Victoria street issues are everybody's problem to deal with
July 13, 2007

Being part of the mayor’s task force that’s trying to figure out the street problems in Victoria’s downtown has given me the opportunity to hear about the issues from every viewpoint.
I’ve been heartened to learn that virtually everybody is worried. We need to be.
But it’s also been discouraging to realize how many of us feel powerless to do anything about it.
My most recent conversation as a member of the task force steering committee was with a group of downtown landlords. They gave me one disturbing anecdote after another when asked about the problems they were experiencing.
One had recently seen a woman raped in an alley off Johnson Street, on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon. The woman was screaming as her attacker beat her with a hammer.
Police were called. The woman, who lived on the streets, refused to press charges, fearing “street justice” if word got out she’d brought charges against her attacker. End of story.
Other landlords chimed in with more disturbing tales - stories about installing yet another iron gate across yet another entry way, and of the relentless accumulation of discarded needles around their property.
Once blessedly rare events, hunting for needles and hosing down urine puddles are now just part of the daily routine for merchants on some blocks.
Prime commercial leasing space in a few critical areas is sitting empty for months - even years - because potential tenants don’t want to risk doing business amid the street problems, say the landlords.
They talked of parking lots where a car break-in is now virtually a given, and how the sight of sick, crazy people setting up camp on your building roof has grown so common that it’s lost its shock power.
And of course, they all had a story about some baffled, angry customer wondering what the hell was going on. It’s tough to sign up a new leaseholder for the empty building down the way when she has to step over used needles and a big splash of reeking urine just to view the place.
For those who don’t live, work or shop in the downtown, it probably all seems a little theoretical.
Indeed, that’s a major reason for the problem. With only a small percentage of the region’s population experiencing the misery, most people seem quite content to sit back and wait for the City of Victoria to sort things out. Their mayors and councils are more than happy to do the same.
But what we’re seeing in the downtown is the ugly face of 20-plus years of flawed decision-making at the provincial and federal level, with a little globalization and international drug trafficking thrown in. Victoria simply can’t set all of that right on its own.
We have a growing street problem in our urban centres because we unthinkingly created the conditions for an underclass. Blame a deadly combination of policy paralysis, social-welfare cuts and ideologically driven health-care “strategy,” and a world that changed too fast for some people to ever catch up.
Even if the City of Victoria could find the money to fix such massive challenges by itself, it doesn’t have the authority. Issues of health, social welfare, crime and child protection are all responsibilities of the provincial and federal governments.
Righting the many wrongs that have created the problems in the downtown won’t be easy, or fast. It will take significant amounts of planning, strategizing, innovation, political action and luck. It will require that we put aside political differences once and for all around social health, and embark on a well-considered strategy that spans at least the next decade.
A big job. But if everyone in this fractured region of ours would engage, it’s possible. Because as powerless as we tend to feel, the fact is that we have all the power we need to make a difference.
The mayor’s task force is an excellent beginning. The people sitting around that table are thinkers, movers and shakers - powerful folks in their own right. Put them in the same room with the people who know what’s happening on the front lines, and you’ve got a 360-degree view of the problems and all the knowledge you need to figure them out.
But the task force doesn’t have the money to fund whatever solutions are identified. Nor does it have the authority to override political stances - for instance, the federal government’s objection to a supervised site for street-level drug addicts to inject - or the ability to reshape provincial and federal policy.
Fortunately, we citizens have that power. Our political process is far from perfect, but it still responds well to pressure.
Money must be found. Flawed policy must be addressed. Sick people bouncing around our streets deserve to get the help they need, and landlords deserve to be spared bearing grim witness to violent rapes on otherwise sunny Saturdays in the region’s most popular shopping district.
Make it happen, people. We’re the only ones who can.

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Love the work. Hate the money-grubbing
July 6, 2007

Three years ago, I stepped into the unknown on the work front. I went from being a full-time newspaper columnist to the executive director of a grassroots social agency that helps sex workers.
It’s been hard, good work. But the time has come to pass the torch. PEERS Victoria will soon be in the hands of a new executive director, Chris Leischner, and I’m glad to feel in her the heart, energy and experience for the challenges ahead.
When I tell people I’m leaving PEERS, they generally assume it’s the problems of the people we help that has worn me out.
Yes, it’s fairly stressful to work with people struggling to keep it together. Their problems are ultimately the problems of PEERS if we’re the ones trying to help them figure things out.
But on all but the worst days, I didn’t mind any of that. The far more stressful aspect of the job was the constant need to look for money to do the work.
I hadn’t thought much about the nature of non-profit work before I took the job at PEERS in the summer of 2004. Believe me, it was a steep learning curve.
A non-profit agency shares much in common with private business.
Revenues and expenses. Marketing plans. Human-resource issues. Government regulation. We both grapple with customers and competitors, and better ways to maximize profit while minimizing cost.
But there are significant differences, too.
Joe’s Shoe Store, for instance, succeeds because Joe runs the kind of business that customers love. Once he’s figured out how to please customers, all is well.
The typical non-profit, however, is doing the equivalent of handing out free shoes to anyone who needs them. It can’t count on revenue from its customers, and instead must find another way to cover the cost of all those shoes.
My five previous years in management at the Times-Colonist stood me in good stead at PEERS. The basic management functions are the same.
The endless search for money, however - that was new. I just had no idea that the work of non-profit was funded so precariously.
I understand the dilemma. The taxpayers and donors whose funds fuel the work of non-profits dislike being tied up for the long term, and there are thousands of worthwhile, hungry agencies out there.
But the constant trolling for money is soul-destroying. And to then see people trapped in miserable circumstance because the services aren’t there - well, that gets pretty hard to take.
Non-profits aren’t the only ones living with uncertainty, of course. Back at the shoe shop, Joe may not know whether his store will be around next year any more than a non-profit knows whether its funding will continue.
Joe, however, has the option of trying to be the best darn shoe shop on the block. For a non-profit, doing good work doesn’t guarantee anything.
You could have plenty of satisfied customers walking through your door in the non-profit sector. But that’s not the same thing as having the money to help them.
I found that awfully discouraging.
What could be done about it? A shift to contracts, perhaps.
Whoever is putting up the money for social services deserves to know what they’re paying for, and what societal changes to expect at the end of the day. Contracts provide an opportunity to map out such goals.
More importantly for non-profits, contracts offer stability - five years, maybe even 10 in some distant dream world. For agencies that for the most part live year-to-year, that would be a wonderful thing.
Helping people to their feet is a slow, hard process. It takes time, and no amount of wishing that it were otherwise is going to change that. Oh, the hours I could have given to other PEERS pursuits had I had the luxury of relaxing even for a moment around whether the money for the work would continue to be there.
Granted, a stabilized non-profit sector would require putting an end to using social issues as political fodder. A 10-year contract could conceivably span two or even three governments.
Fortunately, nothing but good would come from moving social issues out of the political realm.
No government ever contemplates eliminating cancer services, or leaving people with broken bones to tough it out. Such matters are by and large beyond the scope of politics.
Extend the same courtesy to health issues like addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse and brain injury, and life will get a whole lot easier for non-profits and the people they serve. Meanwhile, the community would benefit from having problems dealt with rather than merely pushed from one neighbourhood to another.
But we’re a long way from anything like that, and it’s time for me to step aside before I get frustrated to the point of forgetting the many good parts of my time at PEERS.
I’ve loved the work, and will really miss the people. But looking for money all the time just kind of wears a person down.

