Put Langford 'vision' to work on homelessness
Sept. 12, 2008
Mayor Stew Young and his council have much to be proud of in the transformation of Langford over the years. They’ve helped create an attractive, well-serviced town out of a place that not so long ago was more likely to be the punch line of a bad trailer-trash joke.
Councillors, take a bow. Municipal staff, you too, because you’ve proven the worth of a fast and efficient civic bureaucracy that knows how to get things done.
But the greatest test of Langford’s visionary capability is still to come. As the City of Victoria can woefully attest, the gentrification of a community inevitably strips away its ability to hide its social problems. Once you’ve torn down the bad part of town, there’s no hiding anything anymore.
Can we anticipate that Langford will be ahead of the curve in dealing with those coming challenges, too? So far, the verdict is still very much out on that front.
On the one hand, Langford has established civic policy that has already led to the creation of 30 affordable new homes that are selling at half the market price. That’s a brilliant move.
On the other, the municipality appears to be walking into emerging street problems with the same tired strategies that have been tried to no avail in one Canadian city after another.
Those cities can attest through painful first experience that Langford’s attempts to crack down on urban “campers” and sue the family of some kid with a prolific graffiti record simply aren’t strategic actions in terms of preventing social decay.
We’ve got two decades of experience right here in B.C. as to what happens when you try to deal with social problems solely by getting tough. Short answer: You spend a lot of money to little effect, and your problems multiply exponentially in the meantime.
Leave the whole mess long enough, as has happened in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and you end up with a tragic wasteland where a lively downtown used to be. The situation isn’t quite so grim in downtown Victoria, but it’s still a pretty telling example of what can happen when a city gets things wrong around homelessness.
I would have thought a guy as clever as Stew Young would know that you can’t police social problems out of existence. Cities have been testing that strategy for well over two decades now. You only have to look at the significant rise in homelessness during that same period - at least tenfold in our region alone - for proof that the strategy doesn’t work.
The gentrification of a community is obviously a noble undertaking. Seedy crack shacks and a string of dilapidated rental properties aren’t anybody’s idea of pretty.
But with gentrification comes the razing of the last remnants of housing that poor people can still afford. Rough-looking streets of neglected duplexes and sagging houses give way to high-end condos and snazzy townhouses, with nary an impoverished renter in sight.
You can see where that practice inevitably leads, especially when nobody’s making any effort to replace the cheap and easy housing that’s being lost. Add in the damage done to the social-safety net by years of cuts and offloading at the provincial and federal level, and you’ve got the recipe for social mayhem.
What’s a municipality to do? First and foremost, see it coming and plan for it.
Countless U.S. cities have walked themselves into major street problems in decades past. Their well-documented failures stand as stark warning to modern-day communities hoping to avoid the same mistakes. OK, Langford is no New York City, but the determinants of homelessness are the same all over the world, and here’s simply no excuse for a community to stumble blindly into urban decay anymore.
I would have expected Langford to be watching and learning from Victoria as the mistakes piled up into an outright homeless crisis in the capital’s downtown. Stew Young needn’t look far afield for a reminder of what can happen when a city tries to deal with homelessness as an offence rather than a troubling social phenomenon.
Were I the undisputed king of Langford, I’d be working on having at least 10 permanently subsidized and supported units of housing built into every new development. I’d be trying to engage the town youth in something more fun than spray-painting other people’s property. I’d be out there with the same kind of innovation that Langford has shown on so many other fronts, building homes for the homeless without a minute wasted on chasing them from place to place.
Come on, Stew. You’re the man with the plan. Show us you know how to build a great community as well as a town.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Deli-meat sandwiches should be no-go for elderly patients
Sept. 5, 2008
So I’ve done my due diligence this week and read through several dozen news items, reports and public-health warnings about the listeriosis outbreak that’s killing Canadians. I’m afraid I have to fall back on that old cliché about being left with more questions than answers, particularly around why old, sick people are still being fed deli meats.
Like most of the bacteria that cause food poisoning, listeria monocytogenes is found everywhere: In our soil and water; in almost 40 species of mammals (including humans); in fish; crustaceans; ticks; sewage waste; sickrooms. Healthy farm animals and humans alike can harbour it quite comfortably with no symptoms.
For a healthy adult under age 50, a bout of listeriosis is unpleasant but generally manageable. Still, the overall fatality rate is 20 to 30 per cent. And for those whose health issues put them at greater risk, the fatality rate is 40 per cent or more.
Pregnant women and their fetuses have a 20-fold higher risk of developing listeriosis. Almost all of the victims in Canada’s only other major listeria outbreak 27 years ago were unborn and newborn babies. Fatality rates are extremely high for fetuses infected in the womb.
People with AIDS are 300 times more at risk of infection. Anyone with suppressed immune systems - whether from chemotherapy, chronic illness, alcoholism or old age - is at significantly higher risk.
The health recommendations for those high-risk groups have been clear for years: Those who are elderly, seriously ill or pregnant should avoid eating foods known to carry the risk of listeria contamination - particularly soft, unpasteurized cheeses and “non-dry” deli meats (sliced ham, roast beef, chicken and turkey, for instance, as opposed to dried meats like salami and pepperoni).
Personal details aren’t available yet on the 13 deaths so far in this latest outbreak, or on another 25 confirmed cases of illness. But it’s known that most of the fatalities so far involved elderly patients at hospitals and seniors’ care facilities.
They died from eating infected sandwich meats from a single Toronto meat-processing plant, which produces some of Canada’s most popular brands. What has yet to be ascertained is whether anyone in authority gave even a second thought to the wisdom of serving frail seniors food that isn’t recommended for them.
I get that we consume untold tonnes of deli meat in Canada every year without incident - $1.2 billion worth, in fact. I get that most people will spend a lifetime eating deli meats and never get listeriosis. Coleslaw was the culprit in the 1981 listeriosis outbreak in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that killed 18 people, so it’s not like it’s all about sandwich meats anyway.
But my research this week nonetheless turned up U.S. health warnings dating back 16 years that advised people in high-risk groups to avoid soft cheeses and deli meats that hadn’t been dried. Health Canada made a similar recommendation in 2005. BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital quit serving deli meats to its patients last year.
But the deli-meat sandwiches clearly never stopped coming in facilities serving old, sick people.
How does contamination happen? In the 1981 outbreak, the problem turned out to be a farm that used contaminated sheep manure on its cabbage patch. A small outbreak on Vancouver Island six years ago was traced to problems with decontamination measures at a Parksville plant making soft cheese with unpasteurized milk.
For the latest outbreak, we know the contamination occurred at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto, but are still waiting for the rest of the story. It will likely involve the waste of one animal or another, as that’s the primary way listeria is spread.
Health professionals are not of one mind around dealing with listeriosis. Canada records some 13 million cases of food poisoning of one kind or another every year, and the incidence of listeriosis remains blessedly rare. A nationwide ban of listeria-prone foods in all hospitals and care homes has perhaps seemed unnecessarily extreme.
But the world is changing. The sheer coast-to-coast, shelf-emptying scope of a modern-day food recall is proof of that, and the latest incident yet another telling example of the downside of a consolidated, mechanized, multi-national food industry that’s about as far from the farm gate as you can get.
Miraculously, most foods we eat will continue to be safe even so. Most of us will neither fall ill nor die from listeriosis. But if all it takes to save a few more lives is to switch the sandwich fixings in our care facilities, surely we can take that one small step.
Sept. 5, 2008
So I’ve done my due diligence this week and read through several dozen news items, reports and public-health warnings about the listeriosis outbreak that’s killing Canadians. I’m afraid I have to fall back on that old cliché about being left with more questions than answers, particularly around why old, sick people are still being fed deli meats.
Like most of the bacteria that cause food poisoning, listeria monocytogenes is found everywhere: In our soil and water; in almost 40 species of mammals (including humans); in fish; crustaceans; ticks; sewage waste; sickrooms. Healthy farm animals and humans alike can harbour it quite comfortably with no symptoms.
For a healthy adult under age 50, a bout of listeriosis is unpleasant but generally manageable. Still, the overall fatality rate is 20 to 30 per cent. And for those whose health issues put them at greater risk, the fatality rate is 40 per cent or more.
Pregnant women and their fetuses have a 20-fold higher risk of developing listeriosis. Almost all of the victims in Canada’s only other major listeria outbreak 27 years ago were unborn and newborn babies. Fatality rates are extremely high for fetuses infected in the womb.
People with AIDS are 300 times more at risk of infection. Anyone with suppressed immune systems - whether from chemotherapy, chronic illness, alcoholism or old age - is at significantly higher risk.
The health recommendations for those high-risk groups have been clear for years: Those who are elderly, seriously ill or pregnant should avoid eating foods known to carry the risk of listeria contamination - particularly soft, unpasteurized cheeses and “non-dry” deli meats (sliced ham, roast beef, chicken and turkey, for instance, as opposed to dried meats like salami and pepperoni).
Personal details aren’t available yet on the 13 deaths so far in this latest outbreak, or on another 25 confirmed cases of illness. But it’s known that most of the fatalities so far involved elderly patients at hospitals and seniors’ care facilities.
They died from eating infected sandwich meats from a single Toronto meat-processing plant, which produces some of Canada’s most popular brands. What has yet to be ascertained is whether anyone in authority gave even a second thought to the wisdom of serving frail seniors food that isn’t recommended for them.
I get that we consume untold tonnes of deli meat in Canada every year without incident - $1.2 billion worth, in fact. I get that most people will spend a lifetime eating deli meats and never get listeriosis. Coleslaw was the culprit in the 1981 listeriosis outbreak in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that killed 18 people, so it’s not like it’s all about sandwich meats anyway.
But my research this week nonetheless turned up U.S. health warnings dating back 16 years that advised people in high-risk groups to avoid soft cheeses and deli meats that hadn’t been dried. Health Canada made a similar recommendation in 2005. BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital quit serving deli meats to its patients last year.
But the deli-meat sandwiches clearly never stopped coming in facilities serving old, sick people.
How does contamination happen? In the 1981 outbreak, the problem turned out to be a farm that used contaminated sheep manure on its cabbage patch. A small outbreak on Vancouver Island six years ago was traced to problems with decontamination measures at a Parksville plant making soft cheese with unpasteurized milk.
For the latest outbreak, we know the contamination occurred at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto, but are still waiting for the rest of the story. It will likely involve the waste of one animal or another, as that’s the primary way listeria is spread.
Health professionals are not of one mind around dealing with listeriosis. Canada records some 13 million cases of food poisoning of one kind or another every year, and the incidence of listeriosis remains blessedly rare. A nationwide ban of listeria-prone foods in all hospitals and care homes has perhaps seemed unnecessarily extreme.
But the world is changing. The sheer coast-to-coast, shelf-emptying scope of a modern-day food recall is proof of that, and the latest incident yet another telling example of the downside of a consolidated, mechanized, multi-national food industry that’s about as far from the farm gate as you can get.
Miraculously, most foods we eat will continue to be safe even so. Most of us will neither fall ill nor die from listeriosis. But if all it takes to save a few more lives is to switch the sandwich fixings in our care facilities, surely we can take that one small step.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
VIHA's problems go much deeper than communications department
Aug. 29, 2008
It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff.
That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA.
I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time.
When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the tightly controlled direction of a former deputy health minister from Saskatchewan, Ken Fyke. Then came Capital Health (subsequently renamed Capital Health Region) to swallow GVHS and other community-based health services in the region, and finally VIHA to engulf everything health-related on the Island.
The GVHS was born from conflict, as local hospitals and their medical staff didn’t go willingly into a top-down amalgamation of regional hospital services. Lots of leaks and brown envelopes from disgruntled hospital staff came my way in those years, evidence of much mistrust in the system.
Is that bad beginning partly to blame for the “communication problems” that have stuck like burrs to every version of the health authority ever since? Tough to say, but I do know that bad communication by the local health authority dates back at least 19 years, and that no overhaul of the communications department is going to touch it.
What I know of health-authority communications staff from my dealings with them over the years is that they’re by and large skilled, professional people doing their best in trying circumstance.
I suspect the current batch know all about good communications. I bet there are times when they’re watching in quiet horror as VIHA walks head-on into yet another populist community uprising led by whatever vulnerable, underdog group is losing services. (Frail seniors, people with severe mental illness, children with disabilities, the sickest addicts - oh, it’s quite a list.)
But what’s a department to do if the bosses have a completely different take on what it means to communicate effectively? With a few notable exceptions (the Victoria Health Project, for instance), the standard communications strategy employed by local health authorities over the years boils down to this: “We dictate, you accept.” I’d like to meet the communications department that could do a bang-up job with a message like that.
A story by Cindy Harnett in this week’s TC gave me new insight into why VIHA so often misses the mark in its communications. In an interview about the pending audit of the communications department, VIHA president Howard Waldner described the closure of Cowichan Lodge as a “good news” story that went bad only because the issue was hijacked by special interest groups and political agendas.
