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On the heels of the NEB’s approval of Kinder Morgan’s pipeline proposal, a raft of research points in the other direction. THERE IS A STRANGE IRONY to the timing of the National Energy Board’s recommendation that the controversial $6.8-billion Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion should get a green light from the federal cabinet. Almost simultaneously with the May release of the NEB report, which concluded that, subject to 157 conditions, the Trans-Mountain pipeline would be in the national interest, a flurry of reports and scientific studies appeared documenting the risks of continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels. These were followed by a number of court challenges to the NEB recommendation. The studies gave momentum to the leave-it-in-the-ground movement and added to public discomfort with the prospect of Kinder Morgan tripling the amount of diluted bitumen flowing from the Alberta oil sands to Burnaby. The expansion would also mean 400 tankers a year—a sevenfold increase—carrying dilbit through the sensitive waters of the Strait of Georgia and Strait of Juan de Fuca. Opponents are emphasizing the project’s climate change implications and questioning how the increase in oil sands output, as the pipeline opens up new Asian markets, can fit with Canada’s commitment at the Paris climate talks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. “Expanding fossil fuel production flies in the face of what is needed to tackle climate change,” said David Suzuki in an email to supporters. “So why is the government still talking about building fossil fuel infrastructure?” The NEB report looked only at direct emissions from pipeline construction and operation, and made nine recommendations. For the first time in its history, the board recommended offsets to ensure no net emissions, but it did not look at upstream or downstream emissions or at the overall effect on climate change. The final pipeline decision will rest with the federal cabinet. Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr has appointed a three-person panel to hear from BC residents, with promises that at least upstream greenhouse gas emissions will be examined in detail. The panel will finish its’ report in November and Carr has promised a government decision no later than December 19, 2016. In the meantime, scientific evidence of harm—both from the processes used to extract bitumen from the oil sands and from greenhouse gas emissions released later on—continues to mount. A STUDY, led by Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists, published in the journal Nature in May, found the oil sands pose another big problem, beyond their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions: They are one of the largest sources of “secondary organic aerosol” pollution in North America. The pollution is now “comparable to downwind of megacities such as Mexico City and Paris, and is higher than that observed in Tokyo and New England.” The tiny airborne particles, which result in what we call smog, have been linked to major health problems like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Other studies examined the impacts of climate change on Canada. As carbon dioxide continues to be released into the atmosphere, Canada’s future, according to different scientific papers, includes both increasing droughts and floods. David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the Prairies are likely to see droughts worse than the 1930s. Meanwhile, the Fraser Basin Council warned that climate change is increasing the risk of major floods in the Lower Mainland. Tim Takaro, Simon Fraser University health sciences professor, finds it difficult to understand why the NEB did not adequately consider climate change. “Climate change is huge. You can see the evidence happening in Fort McMurray. It affects our health and you can’t ignore that in a project of this scale,” he said. “It is unconscionable to me that we can be discussing this dramatic expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure without considering climate changes and the health impacts,” Takaro said in an interview. Health problems could come from a spill of diluted bitumen, but the effects of air pollution, temperature increases, flooding and sea level rise must also be considered, said Takaro. “The International Panel on Climate Change of the UN has very clearly said that, if we [are to] have any chance of getting hold of this tiger and controlling it, we have to stop building super-large fossil fuel infrastructure,” he said. An examination of what will happen if we don’t take such action came in May from a team of climate scientists, led by University of Victoria PhD student Katarzyna Tokarska. Published in Nature Climate Change, their study warned that if the Earth’s remaining untapped fossil-fuel resources are burned, the average global temperature is likely to rise between 6.4 and 9.5 degrees Celsius by 2300, with Arctic temperatures warming an astounding 14.7 and 19.5 degrees Celsius by that year. These increases are a far cry from the 2.0 degrees of warming that is accepted as the upward limit to avoid the most serious effects of climate change. Such warming would end life as we know it on planet Earth. Tokarska applied sophisticated climate models to the current estimate of known fossil fuel reserves, with their conservative associated five trillion tonnes of carbon emissions when burned, to project “considerably more profound climate changes than previously suggested.” “What we are doing is showing it’s relevant to know what will happen if we don’t take any action to mitigate climate change—if we don’t ever implement the Paris agreement or other such agreements. It’s a worst case scenario if we don’t do anything now,” Tokarska said in an interview. Climate scientist and MLA Andrew Weaver, a co-author of Tokarska’s paper, said in an interview that if Canada is serious about the Paris agreement, the government should not even consider the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. “Signing that agreement says we shouldn’t be building pipelines and we shouldn’t be building new LNG facilities,” said Weaver, who is also leader of the BC Green Party. “Canada investing in infrastructure to enhance its extraction of a resource, 80 percent of which, globally, has to be left in the ground if we are going to meet our targets, makes no sense,” Weaver added. CONTINUED RELIANCE ON FOSSIL FUELS also does not make economic sense, said Weaver. He pointed to Saudi Arabia’s decision to move to an economy that does not rely on oil and Norway’s decision to eliminate fossil fuel vehicles. “Canada is in a very precarious position. If we double down on the 20th century economy, which is dependent on resource extraction, we are going to be very poorly positioned when other jurisdictions transition away from fossil fuel,” he said. The economic uncertainty is echoed by a federal government think-tank that, in a draft report obtained by the CBC in May, said the rapid transformation of the world’s energy landscape could jeopardize economies based on fossil fuels. Policy Horizons Canada, which provides future-looking advice to federal bureaucrats, said in the report that electricity from wind and solar is becoming competitive with electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power. “The shift to an electricity-dominated global energy mix will be accelerated as decreasing costs combine with increasing government and private sector concerns over climate change, energy security and air pollution, particularly in developing countries where the need for additional energy capacity is greatest,” says the report. David Hughes, former research director at the Geological Survey of Canada, agrees that the economic case for new pipelines is flawed. In another new study, he noted that the international price of oil is no longer significantly higher than North American prices. “The idea that exporting more oil sands bitumen to Europe or Asia will boost returns to Alberta simply doesn’t hold water,” Hughes wrote in the study conducted for the Corporate Mapping Project, led by the University of Victoria, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and Alberta’s Parkland Institute. “Oil sand bitumen will always sell at a discount due to its lower quality, regardless of whether it’s sold in North America or on international markets,” says the study. Hughes also eviscerates claims by politicians that it is possible to meet climate commitments while significantly expanding oil and gas production and building new export pipelines. “Short of an economic collapse, it is difficult to see how Canada can realistically meet its Paris commitments in the 14 years remaining without rethinking its plans for oil and gas development,” he wrote. Hughes, who also factors in the five liquefied natural gas export terminals envisioned by the provincial government, found that with projected oil sands growth, emissions in other sectors would have to shrink by 55 percent to meet Paris Agreement commitments. “If Canada is to have any hope of meeting its Paris commitment, the aggressive oil and gas growth ambitions of the Alberta and BC governments will have to be reconsidered and reduced,” he said. Environment and Climate Change Canada, in a May review, estimated that, if the pipeline expansion is approved, upstream emissions—those associated with the production, processing and transportation of oil—could be between 20 and 26 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The NEB previously estimated that the pipeline itself would generate about one million tonnes of greenhouse gases during construction and another 400,000 tonnes annually once in operation. The government review, however, also noted that the upstream emissions might occur whether or not the Trans Mountain pipeline is built; if oil sands production does not happen in Canada, investments would be made in other jurisdictions and global oil consumption would be materially unchanged in the long-term. That assumption is being challenged by critics such as Ecojustice lawyer Dyna Tuytel who wrote in her blog that it amounts to a failure to take responsibility for Canadian upstream emissions. “This means that Environment Canada will not consider the emissions from additional tar sands production itself and, instead, will focus on the difference in emissions intensity of oil production in Canada compared to other hypothetical jurisdictions if Canada were not to produce it here,” she wrote. ECOJUSTICE, REPRESENTING the Living Oceans Society and Raincoast Conservation Foundation, is among the groups now challenging the NEB report in the courts. Lawyers for Ecojustice have filed for a judicial review of the report saying that the board failed to adequately consider the adverse effects of tankers on endangered southern resident killer whales and their habitat. The Squamish Nation has filed for a judicial review, as well, claiming that the First Nation’s concerns were not adequately taken into consideration and that the NEB process was flawed. And in June the City of Vancouver filed for a judicial review saying the NEB report is “flawed and biased” and ignores scientific evidence about the consequences of a major spill and the effect on greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the federal Liberal government has launched a lengthy review of the NEB process and other legislation governing the way major projects are assessed. Many of the laws, such as the Fisheries Act, Environmental Assessment Act, and the Fisheries and Navigation Protection Act, were changed in 2012 by the former Conservative government in an effort to get industrial and resource projects fast-tracked and approved more quickly. Expert panels will now review the legislation and issue a report in January. Some of the laws will also be studied by two parliamentary committees. However, the Liberal government has already said that projects already in the process—such as Kinder Morgan—will not be required to go back to square one and instead will face additional regulation through already-announced interim measures, including more consultation with First Nations and more emphasis on the effect projects will have on greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the continuing controversy, Kinder Morgan is confident that it can meet NEB’s conditions, including controlling emissions. A communications spokesman said in an emailed statement that the company welcomes the NEB’s requirement for a GHG offset plan. Although pipelines account for only about one percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, the industry is ready to do its part, he said. “It is a sign of the times and an appropriate reflection by the NEB, taking into consideration an issue of great public interest and importance,” he said. “We understand climate change is an important global issue requiring action across many industries around the world.” PROVINCIALLY, KINDER MORGAN’S pipeline faces hurdles into 2017 when it will likely become a provincial election issue. Before that it will have to face a provincial environmental review following a BC Supreme Court ruling that the province cannot rely solely on the federal process and, so far, the provincial government is not ready to give a go-ahead. “Our government position has always been clear and consistent. We will only support heavy oil pipelines in BC if our five conditions are met,” said Environment Minister Mary Polak. “We are not there yet.” Polak noted that some conditions set by the NEB do address BC’s concerns, but there is work yet to do on issues such as marine spill response, First Nations and benefits for BC. The provincial conditions include a world-class response to spills and for BC to receive its fair share of benefits, but do not mention climate change or emissions. That’s because pipeline greenhouse gas emissions are a federal responsibility, explained BC Ministry of Environment spokesman David Karn. “As the regulator of interprovincial pipelines, it is the federal government’s responsibility to ensure emissions are managed so that federal commitments are achieved,” he said. The province will rely on information from the NEB environmental assessment, but provincial Environmental Assessment Office staff will meet with aboriginal groups to determine whether Kinder Morgan has adequately consulted First Nations, Karn said. The provincial cabinet decision is likely to be made after the federal ruling in December and it is not clear what will happen if the two do not dovetail. Leading towards May 2017’s provincial election, where do the parties stand on the pipeline? George Heyman, NDP environment critic, says the NDP has consistently opposed the project, partially because of the NEB failure to consider climate change and lack of information on what part the pipeline plays in an overall climate plan. “This not in British Columbia’s interest,” Heyman said, counting off potential risks to the environment and the economy and accusing the BC Liberals of trying to have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too by taking an ambivalent stance. During the last provincial election, the NDP loss was partially blamed on then-leader Adrian Dix coming out against the pipeline during the campaign, but Heyman said that there are no concerns that it will deter voters next spring. “One of the reasons we took this position clearly and early is so people know where we stand. We will go forward into an election telling people what we are going to do to create jobs and a healthy economy as well as what clear measures we will take to have a good climate action plan,” he said. Weaver also believes the issue could still be knocking around during next spring’s provincial election and, as Green Party leader, he wants to see the Province just say “No.” “I have said very clearly that Kinder Morgan is simply not going to happen on my watch and they should not be wasting people’s time going through a process that is not in the interest of British Columbians or Canadians,” he said. The government always seems focused on “getting to yes, no matter what the question is,” Weaver said. “But with some projects the answer should be ‘No’—and Kinder Morgan is one of those projects.” Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.