Kieran King: My Kind of Canadian
June 29, 2007

Presumably there are people out there who agree that Saskatchewan teen Kieran King deserved a school suspension for daring to talk about marijuana. I’m not one of them.
In fact, I’m hoping the kid sues somebody over the whole misadventure, and wins. What happened to the 15-year-old boy was a flagrant abuse of power.
The news in brief: A Grade 10 student at Wawota Parkland School feels unconvinced after an anti-drug presentation at his school. He decides to do some research of his own before making up his mind.
He goes deep. His mom says King loves a good research project. The boy eventually reaches the conclusion that compared to both alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is less harmful.
He’s right, but let’s leave that debate for a moment. For now, let’s just focus on the actual series of events that then unfolded for Kieran King.
Having finished up his research, the teen tells a few friends what he’s learned. One complains to the principal that King is advocating marijuana use.
The principal tells him to keep a lid on it. She calls his mom and tells her that if King talks about marijuana again, “I’m calling the police.”
King organizes a small and peaceful protest outside the school in the name of free speech. True to her word, the principal calls the police.
RCMP and school counsellors gather soon after to do a “threat assessment” on the teenager, finding that he has talked about marijuana at least four or five times in the past. (He’s never actually used it however.)
King gets a three-day suspension that shuts him out of school just as final exams are beginning. That destroys his year-end marks, as he gets zero on the exams that the ban prevented him from writing.
You can imagine the lessons the teenager will likely take away from the whole sorry experience.
That it’s wrong to seek insight, for one, or to share new knowledge with others. That it’s wrong to question what you’re being told, even when you don’t feel convinced.
And of course, that it’s wrong to question authority.
That point is underlined nicely in this particular case by the fact that for no other reason than he organized a little free-speech protest, King ended up the subject of an RCMP “threat assessment.”
Anyone who cherishes the right to challenge prevailing wisdom without having the police called out to arrest them will recognize this turn of events for the truly alarming development that it is. Sure, it’s just one kid and a tiny school in Wawota that we’re talking about at the moment, but we can’t take any infringement lightly.
As for the subject being marijuana, that has barely a thing to do with anything. The subject that day could have been abortion, religious belief, euthanasia - any number of things we’re loath to acknowledge yet do all the time. The subject isn’t the point.
What matters is that Kieran King got curious. He looked into a subject more thoroughly, and along the way reached an informed conclusion that was different than what the school was telling him. He told a few classmates what he’d learned, and the response of one of them was to report him to the school authorities.
But even when you do factor in the subject, none of it makes sense.
Is talking about marijuana at school really something that warrants a three-day suspension?
And if marijuana’s on the no-speak list, what other subjects are considered taboo for students to raise? Who decides what’s on the list - and where can I get a copy?
Like any drug, marijuana has its downsides. And yes, it’s illegal, although King’s interest was confined to its potential health risks.
What he concluded at the end of his research was that marijuana use didn’t have as many health risks as did alcohol or tobacco use.
He’s got a fair amount of science on his side. No drug can be considered safe, but alcohol and tobacco are particularly damaging to people’s health. That doesn’t change just because they’re legal and other drugs aren’t.
King also has a lot of potential converts to his way of thinking. In B.C. alone, 1.8 million B.C. adults report having used marijuana at some point in their lives. A third of that group used it in the past year.
But for King’s sake, I hope people don’t get too caught up in turning his story into one about marijuana. We can’t be getting sidetracked with more marijuana debate when what’s actually on the line in the King case is a valued Canadian right.
King questioned what he heard. He was reluctant to just accept what he was being told. When his school tried to silence him because it didn’t like what he had to say, he didn’t go along with it. He fought back, because he knew it mattered.
Good on you, kid. That’s exactly what I like to see in a good Canadian.

Manitoba chief's blockade threats may be best strategy
June 22, 2007

Calls for a coast-to-coast railway blockade by aboriginal leader Terrance Nelson couldn’t be more un-Canadian.
We like things settled without conflict. We’re particularly loath to engage in it right out in the open, the way Nelson likes to do it.
The chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation says some outrageous things when he gets heated up about the grim struggles of Canada’s aboriginal population.
And he’s just about at the boiling point these days. The Assembly of First Nations is organizing a “day of action” next week for the nation’s aboriginals, and Nelson wants to see a blockade so big that Canada’s economy will still be reeling from the shock months from now.
“There’s only one way to deal with a white man. You either pick up a gun or you stand between him and his money,” Nelson most famously said a month ago in a media interview.
In a follow-up Globe and Mail profile this week, he reiterated his hope that aboriginals use the June 29 day of action as an opportunity to disrupt Canadian National railway shipments across the country.
On first blush, there’s no way to defend a guy like Nelson. What do racist comments and blockaded trains have to do with the problems of Canadian First Nations?
But viewed as a strategy, Nelson’s call to action is more understandable. And while the whole thing may seem just a little too angry for Canada’s tastes, in fact he’s got history on his side in advocating economic protest.
Maybe Nelson has even read Poor People’s Movements, the 1979 book that identified economic protest as one of the most important factors in determining whether anything actually changed for a particular sub-class fighting for its rights.
Authors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Coward looked at movements like American civil rights, welfare reform and workers’ rights. The issues are different again for Canada’s aboriginals, but they’ve certainly been stymied by many of the same things that got in the way of those earlier movements.
The Piven/Coward book found self-interest to be one of the most powerful motivators in prompting social change.
The “elite” who control society tend not to respond to the needs of poor people until their own interests are compromised. Economic disruptions get their attention.
Of course, a whole lot of other factors have to be in place as well. The authors documented the efforts of countless hard-working believers who played vital roles on the front lines of each of the movements.
The twists and turns of history also set the stage for change. The high unemployment rates of the Depression, for instance, primed the public to accept the need for benefits for unemployed workers.
So change isn’t only about applying economic pressure. Nelson needs a plan that’s far broader than a single day of railway blockades if he hopes to help aboriginals see a brighter day.
But I’d have to concur with him that it’s time to quit waiting for the nice people in charge to set things right.
As Nelson knows all too well, everything that goes wrong in this country goes wrong way more often for aboriginals.
They live in far greater poverty. They die at a much younger age, and endure challenging health problems more often. They drop out of school at alarming rates from Grade 8 on.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On any social front, from homelessness to addiction to foster care, aboriginals lead the downward curve. They’ve been leading it for as long as I can remember, and for several decades before that.
“Look, I’m 53,” Nelson told the Globe in defending his call for a blockade. “We have done everything we can to wake up Canada. . .”
I suspect it must be hard to get aboriginals mad enough to rise up, because I would have expected rioting in the streets by this point.
You need only think of smallpox, land appropriation, cultural extermination, residential schools, the Indian Act and our complete inability to negotiate a treaty to know that history has not unfolded particularly well for Canada’s aboriginals.
At 53, Nelson has lived long enough to see any number of grand promises to Canada’s aboriginals wilt on the vine. Money changes hands and great wads of it seem to be spent in pursuit of a solution, but it never seems to trickle down to the people who need it most.
Can you get to the bottom of a problem like that by orchestrating a 24-hour national railway blockade? Probably not.
In fact, Assembly of First Nations leader Phil Fontaine is already playing down any suggestion of genuine confrontation, and is instead promoting June 29 as a day for Canada to educate itself about aboriginal issues.
That’s a nice Canadian-style compromise. But people like Nelson have figured out what that actually means: Nothing will change. In terms of really getting Canadians’ attention, a day of education doesn’t hold a candle to a day of railway blockades.
Peaceful, dignified solutions - yes, I still hope for that. But sometimes protest is all you’ve got left.

