Trouble inside VIHA?
Check out this intriguing series of letters and opinion pieces from doctors and VIHA directors, all published in the Times Colonist in the past month. I've started with the June 9 editorial that got things rolling, followed by the three letters that have run so far revealing a whole lot of internal dissent about the cuts to mental-health services this past year. I'll be writing about this issue in my column on Friday, June 25.
A terrible failure on mental illness
Times Colonist (Victoria)
Wed Jun 9 2010
A terrible failure on mental illness
There is no worry greater than being the parent of a child with a serious mental illness or addiction. Any illness suffered by a family member is, of course, traumatic.
But for most ailments and injuries, especially critical ones, there is support and help. If your child has cancer, the health care system provides remarkable care; support services help the family; friends and neighbours pitch in. Parents know that even after they are gone, their child will be supported.
None of those things is true for people suffering with mental illness. We would not turn someone away requiring critical cancer care; we routinely tell people dealing with serious -- potentially fatal -- mental illness that there just isn't space to provide care. Patients are stigmatized and families isolated.
The consequences are terrible for individuals, families and society.
The tragic stabbing death of 15-year-old Justin Wendland has refocused attention. The man charged with murder has a long history of mental illness and addiction.
But it should hardly take such a case to remind us of this health care failure. Look at downtown streets and the people camped along Pandora Avenue most nights.
Most are not well. Of some 1,400 homeless people in the city, about 40 per cent have a mental illness; 50 per cent have an addiction. Many are dealing with both.
That means that some 800 sick people are warehoused on the streets with little or no support or treatment. Often, they lurch from crisis to crisis. When things get bad enough, there is a brief, expensive response from the system, in the form of acute care or jail time. Then they are left on their own until the next crisis.
It's not easy to provide treatment. Some patients reject help; others shun medication that could assist in managing their illnesses (sometimes with good reason). Others are just terribly difficult. Involuntary treatment is sometimes necessary.
But we are a long, long way from having to worry about finding ways to persuade the recalcitrant to accept care.
Even when people want care -- when their families are desperate -- there are likely no beds available and little support. The Vancouver Island Health Authority cut mental health services in the capital region, both psychiatric beds and community support. Patients who should be in the hospital, according to their doctors, aren't. Some 350 patients lost the support of mental health caseworkers.
VIHA is simply balancing priorities against inadequate funding. Mental illness is a lesser priority.
But the health system's savings are offset by the extra costs for policing, shelters and crisis response.
It must be noted that mental illness, like many other diseases, can be managed. Millions of people live happy, productive lives. Even those seriously ill are rarely -- almost never -- a danger to anyone but themselves.
But the extreme cases are a reminder of the high price we pay every day for failing to provide adequate mental health care.
Services increased to the mentally ill
Times Colonist (Victoria)
Sat Jun 12 2010
Re: "A terrible failure on mental illness," June 9.
Over the past three years, VIHA has greatly increased funding in Victoria for services to the homeless, mentally ill and addicted. This includes an increase of more than $6 million every year toward enhancing services for those who suffer from mental illnesses or addiction, including those living on the streets, and we are seeing excellent results.
In Victoria, the establishment of four Assertive Community Treatment outreach teams proactively connects individuals who suffer from serious mental illnesses and-or addictions, particularly those who are homeless or poorly housed in the downtown, with the services they need and has reduced the number of individuals coming to emergency rooms. Clients are now better able to manage their mental illnesses long term with the ongoing contact and support from these teams.
We have tripled the number of medical detox beds and tripled stabilization and supportive recovery beds for those in long-term recovery from addictions.
Services provided at a number of supported housing apartments for mental-health clients continue to help them transition into wellness and reintegrate into the community.
This past year, we have shifted some of our funding in order to provide services to those communities in the Central and North Island communities that have been significantly underserved. This meant a reduction in services in the Greater Victoria area.
We can and will do more. We all recognize that it will take the combined and determined efforts of many agencies, and the support of all citizens, to ensure that everyone has a safe place to live, their basic needs met and a valued role in our community.
Alan Campbell
Director, Mental health and addictions services Vancouver Island Health Authority
No confidence in VIHA's mental-health efforts
Thu Jun 17 2010
Page: A14
Source: Special to Times Colonist
The letter from Alan Campbell, Vancouver Island Health Authority director of mental health, suggests he must be living on a different planet than the majority of front-line psychiatrists and case managers who are trying to deal with cuts to services for their chronically ill mental health patients in Victoria ("Services increased to the mentally ill," June 9).
On my planet, the following facts are the reality:
- A motion passed at the Nov. 10, 2009, meeting of the department of psychiatry, south Island, condemned the unacceptable way in which budget reductions in mental health took place, the lack of clinical consultation, the significant failure of managers and co-ordinators to share information and the resulting low morale, despondency and mistrust that had ensued.
- A draft e-mail in November 2009 from one of Campbell's managers stated, "With the reduction of six case management staff in early December, the case management program will need to discharge a total of over 300 individuals in the next few weeks." Case managers are afraid to speak out about this, or any other matter affecting their patients, for fear of retribution by senior management. This is not a healthy state of affairs.
- On Nov. 30, 2009, and because of continued frustration with management, a group of nine psychiatrists signed a letter of complaint about a situation in the Mental Health Centre that also referred to low morale affecting staff. Nothing was done to address the complaints; the reply from Campbell on Dec. 3 said he was directly involved in the decisions made and was accountable.
- On April 22, 2010, we received notice that Dr. Anthony Barale was closing his outpatient neuropsychiatry practice at Victoria General Hospital. He complained about the lack of concern by VIHA for brain-injured patients, who are amongst the most complex in the system. He said they have organic brain conditions, addictions, concurrent psychiatric disorders and multiple medical conditions, yet mental health is currently putting up as many barriers as possible to this patient group. He is no longer prepared to support a system that is failing patients and their families.
- Dr. Adam Gunn has tendered his resignation from the Schizophrenia Clinic and Affective Disorders Clinic in Victoria effective June 26. He referred to difficulty with the profoundly negative effects that VIHA cuts have had on patient care, causing serious concerns about safety and the expectation that there will be dangerous consequences, with patients' lives at stake.
He said he could no longer be a part of it. He went on to state that the quality of care has already been severely eroded, and accessing treatment services for quite ill patients is now extremely difficult and in some cases impossible. As well, he felt that VIHA has now become an unhealthy workplace, with patients, their families and his colleagues deserving better and believed that bad things will follow from this in the coming months. Other VIHA psychiatrists are considering resigning because of similar concerns.
Meanwhile, VIHA funds programs for patients to do yoga, Qigong and power walking. Not much use to the patients of Barale and Gunn, nor to the 194 patients I saw in 2009 who suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder and serious depression. Not much use to the 300 Mental Health Clinic patients who have been disenfranchised with the loss of six of their case managers.
Mental health management continues to bury its head in the sand and ignore a very large group of chronically mentally ill patients. They and their families rarely speak out; they do not cause problems downtown, and are no more likely to commit crime than the general population. Indeed most of my patients have been afraid to go downtown or near Our Place because of the presence of the drug abusers who present a threat and are most likely to commit crimes, from theft to serious assaults.
The problems downtown have been erroneously blamed on the mentally ill. Their incidence in the population has remained static, but there has been a totally unacceptable explosion in the numbers of drug addicts who have been allowed to take over our city.
Repeatedly, I have called for an audit of actions taken by mental health management in the last three years, but this has fallen on deaf ears.
André Masters is a psychiatrist who has worked in mental health for 49 years in the United Kingdom, Saskatchewan and Victoria. He recently retired from a position as a consultant in general psychiatry at the Victoria Mental Health Centre, but continues to do part-time consultations for the Mental Health Service in Victoria.
Mental-health improvements up to us
Times Colonist (Victoria)
Sat Jun 19 2010
Re: "No confidence in VIHA's mental health efforts," June 17.
There are, to be sure, profound differences in the perspectives of Dr. André Masters and Alan Campbell, who retires next month after a lifetime serving the needs of the mentally ill in B.C.
These differences go some way to explain their differing views of the progress made in serving the mentally ill on Vancouver Island over the past several years.
As Vancouver Island Health Authority director of mental health, Campbell has to support the needs of all those who live on Vancouver Island who are mentally disordered. He cannot favour those with mental illnesses judged as respectable or unavoidable and neglect those whose impairments are secondary to a lifestyle that might have been prevented.
He must seek to provide fair funding for all communities, redressing the gross imbalance that has favoured the south island. VIHA now spends $6 million more annually in new mental health and addictions funding in Victoria. So, despite reductions to service in Victoria totalling about $1.5 million last year, there has been a net increase of nearly $4.5 million over the past few years.
Masters has been an exceptional advocate for his own patients; but he has not had to be concerned that continuing to favour some continues to disadvantage many.
We are, fundamentally, on the same side. We recognize that mental illness is the cause of the greatest loss to our quality of life and the largest economic burden to our society.
The answer lies with our population, who must decide how much value to attribute to mental health and addiction care compared to other health care. Canada has traditionally spent a smaller proportion of its health-care dollars on mental health and addiction care than other western nations.
If we are to increase this proportion to amounts that match other countries, it must mean reductions or funding changes in other areas. Are we as a population ready to bite that bullet?
Dr. Robert Miller
Head of department of psychiatry
Medical director, Mental Health and Addictions Services
Vancouver Island Health Authority
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
B.C. families need to fight for group homes
I remember the exact moment I started to look at people with mental handicaps in a completely different way.
It was 1985, not long after the province had closed the huge institution for “retarded” people at Tranquille, an old tuberculosis sanatorium outside Kamloops. I was working at a Kamloops newspaper at the time and the closure was big news, so I’d been part of documenting the hope, fear, anger and anticipation that the closure had sparked.
Families had been working for long, long lifetimes by then to move things forward for their mentally handicapped children, who were all ages. They had few choices in those years when it came to finding services or schooling for their children in their own home towns, and often had no option but to send their children hundreds of kilometres away to institutions such as Tranquille, Woodlands and Glendale.
The families were mostly over the moon at the thought that Tranquille’s closure would allow them to bring their children home to get all the support they needed in their own communities, which is what the government was promising. But they were terrified, too, because it’s very hard to give up a sure thing for a promise when it’s your child’s life at stake.
As for how I felt personally about the closure of Tranquille - well, I hadn’t really wondered to ask myself about that.
But then came the day when I happened to be stopped on a Kamloops street waiting for a young mentally handicapped boy to cross at the crosswalk. He appeared to be on his way home from school, walking along in the sunshine with a schoolmate and swinging his lunch kit in that big-armed way that every kid in the world is probably familiar with.
And it was all so normal. A 30-second scene, yet it clarified for me in an instant why we had to put the days of giant institutions behind us. Normal is a pretty nice place to be.
All these years on, much has changed for people with mental handicaps. They have the right to go to school. To live a real life in a real community, near to friends and family. To be paid a fair wage for a job well done. To have some say over their own lives. Those are meaningful achievements.
As for the families - well, let’s just say it’s been an interesting 25 years.
Their children’s basic needs haven’t changed in that time, because a mental handicap is forever. But everything about the way the government operates its services has been in a near-constant state of flux. Sometimes that was due to shifting philosophies or new research, but more often it was because somebody in government thought there were savings to be had by doing things differently.
The language changed: mental handicaps became developmental disabilities, and the associations and programs serving that population took to referring to their services as “community living.” When the government created Community Living BC in 2005, a new governance authority that would give families more say over services, many of those families felt they were realizing a dream.
But it’s the year of broken dreams. CLBC is now preparing to shut down group homes - the four- and five-bedroom staffed homes that people were moved into after the institutions closed. The move has been portrayed as being about choice for families, but it’s mostly about saving $22 million a year.
Many families have lobbied hard to give their adult children more housing options beyond just moving into a group home. Independent living is one more step toward normal, and I’m all for it, too.
But everything changes when the primary goal is cost savings. If families aren’t yet alarmed by what they’re hearing from CLBC, they might want to ponder what it would really mean to eliminate the only designated housing supports in B.C. for people with developmental disabilities.
Once all the group homes are gone, families will be left to fight it out with everybody else for low-income housing for their adult children. The support to help people find and keep housing will be there initially, because government needs to make the changes palatable. But for how long? And then what?
This government in particular has a history of being deceptive, ruthlessly ideological and dangerously ill-informed around social spending. CLBC may have honourable intentions, but it’s a good soldier. It’s no more likely than the health authorities to challenge government demands for cuts.
Families, you’ve been here before. It’s wrong that they’re coming for you again, but so it goes in this often unjust world. Fight.
I remember the exact moment I started to look at people with mental handicaps in a completely different way.
It was 1985, not long after the province had closed the huge institution for “retarded” people at Tranquille, an old tuberculosis sanatorium outside Kamloops. I was working at a Kamloops newspaper at the time and the closure was big news, so I’d been part of documenting the hope, fear, anger and anticipation that the closure had sparked.
Families had been working for long, long lifetimes by then to move things forward for their mentally handicapped children, who were all ages. They had few choices in those years when it came to finding services or schooling for their children in their own home towns, and often had no option but to send their children hundreds of kilometres away to institutions such as Tranquille, Woodlands and Glendale.
The families were mostly over the moon at the thought that Tranquille’s closure would allow them to bring their children home to get all the support they needed in their own communities, which is what the government was promising. But they were terrified, too, because it’s very hard to give up a sure thing for a promise when it’s your child’s life at stake.
As for how I felt personally about the closure of Tranquille - well, I hadn’t really wondered to ask myself about that.
But then came the day when I happened to be stopped on a Kamloops street waiting for a young mentally handicapped boy to cross at the crosswalk. He appeared to be on his way home from school, walking along in the sunshine with a schoolmate and swinging his lunch kit in that big-armed way that every kid in the world is probably familiar with.
And it was all so normal. A 30-second scene, yet it clarified for me in an instant why we had to put the days of giant institutions behind us. Normal is a pretty nice place to be.
All these years on, much has changed for people with mental handicaps. They have the right to go to school. To live a real life in a real community, near to friends and family. To be paid a fair wage for a job well done. To have some say over their own lives. Those are meaningful achievements.
As for the families - well, let’s just say it’s been an interesting 25 years.
Their children’s basic needs haven’t changed in that time, because a mental handicap is forever. But everything about the way the government operates its services has been in a near-constant state of flux. Sometimes that was due to shifting philosophies or new research, but more often it was because somebody in government thought there were savings to be had by doing things differently.