BC’s Seniors Advocate Isobel Mackenzie makes the case for more government intervention on behalf of seniors. I MEET WITH BC SENIORS ADVOCATE ISOBEL MACKENZIE weighed down by personal experience of aging parents and relations, and complaints about “the system” from friends and fed-up professionals in the health and homecare fields. Much of my baggage points to at least some systemic dysfunction and an apparent disconnect between what is claimed about the government’s respect for seniors and what’s happening on the ground. After reading through most of the eight reports produced by Mackenzie’s office over the past two years, I discover the data largely dovetails with my experiences. It certainly makes clear that we are not doing enough for a significant number of seniors, particularly those with lower incomes or who reside in rural and northern areas of the province. Mackenzie was appointed BC’s Seniors Advocate—the first such in Canada—in 2014 after an 18-year career with Victoria-based Beacon Community Services. As Beacon’s executive director, she led the implementation of a new model of dementia care that has become a national best practice. In her office on the main floor of the Blanshard Street Ministry of Health building, Mackenzie is keen to talk about anything and everything related to seniors. We get right into her recent response—in no uncertain terms—to a June 7 column by Globe & Mail writer Margaret Wente. In “Time to Soak the Seniors,” Wente suggested the federal government is throwing too much money at seniors. Mackenzie described the column as a “generationally divisive and stunningly inaccurate generalization of a group of people based on their age.” Contrary to the image painted by Wente of seniors who use their Old Age Security (OAS) “to pay the air-conditioning bill for the winter place in Florida,” Mackenzie points out that “fully half of single Canadian seniors are living on less than $26,000 a year.” She tells me she does not disagree with Wente’s questioning of OAS payments made to those who do enjoy a high income: “People with $100,000 in income don’t need…OAS. I agree with that.” And in fact, she says, many BC seniors are doing just fine. “But offices like this don’t exist for the majority,” she comments. And she certainly takes issue with Wente including seniors’ health care costs in her calculations of government largesse towards them: “Before we go blaming seniors for the fact they need a new hip or bypass surgery, we should first thank them for the billions, yes billions of dollars they save the health care system by taking care of each other.” BC seniors, she tells me, “have the lowest median income of any age cohort. Median is a much more meaningful number than average, because average is skewed if there are some high income earners, and conversely if there are some low income earners. So we know that half of the seniors in this province live on less than $26,000 a year. We know that they disproportionately live alone, relative to the rest of the population, so it’s one income for the household.” Mackenzie’s research shows that it’s income that largely influences other determinants of health. A low income can play out in many ways, from not being able to afford hearing aids, which in turn cuts one off from others, which leads to depression, to forcing a senior out of a beloved home when maintenance costs mount. BC has a host of programs aimed at helping low income seniors—programs like the Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters (SAFER), Medical Service Plan Premium Assistance, Fair Pharmacare, Property Tax Deferment Program, and Home Adaptations for Independence. Ironically, Mackenzie’s research indicates, it is exactly the people most in need who are least aware of them. Hurdles with home support The Seniors Advocate’s 2015 Seniors’ Housing in BC report provided a snapshot of the places seniors call home: A rather surprising 93 percent of seniors live independently. Twenty-six percent live alone. Twenty percent rent. Eighty percent are homeowners, four-fifths of them mortgage-free. Only three percent live in assisted living facilities and four percent in “residential” or long-term care (LTC). Among those over 85, 15 percent live in LTC. BC seniors who are living independently constitute by far the largest group of seniors. Some need and receive subsidized support services to be able to remain independent. They’re charged a reduced rate based on income. This might mean a care worker dropping by daily for an hour or two to help a senior get up and dressed, do regular meal preparation, medication checks, weekly showers and other personal care. Housework is generally not provided. Despite the rising population, such assistance, Mackenzie tells me, is decreasing. The number of hours of home support went down in three out of five health authorities (Island Health was one of them), while the number of clients increased in four out of five. Yet she acknowledges that all the research shows that helping people stay in their own homes not only keeps them happy, but helps save taxpayer dollars. And, she says, “I believe the government is genuine when it says ‘We want to keep people in their homes.’” So why the apparent disconnect? Why are home care hours being cut back or limited when a bit more might, in the end, save the government money? The delivery of services, she notes, is driven by funding decisions and human resources. “I think what happens is there are so many layers and people involved, and different perspectives, and different values…” Case managers are people, after all, and each applies their own values at least to some degree; the evaluation process for care, making a judgement about what is safe, is not an exact science, she says. And clients are living longer, with complex needs and evolving expectations. To illustrate, Mackenzie says, “I looked at the assessments of our home support clients and found 53 percent meet the clinical complexity of people in residential care. When I started 20 years ago, that number was about 10 percent.” Additionally, she points out, we’ve “fragmented the system.” Even something as simple as approving the installation of a raised toilet seat for a client can now mean home visits by two professionals with attendant communications—and delays. In keeping with Mackenzie’s penchant for fact-based decision-making, a survey was recently completed by her office of the 22,000 people receiving subsidized home support 9000 surveys came back. Results will be reported on later this summer, but she gives me some hints about what it shows. “I think about 79 percent say that the program is usually or always meeting their needs. When it’s not meeting their needs, the number one thing that people want is housekeeping, followed by meal preparation.” She was surprised that while the survey results point to some frustration with the multiple workers sent out to provide care, it wasn’t “to the degree we expected to find.” “The other thing it shows is about medications. Some of the good news is most people knew the medications they were taking and why they were taking them, but they didn’t know the side effects. And so, we have to remember that part of the job is to say, ‘Okay, Leslie, this is your statin pill, this is your blood pressure pill. This is why you’re taking them.’ The other half is to say, ‘Now, some potential side effects from these drugs could include…mental confusion, or dry mouth, or lethargy…” This is particularly important with seniors as many drug side effects could be mistaken as just another challenge of aging. Mackenzie has now visited communities all over the province and thinks those of us in Victoria and the lower mainland have it pretty good on the home support front—at least compared to rural areas where just finding people to do the work is a big problem. It was, she tells me “an unbelievably eye-opening experience when I started to go to other parts of the province.” Home support programs are supposedly province-wide, but she’s found stark differences across BC. She tells me one part of the province has cut meal preparation from care plans whereas others include it. Even between South Island and North Island there are “different approval processes for maximum hours.” She explains, while there’s no formal maximum hours, the general rule of thumb was always 120 hours a month, or 4 four hours a day, of subsidized care for lower income seniors. But some health authorities aren’t doing that, she says. “In some health authorities, the discharge nurse will come in and say, ‘Well, you need four hours of home support a day. We can provide two. How are you going to provide the other two?’” Which leads to the matter of affordability. Tapping into home equity As mentioned, 80 percent of BC seniors are homeowners. For low income senior homeowners, Mackenzie is advocating the BC government come up with a plan—two plans actually—that would allow them to access the equity in their homes. Together they would give such seniors needed funds to fix the furnace or roof, and afford more care services. The Office of the Seniors Advocate has already calculated that the average monthly cost of homeowning, without a mortgage, is $1000. Some seniors, especially when single or widowed, are being forced to move simply for lack of funds—while their home could easily be worth $500,000 or a million, at least in the hot markets of Victoria and Vancouver. To force someone to sell such a home for want of the cash to pay for a new furnace or to keep up with utility and insurance payments seems absurd. Where could they go in such low vacancy times and pay less than their mortgage-free home? Some could well be forced into subsidized assisted living or residential care facilities. To address such realities, Mackenzie has asked the government to establish a “Homeowner Expense Deferral Account” which would allow seniors to tap into the equity in their homes to pay for housing costs such as hydro, home insurance and major repairs. The government is thinking about it. Meanwhile, she’s thinking about a broader application of the concept of tapping into home equity. “The question is, in my mind, does government have an interest in allowing seniors to access as much equity as possible to support their independence? I think they do. Any of that equity that they’re paying to commercial interest charges [with reverse mortgages], is money they can’t spend on themselves. And so, if we had a provincial program, under similar financial rules as property tax deferral, it doesn’t make the Province money, but it doesn’t cost the Province money, either.” Regarding the broader program, she notes, “By the time you need full-time live-in care, you’re not talking 20 years of life, right? You’re not talking about 20 years of financing. You might be talking about 5, maybe 10.” This type of program, she feels, would allow a more sustainable way for seniors to access their equity than do commercial reverse mortgages. Both the Expense Deferral and this broader program could be offered at no cost or risk to taxpayers. And given the cost of subsidized care—for example, LTC costs are $7000/month, with clients charged a maximum of only $3157—the plans should ultimately save the government money. Mackenzie believes the government is receptive, but cautious. “The government’s concern is, number one, they want to make sure that there’s enough equity left in the house to pay off what’s owed when the house is sold. Fair enough. Certainly you shouldn’t allow it at 55, like we have started to allow property tax deferral, but you may want to say these are the triggers for accessing it.” She says the government tends to like simplicity and prefers to not interfere with the market. “So it’s my job to remind government that [it could put] an income test on accessing this money. These are folks you’re going to be taking care of one way or another, and it’s convenient, it’s serendipitous that what people want actually happens to be what will cost the government less.” Mackenzie is also concerned about appropriate housing in rural areas. Think of a widow, she suggests, who