I'm co-ordinating Homelessness Action Week events this October on behalf of the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, including our second annual Project Connect. Here's the press release that will be going out tomorrow - if you're interested in contributing to the week, please see the list of needs below. And if you can volunteer your time for Project Connect on Oct. 14, please let me know. Hope to see you there!


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 14, 2009

Service day for street community helps prep for winter cold

A service fair next month for people living homeless and in poverty returns for another year with even more on offer for hundreds in the capital region preparing for a cold, wet winter on the streets.
Almost 600 people attended Project Connect last year, an all-day event sponsored by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness and its partners across the region. Organizers are preparing for even higher numbers for this year’s, to be held Oct. 14 at Our Place. The popular event, part of Homelessness Action Week (Oct. 11-17), provides one-stop access to a wide variety of services and food for people living in deep poverty and homelessness in our region.
“We bring key community services into the same room for a day and make it as easy as possible for people coming to the event to find the support they need,” says Jody Paterson, who’s co-ordinating Homelessness Action Week activities this year on behalf of the Coalition.
“So we’ll have the street nurses there, and people doing footcare, and help for people needing to get on income assistance, replace missing ID, or connect with the major outreach teams working in the downtown. But we’ll also have haircuts, veterinarian care, acupuncture, resume-writing and a whole lot of food, which means the day is also about helping people have a good time for a few hours.”
Donations of all kinds are most welcome. The Coalition is organizing a backpack drive in local secondary schools, and hopes that every Project Connect participant leaves the event with a backpack filled with donations from the community: socks, gloves, toques, scarves, grooming products, feminine hygiene, toothbrushes and toothpaste, reading glasses.
Please drop off Project Connect donations at Our Place, 919 Pandora Ave., any morning Sept. 21-24, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Ask to be directed to the Project Connect volunteers.
The Coalition is also looking for haircutters willing to volunteer a few hours that day, having seen last year that haircuts were one of the most sought-after services. Volunteers in general will be needed to help out at Project Connect and in the coming weeks; contact Deb Nilsen at dnilsen@shaw.ca to get involved. The Capital City Lions Club will return for a second year for a day-long burgers-and-dogs barbecue.
The Coalition is a non-profit community-based partnership of agencies that work together to end homelessness in Greater Victoria. More than 400 people were housed and supported last year through the collective efforts of coalition member agencies, and almost 400 more units of housing and shelter are now underway.
Visit the Coalition's Web sitefor more on the coalition. For information on Project Connect and Homelessness Action Week events, contact Jody Paterson at jodypaterson@shaw.ca.
30


Homelessness Action Week events
Oct. 11-17, 2009

Here are a few of the events being organized by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness and other service providers in the region. Keep an eye on the Coalition’s Web site at www.solvehomelessness.ca for more information on events as the date draws closer.

• An art show featuring the art and music of people who have experienced homelessness, including selected works from the Street Voice Project. Friday, Oct. 16, 7-10 p.m. at the Victoria Conservatory of Music.
• A forum for leadership students throughout the region led by a panel of people who have experienced homelessness. Tuesday, Oct. 13, venue and time TBA.
• Tours of service agencies and other organizations working in the area of homelessness, including the new Access Health Centre and Woodwynn Farm
• Landlord Appreciation Day, sponsored by Pacifica Housing
• Public premiere of the documentary 40 Years of Cool Aid Culture

About the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness:
Formed in 2008, our diverse non-profit coalition is made up of representatives of all key organizations whose work relates to homelessness, including service providers, government ministries, police, funders, the health authority and elected officials. We work to find housing and support for people living homeless using a “housing first” approach, and also to stop the flow of new people onto our streets by addressing the root causes of homelessness.
The cost of people living homeless is estimated at $50,000 annually per person - a total of $75 million a year in our region alone based on an estimated homeless population of 1,500. Housing people and providing the supports they need not only improves their quality of life and community connection, but reduces the enormous social, health, justice and sanitation costs of homelessness.

A few highlights from the past year:
• More than 400 people housed and supported through the collective efforts of coalition member agencies - significantly exceeding the target of 250
• 130 additional rent supplements for our region from BC Housing
• 15 new adult detox/residential treatment beds brought on by the Vancouver Island Health Authority, for a total of 21 in the region
• The forging of a new partnership merging the Coalition and the Victoria Steering Committee on Homelessness, bringing $1.2 million in federal contributions to the Coalition over the next two years.
• Some 367 units of supportive and transitional housing in the works or newly available, including a shelter under construction on Ellice Street and supported housing units on Humboldt and Swift streets

Muddy waters hide true level of cuts in BC budget

The devil’s in the details, as the saying goes. But good luck trying to find them in the revamped provincial budget if you’re looking to understand where the cuts to provincially funded services are going to hurt the most.
What is clear is that somebody’s definitely going to be feeling pain. The revised 2009-10 budget reflects a major downturn in provincial revenue. Government has earmarked almost $2 billion in cuts over the next three years that will come from “administrative efficiencies” inside government, and an additional $1.5 billion in cuts to various community services receiving year-to-year grants.
The government calls such grants “discretionary.” What they mean by that is that government is under no obligation to provide the money in the first place, or to keep it coming. Discretionary grants have become a very common but extremely unstable way of funding many kinds of community services.
The $159 million or so the government hands out every year in gaming grants are considered discretionary, for instance. But that’s only the government’s opinion. Ask any of the thousands of community groups that desperately count on that money to fund important services and they’ll tell you that those gaming grants are essential.
A senior Finance Ministry bureaucrat told me at this week’s budget release that it only makes sense to cut discretionary spending first. “Isn’t that what you’d do in your own household?” he asked me.
Sure, but in that case it would be up to me to decide what expenses could be classified as discretionary. Who is it that defines “discretionary” at the provincial level for purposes of funding cuts? Whose grants are on the hit list? I spent six hours poring over pages and pages of budget documents Tuesday and am still no closer to the answer.
Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer asked the question of the day on this point when he queried Finance Minister Colin Hansen at the budget lockup as to why there wasn’t a list of all the grants being cut. I wonder whether anyone in government even has such a list, or has any idea of what the cumulative effect will be from cutting so many community grants all at once.
Hansen invited Palmer and any other interested media to scrutinize three account classifications in the “Supplement to the Estimates” to find that out. Such classifications are known as Standard Objects of Expense - STOBS - and the ones in question are numbers 77, 79 and 80. All three provide funding for community partners, whether in the form of discretionary grants, required payments, or contractual agreements.
So I put on my reading glasses and scrutinized, aided by a kind Finance Ministry staffer who dug up the original supplement from the February budget needed to compare any differences between the two.
But as it turns out, the task is impossible even with both documents in hand. That’s because while government ministries were cutting discretionary grants, they were muddying the waters by also recategorizing a whole bunch of other STOBs that fit into those same three classifications.
For example, what looks like the wholesale slaughter of discretionary grants within the Attorney General’s ministry turns out to be just a shifting of legal-aid services into a different. Discretionary grants in the Health Ministry look like they’ll shrink from $50 million to a mere $4.3 million, but ministry bureaucrats say that, too, is just the result of funding being moved around.
In the Public Service and Solicitor General’s ministry, there’s $1 million less for discretionary grants related to policing, community services and victim services. In the Ministry of Children and Family Development, there’s $2 million less for child and family development.
Can we presume those are cuts to community groups? I don’t have a clue. Nothing I could find in the documents added up to anything like the $385 million in cuts to discretionary funding that have apparently already been made this year, so who knows what it all means?
It will be weeks or even months before anyone on the ground has any real sense of what’s being lost. At the same time, communities will be feeling the effects of local health authorities cutting $25 million a year from their budgets by reducing admin costs and their own “discretionary” spending.
The provincial cuts have all been made for this year, the Finance Ministry assures me. But that’s not to say that those on the receiving end have been informed yet, or are in any way prepared for even heavier cuts this spring. Listen for the wails in a community near you.