Choosing death ought to be our right
June 15, 2007

With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death.
I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another.
But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that.
I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest.
People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions.
I can live with that. What scares me is imagining being in the same position as the 93-year-old Vernon woman who made the news this week after her doctor was convicted of trying to help her commit suicide.
The woman managed to secure a lethal dose of pills for herself. But staff at facility where she stayed found out before she could take the pills. They stopped her.
I think we’re supposed to be happy that her life was saved. Instead, I find myself nervous at the reminder of how tough it still is for people to die with dignity.
If it were up to me, I would have a death like in the Dutch movie Antonia’s Line - holding court with one loved one after another in a long and final farewell.
My dad’s oldest sister had a death very much like that. I still remember her resplendent in her white negligee, inviting each of us into her bedroom in her final weeks for a last warm word. It seemed a perfect death, if there could be such a thing.
But here we are eight years later, convicting a doctor for trying to help another tired old lady die sooner rather than later. And I realize how tenuous it all is.
I can strive to die like my aunt. But I could just as easily end up stuck someplace where nobody knows how important it is for me to have some control over my death, and end up living long enough to see my doctor convicted of trying to help me out.
The laws needn’t be sweeping. We don’t need to get into abortion, or any actions that might lead to people dying who aren’t ready to die.
But an old person grown too tired and sick to live anymore - that’s a different matter. There has to be a way to create laws that maintain respect for the right to life overall while making exceptions for personal choice at the end of life.
In some cases, there’s nothing wrong with choosing death over life. We accept that in theory. More than seven out of 10 of Canadians polled last week by Ipsos-Reid came out in support of the right to die.
In practice, it all depends.
If your type of death involves a great deal of pain, your chances of getting enough legal medication to kill you is more of a possibility. If you’re dying of less dramatic causes and without much pain, you could linger for years.
You can do things like living wills, or pieces like this one so that nobody ever thinks for a moment that you’d choose to be kept alive at any cost.
But what kind of a guarantee is that? Until Canadian law enshrines some mechanism that gives people the right to die under certain circumstances, even the best-laid plans can go awry. Next thing you know, they’re “saving” your life and trying to send your doctor to jail.
Ultimately, the problem seems to be that we can’t shake the feeling that nobody sane would ever choose to die. In fact, we all die. We deserve the chance to exercise at least a modicum of control over how it goes.
We had a heck of a time registering gun owners, and I imagine that endorsing the right to die could be even more paralysing. But we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.
Not when three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say they support the right to die. Not when doctors still risk criminal records for giving their patients a helping hand.
When time ran out for my mom’s old dog Jake, the vet came by the house and shot him up with something that sent him into a gentle, happy stupor, and then deep sleep. When it came to the final needle, he didn’t even notice.
It was a great way to go. I can only hope for the same.

Problems at BC Lottery bigger than Poleschuk
June 8, 2007

Vic Poleschuk had to go.
Somebody had to take the fall at the BC Lottery Corporation over the issue of whether a few retailers are cheating lottery customers out of their winnings. The president of the corporation is an obvious choice.
But we’d be naive to think that the problem ends there. If we’ve actually set up a government-run gambling industry that tolerates the cheating of customers, we’ve got a lot more to worry about than can ever be addressed by just firing the guy at the top.
Poleschuk has worked in upper reaches of BC Lottery Corp virtually since its inception in 1985, first as vice-president and then as president.
During his tenure, the lottery corporation presided over a 500 per cent rise in gambling revenues, to more than $2.5 billion a year. That’s pretty impressive from a business perspective.
But the gambling industry isn’t just another business. Poleschuk talked on many occasions about that very thing, and the need for lottery operations to be above reproach.
Before a government can “ normalize” gambling in the minds of its citizens, it must first convince doubters that yesterday’s sin is today’s legitimate revenue stream. That can be a tough sell.
In terms of gambling, a government has to convince people that the system is honest. You may not win after a night of government-sanctioned gambling, but the theory is that at least you can rest assured that you lost fair and square.
It’s an issue that the Canadian gambling industry has worked hard on. And so it should. It’s an industry that very readily lends itself to corruption.
Poleschuk - a lottery man ever since stepping out of the University of Manitoba back in 1978 - knew that keeping the trust of British Columbians was paramount. He wanted to see gambling “normalized” as a regular and acceptable activity, as did others at a national industry conference in Vancouver last year.
“Why do we have so much anti-gambling (sentiment) rather than focus on what we do and how we should support our customers?” asked Ontario Lottery chief Duncan Brown at the summit. “Until we can better frame that policy debate, we’re never going to be accepted in the same way as alcohol.”
A little disturbing, but probably true. The transformation of gambling’s image from sinful and bad to a fun thing for the whole family will be complete when gambling and alcohol are equally acceptable in our culture.
Given the ongoing challenges around gambling’s image, how did BC Lottery Corp. miss the signs that a handful of retailers might be cheating people out of their winnings? Whatever the answer, it’s much bigger than Vic Poleschuk.
B.C. Ombudsman Kim Carter dug deeper after lottery customers complained to her, and found a retailer who won more than $300,000 in small batches over five years. A second retailer won $10,000 annually for four consecutive years. Two others collected $8,000-plus for three out of four years.
Every penny might have been legitimately won, of course. The lottery corporation contends that a high win rate among its retailers merely reflects that they buy more tickets.
That’s undoubtedly true. Most retailers aren’t cheating anyone. Carter’s findings overall are heartening proof that the vast majority of lottery retailers are honest folks.
But the bigger problem identified in the ombudsman’s report is that there’s no way to say for sure.
Insubstantial to begin with, the various systems and processes the lottery corporation uses to prevent retailer fraud appear to be just plain missing in action.
For instance, customers are supposed to know to listen for a certain song whenever a winning ticket is presented to a retailer for verification. If you hear that song - You’re In the Money - I guess you’re supposed to challenge the clerk if he tries to tell you you’re not a winner.
I’d have my doubts about any security strategy that boils down to leaving it to customers to listen for a song. But it’s truly pointless when retailers merely have to turn off the sound of the computer to thwart the process.
Should customers grow suspicious of a retailer and complain to BC Lottery, the worst that can happen is a retailer no longer having the right to sell lottery products. No further investigations are done unless the customer can convince the police to do it. No word on how often police say yes.
Part of Poleschuk’s job was to see the inadequacies in such policies. In the wake of the current scandal, he had to be jettisoned as evidence of a corporation dedicated to maintaining system integrity and public trust.
But where was everybody else as the ? We have an entire branch of government devoted to gaming enforcement, and a billion-dollar-a-year need for its profits. If a problem as obvious as retailers being tempted to cheat slides under the radar, what else goes unnoticed?
Possibly nothing at all. But with an audit soon to come, now’s the time to be sure about that.

