poor people in the 1860s, things were in fact improving for those living in poverty at that time - fewer dead babies every year, better living conditions, new and better care for sick people. Can we make the same claim now?
The 20-year-old tenement museum was set up by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a group of museums and historical sites with an interest in raising awareness of past injustices and struggles. After our tour, we shared popcorn and ice tea with our little group of fellow travellers at a session facilitated by museum staff - a “kitchen conversation” designed to get people reflecting on what they’d seen.
Our group included a couple from Oakland, Calif., and four British travellers from London and Birmingham. As talk turned to housing in our own home towns, everyone reported similar problems: an erosion of supported housing programs; more people on the streets; the emergence of what appeared to be a permanent underclass.
(“In Canada?” the woman from California asked us incredulously. “I thought you were the ones who were doing things better than us!”)
The building where the Moores lived was a grim place: 120 people sharing four outhouses and one water pump at the back of the building, families with three or more kids squeezed into 325 square feet of space.
We don’t tolerate tenement buildings like that anymore, it’s true. But we can hardly claim the moral high ground given that children are still dying by the dozen from swill milk, and tens of thousands of Canadians don’t even have running water and an indoor toilet, let alone 325 square feet to call their own.
The Moore family eventually moved to a nicer building. Their three children grew up, got jobs, bought houses, and lived better lives than their parents.
Life was bad back then, but it was getting better. A century and a half later, we can’t make the same claim.