Throne Speech foreshadows cuts to come


Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones and barely feel a blip when the provincial government reveals its retooled budget next week.
But in the capital city, in a region dependent on government jobs and provincial funding on all kinds of fronts, there can’t be many of those kind of people out there. My sense is that a lot more are awaiting Tuesday’s budget announcement with trepidation and fear, and this week’s throne speech certainly brought no comfort.
Throne speeches are typically pretty vague with the details. They give the flavour of the budget to come, and set the tone. But they don’t actually say what’s going to happen, leaving those who desperately want to know more to read between the lines.
The gist of the Aug. 25 throne speech is roughly this: “B.C. is in the grips of something so awful that we couldn’t have imagined it, and we’ve really had to make some tough decisions around spending. But you can trust us to look after what’s important.”
The throne speech that Lt.-Gov. Steven Point delivered opens with heartfelt sympathies to the families of various prominent British Columbians who died in the last six months, and ends 4,000 words later with an ode to the Olympics. There are no less than a dozen warm references to the importance of B.C.’s children.
But you can hear what’s really being said in the phrases about seismic economic change and decimated government revenues, and in the promises to protect indispensable services while rooting out unnecessary spending. I get the shivers when government starts talking like that, because those are nice little setup lines for all kinds of cuts.
The feeling I got from reading the throne speech was of a worried-uncle type peering sincerely into my eyes, giving me one of those sad-faced, isn’t-this-just-crappy-but-what’s-a-province-to-do looks.
He’s telling me that he’s sorry, so sorry. But these are extraordinary times, and we’re all just going to have to hunker down and tough it out. Why, if he had the money, he’d be taking me out to paint the town red right now, but his fiscal cupboard is bare.
He urges me to trust him, and assures me that all will be well soon. He squeezes my shoulder and says I should be happy that he’s here to take care of things, because at least he knows how to live within his means.
Not quite, what with four or more years of deficits on the horizon. But never mind. What worries me more is having to trust that government will think things all the way through before making cuts. I’m not sure I have much trust left for any government after decades of politicized, poorly informed and random cuts and policy changes that definitely haven’t turned out well for B.C.
When I read in the throne speech that government is going to minimize spending on non-essential services, I wonder: Who’s defining “non-essential”? When I see a pledge to “protect critical health and education services,” I’m curious to know what government considers critical, and why it is that so many other vital government-funded services were left off that very short list.
I guess we’ll all find out in the weeks and months to come, when the long columns of figures in Tuesday’s revised budget become the flesh-and-blood faces of people and communities who are affected negatively by whatever cuts are coming.
You and I will have no say in any of it, because the decisions have already been made. The programs and services that government considers “non-essential” or “discretionary” have already been identified and marked for cuts. Our input wasn’t sought, but we’ll be the ones living with whatever new world order comes out of this.
The throne speech is as interesting for what’s not in it as it is for what’s mentioned. There’s not a single word about income assistance, poverty, affordable rental housing, or mental health and addiction services during hard times ahead, even though the downturn is already having a heavy impact on all those areas. Aside from a brief reference to the need to “strengthen our social fabric,” there was no talk of social services at all.
Shall we take that to mean such issues are so deeply a part of our value system in B.C. that we no longer need to include them when talking about indispensable public services? I fear not.
But we’ll just have to wait until Tuesday to know, and then through the months and years it sometimes takes for the impact of cuts made in haste to hit home. In the meantime, read between the lines at http://www.leg.bc.ca/39th1st/4-8-39-1.htm.

Stereotypes getting in way of good care for seniors

This is a column about my mom, and the crazy things that can happen when you take ill at 83.
My mother is a retired nurse who has done everything right in terms of looking after her health all these years. Despite mobility challenges since being hit by a car in a crosswalk seven years ago, she’s still very much a “tough old broad,” as a friend once described her.
But as our family has now come to see, in the eyes of our depersonalized and harried health-care system, she’s just Old Person No. 347,050 on a very long list. And from what she’s been hearing from her friends, that’s just how it is once you cross some invisible line into old age.
She has no chronic health conditions. She isn’t on any long-term medication. Up until two months ago, she was travelling, cooking dinner for one friend or another virtually every night she was home, and was an active, engaged community volunteer.
Then we went on a family holiday to Tofino in June. She got too much sun one day and went to bed feeling sick. Perhaps she slept too heavily on her bad arm - the accident left her with a broken shoulder and severe limitations in the use of her right arm. At any rate, she awoke the next day with major pain in her arm.
It’s been one strange ride ever since, starting with the prescription drug she was given to reduce inflammation - which lived up to its potential to cause “a general feeling of illness” as one of its side-effects.
By the time she figured that out and quit the drug, she’d developed blood-sugar problems and was showing diabetes-like symptoms. (With any luck, that was a side-effect of the drug as well, because they’ve since stopped.)
And wouldn’t you know it, my mother’s trusted family doctor retired just as all of this got underway. That put her into the care of the doctor who’d just bought the practice.
They’d never met before my mother came in about the pain in her arm. The physician knew nothing of the vigorous, active woman my mother had been just a few days earlier, and didn’t bother to ask. I’m guessing the doctor just saw a tired, sick 83-year-old with a bum shoulder - one who had yet to come to grips with her pain and illness as the byproducts of aging.
OK, I get that. So does my mom. She recognizes that she’s in the countdown. She won’t be looking for medical heroics when her time comes.
But there’s a fine line between expecting people to accept the aging process and relegating them to assembly-line care that presumes they’ll soon be dead anyway. That’s how it has felt for my mother these past two months.
Her saga was complicated by a much-anticipated cruise to Alaska in early July, which she desperately wanted to go on. The x-ray of her shoulder found nothing untoward and the doctors didn’t seem too interested in exploring the issue further, so she mustered her strength to go on the cruise. She still didn’t know whether the diabetes-like problems she’d experienced were a reaction to the anti-inflammatory she’d taken, but figured results from the blood-sugar tests would be ready when she returned.
And they were. But by then she’d caught some terrible flu-like thing that had morphed into a secondary bronchial infection, as had her sister on the final days of the cruise. (Could it be swine flu? My mother is on Day 21 of what she describes as the worst illness of her life, and nobody has even suggested she be tested for it.)
So the bronchial infection was the more pressing issue by the time she got home. In B.C., you’re only allowed one health concern per visit these days when you go to the doctor, which meant her doctor listened to her chest but then refused to review her blood-sugar results until a later appointment.
Her active life has ground to a halt over the past two months. Depression crept in. Fortunately, all those friends she cooks for have come through for her. And the really good news is that so much time has passed since her arm first started to hurt that the original problem appears to have resolved itself. I think she’s going to be fine.
I wouldn’t say the system failed her; she got drugs, tests and an x-ray. But all of it came grudgingly, as if done just to silence a frail old lady who hadn’t come to grips with her own mortality. Come on, docs - look past those aging bodies to the people who are still very much alive inside them.

