Are we sure we're still on the way up?

I suppose every generation wants to believe it’s improving on the past. That’s how it always seemed in my history lessons at school, too - that we were intent on working our way up, from “primitive” to medieval to Renaissance and right on through to the enlightened human beings of modern times.
We’ve made some remarkable progress. We’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and easily surviving diseases that once used to kill us off in vast numbers. We don’t just talk about human rights, we enshrine them in our laws. We wear our seatbelts, bicycle helmets, sunscreen and in-car sobriety with pride, and are better for it.
I used to ponder ugly moments in history and feel grateful for not having been alive in those years. The destructive and stupid behaviours of human beings through the ages baffled me, but I was happy that my generation dwelt in kinder, gentler times and was in turn leaving a better world for their own children.
But is that what’s actually happening? Is life in Canada improving? I’ve got my doubts, given the wear and tear of two decades of federal and provincial governments whose actions have seriously eroded the social fabric of the Canada I was born into.
I don’t mean to suggest another Crusades is imminent, or that we’ll soon be using wild animals to kill off the old and weak in front of a cheering crowd of thousands.
But the disasters of history start out small - one thing and then another, each piling on top of each other to bend a country in a way that no one had expected. The emergence of a growing underclass in Canada is of no small concern.
The decline most evident to me after most of a lifetime in B.C. is a loss of economic and political power for the “common people,” if you will. It’s a subtle change that has come about incrementally, aggravated by a prevailing political ideology in which minimal government is the stated goal even while power and money accumulate at the top in ways that are very nearly feudal.
An interesting statistic, courtesy of child advocacy group First Call and Stats Canada: Between 1989 and 2006, the richest 10 per cent of B.C. families with children saw their average annual income rise 30 per cent, to $201,490. In that same period, the poorest 10 per cent of families saw their income fall eight per cent, to $15,657.
The richest of the rich in Canada more than doubled their average yearly income in the years between 1982 and 2004, to $2.5 million. The years weren’t as kind to families in the bottom 10 per cent, who by 2004 had average income of a mere $6,000 a year.
That’s not to say rich people aren’t entitled to their wealth. No doubt many work very hard for the money. But the growing gap between the rich and poor in Canada didn’t come about because the rich work hard and the poor are lazy. We’ve had a series of governments whose policies have made things better for those who already had it pretty good, and considerably worse for those just getting by.
In B.C., one of the first things to go was the fishing industry, given away by Ottawa to a handful of wealthy men. Next was forestry, to the point that even the land where the trees once grew now gets handed off to developers without a whisper of consultation.
Our social systems have become twisted versions of themselves, to the point where our governments reward themselves for taking away people’s benefits.
In the first year of B.C.’s intensified crackdown on welfare under the Liberals, a deputy minister received a $15,400 bonus for slashing the welfare caseload by 22 per cent. Eight years on, there’s little evidence that anything about the immensely costly welfare-to-work years have benefited British Columbians (see http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/04/27/Poverty/). A massive increase in homelessness in the same period has in fact increased the cost and extent of poverty dramatically.
Meanwhile, employment insurance is now so difficult to get that barely 30 to 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians qualify for it, even while Ottawa sits on a $54-billion EI surplus. If you feel frustratingly powerless to change such things, as I do, that’s a pretty serious signal that we’ve lost control of our governments.
In less than two weeks, a new government will be elected in B.C. For the sake of a better tomorrow, please pick with care and thoughtfulness. And vote “yes” for STV, which at least puts a little power back into the hands of the people.