Wow. Does he really believe that? Anyone with their head even partially out of the rabbit hole would have seen that one coming, especially when the lodge’s aging residents were initially given just two months’ notice instead of the one year required under B.C. law.
In VIHA’s defence, there’s no way to come out looking like the good guy when you’re the one ordering old, sick Grandpa to pack up for another move just when he’d finally settled in. But the health authority has a knack for making bad news just a little bit worse as a “communications event” - first by never telling communities what’s up until it’s too late, and then by being completely unprepared for the negative fallout.
There are better ways to do it. The first option, and the one I’d root for: Mitigate disaster from the outset by genuinely consulting with people before making major changes that will affect their lives forever. Adjust plans accordingly.
Option two: At least have the common sense to understand that autocratic, secretive decision-making is a recipe for communications problems. Have a plan for dealing with the backlash that goes beyond blaming special interest groups for raining on your parade. Thin-skinned, defensive responses that deflect blame elsewhere are just so yesterday.
As for your communications department, let ‘em live. You know what they say about shooting the messenger.
Aug. 29, 2008
It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, so let’s hope the Vancouver Island Health Authority rethinks its decision to lay the blame for bad communications on its long-suffering public relations staff.
That VIHA pays $1 million a year to communicate badly is certainly a problem. But if the health authority genuinely believes the root cause of that is due to the communication department not doing its job - well, that goes a long way to explaining why these kind of problems continue to dog VIHA.
I’ve been an observer of the local health scene for many years, having started my work at the Times Colonist in 1989 as the paper’s health reporter. I’ve never lost interest in the subject, or the ongoing communication problems that have plagued whatever entity was running regional health services at a particular point in time.
When I arrived here, the Greater Victoria Hospital Society was running things, under the tightly controlled direction of a former deputy health minister from Saskatchewan, Ken Fyke. Then came Capital Health (subsequently renamed Capital Health Region) to swallow GVHS and other community-based health services in the region, and finally VIHA to engulf everything health-related on the Island.
The GVHS was born from conflict, as local hospitals and their medical staff didn’t go willingly into a top-down amalgamation of regional hospital services. Lots of leaks and brown envelopes from disgruntled hospital staff came my way in those years, evidence of much mistrust in the system.
Is that bad beginning partly to blame for the “communication problems” that have stuck like burrs to every version of the health authority ever since? Tough to say, but I do know that bad communication by the local health authority dates back at least 19 years, and that no overhaul of the communications department is going to touch it.
What I know of health-authority communications staff from my dealings with them over the years is that they’re by and large skilled, professional people doing their best in trying circumstance.
I suspect the current batch know all about good communications. I bet there are times when they’re watching in quiet horror as VIHA walks head-on into yet another populist community uprising led by whatever vulnerable, underdog group is losing services. (Frail seniors, people with severe mental illness, children with disabilities, the sickest addicts - oh, it’s quite a list.)
But what’s a department to do if the bosses have a completely different take on what it means to communicate effectively? With a few notable exceptions (the Victoria Health Project, for instance), the standard communications strategy employed by local health authorities over the years boils down to this: “We dictate, you accept.” I’d like to meet the communications department that could do a bang-up job with a message like that.
A story by Cindy Harnett in this week’s TC gave me new insight into why VIHA so often misses the mark in its communications. In an interview about the pending audit of the communications department, VIHA president Howard Waldner described the closure of Cowichan Lodge as a “good news” story that went bad only because the issue was hijacked by special interest groups and political agendas.
Wow. Does he really believe that? Anyone with their head even partially out of the rabbit hole would have seen that one coming, especially when the lodge’s aging residents were initially given just two months’ notice instead of the one year required under B.C. law.
In VIHA’s defence, there’s no way to come out looking like the good guy when you’re the one ordering old, sick Grandpa to pack up for another move just when he’d finally settled in. But the health authority has a knack for making bad news just a little bit worse as a “communications event” - first by never telling communities what’s up until it’s too late, and then by being completely unprepared for the negative fallout.
There are better ways to do it. The first option, and the one I’d root for: Mitigate disaster from the outset by genuinely consulting with people before making major changes that will affect their lives forever. Adjust plans accordingly.
Option two: At least have the common sense to understand that autocratic, secretive decision-making is a recipe for communications problems. Have a plan for dealing with the backlash that goes beyond blaming special interest groups for raining on your parade. Thin-skinned, defensive responses that deflect blame elsewhere are just so yesterday.
As for your communications department, let ‘em live. You know what they say about shooting the messenger.
Monday, August 25, 2008
The secret "chill pill" for outrage: Grandkids
Aug. 22, 2008
Outrage is an opinion writer’s stock in trade. So at one level I’m grateful for having a deep vein of wide-ranging indignation inside me to mine as needed.
But just back from a holiday with the grandchildren, I’m also grateful for the things that allow me to let go for a while. Tending to the basic needs of young children is the best therapy I’ve found as a break from chronic outrage.
As any parent well knows, looking after young children is a full mind-body activity. I’m a superb multi-tasker in most areas of my life, but I can barely make it all the way through a single magazine article over the course of a long summer day if also charged with the care and feeding of three engaged and energetic little boys.
It’s a blessing that I didn’t appreciate the first time round, when I was a young woman fearful that my full-time life of raising children was turning me into the worst kind of bore.
In those days of endless skinned knees, playground visits and Kraft dinner lunches, I fantasized about having the time to think bigger thoughts. Now, I seek relief among my grandchildren from too much time spent doing that very thing, once again proving the old adage about grass looking greener from the other side.
We live in times that call for outrage, and I don’t much regret being born with lots of it at the ready for all the grand problems of the world. Still, I’m happy to have grown old enough to comprehend the world-changing potential of just looking out for the needs of young children, which obviously plays a key role anyway in the building of a better future.
When I’m in full grandmother mode - which is to say, returned temporarily to being a mother of young children, only with much more patience and sang-froid - I live happily in the moment. “Tomorrow” really means tomorrow, and the only thing about it that causes concern is how you’re going to keep the sandwiches cool enough to survive a hot couple hours at the beach.
Of course, even the best picnic lunch can never negate all of the woes of the world, particularly for a journalist couple who can’t resist buying at least the occasional newspaper in their grandparently travels.
So I won’t pretend we went indignation-free for the entire 10-day holiday. I won’t deny the occasional outburst over some bit of news that made its way to us (although not nearly so often as happens during our regular life, when we begin every morning with a coffee-and-newspaper routine that walks a fine line between beloved ritual and grim start to the day). Sad, bad and gloomy events continued to unfold around the globe regardless of whether we were on a road trip.
But the bad stuff just can’t take the same hold on you when you’re charged with looking after young children. Yes, things appear to be heating up worryingly between Russia and Georgia, but you’ve got three dripping popsicles to deal with right now and it’s just going to have to wait.
And should you manage against all odds to start into a rant anyway about some crazy development somewhere on this crazy planet, a young child will simply shut you down - either by falling headfirst from the monkey bars at that very moment or with a long, long anecdote about making it through to the sixth level of the new video game he’s trying to master.
Kids also knock the stuffing out of would-be outrage by cutting to the chase.
An example from this most recent trip: Having spotted one of those awful and arrogant “Best Place on Earth” licence plates that British Columbians have been saddled with, I was working up a head of steam on the subject when my five-year-old grandson interjected with a question. “Who’s second?” he asked. I couldn’t have made the point more effectively.
Re-entry into the workaday world is admittedly difficult after a holiday with the grandchildren. The descent is fierce and fast, usually starting with that first frightful peek into the e-mail inbox.
I’m always ready for the break from the rigours of full-time parenting when we get back, and curious to catch up on the news. But I still dread the first tingles of indignation returning (thanks, Tony Clements). I’d probably give the whole thing a miss if it weren’t for the fact that railing against the injustices of this world is another vital way we care for our grandchildren.
They give us the gift of living for today. I figure we owe it to them to worry about tomorrow.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Oldest profession much like any business
Aug. 8, 2008
The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand.
Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business.
The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country.
Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers.
The naysayers - and there were many of them - predicted the worst in the heated debate preceding legalization: Dramatic expansion of the industry; a flood of new “victims” forced into the work; a rise in trafficking and organized crime.
Fortunately, New Zealand academics had the foresight to launch thorough studies of the industry before and after changes to the laws. That virtually none of the dire predictions have come true five years on has done much to shift attitudes here about the industry. We’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone in our travels who has lingering concerns beyond the usual zoning and location issues.
“For the five-year anniversary, we had a little celebration in parliament and even the prime minister dropped in to congratulate us,” notes Catherine Healey, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective that played a pivotal role in the long battle for legal workplaces.
As you might expect, the most significant change since legalization has been for sex workers.
“Sex workers throughout the world can tell you how it feels to have to talk to the police when the work they’re doing is illegal,” says Healey. “They can tell you about that phone call from the school and the fear of losing their child because someone has found out what they do for a living. They live with the knowledge that they can be picked up by the police at any time.
“Since the changes in New Zealand, all of those feelings have started to dissipate. Sex workers now know they have rights, and that they’re not lawbreakers. They’re finally able to be honest about what they do.”
With everything about the industry now wide open, new regulations requiring “all reasonable effort” be taken to practise safe sex make it easier for workers to convince reluctant clients to use condoms. (One such client has already been prosecuted for refusing to do so.) Brothel managers can talk openly with workers about safe-sex practices rather than in the veiled and coded language previously used to guard against a new hire turning out to be an undercover police officer.
Workers are far more willing to go to police with concerns or with information about violent customers, a change particularly noticeable among those working the streets. One of Healey’s favourite stories of late is of the police officer who inadvertently blocked a street worker’s line of sight to potential customers when he pulled his car up one evening. Suddenly realizing his mistake, the officer apologized and moved the vehicle.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. A simple law change doesn’t eradicate every bad brothel owner or end exploitation.
Immigrant sex work remains illegal, an attempt to prevent cross-border trafficking that has instead trapped some workers in the shadows. Municipalities aren’t uniformally happy about having to govern the adult sex industry by the same rules as any other business, particularly around location. Abuse still occurs, and disadvantaged children remain at risk.
But what was bad about the industry was even worse when it was illegal, note sex workers. They now have the same rights as any other worker, including the ability to take a bad boss to court for sexual harassment or breach of contract. Like any other citizen, they’re finally able to turn to the police for help.
And with workers newly free to talk openly about their profession, they’re comparing notes more often and making different choices about where they work. The single biggest change with the legalization of the adult industry has been a shift away from brothels into small “solo” operations of three or four workers.
“It’s not like we’ve done away with all the problems,” acknowledges Healey. “But when it was illegal, the laws were always there to compound whatever problems a person already had.”
Aug. 8, 2008
The business of sex is surprisingly unsexy when you’re getting all you want, and our little film crew has certainly had its fill this past week in New Zealand.
Four of us are down here right now trolling through a few of the country’s brothels - legalized five year ago when New Zealand scrapped its Canadian-style laws against adult prostitution and started treating the industry like any other business.
The most immediate result of our travels will be a documentary next spring on Global TV. But what I’m hoping will be the ultimate outcome is the beginning of change in our own country.
Like Canada, New Zealand has long had an active sex industry and many, many brothels regardless of laws against them. The sale of sexual services has been legal here all along, as it is in Canada, so the 2003 changes were primarily about acknowledging the right to safe, fair workplaces for the country’s estimated 4,000 sex workers.
The naysayers - and there were many of them - predicted the worst in the heated debate preceding legalization: Dramatic expansion of the industry; a flood of new “victims” forced into the work; a rise in trafficking and organized crime.
Fortunately, New Zealand academics had the foresight to launch thorough studies of the industry before and after changes to the laws. That virtually none of the dire predictions have come true five years on has done much to shift attitudes here about the industry. We’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone in our travels who has lingering concerns beyond the usual zoning and location issues.
“For the five-year anniversary, we had a little celebration in parliament and even the prime minister dropped in to congratulate us,” notes Catherine Healey, a founder of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective that played a pivotal role in the long battle for legal workplaces.
As you might expect, the most significant change since legalization has been for sex workers.
“Sex workers throughout the world can tell you how it feels to have to talk to the police when the work they’re doing is illegal,” says Healey. “They can tell you about that phone call from the school and the fear of losing their child because someone has found out what they do for a living. They live with the knowledge that they can be picked up by the police at any time.
“Since the changes in New Zealand, all of those feelings have started to dissipate. Sex workers now know they have rights, and that they’re not lawbreakers. They’re finally able to be honest about what they do.”
With everything about the industry now wide open, new regulations requiring “all reasonable effort” be taken to practise safe sex make it easier for workers to convince reluctant clients to use condoms. (One such client has already been prosecuted for refusing to do so.) Brothel managers can talk openly with workers about safe-sex practices rather than in the veiled and coded language previously used to guard against a new hire turning out to be an undercover police officer.