Must share this absolutely hilarious link to a Global TV newscast that went wildly to the dogs.

The upside of mental illness - creative brilliance

Nice to see mental illness finally getting some good press. The latest news is of a genetic link between creativity and mental illnesses, which seems to confirm once and for all what many other studies over the decades have also found.
From the Oracle of Delphi to the great creative talents of today, this thing we call mental illness has been enriching our communities for a very long time.
These days, it’s popular to wish for all mental illnesses to be treated and cured. But we’d be a poorer society in so many ways were we ever to achieve that questionable goal. Think of all the beautiful words, paintings, music and design we’d have missed out on over the centuries were it not for the brilliant work of creative people with mental illness.
I met a young busker and his friend on the Inner Harbour a couple weeks back, and have been struggling with how to write up their very interesting story without falling into one of those man-with-schizophrenia-overcomes-disability tales.
Because the thing about mental illness is that it’s not all about trying to “overcome” it. As science is now confirming, illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are linked to creative brilliance. And what’s intriguing about the story of Jordan Blaikie and his pal Ross Johnson is that their mental illnesses are in fact what brought them together in the first place, which has turned out to be a very positive thing.
Blaikie is 30 and Johnson is 29. Both have lived with mental illness for all of their adult lives and then some, having been diagnosed when they were teenagers.
They certainly know the negative aspects of living with mental illness, not the least of which has been an inability for the two men to find and keep a decent job. They’ve had to get by on disability cheques for the most part, supplemented with part-time work at pizza joints and the like. (“It’s a lot more fun to go busking,” notes Blaikie.)
Over the years they’ve been on medication, off medication and everything in between, and are all too aware of the challenges faced by people living with chronic and persistent mental illness.
Still, if they’d never experienced a mental-health crisis, they’d never have met. They met because they were housemates in 2007 at the Seven Oaks psychiatric facility, and struck up the conversation that ultimately led them to their new business venture: Tricky Magic Productions.
Blaikie had worked off and on as a street magician for three years before he met Johnson, having inherited his sister’s old magic tricks after she lost interest. Johnson had ideas for how Blaikie could extend his busking season by performing indoors in the winter months at seniors’ centres and community events.
And so far, so good. Blaikie took his magic show to 25 venues over the winter. More recently, the pair has branched into “casino nights” at some of the seniors’ facilities, having discovered the joys of dealing blackjack and Texas Hold ‘Em for delighted residents gambling for Thrifty Foods coupons.
It’s on to bigger and better things this fall. Johnson has booked the theatre at Eric Martin Institute for a variety show Oct. 10. The show will be a fundraiser for the Friends of Music Society, an organization that works on bridging the gaps between musicians with mental illness and those without it. The headliner will be Blaikie, of course - “The Great Jordano.”
“I’m hoping to have nine performers that night - we’re calling it ‘Monty Pylon’s Family Circus,’ “ says Johnson. “Most of us have disabilities, but not all of us. Anyway, it’s about the ability, not the disability.”
Blaikie dreams of becoming a cruise-ship magician. Johnson lists six Vancouver Island theatres he wants to do shows at one day. Mental illness will undoubtedly complicate things for the men, because it generally does. But maybe it’s also the thing that helps make Blaikie a confident and charming magician, and Johnson a sweetly enthusiastic pitch man.
Think of the creative gifts that mental illness has given us over the centuries. Would Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf have set pen to paper in such compelling fashion if not for their mental illnesses? Would Van Gogh have painted with such passion and insight? Or Beethoven written with the same power?
Call it a sickness if you must, but the truth is that the world is a much better place for having people with mental illness in it. I wish my young busker friends a lifetime of shining in the dark.

We're NOT going to take it - are we?


Ever been to one of those meetings where you’re thinking damn, if I have to take another five minutes of this, I’m going to run screaming from the room?
BC Ferries has found an easy solution. They just pay their directors to go - $1,500 a pop if you’re there in person, $750 if you phone in. And that’s on top of the $48,000-$58,000 a year the directors are already getting just to be on the board - an amount that’s quite a bit more than the full-year working wage of an average Canadian.
What the heck is going on? So much is weird in this world around the things we give value to that I sometimes fantasize about becoming one of those crazed tax resisters holed up in a (sunny) hideaway in some distant land. I mean, really, when IS the revolution?
Something dehumanizing must happen to people when they reach the top of the food chain. Otherwise, how could it be that just sitting on a board of directors ends up being worth more than, say, a full year of difficult, stressful work for a bullet-sweating manager of a typical non-profit?
There are nine directors on the ferry authority. Eight receive an annual stipend of $48,000 for agreeing to be on the board, and $10,000 more if they chair a committee. The ninth is the board chair, who gets $140,000. In the last fiscal year, the directors met six times as a full board, and 10 additional times as committees.
If we assume that all nine attended the board meetings (wouldn’t you if someone was paying you $1,500 to be there?), that’s another $81,000, and a further $75,000 if half are presumed to have attended the committee meetings. All in: about $700,000.
My mind often goes to the non-profit sector when I hear about stuff like this, because the contrast is just so dramatic - especially with the government revising its 2009-10 budget downward at this very moment and scaring the wits out of every non-profit in town.
So here’s an interesting fact: What the ferries board got paid last year just to go to a few meetings and stand as directors is substantially richer than the total annual budget of PEERS when I was finishing up my time there as executive director in 2007.
We employed 11 people at PEERS at that time, most of whom were coming out of tough circumstance. We provided outreach to more than 100 women. We ran a training program for another 50 or so participants who came for help getting their lives on track. I like to think we made a real difference in a lot of people’s lives.
Obviously, it’s difficult to compare the worth of providing support to citizens in need with keeping the ferry service running. I’ve seen loads of stats on the tremendous value the ferry service adds to the B.C. economy, but nothing from government that measures the worth of the thousands of little agencies that help British Columbians stabilize and improve their lives.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be clear on any of that to question whether being on the board of the ferry authority should ever be worth more than a year of work for the average Canadian. I say no.
Another example of top-of-the-food-chain syndrome: the use of gambling revenues. Anticipate disaster for non-profits if the grants really are frozen this year, because the arts and culture grants hitting the headlines now are just the first of seven waves of annual grants that thousands of agencies depend on.
Once upon a time, British Columbians agreed to let government turn gambling into a major revenue stream, largely because charities were supposed to reap the benefits. And gambling did indeed turn into a major revenue stream, one that generates over a billion dollars a year in net profit for the province. That’s more than a 100 per cent increase from a decade ago.
But the amount designated for charity has risen less than 25 per cent. Ten years ago, 5,000 B.C. charities shared just under a third of all government gaming profits. Now, almost 7,000 charities compete for just 17 per cent of the pie, and the average annual grant per charity has fallen almost $3,000. And we just take it.
Throw open the nearest window, people, and lean out all crazy-eyed like Peter Finch did in the movie Network. Shout loud enough to rattle the roof in the places where it’s so painfully clear they don’t have a clue how it feels to be us: We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Too-efficient parking enforcement no way to lure people downtown