U.S. road trip an eyeopener into true impact of recession

I’m newly back this week from a road trip through California, and had been curious before we left whether we’d see evidence of the economic downturn during our travels.
In fact, the signs of trouble were hard to miss. We were travelling routes that primarily took us through small towns, and it took but a glance at the lineup of grim legal notices in virtually every community’s local newspaper to grasp the impact the recession is having in the U.S.
The April 8 edition of the Pahrump Valley Times, for instance, featured close to five pages of legal notices, almost all of them involving trustee sales of houses in foreclosure. The legal language of the ads made things sound very dry and orderly, but it didn’t take much to imagine the distress of the overwhelmed, indebted homeowner at the heart of every one of them.
One California auction company handling foreclosures lists almost 1,400 homes for sale - and that’s just one company, in one state. Nationally, more than 800,000 households in the U.S. went into foreclosure in the first quarter of 2009. (RealtyTrac.com, which is monitoring the issue, notes on its Web site that the real number will likely surpass a million by the time all the “latent foreclosure activity” is sorted out.)
Last month alone, some 341,000 U.S. households went into foreclosure - a 12 per cent jump over any month on record. In parts of Caifornia, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Idaho, as many as one in every 55 houses are now in foreclosure. A new industry has sprung up just to deal with empty houses, which are attracting looters and squatters - in some cases, the rousted families who have nowhere else to go.
Some of the routes we drove have been in trouble for a while, of course. The stretch of highway between Las Vegas and Hawthorne, Nev., was dotted with struggling towns on the brink of collapse 10 years ago when we travelled through there.
But some of those communities are now full-out ghost towns. At least one abandoned roadside motel - and more likely two or three - was for sale in every little community we passed through. Restaurants, country stores, car dealerships, mall spaces - even brothels - sat empty and boarded up.
We found permanent residents in every RV park we pulled into, and not the typical older couple enjoying a travel-filled retirement. In Oregon, we came across a two-car family living out of their fifth-wheel trailer at an RV park steps away from Interstate 5. They’d been living there for more than a year.
Housing is housing, mind you, and a fifth-wheel is better than nothing. But these are people living in RV parks not because they choose to, but because they have to. Meanwhile, the U.S. newspapers detail the stories of those other folks - the homeless, whose numbers are dramatically on the rise as well.
In Clark County, Nev. - the region that encompasses Las Vegas - almost 13,500 people are now living homeless. That’s nearly a 20 per cent increase from the last count two years ago. Two-thirds of those surveyed reported they’re homeless because they lost their job. Almost a fifth of the homeless are military veterans, primarily from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and Afghanistan wars.
Child poverty is on the rise, too, and President Barack Obama’s promise to get that problem fixed by 2015 isn’t doing much to help the hungry kids and cash-strapped schools grappling with a worrying increase in families who qualify for subsidized meal programs.
In Portland, Ore., the schools in poor neighbourhoods continue to see the most demand, with more than 90 per cent of families in some parts of the city now dependent on subsidized meals for their children. But nine middle-class neighbourhoods are also reporting a rise in qualifying families.
On the bright side, property prices are truly astounding right now in the states we passed through. If you’ve ever fantasized about having a modest rancher somewhere in the interior of California or Nevada on an acre or two of land, these are dream days. Don’t bet the farm on our own real-estate market recovering any time soon when prices are this low in the U.S.
What’s it all going to mean for Canada? That’s the big question, with enough differences between our two countries that it’s hard to make any predictions with much certainty. But when your most important neighbour and trading partner is in this much trouble, I’d brace for a rough ride.

I wrote a while ago about a media report that really got it wrong about rates of HIV infection among Vancouver sex workers. I alerted University of Victoria professor Cecilia Benoit to the error, as she has done considerable competent research work around sex workers, and she in turn wrote a great piece for Harm Reduction magazine (where the original piece appeared) that sets things straight.

Follow this link to find her response, which serves as a fine reminder that we can't be too careful when reading any research document, not to mention the media's interpretation of it.

I'm just back from a terrific road trip to Yosemite and Death Valley in California - if you're interested in such things, I'll be posting photos in a day or two to my Facebook page (link is on the left), so feel free to check 'em out.

However, I couldn't wait to share this crazy photo of a huge flock of snow geese - 4000-5000 as best I could estimate - we stumbled across near Mount Vernon, Wash. this week as we made our way home. Apparently they show up in the farm fields around Mt. Vernon/LaConner every year on their way to summer nesting grounds in the Arctic.