wants to move from a farm into the nearby town—or just wants to downsize to a more manageable home. “There are no condos. There are no patio homes. There’s no assisted living,” she says. “Because the private sector isn’t going in there and building these kinds of things because there aren’t enough people. So, for those folks, the government’s going to have to look at its role in the supply of suitable independent housing.” The “FAB” system not so fab Once an elder is deemed, through a formal assessment process, to have needs that make it impossible for that person to be safely cared for in the community or assisted living, his or her name goes on a waitlist for one of BC’s 300 publicly subsidized LTC facilities. They are told to choose a facility—referred to as “Preferred Bed” (PB)—but are also informed they must take the “First Appropriate Bed” (FAB) in their chosen geographical area. They are warned to be ready to move within 48 hours of approval for a bed. Time spent on the waitlist seems to vary wildly among regions, and Mackenzie’s numbers appear rosier than the present day realities that have come to my attention. Those statistics, for 2013-14, show Island Health seniors spent an average of 41 days on the waitlist before getting a bed. Caseworkers have told me it’s now averaging six months in Victoria. Mackenzie believes that 5 to 15 percent of BC seniors living in residential care may be incorrectly housed—they are more suited for assisted living or being back in the community with supports. She has called for a reassessment of certain residents, allowing them—if desired—to move elsewhere. This could free up needed LTC beds as assisted living facilities have a 10 percent vacancy rate. This May, a 600-page downloadable Residential Care Facilities Quick Facts Directory was published on the Seniors Advocate website. It provides standardized, easy to read, comparative information on each long-term care facility in BC—definitely not a marketing brochure, says Mackenzie. For each facility it indicates the number of beds, shared rooms, percentage of the residents on antidepressants and antipsychotics, the number of reported “incidents” (falls, aggression, etc), when it was last inspected, and what percentage of the residents get recreation and other therapies. Given my own experience with elders on LTC waitlists, this knowledge is a mixed blessing. Stated preferences seem to count for nothing. Mackenzie’s own data is a little less grim. During 2013/14, clients got their “Preferred Bed” 23 to 45 percent of the time, depending on health authority. Even after they accepted the “First Appropriate Bed” (FAB) and applied for a transfer, only 4 to 22 percent of the time—depending on health authority—did they get to move to their desired facility. Mackenzie says her office hears from many frustrated seniors and their families about this. “Some seniors in more rural and remote regions of the province can find their spouse placed hundreds of kilometres away under the FAB policy.” The FAB system was to be used in tandem with “a fair, equitable and transparent transfer process that would ensure seniors got to their preferred facility as soon as possible.” But that, says Mackenzie, is not happening. She has recommended health authorities “be diligent” in filling available beds first from the preferred facility transfer list. She knows this is a bit more work for everyone, as it can mean multiple domino-like moves, but if it’s “implemented, monitored and enforced in all health authorities, then seniors and their family members will have greater certainty. They will know exactly how many people are ahead of them on the transfer list and there will be a general idea of how often a bed becomes available in a certain facility. The current situation gives no ability to predict because beds are getting filled first by people on the waiting list, not from the transfer list.” Mackenzie has also asked the government to ensure that by 2025, 95 percent of all residential care beds in the province will be single room occupancy. Meanwhile she’d like to see those seniors who end up—through no choice of their own—sharing a room, get a rate adjustment. Mackenzie and her team are currently gearing up to do a massive survey on long term care facilities from the user’s point of view. Her office’s biggest undertaking to date, trained multi-lingual volunteers will interview all 27,000 seniors in care and their most frequent visitor. The survey, says Mackenzie, “[will let us] see if and how the quality of experience is different depending on which care facility, which health authority, which area within the health authority. Are there differences? We’re going to find out.” But again, I wonder how that knowledge will serve seniors if they cannot choose a facility with much certainty of ending up there. Finding themselves placed in a facility they purposely avoided choosing because of negative reviews might actually be quite worrisome and depressing. Funding all over the map Some of BC’s 300 subsidized facilities—two-thirds in fact—are operated by non-profits or private companies on contract to the health authorities. The 27,000 residents in these facilities pay 80 percent of their income towards their care to a maximum of $3157. Asked why there are only 2000 BC elders in totally private beds, Mackenzie notes simply, “Because it costs them eight grand a month.” The government calculates funding for operators of LTC facilities on the basis of 3.36 hours of care per resident daily for such tasks as toileting, feeding, medication management, and bathing. When compiling information for the Quick Facts Directory, says Mackenzie, “we asked every facility what their funded direct hours of care were, and we found out that 82 percent came up short of the recommended 3.36.” Yet, she points out, there is no penalty. “Right now, if you run a care facility and you aren’t meeting standards, or you have licensing infractions, [inspectors] come on-site, and it’s embarrassing, and you [generally] fix it, right? But there’s no financial penalty if you don’t. The ultimate penalty is they’ll close you down…But [the government] doesn’t really want to do that because where are they going to put the people who are living there?” She believes there should be a financial incentive for compliance. The funding, she says, is all over the map. “We’ve done the analysis seven ways to Sunday. We’ve looked at the resident assessment instrument…to see if there is a pattern of higher complexity with higher funding. But there’s nothing.” Mackenzie says the ministry is looking at it. “I’ve said I believe the 3.36 is what everybody should be funded for, and then you do something called ‘case mix adjust,’ which is you look at the profile, you look at the assessments of the folks, and if there’s higher complexity than norm, you would staff more. If there was lower complexity, you might adjust the staffing downwards. But that’s not happening right now.” When she hears health authorities making arguments claiming they will look at increasing their staff as funding allows, she says: “Whoa, wait a minute. We’re not talking about when we can afford to upgrade the car…We’re talking about the people in the care facility today who aren’t going to benefit from that tomorrow. They’re the ones who are not getting the [correct level of services].” She cites recreational therapy as an example, noting that BC’s residential care facilities provide less per person than Alberta’s do. Moreover, “We use more antipsychotics and antidepressants in BC for people who don’t need them than they do in Alberta.” While admitting that, at this point, a causal link isn’t established, she does say, “A population that is more sedated is going to be less likely to engage in recreational therapy [which] does require resources, staffing. And so if you’re lower on the staffing, and you’re higher on the drug use, yes, they could be linked.” 47 percent on antidepressants The statistics show that the use of antipsychotics has come down from roughly 50 percent of all BC’s LTC residents several years ago to closer to 30 percent—still high considering that they are being used “off label” on a group of frail elders who can experience severe side effects. “The good news is, it’s coming down,” says Mackenzie. “It’s coming down everywhere. People are becoming aware of this. The not-so-good news is BC is still one of the highest. Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario are all better than we are.” Asked about the doctors’ role in prescribing these powerful drugs for so many elders, she says she has talked with them and, “depending on the doctor…many will acknowledge that there’s over-prescribing—but they don’t over-prescribe.” She also points out that “within the medical community, there is ageism. Again, I don’t like generalizations, so not all doctors. But a lack of either awareness or understanding of alternatives, a lowered expectation for seniors around life experience, maybe. I think families play a part in this as well: You know, ‘mum’s not happy, or mum’s behaviour is [problematic]. What can we do?’ It’s no different than you and I seeking antibiotics—just give me the pill I can take to feel better, right? We do this at any age. It doesn’t stop when we get older. When we get older, we sometimes have our family members [making requests as well].” “The antipsychotics are about wanting to regulate their behaviour…On the behavioural front in care facilities, there’s a desire for compliance. It’s communal living, and maybe we need to be more tolerant of different behaviours. Not dangerous behaviours, but different behaviours.” And on the antidepressant side, she says, “maybe we need to be more tolerant…and recognize that unhappiness and clinical depression are not the same thing.” Still, it’s disconcerting to learn that, on average, 47 percent of residential care clients are being prescribed antidepressant medications—especially when only 24 percent of them have been diagnosed as depressed. Mackenzie’s staff is examining the data to figure out what medications people were on prior to entering a facility. She wonders if it isn’t a completely “normal” reaction for a person entering a care facility to feel unhappy, even upset. The desire to “fix” the situation, she feels, sometimes overrides accepting that an elder may simply need time to adjust. Keeping government on the ball Given the rising tide of the elder demographic, the time seems ripe to adjust “the system” to be more efficient, effective, compassionate and fair at helping seniors navigate the last decade or two of their lives. Seniors already represent 17 percent of Canada’s population, and according to Statistics Canada, by 2031 they will be closer to 24 percent. Being Seniors Advocate means Mackenzie is in a key place to help us change the system. But is the government listening? Mackenzie points to at least two areas where the government has taken action: First, it has relaxed the rules that in the past would have forced a senior to move from his or her assisted living unit into a residential care home. For instance, they can now, up to a point, have more assistance with eating, dressing, personal hygiene, medications and rehab therapies without rocking the boat. Secondly, the government has increased the number of seniors who qualify for a subsidy for MSP payments. But, as her numerous reports attest, there’s much more that can and should be done. Armed with all the data she’s gleaned over the past two years, Mackenzie will keep at it. She recognizes the need for both patience and persistence when it comes to dealing with the government and existing institutions. “You’ve got to get their attention, you’ve got to keep their attention. I’ve learned that lesson. You may think you’ve got them, but, then there’s a shiny red ball over there and they’ve moved on. So you’ve got to go back and say, okay, we haven’t forgotten about this. We gave you some time. Where is this? And keep harping on about it.” Leslie Campbell recommends that readers visit www.seniorsadvocatebc.ca for further information on the seniors situation in BC.