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care
June 1, 2007

I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was.
They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist.
On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process.
Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking.
We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to more people needing help.
Few documents provide more heartwrenching proof of that than this week’s release from Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-LaFond.
Written with provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, the report examined how B.C.’s kids in care are faring in school. Its grim findings answer a lot of questions about the roots of our growing social problems.
The study looked at 32,186 B.C. youngsters who had been in government care between 1997 and 2005. They were compared to 1.5 million other B.C. kids, to see what differences came up in terms of their education.
The differences are massive.
For starters, the high school dropout rate among kids in care is 79 per cent, versus 22 per cent for other students.
What do we know about a lack of education? Among other things, that it correlates with poorer health, lower income, more family problems and the likelihood of jail time.
People who drop out of high school are five times as likely as graduates to end up on income assistance, notes the study. They’re twice as likely to go to jail. Their physical health is poorer.
In other words, a high-school education goes a long way to predicting how the rest of your life turns out.
But the story gets worse for B.C.’s children in care. More than half of those in the study were designated “special needs,” compared to a scant 8.4 per cent of the other students. By age 16, fully three-quarters of boys in care were considered to have special needs.
Most of those special needs related to behaviour problems and mental illness. That was sharply different than other children in the study, who were most likely to be designated as having “special needs” because they were gifted.
The study found a disturbing pattern: Children in care came to kindergarten less prepared to learn, started falling behind the other students almost immediately, and continued stumbling until they finally dropped out.
True, children who need to be taken away from their families can be presumed to already have the deck stacked against them.
Indeed, even in kindergarten, these children were three times as likely as their peers to have poor physical health, language and cognitive barriers, and less social competence.
But the really sad story revealed by the report is that they stayed that way. They arrived at school already struggling, and never really caught up.
Many of those kids will nonetheless live out their lives in honest and hard-working fashion, because what happens in high school doesn’t tell the full story of a person’s life.
But no doubt some of those children from the early period of the study have already drifted to the streets by now. Bad things can happen to anyone, it’s true, but they’re way more likely to happen to a poor kid who starts out life disadvantaged and never does get his feet underneath him.
That must have always been so, of course. I have no definitive answers for why the disadvantages of today seem to have a far greater impact on a person’s life than seemed the case 50 years ago - when the dropout rates were far higher and social supports even less.
But whatever the reasons, things are different now. Proof of that is all around us. The way it used to be is no longer the way it is, nor will change happen just by wishing for it.
On the streets, we’ll begin the transformation when we recognize the problems for what they are and start building housing, more comprehensive supports and a disease-management plan for addiction.
But the future is in our schools. The problems of tomorrow will be avoided in large part by meeting kids’ needs today. We’ve just been given a sobering reminder of how far we still have to go.

Fraser Institute findings ought to worry us
May 25, 2007

The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day.
Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue.
Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools.
But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools.
In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did when tested in Grade 4 and again in Grade 7 on their reading and numeracy skills.
Once upon a time, the institute’s report didn’t tell you much more than the test scores. But the information now being gathered includes more detail, like the percentage of a school’s students who are categorized as special needs, or are learning English as a second language.
Not surprisingly, the Fraser Institute report reveals that higher numbers of students with those additional challenges generally correlates with a school’s poorer academic performance.
But not always, which is why the school-by-school analysis ought to be mandatory reading for every parent in the province.
What the figures show is that throughout the province, things are not going well in some of our schools.
Of the 154 Vancouver Island schools surveyed, very nearly half now have 20 per cent or more of their students performing below Ministry of Education expectations. At one Nanaimo school, the majority of students scored below expectations.
That ought to worry us.
Schools can be measured any number of ways, and tests aren’t even necessarily the best way. But the percentage of students performing below expectations in provincial tests is still a significant indicator of overall school performance.
If scores are low in B.C. because there are an abundance of young students needing special-needs support or help learning English as a second language (ESL), then more of that kind of support will be needed to fix the problem.
But those challenges alone don’t explain everything about why some Island schools do poorly.
At Nanaimo’s North Oyster school, for instance, some of the poor test performance can likely be attributed to having 23.6 per cent ESL students, let alone another 8.3 per cent with special needs. It’s the obvious explanation for why more than half of the North Oyster students are scoring below provincial expectations.
Except that at Torquay Elementary here in Victoria, the percentage of ESL students is 30 per cent, and 8.7 per cent of the students have special needs. Yet only three per cent of their students scored below expectations.
Why such a gap? I hope we would want to know. We need to know, if only for the sake of every little kid who’s trusting us to provide a useful education.
At 14 Island elementaries, at least 30 per cent of the students are performing below expectations. The problem seems particularly alarming in the Nanaimo school district, which has eight of those 14 schools.
The rates of ESL and special-needs students fluctuate dramatically at those poorly performing schools. The level of challenge is definitely a factor in overall school performance, but clearly not the only one.
In the Comox Valley, Cumberland Elementary has just 3.1 per cent ESL students, and 7.9 per cent special needs. Over at Glacier View Elementary, there are twice as many ESL students, and almost twice as many special-needs students.
But when it comes to student performance, Glacier View scores notably higher. Twenty per cent of its students scored below provincial expectations, compared to almost 33 per cent at the Cumberland school.
That’s not to suggest we leap to the conclusion that the problem is about teaching quality. Still, something’s obviously up. Whatever the reasons behind our schools’ failings, we need to take them very seriously. We need to know why they’re happening.
Statistics have to be handled with care, of course. It just might turn out that the real problem is the Grades 4 and 7 assessments themselves, or that the student populations being looked at for the study are too small to be translated into meaningful percentages.
But we owe it to B.C.’s kids to figure that out. Maintaining an effective public system means addressing the inexplicable differences in performance at our schools before the gaps grow any larger.
Visit www.fraserinstitute.ca/reportcards/index.asp?snav=rc for school-by-school results. And if it looks like your child’s school is struggling to meet standards, ask why.