As usual, travelling in the U.S. reminded me that while I don't always like American policy, I sure do like Americans. But the country is clearly feeling the pains of the economic recession in a much more obvious way than I'd expected. One glance through any town's community newspaper was enough to make that clear - most poignantly, in the jam-packed legal notices in the classified section detailing trustee sales of houses that had gone into foreclosure. Frightening, really - they've even got companies starting up now to check for squatters in empty homes, because there are getting to be so many of them. I'll be detailing that more in my column next Friday for the Times Colonist, so stay tuned.

But there's an upside to everything, and I have to admit that the downturn made for pretty economical travel in the U.S. Gas is much cheaper there than it is up here - we generally paid $2.20-$2.40 a gallon, which works out very favourable even when you factor in smaller gallons and an exchange rate of about $1.25 right now on Canadian dollars. Camping sites were rarely more than $25 anywhere. And man, if you've ever thought about picking up a nice modular home on an acre or two of land in a rural community just about anywhere in interior California, the prices are crazy-low.

As for the travel itself, there's nothing like a road trip. I know, I know - I suppose they're politically incorrect these days, what with carbon emissions and all that. But I sometimes wonder if things wouldn't turn out in favour of road trips if you ran the thing all the way through - that we didn't take a plane anywhere, that we cooked our own meals that in many cases used local ingredients, that our energy use plummeted because we've got a solar panel on the roof of our motorhome, and so on. At any rate, I think it's the best form of travel going for sheer enjoyment of the landscape, the people and the moment.

Yosemite is unbelievably beautiful, and April turned out to be a good time to go in terms of minimal tourists (although an amazing number of brave tenters toughing it out through below-freezing temperatures at night). Spring is waterfall season, so the fact that you can't access a significant portion of the park this early in the year is made up for by being able to see massive falls tumbling down all over the place along the valley's vast granite walls. Daytime temperatures were a comfortable and sunny 15 or so while we were there - great for all the hiking you want to be doing while there.

Death Valley actually wraps up its season at the end of the month, as the weather gets too hot from this point on to be able to enjoy all its fabulous hikes and wild scenic vistas. This is our second trip to Death Valley and it's definitely on my greatest-hits list, and never mind the 12-hour sand storm we gritted our teeth through (literally) one night at Stovepipe Wells. Definitely wouldn't have wanted to be a tenter on THAT night.

But a road trip is about all the other places you visit along the way, and we spent some quality time in places like Mojave, Likely, Groveland, and Folsom Lake. Even our overnight at LaConner to get ready for an early-morning ferry ride home via Anacortes was really pleasant, even though the famed tulip fields still aren't in bloom yet due to the cold spring.

On the subject of ferry travel: We saved a considerable amount of money both ways by going on American ferries instead of BC ferries. Taking a 28-foot motorhome on a BC ferry sets you back $150 each way. Meanwhile, we paid $100 Cdn to go via Port Angeles on the way down, and benefited from an "RV sale" on the Anacortes ferry on the way back that kept the fee below $100 again. What's up with that??

Downtown community finds its stride in running club


It's a grey but dry afternoon, and our little group is on the run -- down to the bottom of Pandora, a sharp left past the "whale wall," onward to the Inner Harbour and beyond. In a city full of runners, we blend in nicely.

But this is no ordinary running club. Based on an innovative program that got its start in Philadelphia two years ago, Victoria's newest running group is for people living in tough circumstance and poverty in the downtown. They run for half an hour twice a week, starting out in borrowed running shoes and working their way toward brand-new ones once they've stuck it out for 15 runs.

"This is my 10th time out, and I'm loving it," says Desi, a middle-aged participant who's new to running. "I hadn't run before other than for the bus, but it's been really good."

The concept for Every Step Counts is deliberately simple: A brief warm-up and a little conversation at the Cool Aid Society's Downtown Activity Centre; a 30-minute run; a quick stretch and some food back at the activity centre to wrap things up. The challenges people have in their lives are left behind for the duration.