As a general rule, I try to avoid being self-serving in my column. I try not to use my public platform to write about issues that I’ve got a personal stake in.
But - and there’s always a but, isn’t there? - I do have one personal issue that drives me absolutely mad, to the point that on rare occasions I ignore all that stuff about separating the personal and the public and have a little rant anyway. The subject is parking tickets.
I’ve had a few in my day - probably 10 a year since I moved here in 1989. I generally pay up within the two-week discount period, primarily because I refuse to let the city take any more money from me.
Every one of the tickets has angered me. That’s neither here nor there as a public issue except if you consider that the City of Victoria has given me at least 200 easy opportunities to feel resentful toward it. I suspect the same goes for virtually anyone who gets a ticket, unless there really are people out there who chuckle good-naturedly at their knuckleheadedness at the sight of another ticket on their windshield.
I’ve had three tickets in the last week and a half. Anyone who spends even small amounts of time in the downtown on a regular basis can relate to the sinking feeling of dashing back to your car only to find a ticket fluttering under your wiper and a $20 instant fine waiting.
The first ticket was issued one minute after a 20-minute meter expired (the city has a grace period of five minutes, but wouldn’t you know, only on 90-minute meters). The other was issued five minutes after I’d distractedly walked away from an unfed meter and briefly poked my head inside a store with a good sale on.
The third was more garden-variety: a meeting simply went on longer than predicted. Running two blocks to feed the meter - which the city doesn’t allow anyway, of course - simply wasn’t an option.
I get the whole revenue/expenses thing. One of the city’s objectives is to offset costs through parking revenues, which generate more than $4 million a year for the city. I also get that if there weren’t rules and fines, people who work downtown might take up all the street space and shoppers wouldn’t be able to find parking.
But equally important objectives in the city’s 2007 parking strategy are to “support the economic vitality of downtown,” and “create incentives to position downtown as the destination of choice.” How does an overly efficient parking-ticket process fit in?
I expect the city will follow up this column with a letter directing me to one of the city’s five parkades, all of which have rates that match that of street meters with the bonus of a discount first hour. They might also recommend I get a parking card, which ensures I always have money for a meter.
I have, in fact, been motivated by rising fine prices to work much harder at using the parkades, and I love my parking card. But there are days when I think I’m going to take 90 minutes, but I take longer. There are days when I’m running late, lugging heavy things, or just unable to turn away from some beautiful open parking spot right out front. Why do I have to be fined $20 for that?
With no disrespect to hard-working city councillors, I’d take away their free parking privileges if it were up to me. Elected officials need to stay real if they want to keep their citizens happy, and that includes experiencing the frustration of parking tickets. Councillors, you need to become familiar with the feeling of being fined for spending too much time in the downtown.
If the problem really is downtown workers hogging meters, then let’s deal with that rather than continue to fine a completely different group of downtown users.
How about opening up the meters to accommodate longer parking? A bigger discount at the parkades, and a reasonable first-day fine rate? Not so long ago, people paid $7.50 if they dealt with their parking tickets promptly; how about a rate like that for those who pay up within a day or two?
Thank you, Downtown Victoria Business Association, for your two-hour-free Saturday coupons and your “meter fairies,” who use top-ups to quietly save people from tickets. I appreciate your attempts to mitigate the effects of an overly efficient parking system.
But it takes more than fairies to fix the inherent problems of a city constantly fining the very people that it’s ostensibly trying to lure into doing business downtown. There has to be a better way.

Consider yourself a journalist? Post your ethics code

No TC column this past week (CanWest cutbacks), but I thought I might fill the blank by posting my personal ethics code as a journalist.
I put it together last fall when I was teaching a journalism course at the University of Victoria. We got into a big discussion one day about ethical behaviour in journalism, and I went home and for the first time wrote down the personal code I followed as a journalist.
In these times of disintegrating mainstream media and anyone-is-a-journalist, I think it's going to be essential for readers/viewers to ask their favourite bloggers and writers to produce their own codes. If we're all going to be getting our news from wildly diverse sources, we'd be wise to understand what principles our news gatherers are using when collecting their information.
Anyone can call themselves a journalist, but there's no association that journalists have to belong to, or code that we have to swear to uphold. So the only thing that separates a conscientious journalist from an irresponsible, muck-raking fiction writer is the internal ethics code that the writer is guided by. Here's mine:

Jody’s personal ethics code:

- Through my own efforts or that of trusted sources, I have done my best to ensure that the information I’m presenting is factual.

- I believe the story I’m writing is in the greater public interest or meets the test of the public’s need to know, and is not merely voyeuristic, sensational or exploitive.

- I have done my best to present all sides of the issues, and have set aside my own personal views in order to provide a fair and balanced story that puts the issues at hand in context for the reader.

- I understand that people may be harmed in some way as a result of my story, but have considered those risks and believe that the greater public good in this case outweighs the risks of individual harm.

- I am familiar with Canada’s laws around libel, defamation and contempt of court, and have done my best to present a story that is not in conflict with those legal issues. Where a story still may be a concern on those fronts, I have notified my editor.

- While I have been very careful to avoid making mistakes of any kind - errors of fact, spelling, geography, timelines, etc - I recognize that mistakes are always a possibility. I take full responsibility for correcting those mistakes quickly, graciously and without malice.

- I identify all sources of information for my readers, and in the rare case when it’s not possible to identify a source, I tell the reader why anonymity is justified.

- I recognize that “facts,” perspectives and knowledge are ever-changing, and am always willing to take another look at an issue or change my mind.

- I do not lie or falsely represent myself to anyone I am seeking information from or interviewing.

- I am proud to put my name to the pieces I write and recognize that my personal reputation is on the line with every story that appears under my byline.