Peace in a kayak
May 18, 2007

Being a woman of many enthusiasms, I was bound to stumble upon kayaking sooner or later.
I’d been curious about it for years. How can you grow up on an island without feeling the pull of being out on the water?
Boats had figured more prominently in my life in my younger years - the benefit of growing up in an era when Vancouver Island’s then-thriving logging and fishing industries put real money in people’s pockets.
But except for a canoe or two, it had never been me who’d owned those boats. Eventually there came a time when the only boating I was regularly experiencing was aboard a BC ferry, on a routine journey so familiar to me that it barely felt like being on the water at all.
Kayakers caught my eye throughout the Ferry Years, but I tended to write the sport off as something that would require more skill, knowledge and money than I was prepared to invest.
I guess they just looked so sleek and expert out there in their beautiful boats that I assumed I couldn’t easily become one of them.
Then came a sunny, warm weekend last September, when my partner and I finally acted on our much talked-about plans to rent kayaks for a couple hours. We launched into the Gorge with only the briefest of instructions around how to hold our paddles.
The love affair was on.
September turned out to be an ideal time to fall in love, what with it being the season of the sell-off in the world of rental kayaks. By the next weekend, we were the proud owners of two slightly used kayaks, paddles and life jackets, for less than $1,500 all in.
I’ve kayaked almost every weekend since then. It’s been a transforming experience.
My little plastic kayak is light enough for me to sling easily into the back of my pickup truck, and to lug from the parking lot to whatever small beach I’ve found for my launch.
I assumed initially that I’d put my kayaking on hold when the winter cold set in, but I never did.
It turns out there’s a miraculous invention known as the “pogey” - a big neoprene mitt that fits over your hand and paddle - that keeps your hands toasty no matter the weather. A half-decent waterproof jacket and pants take care of the rest.
As for gentle ocean waters for a beginner to learn on, a Capital Region kayaker couldn’t be more blessed.
The Gorge. Portage Inlet. The Inner Harbour. Esquimalt Harbour. Saanich Inlet. Esquimalt Lagoon. Sooke basin. With basic paddling knowledge and even a rudimentary understanding of tides and weather, there are easily a couple dozen two- or three-hour paddles in our region suitable for a beginner.
I’ve made some bad calls, mind you. One particularly cold December day in Portage Inlet, I got stuck on the wrong side of surface ice blocking my route home, and then trapped in the middle of it. (No rescue necessary - I managed to hack my way through.)
Another time, I found myself paddling feverishly but barely moving while fighting a strong current near Sooke Harbour, after what had already been an exhausting couple of hours in choppy water.
But a tubby little plastic kayak turns out to be quite a stable fellow. Coupled with my healthy fear of the power of the ocean, that has made for very few scary moments.
If ducks are your thing, kayaking in the winter is a bird bonanza. Having limited most of my previous boating to summer months, I’d had no idea of the vast varieties of ducks that winter in our waters.
With summer now approaching, the scene has changed: the ducks largely gone, but ospreys, eagles and hawks now everywhere. Seals and otters are common viewing fare on every trip.
Even if nature isn’t your thing, kayaking has other pleasures. For one, you can’t believe the spectacular, over-the-top waterfront homes going up around our region.
A paddle from Brentwood Bay to Patricia Bay one day this week left me agog at the massive new houses along that route. There’s a kayak-based real estate service just waiting to be discovered, because there’s no more appealing way to view a waterfront mansion than from the water.
On the night of the winter solstice, Dec. 21, my partner and I slipped our kayaks into the Gorge to look at Christmas lights. I could see that short trip developing into an annual event if we could figure out a way to lure more waterfront homeowners into lighting up for the season.
So if you’ve wondered even a little about whether you might like kayaking, make this the year to test your theory. Serenity is a rare commodity in these clamorous times, and for me to have found it so close at hand has been a most wonderful gift.
See you on the water.

Beware the spin
May 11, 2007

News flash: Vancouver’s safe-injection site causes more harm than good.
So says the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which last week reported “serious problems in the interpretation of findings” in a review of 10 studies about the site.
Research on the three-year-old site has to this point mostly been positive. Among other things, there’s been a drop in social disorder in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, an increase in the number of drug users wanting treatment, and successful interventions in 400-plus potentially fatal overdoses.
But prevention-network research director Colin Mangham contends the real picture is not nearly so rosy. He reviewed some of the studies and found that while they “give the impression the facility is successful. . . the research clearly shows a lack of progress, impact and success.”
Mangham’s findings were reported straight up by Canadian Press last week. They also made their way unchallenged into the on-line edition of Maclean’s magazine, CBC Radio, and some Canadian newspapers.
But as a number of intrepid bloggers have pointed out, the mainstream media outlets that took the CP story at its word did a disservice to anyone looking for all the facts.
A couple of rudimentary Google searches are all it takes to flush out some interesting details, as proven by the bloggers who looked a little deeper into the Mangham report.
Searching on the name of the group that wrote it, for instance, reveals that the organization is privately funded, abstinence-based, and headed by former Reform/Alliance MP Randy White. The vice-president of REAL Women Canada sits on the network’s board, as do representatives from a number of Christian groups.
Search on Mangham’s name and you’ll find that while he’s a genuine drug-policy researcher, his primary focus is abstinence.
His particular knowledge is around tobacco. Mangham runs the provincially funded Prevention Source BC, which aims to stop people from smoking.
Search on the name of the publication where Mangham’s report first ran, the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, and you’ll learn that it’s funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sitting on its editorial board are U.S. groups such as the Drug-Free Schools Coalition, the Drug Free America Foundation, and the National Drug Prevention Alliance.
The journal has published just two issues.
The first featured critiques of liberal marijuana policies. The second focused on harm-reduction programs like the safe-injection site, with headlines including “The Lure and Loss of Harm Reduction in UK Drug Policy and Practice,” and “Is it Harm Reduction or Harm Continuation?”
Nothing wrong with differing viewpoints on drug use and harm reduction, of course. A safe injection site is, after all, just a tiny piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing the harms of addiction.
Ultimately, the Manghams of the world want to prevent the many miseries caused by drugs. I can’t fault them for that.
But being able to weight the findings of those with something to say on this most vital issue is of critical importance. We can’t afford to keep on making wrong moves in our drug policy.
Health care. Justice. Human rights. Urban renewal. Personal safety. Child welfare. On all fronts, we’re feeling the impact of drug addiction. Add in the exponential effect of leaving a growing problem to fester unattended, and the future looks downright ugly.
So if we hope to do something about that, we need to be informed as never before. We need the facts, presented as often as possible without the spin of a special-interest group in the background.
We don’t need this forces-of-good/evil approach anymore when it comes to our drug policy. It’s not working. We need clear-eyed thinking and well-reasoned approaches, all of it based on proven, efficient strategies.
Hearing what people like Mangham have to say is part of that process. I’ve got no quarrel with some of his or Randy White’s thoughts on dealing with addiction, particularly around providing easy access to treatment for anyone who wants it.
But knowing how to weight the blizzard of “facts” we’re presented with on any given day requires knowing more about whose facts they are, and what’s the context.
So no problem with the mainstream media running a story about a literature review published in a fledgling anti-harm-reduction publication funded by U.S. anti-drug interests. Or that the author of the review is a long-time foe of harm-reduction strategies with the support of some of the most conservative groups in Canada.
But we really need to know all that going in. In this case, the bloggers made sure that we did. The mainstream media didn’t.
The lessons learned? Trust no one, me included. Verify your own facts. Know the sources of the information you’re using to form your opinion.
And in the interests of better Canadian drug policy, do it soon.