"It's an exceptional program. I wish it had occurred to somebody in the medical and mental-health community long before this," enthused one participant with chronic mental illness. "It's very simple, it's very direct -- no psychobabble. I'm a 46-year smoker and am now determined to quit because I want to be able to keep this up."

The impetus for Every Step Counts came from Victoria Foundation executive director Sandy Richardson, who'd heard about Philadelphia marathoner Anne Mahlum and the success she'd had starting a homeless running group in that city.

Mahlum got the idea after running regularly past a homeless shelter during her marathon training. What started out as a few friendly words exchanged with the shelter residents she'd pass every morning eventually grew into the program Back on My Feet, which now operates out of five shelters in the Philadelphia area.

Richardson turned to local Frontrunners business owner and running enthusiast Rob Reid to help get something similar going in Victoria. The foundation, Frontrunners and a variety of other sponsors chipped in for funding and gear, and a part-time co-ordinator was hired in early February and Every Step Counts was launched.

It's very much a collective effort. Reid uses his extensive running contacts to pull together "gently used" running shoes and clothing for participants. Co-ordinator Gillie Easdon makes the food for the post-run snacks. On the day I joined the group for its run, two staff from Cool Aid were taking part, making sure that the slower runners always had company as we made our way through the downtown.

Easdon has her own interesting story for how she came to the job. She's a downtown resident who up until a year ago was more likely to find herself griping about the impact of street issues on her life rather than rolling up her sleeves to do something about them. "I held some ill-informed but common opinions," she says.

That changed when she decided to "get informed" by volunteering at a one-day event for the street community put on last October by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. Project Connect gave Easdon a new perspective on the issues around homelessness, and a desire to do more to help.

A runner herself, she loves seeing participants find their stride through the new running program. The group is now training for the Times Colonist 10K on April 26, with a few participants even pondering the Royal Victoria Marathon in the fall. Those interested in donating money, food or good-quality running gear to the program, contact Easdon at gillie.easdon@gmail.com.

The participant who'd earlier told me he was grateful for a lack of "psychobabble" says the program has brought him back to running after more than seven years of sedentary, unhappy living due to his struggles with worsening mental-health problems.

"When you're on medication for all of that, you don't get out much, and you start feeling worse and worse because you're not getting out," he says. "It's a negative cycle.

"But these runs are a simple achievement. We've got simple goals from one week to the next. It's all about just putting one foot in front of the other."

- - -

Speaking of sports gear for good causes, the Cool Aid floor hockey team could really use some proper goalie equipment. If you can donate, call Mike at 250-380-8768.

Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction'

Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests.

But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system.

Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with.

Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify as sub-par.

Kudos to the B.C. Liberals for initiating the satisfaction surveys in 2003. It's important to be taking the measure of all our systems to ensure they're effective and efficient. I appreciate government that opens itself up to public scrutiny in the interest of doing a better job.

But if we're bothering to ask students and parents whether they're happy with our schools, you'd presume we'd also want to act on what they tell us. Five years of poor scores in several major categories looks to me like we're not doing that.

The satisfaction surveys are given annually to parents, school staff, and certain grades of students. The 18 questions gauge people's perceptions of how well their school is doing in terms of student achievement, human and social development, school environment, safety, computer skills and physical activity.

There are bright spots in the 2007-08 survey. Most students feel safe at school. Most report that their teachers help them with their problems. More than 80 per cent think their school is inclusive and welcoming to people who are "different." At least three-quarters of parents are satisfied with what their child is learning in school, up four percentage points since the surveys first started.

Still, there's significant room for improvement on all fronts, and work to do to understand why satisfaction rates drop so precipitously as students enter secondary school.

Students are surveyed in Grade 3-4 and again in grades 7, 10 and 12. The across-the-board drop in satisfaction as they progress through the grades is striking. Asked whether they're getting better in math, for instance, 81 per cent of Grade 3-4s in the most recent survey agreed. The figure falls to 72 per cent among Grade 7s and 59 per cent for Grade 10s. By Grade 12, only half of the students are seeing improvement.