Workers are far more willing to go to police with concerns or with information about violent customers, a change particularly noticeable among those working the streets. One of Healey’s favourite stories of late is of the police officer who inadvertently blocked a street worker’s line of sight to potential customers when he pulled his car up one evening. Suddenly realizing his mistake, the officer apologized and moved the vehicle.
It’s not all happiness and light, of course. A simple law change doesn’t eradicate every bad brothel owner or end exploitation.
Immigrant sex work remains illegal, an attempt to prevent cross-border trafficking that has instead trapped some workers in the shadows. Municipalities aren’t uniformally happy about having to govern the adult sex industry by the same rules as any other business, particularly around location. Abuse still occurs, and disadvantaged children remain at risk.
But what was bad about the industry was even worse when it was illegal, note sex workers. They now have the same rights as any other worker, including the ability to take a bad boss to court for sexual harassment or breach of contract. Like any other citizen, they’re finally able to turn to the police for help.
And with workers newly free to talk openly about their profession, they’re comparing notes more often and making different choices about where they work. The single biggest change with the legalization of the adult industry has been a shift away from brothels into small “solo” operations of three or four workers.
“It’s not like we’ve done away with all the problems,” acknowledges Healey. “But when it was illegal, the laws were always there to compound whatever problems a person already had.”
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Five years of fair treatment for sex workers in New Zealand
Aug. 1, 2008
As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself.
New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals.
Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen.
It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspects of consenting adult prostitution are now legal, while the “genuine harms” of prostitution have been separated out to be managed in different ways.
Like Canada, New Zealand’s laws up to that point made it a crime for an adult to solicit sex for money in a public place, keep or manage a brothel, or live on the earnings of sex work. Like us, the country tolerated a bustling sex industry while maintaining pretence of trying to eliminate it, trapping sex workers in a grey zone of quasi-legality. (Also like us, they had laws and policies prohibiting children from working in the industry and preventing exploitation and violence, and those laws have rightfully remained in place.)
If you’ve watched the creeping progress through government of any issue of significance, let alone one as controversial as this, you recognize how amazing it is that in just three years, New Zealand made it all the way to decriminalization. How did that happen?
That’s an important question for people like me, who want to be part of making something happen sooner rather than later on the same front here in Canada. Here’s how it unfolded in New Zealand:
Barnett had been a long-time advocate of sex workers’ rights, and it was his bill that ultimately got the attention of New Zealand’s House of Parliament. But many other organizations had been pressing for reform as well, including the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Council of Women, the national YWCA, and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.
Not all of the groups condoned prostitution. But they came together in recognition that continuing to pretend the industry didn’t exist was simply making things much worse for the people working in it.
Barnett’s bill was sent to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee for a hard look, and the committee drafted a four-stage process for reform.
• First, identify the risks from the activity. Coercion, sexually transmitted infections, and being trapped in the industry were all seen as examples of risk associated with prostitution.
• Next, identify which risks could realistically be dealt with by law, and which required public education, better community services, etc.
• Third, separate the risks that do need a special legal solution from those that could be covered by current law. Thus the issue of sex workers ages 16 to 18 was to be dealt with differently than the regular employment policies that would apply to adult sex workers.
• Lastly, create new prostitution law.
It all came to be, but not without considerable dissent. The law squeaked by in a vote of 60 to 59, ultimately helped along by a passionate speech to parliament from a fellow MP who was a former sex worker. “It is about accepting that which occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights,” Georgina Beyer told her peers.
Those opposing the law cited a number of concerns going into the reform: growth of the sex industry; more visibility of street prostitution; an increase in violence against sex workers; the spread of disease and organized crime; the exploitation of children.
Research before and after the new law took effect found that hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, the the newly regulated industry could now be brought to task for the first time around health and safety issues, workers’ rights and contractual obligations.
That’s not to suggest that everything problematic about the sex industry vanishes when you decriminalize. But if the worst didn’t happen when New Zealand sex workers were finally given the right to earn a living, what’s our excuse for continuing to do nothing?
As you read this, I’m somewhere in Auckland, in the midst of an intense few days immersed in the New Zealand sex industry. I want to learn, and there’s no better way to do that than to go see things for yourself.
New Zealand had laws very much like ours governing the sex industry up until 2003, when the country changed course and decriminalized prostitution. I figure it’ll be a great place to look for really current information on what happens when a country stops viewing its sex workers as criminals.
Thanks to a law student from the University of Victoria, Hillary Bullock, I’ve got a binder full of information on how New Zealand made the transition. She was looking for a class project and I was looking for exactly what she delivered, which was a detailed report on how that country made it happen.
It was a remarkably fast transition. Introduced in 2000 by Labour MP Tim Barnett, the Prostitution Reform Bill was passed into law just three years later. Most aspects of consenting adult prostitution are now legal, while the “genuine harms” of prostitution have been separated out to be managed in different ways.
Like Canada, New Zealand’s laws up to that point made it a crime for an adult to solicit sex for money in a public place, keep or manage a brothel, or live on the earnings of sex work. Like us, the country tolerated a bustling sex industry while maintaining pretence of trying to eliminate it, trapping sex workers in a grey zone of quasi-legality. (Also like us, they had laws and policies prohibiting children from working in the industry and preventing exploitation and violence, and those laws have rightfully remained in place.)
If you’ve watched the creeping progress through government of any issue of significance, let alone one as controversial as this, you recognize how amazing it is that in just three years, New Zealand made it all the way to decriminalization. How did that happen?
That’s an important question for people like me, who want to be part of making something happen sooner rather than later on the same front here in Canada. Here’s how it unfolded in New Zealand:
Barnett had been a long-time advocate of sex workers’ rights, and it was his bill that ultimately got the attention of New Zealand’s House of Parliament. But many other organizations had been pressing for reform as well, including the Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Council of Women, the national YWCA, and the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.
Not all of the groups condoned prostitution. But they came together in recognition that continuing to pretend the industry didn’t exist was simply making things much worse for the people working in it.
Barnett’s bill was sent to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee for a hard look, and the committee drafted a four-stage process for reform.
• First, identify the risks from the activity. Coercion, sexually transmitted infections, and being trapped in the industry were all seen as examples of risk associated with prostitution.
• Next, identify which risks could realistically be dealt with by law, and which required public education, better community services, etc.
• Third, separate the risks that do need a special legal solution from those that could be covered by current law. Thus the issue of sex workers ages 16 to 18 was to be dealt with differently than the regular employment policies that would apply to adult sex workers.
• Lastly, create new prostitution law.
It all came to be, but not without considerable dissent. The law squeaked by in a vote of 60 to 59, ultimately helped along by a passionate speech to parliament from a fellow MP who was a former sex worker. “It is about accepting that which occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights,” Georgina Beyer told her peers.
Those opposing the law cited a number of concerns going into the reform: growth of the sex industry; more visibility of street prostitution; an increase in violence against sex workers; the spread of disease and organized crime; the exploitation of children.
Research before and after the new law took effect found that hadn’t happened. Meanwhile, the the newly regulated industry could now be brought to task for the first time around health and safety issues, workers’ rights and contractual obligations.
That’s not to suggest that everything problematic about the sex industry vanishes when you decriminalize. But if the worst didn’t happen when New Zealand sex workers were finally given the right to earn a living, what’s our excuse for continuing to do nothing?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Lessons learned from the brothel project
July 25, 2008
It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life.
Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers.
As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair and friendly place to work.
Next thing you know, things were happening - at warp speed, of course, which I’ve learned is the standard operating speed for those working in the industry.
By June, the two young women had the licensing and business requirements in hand for a Victoria agency. By July, the Web site was up and eight independent workers had signed on give the new model a try. My head’s still spinning at how quickly things came together.
Like any fledgling business, it’s still very much a work in progress. The indoor sex industry has much in common with any industry, but some significant differences as well, including finding investors willing to put their money into an enterprise that at best can be categorized as “kind of legal.”
Developing workplace policy also isn’t as simple as just following standard business practice. As just a small for-instance, consider the delicacies of a workplace drug and alcohol policy when having a drink or two with a customer is often part of the job. Given the nature of the work, it’s a fine line as well that has to be walked to ensure that no worker ever feels exploited or forced to work, yet at the same time can be counted on to show up for her shifts.
Nor is our little business donating any profits yet, or firm on when the point will come when that’s financially possible. We’re not yet a brothel, either, as that really requires either buying a place or having an open-minded landlord in terms of maintaining the discretion required to operate in the land of the quasi-legal. Independent workers generally work out of their homes anyway, and that might work better with the coalition of independents with a centralized administrative core that’s taking shape.
I could fill a book with what I’ve learned about the sex industry in recent years, and in fact think I’ll do that one day soon. Perhaps the most surprising thing has been my own shift in thinking in the past decade - from a decidedly anti-industry position to someone helping to launch a new escort service. Much to my amazement, I’m even starting to understand why men buy sex.
I know I’ve baffled some people with my newfound embrace of the industry, a position that has cost me two friends in the past year alone due to irreconcilable differences in our opinions. I’m uncomfortable and sad to find myself pitted in the media against dedicated, caring feminists for whom I’m now the enemy. Sex work is almost as notable as abortion as a polarizing issue among people who thought they knew each other.
But at the same time, I cherish the memory of a former Catholic nun who took my hand and told me that if I was taking this brothel project on, then she had to presume it was worthy. I’ve been deeply touched by the support of people from all walks of life who, regardless of whether they like that the sex industry exists, share my view that as long as it does, we might as well try to make it as safe and healthy as possible for the tens of thousands of Canadian adults who work in it.
Lauren and I have had a documentary crew following us for a year now as we worked on our project (watch for us on Global TV’s Global Currents show sometime in the spring of 2009). We’re leaving Monday to tour the brothels of New Zealand with documentary director April Parry and the Force Four production crew to see how that country is coping since legalizing brothels five years ago.
Stay tuned for my updates from afar over the next couple Fridays. I’m counting on a very interesting experience.
July 25, 2008
It’s been close to a year since I started talking publicly about wanting to open a brothel. And let me tell you, it’s been one of the most fascinating and surprising years of my life.
Brothels and escort agencies flourish in our region and right across the country, so I and my good pal Lauren Casey weren’t breaking new ground on that front with our little plan to start an escort agency with a difference. Our aim was to develop a fair and benevolent workplace for adult sex workers that also donated a share of profits to services and supports for disadvantaged workers.
As you might expect of a volunteer project taken on by two very busy women, our plans poked along at a snail’s pace for months. But in the spring we quite accidentally connected with a human dynamo of a sex worker here in Victoria, who in turn connected us with a human dynamo of an entrepreneur with experience running a Vancouver escort agency noted for being a fair and friendly place to work.
Next thing you know, things were happening - at warp speed, of course, which I’ve learned is the standard operating speed for those working in the industry.
By June, the two young women had the licensing and business requirements in hand for a Victoria agency. By July, the Web site was up and eight independent workers had signed on give the new model a try. My head’s still spinning at how quickly things came together.
Like any fledgling business, it’s still very much a work in progress. The indoor sex industry has much in common with any industry, but some significant differences as well, including finding investors willing to put their money into an enterprise that at best can be categorized as “kind of legal.”
Developing workplace policy also isn’t as simple as just following standard business practice. As just a small for-instance, consider the delicacies of a workplace drug and alcohol policy when having a drink or two with a customer is often part of the job. Given the nature of the work, it’s a fine line as well that has to be walked to ensure that no worker ever feels exploited or forced to work, yet at the same time can be counted on to show up for her shifts.
Nor is our little business donating any profits yet, or firm on when the point will come when that’s financially possible. We’re not yet a brothel, either, as that really requires either buying a place or having an open-minded landlord in terms of maintaining the discretion required to operate in the land of the quasi-legal. Independent workers generally work out of their homes anyway, and that might work better with the coalition of independents with a centralized administrative core that’s taking shape.
I could fill a book with what I’ve learned about the sex industry in recent years, and in fact think I’ll do that one day soon. Perhaps the most surprising thing has been my own shift in thinking in the past decade - from a decidedly anti-industry position to someone helping to launch a new escort service. Much to my amazement, I’m even starting to understand why men buy sex.
I know I’ve baffled some people with my newfound embrace of the industry, a position that has cost me two friends in the past year alone due to irreconcilable differences in our opinions. I’m uncomfortable and sad to find myself pitted in the media against dedicated, caring feminists for whom I’m now the enemy. Sex work is almost as notable as abortion as a polarizing issue among people who thought they knew each other.
But at the same time, I cherish the memory of a former Catholic nun who took my hand and told me that if I was taking this brothel project on, then she had to presume it was worthy. I’ve been deeply touched by the support of people from all walks of life who, regardless of whether they like that the sex industry exists, share my view that as long as it does, we might as well try to make it as safe and healthy as possible for the tens of thousands of Canadian adults who work in it.
Lauren and I have had a documentary crew following us for a year now as we worked on our project (watch for us on Global TV’s Global Currents show sometime in the spring of 2009). We’re leaving Monday to tour the brothels of New Zealand with documentary director April Parry and the Force Four production crew to see how that country is coping since legalizing brothels five years ago.