Don't tear down the Kinsol Trestle
May 5, 2007

People have been debating the future of the Kinsol Trestle for a year now. I admit to barely paying attention to a word of it.
I guess it just didn’t seem like something I needed to care about. But then my partner and I went to see the trestle for ourselves last Sunday.
It’s spectacular. Tearing it down would be a terrible thing. Count me an instant convert to the “save the Kinsol” movement.
Perhaps it’s a recent trip to Europe that has me thinking about the importance of preserving history.
Had our global ancestors been even a fraction as hasty as us in tearing down history, I’d have missed out on the amazing feeling of stepping into the past. Deep thanks to several millennia’s worth of taxpayers who have willingly borne the cost of history’s upkeep.
The pyramids of Mexico and Egypt. Greek ruins. Ancient churches. England’s Roman baths. Nothing you can read about them, or watch on television, can ever come close to experiencing them first-hand. There’s nothing like it.
Even the places where great ugliness has happened are spellbinding. They can be unbearably hard to look at - a concentration camp, the Ghanian slave prisons - but we need them to remind us of times when we did the unthinkable.
Like so many of the wonders of the world, the Kinsol Trestle is both marvel and tragedy.
The trestle is a beauty, and a wonderful reminder of B.C.’s past. On the day we visited, the tight little river valley that the trestle spans was sunny and inviting. We walked up and down, to see the trestle from all angles, and I could feel the tremendous vision and hard work that must have gone in to getting it built.
But men died building the massive structure. On that front, the trestle also serves as a reminder of the immense challenge it would have been in 1921 to build a structure so grand, high above the valley floor.
The trestle has been through a heck of a lot since being brought to life, the last 28 years of which have been quite ignominious. Abandoned by its former railway owners in 1979 and already in a state of disrepair, the trestle has been profoundly neglected in intervening years.
Its fate was sealed in a report last year that concluded it was too wrecked to fix. The province is planning to spend $1.5 million to tear it down, and another $1.6 million through the B.C. pathway program Local Motion to build a different bridge.
I’m no engineer, but even my untrained eye could see that parts of the trestle are in rough shape. I don’t know whether it’s realistic to restore it to working shape again.
But that doesn’t mean we have to tear it down. If it simply isn’t feasible to restore the Kinsol Trestle as a working pathway, then by all means, let’s build a different bridge.
But why does the trestle need to be torn down to accomplish that? We might just change our minds one day about a full restoration, or find other ways to fund the work. Why not repair the worst of the damage right now and leave the trestle standing?
New Democrat MLA John Horgan was quoted a year ago saying that getting across the river is “more important than preserving rotting timber.”
It needn’t be either/or. We can choose to get people across the river and preserve history at the same time. Building a new bridge for cyclists and pedestrians would, in fact, provide incomparable views of a preserved Kinsol Trestle.
And it might even save money. The Cowichan Valley Regional District figures it would cost $6.2 million to restore the existing trestle to working order, and $4.2 million if you started from scratch and built a two-thirds replica of the trestle instead.
We could save at least $1.5 million right off by not tearing the trestle down. Meanwhile, if the trestle remains in place where everyone can continue to gaze at it as they cross the valley on the new bridge, you can opt for a cheaper, functional bridge style rather than a costlier replica.
In the end, though, it isn’t really be about the money. It’s about respecting that a massive 86-year-old trestle is a sight to see, and living testimony to a time when B.C. had big trees, big dreams and endless amounts of crazy ambition. We owe a duty to the future to look after the legacies of the past.
Don’t take my word for it. Go see the trestle for yourself - it’s just past Shawnigan Lake, and easy to get to (www.kinsoltrestle.ca; click on “Map”).
The pictures don’t do it justice. Neither will a pile of rubble and a fancy new bridge marking the spot where the old trestle was torn down.