The language changed: mental handicaps became developmental disabilities, and the associations and programs serving that population took to referring to their services as “community living.” When the government created Community Living BC in 2005, a new governance authority that would give families more say over services, many of those families felt they were realizing a dream.
But it’s the year of broken dreams. CLBC is now preparing to shut down group homes - the four- and five-bedroom staffed homes that people were moved into after the institutions closed. The move has been portrayed as being about choice for families, but it’s mostly about saving $22 million a year.
Many families have lobbied hard to give their adult children more housing options beyond just moving into a group home. Independent living is one more step toward normal, and I’m all for it, too.
But everything changes when the primary goal is cost savings. If families aren’t yet alarmed by what they’re hearing from CLBC, they might want to ponder what it would really mean to eliminate the only designated housing supports in B.C. for people with developmental disabilities.
Once all the group homes are gone, families will be left to fight it out with everybody else for low-income housing for their adult children. The support to help people find and keep housing will be there initially, because government needs to make the changes palatable. But for how long? And then what?
This government in particular has a history of being deceptive, ruthlessly ideological and dangerously ill-informed around social spending. CLBC may have honourable intentions, but it’s a good soldier. It’s no more likely than the health authorities to challenge government demands for cuts.
Families, you’ve been here before. It’s wrong that they’re coming for you again, but so it goes in this often unjust world. Fight.
Friday, June 04, 2010
Lessons from BP tragedy: Trust is not an option
As barrel after barrel of oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning every living creature that comes in contact with it, I feel again a creeping dread at how little we know about the things we say yes to.
I know almost nothing about deep-sea oil drilling. And I see now that I have made a terrible error in not knowing more, because one of the greatest environmental disasters of our time is unfolding and all I can do is stand here bewildered at how this can possibly be happening.
As with all things I don’t know enough about, I just thought somebody was taking care of things. I thought people with a lot more smarts than me were considering everything carefully and proceeding with the utmost caution, because it’s in nobody’s interest to kill off our oceans.
I presumed - and isn’t that just the saddest word? - that a company drilling an oil well reaching 17,000 feet below the surface of the ocean would have had a backup plan for every eventuality. And that certainly would have included what to do in the event of an explosion tearing the drilling equipment away from the underwater wellhead, as happened April 20 in the gulf.
We know the horrible truth of that all too well now. But it’s just a little late. As always, we are learning the hard way what we never thought to wonder about up until things suddenly blew up.
In the case of the oil spill, perhaps the most disturbing revelation is that neither the company nor any of the regulatory bodies has any idea of how to cap the ruptured well.
Think about that. BP Global has been spending $1 million a day for the last nine years to drill for what it hopes will be three billion barrels of oil deep in the sea, but it doesn’t have a workable contingency plan for capping the hole it has made in the ocean floor. It’s working in water more than a kilometre and a half deep to drill a well that will reach a further four kilometres into the seabed, but it had no tested strategy for turning that massive gusher off in the event of equipment failure.
BP spokesmen are now saying it will probably be August before it gets the spill under control.
In the meantime, the oil pours into the gulf, at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. An estimated 80 to 170 million litres of oil have poured into the gulf to date, dwarfing the 42 million litres spilled in the Valdez accident. By August, the gulf will be awash in 10 times the amount of oil spilled by the Valdez, and that’s presuming that BP is even successful in stopping it then.
How could this have happened? Point the finger in a dozen different directions. Like the sub-prime mortgage crisis that has ended up devastating the world economy, there are many reasons why.
The U.S. pundits and bloggers paint a picture of a compromised federal government, and an industry used to getting its own way. The inspection process was obviously flawed as well, seeing as the Deepwater Horizon passed every one of its monthly safety inspections this year right up until it blew up in April.
What’s scary about both the mortgage crisis and the oil spill is that they were years in the making, yet no one behind all the fateful policy decisions and bad choices foresaw the disaster being wrought.
Until hundreds of thousands of Americans started losing their homes in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, we all thought somebody was tending to things like that. Until it exploded, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon barely got a mention in the U.S. press, and the world slept well at night in the naive belief that somebody would know what to do were the worst to happen.
We know better now. But what’s to be done about it?
One thing seems obvious: No more presuming that anyone has your back. If you want your children and grandchildren to enjoy a lifetime on this Earth that’s at least as good as the one you’re having, let go of the comforting fallacy that government is tending to all the big stuff.
A rich country. Thousands of brilliant minds. A thick stack of long-standing environmental regulations. And none of it can stop the oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s a lesson we can’t let ourselves forget.
Link to the live feed from one of the remote operating vehicles near the wellhead.
As barrel after barrel of oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning every living creature that comes in contact with it, I feel again a creeping dread at how little we know about the things we say yes to.
I know almost nothing about deep-sea oil drilling. And I see now that I have made a terrible error in not knowing more, because one of the greatest environmental disasters of our time is unfolding and all I can do is stand here bewildered at how this can possibly be happening.
As with all things I don’t know enough about, I just thought somebody was taking care of things. I thought people with a lot more smarts than me were considering everything carefully and proceeding with the utmost caution, because it’s in nobody’s interest to kill off our oceans.
I presumed - and isn’t that just the saddest word? - that a company drilling an oil well reaching 17,000 feet below the surface of the ocean would have had a backup plan for every eventuality. And that certainly would have included what to do in the event of an explosion tearing the drilling equipment away from the underwater wellhead, as happened April 20 in the gulf.
We know the horrible truth of that all too well now. But it’s just a little late. As always, we are learning the hard way what we never thought to wonder about up until things suddenly blew up.
In the case of the oil spill, perhaps the most disturbing revelation is that neither the company nor any of the regulatory bodies has any idea of how to cap the ruptured well.
Think about that. BP Global has been spending $1 million a day for the last nine years to drill for what it hopes will be three billion barrels of oil deep in the sea, but it doesn’t have a workable contingency plan for capping the hole it has made in the ocean floor. It’s working in water more than a kilometre and a half deep to drill a well that will reach a further four kilometres into the seabed, but it had no tested strategy for turning that massive gusher off in the event of equipment failure.
BP spokesmen are now saying it will probably be August before it gets the spill under control.
In the meantime, the oil pours into the gulf, at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. An estimated 80 to 170 million litres of oil have poured into the gulf to date, dwarfing the 42 million litres spilled in the Valdez accident. By August, the gulf will be awash in 10 times the amount of oil spilled by the Valdez, and that’s presuming that BP is even successful in stopping it then.
How could this have happened? Point the finger in a dozen different directions. Like the sub-prime mortgage crisis that has ended up devastating the world economy, there are many reasons why.
The U.S. pundits and bloggers paint a picture of a compromised federal government, and an industry used to getting its own way. The inspection process was obviously flawed as well, seeing as the Deepwater Horizon passed every one of its monthly safety inspections this year right up until it blew up in April.
What’s scary about both the mortgage crisis and the oil spill is that they were years in the making, yet no one behind all the fateful policy decisions and bad choices foresaw the disaster being wrought.
Until hundreds of thousands of Americans started losing their homes in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, we all thought somebody was tending to things like that. Until it exploded, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon barely got a mention in the U.S. press, and the world slept well at night in the naive belief that somebody would know what to do were the worst to happen.
We know better now. But what’s to be done about it?
One thing seems obvious: No more presuming that anyone has your back. If you want your children and grandchildren to enjoy a lifetime on this Earth that’s at least as good as the one you’re having, let go of the comforting fallacy that government is tending to all the big stuff.
A rich country. Thousands of brilliant minds. A thick stack of long-standing environmental regulations. And none of it can stop the oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s a lesson we can’t let ourselves forget.
Link to the live feed from one of the remote operating vehicles near the wellhead.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Can Trackside Gallery be reborn?
(Here's a link to a Barry Barr photo of Trackside art)
Not so long ago, Esquimalt’s Trackside Art Gallery was being feted far and wide as an extraordinary achievement.
A dark and crime-filled little lane transformed into an urban art gallery that was turning around young, troubled lives - well, that was a story that everybody wanted to tell. There were raves all round for Tom Woods and the non-profit Rock Solid Foundation when the outdoor gallery launched in 2001.
But that was then.
Today, painting graffiti on the warehouse walls in the 800-block of Hereward Road is once again prohibited, and volunteers with an unlimited amount of beige spray paint work very, very diligently to keep it that way. The ever-changing art that adorned the walls in years past is long gone, as is the dream of an artsy public space where young graffiti artists and the community could happily co-exist.
All that remains of the bold experiment are the 48 large murals that were painted in the first three years of the project and hung up high on the walls at Trackside, named for the E&N railway that runs alongside it.
The colourful and transient art that once dotted the lower wall has been painted over. The street lights in the area are off now that Rock Solid’s no longer paying the hydro bill. The youth who Woods envisaged a brighter future for have scattered around the region, along with their tagging.
Woods has been so wounded by three years of skirmishes with Esquimalt municipality that Rock Solid has now removed itself from the Trackside project. A new group of supporters under local businessman Jason Guille has taken shape, but they’ll be against a determined group of residents that doesn’t want to see graffiti return to the area.
Woods knew it was time to let go of Trackside the day an angry resident dumped a garbage bag filled with used spray-paint cans on the steps of the Rock Solid office. “Rock Solid had suddenly turned into the one being blamed for the problem,” he says in bewilderment.
Few people feel neutral about graffiti. Some appreciate it as a vehicle for artistic and teenage self- expression. Others see it as an offensive, unwanted and costly blight on the urban landscape. Both Woods and Guille respect the arguments of those who hate the stuff, but they also see much potential in having a spot where young outdoor artists can cut loose.
“Boundary creep” is a big problem for anyone making an argument for a legitimate graffiti space. Give youth a designated place to express themselves with a can of spray paint, and the next thing you know some of them are expressing themselves on all the nearby buildings for six blocks around.
More challenging still is the fact that flouting authority is part of graffiti-art culture. So it’s not like you can just lecture everybody about sticking to the rules and that’s that. Guille was reminded of that while talking to a young artist about the need for a firm graffiti boundary at Trackside. “He told me, ‘You don’t understand - I’m against all private property.’”
Guile came to the Trackside revival project through his Herald Street art and music space, the Sunset Room. He wasn’t familiar with Trackside, but artists exhibiting and selling at Sunset always seemed to be mentioning it.
“It kept coming up, mostly as, ‘I sure miss that place,’” recalls Guille. “So we brought together everyone who was interested to see if we could find a solution.”
Municipal staff didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but Guille confirms he has met with the head of facilities operations, Mike Reed. What’s clear is that nothing’s going to happen on the lower wall without a management plan establishing responsibility, says Guille. “That’s the question. How is it sustained? Who controls it?”
Guille wants a solution that keeps everybody happy. He tosses out some ideas: A twice-yearly urban arts festival in which artists volunteered to do a general cleanup of the surrounding neighbourhoods in exchange for the right to paint the wall. A SWAT team of young volunteers tasked with cleaning up any graffiti outside the zone.
Or maybe the artists’ group just pays Esquimalt every year to cover the costs of graffiti removal - “like carbon offsetting,” says Guille. He’s got calls in to Mayor Barb Desjardins to talk further.
“The dream from my artistic side is to have a free wall again. From my community side, it’s to have one without much cost,” he says.
“It’s not going to be easy. But we’ve got some good people involved. We’ve got people who understand the difference between vandalism and art.”
(Here's a link to a Barry Barr photo of Trackside art)
Not so long ago, Esquimalt’s Trackside Art Gallery was being feted far and wide as an extraordinary achievement.
A dark and crime-filled little lane transformed into an urban art gallery that was turning around young, troubled lives - well, that was a story that everybody wanted to tell. There were raves all round for Tom Woods and the non-profit Rock Solid Foundation when the outdoor gallery launched in 2001.
But that was then.
Today, painting graffiti on the warehouse walls in the 800-block of Hereward Road is once again prohibited, and volunteers with an unlimited amount of beige spray paint work very, very diligently to keep it that way. The ever-changing art that adorned the walls in years past is long gone, as is the dream of an artsy public space where young graffiti artists and the community could happily co-exist.
All that remains of the bold experiment are the 48 large murals that were painted in the first three years of the project and hung up high on the walls at Trackside, named for the E&N railway that runs alongside it.
The colourful and transient art that once dotted the lower wall has been painted over. The street lights in the area are off now that Rock Solid’s no longer paying the hydro bill. The youth who Woods envisaged a brighter future for have scattered around the region, along with their tagging.
Woods has been so wounded by three years of skirmishes with Esquimalt municipality that Rock Solid has now removed itself from the Trackside project. A new group of supporters under local businessman Jason Guille has taken shape, but they’ll be against a determined group of residents that doesn’t want to see graffiti return to the area.
Woods knew it was time to let go of Trackside the day an angry resident dumped a garbage bag filled with used spray-paint cans on the steps of the Rock Solid office. “Rock Solid had suddenly turned into the one being blamed for the problem,” he says in bewilderment.
Few people feel neutral about graffiti. Some appreciate it as a vehicle for artistic and teenage self- expression. Others see it as an offensive, unwanted and costly blight on the urban landscape. Both Woods and Guille respect the arguments of those who hate the stuff, but they also see much potential in having a spot where young outdoor artists can cut loose.
“Boundary creep” is a big problem for anyone making an argument for a legitimate graffiti space. Give youth a designated place to express themselves with a can of spray paint, and the next thing you know some of them are expressing themselves on all the nearby buildings for six blocks around.
More challenging still is the fact that flouting authority is part of graffiti-art culture. So it’s not like you can just lecture everybody about sticking to the rules and that’s that. Guille was reminded of that while talking to a young artist about the need for a firm graffiti boundary at Trackside. “He told me, ‘You don’t understand - I’m against all private property.’”
Guile came to the Trackside revival project through his Herald Street art and music space, the Sunset Room. He wasn’t familiar with Trackside, but artists exhibiting and selling at Sunset always seemed to be mentioning it.
“It kept coming up, mostly as, ‘I sure miss that place,’” recalls Guille. “So we brought together everyone who was interested to see if we could find a solution.”
Municipal staff didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but Guille confirms he has met with the head of facilities operations, Mike Reed. What’s clear is that nothing’s going to happen on the lower wall without a management plan establishing responsibility, says Guille. “That’s the question. How is it sustained? Who controls it?”