Don't let racist element blur the view on stupid boys fighting

Nobody needs an ugly video of a three-on-one street fight in Courtenay to remind them that racism is alive and well in our country and around the world. We humans always need an enemy, and physical appearance has long been an easy fallback for the purposes of defining “us” and “them.”
I feel sorry for the town of Courtenay, which in my experience is no more of a hotbed of racism than any other community. I grew up there and did see quite a bit of street-fighting in my teen years, however, most of it involving stupid young guys fighting for no particular reason.
When racial taunts were available to the boys of my generation, I expect they used them. Courtenay was a fairly white town in those days, though, so they generally needed a different excuse for singling someone out for a roughing up. But there was always some hurtful insult available if a guy needed to goad somebody into a fight.
I know we’d like to think we’ve changed as a society since then. But what I see most clearly in the sad video footage of Jay Phillips getting jumped on in Courtenay last week is just more proof that the legacy of stupid young guys lives on.
In this case, the three young men allegedly started the fight by grabbing the most obvious racial epithet to hurl at Phillips. But I hope we don’t get so lost in the race issue that we overlook the very unsocial fact of guys fighting each other in the street. Yes, racism is a terrible thing, but to see Phillips’ attackers conveniently packaged as “white supremacists” is to completely miss the point that the problem at the core of this incident is violence.
More than 8,400 people have already seen the video of the street fight uploaded to YouTube. More than 220 people have commented, almost all of them condemning Phillips’ attackers for racist and cowardly behaviour. Headlined “Black Man Fights Off White Supremacists,” the video is hard to miss. Courtenay will wear the shame for years to come.
The truth is, such fights go on among young men everywhere. To categorize this as a racial problem in Courtenay is to miss the point that stupid boys fighting is a problem that continues to elude us in every community. Even the vicious gang wars in Vancouver boil down to stupid boys fighting, albeit with much more sophisticated weaponry.
Ask Victoria Police how they spend their Saturday nights downtown. They’ll tell you all about the stupid boys fighting after the bar closes, hurling their share of racial slurs and insults to heat things up.
Were there to be a bright new future where nobody used racial slurs, those guys would just latch onto some other equally offensive name-calling for their fights. The whole point is to offend.
Of course, we’re not talking about all young men. Only a small minority are violent - affirmation that we’re doing many things right. But we’re still ending up with a persistent population of young men looking for a fight.
Anybody can find a fight if they’re looking for one. In the Courtenay case, the three young men were reportedly driving around in their now-infamous red truck and called out a racial epithet as they passed Phillips. When he swore back at them, they stopped their truck and swarmed him.
If I thought jail worked as a deterrent for unsocial behaviour, I’d have turned into a law and order type a long time ago. But prison time alone does little, and the macho atmosphere just amplifies angry-young-man syndrome. What really needs to happen with those three men and all the generations to come if the goal is to curb the anti-social behaviour of (some) young men?
If convicted of assault, I imagine the Courtenay guys will end up with a court order aimed at giving them an education about racial tolerance - volunteer hours at the multicultural centre or some such thing. Good idea. So is an anger-management course. The good news is that they’ll likely give up such foolishness in a few years no matter what, because street-fighting is by and large a young man’s game.
But what about the young men who never get caught on film? What of the generations of boys to come - the ones who need to see past the racism of the Phillips attack and into the senseless violence at its core? Yelling racial epithets is unacceptable, but beating people up is the bigger problem here.
Credit the new age of public videotaping for once again bringing an ugly human moment to our attention. Now what?

Wish I'd seized the moment to know my grandmother better

My mother didn’t give me much choice about attending family reunions when I was younger, and there were times in years past when I wasn’t too happy about that. I love my family, but long summer treks to Saskatchewan weren’t necessarily my idea of a good time.
But somewhere along the line, I got hooked. I can’t remember the exact reunion when it all clicked in, but I recall looking around at my many cousins as we made merry and thinking how incredible it was that we barely knew each other, had grown up thousands of miles away, and yet all had stories in common of our quirky grandmother.
That connection is very much on my mind this week, because the aunts and the uncles and the cousins are all in town at this very moment for a family reunion in Victoria. Chances are I’m swapping Grandma Chow stories with some of them even as you’re reading this.
Mary Feica was a Romanian teenager who married Chinese immigrant Charles Chow in 1910 in Moose Jaw, Sask. They’d met when my grandmother got a job working at the restaurant my grandfather managed.
The circumstances of that marriage alone, at a time when few things could have been more scandalous, have made for many happy hours of chatty speculation for me and my cousins. But there’s much more than that to the life of Mary and Charles Chow and their nine very interesting children, so we’re never short of things to talk about.
I have no memory of my grandfather, as he died the year I was born. But Grandma Chow lived until 1979 and was a regular visitor to our house during my childhood. She was a traveller without a home base in the years when I have the clearest memories of her, moving from one relative’s house to another for extended periods.
Oh, the things I wish I’d asked her during the times when she stayed with us. She was a woman who lived against the tenets of her time on a number of fronts, and if she was here before me now I’d have a million questions for her about what that was like. (Every now and then, the cousins get to talking about how we’ll write a book about our grandparents.)
But wouldn’t you know, I wasn’t interested in Grandma Chow’s stories in the years when she was visiting. I was a kid, and then a self-absorbed teenager, and then off on my own adventures. My memories of her are only of an elderly woman with a heavy accent and thick eyeglasses, humming tuneless melodies as she moved around our kitchen making something strange to eat.
Such a lost opportunity. I’m thankful that one of my cousins is trying to fill in some of the gaps in our family knowledge by interviewing the three surviving Chow children - my mother Helen, her sister Joan, and baby brother Eddie. But I wish I’d had the foresight to be more curious with Grandma Chow herself when I had the chance, as I’m sadly certain that she would have been happy to have been asked.
It’s not so much the geography of her life that interests me - lived here or there, worked at this job or that. I’d like to know those details too, of course, but what I really want to know is what it was like to be her.
Nine children, a language barrier with her own husband, the death of a young son, years of poverty during the Depression - Mary, how did you endure it? She made choices throughout her life that would have brought tremendous judgment down on her at the time(sorry - you’ll have to wait for the book for more details), and yet she just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and carrying on.
I see her legacy in all of us Chow cousins. There’s no shortage of skeletons in the closet when it comes to our family, but we’re a tough-minded, passionate, independent bunch who know how to carry on. I’m proud to be the descendent of a strong, resilient woman who lived a life in full.
The good thing about regular family reunions is that the people who attend eventually develop their own shared history just from being at all those reunions. Grandma Chow remains a favourite subject, but now we’ve got our own tangled lives and crazy stories from previous reunions to add to the mix.
A big thanks to my Auntie Joan and cousins Tracy and Toni for making this weekend’s reunion happen. Chow family, party on.

Epilogue on July 7: Family reunion was a blast! Next reunion: Summer of 2012 in Three Hills, Alta.