Contamination of local politics by a false pretence and a toxic promise requires primary treatment at the ballot box. OVER THE NEXT 30 YEARS, Victoria-area households will pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.2-$2.2 billion to fund borrowing by the Capital Regional District for land-based sewage treatment. The costs of operating those facilities over that period will add another $650-$900 million to the cost of treatment—a service that numerous local marine scientists and health officials have said will provide little or no measureable health or environmental benefit. Once initial annual costs have been settled, electors will be expected to keep paying for this service in perpetuity. The legal right of Victoria electors to choose by a referendum whether or not they are willing to incur the debt those billions in payments would finance was taken from them in 2006. That right is generally protected by provincial legislation, but in this case the need for consent was overturned by a never- before-used section of the Environmental Management Act. That protected right now appears to have been taken under false pretences. At the time, the Province claimed an area of the seabed around each of the city’s two marine outfalls was so contaminated that they could each be designated a “contaminated site” under BC’s Contaminated Sites Regulation. It was widely accepted in the community at the time that the pollution had to be stopped and recalcitrant taxpayers could not be allowed to stand in the way of environmental protection. Then-BC Environment Minister Barry Penner justified this action on the basis of what came to be known as the MacDonald Report. That report has since been exposed as fundamentally flawed and its main conclusion just plain wrong. Commissioned by the Province, environmental scientist Donald MacDonald had analysed four years of data gathered by the CRD about what was in the sediment on the seafloor in the area adjacent to each outfall. Although MacDonald admitted he had “insufficient data” to “thoroughly evaluate sediment quality conditions,” he felt he could do “a preliminary investigation.” Based on this preliminary evaluation, MacDonald reported that sediments at the outfalls “are sufficiently contaminated to warrant designation…as a contaminated site.” His report didn’t include an analysis of the source, or sources, of the contamination suggested by the CRD’s data. The outfalls were assumed to be the source. MacDonald included in his report a flow chart that showed the five steps in the process of determining whether such a site was “legally contaminated.” He noted that the second step had not been completed. To determine whether a site is “legally contaminated” would have required completion of the second step followed by three additional, onerous steps. Penner didn’t bother to complete even the second step. MacDonald’s report was dated May 2006, but by that July Penner had ordered the CRD to create a plan for treatment. His order was made under Section 24(3) of the Environmental Management Act. Its use implied that a significant environmental harm was occurring and suspension of the basic principle of elector assent was therefore justified. This allowed Penner to run around the step-by-step requirements of the Contaminated Sites Regulation, and it allowed him to order treatment without having to specify what, precisely, sewage treatment needed to stop. Penner could have used the Abatement of Municipal Pollution section of the Environmental Management Act to order the CRD to address potential contamination, but that section would have limited such work to that “reasonably necessary to control, abate or stop the pollution,” or to remediation. Under that section, the legal requirement for electoral approval would also have been suspended, but the changes that the CRD would be required to make would have been limited to what was “reasonably necessary” to meet provincial regulations. Penner’s ministry would have been obligated to detail precisely what was “reasonably necessary.” He didn’t do that. Instead, he used Section 24 and opened up Pandora’s box. In his order to the CRD Penner stated: “To ensure value for taxpayers, I encourage the CRD to consider new technologies and alternative financing and delivery options, including the potential for private sector development.” Given that vague direction, it was perhaps inevitable that, 10 years later, the cost of the CRD’s considerations would have mounted to $70 million and the community would be divided into three camps over what action needed to be taken. But during that time, two facts have emerged that challenge the right of the Province to enable the CRD to proceed any further without seeking elector approval. First, over the past ten years the CRD has continued to monitor the sediment chemistry at the outfalls. Report after report has shown that, aside from occasional exceedances of permitted levels of a few substances, neither outfall would have qualified as a “contaminated site” under the Provincial regulation. Specifically, in 2011, environmental scientists with Golder and Associates completed an extensive study that looked at the trend in contamination at the outfalls between 1991 and 2009. They concluded the data “does not provide strong evidence that toxicity or other biological responses are expected.” In 2012, a peer-reviewed scientific study authored by Mark Yunker, Avrael Perreault and Chris Lowe presented information that has explained the presence of unexpectedly high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in sediments to the east of the Macaulay outfall. In a wonderful piece of scientific detective work, their analysis eliminated both Penner’s theory—contamination by PAHs from wastewater—and a subsequent theory that the contamination was the result of the sinking of the collier San Pedro off Brotchie Ledge in 1891. By analysing the chemical signature of the predominant PAHs in the contaminated sediments, the scientists were able to determine a more likely source: “dredged sediment containing pyrolised coal waste from a former coal gas plant in Victoria Harbour” that had been dumped there long before the outfall was even built. At Clover Point, it turns out, there is so little sediment on the rocky bottom to test that reliable samples are difficult for scientists to even obtain. Nevertheless, the data from the last sediment survey conducted there in 2012 showed only a single reading in one location for only one substance—copper—that was above the Province’s guidelines. CRD scientist Chris Lowe told Focus that the as-yet unpublished data for the 2015 sediment survey showed the latest reading for copper at that location was a little more than one-half of the 2012 reading. In other words, although there is seabed contamination near the outfalls, the contribution from the outfalls to that contamination is limited and there’s no evidence of worsening environmental conditions. This is what local marine scientists have been saying for several years. The second piece of evidence that has emerged that challenges the Province’s removal of the requirement for elector consent originated in Olympia, Washington. A letter written to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps by Washington State Representative Jeff Morris and signed by 37 other Washington legislators confirmed that Penner’s order to the CRD was, in fact, motivated by an unpublicized agreement made between then-BC Premier Gordon Campbell and then-Washington Governor Christine Gregoire in June 2006. Campbell and Gregoire and their respective cabinets had met at that time as part of a process “to enhance trade opportunities and create stronger ties between the two jurisdictions.” According to the legislators, during discussions relating to Vancouver’s hosting of the 2010 Olympics, Gregoire told Campbell her government was unhappy about promises made about sewage treatment in Victoria that had not been kept. As a result of that, the legislators claim, Penner ordered the CRD “to make good on those promises.” According to Morris, then, Penner’s order to Victoria was part of a trade deal. The contamination claimed by the MacDonald Report provided Penner with a plausible rationale for ordering Victoria to shift to land-based treatment. Invoking Section 24 ensured that Victoria electors would not be able to stand in the way of Campbell’s promise to Gregoire. Last edition I wrote about the chemical contamination of Puget Sound by a burgeoning population there and the state’s dismal sewage treatment facilities. The cumulative impacts of all those people living and working around a small, constricted inlet threaten Chinook salmon and are pushing endangered southern resident orca to the brink. Washington political figures like Morris have been intent on shifting blame for the continuing deterioration of the Sound to Victoria’s outfalls. Slowing rapid population growth, regulating industry and spending billions on higher levels of sewage treatment are politically unpopular in Washington; it’s much easier to deflect constituents’ attention to Victoria’s easily misunderstood natural treatment system. Vancouver-area politicians, perhaps for the same reasons, have been happy to support the Americans’ claims. Although MacDonald’s contamination has since been disproven by scientific study, it is still regarded in Victoria as the fundamental rationale for sewage treatment. For example, in a May 26, 2016 story in the Times Colonist about a recent development in the issue, a senior reporter noted, “The CRD has been trying to come up with a plan for sewage treatment since 2006, when an environmental assessment of the seabeds around the outfalls found them to be contaminated. As a result, the Province directed the region to put in secondary treatment.” If there is no environmental emergency to warrant removal of elector consent for the imposition of such a heavy financial burden on the community, what else might justify such a draconian measure? Before considering the possibilities, let’s go back to the $2-$3 billion cost over 30 years mentioned above. Why would there be such a large range in the possible long-term cost? For this, too, Victorians have Penner to thank. Penner’s encouragement to “consider new technologies,” coupled with his removal of the requirement of elector consent, has allowed local elected officials to, in effect, go crazy. In response to supposed contamination of the seafloor, “consider new technologies” exploded into schemes for recovering energy, producing drinking water and integrating liquid and solid waste streams. Each of these may be worthy goals, somewhere, but under the umbrella of Penner’s Section 24 order, none of these expensive add-ons would be subject to elector approval. So that $2-$3 billion range in long-term cost arises from the difference between a secondary treatment project cost of $1 billion and a tertiary treatment project cost of up to $1.5 billion. Since maximum federal and provincial funding has been capped at $482.5 million (down $16 million from the original promise), the additional cost for treatment that goes beyond regulatory requirements would have a profound impact on the level of borrowing the CRD would need. With no plausible environmental emergency as justification, what is the legal basis on which the Province would allow the CRD to proceed with such heavy borrowing without elector consent? BC Ministry of Environment spokesperson David Karn quoted Section 24 of the Environmental Management Act as providing the legal basis for proceeding without elector consent. “The legislation provides local governments with the ability to waive elector approval if they have an approved Liquid Waste Management Plan,” Karn said. He confirmed that a “plan” could go beyond current regulatory requirements and include advanced treatment, biosolids treatment, energy recovery and integration of a community’s liquid and solid waste streams through integrated resource management. What safeguard do electors have against elected representatives sending the minister a plan that goes beyond community requirement? Karn explained, “During the development and/or amendment of a Liquid Waste Management Plan, the public consultation process must provide opportunities for elector participation, and the minister must be satisfied that there has been adequate consultation during the planning process before approving the plan. Once the plan is approved, further consent by electors is not needed.” The utter inadequacy of the safeguard of “adequate consultation,” though, was demonstrated during the attempt to locate a secondary treatment plant at Esquimalt’s McLoughlin Point. In June, 2010 the CRD board, at an in camera meeting, voted to switch the official plan from a four-plant configuration to a single plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt. This was a major change—just look at what has happened since. But at that point the CRD had conducted no consultation with the broad Victoria public on this one-plant configuration and, unbelievably, none about either configuration in the community expected to host the plant, Esquimalt. The CRD had obviously not consulted with the public at all, let alone adequately, yet Penner approved the plan anyway. In 2013 the CRD underlined the uselessness of “adequate consultation” as a safeguard by secretly purchasing property on Viewfield Road close to Esquimalt and Victoria West neighbourhoods. It then attempted to justify this as a good location for a massive sewage sludge biodigester, infrastructure that is known to be subject to explosion. The Province is evidently unconcerned about stripping local electors of their legally-enshrined right to reject such arbitrary, unjustified and dangerous actions by elected officials. Are there other overriding issues beyond the “contaminated site” rationale that clearly justify such a stripping away of community control over spending for sewage treatment? Do health safety issues require removal of elector consent? It was hot and dry on the south coast of British Columbia in August 2014, the kind of weather that drives thousands to beaches in Vancouver and Victoria to escape the heat. But even as the temperatures peaked and the waters of English Bay and West Vancouver’s coves warmed enough to encourage people to wade or swim, Vancouver public health officials were busily posting warning signs at many saltwater beaches around Vancouver’s shoreline. Starting in late July and running into early September that year, measurement of fecal coliforms and E coli in the water showed levels had spiked far above those considered safe for contact with human skin. At Sunset Beach on August 7, 2014, the level of bacteria in the water was nearly seven times the maximum considered