Guille wants a solution that keeps everybody happy. He tosses out some ideas: A twice-yearly urban arts festival in which artists volunteered to do a general cleanup of the surrounding neighbourhoods in exchange for the right to paint the wall. A SWAT team of young volunteers tasked with cleaning up any graffiti outside the zone.
Or maybe the artists’ group just pays Esquimalt every year to cover the costs of graffiti removal - “like carbon offsetting,” says Guille. He’s got calls in to Mayor Barb Desjardins to talk further.
“The dream from my artistic side is to have a free wall again. From my community side, it’s to have one without much cost,” he says.
“It’s not going to be easy. But we’ve got some good people involved. We’ve got people who understand the difference between vandalism and art.”
Friday, May 14, 2010
Living dark in a white world
It’s a weird feeling to be travelling in countries where virtually every face is dark-skinned, yet all the images on billboards and TV advertising are resolutely white.
Even the storefront mannequins and baby dolls are blond-haired and blue-eyed in Vietnam, where I recently travelled. If dolls are the way a little girl begins to imagine the adult world, what does it mean to an Asian child when no doll looks anything like her?
In Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam, many of the young women now cover themselves from head to toe to prevent the sun from darkening their skin. Wearing jazzed-up face masks that have become a fashion staple in the country, the girls sweat it out in 35-degree heat wearing jeans, long-sleeved jackets, winter gloves and masks to shield their skin.
“It’s very hot!” one young woman told me from behind her flannel face mask. She was working the tourist beach at Hoi An on a scorcher of a day, running out onto the sand every few minutes to try to convince sun-seeking foreigners to rent beach chairs from her for the day (a highly competitive business, as it turns out).
“But I don’t want to get dark,” she added. “In Vietnam, we think it’s more beautiful to have white skin.”
Hey, we’ve all got our dreams. Vanity, thy name is woman.
But there’s a reason for being brown. Darker skin is less susceptible to sunburn, which is why people native to hot countries like Vietnam are generally darker than those from cold countries like Sweden. The basic biology of skin colour has little to do with the cruel realities of racism, but count it as a very disturbing development when any race learns to hate its own skin colour.
Women the world over have long engaged in acts of self-hatred in their quest for “beauty,” of course; nothing new about that. But for a whole nation of young women to have defined beauty as a skin colour that isn’t theirs - that’s just plain sad.
Go into the cosmetics section of any Vietnamese store and you’ll find row upon row of skin-whitening products for women. The bigger stores have whole sections devoted to “anti-melanin” creams and lotions, each promising whiter, brighter skin.
Pond’s, L’Oreal, Clinique, Nivea - all the big names in global cosmetics are selling extensive lines of whitening products in Vietnam. Here in Canada, the dream marketed in our cosmetics aisles is of eternal youth, but in Vietnam it’s all about being whiter.
More brilliant minds than mine have dissected the issues of power, race, sexism, colonialism and all those other heavy hitters that you’d probably find at the root of all this. No doubt the series of events leading to the phenomenon of the modern-day Vietnamese cosmetics counter were decades in the making, and complex in their origins.
But some of it is easy enough to understand, even for us average thinkers.
Maybe the reason that all the dolls and mannequins are Caucasian is simply because that’s what the big Vietnamese factories are manufacturing for export to the developed world, so that’s what’s most affordable to sell locally. Maybe the truth is that almost all the dolls and mannequins being manufactured anywhere in the world are white ones.
The giant store billboards in places like Ho Chi Minh City, with their ubiquitous images of languid white-European models looking great in clothes - they’re the identical ads we see over here. What motivation is there for a big fashion company to change its models to better suit a Vietnamese market, when everywhere else in the world accepts those same white-centric images without question?
That’s ultimately the grand revelation, I suppose: That we’re all being sold an ideal of white skin.
It’s more noticeable in a place like Vietnam, because the contrast between the ads overhead and the people on the street is just too ludicrous to go unnoticed.
Then again, try to recall ever seeing an Asian or aboriginal face in a major fashion campaign in Canada. Or a dark-skinned doll in a toy store that didn’t just look like a token brown-plastic version of a white doll. And that’s right here in Canada, where almost a third of the population isn’t white.
If I ever decide to launch a campaign for the right of every little girl to have an alternative to blonde-haired, blue-eyed dolls, at least I’ll be able to start close to home.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Vietnam pictures on Facebook
Hi, Blog visitors. I've uploaded my photos from a recent trip to Vietnam onto my Facebook site, if you're interested in taking a look. They're available for anyone to see as long as they're on Facebook. Find them here.
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Travel a reminder of how much we all have in common
Being able to travel isn’t always an option for people, for all kinds of reasons. It costs money and time, after all, two things that most of us never have enough of to begin with.
My early adulthood was like that. I missed the chance to be one of those adventurous young people I see all the time out there in the world, mixing it up joyously with young wanderers from around the globe while discovering what a big, big world this truly is. Regrets, I’ve had a few, and that’s one of them.
Fortunately, I’ve had the privilege over these last 15 or so years to be in a place in my life where I could do some of that travelling that never came my way as a young person. I learned I could start out easy and take it from there. I could buy a good guide book and find ways to travel inexpensively.
Since then, travel has become one of the most important aspects of my life. I’ve concluded that it’s such a profound and essential thing to experience, we should just find ways to make travel happen more often for everybody. What the world needs now isn’t love, it’s understanding.
This last trip, March 20 to May 1, was six glorious weeks. My partner and I travelled through parts of Thailand, Malaysia and Australia, then spent more than three weeks in Vietnam. I could have kept going.
The two of us are too old for the hostels and the all-night parties awaiting younger travellers; we’ll just have to catch that experience in the next lifetime. Happily, the world is full of one- and two-star hotels that are just fine for middle-aged, economy-minded travellers who like to be in bed by 11 p.m. and would rather not share their bathroom.
The gift of travel is that it’s both familiar and deeply strange at the same time. You visit countries where they’ve got all kinds of peculiar governance styles and punishing laws and different ways of doing things, but the people you meet on the ground are essentially just trying to get through their lives like anybody else.
Wherever we end up living in this world, we’ll spend our lives in search of food, work and purpose. We’ll help our kids grow up. We’ll eat, we’ll love. We’ll shape the world at hand to suit our needs, and sometimes the result will be a beautiful thing to behold and other times, it won’t.
The government, the police, “the state” - they come in all shapes and sizes, and are capable at any point in time of great good as well as unbelievable evil, often both at the same time. But down at the people level, life at its most basic goes on. People always find ways to carry on.
If you read a textbook on Vietnam, you’d learn that it’s a socialist country where traffic is strictly controlled through low speed limits and tough laws for the country’s tens of millions of scooter-riders. It’s against the law to go without a helmet or carry more than one passenger, both offences carrying crippling fines and licence suspensions.
The reality is a seething, swerving sea of scooters doing whatever the heck they want. In Hanoi, it’s common to see mom, dad and at least a couple of children stacked onto a scooter for the slow morning weave through traffic. Until Hanoi, I never would have believed that one person could carry dozens of water-filled bags of goldfish on a single motor scooter, let alone hundreds of pomelos and an antique dresser.
The Vietnamese are not an unlawful people, mind you. They’re just doing what humans anywhere would do if they found themselves needing to get around - they’re figuring it out. If that means stacking the two youngest babies length-wise on top of each other so the five of you fit on the scooter, so be it. Police look the other way for the most part.
Things are different in our society, where you really would get in big trouble for riding helmetless up the sidewalk with three generations of relatives and a queen-size mattress on your scooter. Then again, our poor in Canada can’t even afford scooters. They’re just stuck in place. Is that better?
That’s what travel does for you. It’s about things that make you go, “Hmm.” Our similarities and differences are most obvious in poorer countries, where so many people end up living where everybody can see them. But anywhere is interesting.
You’ll make your own decisions about travel, of course. But if I were you, I’d seize the day. The world awaits.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Governments struggle to get it right on social issues
You learn things over the course of a journalism career.
A lot of it just flies right out of your head a month or two later. But some sticks. I wouldn’t say it gives you wisdom, exactly, but you do start developing a sense for how certain stories tend to turn out.
Observing government has been particularly informative. We all know history repeats itself, but it repeats itself really quickly when it comes to government. With a new cast of characters every three or four years, there are always newcomers to stumble into the same mistakes as their predecessors. Pretty soon, you start to recognize the signs.
First, a moment of appreciation for all the good things that our regional, provincial and federal governments do. Trying to represent the interests of all of us is one heck of an undertaking, and on many fronts governments get it right.
The roads are paved. The lights are on. The taxes are collected and the debts are paid. Sure, we grumble, but much of what governments do on our behalf works out perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, there’s one area that trips up virtually all of them. Governments routinely get it wrong around social issues.
I know, I know - who am I to define something as “wrong” just because I don’t agree with the tack taken? But what I’m talking about is a measurable kind of wrong, one that hurts the economy, the citizenry and the culture in the long term.
That almost 30 per cent of B.C. children are developmentally behind by the time they start kindergarten, for instance, will cost the province 20 per cent in lost GDP growth by the time this generation of five-year-olds reaches retirement age. We talk about improving that vulnerability rate, but the cuts to community services going on right now are taking us in the opposite direction.
Social decay happens in increments, and over a very long time. A government that cuts social supports will in most cases not be around when the chickens come home to roost, so they have little to fear in making such cuts.
I’ve seen every shade of politician cut social spending. Perhaps it’s because it seems like such an “easy” place to find short-term savings, with little risk of political repercussion. In some cases I think it’s because a political party genuinely believes that tough love is the answer, although you’d think the huge growth in homelessness over the last couple of decades might at least give small pause to the validity of that belief.
Looking at the issue through a political lens, you can see why a politician might conclude that the place to cut is around social support.
When social care is working, it’s all about an absence of problems. Get it right, and families don’t break up. Teenage girls don’t get pregnant.
Adolescent boys don’t fall into youth gangs. Old people live out their final years without event. People don’t commit crimes. Little children grow up healthy and happy, the bad life that they might have been headed for never gaining a foothold.
Happy news in terms of healthy communities. But how is a politician supposed to take credit for nothing happening as a selling point in his or her re-election? You can see why things like bridges and arenas and Olympics events are so appealing to elected officials - they’re tangible proof of something accomplished during their time in office.
Cutting social support also seems to be an easy sell to voters, many of whom are only too happy to back a Darwinian approach if it means they get to pay less tax. They fail to recognize that yesterday’s shattered family is tomorrow’s public expense, for reasons ranging from chronic illness and poor health to low productivity, more violence and crime, intergenerational poverty and increased disability.
It certainly doesn’t help that there’s such a long gap between when social cuts are made and when problems start manifesting. A journalist might make note of such things as the years unfold, but the average person isn’t necessarily going to connect the dots.
Even when they do, who are they supposed to hold accountable? It was a Social Credit government that kick-started the crisis of mass homelessness we’re now experiencing by closing B.C.’s big mental institutions in the mid-1980s, but they were nowhere in sight when things started to derail.
By the time the real costs from the current cuts hit home, this government will probably be long gone, too. Too bad the bill for their short-sighted mistakes will linger on.
Tips for getting noticed when you're gone
I heard a very amusing talk on death a while ago, given by Globe obituary writer Sandra Martin. Among other things, she discussed how she picked the people she wrote about.
Would she pick you if you died tomorrow? It’s an intriguing thing to ponder, should you be the type who likes to reflect on the criteria for leaving a splashy national obit behind.
I don’t write obituaries, but I do read them, along with the media coverage that certain deaths tend to generate. I’ve spotted a few surefire strategies for getting noticed after you die.
Be a celebrity. If you’re a Margaret Atwood or a Gordon Lightfoot, or even that friendly looking guy from Corner Gas, you’re going to get a decent obit in virtually every major paper in the country. If you don’t make it to the national stage, no worries - be a celebrity in your own hometown.
Be a humanitarian. We love remembering people who do good things. Stephen Lewis, Romeo Dallaire, Craig Kielburger - they’re in.
Be a scoundrel, or a monster. We also love remembering those who do bad things. Garden-variety criminals need not apply, though; this category is for the charming psychopathic rogues and the truly heinous. No need to worry that Clifford Olson’s death will slip by unnoticed, or Ian Thow’s either.
Be “first” at something. The first monkey in space, the first aboriginal hockey player, the first woman to file a sex-harassment suit against her boss - such acts make you a permanent part of history. We will remember you, at least for a day or two right after you die.
Be interesting. This one is harder to define. We all like to think of ourselves as interesting, but to qualify for a big media response you really have to kick this one up a notch. For instance, you know Renee Richards is guaranteed a ton of coverage when she dies, because what’s not interesting about a transgendered professional tennis player who became a renowned eye surgeon?
Be a hero. To die doing something perceived as noble is guaranteed to get headlines. You’ll have noticed, for instance, that all Canadian soldiers killed in the line of duty get written about in the media.
As for the rest of us, anyone who dies in the midst of a “heroic act” gets much more media coverage than if death comes in more ordinary fashion. The boy who drowns after diving into the river to save his dog gets a feature, the boy who just tumbles in on his own gets a couple of paragraphs.
Be local. If your name transcends jurisdiction, go ahead and die anywhere in the world. The media will find you. But for those of us whose name has little resonance beyond our yards, your best bet when you die is to live somewhere that people can recall you having lived a very long time.
That is, unless you already fit in a category I’ve noted, in which case your home town will probably remember you even after you move away. There will always be a spot in the Ladysmith Chronicle to observe the passing of Pamela Anderson.
Be young. There’s something so wrong about the death of a young person that it generally attracts media attention if it’s at all public - a car accident, a violent death, a drowning. The one exception to this is death by suicide, which in fact is the second leading cause of death among young people but rarely mentioned in the media.
Be extremely old. Why, when I was a young reporter, you could live to be 100 certain in the knowledge that you’d be getting your picture in the paper. How times have changed. Living for a century is old hat now; if you want public recognition of your passing, you’re going to want to make it past 110 these days.
Be rich and powerful. This is a bit like being a celebrity, but not always. Rich and powerful people often keep a low profile during their lifetime, and it’s only when you read their obituary that you realize they owned everything in the world.
Build a weirder mousetrap. The guy who invented the “Magic Fingers” vibrating bed got an obit. So did the guy who invented Teflon (he “slid away,” the headline opined), and the fellow who owned Britain’s last fairground boxing booth. Get creative.