Stay tuned for my updates from afar over the next couple Fridays. I’m counting on a very interesting experience.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Drunkenness at Music Fest puts teens at major risk
July 18, 2008
As always, I had a wonderful time at Courtenay’s Island Music Fest this past weekend, and I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken as criticism of what is truly a summer highlight for my family.
But holy moly, there was some out-of-control drinking going on up there.
There were kids drinking so hard that I suspect some of them were putting their lives at risk. They were falling-down, glassy-eyed, fumble-footed drunks. I can’t imagine the drunken coupling that went on in the teens’ sprawling, bottle-strewn campsites that wouldn’t have met the legal test of consent.
I like young people, and saw a whole lot of them at Music Fest who were there for all the right reasons and not just to drink themselves blotto in the campground. So I definitely wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I’m pointing the finger at young people in general - or even underage drinking. What actually disturbed me was not that some teens were drinking, but that they were drinking so heavily.
I saw one girl, maybe 15 or 16 years old, staggering around between the tents absolutely blasted, wearing an itsy, bitsy bikini and carrying a beer. It was 10 a.m. I couldn’t help but wonder at all the bad things that might have happened to her already.
One worried camper started bringing water to the drunken teens camped near his site, trying to help them stay hydrated as they sat drinking fearlessly for hour after hour in the hot sun.
The studies call it “binge drinking.” It’s defined as any single drinking session where you consume four or more alcoholic drinks (four for females, six for males). Not surprisingly, it’s the riskiest way to drink, and the most likely to lead to something bad happening.
Binge drinkers are five times more likely to have unprotected sex. They’re more likely to drive drunk - and cause accidents that kill people. They’re at significantly more risk of getting in trouble with police, and much more likely to get in fights. Gender matters: men are three to six times more likely than women to binge-drink.
Should a binge drinker develop hard-drinking habits that last - another known risk - he or she is looking at higher risk of more than 60 health conditions down the line: heart disease, brain damage, liver failure, cancer. Hard drinkers also risk chronic problems with sexual performance and fertility.
In other words, nothing good comes from binge-drinking. But the health stats still don’t really get at the issue that scares me most when I see kids drinking hard, which is how completely vulnerable they are at that moment to unforeseen events that could change the course of their life forever.
I drank to get drunk myself as a young teen, although I can’t recall ever being quite as blasted as some of the girls I saw last weekend. I’d put the age range of those drinking hardest at 14 to early 20s, but that’s not to say there weren’t a number of older festival-goers hammering it back as well.
Drinking is more or less sanctioned at the festival, what with a beer garden on site and a liberal alcohol policy in the campsite. Perhaps that’s something organizers will want to reflect on.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you have to, and it’s that point that requires the most thought going forward.
More than a fifth of British Columbians are occasional binge-drinkers. In terms of consumption - which is rising - Vancouver Island is second only to the Interior as the B.C. region that drinks the most. In Europe, where binge-drinking is a growing concern, a 2006 study found that 80 million Europeans were drinking at harmful levels once a week or more.
Hopefully we all know the drill on alcohol: That it slows the functions of the central nervous system; affects parts of the brain that control emotion, movement, balance, judgment and impulse; lowers people’s pain thresholds; fogs all five senses. If you’re pregnant, it wreaks havoc on the developing fetus. Too much of it and you’re dead, as a group of California teens were reminded in March when a 16-year-old pal drank herself to death at their party.
The message: Don’t binge-drink, both for your sake and for that of whatever young kid is noticing how you knock them back and concluding that’s the way it’s done.
And one for the parents: What the heck are you doing blithely dropping off young teens at the festival campground for three days as if somebody’s looking out for them? Teens need their parents to help them learn when to draw the line.
July 18, 2008
As always, I had a wonderful time at Courtenay’s Island Music Fest this past weekend, and I don’t want what I’m about to say to be taken as criticism of what is truly a summer highlight for my family.
But holy moly, there was some out-of-control drinking going on up there.
There were kids drinking so hard that I suspect some of them were putting their lives at risk. They were falling-down, glassy-eyed, fumble-footed drunks. I can’t imagine the drunken coupling that went on in the teens’ sprawling, bottle-strewn campsites that wouldn’t have met the legal test of consent.
I like young people, and saw a whole lot of them at Music Fest who were there for all the right reasons and not just to drink themselves blotto in the campground. So I definitely wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I’m pointing the finger at young people in general - or even underage drinking. What actually disturbed me was not that some teens were drinking, but that they were drinking so heavily.
I saw one girl, maybe 15 or 16 years old, staggering around between the tents absolutely blasted, wearing an itsy, bitsy bikini and carrying a beer. It was 10 a.m. I couldn’t help but wonder at all the bad things that might have happened to her already.
One worried camper started bringing water to the drunken teens camped near his site, trying to help them stay hydrated as they sat drinking fearlessly for hour after hour in the hot sun.
The studies call it “binge drinking.” It’s defined as any single drinking session where you consume four or more alcoholic drinks (four for females, six for males). Not surprisingly, it’s the riskiest way to drink, and the most likely to lead to something bad happening.
Binge drinkers are five times more likely to have unprotected sex. They’re more likely to drive drunk - and cause accidents that kill people. They’re at significantly more risk of getting in trouble with police, and much more likely to get in fights. Gender matters: men are three to six times more likely than women to binge-drink.
Should a binge drinker develop hard-drinking habits that last - another known risk - he or she is looking at higher risk of more than 60 health conditions down the line: heart disease, brain damage, liver failure, cancer. Hard drinkers also risk chronic problems with sexual performance and fertility.
In other words, nothing good comes from binge-drinking. But the health stats still don’t really get at the issue that scares me most when I see kids drinking hard, which is how completely vulnerable they are at that moment to unforeseen events that could change the course of their life forever.
I drank to get drunk myself as a young teen, although I can’t recall ever being quite as blasted as some of the girls I saw last weekend. I’d put the age range of those drinking hardest at 14 to early 20s, but that’s not to say there weren’t a number of older festival-goers hammering it back as well.
Drinking is more or less sanctioned at the festival, what with a beer garden on site and a liberal alcohol policy in the campsite. Perhaps that’s something organizers will want to reflect on.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you have to, and it’s that point that requires the most thought going forward.
More than a fifth of British Columbians are occasional binge-drinkers. In terms of consumption - which is rising - Vancouver Island is second only to the Interior as the B.C. region that drinks the most. In Europe, where binge-drinking is a growing concern, a 2006 study found that 80 million Europeans were drinking at harmful levels once a week or more.
Hopefully we all know the drill on alcohol: That it slows the functions of the central nervous system; affects parts of the brain that control emotion, movement, balance, judgment and impulse; lowers people’s pain thresholds; fogs all five senses. If you’re pregnant, it wreaks havoc on the developing fetus. Too much of it and you’re dead, as a group of California teens were reminded in March when a 16-year-old pal drank herself to death at their party.
The message: Don’t binge-drink, both for your sake and for that of whatever young kid is noticing how you knock them back and concluding that’s the way it’s done.
And one for the parents: What the heck are you doing blithely dropping off young teens at the festival campground for three days as if somebody’s looking out for them? Teens need their parents to help them learn when to draw the line.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Traumatic brain injury a common and life-altering experience
July 11, 2008
One hard fall is all it takes. One punch. One smashup. One bolt out of the blue - a stroke, a case of meningitis.
The official name for what results is “traumatic brain injury,” but that little label barely touches on what it means to have to live with one. Life will never be the same for those whose brains sustain a severe injury. People sometimes feel so dramatically altered that they come to consider the date of their injury as their new birthday.
For Victoria man Des Christie, the injury was from a car accident at the age of 14. For the other 10,000 to 14,000 British Columbians who incur a traumatic brain injury in any given year, it might be a workplace accident, fall around the home, sports injury, medical problem, or any number of weird and unpredictable twists of fate.
“In this organization alone, we’ve got a staff member, my younger brother, another staff member’s daughter and another staff member’s husband - all of them with an acquired brain injury,” says Cridge Centre CEO Shelley Morris. “It’s much more common than people realize.”
The Cridge - more commonly known for its work with children and seniors - operates the region’s sole group home for people with traumatic brain injury. It’s for men only, but then again, men are twice as likely to experience a brain injury. The most common cause is a car accident, and the most common victim is a young man between the age of 19 and 25 injured while taking part in a risky activity.
McDonald House provides housing for 10 men. Christie has been living there for 14 years, but first had to put in a hard and trouble-ridden 22 years trying to make it on his own before finding a place that understood his challenges. Geoff Sing, the Cridge’s manager of brain-injury services and a brain-injury survivor himself, figures he could easily fill “three more McDonald Houses” if the resources were there.
One of the many little cruelties of brain injury is that it’s frequently invisible. The person looks unchanged to outward appearances, but no longer acts the same. They might not be able to hold their emotions in check. They’ll have memory problems. They tire much more easily. They may have suffered a permanent loss of motor control and brain function, and are unable to keep work or sustain a happy family life.
“The divorce rates after a brain injury are 85 per cent,” notes Sing.
Anecdotally, traumatic brain injury is presumed to be a major contributor to problems on Victoria’s streets. For some, the brain injury came first and resulted in a fall to the streets. For others, the street came first and the brain injury followed. Beatings, accidents and drug-induced disasters are daily possibilities for many of those on the streets, and injury rates overall are high.
The Cridge Centre wants to get a survey off the ground in the next few months to ascertain the level of brain injury on the street in a more formal fashion, in hopes of making a case for more resources.
“If we can get some specific numbers in the homeless community, my hope is that it will arm us - and the Vancouver Island Health Authority - with what we need to put more money into this,” says Morris. “I think it would be staggering to see the stats on this.”
As with any chronic and complex health condition, what’s needed for those with traumatic brain injury is a continuum of services. People typically start out in an acute-care hospital after their injury, then transfer to a rehabilitative facility. But what happens after that - or along the way - varies wildly. Without advocacy and support, life gets dicey quickly for those with brain injuries, and problems pile up fast.
Real work for real wages figures prominently in maintaining quality of life for those with a brain injury, says Morris. For the past two years, the Cridge has partnered with Camosun College to provide work training and on-the-job support for 36 people; Thrifty Foods, Carmanah Technologies and Rogers Chocolates are among the employers hiring from the program.
It’s not about lowering standards to suit people with brain injuries, stresses Sing, but rather about building flexibility and training into the work. Christie hadn’t worked for years before landing a job at Carmanah through the program, and is delighted with the boost to his disability income and his self-esteem: “I feel happier when I’m working. Otherwise, I just feel useless.”
Like the saying goes, it’s not exactly rocket science. “We want to grow residential housing and a job for people,” says Morris. “Can it get any more basic than that?”
July 11, 2008
One hard fall is all it takes. One punch. One smashup. One bolt out of the blue - a stroke, a case of meningitis.
The official name for what results is “traumatic brain injury,” but that little label barely touches on what it means to have to live with one. Life will never be the same for those whose brains sustain a severe injury. People sometimes feel so dramatically altered that they come to consider the date of their injury as their new birthday.
For Victoria man Des Christie, the injury was from a car accident at the age of 14. For the other 10,000 to 14,000 British Columbians who incur a traumatic brain injury in any given year, it might be a workplace accident, fall around the home, sports injury, medical problem, or any number of weird and unpredictable twists of fate.
“In this organization alone, we’ve got a staff member, my younger brother, another staff member’s daughter and another staff member’s husband - all of them with an acquired brain injury,” says Cridge Centre CEO Shelley Morris. “It’s much more common than people realize.”
The Cridge - more commonly known for its work with children and seniors - operates the region’s sole group home for people with traumatic brain injury. It’s for men only, but then again, men are twice as likely to experience a brain injury. The most common cause is a car accident, and the most common victim is a young man between the age of 19 and 25 injured while taking part in a risky activity.
McDonald House provides housing for 10 men. Christie has been living there for 14 years, but first had to put in a hard and trouble-ridden 22 years trying to make it on his own before finding a place that understood his challenges. Geoff Sing, the Cridge’s manager of brain-injury services and a brain-injury survivor himself, figures he could easily fill “three more McDonald Houses” if the resources were there.
One of the many little cruelties of brain injury is that it’s frequently invisible. The person looks unchanged to outward appearances, but no longer acts the same. They might not be able to hold their emotions in check. They’ll have memory problems. They tire much more easily. They may have suffered a permanent loss of motor control and brain function, and are unable to keep work or sustain a happy family life.
“The divorce rates after a brain injury are 85 per cent,” notes Sing.
Anecdotally, traumatic brain injury is presumed to be a major contributor to problems on Victoria’s streets. For some, the brain injury came first and resulted in a fall to the streets. For others, the street came first and the brain injury followed. Beatings, accidents and drug-induced disasters are daily possibilities for many of those on the streets, and injury rates overall are high.
The Cridge Centre wants to get a survey off the ground in the next few months to ascertain the level of brain injury on the street in a more formal fashion, in hopes of making a case for more resources.