Wane of traditional media leaves information gap

I’ve been slow to slip into Chicken Little mode on the question of whether the Internet will be the death of traditional media. People have asked me about that for at least 15 years now, and for the longest time I assured them the industry would always survive.
But whether it really is the Web or just a sign of the times we live in, there’s not much question anymore that the industry is in the fight of its life.
Blame the recession for some of that. All media rely heavily on advertising dollars, and those dollars aren’t as dependable during tough economic times.
But the bigger problem for the industry is that its readers, viewers and listeners simply don’t want to pay for information about their community anymore.
Even just a couple of decades ago, that would have been unthinkable. Local media outlets were virtually the only way anyone got reliable information about their community and the world. Most households had a subscription to at least one newspaper, a favourite radio station for catching the news of the moment, and a nightly TV newscast they rarely missed.
No more. Now, on-line news from around the world is at the fingertips of anyone who has an Internet connection - which is to say, virtually everyone.
Where once there were local newspapers read daily by almost everyone in town, now there are customized news feeds from thousands of different sources delivered directly to your e-mail inbox. Where once there were popular radio and TV newscasts providing the topics for that day’s water-cooler conversations, now it’s podcasts and YouTube videos and astounding footage from somebody’s cell phone camera.
And hey, maybe such competition will be a good thing in the long run for the traditional media that manage to stay in the game. As the saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and those that make it through these deeply uncertain times will have a whole new set of strategies for staying relevant.
The impact in the short term, however - well, that’s just a little scary, and not only for people like me who work in the business. How will we talk to each other as a community about the things that matter if the day comes when none of us have any news sources in common?
The Internet is a marvellous vehicle for finding information you want. But what about the information you don’t know you want? Or the information that you ought to want, but aren’t likely to go looking for? Without traditional media, what is the mechanism for getting us news that we need to know?
Those questions go to the heart of what it means to be a community. Don’t get me wrong - I love living in a wired global village. But it’s still traditional media that covers local news best. It’s still traditional media that’s most effective at bringing us together in our own home towns to rally behind a cause, a concern, a crisis.
In the new age of on-line information, we can all become experts in the things that we take an interest in, and active participants in a virtual community of people around the world who think just like us. We can find all the stories we’d ever want to confirm what we already believe.
But our exposure to the stories that might challenge those beliefs, or promote new ways of thinking, will be greatly reduced. On the one hand, the Internet opens up the world as never before; on the other, it narrows it dramatically by placing us into skinny streams of information that don’t accommodate the flow of contrary thought.
Then there’s the fact of the on-line information itself, much of which stems from the reporting work of traditional media. I overheard a woman talking to a friend the other day about why she no longer bothered with a daily paper: “Everybody just gets their news on-line now.”
But much of that news comes from the newsrooms of traditional media, which heavily subsidize the cost of their on-line presence through their other operations. If those operations falter, the news as we know it will falter as well. We may like to gripe about the shortcomings of the media, but life without them is a frightening concept.
When Conrad Black ruled the roost in Canada, people were downright hysterical about the impact of concentrated media ownership on a free press, for what ultimately turned out to be just a blip in the business cycle. Alas, the real bogeyman has arrived.

Old West-style justice system strands binner in Oak Bay

Hear the one about the homeless guy stranded in Oak Bay?
It’d make a pretty good opening line for a joke. But there’s nothing funny about it in reality, seeing as the man who it happened to had no access to food or shelter for 10 days because of a court order banishing him from the City of Victoria.
The courts routinely use “red zone” orders for drug charges to keep people away from certain areas where drugs are bought and sold. The red zone in our region is typically downtown Victoria - roughly the area bounded by Cook, Store, Belleville and Discovery streets.
But binner Ron Beland got hit with the red-zone order of all time last month. Charged with assault after a fight with another homeless man, Beland found himself ordered out of the entire City of Victoria until his next court appearance 10 days later.
Seeing as the region’s only services and supports for homeless people are in the City of Victoria, that left Beland to dig through dumpsters for food and sleep in an Oak Bay park for the duration. Lucky thing it all happened during a stretch of good weather; had it happened during winter, it might have been “a death sentence,” notes Beland.
“Everything I need - everything - is in the downtown,” said Beland. “I showed the Oak Bay cops my order, and they were like, ‘What??!’ They can’t even take me to the drunk tank, because Oak Bay doesn’t have one and I’m not allowed in Victoria.”
Crown counsel spokesman Robin Baird was unaware of Beland’s case and surprised to hear of the extent of the order, although he recalled another time when a judge ordered a Nanaimo man to stay south of the 49th parallel.
“It kind of smacks of the old westerns - taking someone to the outskirts of town,” admitted Baird. “I think that’s too broad a brush for the court to be using. [The justice system] bears the onus at every stage to show that the restrictions on a person’s liberty are not being unduly infringed upon.”
Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton hadn’t heard about Beland’s banishment either. He was concerned both for Beland’s well-being and the risk to Oak Bay citizens, seeing as Beland was charged with assault.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” said Causton. “I don’t know what the backup is at times like this, but we don’t have any services.”
John Howard Society executive director Dave Johnson said he’s been noticing “red-zone creep” in the court orders of his organization’s clients, both in the reach of the zones and the types of offences the orders are used for. It’s not uncommon to see red-zone orders nowadays that extend all the way to the John Howard neighbourhood of Rock Bay, said Johnson - meaning a client risks breaching a court order just by coming in for support.
“But I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says Johnson of Beland’s order. “The downtown red zone at least had boundaries that kind of made sense. Being compelled to reside in Oak Bay - well, that’s interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if police helped him relocate to Saanich.”
Defence lawyer Tom Merino deals with people like Beland all the time through his legal-aid work. He didn’t know the Beland case personally but said he’s not surprised by it, given the court’s ever-more desperate attempts to manage problems beyond its realm of expertise.
“I find these kinds of orders offensive in the extreme,” said Merino. “I understand the frustration of those in power, trying to use the limited tools available to them. But this doesn’t work. You can’t solve social problems through the courts.”
People can return to court to argue that an order is too onerous, said Merino. But they certainly can’t count on having a lawyer represent them, what with ongoing cuts to legal aid.
Had Beland breached his City of Victoria ban by sneaking downtown for a meal, for instance, he wouldn’t have qualified for legal aid. “Category one” offences such as breaches were delisted as a legal-aid category in B.C. two months ago.
Last we talked, Beland was surviving his 10-day banishment with a little help from his friends - two Victoria binners whose daily bottle routes take them to the Oak Bay border. They shared food, sherry and companionship with Beland, who wasn’t used to the quiet Oak Bay scene.
“I have to get back downtown. I need the services,” said Beland. “It’s also the money spot for a binner like me.”