Be a journalist. I used to roll my eyes at the newsroom tradition of doing mandatory obits on anyone who’d ever worked in the business. Now I’m counting on it.
I heard a very amusing talk on death a while ago, given by Globe obituary writer Sandra Martin. Among other things, she discussed how she picked the people she wrote about.
Would she pick you if you died tomorrow? It’s an intriguing thing to ponder, should you be the type who likes to reflect on the criteria for leaving a splashy national obit behind.
I don’t write obituaries, but I do read them, along with the media coverage that certain deaths tend to generate. I’ve spotted a few surefire strategies for getting noticed after you die.
Be a celebrity. If you’re a Margaret Atwood or a Gordon Lightfoot, or even that friendly looking guy from Corner Gas, you’re going to get a decent obit in virtually every major paper in the country. If you don’t make it to the national stage, no worries - be a celebrity in your own hometown.
Be a humanitarian. We love remembering people who do good things. Stephen Lewis, Romeo Dallaire, Craig Kielburger - they’re in.
Be a scoundrel, or a monster. We also love remembering those who do bad things. Garden-variety criminals need not apply, though; this category is for the charming psychopathic rogues and the truly heinous. No need to worry that Clifford Olson’s death will slip by unnoticed, or Ian Thow’s either.
Be “first” at something. The first monkey in space, the first aboriginal hockey player, the first woman to file a sex-harassment suit against her boss - such acts make you a permanent part of history. We will remember you, at least for a day or two right after you die.
Be interesting. This one is harder to define. We all like to think of ourselves as interesting, but to qualify for a big media response you really have to kick this one up a notch. For instance, you know Renee Richards is guaranteed a ton of coverage when she dies, because what’s not interesting about a transgendered professional tennis player who became a renowned eye surgeon?
Be a hero. To die doing something perceived as noble is guaranteed to get headlines. You’ll have noticed, for instance, that all Canadian soldiers killed in the line of duty get written about in the media.
As for the rest of us, anyone who dies in the midst of a “heroic act” gets much more media coverage than if death comes in more ordinary fashion. The boy who drowns after diving into the river to save his dog gets a feature, the boy who just tumbles in on his own gets a couple of paragraphs.
Be local. If your name transcends jurisdiction, go ahead and die anywhere in the world. The media will find you. But for those of us whose name has little resonance beyond our yards, your best bet when you die is to live somewhere that people can recall you having lived a very long time.
That is, unless you already fit in a category I’ve noted, in which case your home town will probably remember you even after you move away. There will always be a spot in the Ladysmith Chronicle to observe the passing of Pamela Anderson.
Be young. There’s something so wrong about the death of a young person that it generally attracts media attention if it’s at all public - a car accident, a violent death, a drowning. The one exception to this is death by suicide, which in fact is the second leading cause of death among young people but rarely mentioned in the media.
Be extremely old. Why, when I was a young reporter, you could live to be 100 certain in the knowledge that you’d be getting your picture in the paper. How times have changed. Living for a century is old hat now; if you want public recognition of your passing, you’re going to want to make it past 110 these days.
Be rich and powerful. This is a bit like being a celebrity, but not always. Rich and powerful people often keep a low profile during their lifetime, and it’s only when you read their obituary that you realize they owned everything in the world.
Build a weirder mousetrap. The guy who invented the “Magic Fingers” vibrating bed got an obit. So did the guy who invented Teflon (he “slid away,” the headline opined), and the fellow who owned Britain’s last fairground boxing booth. Get creative.
Be a journalist. I used to roll my eyes at the newsroom tradition of doing mandatory obits on anyone who’d ever worked in the business. Now I’m counting on it.
Change comes, but never easily
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as French novelist Alphonse Karr so aptly noted a long, long time ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A career in journalism really brings that home. I think I’d been a reporter for less than a year when I first experienced that sense of déjà vu that would eventually become so familiar to me.
I was flipping through the newspaper archives at the time, looking for one of those “25 Years Ago Today” items (hey, somebody has to write them). I came across a long string of stories about the regional district’s struggles to fix the outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system plaguing the Thompson Valley Regional District at that time.
Having just finished up a story that very afternoon about the district’s outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system - which everyone was still worrying about 25 years later - I wondered if my archival find was just an amusing coincidence.
It wasn’t. With many years of journalism now under my belt, I can assure you there’s definitely a lot of Groundhog Day in the things we call “news.”
That’s not to say that the daily news is always the same, or that nothing ever changes - if that were true, I’d still be pecking out stories about the annual stud auction in Kamloops on a typewriter, using hand-me-down carbon paper from the accounting department to satisfy our cheapo corporate owners.
But the big, difficult issues of this world - well, they do have a tendency to drag on.
Some assume a kind of mythic proportion, looming so large that mortal man is brought to his knees at the very thought of trying to find a resolution. I put sewage treatment for the Capital Region in that category, because nothing new has been added to the debate in the 21 years I’ve lived here and yet we still can’t sort it out.
Others present as problems that in fact end up getting fixed, at least for a while. But then everybody mistakenly takes that as meaning they can quit worrying about the issue. And then the money dries up, because nobody’s paying attention anymore.
And then the problems re-emerge, and you find yourself back at the beginning again as if nobody ever did anything.
The Victoria Health Project was a sad example of that. It was a fabulous three-year pilot project to test whether seniors with health and mobility problems could be maintained in their own homes with a few key homecare services, thus avoiding ending up in expensive hospital beds that they didn’t really need.
The pilot worked really well. And for a while, we all lived happily with the programs that grew out of the project - at least until one tight community-health budget after another over the next 20 years starved most of them to death.
Barely 10 years after the Victoria Health Project had identified a better way, health administrators were back grumbling to the media about old people blocking hospital beds. I started calling them to find out how this could be, and discovered not only that the programs were a shadow of their former selves due to funding erosion, but that most of the people now in charge of the health system had never even heard of the project.
That lack of institutional memory is clearly a major factor in why we spin our wheels over problems that we’ve already solved. But inertia strikes me as the primary reason for why the news repeats itself.
An example: Assisted suicide. Sue Rodriguez fought a hard battle in the early 1990 for the right to have someone help her die.
She was a perfect “poster child” for the issue: Smart, young, well-informed, and tragically dying of ALS with no cure in sight. If anyone was going to make us change the laws, it was her.
But nothing happened. Nearly 20 years passed, and all of a sudden my dear friend Bernice Levitz-Packford materialized in the local media earlier this year trying to resurrect the issue. Fortunately for her (but sadly for us), she died at home not long after at the fine age of 95, freeing us to ignore the issue for another couple of decades.
We can’t give up, of course. Inertia and institutional amnesia aside, some things are simply worth fighting for. Change is possible, but what’s striking is how difficult it is to make it last.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as French novelist Alphonse Karr so aptly noted a long, long time ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
A career in journalism really brings that home. I think I’d been a reporter for less than a year when I first experienced that sense of déjà vu that would eventually become so familiar to me.
I was flipping through the newspaper archives at the time, looking for one of those “25 Years Ago Today” items (hey, somebody has to write them). I came across a long string of stories about the regional district’s struggles to fix the outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system plaguing the Thompson Valley Regional District at that time.
Having just finished up a story that very afternoon about the district’s outdated and underperforming hospital laundry system - which everyone was still worrying about 25 years later - I wondered if my archival find was just an amusing coincidence.
It wasn’t. With many years of journalism now under my belt, I can assure you there’s definitely a lot of Groundhog Day in the things we call “news.”
That’s not to say that the daily news is always the same, or that nothing ever changes - if that were true, I’d still be pecking out stories about the annual stud auction in Kamloops on a typewriter, using hand-me-down carbon paper from the accounting department to satisfy our cheapo corporate owners.
But the big, difficult issues of this world - well, they do have a tendency to drag on.
Some assume a kind of mythic proportion, looming so large that mortal man is brought to his knees at the very thought of trying to find a resolution. I put sewage treatment for the Capital Region in that category, because nothing new has been added to the debate in the 21 years I’ve lived here and yet we still can’t sort it out.
Others present as problems that in fact end up getting fixed, at least for a while. But then everybody mistakenly takes that as meaning they can quit worrying about the issue. And then the money dries up, because nobody’s paying attention anymore.
And then the problems re-emerge, and you find yourself back at the beginning again as if nobody ever did anything.
The Victoria Health Project was a sad example of that. It was a fabulous three-year pilot project to test whether seniors with health and mobility problems could be maintained in their own homes with a few key homecare services, thus avoiding ending up in expensive hospital beds that they didn’t really need.
The pilot worked really well. And for a while, we all lived happily with the programs that grew out of the project - at least until one tight community-health budget after another over the next 20 years starved most of them to death.
Barely 10 years after the Victoria Health Project had identified a better way, health administrators were back grumbling to the media about old people blocking hospital beds. I started calling them to find out how this could be, and discovered not only that the programs were a shadow of their former selves due to funding erosion, but that most of the people now in charge of the health system had never even heard of the project.
That lack of institutional memory is clearly a major factor in why we spin our wheels over problems that we’ve already solved. But inertia strikes me as the primary reason for why the news repeats itself.
An example: Assisted suicide. Sue Rodriguez fought a hard battle in the early 1990 for the right to have someone help her die.
She was a perfect “poster child” for the issue: Smart, young, well-informed, and tragically dying of ALS with no cure in sight. If anyone was going to make us change the laws, it was her.
But nothing happened. Nearly 20 years passed, and all of a sudden my dear friend Bernice Levitz-Packford materialized in the local media earlier this year trying to resurrect the issue. Fortunately for her (but sadly for us), she died at home not long after at the fine age of 95, freeing us to ignore the issue for another couple of decades.
We can’t give up, of course. Inertia and institutional amnesia aside, some things are simply worth fighting for. Change is possible, but what’s striking is how difficult it is to make it last.
No magic to weight loss - just eat less
One of my friends is an avid reader of the TC’s “Celebrations” section, that Saturday feature where people turning 50 or marking double-digit wedding anniversaries send in photos of themselves from back in the day. She says nobody is ever overweight in those photos.
It’s true. People weren’t nearly so likely to be heavy in those years. Children were virtually never overweight.
But that was then. Nowadays, the kids are getting fat and the adults are getting fatter, and the many health ailments and societal costs related to obesity just keep stacking up higher around us.
What happened to change things? A lot. Still, there’s only one key difference that matters: While previous generations consumed the right amount of calories for their energy needs, ours doesn’t.
True, there were many things about life in the 1950s or ‘60s that made it easier to keep your weight down.
For starters, everybody smoked. (Sure, nicotine is evil, but it does have an effect on body weight.) People were also much more likely to have jobs that required physical work.
Families were more inclined to order their children out of the house to play, which meant children were more active. There was less money for eating out, and far less “fast food.”
Moms didn’t work outside the home as much, so families sat down for regular meals together more often. Most families had only one car, which meant a lot more walking for everybody in the household. Everything was just a little more physical, even changing the TV channel.
In food terms, it’s all just calories burned. People in those years burned as many calories as they ate, so they didn’t accumulate fat.
Our generation’s calorie intake, on the other hand, is profoundly out of whack with our activity levels.
Blame it on societal change. Blame it on corporate food production. Blame it on poor parenting, higher levels of anxiety, and food science manipulating our taste buds, because it’s about all those and more.
But for all that, it’s a simple enough problem to resolve. We just need to eat much less.
How many of us even know how many calories we eat in a day, let alone how many we burn? Until I got my first Big Book of Food Counts a few years ago, I didn’t have a clue about the caloric content of most of what I ate and drank.
I don’t imagine our thin predecessors were particularly well- informed either. But for all the reasons listed above, they didn’t have as much need for awareness. They kept busy enough to burn off the calories they ate, and didn’t have anywhere near the access that we do to cheap, high-calorie foods.
The Vancouver Sun provided a marvellous public service late last year with the creation of the “Fatabase,” a searchable database of 64 restaurant chains operating in B.C. If you haven’t given it a try yet, visit http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/rate-your-plate/fatabase.html for a disturbing insight into your favourite restaurant meals.
As you might expect, the most horrifying counts are at fast-food chains. A Burger King Triple Whopper with cheese, for instance, weighs in at a whopping 1,240 calories - representing more than half the calories and all the fat that an average person needs for a whole day. Throw in a large order of fries and a 12-oz pop, and that’s pretty much your daily caloric max in a single meal.
But don’t think that eating more upscale will save you. A dinner of parmesan-encrusted sole at the Macaroni Grill is 1,710 calories. It contains almost enough fat to meet two days’ worth of dietary needs, and more sodium in one meal than you should eat in an entire day. God help you if you finish things off with a cheesecake dessert.
Maybe humans needed calories like that in our hunter-gatherer days. But we’re a long way from those days. Pecking away at my computer for a full eight hours only burns a scant 240 calories. That’s one piece of buttered toast and an apple.
People like to think that their exercise programs are taking care of their caloric indulgences. But I’d have to run for two full hours just to burn off the calories from a single Triple Whopper with cheese.
Buy a food-count book. Browse the Fatabase. Learn the caloric content of the foods you and your family eat, and how that number stacks up against the calories you burn in a typical day.
That’s how we’ll get a grip on global obesity. One smaller mouthful at a time.
One of my friends is an avid reader of the TC’s “Celebrations” section, that Saturday feature where people turning 50 or marking double-digit wedding anniversaries send in photos of themselves from back in the day. She says nobody is ever overweight in those photos.
It’s true. People weren’t nearly so likely to be heavy in those years. Children were virtually never overweight.
But that was then. Nowadays, the kids are getting fat and the adults are getting fatter, and the many health ailments and societal costs related to obesity just keep stacking up higher around us.
What happened to change things? A lot. Still, there’s only one key difference that matters: While previous generations consumed the right amount of calories for their energy needs, ours doesn’t.
True, there were many things about life in the 1950s or ‘60s that made it easier to keep your weight down.
For starters, everybody smoked. (Sure, nicotine is evil, but it does have an effect on body weight.) People were also much more likely to have jobs that required physical work.
Families were more inclined to order their children out of the house to play, which meant children were more active. There was less money for eating out, and far less “fast food.”
Moms didn’t work outside the home as much, so families sat down for regular meals together more often. Most families had only one car, which meant a lot more walking for everybody in the household. Everything was just a little more physical, even changing the TV channel.