The downward trend is similar for all categories, and particularly dramatic in the area of school environment. Students who replied affirmatively to the question of whether their teacher cared about them, for instance, goes from a high of 92 per cent among Grade 3-4 students to just 54 per cent by Grade 12. Even parents seem to be aware of a shift in teachers' attitudes toward their children as they make their way through the grades, with 89 per cent of elementary-school parents reporting that teachers care for their child compared to just 71 per cent of secondary school parents.

Much like their children, parents become significantly less satisfied with the system as students get into higher grades. Some of the lowest satisfaction rates for parents are around secondary schools' efforts to prepare their child for a job or college/university.

Fewer than half of secondary-school parents think their child's school is doing a good job of preparing the student for work. Just 57 per cent think their child is being well-prepared for post-secondary. (Those are 2007-08 figures, but the numbers have barely budged since surveys started in 2003.) Students have an even poorer perception of how ready they are, with just 40 per cent of Grade 12 students agreeing that their school has prepared them adequately for the workforce.

The surveys also identify a major gap between school staff's perceptions of how well they're doing compared with parent and student perceptions.

In general, staff members feel strongly that their schools are doing a good job on all fronts (with the possible exception of teaching computer skills, which everyone seems to agree isn't going well).

That's a problem. How can staff tackle the serious concerns identified by parents and students if, in their mind, everything's just fine?

It's clearly not.

To read the full report, click here: http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/PubDocs/bcdocs/447534/prov.pdf

Big picture essential when deciding on run-of-river projects

Once upon a time, a previous generation of British Columbians made tough, costly choices on behalf of future citizens. Now it’s our turn, with no certainty that we’re ready for it.
B.C. has enjoyed a seemingly limitless supply of cheap “green” electricity for 40 years thanks to the giant dams built on the Peace and Columbia rivers back when mega-projects and environmental sensitivities weren’t quite so at odds with each other.
But in recent years the population has grown to the point that we’re using more electricity than we generate. The painful process of figuring out what to do about that is underway, but with all-new challenges and complexities that render much of our previous hydro history moot as a guide for what needs to be done.
Is the provincial government up to the task? That’s a big question, as revealed in this week’s headlines about the feverish interest building in the private sector over “run of river” projects. Using similar principles to the big dam sites but on a much smaller scale, such projects are busting out all over B.C., with virtually no public process in place to ponder what it’s all going to mean at the end of the day.
We can’t have it all ways, of course. If we want continued access to inexpensive, abundant electricity generated in ways that are relatively easy on the environment, we’re going to have to tolerate some fairly major industrial development along the way.
As those massive dams on the Peace attest, reliable and affordable electricity always comes at something of a price. You simply can’t produce a consistent supply of clean electricity without cutting down trees, altering scenic vistas, threatening fish and erecting new power lines.
Renewable energy sources such as wind and water may sound gentle and benign. And when you’re talking about a little hydro project on the creek at the back of your property, maybe they are. But the infrastructure needed to harness such natural resources at a provincial scale is considerable.
The 17 projects being proposed by Plutonic Power Corporation for Bute Inlet, for instance, will each require construction of a powerhouse, a flooded area that at minimum is the size of a soccer field, and river diversions of anywhere from two to nine kilometres. In total they’ll require more than 300 kilometres of new roads and 450 kilometres of new power lines, all of it in a pristine part of the province.
It could be that we just need to suck it up and deal with all that if we want to keep the electricity coming. Environmentalists have been touting run-of-river for many years as a green alternative, and B.C. is blessed with an abundance of the kind of rivers that lend themselves well to such projects. (To be profitable for private developers, river segments tagged for diversion require a grade of at least 10 per cent.)
Several run-of-river projects are already in place on Vancouver Island, and nobody’s been howling about devastated rivers and landscapes so far. Most rivers tapped for hydro use are in remote areas anyway, so it’s not like we have to look at them on our way to work every morning.
But the truth is that we’re newbies to this business of run-of-river. And the very fact that it all takes place in remote locations means most of us will have no real clue as to the size and scope of such projects, or their impact on the local environment.
Nor do we know the cumulative impact of going ahead with several dozen such projects all at once. Many are significantly larger than anything B.C. has seen to date. All are envisaged as privately owned and managed projects.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing. But these are uncharted waters for B.C. It’s infinitely wise to proceed with great caution when starting into something new, yet government is plunging in with what appears to be wild abandon.
Yes, there is a lengthy permitting process in place for run-of-river projects - one that many proponents won’t make it through. But can we be certain that developers are getting the thorough once-over given that BC Hydro is on a tight timeline for striking new deals with private suppliers? Is anyone keeping an eye on the big picture?
Sober second thought. Public input. Careful consideration of long-term impacts. B.C.’s Liberals have been consistently weak in all these areas. If we’re not yet worried about what that will mean this time out, we ought to be.