Confessions of a disease vector

Like many other Greater Victorians, I caught a bug recently and am sick this week.
I doubt it’s the infamous “swine flu,” seeing as any number of more common colds and flus are hanging around out there right now. But for a moment let’s pretend that it is, if only for the purposes of demonstrating that there isn’t a sniff of hope in these modern times for containing the spread of new viruses.
The new H1N1 flu is contagious 24 hours before you show any symptoms and for at least seven days after you get sick, as are all flu viruses. That means I was contagious as of last Saturday.
That was the day I was shopping in Seattle with my daughter and stepdaughter. We were jammed into the basement of Nordstrom Rack with at least a thousand other women over the course of the afternoon. I can’t imagine how many articles of clothing I handled that day - how many hangers I jostled, changing-room doors I pushed open, people I brushed up against while engaging in the intense contact sport of discount shopping.
That night, I went to a packed restaurant full of Saturday-night revellers and beautiful young people in prom clothes, out celebrating their high-school grad. I hugged a friend from Seattle who had joined us for dinner, and we all shared an appetizer that involved us breaking off pieces of flatbread and dipping it in a single dish of melted cheese. I spent the night in a very small hotel room with my daughters, both of whom were already sick with some cold-like illness.
On Sunday, my stepdaughter flew back home to England, taking whatever bug she had - and perhaps mine, too - onto two planes, through three airports, and aboard a train ride to Exeter. My other daughter and I spent the morning weaving through throngs of tourists and locals packed into Pike Street Market, then went on to more discount shopping at the bustling outlet mall near the Tulalip Casino.
My credit card passed from me to a store clerk and back again any number of times over the weekend. I shared pens, passed along my passport at the border, handled a whole lot of merchandise in a whole lot of stores. I took a busy BC Ferry back to Victoria on Sunday night.
You get the picture: I shared public space with large numbers of people before I even knew I was sick. I know now, of course, which should mean I’ll take steps to avoid infecting anyone from this point on. But here we stumble into another unworkable theory for flu management: That people will stay home for seven days after the onset of symptoms to prevent the spread of the virus.
Are there people who can just close up their lives for seven days due to possibly having the flu? I know I can’t.
For one thing, I’m self-employed, which means no paid sick time. But even when I did have that fringe benefit, there was no way I would have stayed home for seven days straight just because I thought I had the flu. The truth is that people work through sickness all the time, and the modern workplace depends on it.
On the bright side, I work at home, sans co-workers. But I’ve got two contracts hitting deadlines over the next two weeks, and they require me to get out there and meet with people, flu or no flu. My plan: A couple Dayquils when needed and onward into my regular life, albeit with a bit more attention to hand-washing and avoiding close spaces.
The flu experts want me to wear a mask if I have to go out in public. Maybe I’d consider that if knew absolutely that I had some virulent flu strain and not just a garden-variety cold.
But therein lies the other difficult aspect of controlling the spread of influenza: How often do any of us actually know that we even have a confirmed case of the flu? It’s my opinion that I’ve had the flu many times in my lifetime, but I’ve never gone for a blood test to confirm any of it. Health officials anticipate confirming as few as five per cent of the H1N1 cases currently spreading around the world.
A pandemic strategy is a good thing, of course, and I’m glad for all the stockpiled Tamiflu and scientists working away on new vaccines. But best practice and human habits are leagues apart when it comes to spreading the flu. Eat your veggies and hope for the best, because avoiding each other simply isn’t an option.

Craigslist controversy reveals foolish attitudes toward sex work

My experience is that you can stop any conversation dead by trying to talk about the sex industry. People’s level of discomfort in the subject is near-universal.
So indulge me in trying to steer clear of the squeam-inducing “sex” word for a moment by pretending that this ridiculous Craigslist hullabaloo is in fact about the sale of shoes. Please don’t take it as trivializing last month’s murder of a young Boston woman, as that’s definitely not the intent. I’m just trying for an analogy that might get us past the squirm factor long enough to think straight.
OK then. At issue: The sale of shoes through the on-line listings operated by Craigslist. People have been selling shoes for years on Craigslist and nobody seemed to mind, but something tragic happened in April that has changed that. A shoe seller was killed at a Boston hotel by a shoe buyer, who first contacted her through her ad on Craigslist.
Within hours of the murder, law-and-order types were condemning the practice of selling shoes on Craigslist. Wasn’t that how the Boston murderer was able to find his victim, after all? And given that any shoe buyer is a potential murderer, isn’t it in the interests of shoe sellers everywhere if customers are prevented from finding them?
Various state justice departments soon jumped into the debate. They cranked up the heat on Craigslist, threatening the company with criminal charges for its role in the murder of the shoe seller.
Alarmed shoe sellers tried to wade into the debate, raising concerns about losing an important advertising vehicle. But nobody listened. They’d bought that line about how 98 per cent of shoe sellers only did it because they were forced to, and figured the protests were simply the cries of people too exploited and beaten down to know what they were talking about.
Within a month, a beleaguered Craigslist had agreed to scrap its free shoe-listing service throughout the U.S. It announced it would be relocating shoe sellers to a category renamed “footwear,” and would be much more selective about who advertised there. A victory over evil was declared, followed by calls for Craigslist to do the same in Canada.
Anyway, you get the point. The nuttiness of the Craigslist saga would be pretty clear to all of us if the product was anything other than sex. But it’s like we lose our ability to think rationally when sex is the subject.
Can we ever imagine a time when we would respond to the murder of, say, a real-estate agent by making it harder for real-estate salesmen to advertise? The two things have nothing to do with each other. That there are predators who find all sorts of ways to bring misery to innocent people - well, that’s a given in our world. But you’re not going to fix that by making it harder for the innocent to advertise.
Sex workers already face considerable discrimination in advertising. The sale of sex is legal in Canada, but that’s not to say the ads come cheap. Advertising outlets all take advantage of the highly stigmatized industry by charging many times the going rate if an ad is sex-work related. We can tell ourselves such premiums keep a lid on the industry by driving up costs, but it’s really just an excuse to gouge money out of a sector that can’t afford to complain.
Were we truly interested in preventing the murder of sex workers, we’d provide safer places for people to work. The young Boston woman, Julissa Brisman, wasn’t killed because she advertised in the Craigslist “erotic services” category, but because a killer was able to get her alone in a hotel room. Robert Pickton’s victims didn’t die because they worked in the sex industry, but because a killer knew exactly where to find vulnerable women working alone in the dark.
Recent studies from the United Kingdom and the U.S. estimate that almost 20 per cent of men have used commercial sex services at some point in their lives. The U.S. study found that nearly a third of single men over age 30 were regular buyers of such services. Business is brisk: Nevada’s 25 legal brothels each see an average of 40 customers a day.
Sex sells. North Americans have been despairing about that for as long as Canada and the U.S. have been countries, but it hasn’t changed a thing. That we spend even a moment blaming any of this on Craigslist is sad affirmation of that.

At the request of the Times Colonist, I wrote a
book review of former CBC journalist Victor Malarek's latest, "The Johns." Suffice to say that Mr. Malarek and I have fairly different views when it comes to the subject of prostitution, although I respect his passion.

The piece ran in the Monitor section of the TC on Sunday, and you'll find it at the link above.