In food terms, it’s all just calories burned. People in those years burned as many calories as they ate, so they didn’t accumulate fat.
Our generation’s calorie intake, on the other hand, is profoundly out of whack with our activity levels.
Blame it on societal change. Blame it on corporate food production. Blame it on poor parenting, higher levels of anxiety, and food science manipulating our taste buds, because it’s about all those and more.
But for all that, it’s a simple enough problem to resolve. We just need to eat much less.
How many of us even know how many calories we eat in a day, let alone how many we burn? Until I got my first Big Book of Food Counts a few years ago, I didn’t have a clue about the caloric content of most of what I ate and drank.
I don’t imagine our thin predecessors were particularly well- informed either. But for all the reasons listed above, they didn’t have as much need for awareness. They kept busy enough to burn off the calories they ate, and didn’t have anywhere near the access that we do to cheap, high-calorie foods.
The Vancouver Sun provided a marvellous public service late last year with the creation of the “Fatabase,” a searchable database of 64 restaurant chains operating in B.C. If you haven’t given it a try yet, visit http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/rate-your-plate/fatabase.html for a disturbing insight into your favourite restaurant meals.
As you might expect, the most horrifying counts are at fast-food chains. A Burger King Triple Whopper with cheese, for instance, weighs in at a whopping 1,240 calories - representing more than half the calories and all the fat that an average person needs for a whole day. Throw in a large order of fries and a 12-oz pop, and that’s pretty much your daily caloric max in a single meal.
But don’t think that eating more upscale will save you. A dinner of parmesan-encrusted sole at the Macaroni Grill is 1,710 calories. It contains almost enough fat to meet two days’ worth of dietary needs, and more sodium in one meal than you should eat in an entire day. God help you if you finish things off with a cheesecake dessert.
Maybe humans needed calories like that in our hunter-gatherer days. But we’re a long way from those days. Pecking away at my computer for a full eight hours only burns a scant 240 calories. That’s one piece of buttered toast and an apple.
People like to think that their exercise programs are taking care of their caloric indulgences. But I’d have to run for two full hours just to burn off the calories from a single Triple Whopper with cheese.
Buy a food-count book. Browse the Fatabase. Learn the caloric content of the foods you and your family eat, and how that number stacks up against the calories you burn in a typical day.
That’s how we’ll get a grip on global obesity. One smaller mouthful at a time.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Hi, blog readers. I'm away travelling now until May 1. I've left behind some columns that will be running in the Times Colonist during that time but won't be posting them to my blog until my return. Hope you'll continue to read me at the TC site - you'll find my columns here.
NDP: Please don't leave us with no one who gives a damn
With all due respect to a woman who I personally like, there’s a burning question I need to get off my chest: Where the heck are Carole James and the NDP?
I get that a party has to change with the times. The New Democrats know that if they’re to stand a chance of getting elected in 2013, they’ll need to convince the electorate they care as much about the economy as the Liberals do.
But the party’s attempts to morph into Liberal lite have left no one in the legislature to champion the cause of human beings - not just as units of production, but as regular people trying to get through their lives.
It ought to be pretty obvious to us that we all need to care about such things if we’re genuinely going to build B.C.’s economy. The essence of a healthy economy is a skilled, healthy populace who can provide all the brains, brawn and investment capital needed to ensure prosperity long into the future.
Virtually all of us will find ourselves outside the economic machine at some point in our lives, for any of a thousand different reasons. Where is the voice in the legislature for that group, now that so much of the messaging from both sides of the House excludes them?
People get sick. Their children are born with disabilities. A workplace accident changes their lives forever. Their parents get old. They struggle to find decent, affordable daycare. A loved one develops a mental illness, or an addiction to drugs or alcohol.
Such are the events of life for all of us. Nobody escapes.
Yet in our legislature right now, we have one political party that has been busy eroding social supports and preventive services for almost 10 years now, and another that appears to have checked out of the debate entirely. Yikes.
Of course, a 35-member Opposition can’t possibly stay on top of everything the government is doing. MLAs in Opposition also seem to feel a greater duty of care to their constituents than do those in power, which explains the highly local nature of many of the 18 press releases the NDP has issued since the budget came down March 2.
The party has clearly looked into the crystal ball and decided it needs a broader base of support in B.C., which I guess is why it has made the Harmonized Sales Tax its biggest issue of late.
But when the Liberals cut almost $12.4 million out of services to non-aboriginal B.C. children and families and the story is gone from the media in the blink of an eye - well, that’s a pretty big sign that something’s up with the NDP. There was a time when the New Democrats could have whipped up a media frenzy for weeks over a development like that.
When a whole heap of trouble comes raining down on the province’s poor and the only thing that emerges from the NDP is a mediocre press release repeating the government’s own confusing information on the grim list of cuts to basic health care and birth control, you just have to know that the old fire in the belly that was once a party hallmark has faded to a dim flicker.
Is it because the NDP just don’t want to get into these issues anymore? Or are they having trouble engaging the media, and thus have no vehicle for getting their howls of indignation heard?
I don’t know, but I sure hope they figure it out. I don’t adhere to a particular political ideology or voting pattern, but it’s a very sad day when the only party that has ever talked in a meaningful way about caring for people appears to be losing interest in the subject.
"For the NDP to be successful, it needs to have stronger relations with all sectors of the business community," Moe Sihota told Province columnist Mike Smyth last fall, not long before Sihota’s election as the new president of the B.C. New Democratic Party.
"People need to see that the party is attentive to both business and social concerns. You need to reach out so that people feel comfortable."
True enough, Moe. But you can’t have forgotten your own time in Opposition in the 1980s, when every day was another opportunity to stick it to the Socreds over one poorly considered cut and deception after another. Remember how good it felt to hold the government accountable?
Please get back at it, New Democrats. Your new corporate look is scaring me.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Crazy-making cuts instantly increase government costs
The funny thing about the current government is that I often agree with what they say. It’s what they do that makes me crazy.
For instance, here’s the premier in an interview with the Times Colonist last week: "I think it's really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.”
Indeed. Health eats up 42 cents of every dollar the government spends. Premier, you’ll get no argument from me on that.
But on the very day that Gordon Campbell was saying that, his government was preparing to eliminate birth-control options for women and men living in poverty, who will soon lose access to IUDs and condoms. It was taking away $50 glucometers from people on income assistance who have diabetes, needed to measure their blood sugar every day. It was cancelling funding for a little plastic adapter that makes it easier for people with asthma to use their inhalers.
And I’m left to wonder: Hey, guys, what the heck are you thinking? And how on Earth did your talk ever come to be quite so far away from your walk?
“Who did they consult? Certainly not a doctor I could ever imagine,” says Dr. Danica Gleave, a Cool Aid Health Centre physician who predicts dire repercussions from the health cuts to people on income assistance. “It just baffles me. These are people who have no backup, no other resources.”
Looks like they didn’t fly the plan past the provincial health officer, either. Asked this week about the cuts, Dr. Perry Kendall wondered whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done. “The impact should be monitored, as this may turn out to be counterproductive to health and budgets in the longer run,” he noted.
Hopefully a journalism teacher has latched onto the press release announcing the cuts. It’s a fine example of modern-day propaganda. (As was Budget 2010; there must be a new communications mandate that all bad things are to be restated as good.)
The headline: “Province protects services for low-income clients.” The opening paragraph: Changes will be implemented “in a manner that is fair to all British Columbians and supports children and families.” The cuts to birth control, glucometers and asthma adapters are needed to “ensure these programs will be available to meet the most medically essential needs of clients.”
Well, except for impoverished people in their fertile years, diabetics and asthmatics. And the ones who no longer qualify for “ready-made” orthotics - insoles, braces and the like, which have also been cut. Oh, and the ones with HIV, hanging onto their health with the help of $20 worth of bottled water every month.
Doctors at the Cool Aid centre typically prescribe IUDs to at least a dozen women on income assistance a week, says Gleave.
“We see all kinds of women who benefit from an IUD - sex workers, people with developmental disabilities, people who have behavioural issues that make it hard for them to be compliant with taking a pill every day. These cuts are being made on the backs of the most vulnerable people,” she says.
“The cuts will result in an increased number of unwanted pregnancies. It will increase emergency-room visits for people with asthma. Every diabetic needs to have a glucometer - it’s a huge safety issue for insulin-dependent people. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
There are no savings to be had by denying access to IUDs, says Island Sexual Health executive director Bobbi Turner.
“The IUD is the most cost-effective form of birth control out there. Something like the Copper T costs $60 and lasts three to five years,” says Turner. “IUDs are not part of the ‘compassion program’ that drug companies have to provide free birth-control pills to these women, so this change cuts off a really effective form of birth control.”
I tried to get Health Minister Kevin Falcon to talk to me about this, because it’s obvious that the cuts in Rich Coleman’s Ministry of Housing and Social Development will increase health costs almost immediately. But it appears the government doesn’t like to talk about such things, because I just ended up routed back to the MHSD communications staff.
Maybe I should try for Mary Polak next over at the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The cuts ultimately mean more kids in care for the women who end up pregnant. But she’s probably too distracted right now, what with the $12.3 million in community cuts already going on for non-aboriginal children and families served by her ministry.
Or maybe just straight to the top. Premier, do you really want to get a handle on health-care spending? You have to know you’re never going to get there this way.
The funny thing about the current government is that I often agree with what they say. It’s what they do that makes me crazy.
For instance, here’s the premier in an interview with the Times Colonist last week: "I think it's really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.”
Indeed. Health eats up 42 cents of every dollar the government spends. Premier, you’ll get no argument from me on that.
But on the very day that Gordon Campbell was saying that, his government was preparing to eliminate birth-control options for women and men living in poverty, who will soon lose access to IUDs and condoms. It was taking away $50 glucometers from people on income assistance who have diabetes, needed to measure their blood sugar every day. It was cancelling funding for a little plastic adapter that makes it easier for people with asthma to use their inhalers.
And I’m left to wonder: Hey, guys, what the heck are you thinking? And how on Earth did your talk ever come to be quite so far away from your walk?
“Who did they consult? Certainly not a doctor I could ever imagine,” says Dr. Danica Gleave, a Cool Aid Health Centre physician who predicts dire repercussions from the health cuts to people on income assistance. “It just baffles me. These are people who have no backup, no other resources.”
Looks like they didn’t fly the plan past the provincial health officer, either. Asked this week about the cuts, Dr. Perry Kendall wondered whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done. “The impact should be monitored, as this may turn out to be counterproductive to health and budgets in the longer run,” he noted.
Hopefully a journalism teacher has latched onto the press release announcing the cuts. It’s a fine example of modern-day propaganda. (As was Budget 2010; there must be a new communications mandate that all bad things are to be restated as good.)
The headline: “Province protects services for low-income clients.” The opening paragraph: Changes will be implemented “in a manner that is fair to all British Columbians and supports children and families.” The cuts to birth control, glucometers and asthma adapters are needed to “ensure these programs will be available to meet the most medically essential needs of clients.”
Well, except for impoverished people in their fertile years, diabetics and asthmatics. And the ones who no longer qualify for “ready-made” orthotics - insoles, braces and the like, which have also been cut. Oh, and the ones with HIV, hanging onto their health with the help of $20 worth of bottled water every month.
Doctors at the Cool Aid centre typically prescribe IUDs to at least a dozen women on income assistance a week, says Gleave.
“We see all kinds of women who benefit from an IUD - sex workers, people with developmental disabilities, people who have behavioural issues that make it hard for them to be compliant with taking a pill every day. These cuts are being made on the backs of the most vulnerable people,” she says.
“The cuts will result in an increased number of unwanted pregnancies. It will increase emergency-room visits for people with asthma. Every diabetic needs to have a glucometer - it’s a huge safety issue for insulin-dependent people. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
There are no savings to be had by denying access to IUDs, says Island Sexual Health executive director Bobbi Turner.
“The IUD is the most cost-effective form of birth control out there. Something like the Copper T costs $60 and lasts three to five years,” says Turner. “IUDs are not part of the ‘compassion program’ that drug companies have to provide free birth-control pills to these women, so this change cuts off a really effective form of birth control.”
I tried to get Health Minister Kevin Falcon to talk to me about this, because it’s obvious that the cuts in Rich Coleman’s Ministry of Housing and Social Development will increase health costs almost immediately. But it appears the government doesn’t like to talk about such things, because I just ended up routed back to the MHSD communications staff.
Maybe I should try for Mary Polak next over at the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The cuts ultimately mean more kids in care for the women who end up pregnant. But she’s probably too distracted right now, what with the $12.3 million in community cuts already going on for non-aboriginal children and families served by her ministry.
Or maybe just straight to the top. Premier, do you really want to get a handle on health-care spending? You have to know you’re never going to get there this way.
Friday, March 05, 2010
Inside the B.C. 2010 budget lockup
For those of you who have never been in a provincial budget lockup, this is how it is: You spend six hours flipping through page after page of financial information, scribbling asterisks in the margins here and there to signal “Important!” and folding down corners to remind yourself to go back and figure something out late.
And then you leave thinking, hey, did I learn anything new at all? Do I really have a clue about how the next year in B.C. is shaping up?
It has always been thus, ever since my first lockup in 1996 or so. I go every time thinking that maybe this once, I’m going to find the nugget, experience the “Aha!”, make somebody squirm in government by ferreting out The Thing, the one they really didn’t want to talk about.
Not so far. In my experience, it’s more like a shell game. I go up to the nice people in suits with my budget in hand and ask some variation of “Where’d the money go?” They always have a prompt and clear answer, but it’s always some variation of, “No worries, its right over here.”
Is it? Who knows? By then it’s been blended into three other funding streams, cut up across eight new programs, given a different name and shifted to another ministry. Good luck following the money.
The lockup is a provincial tradition that gives several hundred media and “stakeholders” an early look at the coming year’s budget, and to ask questions of deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers who know their stuff. That’s the real attraction of the event, but you also get a lot of documents to browse through, too.
They call it a lockup because that’s what happens: Once you’re in, you can’t leave until the finance minister rises in the legislature around 2:30 p.m. So you’ve got a lot of time to reflect on those numbers if you arrive early enough. I guess that’s why I always think there’s a chance that in an entire six hours, I might unearth some fascinating fact, some deeper understanding of the figures.