Hip, hip, hooray - Woodwynn Farm's going forward

Hey, could this be hope I’m feeling? It’s such a hard thing to hold onto amid the gloom and doom of the day, but this past week I started to notice a distinct cheery bonhomie creeping over me. I’d almost forgotten how good it feels.
It started last Wednesday, after I toured Vancouver’s terrific new emergency housing for people living hard on the street - the so-called “hardest to house. “ It’s a label that calls up scary images of people beyond help, but the Vancouver experience - set in motion by a committed city council focused on homelessness - is rapidly disproving the myths of that (more on that in a future column).
And then this week, it was over the moon for me when I got the news that Richard LeBlanc and his team were successful in their bid to buy Woodwynn Farm.
Chalk one up to instant karma, which LeBlanc has surely earned after a particularly hard year of trying to acquire Woodwynn in the face of a fierce NIMBY campaign fought by neighbouring landowners. His work heading up the highly successful Youth Employment Society a few years back stands as proof of his passion and competence, so it’s a major win for him and our community that he has been successful.
LeBlanc’s plan for Woodwynn is to have it up and running by this fall as a therapeutic community for people looking for a new lease on life and a way out of pain, addiction and homelessness. The original plan was that people would live on the farm, but that got nixed last year when Central Saanich council ruled it out before LeBlanc could even ask them about it.
So now, people will work at Woodwynn but live elsewhere (location still to be worked out). There will be 24 people to start, and as many as 96 as the program builds over the next three years. They’ll be doing what you’d expect people on a working farm to be doing: tending the land and the animals; growing food; learning new skills; launching into the world to start their own businesses. Along the way, they’ll rebuild their lives.
It stuns me that anyone can find that controversial.
The group that opposed LeBlanc - Farmlands Trust - positioned itself as a preservationist group that simply wanted to ensure Woodwynn remain a farm in perpetuity. That’s the reason on the record for why the Trust tried to buy the 68-hectare property out from under LeBlanc’s group last spring, and has fought him like the encroaching enemy ever since.
I guess we all tell ourselves stories to help us to sleep at night. No doubt some members of the Trust do want to preserve farmland, but the group didn’t even try to keep a lid on the members whose main agenda was to shut out LeBlanc and his “homeless farm.” Their true colours leaked out often enough that I came to form a somewhat different picture of the Trust’s efforts.
Seeing as LeBlanc only wanted the same thing that Farmlands Trust ostensibly wanted - to maintain Woodwynn as a working farm - surely at least a few members of the Trust are celebrating with him this week in the achievement of their common goal.
Hopefully the Trust reflects on what it means to have found common purpose with those whose uninformed, ugly opinions surfaced over the past year with each flurry of media interest in LeBlanc’s project. How did a farmland-preservation group end up so far from home?
Hopefully the members of the Trust are gracious in defeat, and just get out of the way so LeBlanc can try to do a good thing. I think the disbelievers will be pleasantly surprised at how much a person in tough circumstance looks just like anybody else once they’ve got a place to go, a community to help them get there, and a fresh set of clothes.
LeBlanc and his organization, the Create Homefulness Society, have a tough road to travel still, of course. The purchase of Woodwynn happened because a few generous people in our region anted up for his cause. They’ll want to be paid back sometime in the next five years.
Then there’s all the work that will have to be done to raise money for operations. That’s never easy. For better or worse, the society can also expect to be thrust into the ongoing debate around homelessness - and on occasion, find itself the lightning rod for our fears and misconceptions.
But that’s for later. For now, let’s just celebrate that the good guys won.