Our favourite drug causes major problems

Broken windows. Broken bones. Bar fights that spill out onto the street. The news of drunk young men and the latest harm they’ve caused in the downtown just keeps on coming.
The most recent news is of a Victoria police officer getting his leg broken after drunken young scrappers accidentally toppled him during a brawl outside the Pita Pit takeout restaurant. No doubt we’ll soon be talking again about early closure of the Pita Pit as a “solution,” as if the problem is in the gathering and not the fact that young men are drinking themselves into belligerent oblivion every weekend.
Not every young man is out there getting himself slam-faced drunk in the downtown, of course. Most aren’t. But a significant number are routinely drinking at harmful levels, posing a danger to themselves and anyone who crosses their path. That’s the problem we ought to be trying to fix.
I understand the appeal of alcohol, being a social drinker with a clear memory of how hard I drank myself for a couple of years when I was 14 or so. But that’s not to say I’m blind to alcohol’s many harms.
Even social drinkers risk long-term health problems from a lifetime of steady drinking. I co-wrote a book on addiction for ASPECT B.C. last year, and what lingered for me most from the research into the many drugs we take were alcohol’s powerful, lasting effects on every system of the body and mind.
And that’s just for starters. The one-off harms caused by a single night of drunkenness are legion. Car accidents, beatings, killings, robbery, domestic assault, sexual abuse, infidelity, on and on. We’re capable of immensely stupid and tragic acts when we drink too much.
For pregnant women, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs a woman can take in terms of the potential lifelong damage to the baby. It’s a “teratogenic” - a substance capable of crossing the placental wall and wreaking havoc on a developing fetus at the cellular level.
Yet our resistance in Canada even to label alcohol bottles with a warning about that says it all when it comes to the sacred-cow status alcohol enjoys in our society. Case in point: the FASD Community Circle asked the region’s mayors a couple years ago to abstain from alcohol for nine months as a gesture of support for non-drinking pregnant moms, and none of them would do it. (Good on Victoria Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe and her husband for jumping in.)
Then again, how many of us would agree to nine months booze-free? The average British Columbian over the age of 15 now consumes more than 500 alcoholic drinks annually. Among college and university students, one in eight binge-drink every weekend. Each year’s alcohol-sales stats show us drinking a little more than the year before, helped along by the 9,000 liquor stores and drinking establishments that now operate in B.C.
OK, so we love the stuff. But we’re going to have to get past that if we want to deal with the larger problems of harmful alcohol use.
UVic’s Centre for Addiction Research (CARBC) and the provincial medical health officer have done excellent work on this topic. They note that by 2002, the costs of alcohol-related problems in B.C. were already exceeding tax revenues from alcohol sales by $61 million a year. We’ve pushed those revenues up a little further every year since then by drinking more, but the alcohol-related harms always seem to increase faster.
CARBC advocates a variable liquor tax tied to the amount of pure alcohol in a particular product. In countries that have tried such taxing strategies, a beer with less alcohol sells for less than one with a higher level, which encourages consumers to buy lower-alcohol brands. The reverse is true right now for some alcoholic beverages in B.C.; coolers, for instance, actually get cheaper as alcohol content increases.
B.C. medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall has urged the B.C. government to consider the impact of allowing 500 more liquor stores to open in the province in the past seven years, an increase of almost 40 per cent. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that consumption has gone up eight per cent in the same period of time.
We need a campaign - one that motivates through education, price point and prosecution, with particular relevance to the age group causing the bulk of the trouble downtown. We’ve danced around the edges long enough with our debates around pop-up urinals, staggered bar closings, and forced closure of takeout joints for the sin of selling food late at night.
The problem is drunkenness. The solution is less of it.

It's been quite a week. Canucks knocked out of the playoffs, Gordon Campbell's Liberals re-elected, all hope of electoral reform tossed out the window.
The Canucks and Campbell - so it goes. I've been waiting for the Canucks' big win for most of my lifetime, and I guess I still am. And on the Campbell front, it's not like I'm a solid supporter of any party. Still, it's discouraging to see that the Liberals can decimate the social supports of B.C. without getting even a sniff of kickback at the polls.
But the electoral-reform issue - oh, that one has broken my heart. I'd put a lot of stock into STV passing. Probably too much, in hindsight, but to me a "yes" vote would have been a signal that British Columbians were ready for real change. It's not like I thought STV would solve all the problems we endure due to the way we elect governments, but at the very least a yes vote would have been a clear statement that we want something better.
Instead, it got trashed. The politicians have no love for voting systems that give the people more power at the best of times, and we just handed them a perfect excuse for never having to raise the subject of electoral reform again. So that's it, then.
A while back, maybe when the Twin Towers got bombed, I discovered that Bobby Bare's version of "Blowing in the Wind" is the kind of song for moments like this.
I listened to it over and over that day in September 2001, and again when George Bush declared war on Iraq. It's playing on my iPod right now, and I might just keep it on for the rest of the afternoon. Hopes and dreams for a better B.C., blowin' in the wind...

Why I'm voting 'Yes!' to STV

You probably know who you’re voting for in Tuesday’s provincial election. I’m not going to try to influence your decision, other than to urge you to vote with brain on and eyes wide open.
But I do want to influence your vote on changing B.C.’s electoral system. You’ll have the chance to vote on that issue as well as pick an MLA when you go to the polls this Tuesday, and hopefully you’ll vote yes to STV.
The acronym stands for Single Transferrable Vote. Far more informed people than I can give you the lowdown as to the details of STV (I’ve listed some Web sites at the bottom of this column), but the short version is that it’s a way of voting in which the makeup of the legislature more closely mirrors the popular vote. If 45 per cent of voters pick Party A, 30 per cent pick Party B and 15 per cent pick C, then that will be the party breakdown inside the House.
The party that wins the biggest percentage of the popular vote still forms government, as is the case now. But individual MLAs wield more power in an STV-elected legislature. Ruling parties don’t get the run of the place to the same degree as they do under our current system.
The theory is that such proportional representation creates governments that are more responsible to those they govern. Critics of STV rightly note that there’s a higher risk of unstable minority governments under such a system. Supporters point to the benefits of more coalition-building and compromise, and the much greater chance of smaller parties and independents getting elected.
Many countries of the world use versions of STV. British Columbians were very close to that point themselves in 2005, when nearly 58 per cent of provincial voters said yes to the province’s initial STV referendum.
Alas, the threshold had been set at 60 per cent for that referendum (and this one), and so the vote failed. Now we have a second opportunity.
As I mentioned, I’m not an expert on voting systems. I doubt many of us are, or plan to become one in time for Tuesday’s election. Fortunately, a group of 160 randomly chosen British Columbians have already done the legwork for us.
Known as the Citizens’ Assembly, those 160 hard-working volunteers put in close to a year of research, public hearings and community presentations in 2004 after being asked by Premier Gordon Campbell to take on the task of assessing voting methods and recommending the best one.
The one they picked was STV. And if that’s the informed opinion of a diverse, apolitical citizens’ group after many months spent learning and listening, then that’s good enough for me.
In a “first past the post” system like the one we have, the only votes that ultimately count are those for the victorious party. The 1996 election year revealed the risks of such a system, when just 39 per cent of the popular vote went to Glen Clark’s New Democrats and yet the NDP still formed a majority government.
The 2001 election highlighted another quirk in the system. That time out, Gordon Campbell’s Liberals won 57 per cent of the popular vote, yet claimed 98 per cent of the seats in the legislature. For the next four years, B.C. was essentially a dictatorship, and not a particularly benevolent one.
With STV, every vote counts. You rank your vote - picking a first choice, a second, a third and so on - and thus are no longer picking one candidate but helping select a team of MLAs for your riding. Your first pick may or may not go on to win election, but your vote will still count for the candidates who were your backup choices.
The surplus votes of a landslide - wasted votes as well in their own way, seeing as the candidate didn’t actually need them to win - are also eliminated under STV. Once a candidate has secured enough votes to win election, any surplus votes for that same candidate instead go to voters’ second choices.
No voting system alone guarantees fair governance, of course. STV is merely a different way to vote, not a panacea for all that’s wrong in the legislatures of our country. But I think it’s our best chance for reminding governments who they work for.
Here are a few STV sites to get you started: Citizens' Assembly; Wikipedia; STV campaign; Michael Gobbi site. Or check out the Webcast of a Times Colonist-hosted debate on STV.
See you at the polls May 12.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downtown community finds its stride in running club


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's clearly not.

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