But it’s not just because I’m no expert at numbers. The lockup this week was such a stellar example of obfuscation that I got to wondering whether that’s somebody’s job in government. So much changes budget to budget that a genuine comparison is virtually impossible unless you’re a financial analyst, and I imagine even some of them are tripped up in the fog that politics brings to an exercise like this.
One thing that’s very clear in the budget is the Liberals’ misuse of their own “performance measures” initiative. Come on, you guys! I thought it was a great idea when you started establishing measurements for government performance when you first took office, but what’s the point when you keep changing the goal posts year to year?
I keep vowing to myself I’m going to spread out all the service plans from previous budgets one of these days, and count how many times performance measurements have changed, been severely diluted, or just plain vanished since the initiative started a decade or so ago. I think it would be quite an eye-opener.
The measurements have reached the point of ridiculousness now, as a browse through the 2010-13 ministry service plans underlines. Service plans are where the ministries state their priorities for coming years and then list the performance measures they’ll be using to gauge whether they’ve succeeded.
A couple telling examples from the Ministry of Children and Family Development service plan:
The ministry’s number-one priority is to “Place primary focus on preventing vulnerability in children and youth by providing strong supports for individuals, families and community.” Absolutely. But here’s the single performance measurement the ministry will use to determine whether it’s meeting that priority: An increase in the number of single parents receiving a day-care subsidy.
Really. I can only hope that whoever actually put that into the report as the sole measurement of child and family vulnerability was embarrassed to have to do it.
Another priority calls for early intervention. Bravo. But the sole measurement is a reduction in the number of children coming into government care who are instead placed with extended family and friends.
Targets for improvement are often missed budget to budget - things like aboriginal graduate rates (50 per cent), the number of elementary-school students who are reading at expected levels( as low as 68 per cent), children starting kindergarten behind in their development (28 per cent). Who’s actually responsible for making things happen? Who do we hold accountable?
Us, I guess. We’re the ones who put up with it.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Longer hours, less pay - welcome to a new era
Ever feel like you’re working longer hours than you used to, but still not getting ahead?
Maybe that’s because you are.
The average Canadian now puts in more hours on the job than ever (or at least since 1976, when the federal government started tracking such things). Paid work takes up more than 10 per cent of a typical Canadian’s total year these days, compared to eight or nine per cent in days past.
Worse news still: We’re putting in longer hours but bringing home the same old paycheque. In B.C., the average weekly earnings in 2008 were $780.85. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just $7 more a week compared to a decade earlier.
If you’re the type who likes to ruminate on what trends say about where the world is going, you’ll want to bookmark an intriguing federal Web site, The Indicators of Well-Being in Canada. It tracks statistics in 10 different “areas of well-being” - from work life to family life, from educational status to community connectedness.
I dove into the work category this week and was intrigued by the story the numbers told. It’s certainly not the tale of a new leisure class that the futurists of 20 or 30 years ago were predicting.
The stats get really interesting when you separate the genders.
It’s true that on average, Canadians overall are putting more time than ever into paid work. But most of the Canadian workforce is female now, almost 62 per cent, and that’s skewing the averages when it comes to what’s really going on for working men and women.
So it turns out that only female workers are actually logging longer work weeks. Women now work half an hour more a week on average than they did in 1976, while men work 78 minutes less.
Women continue to earn much, much less than men - $661 a week on average, compared to $903 for men. Take (small) comfort from knowing the wage gap is ever so slightly less now than it was a decade ago, having narrowed by a whopping $19 a week.
Men used to outnumber women in union jobs, but for the last six years it’s been the other way around. Overall unionization rates are falling for both genders, however, with less than a third of Canadian workers now employed in a unionized environment. The Indicators site takes that as worrying news, given that “unions provide workers with a support network to address various work-related issues affecting their well-being.”
On the bright side, men and women alike are experiencing shorter periods of unemployment. Ten years ago, people were typically out of work for six months or more when they lost their job. Now, the average Canadian is back in the saddle within 14.8 weeks - slightly faster if female (13.2 weeks) compared to male (16 weeks). One exception: Workers over the age of 55, who on average will be out of work 23 weeks.
Both genders are experiencing fewer on-the-job injuries.
It’s definitely men who come out the big winners on that front. Their work-related injury rates have fallen dramatically in the last couple of decades, from 44.6 per 1,000 to 23.4. Injury rates for women in that same period fell a more modest six percentage points to 13.6 per 1,000.
Are those improvements because we got a whole lot better at preventing workplace injuries? Could be, but a more likely explanation for falling injury rates is that Canada just doesn’t have as many risky resource-industry jobs anymore.
Unfortunately, that might also explain the lack of growth in average earnings over the years. Yes, more people got injured back in the days when resource industries were booming, but at least they were well-paid.
As for the percentage of Canadians out of work, well, that’s been all over the map for the period of time tracked on the Indicators site.
The worst year on record in the last 35 years was 1983, when the unemployment rate hit 12 per cent. Ten years later, it shot up nearly as high, then settled into a more modest six per cent for most of the years after that. It’s now at 8.3 per cent nationally, and just under that in B.C.
And here’s another sign of changing times: The unemployment rate used to be higher for women than men, but that trend flipped in the 1990s and now it’s men who consistently experience higher rates of unemployment.
Check out the report at http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/. Scroll down to “Knowledge Centre” and you’ll find the link there. Happy browsing.
Ever feel like you’re working longer hours than you used to, but still not getting ahead?
Maybe that’s because you are.
The average Canadian now puts in more hours on the job than ever (or at least since 1976, when the federal government started tracking such things). Paid work takes up more than 10 per cent of a typical Canadian’s total year these days, compared to eight or nine per cent in days past.
Worse news still: We’re putting in longer hours but bringing home the same old paycheque. In B.C., the average weekly earnings in 2008 were $780.85. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just $7 more a week compared to a decade earlier.
If you’re the type who likes to ruminate on what trends say about where the world is going, you’ll want to bookmark an intriguing federal Web site, The Indicators of Well-Being in Canada. It tracks statistics in 10 different “areas of well-being” - from work life to family life, from educational status to community connectedness.
I dove into the work category this week and was intrigued by the story the numbers told. It’s certainly not the tale of a new leisure class that the futurists of 20 or 30 years ago were predicting.
The stats get really interesting when you separate the genders.
It’s true that on average, Canadians overall are putting more time than ever into paid work. But most of the Canadian workforce is female now, almost 62 per cent, and that’s skewing the averages when it comes to what’s really going on for working men and women.
So it turns out that only female workers are actually logging longer work weeks. Women now work half an hour more a week on average than they did in 1976, while men work 78 minutes less.
Women continue to earn much, much less than men - $661 a week on average, compared to $903 for men. Take (small) comfort from knowing the wage gap is ever so slightly less now than it was a decade ago, having narrowed by a whopping $19 a week.
Men used to outnumber women in union jobs, but for the last six years it’s been the other way around. Overall unionization rates are falling for both genders, however, with less than a third of Canadian workers now employed in a unionized environment. The Indicators site takes that as worrying news, given that “unions provide workers with a support network to address various work-related issues affecting their well-being.”
On the bright side, men and women alike are experiencing shorter periods of unemployment. Ten years ago, people were typically out of work for six months or more when they lost their job. Now, the average Canadian is back in the saddle within 14.8 weeks - slightly faster if female (13.2 weeks) compared to male (16 weeks). One exception: Workers over the age of 55, who on average will be out of work 23 weeks.
Both genders are experiencing fewer on-the-job injuries.
It’s definitely men who come out the big winners on that front. Their work-related injury rates have fallen dramatically in the last couple of decades, from 44.6 per 1,000 to 23.4. Injury rates for women in that same period fell a more modest six percentage points to 13.6 per 1,000.
Are those improvements because we got a whole lot better at preventing workplace injuries? Could be, but a more likely explanation for falling injury rates is that Canada just doesn’t have as many risky resource-industry jobs anymore.
Unfortunately, that might also explain the lack of growth in average earnings over the years. Yes, more people got injured back in the days when resource industries were booming, but at least they were well-paid.
As for the percentage of Canadians out of work, well, that’s been all over the map for the period of time tracked on the Indicators site.
The worst year on record in the last 35 years was 1983, when the unemployment rate hit 12 per cent. Ten years later, it shot up nearly as high, then settled into a more modest six per cent for most of the years after that. It’s now at 8.3 per cent nationally, and just under that in B.C.
And here’s another sign of changing times: The unemployment rate used to be higher for women than men, but that trend flipped in the 1990s and now it’s men who consistently experience higher rates of unemployment.
Check out the report at http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/. Scroll down to “Knowledge Centre” and you’ll find the link there. Happy browsing.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Is this really how the premier wants us to remember him?
By the time you’re premier of B.C., you’re probably wrapped pretty tight in people who tell you what you want to hear.
So I got to thinking a while back about Gordon Campbell, and how he might not even know how small and mean his government is looking these days out here in the larger world. It’s not like he gets much opportunity to check in with the common folk and see what’s up.
But if I were him, I’d be making that happen very soon. Once the Olympics party wraps, I hope he takes some time to touch base with the people whose lives he governs.
Campbell will be B.C.’s premier for at least 12 years, possibly longer if he and his government hang in for another term after the 2013 election. What legacy does he want to leave from his time in office?
I’m sure the Olympics are a major piece, as is the sprucing up of B.C.’s economy (well, up until the economy tanked). Campbell can also take credit for making B.C. a friendlier place to do business, and bringing rapid transit to Vancouver International Airport.
But surely the man wouldn’t want to be remembered for picking on people who were barely hanging on to begin with. Yet that’s what sticks in my mind from his time in government so far, and I’m wondering if he really understands that. And that I’m not the only one.
Campbell’s government has been elected for three terms in a row, so we’ll have to presume that most British Columbians support his way of thinking. But not everything has come up roses under the Liberals, and after 12 years it’s definitely starting to show.
Campbell wants government to function more like business. Good business smarts definitely are important for effective governance, because much of government at the ground level is about attending to the very same things that any business needs to attend to in order to stay in operation.
But there are some big differences between the goals of business and government. Most notably: A business operates for the benefit of its owners and shareholders. A government, at least in a democracy, operates for the good of society. They’re very different things.
Being fiscally astute means a heck of a lot to business. And it needs to mean a lot to a provincial government as well, because the cost of debt goes on and on.
But balancing the books certainly isn’t the only consideration for a government. Businesses don’t need to worry about figuring things out for all the poor, weak, old, young, sick, out-of-work or challenged people in their communities. Governments do.
I’m not against the Olympics. But I can completely understand why people might get incensed at governments sparing no expense to fly piles of snow from one mountain to another via helicopter, while at that very moment the province is announcing $15 million in cuts to services for non-aboriginal B.C. youth and families. I mean, that’s just plain wrong.
Nobody can fault Campbell for believing way back when that trickle-down economics and tough new “hand up, not hand out” programs would take care of British Columbians’ problems. Who’s to say until you try?
But a dozen years in, what’s resulted is an entrenched, growing sub-class of people with bigger problems, poorer health, less education and fewer prospects for well-paid, consistent work and stable housing. They are so close to the edge that the tiniest push sends them head over heels into the abyss. Is that really what Campbell wants?
A small example: If you ran B.C., would you opt to provide $6 a day for Meals on Wheels and a small alarm system to help maintain the independence of a man living with Parkinson’s disease, or deny him that and instead fork out $3,000 or so a month for the long-term care bill he’ll soon be ringing up?
It’s a pretty obvious choice, and I bet Campbell would make the smart one if I could ask him. But his government and the insulated yes-men running B.C.’s health authorities consistently make the wrong one - in that particular case and in many similar situations. Small, stupid cruelties like that happen all the time in the lives of thousands of British Columbians down on their luck.
Mr. Premier, time for a reality check. You don’t strike me as a small-minded, mean man. Don’t let your government be remembered as one.
By the time you’re premier of B.C., you’re probably wrapped pretty tight in people who tell you what you want to hear.
So I got to thinking a while back about Gordon Campbell, and how he might not even know how small and mean his government is looking these days out here in the larger world. It’s not like he gets much opportunity to check in with the common folk and see what’s up.
But if I were him, I’d be making that happen very soon. Once the Olympics party wraps, I hope he takes some time to touch base with the people whose lives he governs.
Campbell will be B.C.’s premier for at least 12 years, possibly longer if he and his government hang in for another term after the 2013 election. What legacy does he want to leave from his time in office?
I’m sure the Olympics are a major piece, as is the sprucing up of B.C.’s economy (well, up until the economy tanked). Campbell can also take credit for making B.C. a friendlier place to do business, and bringing rapid transit to Vancouver International Airport.
But surely the man wouldn’t want to be remembered for picking on people who were barely hanging on to begin with. Yet that’s what sticks in my mind from his time in government so far, and I’m wondering if he really understands that. And that I’m not the only one.
Campbell’s government has been elected for three terms in a row, so we’ll have to presume that most British Columbians support his way of thinking. But not everything has come up roses under the Liberals, and after 12 years it’s definitely starting to show.
Campbell wants government to function more like business. Good business smarts definitely are important for effective governance, because much of government at the ground level is about attending to the very same things that any business needs to attend to in order to stay in operation.
But there are some big differences between the goals of business and government. Most notably: A business operates for the benefit of its owners and shareholders. A government, at least in a democracy, operates for the good of society. They’re very different things.
Being fiscally astute means a heck of a lot to business. And it needs to mean a lot to a provincial government as well, because the cost of debt goes on and on.
But balancing the books certainly isn’t the only consideration for a government. Businesses don’t need to worry about figuring things out for all the poor, weak, old, young, sick, out-of-work or challenged people in their communities. Governments do.
I’m not against the Olympics. But I can completely understand why people might get incensed at governments sparing no expense to fly piles of snow from one mountain to another via helicopter, while at that very moment the province is announcing $15 million in cuts to services for non-aboriginal B.C. youth and families. I mean, that’s just plain wrong.
Nobody can fault Campbell for believing way back when that trickle-down economics and tough new “hand up, not hand out” programs would take care of British Columbians’ problems. Who’s to say until you try?
But a dozen years in, what’s resulted is an entrenched, growing sub-class of people with bigger problems, poorer health, less education and fewer prospects for well-paid, consistent work and stable housing. They are so close to the edge that the tiniest push sends them head over heels into the abyss. Is that really what Campbell wants?