safe for human contact. On August 29, the level of fecal coliform and E coli in the central part of False Creek was 11 times higher than safe. Beaches along the shoreline of West Vancouver, from Ambleside Beach near the Lions Gate Bridge out to Eagle Harbour near Horseshoe Bay were all found to be two to four times higher than safe. At the same time, in the surface waters above the Clover Point sewage outfall in Victoria, the data recorded by all 14 floating water-quality monitoring stations showed that levels of fecal coliform and Enterococci stayed well below the levels required by the Province for shellfish harvesting—a considerably higher standard than that used for safe contact with human skin. The Capital Regional District’s records, published in its annual report on the Clover Point and Macaulay Point outfalls for 2014, show the surface waters above the Macaulay outfall that summer were even cleaner. Why were Vancouver swimmers at such high risk of contracting disease from water-borne bacteria in August 2014, yet, at the same time, the surface waters off Victoria, immediately adjacent to its two sewage outfalls, were clean enough, according to the Province’s water quality guidelines, that seafood harvested from those waters could be safely eaten? The source of the bacteria infesting the waters and beaches of Vancouver that summer was undoubtedly human sewage, but no single source was identified by health authorities in Vancouver. The Lions Gate Wastewater Treatment Plant, located beneath the Lions Gate Bridge, discharges 90 million litres a day of primary-level treated effluent at First Narrows. That’s the same volume as Victoria’s two outfalls, combined, discharge. Hydrographic modelling has shown that an oil spill at First Narrows would slosh back and forth through the Narrows many times before most of it washed up on Vancouver area beaches—the same beaches that were posted by health authorities during the bacteria breakout. Was the Lions Gate plant the culprit? The source could also have been one of the 11 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) that discharge into Burrard Inlet. During periods of heavy rain, sewage can flow from sewers into storm drains and then to short stormwater outfalls that discharge close to the shoreline. CSOs act as a relief valve to prevent sewage from backing up into homes or overflowing across land during peak rain events. This situation exists throughout North America and is not resolved by building sewage treatment plants. That’s because the flow of sewage into storm drains in a CSO event occurs upstream of sewage treatment plants. Public health authorities for Metro Vancouver carefully avoided—at least publicly—singling out any possible source. If such an event had happened in Victoria, the indignant furor from Washington State would have prompted, at the very least, the threat of a tourism boycott from Seattle and yet another Victoria-uses-international-waters-as-a-toilet editorial from the Post Intelligencer’s Joel Connelly. But the long-term experience with Victoria’s two deep-water marine outfalls has shown they reliably provide a high level of public health safety. Six past and current public health officers—Dr Richard Stanwick, Dr John Millar, Dr Shaun Peck, Dr Brian Emerson, Dr Brian Allen and Dr Kelly Barnard—have all testified: “There is no measurable public health risk from Victoria’s current method of offshore liquid waste disposal.” There is, however, a health risk posed by Victoria’s numerous CSOs. A very heavy rain in a summer month—an unusual occurrence in Victoria—could cause CSOs that contaminate Victoria’s shoreline at a time when people are also likely to want to be in contact with the water. This source of bacterial contamination is common in fall and winter months when there’s more rain. But the CRD’s proposed plan for secondary treatment at McLoughlin Point would have had almost no impact on this risk. That plan included construction of an attenuation tank in Gordon Head. That tank would have eliminated the necessity for having an unscreened CSO outfall on Saanich’s Finnerty Cove, and would have reduced the occurrence of CSOs at some Oak Bay and Victoria stormwater outfalls. But the CSO performance of most of the system’s stormwater outfalls would not have been improved. The Province is responsible for enforcing water quality guidelines with respect to public health safety, and its reliance on the issue of chemical contamination at Victoria’s outfalls is a matter of public record. Simply put, the deep-water outfalls don’t pose a public health safety issue that could justify the removal of elector assent for borrowing for sewage treatment. Do federal regulations override the right of elector consent? New federal regulations developed by Environment Canada and enforced by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans rated Victoria’s marine-based treatment system as being at “high risk” to endanger the health of fish and humans who eat those fish. Under the regulations, Victoria is required to treat its sewage effluent to a secondary standard by December 2020. Those regulations don’t include any provision to override the right of Victorians to approve or disapprove any long-term borrowing the CRD would need to do to meet the requirements of the regulations. Do they provide moral support for the Province’s removal of that right? Is there actual evidence of fish being killed or made unsafe for human consumption by the effluent? If there was, this would provide support for the Province’s removal of the requirement of elector consent. Before I delve into that, let’s consider how the new federal regulations measured risk and why Victoria scored a “high risk” classification. The new regulations use a point system for assessing risk based on “effluent quality” and the characteristics of the receiving waters. In terms of effluent quality, four characteristics are assessed by the regulation. Victoria passed on two of those—it was well under benchmarks for the maximum amount of chlorine and ammonia allowed in the undiluted discharge—but failed in terms of the amount of total suspended solids and carbonaceous biochemical oxygen demand. It’s important to understand that, other than those four characteristics of effluent quality, the federal regulations make no judgment about the many substances in Victoria’s sewage—like dissolved metals or PAHs—that could be deleterious to the health of fish. Victoria received the best mark possible in terms of the physical geography of the receiving waters, even though the federal regulations give no consideration to such essential factors as water temperature, salinity, rate of mixing, the amount of naturally occurring dissolved oxygen or the speed of currents. These are all characteristics that local marine scientists have identified as providing Victoria with its unique potential for using natural processes to treat its sewage. In spite of all these highly favourable factors, the regulation’s emphasis on measurements of total suspended solids and oxygen demand inside the outfalls pushed Victoria into a high risk classification. Paradoxically, the more successful Victorians are at water conservation, the more dangerous their sewage is judged to be for fish—at least by these regulations. Local marine scientists have argued that suspended solids and oxygen demand are not an issue in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but Environment Canada has refused to listen. Remarkably, DFO scientists published a peer-reviewed scientific study in 2015 that concluded secondary treatment would have “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As mentioned above, DFO is the federal department charged with enforcing the new effluent regulations. In communities around Puget Sound, a body of water that has much less favourable physical conditions than the Strait of Juan de Fuca for breaking down solids and mitigating oxygen demand, permits have been issued for municipal sewage and industrial discharges that delivers six times as much solids and oxygen demand as Victoria’s outfalls. Why isn’t that a problem in Puget Sound? The federal regulations, then, are demonstrably inadequate at assessing “risk.” So let’s go back to the question of whether Victoria’s effluent is killing fish or making them unsafe for human consumption, thus justifying the removal of the requirement of elector consent. There have been no reported fish kills in marine waters off Victoria, but laboratory testing of the rate of mortality for rainbow trout immersed in effluent at 100 percent concentration for 96 hours, as required by the regulations, has shown Victoria’s effluent before discharge to be “acutely toxic.” Proponents of artificial sewage treatment have made much of this result, but the usefulness of this test is dubious. The federal test uses a methodology that has been rejected by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The method amounts to testing the lethality of car engine exhaust for canaries by placing a canary in a sealable container filled with 100 percent car exhaust, closing off the container for 96 hours, and then checking to see how well the bird survived. Don’t try this at home. Is there evidence that fish are being contaminated by the discharge from the outfalls, making them unfit for human consumption? Local residents continue to troll and cast for fish in the area between the outfalls at, for example, Ogden Point Breakwater. But the question of whether those fish are being made unsafe for human consumption by the outfalls’ discharge is made moot by the fact that there are so many sources of contamination in the area, most of which are the federal government’s responsibility. I’ll come back to this point later on, but let’s consider, for a moment, the interaction between science and politics around the question of trace contaminants in our local waters. While local scientists have made the case for several years that the federal regulations fail to assess any real risk to the local marine environment, the federal government’s only public response—a comment piece in a local paper written by North Vancouver Liberal MP Jonathan Wilkinson last May—presumed the CRD would build two tertiary-level treatment plants, going well beyond the federal requirement of secondary treatment. As mentioned above, the new federal regulations confine themselves to how much ammonia and chlorine are in the discharge and have nothing to say about such contaminants as heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, or microplastics. So Wilkinson’s pitch for tertiary treatment was as much a condemnation of the inadequacy of the federal regulations as anything else. Moreover, by the time Wilkinson’s letter had been published, the CRD had already stumbled over the question of whether one of those tertiary plants could even be sited at Clover Point. While Wilkinson made it clear the Trudeau government would favour CRD residents spending more of their own money for a higher level of treatment, he wasn’t offering any more federal money to support that. The entire burden of a higher level of treatment would fall on local ratepayers, who would have no recourse to approve or disapprove the required borrowing. Yet in Wilkinson’s own riding of North Vancouver, federal funding for a new secondary treatment plant to replace the existing Lions Gate primary plant was announced in the recent federal budget. Why would secondary treatment be good enough for Wilkinson’s constituents but not good enough for Victoria? If secondary treatment is good enough for Vancouver, why shouldn’t Victorians be given the right to decide by referendum whether it’s good enough for them? It is, after all, their money. Wilkinson and BC Environment Minister Mary Polak don’t have a good answer to that question. Moreover, even a cursory examination of physical circumstances in Victoria and certain facts about these two levels of treatment would lead a reasonable person to question why the community shouldn’t be given the right to vote about secondary treatment, too. In the long community discussion in Victoria about what level of treatment should be built, those advocating the highest level of treatment have focussed on contaminants whose long-term risk is unknown—and in many cases unknowable—simply because those substances are in the Strait of Juan de Fuca at such low concentrations that their presence in the water column can’t even be detected. Some of those substances—like PCBs and microplastics—have been banned, or are in the process of being banned, by the Government of Canada. But there are more tangible reasons for concern about secondary treatment than its inability to remove all contaminants. For example, consider the concern about copper entering marine waters through wastewater. First, what’s wrong with a little more copper in the water? Washington’s Department of Ecology notes, “Copper is a special concern. While people may not be harmed by small amounts of copper, even low levels of the chemical are a significant threat to salmon and other fish in Puget Sound. Copper interferes with salmon’s sense of smell, which reduces their ability to avoid predators, find their way back to their birthplace to spawn, and find mates.” A common assumption is that sewage treatment gets rid of—or greatly reduces—such problematic contaminants as copper. The actual case is more complicated. Data published by Metro Vancouver for the Annacis Island and Lulu Island secondary treatment plants shows that they produce a higher concentration of dissolved copper in the effluent coming out of the plants than was in the sewage that went into the plants. Got that? The total amount of copper may be reduced, but the amount of dissolved copper actually increases. This effect is common with sewage treatment plants around the globe. But why does this matter? Here’s what the US Environmental Protection Agency says about the dissolved state of metals: “The primary mechanism for toxicity to organisms that live in the water column is by adsorption to or uptake across the gills; physiological process requires metal to be in dissolved form. This is not to say that particulate metal is nontoxic, only that particulate metal appears to exhibit substantially less toxicity than does dissolved metal.” In other words, the federal government’s requirement for secondary treatment—put in place to protect fish—could increase the immediate hazard to fish posed by copper compared with the marine-based treatment system now in place. The data for the Annacis and Lulu plants show other dissolved metals of concern, including cadmium, increasing in concentration from influent to effluent. Both plants are discharging copper and cadmium in concentrations above the provincial water quality guidelines. As