Change the system to get more women into politics
Apr. 27, 2007

So the debate around how to get more women into politics is back in the news again. I have to admit, it’s much harder to feel enthusiasm for the fight this time around, having already seen how the story ended last time.
I note that we’re currently at the point in the discussion where we’re trying to decide whether it’s worth it to infringe on the democratic election process in order to jump-start the number of women elected to government.
I remember the previous discussion well - what was it, 10 or 15 years ago now? Oh, we had a good go at it, to the point that the federal Liberals did eventually bypass the nomination process to hand-pick female candidates in a few ridings.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s a vital discussion to have.
After all, what could be more vital to fair and democratic governance than political representation that mirrored the mix of the Canadian population? I’d love it if our politicians looked more like us on all fronts.
But like I said, enough years have gone by since then that I know how the story ends - right back here, with all of us talking about the same issues like none of it ever happened.
Our typical pattern is to toss the issue around for a few years and then forget all about it. A brief flurry of activity pops up the rate of female candidacy for one election, but efforts aren’t sustained enough to create genuine change.
Theories abound as to why female politicians are so scarce in Canada, particularly at the federal level. Take your pick of opinions: That it’s because the electorate doesn’t vote for them; or the political parties don’t support them; or that they hate the life; or are preoccupied with child-rearing.
Likely there’s some truth in all of those. But I think the bigger problem is the political system itself. It’s not only built to thwart any attempts to change it, but fewer and fewer Canadians are paying attention to begin with. If we actually want change, that has to end.
So if our country truly wanted to get more women involved in politics, the first step in my mind would be electoral reform. As B.C. already knows from dabbling with the concept, there are any number of voting systems around the world that yield more gender diversity than ours.
Strategies like fixing nomination meetings can be another way of getting at the problem. But they’re short-term fixes, and justifiably controversial. Unless we still want to be fussing about this in 2020, maybe it would be better to strive for more fundamental changes - ones that would increase the odds for any number of underrepresented groups.
Somewhere out there is a democratic electoral system that’s just right for us. And here’s a bonus: We already know a heck of a lot about the options, thanks to the brilliant work of the citizens’ commission on electoral reform in 2004.
But time’s a-wasting. We can’t afford to fritter it away on tired old 15-year-old arguments as to the rights and wrongs of leveraging women into politics.
Do we need more women in politics? Absolutely.
Had there been more women in politics from the start, I’m guessing it never would have been legal in Canada for a husband to rape his wife. Instead, it took until 1984 to make that happen.
And women obviously wouldn’t have been shut out of the voting process in Canada’s early years if we’d actually been part of it in the beginning. We’d likely have assumed control over our own bodies much sooner.
Wage inequities? Wouldn’t have happened. Nurses being fired if they chose to marry? Nope. Decades of problems with sexual harassment in the workplace? Probably not.
In defence of the existing political process, those changes did eventually come about. Just because men rule the world doesn’t mean that everything turns out badly.
But each victory is pretty hollow when you consider that all we’re trying to do is catch up to men. We started at the bottom and think it’s heavenly to be halfway up, when what we ought to be doing is claiming our place as equals. Enough with this wishful thinking that such transformation is possible within our current political and voting processes.
Women could, of course, continue to try to slug it out with the boys. Take it like a man. Look at the inroads that gays and ethnic minorities made into politics in the last couple of decades - what’s stopping women?
Clearly, something is. Gays and minorities fought hard for their gains, but at least they saw some. Women are still lost in the trenches. Despite decades of effort, we still account for just 20 to 25 per cent of provincial and federal elected seats, and are even rarer in cabinet.
Maybe that really is a sign that the female sex isn’t compatible with the rigours of the Canadian political scene. So let’s change the scene.

Canadian sex workers deserve better
April 20, 2007

It’s no surprise that federal Justice minister Rob Nicholson is against decriminalizing prostitution. A party with Alliance roots just isn’t going to see its way clear to taking action on the issues of the sex trade.
But it’s still pretty galling to have to read Nicholson’s comments on the matter. Decriminalizing prostitution would lead to the exploitation of women, says Nicholson, and therefore can’t be tolerated.
Nice theory. But what he’s actually saying is that he upholds the status quo.
In other words, the tens of thousands of Canadian women and men who work in the sex trade will just have to figure a way out of it, because the government isn’t prepared to do a damn thing about their working conditions. The killings and disappearances of hundreds of sex workers will continue unabated, because nothing is going to change.
I just don’t get it. The sex trade exists because the men of our communities buy sex. There’s a demand, therefore there’s a supply. That’s how a free market works, as Nicholson well knows.
So even if Nicholson’s dream came true to end the steady flow of Canadians of all ages into the sex trade, not even 24 hours would go by before someone had hooked into a new supply of sex workers from some distant land where people needed money. Got to feed that demand.
The sex trade is on our streets, and in our newspapers, phone books and magazines. It’s on our televisions. It’s in our DVD players. Aside from drugs, sex is just about the most readily available service in any city - and on sale around the clock to boot.
Not only that, but it’s the one service that unites the world. Communist-controlled, dictatorship, capitalist, military-led, profoundly religious - whatever the form of government, sex is always for sale somewhere in the country.
Sex is also common tourist fare. I visited Cuba years ago and saw grandpas from Toronto and Montreal buying young girls for as litle as $5 US. More recently, I had the distinct displeasure during a trip to Prague of being seated for a restaurant meal next to three American sex tourists engaged in a loud and loathsome conversation about the night before. Here in Victoria, workers plan for the tourist season.
So what could possibly be our rationale for shutting out the workers?
Why is their workplace unregulated and without oversight? Why do we even have such a thing as outdoor sex workers? Why do the workers live in shame and profound stigma, judged at every juncture of their lives, while their buyers enjoy ease of service and complete anonymity?
And why do we carry on in this foolish charade about how we’re going to address prostitution in Canada by “focusing on reducing its prevalence?” Give me a break, Minister Nicholson. Just say it straight up: You’ve got no intention of doing anything about Canada’s sex trade.
Reducing the prevalence of prostitution is likely an impossible goal even in an ideal world unless all efforts were focused on reducing demand. But that goal is even farther out of reach in a time when governments are also slashing social supports on all fronts.
Children in particular drift into the sex trade because there’s no support system around them - in their home, at their school or in whatever recreational activities they might have been doing had they ever b een connected to them. Outdoor sex work is also primarily an issue of social disadvantage, along with whatever it is that sends men to prowl the streets for sex and violence.
Nicholson’s comments are particularly nervy given that his party has often led the charge around social-spending cuts. I’d sure like to hear his theories on how our country will reduce the prevalence of sex workers while actively priming the pump for more disadvantage.
And what the heck is wrong with the rest of us? There isn’t a single other mainstream service whose workers face the same kind of routine danger - all due to a lack of workplace regulation and oversight. With a workforce that’s at least 90 per cent female, it would be tough to find a more pressing women’s issue.
Yet time and again, the decades-old debate fizzles out with pious musings about the need to prevent exploitation and violence against women. And nothing changes.
We pay a terrible price on a number of fronts. Children continue to suffer in an industry that we completely ignore. Adult Canadians labour in profoundly unsafe conditions. Neighbourhoods break down under the wear and tear of hosting the local prostitution stroll.
I’m still fuming over the Canadian Labour Congress’s dismissal of this issue as one that its members are too “divided” on for the congress to take action. I would have thought workers’ rights trumped moral judgment. Who are we to judge how someone earns a living - especially when our own brothers, sons, friends and lovers are the buyers?
Our paralysis is tragic. Conditions are worsening, and all we do is continue to dither over whose ideology has it right. Unbearable.