A small example: If you ran B.C., would you opt to provide $6 a day for Meals on Wheels and a small alarm system to help maintain the independence of a man living with Parkinson’s disease, or deny him that and instead fork out $3,000 or so a month for the long-term care bill he’ll soon be ringing up?
It’s a pretty obvious choice, and I bet Campbell would make the smart one if I could ask him. But his government and the insulated yes-men running B.C.’s health authorities consistently make the wrong one - in that particular case and in many similar situations. Small, stupid cruelties like that happen all the time in the lives of thousands of British Columbians down on their luck.
Mr. Premier, time for a reality check. You don’t strike me as a small-minded, mean man. Don’t let your government be remembered as one.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Poor government policy feeds social problems, municipalities pay the price
Like it or not, it’s our municipal governments who are being left to figure out real solutions to the problems and miseries on our streets.
It’s not right that things have turned out that way. But so it goes sometimes. Kudos to the City of Victoria, the Capital Regional District and the City of Vancouver for recognizing that, even though it must be infuriating to be put in that position.
I take heart from the news this week that the City of Victoria is bidding on three Traveller’s Inn hotels for social-housing use, and funding Our Place street drop-in so it can open two hours longer every day. It’s great that the CRD has stepped in with money to spare the barely-out-of-the-box Coalition to End Homelessness an untimely demise. I like that the City of Vancouver launched new shelters in warehouse space that it owns, instantly housing hundreds of people.
But while I don’t want to be a wet blanket, there’s just one little problem: While our municipalities are stepping up to make things happen, senior levels of government continue to make the same bad decisions that landed us here in the first place. Hard cuts to B.C. community services this year and next threaten to cancel out the small wins we’ve seen around homelessness.
My journalism career has almost exactly tracked the tremendous rise in homelessness in our province, giving me a unique front-row seat to the making of a social catastrophe.
It’s a complex problem, and not everything can be blamed on the actions of senior levels of government. But much of it can.
Homelessness wasn’t even a word when I first started reporting in Kamloops in 1982. When I moved to Victoria in 1989, the dozen or so alcoholics who accounted for Victoria’s street problems at that time seemed so non-threatening that the downtown community whimsically dubbed them “The Apple Tree Gang” and generally spoke fondly of the men.
Pockets of poverty have always existed throughout the province, of course, and there have always been people homeless. (A woman who grew up in the 1930s and ‘40s along Cecelia Ravine recalls seeing men living in empty concrete culverts in that area during those tough years.)
But it was a sporadic problem at best in times gone by, and virtually unheard of outside larger centres. The level of homelessness we’ve now grown used to in B.C. communities would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.
Many, many federal and provincial policies and practises have changed since the early 1980s, when B.C.’s troubles began. The bad decision-making can’t be pinned on one political party, or one party leader; in my time, I’ve seen governments of all stripes participate in the creation of widespread homelessness.
I wish I could tell you I was prescient enough to foresee the terrible thing that resulted from the collective impact of dozens of small policy shifts. But like everybody else, it took me a long time to connect the dots. Homelessness as we know it in B.C. developed drip by drip, one seemingly unrelated policy decision at a time.
The economy has changed enormously over the years as well, in B.C. and around the world. The places where people on the margins once lived and worked have vanished in a blur of gentrification and upward mobility.
The resource work is gone. The welfare and employment insurance is way harder to get. The housing prices are crazy, and rentals are scarce. Even the drugs have changed, bringing a whole new set of issues with them.
Life has also gotten much meaner for anyone with personal problems - a disability, a head injury, a difficult divorce, a troubled child, an infirm or impoverished old age. The “social safety net” in Canada is beyond frayed at this point.
Once again, blame senior levels of government for getting us to this point, and the electorate for not holding them accountable for their devastating actions. At this very moment, even as our communities take on more responsibility around homelessness, the province and the health authorities are making cuts that will fuel further social problems across B.C.
Effective, long-standing services are vanishing under the knife, eliminated with nary a hint of preparation or planning for the social fallout. Only harm can come of that - for those tipping precariously toward the streets, and for anyone dreaming of happier, healthier days for our communities.
Our municipalities are trying to fill gaps as best they can. But as long as higher levels of government are undermining their every step, they won’t succeed.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Visit me at lifeasahuman.com
I'm now doing some writing for a new on-line site, lifeasahuman. Here's my first post.
I'm now doing some writing for a new on-line site, lifeasahuman. Here's my first post.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Disgrace can't erase Fonyo's accomplishments
Poor Steve Fonyo. Something about that guy just breaks my heart.
Few things are more painful to watch than a long and very public fall from grace. Fonyo’s fall has been more painful than most, because he really was just an ordinary teen trying to do something positive when he set out to run across the country in 1984.
He accomplished something quite miraculous. Not only did he run all the way from St. John’s, Nfld. to Victoria - 7,294 kilometres in all - but he raised $13 million for the Canadian Cancer Society along the way. And it all took place just five years after Fonyo lost his leg to cancer at age 12.
Canadians loved Fonyo, at least for a little while. But he soon began to try our affections, starting with a drunk-driving conviction in 1987 and then a seemingly endless series of criminal convictions over the next 22 years for things like shoplifting, driving without a licence, and fraud.
The latest humiliation came this week, when Fonyo was stripped of his 1985 Order of Canada. He’s one of just four people to be removed from the Order in its 42-year history. For his sins, he now shares a place in Canadian history with NHL players’ agent Alan Eagleson, aboriginal leader David Ahenakew, and lawyer Sher Singh, all deemed to have brought the Order into disrepute through bad behaviour or criminal activities.
Timing is everything, and it’s unfortunate that in the period when Fonyo was preparing for his run, Canadians needed more than just a plucky one-legged teen running across the country for cancer. We needed a hero.
Terry Fox’s tragic story had captured the nation just three years earlier. We wanted Fonyo to be everything that Fox had seemed destined for.
Who could meet such a tall order? Certainly not Fonyo, who was just a kid when he suddenly found himself elevated to hero status following his 14-month run. He achieved what Fox had not been able to do (Fox died a year into his run), but couldn’t possibly live up to the myth.
Even the $13 million Fonyo raised with his cross-Canada Journey For Lives pales in comparison with the $24 million that Fox raised without ever completing his run, let alone the hundreds of millions raised in Fox’s memory since his death.
Fonyo enjoyed a few heady months caught up in the whirl of fame - riding in red Ferraris with George Harrison; meeting the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul; receiving the Order of Canada at the tender age of 18. But real life is no fairy tale, and Fonyo’s brief time in the limelight was over soon enough.
He tried to kick-start things again in 1987 with another fundraising run, this time across the United Kingdom. But the disastrous run raised just $115,000 and left Fonyo deep in debt.
His first conviction for drunk driving came later that same year, right around the time his car was seized due to unpaid bills. He was 20 years old and $36,000 in debt.
His ongoing problems with drugs and alcohol have been well-documented by the Canadian media. In fact, every bump in the road that Fonyo has encountered in the last two decades has been well-documented, to the point that it’s now the drunk and disorderly side of Fonyo that springs most easily to mind whenever his name comes up. The hero is no more.
What can you wish for a man like Fonyo?
We liked him well enough when he was a kid with a disability and a simple and compelling dream. But the full-grown man - warts and all - has been much harder to warm up to. His years of criminal behaviour have doubtlessly hurt many people, and he has put countless lives at risk by repeatedly driving drunk and without a licence.
Still, he did something amazing once upon a time. He’s a small-town B.C. boy who raised a staggering amount of money for cancer, and is still the only one-legged runner in history to run across Canada. I hope he still hangs onto the memory of that proud achievement in the midst of his latest disgrace.
Fonyo was reportedly devastated when he found out he was to be removed from the Order of Canada. A former boss at a Surrey auto-repair shop told the Vancouver Sun this week that it just seems wrong to do that to Fonyo.
“They gave him the Order of Canada based on his accomplishments, and they’re still there. It’s not like he didn’t do it, or lied about it,” says Satnam Singh Sidhu. “He finished his marathon and was an inspiration to a lot of people.”
Poor Steve Fonyo. Something about that guy just breaks my heart.
Few things are more painful to watch than a long and very public fall from grace. Fonyo’s fall has been more painful than most, because he really was just an ordinary teen trying to do something positive when he set out to run across the country in 1984.
He accomplished something quite miraculous. Not only did he run all the way from St. John’s, Nfld. to Victoria - 7,294 kilometres in all - but he raised $13 million for the Canadian Cancer Society along the way. And it all took place just five years after Fonyo lost his leg to cancer at age 12.
Canadians loved Fonyo, at least for a little while. But he soon began to try our affections, starting with a drunk-driving conviction in 1987 and then a seemingly endless series of criminal convictions over the next 22 years for things like shoplifting, driving without a licence, and fraud.
The latest humiliation came this week, when Fonyo was stripped of his 1985 Order of Canada. He’s one of just four people to be removed from the Order in its 42-year history. For his sins, he now shares a place in Canadian history with NHL players’ agent Alan Eagleson, aboriginal leader David Ahenakew, and lawyer Sher Singh, all deemed to have brought the Order into disrepute through bad behaviour or criminal activities.
Timing is everything, and it’s unfortunate that in the period when Fonyo was preparing for his run, Canadians needed more than just a plucky one-legged teen running across the country for cancer. We needed a hero.
Terry Fox’s tragic story had captured the nation just three years earlier. We wanted Fonyo to be everything that Fox had seemed destined for.
Who could meet such a tall order? Certainly not Fonyo, who was just a kid when he suddenly found himself elevated to hero status following his 14-month run. He achieved what Fox had not been able to do (Fox died a year into his run), but couldn’t possibly live up to the myth.
Even the $13 million Fonyo raised with his cross-Canada Journey For Lives pales in comparison with the $24 million that Fox raised without ever completing his run, let alone the hundreds of millions raised in Fox’s memory since his death.
Fonyo enjoyed a few heady months caught up in the whirl of fame - riding in red Ferraris with George Harrison; meeting the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul; receiving the Order of Canada at the tender age of 18. But real life is no fairy tale, and Fonyo’s brief time in the limelight was over soon enough.
He tried to kick-start things again in 1987 with another fundraising run, this time across the United Kingdom. But the disastrous run raised just $115,000 and left Fonyo deep in debt.
His first conviction for drunk driving came later that same year, right around the time his car was seized due to unpaid bills. He was 20 years old and $36,000 in debt.
His ongoing problems with drugs and alcohol have been well-documented by the Canadian media. In fact, every bump in the road that Fonyo has encountered in the last two decades has been well-documented, to the point that it’s now the drunk and disorderly side of Fonyo that springs most easily to mind whenever his name comes up. The hero is no more.
What can you wish for a man like Fonyo?
We liked him well enough when he was a kid with a disability and a simple and compelling dream. But the full-grown man - warts and all - has been much harder to warm up to. His years of criminal behaviour have doubtlessly hurt many people, and he has put countless lives at risk by repeatedly driving drunk and without a licence.
Still, he did something amazing once upon a time. He’s a small-town B.C. boy who raised a staggering amount of money for cancer, and is still the only one-legged runner in history to run across Canada. I hope he still hangs onto the memory of that proud achievement in the midst of his latest disgrace.
Fonyo was reportedly devastated when he found out he was to be removed from the Order of Canada. A former boss at a Surrey auto-repair shop told the Vancouver Sun this week that it just seems wrong to do that to Fonyo.
“They gave him the Order of Canada based on his accomplishments, and they’re still there. It’s not like he didn’t do it, or lied about it,” says Satnam Singh Sidhu. “He finished his marathon and was an inspiration to a lot of people.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Why do we need to believe the worst about the sex industry?
A new study out of Simon Fraser University concludes that people who buy sex are no more prone to violence than anyone else.
Fewer than two per cent of the 1,000 respondents who took part in SFU sociologist Chris Atchison’s study reported ever having hit, hurt, raped or robbed the person who they’d bought sex from.
Granted, that’s just them saying so. But Atchison noted in a Vancouver Sun story this week about his research that there was little reason for the respondents to lie, given that the survey was anonymous.
That his findings are provocative is an understatement.
"It's an outrageous study and it really works towards normalizing sexual assault," said Aurea Flynn of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, which is the go-to organization in B.C. when media are looking for a quote from someone vehemently opposed to prostitution.
"I'm really angry about the emphasis on the compassion for johns that the study provides,” added Flynn, “and I'm very concerned about its impact on the continued normalization of prostitution in Canada because I believe prostitution is violence against women."
It’s odd, really. Atchison’s findings ought to be considered good news in a society that puts so much emphasis on reducing violence for all British Columbians. Shouldn’t we be happy that most of the thousands of British Columbians who buy sex on a regular basis aren’t violent toward sex workers?
Ah, but this is about the sex industry. We don’t want to hear anything “nice” about it. We don’t want anybody telling us that most of the customers of the sex industry are largely average, non-violent guys - the kind of men we work with, live with and even love. We don’t want to hear that most adult sex workers in Canada might actually be choosing to work in the business.
When it comes to prostitution, we only like it violent, coercive and miserable. I guess we pretty much have to cling to that belief, because otherwise we just might question the ineffective, discriminatory and ultimately harmful laws that govern how the sex industry operates in our country.
We prefer a single story line when it comes to public conversations about the sex trade - one in which all the people who buy sex are exploitive predators, and all the people who sell it are victims needing to be saved (or at the very least prosecuted in the event they refuse “rescue”).
But what if we’ve got that wrong?
Without question, there are some loathsome and horrendous things that go on in the global sex industry. No civil society should tolerate the truly awful parts of the sex industry. We need strong laws - and much more effective enforcement of them - to protect against the exploitation of vulnerable people and prevent child abuse, human trafficking and sex tourism.
We also need plenty of community supports to help people wanting out of the sex trade. It’s not a job that anybody should have to feel they’re doing against their will, including for economic reasons.
But at the same time, it’s profoundly hypocritical for a country with so many eager customers of the sex trade to pretend that the entire industry is monstrous. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that 98 per cent of the people who took part in Atchison’s survey really are just looking for a sexual encounter, not the opportunity to hurt anybody.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a number of adult escorts over the past couple of years, and they’ve given me a whole new perspective on who their customers are. I’ve been stunned to discover just how many customers there are, and their many complex reasons for paying for sex.
So to judge them all as vicious creeps just doesn’t work for me anymore. We may like to tell ourselves that they’re all Robert Pickton types looking for any excuse to make some crushed and exploited woman’s life a little more miserable, but it just isn’t true.