“If we can get some specific numbers in the homeless community, my hope is that it will arm us - and the Vancouver Island Health Authority - with what we need to put more money into this,” says Morris. “I think it would be staggering to see the stats on this.”
As with any chronic and complex health condition, what’s needed for those with traumatic brain injury is a continuum of services. People typically start out in an acute-care hospital after their injury, then transfer to a rehabilitative facility. But what happens after that - or along the way - varies wildly. Without advocacy and support, life gets dicey quickly for those with brain injuries, and problems pile up fast.
Real work for real wages figures prominently in maintaining quality of life for those with a brain injury, says Morris. For the past two years, the Cridge has partnered with Camosun College to provide work training and on-the-job support for 36 people; Thrifty Foods, Carmanah Technologies and Rogers Chocolates are among the employers hiring from the program.
It’s not about lowering standards to suit people with brain injuries, stresses Sing, but rather about building flexibility and training into the work. Christie hadn’t worked for years before landing a job at Carmanah through the program, and is delighted with the boost to his disability income and his self-esteem: “I feel happier when I’m working. Otherwise, I just feel useless.”
Like the saying goes, it’s not exactly rocket science. “We want to grow residential housing and a job for people,” says Morris. “Can it get any more basic than that?”
Monday, July 07, 2008
Little things mean a lot in halting a fall
July 4, 2008
Everybody stumbles in their life. Most of us will bounce through any number of ups and downs over the course of a lifetime, some of it the result of bad choices and a lot of it for no obvious explanation other than bad luck and lousy circumstance.
I suspect that’s why I’ve got a thing for issues like homelessness. I’ve seen my share of bad luck and lousy circumstance - nothing on a grand scale, but enough to help me see from an early age that life can hold some rough surprises. As the late John Lennon so eloquently penned, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
Fortunately, every object nudged over the brink of the abyss is not destined to plunge non-stop to the bottom. Any number of things along the way can break the fall. The researchers call them “protective factors,” but what they ultimately come down to is having people in your life to catch you before you fall any farther.
It’s a role that family is intended to play, and certainly did in my life. But what if they don’t - or won’t? That’s where community service agencies shine as a kind of substitute family, breaking people’s falls with any number of small interventions before they plunge any further.
Consider the potentially disastrous fall of a young man named Jason, a 30-year-old dad who got injured on the job. Partway through his claim, he had his compensation cut in half to $400 a month, and suddenly found himself unable to make the rent. Poised to get joint-custody rights of his two-year-old son, Jason faced losing it all if he lost his housing.
Enter the Burnside-Gorge Community Association, one of a number of family-serving agencies in the region that play a vital role in catching people on the way down.
In Jason’s case, they gave him a crisis grant for the balance of April’s rent and walked him through all the papers needed for subsidized housing. Then they got him a place he could actually afford in just a week. They gave him a $2 lunch whenever he felt like dropping by. And in no time flat, Jason got things together again.
“If I’d have lost my house, I’d have lost my son - and I’d just gotten him back,” says Jason, who describes his Burnside-Gorge outreach worker as “a little angel on my shoulder through the whole thing.”
For a former Hamilton woman, the descent began with a cancer scare and the growing needs of her two children. The woman - we’ll call her Charlotte - was worried about her health and exhausted from being a single, working parent of two special-needs children. She figured she’d wrap up her seven years in Victoria and return to Hamilton to get more family support, including from the children’s father.
Things didn’t work out. The children hated their school, and were routinely teased and bullied. The family was unprepared for the behavioural problems in Charlotte’s children.
But she had spent every last dime of her savings getting to Hamilton, and couldn’t afford a second cross-country move to get back to Victoria. For 18 months, she and her kids toughed it out in Ontario. Then she and her ex-husband struck a deal: She’d return to Victoria, stay with a friend, and then put in four months at whatever job she could find to get back on her feet. He’d keep the kids in Hamilton until then.
Three weeks after her return to Victoria, however, her ex had given up and the children were back with Charlotte. Sharing a tiny basement suite with a friend up to that point, Charlotte and her children suddenly had nowhere to live. The three of them ended up spending a month in a Victoria transition house, with no clear plans for where they’d go after that.
Enter Burnside-Gorge once more, this time with a damage deposit for a rental house for Charlotte and the kids. She’d gotten her old job back by then and had money to cover the rent, but wouldn’t have been able to get the place without that damage deposit.
“I really didn’t know how I was going to come up with it,” says Charlotte. “Getting the damage deposit was a real turning point for me. I had no idea the Burnside-Gorge program even existed before that. Now that the kids and I are in a more stable situation, I want to find a way to give back.”
Score two for little miracles.
July 4, 2008
Everybody stumbles in their life. Most of us will bounce through any number of ups and downs over the course of a lifetime, some of it the result of bad choices and a lot of it for no obvious explanation other than bad luck and lousy circumstance.
I suspect that’s why I’ve got a thing for issues like homelessness. I’ve seen my share of bad luck and lousy circumstance - nothing on a grand scale, but enough to help me see from an early age that life can hold some rough surprises. As the late John Lennon so eloquently penned, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
Fortunately, every object nudged over the brink of the abyss is not destined to plunge non-stop to the bottom. Any number of things along the way can break the fall. The researchers call them “protective factors,” but what they ultimately come down to is having people in your life to catch you before you fall any farther.
It’s a role that family is intended to play, and certainly did in my life. But what if they don’t - or won’t? That’s where community service agencies shine as a kind of substitute family, breaking people’s falls with any number of small interventions before they plunge any further.
Consider the potentially disastrous fall of a young man named Jason, a 30-year-old dad who got injured on the job. Partway through his claim, he had his compensation cut in half to $400 a month, and suddenly found himself unable to make the rent. Poised to get joint-custody rights of his two-year-old son, Jason faced losing it all if he lost his housing.
Enter the Burnside-Gorge Community Association, one of a number of family-serving agencies in the region that play a vital role in catching people on the way down.
In Jason’s case, they gave him a crisis grant for the balance of April’s rent and walked him through all the papers needed for subsidized housing. Then they got him a place he could actually afford in just a week. They gave him a $2 lunch whenever he felt like dropping by. And in no time flat, Jason got things together again.
“If I’d have lost my house, I’d have lost my son - and I’d just gotten him back,” says Jason, who describes his Burnside-Gorge outreach worker as “a little angel on my shoulder through the whole thing.”
For a former Hamilton woman, the descent began with a cancer scare and the growing needs of her two children. The woman - we’ll call her Charlotte - was worried about her health and exhausted from being a single, working parent of two special-needs children. She figured she’d wrap up her seven years in Victoria and return to Hamilton to get more family support, including from the children’s father.
Things didn’t work out. The children hated their school, and were routinely teased and bullied. The family was unprepared for the behavioural problems in Charlotte’s children.
But she had spent every last dime of her savings getting to Hamilton, and couldn’t afford a second cross-country move to get back to Victoria. For 18 months, she and her kids toughed it out in Ontario. Then she and her ex-husband struck a deal: She’d return to Victoria, stay with a friend, and then put in four months at whatever job she could find to get back on her feet. He’d keep the kids in Hamilton until then.
Three weeks after her return to Victoria, however, her ex had given up and the children were back with Charlotte. Sharing a tiny basement suite with a friend up to that point, Charlotte and her children suddenly had nowhere to live. The three of them ended up spending a month in a Victoria transition house, with no clear plans for where they’d go after that.
Enter Burnside-Gorge once more, this time with a damage deposit for a rental house for Charlotte and the kids. She’d gotten her old job back by then and had money to cover the rent, but wouldn’t have been able to get the place without that damage deposit.
“I really didn’t know how I was going to come up with it,” says Charlotte. “Getting the damage deposit was a real turning point for me. I had no idea the Burnside-Gorge program even existed before that. Now that the kids and I are in a more stable situation, I want to find a way to give back.”
Score two for little miracles.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Coleman's autocratic style could be problem in new ministry
June 27, 2008
Dare we hope that a new day is dawning with news this week that B.C.’s most pressing social issues are now the responsibility of a single provincial ministry?
The new Housing and Social Development Ministry is an amalgam of various challenging bits pulled from other ministries, and on that front reminds me of the old “Ministry of Lost Causes” - the wink-wink nudge-nudge name for the now-defunct Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Ministry, which seemed more than anything to be a place where unpopular issues went to die.
The rebundled housing ministry has responsibility for virtually everything that relates to poverty: welfare; subsidized housing and homelessness; addiction and mental health strategy; landlord-tenant disputes; transition houses. It’s also got responsibility for anyone with a disability, including those with mental handicaps. Every impoverished and disadvantaged person in the province will be a client of the new ministry in one way or the other.
But at the same time, the ministry also manages two major B.C. revenue streams: alcohol sales and gaming. That’s not to say it’s able to spend the almost $2 billion in net revenues that drinking and gambling generate every year in B.C., but surely it can’t hurt to be in the room whenever that much money is flying around.
MLA Rich Coleman will preside over the new creation. He’s familiar with at least some of the issues, having had responsibility for gaming in a previous cabinet job and more recently, for social housing as part of his Forests Ministry portfolio. Whether he’s up for a considerably more intense portfolio at a point in time when B.C.’s social problems have never been worse - well, I guess we’ll see.
I generally take the measure of a politician from their time in Opposition, when they haven’t yet been brought to heel by “party discipline.” So I browsed old newspaper files this week for stories from Coleman’s five years in Opposition under Glen Clark’s New Democrat government (1996-2001).
Coleman was new to politics then, having previously been a real estate developer, security adviser, and RCMP officer. Given that he was the housing critic at the time, the strategies he was promoting then have real relevance to his current position.
The good news: He’s clearly an engaged, caring kind of guy. The Fort Langley-Aldergrove MLA has an active history with Kinsmen and Rotary clubs and his local Chamber of Commerce, and has won three awards over the years for his community involvement. As a new MLA, he personally advocated on behalf of a family fighting to keep their children from being apprehended by the province.
The bad news: He’s a long-time believer in leaving it to the private sector to sort out housing issues. He’s on record opposing government construction of social housing, contending instead that the province’s role in the issue should be limited to providing individual rent subsidies. Coleman was so adamant on that point that a worried Co-operative Housing Federation formed a special committee in 2000 just to combat his take on the subject.
People change, of course, and Coleman’s tack these past two years as minister responsible for housing certainly seems to indicate some changed thinking.
Under his leadership these past two years, the province has bought a total of 32 building sites and old hotels in Vancouver for conversion into social housing, which will house 1,800 people all told when built out sometime around 2010. Purse strings are loosening in our region as well.
What’s perhaps more of a concern in the new gig, then, is Coleman’s style. As we’ve learned the hard way from the appalling handoff of forestry lands to private developers in Port Alberni and now Sooke, Coleman feels no need to consult with anyone outside of government before doing whatever he wants.
And while nobody likes hearing that they’re making mistakes, Coleman really seems to dislike criticism. In the past few months alone, he has challenged the findings of the forest-safety ombudsman, a team of Simon Fraser University researchers looking into homelessness, and planners working on a massive mixed-housing development at the Riverview psychiatric hospital site. As forests minister, his autocratic ways managed to unite industry workers and environmentalists in a call for his resignation.
That doesn’t bode well for his new position. Addressing the complex problems of poor and disadvantaged citizens simply can’t be done in the absence of genuine community consultation. We need a minister who knows how to listen, and Coleman doesn’t come across as someone who gets that.
But hey, maybe this time will be different. With a deepening social crisis hanging in the balance, we’ll know soon enough.
June 27, 2008
Dare we hope that a new day is dawning with news this week that B.C.’s most pressing social issues are now the responsibility of a single provincial ministry?
The new Housing and Social Development Ministry is an amalgam of various challenging bits pulled from other ministries, and on that front reminds me of the old “Ministry of Lost Causes” - the wink-wink nudge-nudge name for the now-defunct Community, Aboriginal and Women’s Ministry, which seemed more than anything to be a place where unpopular issues went to die.
The rebundled housing ministry has responsibility for virtually everything that relates to poverty: welfare; subsidized housing and homelessness; addiction and mental health strategy; landlord-tenant disputes; transition houses. It’s also got responsibility for anyone with a disability, including those with mental handicaps. Every impoverished and disadvantaged person in the province will be a client of the new ministry in one way or the other.
But at the same time, the ministry also manages two major B.C. revenue streams: alcohol sales and gaming. That’s not to say it’s able to spend the almost $2 billion in net revenues that drinking and gambling generate every year in B.C., but surely it can’t hurt to be in the room whenever that much money is flying around.
MLA Rich Coleman will preside over the new creation. He’s familiar with at least some of the issues, having had responsibility for gaming in a previous cabinet job and more recently, for social housing as part of his Forests Ministry portfolio. Whether he’s up for a considerably more intense portfolio at a point in time when B.C.’s social problems have never been worse - well, I guess we’ll see.