well, research done by scientist James Meador in Washington suggests other ways in which secondary treatment’s purported benefit to fish is illusory. Meador has shown that juvenile Chinook salmon have a 45 percent higher rate of mortality if their natal estuary is contaminated. He has also connected chemical compounds (Amitriptyline, Amlodipine, Amphetamine, Azithromycin, Benztropine, Bisphenol A, Caffeine, DEET, Diazepam, Diltiazem, Diltiazem desmethyl… et cetera) found in the tissue of juvenile salmon in estuaries downstream from secondary sewage treatment plants, to the effluent released from those plants. Secondary treatment plants, Meador's research suggests, are doubling early mortality of chinook salmon, a threatened species in Puget Sound. Secondary treatment plants are obviously no panacea for what ails wild salmon. On both the issue of dissolved metals and trace contaminants, then, the benefits of secondary treatment to fish aren’t as clear as Environment Canada’s new regulations would have us believe. In Victoria’s case this may sound like an obvious argument for tertiary treatment, but there are scientific doubts about whether a higher level of treatment would be effective in reducing the trace contaminants Meador found were getting through secondary plants. UBC engineering professor Dr Don Mavinic, considered one of BC’s top experts on sewage treatment, told Focus, “The fact is that there really isn’t any effective technology out there in the marketplace yet to deal with these other contaminants. It’s coming, but it isn’t there. This is a very young science still. There’s a huge amount of research going on globally right now on this subject, including here at UBC, but the jury is still out.” So while there may be a strong current of thought in Victoria that those contaminants should be removed, there’s no scientific or engineering consensus that it can actually be done. Why, then, shouldn’t Victorians have the right to listen to the evidence and decide for themselves whether or not they want to pay for such uncertain benefits? Meanwhile, there is a huge pool of highly toxic chemicals contaminating Victoria’s near-shore waters that could be cleaned up using technology that’s already been proven: excavators and dump trucks. And, ironically, this is a situation for which the federal government is solely responsible. Victoria’s 376 Federal Contaminated Sites In Wilkinson’s call-out to Victoria to put the question of sewage treatment behind them, he quoted Ken Ashley, an expert on the effects of wastewater on receiving environments: “Although the receiving water dilutes Victoria’s sewage to low concentrations, the marine food web will re-concentrate certain pollutants via food web biomagnification to the point where southern resident orcas are at risk, and classified as toxic waste when dead ones wash up on our beaches.” No reasonable person would question that some contaminants bioaccumulate and biomagnify. But the question is, which sources of those contaminants is most important to address first? Local marine scientists have placed a higher priority on clean-up of near-shore contamination from stormwater runoff and combined sewer overflows than the wastewater going through the outfalls. Yet these two problems in Victoria will remain unimproved by either secondary or tertiary treatment. Near-shore contamination in Victoria is, in fact, an exceptional problem. That’s largely because Victoria has been the home of Canada’s Pacific Coast naval fleet in Esquimalt Harbour for well over a century. Over that time, military-related activity has created a legacy of highly-toxic chemical contamination of both marine sediments, soil and groundwater, from Colwood to Victoria Harbour. Progress on cleaning up the 376 contaminated sites in the Victoria area that are listed on the Federal Contaminated Sites Registry is very slow. Not all the sites are military-related, of course. One non-military case—Site 17348008 on Rock Bay—is in the final stages of remediation of 207,404 cubic meters of contaminated material that contained metals, metalloids and organometallic compounds.The site has been contaminating groundwater for many decades, and that groundwater has been free to leach into Middle Harbour and from there to bioaccumulate and biomagnify in the marine food web. But Rock Bay is just one of dozens of large, highly-contaminated sites around Victoria Harbour, Esquimalt Harbour, and numerous other bays and coves, that are—or are suspected of—leaching highly toxic substances into groundwater and near-shore waters. There are some surprises on this list. Both Discovery Island and Trial Island are home to contaminated sites. The federal registry indicates there are 2899 cubic metres of soil on Discovery Island contaminated with metals, metalloids, organometallic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and petroleum hydrocarbons. On the southernmost of the Trial Islands, Site 17330001 contains 3060 cubic metres of soil contaminated with metals, metalloids, organometallic compounds and petroleum hydrocarbons. Both of these are likely contaminating near-shore waters. But these are small problems compared with some of the many military-related contaminated sites, especially in Esquimalt Harbour. Some of those are large and contain all the scarey stuff: Site 17410007, for instance, better known as Esquimalt Graving Dock, has 185,930 cubic meters of sediment that contains everything mentioned in the sites above, but also PCBs, dioxins, furans and pesticides. The federal government has listed many of these as “high priority for action,” but has announced no plan to actually do anything beyond further study. Many other sites are in the preliminary investigation stage, so there’s no comprehensive understanding of the extent of the problem, how long it would take to remediate all these sites, or how much that would cost. The Rock Bay site took 11 years and $138 million to clean up. It could be a century or more before remediation of all the military-related sites is substantially complete. Meanwhile, contamination of groundwater and near-shore marine waters will continue. Wilkinson wants Victorians to put behind them the issue of spending $2-$3 billion of local money on tertiary treatment that might or might not remove trace contaminants from the water even while the federal government drags its own feet on dealing with its long, long list of highly-contaminated sites. Does this make sense? We don’t know the answer to that question because Penner’s order was motivated by a promise to Washington, not contamination. That made it unlikely that public consideration of the broader context of chemical contamination—and how to most effectively reduce it—would ever take place. Nothing computes Penner’s politically-motivated haste to condemn both outfalls as contaminated sites also obscured an important fact about Victoria’s marine-based treatment system that has been observed by scientists: physical conditions at Clover Point are significantly better at reducing the risk of contamination of the seafloor than at Macaulay Point. The waters off Clover Point have stronger currents to disperse discharged solids and there is a rocky bottom. The bottom near the Macaulay outfall contains much more sediment, which acts like a sponge for such contaminants as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Since contamination of seafloor sediments was the only physical rationale given by Penner for ordering Victoria to build land-based treatment facilities, one would have expected that the best location for an outfall would have been a primary concern of engineers charged with planning a new system. Instead, the location of a central plant at McLoughlin Point was chosen simply because land was available there. That plant’s single outfall would have discharged a volume equivalent to the combined flows of the Clover Point and Macaulay Point outfalls. Since secondary treatment removes only some of the contaminants, an outfall with twice the discharge would still have meant a lot of potential contamination. In fact, the site where engineers planned to put the diffuser of a new McLoughlin outfall is already contaminated by historical dumping of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and likely other contaminants. According to the MacDonald Report, the location could already be designated a contaminated site under BC’s Contaminated Sites Regulation. It’s not hard to imagine what mischief some future politicians could make of that situation:Victoria’s ancient treatment plant at McLoughlin Point is contaminating the seabed! We must find a new site for a new plant! Unlikely? See Campbell, Gregoire, Penner et al, 2006. When a very significant, long-term allocation of community resources is going to be made, it’s obviously unwise to do that for reasons that aren’t connected to some identified and agreed-upon need in the community. In this case, the Liberals’ promised allocation of Victoria’s resources was made because Vancouver politicians desired a successful Olympics. As a consequence, most of the planning that has been done in Victoria—including where a super outfall would be located—makes no sense. Nothing computes. To the ballot box we must go The Liberals removed the legislated requirement of elector consent for borrowing for sewage treatment for a good reason. Victorians had already shown they understood the high value of the natural treatment system they have been blessed with, and were unlikely to give that advantage up at the ballot box. In 1992, Victorians were given the opportunity to choose through a plebiscite whether they wanted to use preliminary treatment, primary treatment, or secondary treatment to regulate the impact of their sewage on the environment. The “preliminary treatment” option came with the proviso that the CRD would develop a source control program to reduce contaminants of concern. That source control program would cost money. At the ballot box, 57 percent chose source control and preliminary treatment. The rest of the vote was evenly split between the other two options. Afterwards, the CRD developed what has become one of the most advanced source-control programs regulating municipal wastewater in North America. The actual physical impact on the environment of that choice is now evident in the numerous studies conducted by scientists from the CRD, DFO and private companies over the 24 years since. An extensive 2011 study by Golder and Associates on what contaminants were in the wastewater being discharged by the outfalls—a companion to the previously-mentioned Golder study on sediments that examined data gathered between 1991 and 2011—found “evidence of stable or decreasing concentrations and loadings of substances in the wastewater stream.” Golder’s scientists noted, “Source control initiatives appear to have yielded significant benefits in terms of concentrations and loadings of priority contaminants.” Interestingly, this latter study was not shown to elected officials at the CRD until April 2013, and I can find no evidence that its findings were ever publicized by the CRD or Victoria media. Some of you will recall that in late 2012, Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen called for “a full environmental study that will assess the comparative environmental impact of the current process and proposed process for disposing of liquid waste before the CRD plans are finalized.” At the time that Jensen and other elected officials were calling for that study, the CRD was sitting on the Golder research that had found source control was working. Jensen’s bid for that study was unsuccessful. The obvious takeaway from Golder’s examination is that an expanded source control program would provide increased reductions of contaminants. This course of action would save Victorians billions of dollars over the next 30 years, money that could be spent in areas where a need has actually been proven. But the Province clearly doesn’t want that to happen. They recently removed the last vestige of local control over the issue by ousting elected CRD officials from the process. After a year-long search by the CRD for an alternative to McLoughlin Point, the elected directors suddenly found themselves trapped between two unpopular ideas: McLoughlin and Rock Bay. They tried to find their way out of that fix by proposing two plants located immediately upstream of each of the existing outfalls. That move, in turn, prompted a “Save Clover Point” neighbourhood revolt and the project was on the edge of either complete collapse or a return to McLoughlin Point. The Province quickly moved in and threatened the elected officials with the loss of the aforementioned $482.5 million in provincial and federal funding unless critical decisions about the project were handed over to an appointed board. The elected directors, faced with being held responsible for losing $482.5 million and knowing that agreement amongst them was unlikely, capitulated. The appointed board will now decide what form of treatment to use and where a plant—or plants—will be located. The chair of that board, lawyer Jane Bird, is reputed to be a close personal friend of Gordon Campbell. During the time Campbell has been Canadian High Commissioner to the UK in London, Bird received an appointment with Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Development as an “Attaché.” An Attaché is a person on the staff of an ambassador with a specific area of responsibility. Under Campbell, Bird served as “Project Manager” for the $18 million redecoration of Canada House in London. Incidently, the other main decision-maker involved on that project, besides Campbell, was Noel Best, who is a principal of Stantec’s Vancouver office. Now Bird is in control of Victoria’s sewage treatment project, a project Campbell ordered and one in which Stantec’s costly involvement has been controversial. The connections between Bird, Stantec and Campbell will do little to assuage the concern in Victoria that taxpayers here are being forced to underwrite debts incurred by Campbell during Vancouver’s Olympic party. A lot of people think the new board will choose secondary treatment at McLoughlin Point. No matter. At some point, whatever they propose has to come back to the CRD’s elected directors for their approval. With the information that has now emerged about the dubious origins of Penner’s 2006 order, it’s hard to see how those directors would believe they have the moral authority to approve a project without first seeking electors’ consent in a referendum. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. He believes contamination of democracy by toxic political promises that are unrelated to a community’s real needs does require primary treatment—at the ballot box.