I do think the people who buy sex need to get a spine, however, and start doing more to change the laws to ensure fair, safe workplaces for adult sex workers. The customers of the massive sex industry hold all kinds of authority positions, in our region and around the world. How about they start using some of that influence to create real change for adult workers, starting with decriminalization?
For another view of the industry, come on down to the screening of The Brothel Project Jan. 31 at the Victoria Film Festival. The documentary by April Butler-Parry follows me and UVic researcher and outreach worker Lauren Casey in our 2008 attempt to open a co-op brothel in Victoria.
Fewer than two per cent of the 1,000 respondents who took part in SFU sociologist Chris Atchison’s study reported ever having hit, hurt, raped or robbed the person who they’d bought sex from.
Granted, that’s just them saying so. But Atchison noted in a Vancouver Sun story this week about his research that there was little reason for the respondents to lie, given that the survey was anonymous.
That his findings are provocative is an understatement.
"It's an outrageous study and it really works towards normalizing sexual assault," said Aurea Flynn of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, which is the go-to organization in B.C. when media are looking for a quote from someone vehemently opposed to prostitution.
"I'm really angry about the emphasis on the compassion for johns that the study provides,” added Flynn, “and I'm very concerned about its impact on the continued normalization of prostitution in Canada because I believe prostitution is violence against women."
It’s odd, really. Atchison’s findings ought to be considered good news in a society that puts so much emphasis on reducing violence for all British Columbians. Shouldn’t we be happy that most of the thousands of British Columbians who buy sex on a regular basis aren’t violent toward sex workers?
Ah, but this is about the sex industry. We don’t want to hear anything “nice” about it. We don’t want anybody telling us that most of the customers of the sex industry are largely average, non-violent guys - the kind of men we work with, live with and even love. We don’t want to hear that most adult sex workers in Canada might actually be choosing to work in the business.
When it comes to prostitution, we only like it violent, coercive and miserable. I guess we pretty much have to cling to that belief, because otherwise we just might question the ineffective, discriminatory and ultimately harmful laws that govern how the sex industry operates in our country.
We prefer a single story line when it comes to public conversations about the sex trade - one in which all the people who buy sex are exploitive predators, and all the people who sell it are victims needing to be saved (or at the very least prosecuted in the event they refuse “rescue”).
But what if we’ve got that wrong?
Without question, there are some loathsome and horrendous things that go on in the global sex industry. No civil society should tolerate the truly awful parts of the sex industry. We need strong laws - and much more effective enforcement of them - to protect against the exploitation of vulnerable people and prevent child abuse, human trafficking and sex tourism.
We also need plenty of community supports to help people wanting out of the sex trade. It’s not a job that anybody should have to feel they’re doing against their will, including for economic reasons.
But at the same time, it’s profoundly hypocritical for a country with so many eager customers of the sex trade to pretend that the entire industry is monstrous. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that 98 per cent of the people who took part in Atchison’s survey really are just looking for a sexual encounter, not the opportunity to hurt anybody.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a number of adult escorts over the past couple of years, and they’ve given me a whole new perspective on who their customers are. I’ve been stunned to discover just how many customers there are, and their many complex reasons for paying for sex.
So to judge them all as vicious creeps just doesn’t work for me anymore. We may like to tell ourselves that they’re all Robert Pickton types looking for any excuse to make some crushed and exploited woman’s life a little more miserable, but it just isn’t true.
I do think the people who buy sex need to get a spine, however, and start doing more to change the laws to ensure fair, safe workplaces for adult sex workers. The customers of the massive sex industry hold all kinds of authority positions, in our region and around the world. How about they start using some of that influence to create real change for adult workers, starting with decriminalization?
For another view of the industry, come on down to the screening of The Brothel Project Jan. 31 at the Victoria Film Festival. The documentary by April Butler-Parry follows me and UVic researcher and outreach worker Lauren Casey in our 2008 attempt to open a co-op brothel in Victoria.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Major rent increases coming for people in B.C. residential care
It isn’t often that a landlord can quietly order up a 30 per cent rent increase for more than 2,000 people without anybody making a public fuss about it.
But maybe that’s what happens when your tenants are elderly, frail seniors living in B.C.’s long-term care facilities. As of Jan. 31, “rents” will go up for most of the 26,000 people living in government-subsidized residential-care facilities, in some cases jumping as much as $672 a month.
That barely a word of it has made it into the major B.C. media says one of two things: Either the people in residential care think it’s a fair deal and aren’t complaining; or the reality hasn’t sunk in yet. I guess we’ll know soon enough which one it is.
The rent increase is far beyond what any private landlord could dream of imposing on an existing tenant. The allowable rent increase for B.C. landlords in 2009 was 3.7 per cent.
Alas, residential-care facilities aren’t governed by the same act as home rentals. The provincial Health Services Ministry says people in subsidized long-term care should pay a larger share of their room and board costs, and contends a rate increase of this magnitude is needed to address the problem.
Unlike the “free” care we receive when we go to an acute-care hospital, seniors’ care in B.C.is a little more complex. Tax dollars fund the medical component of long-term care, but seniors are required to contribute toward the room and board component of their stays. That “co-payment” is currently too low in most cases, contends government.
Right now, the amount a senior has to pay is based on an 11-step grid ranging from $940 to $2,260 a month, depending on income. As of Jan. 31, everyone in residential care will instead pay 80 per cent of their annual income to a maximum of $2,932 a month. Most will also be allowed to keep $275 a month.
It’s not all bad news. Low-income seniors will see a small drop in their monthly rents under the new system. All told, a quarter of the people currently in residential care will see their “rents” either stay the same or decrease a little.
As for the other 75 per cent - well, they’ll be paying more. The co-payment for people in the highest income bracket is going up by $672 a month (effective immediately for those just heading into care, and phased in over this year and the next for those currently in care). Of course, that’s arguably still a bargain compared to the private sector, where room-and-board rates can easily top $5,000 a month in an assisted-living facility.
The increases in the public rates will likely hit hardest for couples in which one spouse is in residential care and the other is still in their own home. They can launch individual “hardship” appeals through the Vancouver Island Health Authority, but that’s a lot to ask of an aging couple at one of the most stressful points in their lives.
One local man whose father is in residential care cautions not to expect an easy solution to such appeals. His mother tried the hardship route under the current system after her husband went into full-time care, but ended up having to legally separate from him to be certain she could retain enough income to live on.
Anticipate some problems as well with the $275 a month that people are allowed to retain for personal expenses. (Most people, anyway: those on income assistance will keep just $95/month).
True, that amount is higher in B.C. than in any other province. But that’s not to say it’s sufficient to cover everybody’s costs. All expenses have to come out of that $275: prescription drugs that aren’t covered under the government plan, over-the-counter drugs, mobility aids, grooming and care products, clothing, haircuts, dental care, phone, and so on.
The government says it will review the rate every three years. But that’s a pointless promise in a system where the average stay is a year and a half. Few of those in long-term care right now will be around to get any satisfaction out of the 2013 rate review.
All in, people in residential care will be paying an additional $54 million a year under the new rates. The government says the money will be reinvested into things like more client care, more staff, more rehab. Read the fine print, though, and it’s no sure thing. Health authorities will actually decide how to spend the money, at sites with “the greatest needs.”
Should we be alarmed by all this? Too soon to say. But the changes affect thousands of vulnerable British Columbians, and that’s a warning sign in itself to proceed with caution. Heads up, people.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Bridge too fast scares up thousands of resisters
OK, I get Victoria councillor Lynn Hunter’s concern about deciding things by referendum. Direct democracy can be an unpredictable and potentially harmful form of governance, as the state of California can attest.
But when it comes to the Johnson Street bridge, I understand completely why more than 9,000 Victoria citizens have signed petitions demanding that city council’s decision to replace the bridge be put to referendum.
For one thing, the idea of replacing the bridge came out of nowhere nine months ago. City council (with the exception of Geoff Young) was such an enthusiastic booster from the start that no one with a wrong word to say about the project was given any chance to air their concerns.
And it was council who created the “alternate approval process” that brought us to this point. Usually the city lets its citizens participate in the decision-making process, but this time council took the position that the answer was “yes” unless they heard otherwise by Jan. 4 from at least 10 per cent of eligible city voters. So those with concerns about the need for a $63 million rebuild of the bridge set out to collect enough signatures to make that happen.
That they succeeded isn’t a blow to representative democracy, as Hunter portrayed it at the Dec. 10 council meeting (See the B Channel video). It’s just the only option people had to try to slow the train down.
The rap against governance by referendum is that poorer decisions will result because the public simply isn’t as informed and knowledgeable about issues compared to their elected representatives. Applied here, that theory presumes Victoria council spent considerable time weighing the options before deciding that replacing the 85-year-old Johnson Street bridge was better than repairing it.
But how many days do you think went by between the first-ever mention in the Times Colonist of the need to replace the bridge, and city council’s vote of approval? Twenty-one. Knock out the weekends and that leaves just 15 working days for council to have reflected on the massive project.
Seeing as they get together only a couple times a week and are wrestling with dozens of other issues at those meetings as well, I’d be surprised if councillors spent more than a few hours all told mulling the bridge issue.
A year ago when the current council was newly elected, not one of them was talking about replacing the bridge. It was a non-issue. Back in 1999, the city spent just over $1 million getting the bridge repaired and resurfaced, and at that time told the public that the refit meant “several more decades of life” for the bridge.
So how did we suddenly end up on a fast track to bridge replacement? How did it become “the number-one infrastructure policy” for the city, as Mayor Dean Fortin described it? I can’t shake the feeling that if the federal government hadn’t been throwing money around last year for capital projects, we still wouldn’t be talking about the Johnson Street bridge.
There’s nothing wrong with the city trying to get its hands on some federal funding, of course. It landed $21 million in the end, half of what it was hoping for but still a nice chunk of change.
But Victoria’s citizens still face being on the hook for two-thirds of the costly rebuild of a bridge that many people don’t believe needs to be replaced . And it’s clear from the results of the counter-petition this week that several thousand of them felt strongly enough about that to put their name to the call for a referendum.
Congratulations to Ross Crockford, Mat Wright and Yule Heibel, the three Victorians who built a solid grassroots campaign out of a conversation that started around a summer barbecue among people puzzling over why the city was suddenly hell-bent on rebuilding the bridge. More than 100 volunteers signed on to help collect signatures. (Here's their site.)
They weren’t looking to make trouble. They weren’t trying to throw a wrench into representative democracy. They just wanted more answers than city hall was willing to give them.
I talked to Crockford, a journalist, this week. The story of how he ended up a spokesman for the bridge revolt is charmingly happenstance, and would likely hearten Hunter as a fine example of democracy in action if she could just break free of the group-think at the council table these days.
People want a referendum on the bridge because they aren’t convinced city council is acting in their best interests. With no chance for public input and a warp-speed approval process, who can blame them?
OK, I get Victoria councillor Lynn Hunter’s concern about deciding things by referendum. Direct democracy can be an unpredictable and potentially harmful form of governance, as the state of California can attest.
But when it comes to the Johnson Street bridge, I understand completely why more than 9,000 Victoria citizens have signed petitions demanding that city council’s decision to replace the bridge be put to referendum.
For one thing, the idea of replacing the bridge came out of nowhere nine months ago. City council (with the exception of Geoff Young) was such an enthusiastic booster from the start that no one with a wrong word to say about the project was given any chance to air their concerns.
And it was council who created the “alternate approval process” that brought us to this point. Usually the city lets its citizens participate in the decision-making process, but this time council took the position that the answer was “yes” unless they heard otherwise by Jan. 4 from at least 10 per cent of eligible city voters. So those with concerns about the need for a $63 million rebuild of the bridge set out to collect enough signatures to make that happen.
That they succeeded isn’t a blow to representative democracy, as Hunter portrayed it at the Dec. 10 council meeting (See the B Channel video). It’s just the only option people had to try to slow the train down.
The rap against governance by referendum is that poorer decisions will result because the public simply isn’t as informed and knowledgeable about issues compared to their elected representatives. Applied here, that theory presumes Victoria council spent considerable time weighing the options before deciding that replacing the 85-year-old Johnson Street bridge was better than repairing it.
But how many days do you think went by between the first-ever mention in the Times Colonist of the need to replace the bridge, and city council’s vote of approval? Twenty-one. Knock out the weekends and that leaves just 15 working days for council to have reflected on the massive project.
Seeing as they get together only a couple times a week and are wrestling with dozens of other issues at those meetings as well, I’d be surprised if councillors spent more than a few hours all told mulling the bridge issue.
A year ago when the current council was newly elected, not one of them was talking about replacing the bridge. It was a non-issue. Back in 1999, the city spent just over $1 million getting the bridge repaired and resurfaced, and at that time told the public that the refit meant “several more decades of life” for the bridge.
So how did we suddenly end up on a fast track to bridge replacement? How did it become “the number-one infrastructure policy” for the city, as Mayor Dean Fortin described it? I can’t shake the feeling that if the federal government hadn’t been throwing money around last year for capital projects, we still wouldn’t be talking about the Johnson Street bridge.
There’s nothing wrong with the city trying to get its hands on some federal funding, of course. It landed $21 million in the end, half of what it was hoping for but still a nice chunk of change.
But Victoria’s citizens still face being on the hook for two-thirds of the costly rebuild of a bridge that many people don’t believe needs to be replaced . And it’s clear from the results of the counter-petition this week that several thousand of them felt strongly enough about that to put their name to the call for a referendum.
Congratulations to Ross Crockford, Mat Wright and Yule Heibel, the three Victorians who built a solid grassroots campaign out of a conversation that started around a summer barbecue among people puzzling over why the city was suddenly hell-bent on rebuilding the bridge. More than 100 volunteers signed on to help collect signatures. (Here's their site.)
They weren’t looking to make trouble. They weren’t trying to throw a wrench into representative democracy. They just wanted more answers than city hall was willing to give them.
I talked to Crockford, a journalist, this week. The story of how he ended up a spokesman for the bridge revolt is charmingly happenstance, and would likely hearten Hunter as a fine example of democracy in action if she could just break free of the group-think at the council table these days.
People want a referendum on the bridge because they aren’t convinced city council is acting in their best interests. With no chance for public input and a warp-speed approval process, who can blame them?
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