I generally take the measure of a politician from their time in Opposition, when they haven’t yet been brought to heel by “party discipline.” So I browsed old newspaper files this week for stories from Coleman’s five years in Opposition under Glen Clark’s New Democrat government (1996-2001).
Coleman was new to politics then, having previously been a real estate developer, security adviser, and RCMP officer. Given that he was the housing critic at the time, the strategies he was promoting then have real relevance to his current position.
The good news: He’s clearly an engaged, caring kind of guy. The Fort Langley-Aldergrove MLA has an active history with Kinsmen and Rotary clubs and his local Chamber of Commerce, and has won three awards over the years for his community involvement. As a new MLA, he personally advocated on behalf of a family fighting to keep their children from being apprehended by the province.
The bad news: He’s a long-time believer in leaving it to the private sector to sort out housing issues. He’s on record opposing government construction of social housing, contending instead that the province’s role in the issue should be limited to providing individual rent subsidies. Coleman was so adamant on that point that a worried Co-operative Housing Federation formed a special committee in 2000 just to combat his take on the subject.
People change, of course, and Coleman’s tack these past two years as minister responsible for housing certainly seems to indicate some changed thinking.
Under his leadership these past two years, the province has bought a total of 32 building sites and old hotels in Vancouver for conversion into social housing, which will house 1,800 people all told when built out sometime around 2010. Purse strings are loosening in our region as well.
What’s perhaps more of a concern in the new gig, then, is Coleman’s style. As we’ve learned the hard way from the appalling handoff of forestry lands to private developers in Port Alberni and now Sooke, Coleman feels no need to consult with anyone outside of government before doing whatever he wants.
And while nobody likes hearing that they’re making mistakes, Coleman really seems to dislike criticism. In the past few months alone, he has challenged the findings of the forest-safety ombudsman, a team of Simon Fraser University researchers looking into homelessness, and planners working on a massive mixed-housing development at the Riverview psychiatric hospital site. As forests minister, his autocratic ways managed to unite industry workers and environmentalists in a call for his resignation.
That doesn’t bode well for his new position. Addressing the complex problems of poor and disadvantaged citizens simply can’t be done in the absence of genuine community consultation. We need a minister who knows how to listen, and Coleman doesn’t come across as someone who gets that.
But hey, maybe this time will be different. With a deepening social crisis hanging in the balance, we’ll know soon enough.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Don't let Scotch broom's pretty flowers fool you
June 20, 2008
I drove up-Island to Courtenay one night last week and was treated to a spectacular sight. The normally drab stretch of the Inland Highway north of Parksville had been transformed into a twinkling sea of blue lupines and yellow broom, which dazzled me all the way to my destination.
Unfortunately, I knew too much about broom to be able to give in fully to the pleasure of the moment. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but hard to ignore what it meant to be passing through dense thickets of broom on both sides of the road for well over an hour.
Scotch broom is native to Africa and the Mediterranean, but made its way here after Capt. Walter Grant brought a handful of seeds to the Island in 1850 from his travels in Hawaii. Three plants grew from the seeds he planted in Sooke. Within 50 years, the plant had naturalized on the Island.
In simpler times, B.C.’s Highways Ministry used to plant Scotch broom along our highways for its cheery colour. That stopped after everyone figured out that the tenacious plant takes over in every sunny spot where it gains a foothold, squeezing out native species and producing an alarming 18,000 seeds per plant each year.
We also came to see over the years that broom was tough to poison, difficult to plough under, resistant to seemingly all insect predation, and too woody and unpleasant for any animal to consider eating. It wreaked havoc with reforestation. It drove up the cost of road and power-line maintenance.
Still, we let it get away from us just the same. Here on the Island, Scotch broom now covers more than 300,000 hectares - 10 per cent of the total land mass.
Oh, it’s a pretty plant, all right. But it’s bad news on just about every other front.
Scotch broom has yet to make the province’s official “bad weed” list, but it’s the source of much concern. It’s a particular problem on southeastern Vancouver Island due to its disruptive impact on two tree species that thrive in our region and few other places: Garry oak and Douglas fir.
Broom certainly isn’t the only problem facing those trees in these wild days of Island development. But its aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of growth blocks sun to new seedlings. Broom also wipes out plants that Island deer depend on for food, and creates such dense thickets in open, sunny spaces that resident quail are forced out of their habitat.
The time to do something about broom is right now, when the bloom is on. Waiting any longer allows the seeds to develop, and ultimately to be spread even farther afield through our fruitless attempts to burn, bury or otherwise destroy the resilient seed pods.
But whose job is it to curb the spread of bad plants? That there’s no real answer to that question perhaps explains why Scotch broom has flourished in B.C.
The Invasive Plant Council of B.C. identified the problem nicely in the title of a symposium on the issue a few years back: “Weeds Know No Boundaries.” Controlling the spread of invasive plants requires, at a minimum, the co-operation and commitment of all surrounding landowners. With B.C.’s mishmash of Crown land, aboriginal reserve, federal land, forest reserve and private property, it’s a major challenge just to accomplish that initial step.
Small wonder, then, that topping the plant council’s list of 10 biggest challenges around tackling invasive species is the task of “improving co-operation” between B.C. landowners. It has to be all for one and one for all when you’re talking about plant control, because nobody’s going to put in the hard work of wiping out broom on their property only to have a few hundred thousand seeds drift down from neighbouring lands where the owner didn’t bother.
Loss of habitat is the major reason for the extinction of native flora and fauna in B.C. But the spread of invasive species comes a close second. On the heavily developed southern Island, that’s a one-two punch for native species.
A 1997 inventory of B.C.’s sensitive ecosystems found only eight per cent of our Coastal Douglas fir region remained in a “relatively natural state.” By 2002, a further 8,800 hectares had been negatively affected. The losses are heaviest in second-growth forest, and you can bet that Scotch broom is doing its part to make matters worse.
Want to join the battle against broom? Visit www.broombusters.org for tips on how to take action.
As for those lovely lupines, enjoy. They’re native.
June 20, 2008
I drove up-Island to Courtenay one night last week and was treated to a spectacular sight. The normally drab stretch of the Inland Highway north of Parksville had been transformed into a twinkling sea of blue lupines and yellow broom, which dazzled me all the way to my destination.
Unfortunately, I knew too much about broom to be able to give in fully to the pleasure of the moment. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but hard to ignore what it meant to be passing through dense thickets of broom on both sides of the road for well over an hour.
Scotch broom is native to Africa and the Mediterranean, but made its way here after Capt. Walter Grant brought a handful of seeds to the Island in 1850 from his travels in Hawaii. Three plants grew from the seeds he planted in Sooke. Within 50 years, the plant had naturalized on the Island.
In simpler times, B.C.’s Highways Ministry used to plant Scotch broom along our highways for its cheery colour. That stopped after everyone figured out that the tenacious plant takes over in every sunny spot where it gains a foothold, squeezing out native species and producing an alarming 18,000 seeds per plant each year.
We also came to see over the years that broom was tough to poison, difficult to plough under, resistant to seemingly all insect predation, and too woody and unpleasant for any animal to consider eating. It wreaked havoc with reforestation. It drove up the cost of road and power-line maintenance.
Still, we let it get away from us just the same. Here on the Island, Scotch broom now covers more than 300,000 hectares - 10 per cent of the total land mass.
Oh, it’s a pretty plant, all right. But it’s bad news on just about every other front.
Scotch broom has yet to make the province’s official “bad weed” list, but it’s the source of much concern. It’s a particular problem on southeastern Vancouver Island due to its disruptive impact on two tree species that thrive in our region and few other places: Garry oak and Douglas fir.
Broom certainly isn’t the only problem facing those trees in these wild days of Island development. But its aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of growth blocks sun to new seedlings. Broom also wipes out plants that Island deer depend on for food, and creates such dense thickets in open, sunny spaces that resident quail are forced out of their habitat.
The time to do something about broom is right now, when the bloom is on. Waiting any longer allows the seeds to develop, and ultimately to be spread even farther afield through our fruitless attempts to burn, bury or otherwise destroy the resilient seed pods.
But whose job is it to curb the spread of bad plants? That there’s no real answer to that question perhaps explains why Scotch broom has flourished in B.C.
The Invasive Plant Council of B.C. identified the problem nicely in the title of a symposium on the issue a few years back: “Weeds Know No Boundaries.” Controlling the spread of invasive plants requires, at a minimum, the co-operation and commitment of all surrounding landowners. With B.C.’s mishmash of Crown land, aboriginal reserve, federal land, forest reserve and private property, it’s a major challenge just to accomplish that initial step.
Small wonder, then, that topping the plant council’s list of 10 biggest challenges around tackling invasive species is the task of “improving co-operation” between B.C. landowners. It has to be all for one and one for all when you’re talking about plant control, because nobody’s going to put in the hard work of wiping out broom on their property only to have a few hundred thousand seeds drift down from neighbouring lands where the owner didn’t bother.
Loss of habitat is the major reason for the extinction of native flora and fauna in B.C. But the spread of invasive species comes a close second. On the heavily developed southern Island, that’s a one-two punch for native species.
A 1997 inventory of B.C.’s sensitive ecosystems found only eight per cent of our Coastal Douglas fir region remained in a “relatively natural state.” By 2002, a further 8,800 hectares had been negatively affected. The losses are heaviest in second-growth forest, and you can bet that Scotch broom is doing its part to make matters worse.
Want to join the battle against broom? Visit www.broombusters.org for tips on how to take action.
As for those lovely lupines, enjoy. They’re native.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Teen finds hope amid the traumas of her life
June 13, 2008
These days, Karlie passes her time in an old Victoria restaurant, where she’s working on getting past all the bad things that came her way in the last two years.
She’s 15, and already a veteran of crystal-meth addiction, alcoholism, sexual assault and homelessness. It’s been quite an adolescence.
But clean and sober for a year now, she’s back living with her parents. She’s enrolled in the brand-new Youth Hospitality Training Centre run out of the former Taj Mahal restaurant, and liking it a lot. And she’s dreaming of the day when it’s just her and her dog in their own place - after all, it was the dog that got her through.
Karlie (not her real name) now knows that addiction runs in her family. But at the tender age of 10 - her age when she first started babysitting the children of an addicted neighbour - she had no idea of the trouble she was walking into.
The neighbour used drugs in front of her from the time she was 11, and got her drinking before she was 13. As things took a turn for the worse and Karlie hit Victoria’s streets for a year at age 14, she worked her way in short order through ecstasy, powder cocaine and crack. Then came crystal meth, and she knew from the first hit that she was lost. “I went down pretty fast,” Karlie recalls.
Her father never could stand the neighbour. And for good reason, as it turns out. Karlie was a little girl and the neighbour was 12 years older than her, but that didn’t stop him from pouring her drinks and eventually talking her into having sex with him when she was 13.
She didn’t put the words “statutory rape” to what happened, but her mom did when she snooped in Karlie’s diary and saw what the teen had written about the event. The mother called police. When Karlie told the neighbour, his harsh response set her on the fast track to the streets.
“He wanted me to lie and say it was all a fantasy. But I wouldn’t ,” says Karlie. “So he said he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and that I couldn’t see his kids either. He’d been my best friend, my brother, my boyfriend, even my dad in a way. It was like I lost everything. Not even a week later, I was on the streets.”
Police picked her up regularly during the year she was out there, but just as regularly she ran back to the streets. She found a “street grandpa” who looked out for her, and a 13-year-old “street sister” to curl up with on cold nights. Drugs ruled both of their young lives.
Change comes in unexpected ways, and Karlie certainly wouldn’t have pegged a squabble outside Pacific Christian School as a turning point at the time. She’d yelled at a kid who wouldn’t stop throwing snowballs at her, and told him she’d stab him if she saw him downtown. He told his parents; Karlie ended up charged with uttering threats.
She got six months probation, and then another nine months when she breached one of her conditions. (Her total sentence was several months longer than the house arrest the neighbour got for having sex with her, but she’s trying to let that go.) Ordered by the court into youth detox, Karlie started the hard climb out of her addiction.
Karlie’s got a new dream now: An animal shelter for youth on the streets, one that understands that sometimes a dog or cat is literally the only friend a kid has. Nothing in the bylaws stops a youth on the street from having a dog as long as it’s licensed and on a leash, but Karlie says the reality is that dogs are seized all the time regardless of whether their owners are in compliance.
She was so angry at the loss of two pitbull puppies she and her street sister had that she tried to take Victoria Animal Control to court. But only adults have that right, she discovered.
Karlie has another dog safely stashed at home these days, and credits her pet as the primary motivator for her getting clear of crystal meth. When it seemed like all the world had turned against her, the dog never left her side.
“My shelter will let people drop their dogs off if they need to go to rehab, because that’s a big problem out there,” says Karlie. “I want to change the way homeless people are treated with their dogs. I want to help.”
June 13, 2008
These days, Karlie passes her time in an old Victoria restaurant, where she’s working on getting past all the bad things that came her way in the last two years.