Update on HIV/sex worker issue


I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject:


RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009)
by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner
British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with
his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence
in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in
seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the
research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are
vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy
and programmatic responses. We wish to affirm that it is our overarching
goal to ensure that there are adequate services for all individuals living
with HIV infection in Vancouver. The WHO has consistently shown that less
than 10% of sex workers have adequate access to HIV prevention and care
resources.

Our paper did not aim to highlight HIV infection among sex workers in
particular. Instead, we sought to model the estimate of HIV prevalence at
the city level and related gaps in services in Vancouver. Also of note,
all the studies considered in our paper received institutional ethical
approval.

We acknowledge that prevalence estimates are rarely perfect and are
limited by uncertainty surrounding population size and potential biases
inherent in source data. We would like to clarify that the estimate of HIV
prevalence among female sex workers in 2006 is based on data collected
among survival sex workers predominantly located in Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside, who live in poverty and all who inject and/or smoke illicit
drugs. This estimate therefore does not reflect indoor sex workers, such
as sex workers in establishment-based venues, bars, or escort services. We
are fully aware that female sex workers in Vancouver do not constitute a
homogeneous group. This could have been further stressed in the published
paper.

Perhaps most importantly, we recognize that sex workers have been unfairly
stigmatized in the past by medical research as vectors of disease, and it
was not our intention to perpetuate this in any way. We have acknowledged
in our article that detailed data on sex work clients were not available.
As a global assessment of HIV prevention needs, our article did not seek
to review the factors that enhance vulnerability to HIV infection among
marginalized populations, such as survival sex workers. However, as
mentioned by Dr. Goodyear, we feel it is important to acknowledge that
many pivotal studies both in Canada, including some of our own, and
globally have demonstrated that criminalized sex work legislation,
enforcement-based strategies and violence greatly reduces sex workers’
ability to safely negotiate condom use with clients as well as other HIV
risk reduction strategies.

Finally, we concur with UNAIDS and WHO that structural approaches to HIV
prevention are crucial both for the health of sex workers and clients.
This includes policy changes such as the removal of criminal sanctions
targeting sex workers.