Here’s to a summer of books, reason and love. AS AN ANTIDOTE TO THE BOMBARDMENT OF MODERN LIFE, I’ve turned to reading more books. Even when their message is unsettling, wallowing in a good book is somehow calming. And they certainly quench my thirst for deeper understanding more than the sound bites offered up by the news media. So I’ve been reading more books in general, and—returning to my roots—more philosophy books in particular. In so doing, I’ve been reminded that philosophers revere a good argument. As Socrates advocated, “follow the argument wherever it leads.” “Argument” to philosophers does not have the same meaning as it does to many non-philosophers—that of people angrily, even abusively, hurling insults at each other or making threats and demands. No, a philosophical argument is simply a reasoned analysis drawing from a set of premises or facts, and showing step by step where logic leads. This means avoiding what are called fallacies. These days fallacies seem all the rage. Ad hominem attacks, red herrings, hasty generalizations, shifting the burden of proof, begging the question, appeals to motive, emotion etc. I once taught university students how to spot them, but I still commit them myself occasionally. Our media for our messages—social media in particular—don’t help as they encourage sound bites over sound reasoning. Twitter comments these days often are the news. Strange times indeed. The well-reasoned, civil argument seems to have gone out of style. Mark Kingwell, a philosopher who comments on contemporary issues, opened a piece in the Globe & Mail recently this way: “It can seem as if we are living in a world where fact, truth, and evidence no longer exert the rational pull they once did. Our landscape of fake news sites, junk science, politicians blithely dismissive of fact-checks, and Google searches that appear to make us dumber, renders truth redundant.” I plan to read one of Kingwell’s many books this summer (Measure Yourself Against the Earth is his latest). Another book I’ll read is James Hoggan’s I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up. Hoggan is interviewed in this edition by Amy Reiswig. While not a philosopher, Hoggan interviews some in his book, as well as cognitive scientists, sociologists, and spiritual leaders, all towards understanding and reducing the smog of propaganda and adversarial rhetoric that pollutes the public square. A book with similar themes that I am reading is philosopher James Garvey’s The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants to Change Your Mind (Icon Books, UK). Garvey likes to make philosophy super-relevant and accessible. Another book by him is The Ethics of Climate Change. This latest book tackles the mammoth corporate PR and lobbying industries whose budgets dwarf those of journalists, scientists and other truth-seekers. These industries, in the employ of corporations, political parties and governments, have discovered numerous sophisticated techniques for persuading us—whether it be to buy something or go to war or ignore the risks of climate change or tobacco. Everything from astroturfing, viral marketing, agenda setting, newsjacking and decoy pricing is employed to influence you—estimates are hundreds to thousands of times each day, certainly far more often than you are given a logical argument from facts. Not only do these techniques influence our behaviour, they are also removing reason from the whole equation. Why work out a solid argument when pushing an emotional button works better? Here’s how Garvey explained what is happening—and why it’s so dangerous—in an interview a few months ago: “We’re in the middle of a revolution in persuasion, a shift away from giving reasons to something that operates outside reason. As a result, we’re starting to lose the ability to argue, as a culture. Listen to Prime Minister’s Questions or the literal dick measuring going on in debates between Republican presidential candidates. The ability to argue, to think critically, spot fallacies and work together towards the truth is a kind of intellectual self-defence at the heart of democracy. If we lose that, we lose what it protects. We’re also less able to get along with one another if all we can do is shout back and forth. Modern persuasion undermines not just democracy, but our chances of living happy lives in a peaceful, interconnected world. It would be good if we could learn to listen to reason again. A lot hangs on it.” So how do we “learn to listen to reason again”? Obviously it would help to educate ourselves and be encouraging of those who do use more reasoned approaches to issues, while discouraging those who rely on other techniques. Garvey feels if enough people—a critical mass—get wise to the “persuasive” techniques used on us in the marketplace and community, there’s hope. If people understand what’s happening, they’ll get angry about being so tricked by others, usually for money or political gain. That anger, he admits somewhat paradoxically, will rise to the defense of reason. “It’s in a kind of measured, focused, thoughtful anger that a strategy of struggle lies,” he says at the end of his book. The media can be influential here as well, and certainly in the past was relied on to act as a check on corporate and government power, by digging for facts and exposing the lies. But given what’s happened to traditional media’s funding in the past decade, the resources for investigations have dried up. The people-hours we saw applied in the movie Spotlight to expose the Catholic Church’s massive cover-up of abuse by priests just couldn’t happen anymore. Who has the largest newsroom in BC? The government. This is not limited to BC. On government and corporate beats, journalists have to work with or try to stick-handle their way around “communications” people who work to control the message. Labour statistics from 2011 show there were four PR professionals for every journalist in Canada. It’s not a good situation. But it makes David and me and Focus writers even more determined to produce well-reasoned, fact-based analyses of issues—sometimes even investigative reports that take months of work. We don’t have all the facts, or the final word on anything, but what we report on might move this community closer to a clear understanding of what is going on—whether it be on sewage or seniors, pipelines or railways—so better decision-making stands a chance. In this edition, David Broadland’s investigation of how politics rather than facts lay behind our current sewage treatment “debate” illustrates the severe impact on a community that starting with false premises can have. Besides the waste of money ($70 million spent so far with a billion-plus to come), oft-repeated falsehoods about contamination have blinded us to the more serious sources of toxic contamination of near-shore waters. The billions of dollars at stake in the sewage solution are a precious resource. If the citizenry is not properly informed about the evidence, those billions are likely wasted—misdirected from helping solve other problems in our community, like homelessness, seniors care, and climate change. When facts are not the sole basis for decision-making we get ourselves in trouble. We also get in trouble if we don’t follow democratic principles. The public needs to be involved in decision-making, so it needs to be granted all the facts and all the “logic” used along the way. Too often the facts are mediated through layers of politicians, bureaucrats and spin doctors, and sometimes simply buried out of sight. Consent is manufactured, engineered, rather than won through reason. I’ll end with a thought from one of my favourite philosophers. Asked about what lessons he would like to pass on to future generations by a BBC interviewer in 1959, Bertrand Russell, then 87, said he’d like to say two things—one intellectual, one moral. “The intellectual thing is, when you are studying any matter…ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. Look only and solely at the facts.” The other lesson, the moral one, was this: “Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things we don’t like…If we are going to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance…” Something also worth reflecting on over summer. Leslie Campbell is the editor of Focus. You can find the interview with Bertrand Russell on Youtube—but he also wrote some great books. Have a wonderful summer.

November 2014 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD In seeking a fairer election process, for starters, follow the money. 10 Andrew Weaver | ON EMISSIONS, LNG, AND A NEW VISION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY The shift to reducing emission intensity from absolute reductions is an illusion of action. What’s needed is a shift in direction to develop clean tech industries. 12 David Broadland | END-OF-TERM REPORT CARD Key votes at City Hall raise questions about the judgment of some councillors seeking re-election. 14 Judith Lavoie | STEPHEN ANDREW: NO POLITICAL BAGGAGE Journalist Stephen Andrew’s candidacy was catalyzed by Mayor Fortin’s lack of answers about the Johnson Street Bridge. 16 Katherine Gordon | LISA HELPS: WELCOMING YOUR IDEAS TO CITY HALL Helps wants the public more directly and meaningfully consulted before decisions are made by City Hall. 18 Judith Lavoie | IDA CHONG: READY TO TAKE CHARGE An energetic downtown and fiscal restraint are among Ida Chong’s priorities. 20 David Broadland | RICHARD ATWELL: CRITICAL THINKING ON COMMUNITY ISSUES Mayoral candidate would provide stronger leadership and open up Saanich and the CRD to greater public involvement. 24 Aaren Madden | AS SHE SEES IT Artist Blythe Scott makes the familiar new again with personal impressions of place. 38 Monica Prendergast | ON THE ART OF WATCHING Three productions in November illustrate how theatre helps us grow. 40 Amy Reiswig | REFLECTIONS OF CANADA AND DEMOCRACY Elizabeth May’s new book is a call to take back Canada. 42 Gene Miller | VOTE FOR MAYOR SQUISHY Who the hell thought up Ida Chong? And other insider tips... 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | CREATING RESILIENCE The surest ways to safeguard our neighbourhoods.

December 2014 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | FROM ONE ELECTION TO ANOTHER… Why do we spend more than twice as much on prisons as we spend on young children? 10 David Broadland | LISA’S LANDSLIDE AND THE ATWELL ATTACK Theories on why the region’s two most powerful mayors lost their jobs on November 15. 14 Judith Lavoie | TRANS MOUNTAIN PIPELINE HEATS UP Critics complain the National Energy Board hearings are a farce; Kinder Morgan plays hardball and arrests begin. 16 Briony Penn | WHEN VOTER SUPPRESSION COMES CALLING A new documentary and public forum in Victoria in January will shed light on election fraud in Canada. 18 Aaren Madden | NOTHING IS MISSED A new book provides a glimpse into Godfrey Stephens’ remarkable life and art. 32 Amy Reiswig | GARTH MARTENS: PROLOGUE TO THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCE A poet explores the oil sands through the eyes of its workers. 34 Roszan Holmen | E&N: MORE RED LIGHTS AHEAD? Records recently obtained by FOI show that after explicit warnings about the condition of the E&N Railway tracks in 2009, the BC Safety Authority allowed 22 months of further deterioration before passenger service was finally terminated in 2011. Now, with $20 million in public money allocated to upgrade tracks and restart service, critics say the plan is under-funded, won’t provide long-term safety, and therefore isn’t worth pursuing. At the same time, impassioned advocates see rail as a low-carbon solution to the increasingly congested and accident-prone Island Highway—and a potential boon for tourism. 42 Gene Miller | HOW TALL IS GOD? Belief in a Seven-Days-of-Creation God or any other fabulation bout beginnings is simply post-Paleolithic ooga-booga. 44 Briony Penn | COMMUNITY INTERVENTION FOR LOCAL PARKS NEEDED Who knew? There are 42 provincial parks, from the southern Gulf Islands to Port Renfrew, that need your help. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | THE SOUL FELT ITS WORTH Tailoring Christmas celebrations to your own sense of meaning.