She’s 15, and already a veteran of crystal-meth addiction, alcoholism, sexual assault and homelessness. It’s been quite an adolescence.
But clean and sober for a year now, she’s back living with her parents. She’s enrolled in the brand-new Youth Hospitality Training Centre run out of the former Taj Mahal restaurant, and liking it a lot. And she’s dreaming of the day when it’s just her and her dog in their own place - after all, it was the dog that got her through.
Karlie (not her real name) now knows that addiction runs in her family. But at the tender age of 10 - her age when she first started babysitting the children of an addicted neighbour - she had no idea of the trouble she was walking into.
The neighbour used drugs in front of her from the time she was 11, and got her drinking before she was 13. As things took a turn for the worse and Karlie hit Victoria’s streets for a year at age 14, she worked her way in short order through ecstasy, powder cocaine and crack. Then came crystal meth, and she knew from the first hit that she was lost. “I went down pretty fast,” Karlie recalls.
Her father never could stand the neighbour. And for good reason, as it turns out. Karlie was a little girl and the neighbour was 12 years older than her, but that didn’t stop him from pouring her drinks and eventually talking her into having sex with him when she was 13.
She didn’t put the words “statutory rape” to what happened, but her mom did when she snooped in Karlie’s diary and saw what the teen had written about the event. The mother called police. When Karlie told the neighbour, his harsh response set her on the fast track to the streets.
“He wanted me to lie and say it was all a fantasy. But I wouldn’t ,” says Karlie. “So he said he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and that I couldn’t see his kids either. He’d been my best friend, my brother, my boyfriend, even my dad in a way. It was like I lost everything. Not even a week later, I was on the streets.”
Police picked her up regularly during the year she was out there, but just as regularly she ran back to the streets. She found a “street grandpa” who looked out for her, and a 13-year-old “street sister” to curl up with on cold nights. Drugs ruled both of their young lives.
Change comes in unexpected ways, and Karlie certainly wouldn’t have pegged a squabble outside Pacific Christian School as a turning point at the time. She’d yelled at a kid who wouldn’t stop throwing snowballs at her, and told him she’d stab him if she saw him downtown. He told his parents; Karlie ended up charged with uttering threats.
She got six months probation, and then another nine months when she breached one of her conditions. (Her total sentence was several months longer than the house arrest the neighbour got for having sex with her, but she’s trying to let that go.) Ordered by the court into youth detox, Karlie started the hard climb out of her addiction.
Karlie’s got a new dream now: An animal shelter for youth on the streets, one that understands that sometimes a dog or cat is literally the only friend a kid has. Nothing in the bylaws stops a youth on the street from having a dog as long as it’s licensed and on a leash, but Karlie says the reality is that dogs are seized all the time regardless of whether their owners are in compliance.
She was so angry at the loss of two pitbull puppies she and her street sister had that she tried to take Victoria Animal Control to court. But only adults have that right, she discovered.
Karlie has another dog safely stashed at home these days, and credits her pet as the primary motivator for her getting clear of crystal meth. When it seemed like all the world had turned against her, the dog never left her side.
“My shelter will let people drop their dogs off if they need to go to rehab, because that’s a big problem out there,” says Karlie. “I want to change the way homeless people are treated with their dogs. I want to help.”
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Insite not the answer, but it helps
June 6, 2008
Perhaps you’re already familiar with that ancient fable about the six blind men and the elephant. I find it coming to mind a lot these days in the fight over Canada’s only supervised injection site.
The Indian fable, put into charming verse in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe, tells the story of how the six men interpreted what an elephant looked like based on whatever part of the elephant’s anatomy they touched first. One touches the animal’s massive side and concludes it must resemble a wall; another grabs the trunk and presumes that elephants are shaped like snakes; and so on. (http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html if you’re curious).
The point I’ve always taken from the fable is that it’s impossible to reach the right conclusion if you presume that what you know is all there is to know. Problems are solved not by bickering over six different versions of an elephant but by bringing those viewpoints together to understand the whole.
It’s pretty clear from the battle shaping up around Vancouver’s supervised injection site that we’ve got an elephant on our hands. Blinkered by an ideological viewpoint that simply doesn’t allow for a fuller picture to emerge, the federal government has a tight grasp of the elephant’s tail and an equally firm conviction that its version is the only one that matters.
We can fight it out in court, I suppose, and that appears to be what we’re headed for. A win in B.C. Supreme Court last week that deemed the pending closure of Insite unconstitutional is headed for appeals court and no doubt the Supreme Court of Canada now that Ottawa has made it clear that its sole goal is to shut Insite down.
I suspect last week’s ruling will ultimately be upheld. But for the 8,000 users of Insite who face being hung out to dry for the next decade while we argue about what constitutes an elephant - not to mention tens of thousands of other Canadians who could benefit from similar sites in their own communities - I can only hope for a much quicker resolution than a court fight will ever bring us.
My personal view of places like Insite is that they’re a small but important component of an overall strategy for reducing the harms of drug and alcohol use.
They certainly don’t solve all of the problems around addiction, or even most of them. Nor are they universally supported by people with addictions in their own background, some of whom are every bit as adamantly opposed to injection sites as the Conservative government.
But supervised injection sites do keep people alive to fight another day. They bring a desperate and isolated population into contact with professionals who want to help them. They provide health care to a group of people who otherwise receive very little due to widespread stigmatization of their particular illness.
They reduce the spread of costly and difficult diseases. They provide a badly needed alternative to open drug use on our streets by those too addicted to hide their problems any more. Meanwhile, as has been proven at Insite, they don’t lead to increased street problems or higher rates of crime. That’s good enough for me.
The government questions whether the dire situation in the Downtown Eastside has improved at all since the site opened four years ago, and contends that Insite’s $3 million annual budget would be better spent on “treatment.”
Federal Health Minister Tony Clement is absolutely right when he says much more money needs to be put toward treatment for addictions. But for many of Vancouver’s most disadvantaged users, Insite is where treatment starts.
For some, a visit to the supervised site will be a first step toward recovery. I don’t know how Clement envisages people with severe addictions finding the help they need to begin that journey, but in my experience it starts with them getting support in a place where they’re accepted just as they are.
For others, recovery will be years in the making, perhaps even unachievable. But at the very least they will benefit from a safe, clean place to inject, and our communities will benefit from a reduction in the ferocious bacterial and viral infections spread through street-level injection drug use.
As for fears we’re sending a “poor message” to youth about drug use by allowing supervised injection sites, that’s just one of those fictions that lazy people dream up to create emotional heat around an unsound argument. Nothing says “Kids, don’t do drugs” better than the haunted visage of someone in late-stage addiction.
With as many as 125,000 Canadians thought to be injecting illicit drugs, the elephant is upon us. Time to open our eyes and see the beast for what it is.
June 6, 2008
Perhaps you’re already familiar with that ancient fable about the six blind men and the elephant. I find it coming to mind a lot these days in the fight over Canada’s only supervised injection site.
The Indian fable, put into charming verse in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe, tells the story of how the six men interpreted what an elephant looked like based on whatever part of the elephant’s anatomy they touched first. One touches the animal’s massive side and concludes it must resemble a wall; another grabs the trunk and presumes that elephants are shaped like snakes; and so on. (http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html if you’re curious).
The point I’ve always taken from the fable is that it’s impossible to reach the right conclusion if you presume that what you know is all there is to know. Problems are solved not by bickering over six different versions of an elephant but by bringing those viewpoints together to understand the whole.
It’s pretty clear from the battle shaping up around Vancouver’s supervised injection site that we’ve got an elephant on our hands. Blinkered by an ideological viewpoint that simply doesn’t allow for a fuller picture to emerge, the federal government has a tight grasp of the elephant’s tail and an equally firm conviction that its version is the only one that matters.
We can fight it out in court, I suppose, and that appears to be what we’re headed for. A win in B.C. Supreme Court last week that deemed the pending closure of Insite unconstitutional is headed for appeals court and no doubt the Supreme Court of Canada now that Ottawa has made it clear that its sole goal is to shut Insite down.
I suspect last week’s ruling will ultimately be upheld. But for the 8,000 users of Insite who face being hung out to dry for the next decade while we argue about what constitutes an elephant - not to mention tens of thousands of other Canadians who could benefit from similar sites in their own communities - I can only hope for a much quicker resolution than a court fight will ever bring us.
My personal view of places like Insite is that they’re a small but important component of an overall strategy for reducing the harms of drug and alcohol use.
They certainly don’t solve all of the problems around addiction, or even most of them. Nor are they universally supported by people with addictions in their own background, some of whom are every bit as adamantly opposed to injection sites as the Conservative government.
But supervised injection sites do keep people alive to fight another day. They bring a desperate and isolated population into contact with professionals who want to help them. They provide health care to a group of people who otherwise receive very little due to widespread stigmatization of their particular illness.
They reduce the spread of costly and difficult diseases. They provide a badly needed alternative to open drug use on our streets by those too addicted to hide their problems any more. Meanwhile, as has been proven at Insite, they don’t lead to increased street problems or higher rates of crime. That’s good enough for me.
The government questions whether the dire situation in the Downtown Eastside has improved at all since the site opened four years ago, and contends that Insite’s $3 million annual budget would be better spent on “treatment.”
Federal Health Minister Tony Clement is absolutely right when he says much more money needs to be put toward treatment for addictions. But for many of Vancouver’s most disadvantaged users, Insite is where treatment starts.
For some, a visit to the supervised site will be a first step toward recovery. I don’t know how Clement envisages people with severe addictions finding the help they need to begin that journey, but in my experience it starts with them getting support in a place where they’re accepted just as they are.
For others, recovery will be years in the making, perhaps even unachievable. But at the very least they will benefit from a safe, clean place to inject, and our communities will benefit from a reduction in the ferocious bacterial and viral infections spread through street-level injection drug use.
As for fears we’re sending a “poor message” to youth about drug use by allowing supervised injection sites, that’s just one of those fictions that lazy people dream up to create emotional heat around an unsound argument. Nothing says “Kids, don’t do drugs” better than the haunted visage of someone in late-stage addiction.
With as many as 125,000 Canadians thought to be injecting illicit drugs, the elephant is upon us. Time to open our eyes and see the beast for what it is.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
The problem is doing nothing about the problem
May 31, 2008
I have no particular stake in what Richard LeBlanc is trying to accomplish on Woodwynn Farm, other than a broad interest in anything that aims to tackle the problems on our streets. I don’t know how big a dent his project will make on the most obvious challenges facing the downtown.
But word last week that a citizens’ group had formed to try to buy the farm before he does was still some of the most discouraging news I’d heard in a while. That people would rally to raise more than $6 million just to stop a guy from trying to do a good thing - well, that’s just such a sad statement of where we’re at in this region.
What’s to be done in a community where the biggest problem is an inability to address the problem?
At least we’re no longer debating whether we have social problems. We’ve even reached some consensus on the work that needs to be done: housing (and more housing), outreach, better mental health care, accessible and integrated services, job opportunities, reconnection to community.
Ah, but where will we build those services? That’s the issue that’s stopping us dead right now. We talk a good game about wanting problems solved, but only if it all takes place in someone else’s neighbourhood.
An acronym has already been coined, of course: YITBY, for “Yes, in Their Backyard.”
The group opposing LeBlanc’s project offers a timely example. Farm Trust chair Barbara Souther, a long-time neighbour of Woodwynn Farm, mentioned in media coverage this week that she’s all in favour of helping the homeless, but thinks an empty school a few kilometres away would be a much better location. I wonder what neighbours of the school would say about that.
Similarly, tensions are said to be running high within the Downtown Residents Association between those who live near the now-defunct needle exchange on Cormorant Street - which is permanently closed as of tomorrow - and those who live in the neighbourhoods where the new mobile exchange will operate.
One neighbourhood wins, another loses. Whoever mounts the loudest campaign wins the right to dump the problem into somebody else’s lap for a while, at least until that group can mount their own campaign to push it elsewhere.
But isn’t the challenge, then, to strive for one of those “win-win” solutions we like to talk about? We need to get past the surface hostilities and figure out what it would take for a neighbourhood to feel comfortable enough to say “yes” for a change.
There are many ways to make an unpalatable idea more palatable. Resistant B.C. communities quickly changed their tune about hosting provincial casinos, for example, after they were given a cut of the profits.
What’s the carrot we could use to appease neighbourhoods asked to host projects tackling street issues? Would a tax break help? More community amenities? What are people actually afraid of, and what could be done to convince them that their concerns will be addressed?
I’m anticipating several angry e-mails in response to this column along the line of, “Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a bunch of homeless people living next door to you? Let’s see if you’re so damn supportive once they’re breaking into YOUR house.”
If that’s how things played out, then yes, I’d be unhappy. But as we know from any number of potentially controversial services operating below the radar in their particular neighbourhoods - detox, halfway houses, women’s shelters, recovery houses - a well-run and properly resourced service doesn’t draw problems.