Eric Druyts, Robert Hogg and Julio Montaner

http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/6/1/5/comments

Detox rules work well for some - so let's do it both ways

Speaking up for the rights of one group invariably means stepping on those of another, as I was reminded following my recent column on the no-smoking policy at the new detox.
An old acquaintance of mine - I’ll call her Shelly - phoned me after the column appeared to tell me I was wrong to be critical of Vancouver Island Health Authority staff for prohibiting smoking at the detox. She’d arrived for a stay at the brand-new unit last month prepared to hate the prohibition, too, but instead quit smoking - for the first time in more than 40 years.
She was proudly 28 days nicotine-free when I met up with her last week at the Pembroke Street stabilization unit, which is where people fresh from detox ideally get to stay for a month while they work out the details of a life without drugs. Shelly had gone to detox primarily to get off heroin, valium, alcohol and cocaine, but was delighted to have gotten out from under her cigarette habit at the same time.
“I brought a carton with me when I came, because the word on the street was that you could smoke in the bathroom,” says Shelly, the fourth patient through the new detox after it opened in early February. “Then they told me no. I thought, God, I’m never going to be able to do this. I was asking for the [nicotine] patch within a couple hours. But then I did fine.”
My concerns with the no-smoking policy continue - and indeed, Shelly saw a fellow patient get kicked out of detox after being caught smoking. How crazy is it to deny people urgently needed health care just to make a point about the eventual dangers of cigarette smoking? There’s also a gap a mile wide in the system for adults addicted to cocaine or crystal meth, who for the most part are not accepted at the detox.
That said, far be it from me to deny Shelly the very positive experience she had at the detox, partly as a result of not being allowed to smoke. Being in a stable, smoke-free environment - lots of support, lots of nicotine patches - was really beneficial for Shelly, who looks happier and healthier than I’ve seen her look in years.
A solution, then: A medical detox, smoke-free, for people like Shelly - people whose primary drugs are opiates or alcohol and who need the more intense medical care the new detox provides. And a different kind of detox somewhere else, one where people can get help regardless of the drug they’re addicted to and not have to give up smoking at the same time. Nothing expensive or fancy - just a practical, safe place.
Shelly’s latest journey into recovery has been an exemplary one, and worth detailing for what it says about all the things that have to come together to help those overwhelmed by addiction.
It starts with Shelly, of course, because she was the one who went looking for change. But then she had the good fortune of connecting with outreach workers from the Umbrella Society, a very savvy little peer-led non-profit that helps people with addictions and mental-health issues. Shelly had the will, but it was the Umbrella Society that showed her the way.
“Gordon Harper is a large person in my life right now,” says Shelly of the society’s executive director. “I told him that he was going to have to decide where my next move was, because I didn’t have any brains anymore.
“So he set me up with this - detox, stabilization, a recovery home for at least three months, then to Aurora [treatment centre], then back to a recovery home. I’m expecting it will take me a year to do it, but that’s OK, seeing as I’ve wasted eight years using drugs.”
Other things went right as well. Shelly got a rare 18-day stretch in the new detox, almost three times as long as most get. Then she got a bed immediately in the stabilization unit, also not typical. With Harper on her side, she just might make it through the forms, waitlists, phone calls, intake processes, hard work, meltdowns and meetings that await those trying to get help with their addictions.
Shelly says the help is there for those who reach out for it. But I know too many others lost in the fractured system to see her story as the norm. I can’t imagine why we make it so hard.

Sadly, I've had to give up some of my regular Friday columns, due to cutbacks to the freelance budget at the Times Colonist. I won't be writing for the first Friday of the month anymore.

It's bothering me more than I would have expected, but so it goes. Change always ends up being a positive thing, in my experience, but that's not to say it ever starts out pleasantly.

I've never seen the media industry in such a state. Where's it all going? Nowhere good for the immediate future, and for the industry as it currently exists. But something new will rise from the ashes, and perhaps it's time.

My wish would be for a return to smaller, locally owned media. I never got to experience that during my career, because the Thompson corporation owned all the small papers I was working at in my early years, and since then it's been Southam, Hollinger and Canwest in rapid succession. But I've always thought that would be the model with the most potential for understanding the kind of news that a particular community needs to know.

If there does end up being a fire sale of Canadian media properties, what's stopping a few locals from coming together to start their own media outlet? The business is still profitable for the most part. I can see from the chaos in the industry that things are really going to have to change, but the business of media is far from a lost cause.

People are always going to need information. Communities are always going to need a way for their citizens to talk to each other about issues of shared concern. The Internet is a marvelous place, but it can't meet all our needs. I've always thought the best thing about a good newspaper is that it tells you about things you didn't know you wanted to know about, something that a self-directed Internet news search simply isn't as likely to do.

I've met a lot of young people who don't read any news media. That scares me. But at the same time, I'm as tired of "the news" as anybody else.

Mostly that's because it's the wrong news for me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't choose to be kept up to date on every death, fire, car crash, grotesque act, and tragic turn of event in Canada. I get that I need to know about foreign wars and politics, but surely there's a better way of doing it.

But in between the irrelevant stories, I still find great, compelling, important information in our media. I still love newspapers. So I'm sure hoping that what comes out of all of this crashing about in the industry at the end of the day is more of what's great about it and much, much less of what's not.

Anyway. Hang in for the transformation.

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.