Letter from Prague
April 13, 2007

His name is Alin. I’ll likely never know much more than that about him.
I had come to Prague on holiday, initially without much thought of seeing how the other side lives in that beautiful city. But having heard news of a refitted barge Prague was testing as a shelter for homeless people, I grew curious to see it for myself during my visit to the city last week.
My partner and I first spotted the barge while on a boat tour along the Vltava River, which winds through the centre of Prague.
It matched the photo from an on-line Czech story about the project that I’d asked our bemused hotel clerk to print out for me, and bore the same name: Hermes. Docked in the river below a massive metronome the city had installed to replace a statue of Stalin, I figured the barge wouldn’t be too hard to find again on foot.
The big ship had something of a foreboding look to it when I made my way there a couple days later, as did the man on deck who gestured at me to leave as I made my way down the gangplank. I retreated to the street, eventually spotting Alin as he approached the barge.
Wearing the demeanor and the faded tattoos of someone who’d had a hard life, he seemed like the kind of fellow who might know a thing or two about a barge for the homeless. Neither of us could speak each other’s language, but we managed to settle into something of a conversation.
I pointed to the barge and asked if he slept there. Yes, but he didn’t want the man who had scared me off to see that I was talking to him. Yes, he’d be happy to pose for a picture, but not here. We walked out of sight of the man who Alin nervously called the “chef.”
I asked Alin how many people slept aboard the barge, counting on my fingers to convey my meaning. He pulled out an alarm clock from his backpack and slowly pointed to one number and then another: 68.
I learned later that the barge can actually hold 250 men and women. It opened as a shelter in February, after city council spent the equivalent of $1.3 million to refit the ship, which once travelled the waters between Prague and Hamburg.
People like Alin can sleep there for 20 korunas a night - about $1. On a balmy spring night, with a vast park just a couple staircases away across the street, maybe that fee gets in the way of a full house.
Or maybe it has more to do with the non-stop clatter of the high-speed motorway running alongside the river where the Hermes docks, or the pounding jackhammers from the bridge being renovated directly above. Alin shrugs, and I take his meaning: Nothing wrong with a bed on the barge, but nothing particularly right about it, either.
In Prague, some 6,000 to 10,000 people live homeless, left behind these past 18 years during the city’s massive post-Communist transformation.
Unlike Victoria, Prague still has some bad parts of town where it can hide its growing number of lost souls, out of sight of the international tourists who now flood its vibrant streets by the thousands. Had I not gone looking for the barge, the only visible evidence of social ills would have been a handful of prostrate beggars in the city’s Old Town and the occasional staggering, stumbling street drunk outside a Metro station.
But flourishing economies in cities like Prague, Berlin and London are fuelling the same kind of phenomenal real-estate growth that our region has seen. With even the slummiest of neighbourhoods now facing development pressures, homelessness won’t be invisible anywhere for much longer. Europe alone has more than 2.7 million people living homeless.
Alin and I could talk of none of this, of course. Enthusiastic gestures and pointing only get you so far. So once we’d walked far enough to avoid being seen by the man on the barge, Alin cheerfully posed for a picture, then scratched his palm in a last gesture that I clearly understood: Money, please.
I dug out some korunas, the equivalent of $10 or so. In exchange, he loaded me up with goods from his backpack - stolen, I suppose - that he indicated were for my children and husband.
An electronic sudoku game. A package of modelling clay. A wooden bird with a broken tail. A child’s jacket. A whiskey flask, whisper of spirits still intact. The broken alarm clock he and I had employed in our communications. I resisted all of it, but saw quickly that he interpreted my refusal as an insult.
My own backpack now bulging, we said our goodbyes, and I headed back to the shops at the heart of the city. Alin’s gifts in my pack triggered the anti-shoplifting devices in every store I tried to go in.
An apologetic young Czech security guard at the Bata store finally asked to empty my bag, then repacked it without a word and sent me on my way.

Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change
April 6, 2007

The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly.
I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand.
But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust.
Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later.
Aboriginals failing in school. Children in government care. A better life for people with mental illness. An improved health-care system. A better way to help our kids learn. I’d be hard-pressed to tally all the major Canadian studies I’ve seen come and go in the last couple of decades.
A lot of them were powerful calls for transformation. I sat nodding my head in emphatic agreement through page after page of reports like B.C.’s royal commissions on health and education, or the marvelous Tom Gove report on reforming the way we look after children in care.
Hardly surprising, I suppose. The way to solve a problem is to understand every facet of it, and that’s exactly what royal commissions and other big reports set out to do.
But why do we so rarely take their advice?
One of our primary problems is an inability to focus long enough on an issue to get the job done. Big issues take big solutions, not teeny-tiny strategies mapped out a year at a time.
We also let political parties hijack the public agenda. We end up talking about what the parties feel like talking about, which leaves us lurching from one disjointed strategy to another in the artificial four-year cycle created by our election process.
It’s a disastrous approach when it comes to complex problems requiring patience, support and vision to solve.
One moment, we’re inching closer to finally getting a grip on the ridiculous way we deal with addiction. The next, Vancouver’s safe-injection site is being threatened with closure and Victoria’s main needle exchange is being run out of town.
One day, we’re wiping away tears over some poor little sod killed while in government care. The next, it’s 10 anguished years later and we’re still crying.
I wish I could tell myself I’m just aging into cynicism. But I’ve read the reports, and gone on to live in the brand new world that was supposedly going to result from them. And for the most part, not much changes.
Our national paralysis has us frozen up on some pretty frightening fronts.
By never following through on what our own reports and royal commissions have told us, we’ve actively created the kinds of deep-rooted problems that our country used to be proud not to have. We’re following countries like the U.S. into a mire of social problems and overflowing prisons, and class-based systems of care and schooling.
The worst of it is that we’re walking straight into it, undeterred by the living example of flawed social strategies unfolding in the country just south of us. Their reports have told them to do things differently as well, of course, for many years. But they haven’t, and it shows.
Even 20 years ago, could we have imagined a day when U.S. children would be walking through metal detectors to make sure they weren’t carrying guns? Or when poor, rural Midwesterners in states like Missouri and Iowa would be cited as one of the risk groups for high rates of crystal-methamphetamine use? Isn’t that enough to tell us there’s a high price to pay for getting this stuff wrong?
What it underlines for me is that change won’t come from the top down. Our governments may write a nice report, but the push has to start coming from the people if we ever want to see real change. Shuffling down to the polling booth once every four years just isn’t going to do it.
Where to start?
Pick an issue that’s really bugging you, and go learn something new about it. Track down the series of reports that were almost certainly written about it, and figure out a way to act on whatever part of the solution is within your grasp. Like the late Jerry Garcia tried to tell us, we’ve got to do more than just grumble that “somebody ought to do something about that.”
Sure, they ought to. But they aren’t. So it’s going to have to be us.

True tolerance much deeper than word choice
March 30, 2007

While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.

B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action
March 23, 2007

We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.

If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control
March 16, 2007

I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.

It all comes out in the wash
March 9, 2007

On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com



On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.