It’s understandable why people fear the worst, mind you. The reason things blew up on Cormorant Street wasn’t because a needle exchange was located there, but because it could no longer cope with changing client demographics and a caseload that had tripled since 2002 with no corresponding rise in funding. We taught people to expect a mess should the needle exchange ever come to their neighbourhood, and the challenge in that case is to be absolutely sure we do it right the next time round.
The situation is different in the case of LeBlanc’s farm. His opponents are anticipating problems that I doubt will even materialize. Therapeutic communities like the one he’s proposing hinge on a careful selection process to ensure a good fit with people ready for change. Neighbours need not fear the arrival of busloads of struggling, addicted people plucked fresh from the streets (nor will LeBlanc’s proposal fix all our problems downtown).
We need new ways of resolving an old problem - not homelessness, but our community’s inability to act. Until then, we’re just putting a whole lot of energy into standing still.
May 31, 2008
I have no particular stake in what Richard LeBlanc is trying to accomplish on Woodwynn Farm, other than a broad interest in anything that aims to tackle the problems on our streets. I don’t know how big a dent his project will make on the most obvious challenges facing the downtown.
But word last week that a citizens’ group had formed to try to buy the farm before he does was still some of the most discouraging news I’d heard in a while. That people would rally to raise more than $6 million just to stop a guy from trying to do a good thing - well, that’s just such a sad statement of where we’re at in this region.
What’s to be done in a community where the biggest problem is an inability to address the problem?
At least we’re no longer debating whether we have social problems. We’ve even reached some consensus on the work that needs to be done: housing (and more housing), outreach, better mental health care, accessible and integrated services, job opportunities, reconnection to community.
Ah, but where will we build those services? That’s the issue that’s stopping us dead right now. We talk a good game about wanting problems solved, but only if it all takes place in someone else’s neighbourhood.
An acronym has already been coined, of course: YITBY, for “Yes, in Their Backyard.”
The group opposing LeBlanc’s project offers a timely example. Farm Trust chair Barbara Souther, a long-time neighbour of Woodwynn Farm, mentioned in media coverage this week that she’s all in favour of helping the homeless, but thinks an empty school a few kilometres away would be a much better location. I wonder what neighbours of the school would say about that.
Similarly, tensions are said to be running high within the Downtown Residents Association between those who live near the now-defunct needle exchange on Cormorant Street - which is permanently closed as of tomorrow - and those who live in the neighbourhoods where the new mobile exchange will operate.
One neighbourhood wins, another loses. Whoever mounts the loudest campaign wins the right to dump the problem into somebody else’s lap for a while, at least until that group can mount their own campaign to push it elsewhere.
But isn’t the challenge, then, to strive for one of those “win-win” solutions we like to talk about? We need to get past the surface hostilities and figure out what it would take for a neighbourhood to feel comfortable enough to say “yes” for a change.
There are many ways to make an unpalatable idea more palatable. Resistant B.C. communities quickly changed their tune about hosting provincial casinos, for example, after they were given a cut of the profits.
What’s the carrot we could use to appease neighbourhoods asked to host projects tackling street issues? Would a tax break help? More community amenities? What are people actually afraid of, and what could be done to convince them that their concerns will be addressed?
I’m anticipating several angry e-mails in response to this column along the line of, “Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a bunch of homeless people living next door to you? Let’s see if you’re so damn supportive once they’re breaking into YOUR house.”
If that’s how things played out, then yes, I’d be unhappy. But as we know from any number of potentially controversial services operating below the radar in their particular neighbourhoods - detox, halfway houses, women’s shelters, recovery houses - a well-run and properly resourced service doesn’t draw problems.
It’s understandable why people fear the worst, mind you. The reason things blew up on Cormorant Street wasn’t because a needle exchange was located there, but because it could no longer cope with changing client demographics and a caseload that had tripled since 2002 with no corresponding rise in funding. We taught people to expect a mess should the needle exchange ever come to their neighbourhood, and the challenge in that case is to be absolutely sure we do it right the next time round.
The situation is different in the case of LeBlanc’s farm. His opponents are anticipating problems that I doubt will even materialize. Therapeutic communities like the one he’s proposing hinge on a careful selection process to ensure a good fit with people ready for change. Neighbours need not fear the arrival of busloads of struggling, addicted people plucked fresh from the streets (nor will LeBlanc’s proposal fix all our problems downtown).
We need new ways of resolving an old problem - not homelessness, but our community’s inability to act. Until then, we’re just putting a whole lot of energy into standing still.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Welfare outreach puts workers where the homeless are
May 23, 2008
Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job.
She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times.
An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago.
Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is to find people living on the streets who ought to be on income assistance, and make it happen.
Most of the people she’s dealing with have mental illness. Many have a deep and long-standing distrust of government. The major challenge is in developing that trust, says Sinke.
“I definitely don’t go around announcing, ‘Hi, I’m Wendy from the government,’” says Sinke. “Even when I get them on income assistance, they may not always know I’m with MEIA.”
MEIA has had outreach offices for 12 years, including the Downtown Outreach Service on Cormorant Street. But what’s new about Sinke and her co-workers is that they’re now going out to find people rather than just waiting to be found, and speeding them through the process.
The ministry’s outreach workers have also been given more flexibility around policy - an essential change in terms of working successfully with folks who wouldn’t be able to make their way through the system otherwise.
If somebody doesn’t have identification, for instance - a universal problem for those living in the chaos of the streets - Sinke can not only help them fill out the application forms, but offers to keep their ID safe at her office if they want. She can even skip the ID requirement altogether if a street-serving agency can verify who the person is.
“A group of outreach workers meet every Monday morning, and everybody there knows the street clients,” says Sinke. “So if someone from that group calls to tell me that John Smith is in their office right now and could I come down, I’ll be pretty darn sure that’s John Smith.”
B.C. income assistance is divided into two portions, one for shelter and the other for support. Until they find housing, people living on the streets can’t qualify for the shelter portion - currently $375 a month for a single person. But they can collect $235 a month in support, and up to $532 if they’re considered disabled.
Sinke divvies up her clients’ monthly stipends into weekly payments if they request it, which helps them make their money last while also avoiding the month-end welfare spending splurge known on the streets as “Mardi Gras.”
Sinke’s previous job was working at the Victoria Transition House. That gave her an understanding of societal prejudices as relevant for people on the streets as they are for women fleeing domestic violence. Why a person can’t find their own way off the street is as complex a problem as why a woman stays with an abusive spouse, she notes.
With people on the streets slowly becoming more aware of MEIA’s outreach program, the next big challenge is to make sure service providers know about it, says Sinke.
Under pressure from two consecutive governments, B.C.’s income-assistance caseload as a percentage of the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1995 - from nine per cent of British Columbians to three per cent. Service providers have understandably come to believe that many clients don’t stand much chance of qualifying.
But things have changed, says Sinke: “Unless you’re 18 and fresh out of high school, there are enough exemptions now that nobody needs to be denied.”
The changes are small but significant, and urgently needed as part of the strategy for ending homelessness. Sinke sees the proof of that in her caseload files: In the last five months alone, she’s helped find housing for 12 of her clients.
“These were absolute street people, with long histories of living on the streets. Many of them didn’t even want housing when I first met them,” says Sinke. “That just shows how well this program works.”
May 23, 2008
Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job.
She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times.
An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago.
Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is to find people living on the streets who ought to be on income assistance, and make it happen.
Most of the people she’s dealing with have mental illness. Many have a deep and long-standing distrust of government. The major challenge is in developing that trust, says Sinke.
“I definitely don’t go around announcing, ‘Hi, I’m Wendy from the government,’” says Sinke. “Even when I get them on income assistance, they may not always know I’m with MEIA.”
MEIA has had outreach offices for 12 years, including the Downtown Outreach Service on Cormorant Street. But what’s new about Sinke and her co-workers is that they’re now going out to find people rather than just waiting to be found, and speeding them through the process.
The ministry’s outreach workers have also been given more flexibility around policy - an essential change in terms of working successfully with folks who wouldn’t be able to make their way through the system otherwise.
If somebody doesn’t have identification, for instance - a universal problem for those living in the chaos of the streets - Sinke can not only help them fill out the application forms, but offers to keep their ID safe at her office if they want. She can even skip the ID requirement altogether if a street-serving agency can verify who the person is.
“A group of outreach workers meet every Monday morning, and everybody there knows the street clients,” says Sinke. “So if someone from that group calls to tell me that John Smith is in their office right now and could I come down, I’ll be pretty darn sure that’s John Smith.”
B.C. income assistance is divided into two portions, one for shelter and the other for support. Until they find housing, people living on the streets can’t qualify for the shelter portion - currently $375 a month for a single person. But they can collect $235 a month in support, and up to $532 if they’re considered disabled.
Sinke divvies up her clients’ monthly stipends into weekly payments if they request it, which helps them make their money last while also avoiding the month-end welfare spending splurge known on the streets as “Mardi Gras.”
Sinke’s previous job was working at the Victoria Transition House. That gave her an understanding of societal prejudices as relevant for people on the streets as they are for women fleeing domestic violence. Why a person can’t find their own way off the street is as complex a problem as why a woman stays with an abusive spouse, she notes.
With people on the streets slowly becoming more aware of MEIA’s outreach program, the next big challenge is to make sure service providers know about it, says Sinke.
Under pressure from two consecutive governments, B.C.’s income-assistance caseload as a percentage of the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1995 - from nine per cent of British Columbians to three per cent. Service providers have understandably come to believe that many clients don’t stand much chance of qualifying.
But things have changed, says Sinke: “Unless you’re 18 and fresh out of high school, there are enough exemptions now that nobody needs to be denied.”
The changes are small but significant, and urgently needed as part of the strategy for ending homelessness. Sinke sees the proof of that in her caseload files: In the last five months alone, she’s helped find housing for 12 of her clients.
“These were absolute street people, with long histories of living on the streets. Many of them didn’t even want housing when I first met them,” says Sinke. “That just shows how well this program works.”
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Do you know where your laws are?
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Homeless needle exchange hits road for better or worse
May 9, 2008
We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.
May 9, 2008
We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.
Friday, May 02, 2008
We shine at solving non-problems
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness"
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Redirect bottles and cans to binners
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Problems are fixed when people have a place to live
April 11, 2008
They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son.
He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was.
He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above).
The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but Ishmael figures it was actually about 80. The campers lived on the Toronto lakefront for three years on vacant property owned by Home Depot before being evicted in 2002.
Ishmael had moved in after finding himself out of rent money and in between jobs, and stayed for a year and a half. For him, it was the perfect situation, and in his opinion far more cost-effective than the “current idiocy” of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of homelessness without ever solving the problems.
“When I was in Toronto, it cost $80 a night to keep me at the Salvation Army for two and a half years. That’s 1,000 nights - $80,000 in all - yet I was still as homeless on the day I left as when I arrived,” he says. “Here in Victoria, they’ve got a van that goes around at night handing out soup and sandwiches. But it costs [taxpayers] $12 a head for that soup and sandwich. I could buy the same thing at Quizno’s for half the price.”
These days, Ishmael spends virtually all of his daytime hours at the UVic library. He’s found a place to sleep in the Western Communities, but needs to keep a low profile so the property owner doesn’t spot him. So every day he hops a bus to the university and spends long hours browsing the library stacks.
“I don’t smoke, don’t do dope, don’t drink. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow, so I’m doing this. And I am a bookworm, so it suits me,” says Ishmael, whose favourite writer is Thomas Jefferson. “I’ve got quite a book collection that I drag around with me, including some rare and hard-to-find volumes.”
He’s not sure why he lives like he does, but recognized years ago that he could no longer count on holding down a job long enough to pay his rent.
It wasn’t always that way. After immigrating to Canada from Germany in 1983, he landed a job quickly and was able to buy himself a house within a couple of years.
“But in 1990, I just kind of died,” he says. “They tell me I’m somebody who fell between the cracks. There’s a reason for every one of us to be on the street. A lot of us are really 12-year-old children in adult bodies.”
Ishmael jokes that he was a drifter throughout the 1990s, “then a new century started and I became a vagrant.” But he works when he can, and is currently making do on savings from the $7,000 he earned last year doing odd jobs. He refuses to go on welfare; socialism is “the philosophy of the parasite,” he tells me emphatically.
He’s 51 now, and no longer sure that his 2005 move to B.C. was a good idea. He’d ridden his bicycle from Toronto to Vancouver - a 44-day sojourn - after seeing televised images of the city and finding himself drawn to it.
But things haven’t worked out as planned. He built another tiny house in the woods of Metchosin, but that’s lost to him now. He swapped farm labour for a small wage and a place to live on the Peninsula for a time, but then he and the owner got into an argument and that was that. He’s thinking he might end up back in Toronto if he can find the bus fare, and get a room again at the Salvation Army.
I ask him what he’d suggest for readers wanting to know what part they can play in ending homelessness. Hire people, he says. (Call Cool Aid’s Community Casual Labour Pool at 388-9296 for more information.)
And if you’ve got a little bit of land where a wanderer might settle for a while, he’s all ears.
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