January 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | CAN WE TRUST OUR DEMOCRACY? The use of robocalls and other “voter suppression” tactics suggests we can’t. 10 Sonia Théroux | HOW TO WIN AN ELECTION Bring disengaged citizens back to the polls. 12 David Broadland | THE CASE AGAINST MCLOUGHLINISM Will Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen and Victoria’s Dwayne Kalynchuk lead the region’s big issue back to a gunfight at McLoughlin Point? 16 Katherine Palmer Gordon | UNCHARTED TERRITORY Failure to protect First Nations graves on Grace Islet may lead to the first aboriginal title claim on private property in BC. 20 Judith Lavoie | KINDER MORGAN'S FAIRY TALE The Houston-based pipeline company says it’s a good corporate citizen but its record in Canada doesn’t support that claim. 22 Briony Penn | THE GREAT BEAR: WORTH MORE ALIVE THAN DEAD Will adventure tourism and forest stewardship trump logging, pipelines and hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest? 24 Aaren Madden THE SUM OF EXPERIENCES Jeremy Herndl’s landscape paintings push visual representation into a multisensory realm. 36 Monica Prendergast | BEST ON STAGE The “Spotlight Critics Choice Awards.” 38 Amy Reiswig | OF THE COAST AND ITS CREATURES Ian McAllister’s latest book immerses readers in the magic of the Great Bear Rainforest, as well as the threats to its health. 44 Gene Miller | THE 90-MINUTE SOLUTION If we’re going to invest in a pricey new McKenzie Avenue intersection, let’s charge commuters for stop-reduced driving. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | HERE’S TO AN INNOVATIVE NEW YEAR Lucky for us there are folks taking initiative on some ingenious and beneficial ideas.

February 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | FIGHT? OR PLAY NICE TILL IT’S OVER? Green candidate Jo-Ann Roberts reflects on why a strong public broadcaster is important to democracy. 10 David Broadland | THE TC’S COVERAGE OF RICHARD ATWELL In their coverage of two stories, was the local daily concocting a case for an overturn of November’s election in Saanich? 14 Judith Lavoie | PARTY AT THE PUMPS The low price of oil is raising big questions around pipeline proposals, BC’s carbon tax, emissions, and consumer behavior. 16 Alan Cassels | VACCINATION INSURANCE A Victoria resident spearheads a national vaccine compensation movement. 18 Katherine Palmer Gordon | PLUNDERING THE CARBON SINK The extraordinary potential of Vancouver Island forests to sequester carbon is being lost due to government inaction. 22 Derry McDonell | THE EASTSIDE-WESTSIDE SPLIT Will breaking into two groups create a consensus solution on sewage treatment? Or new unresolvable problems? 26 Aaren Madden | ENERGETIC UNIVERSE Using the fundamentals of gesture, line and colour, Gillian Redwood paints invisible energies into visible form. 40 Monica Prendergast | ABSENT MOTHERS AND PRESENT SONS This month the Belfry helps us explore the bonds and tensions between mothers and sons (with both laughs and tears). 42 Amy Reiswig | KNITTING STORIES In her most recent book, Sylvia Olsen tells stories of knitting relationships as well as wool. 44 Gene Miller | VICKY GOT LUCKY This City has been managed by stewards, not visionaries…until now. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | ENOUGH WITH THE SELFIE CULTURE How about a bucket list for the Earth instead?

March 2016 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | THE DEER QUESTION Living with wildlife can be a community-building project. Oak Bay chose a different path. 14 David Broadland | PENNY-WISE, POUND-FOOLISH The recommended level of seismic protection for the new bridge was secretly lowered as construction costs escalated. 18 Judith Lavoie | DIVESTMENT COOLS TAR SANDS Divestment on its own won’t keep fossil fuel reserves in the ground—but it might help. 20 Briony Penn | BC’S EXPENSIVE FISH FARMS The federal government seems intent on propping up corporate fish farming despite the high costs. 24 David Broadland | McLOUGHLINISM IN RETREAT? In trying to save the McLoughlin Point plan, CRD staff instead shoot it in the foot. 26 Aaren Madden | COLOURFUL HISTORIES Nancy Ruhl’s paintings offer vivid homage to domestic architecture while documenting a changing cityscape. 40 Robin J Miller | FROM THE FAVELAS OF BRAZIL Dance Victoria brings Compagnie Käfig to the Royal Theatre, March 13 and 14. 42 Amy Reiswig | THE ENEMY IS PINK LEGO Jordan Stratford’s feminist adventure story helps girls reboot their own reality. 44 Gene Miller | WHEN I’M 164 Past cultures were gone in a generational eye-blink. Strap in, brothers and sisters! 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL A small house doesn’t have to be a compromise.

Victoria and the Province are blind to the real costs of gambling. THROUGH SUMMER, the wires crackled with the news that Victoria has become the latest winner in the BC Lottery Corporation’s coveted casino lottery. Yes, a casino is coming to town, and while we don’t yet know exactly where and when, there’s plenty of political keenness on the accompanying plum, an annual cheque for about $2 million for the bother of “hosting” the venture. Mayor Lisa Helps has called the coup a “win for everybody.” But is it all good news? While the easy message, the officially-sanctioned one, is that government-sponsored gambling in general, and casinos in particular, are always an asset because they return copious wealth to community coffers and fund altruistic projects that otherwise might not happen, the plain truths about gambling have always been these: 1. Players bear all of the risk and most are certain to lose their money. 2. The gambling establishment operates risk-free and never loses. If it were otherwise, the government wouldn’t be in the business, because it couldn’t afford the risk. Fifteen years ago the Liberals might have been on higher moral ground when they promised during their 2001 election campaign not to expand the gambling industry, but that ground and principle have long since crumbled. Instead, the powerful, crown-owned BCLC has succeeded in creating a lavishly-branded, happy-face industry that quietly and unfailingly harvests hefty profits for the Province by providing an ever- increasing array of “exceptional entertainment for adults.” The 2014-15 fiscal year alone brought in a net profit of $1.25 billion, according to the BCLC website. Even after subtracting various routine payouts, including a transfer of $13.5 million to the government’s own Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, there was still $829 million left over for deposit into general revenue. Who knew fun could be so lucrative? The not-nearly-as-pretty downside of gambling is much more difficult to assess. The non-partisan, non-profit Toronto-based Wellesley Institute claims that’s partially because, “Problem gambling is not well-defined in debates about gambling, [which] can lead to the assumption that unless the gambling is compulsive, it is healthy, responsible and low risk.” (The Real Cost of Casinos, 2013). The BCLC website’s own breezy language might leave you convinced that gambling-related issues are minimal and under control, but many studies show clear correlations between access to casinos, increased problem gambling, and increased social dysfunction. Much of that dysfunction is costly—think medical intervention, policing and social assistance—and all of it is misery pouring outward onto innocent others, including children. Typically, one problem gambler’s fallout negatively impacts up to 10 other people and can cost between $20,000 and $56,000 annually. Given that BCLC’s own commissioned research has identified at least 125,000 known problem gamblers in the province, that’s a huge liability. (Victoria, take note: Much of it falls on municipal shoulders.) The added paradox, the real controversy, is that problem gamblers—who bring in an estimated 40 percent of all gambling revenue—are both the industry’s best clients and most urgent candidates for addictions treatment. Since BCLC both grows the industry and funds the treatment that, if successful, will reduce gambling and therefore revenue, the conflict of interest is starkly obvious. And given that BCLC allocates only a paltry .5 percent of gambling’s net profits to “prevention and services,” its penuriousness speaks volumes about its priorities, as did its detached response to a recent troubling story in the media about an elder who lost $300,000 to gambling. Gambling is every government’s dilemma, a Pandora’s Box just too good to keep closed. Singapore tried to have it both ways when it began allowing casinos in 2010. Hungry for gambling tourists but not gambling strife among its own people, it imposed on residents a per-visit admission of about $100 CAD. The hefty deterrent led to nothing: Singapore now has twice as many residents seeking gambling addiction treatment as it did in 2010. All this is just a scratch on the surface of this mercurial industry, but one thing is quite certain: Victoria would do well to dig a lot deeper before taking any gamble. Trudy isn’t much of a gambler but couldn't resist a game of Chicken Shit Bingo at the recent Salt Spring Island Music and Garlic Festival. The chicken did not pick her number.

Metchosin uses citizens and volunteer scientists to create a low-cost but impressive inventory of species. FIVE YEARS AGO, a group of naturalists in the Capital Region realized there was no comprehensive list of species that inhabited the varied ecosystems in their rural district of Metchosin. Despite containing rare ecosystems like coastal bluffs, Garry oak meadows, and Douglas-fir forests, naturalists Kem Luther, along with Moralea Milne and Andy McKinnon (the latter two now serving on Metchosin’s council) decided to see who they might be sharing their community with (other than humans). The result of their work, which continues to expand today, is one of the most complete species listings of any community in Western Canada. And the actual search for those species? “It’s like a treasure hunt,” Luther tells me proudly. Come November, it’s a hunt in which local residents can also participate. Since 2002, Luther, Milne and McKinnon have been working to empower the public and increase knowledge of local ecosystems—Metchosin’s in particular—through citizen science. They started the Metchosin Biodiversity Project—metchosinbiodiversity.com—in 2002. They began with a now-popular Talk and Walk series, inviting local experts to lead a Saturday evening talk followed by a local ecosystem walk the next morning. The project has hosted 87 events so far, on topics ranging from local butterflies to fungi, amphibians and songbirds. When they started, Milne tells me, they had to convince people to show up; now they regularly host 70-100 attendees. Metchosin occupies a distinct place in the CRD. It is the only municipality to experience a drop in population over the past 20 years (from 6170 people in 1986 to just under 5000 by 2012). It also has a higher- than-average population per dwelling unit than most of the rest of the CRD (2.8 persons per dwelling as opposed to the CRD average of 2.3). Home to over 50 red- and blue-listed species, its official community plan’s objectives are pointedly conservation-centred, foregrounding the support of biodiversity, protection of sensitive ecosystems and minimization of development impacts. This ethos, felt Luther, made Metchosin an ideal place to begin a species count known as a bioblitz, one of only two bioblitzes that occur in Western Canada (the other takes place in the municipality of Whistler). Specialists in botanical, animal, and insect species volunteer from around BC; together with local residents, they help count the huge variety of species found within Metchosin’s boundaries. “We let the experts nerd out together” during the one-day blitz, McKinnon tells me. The scientists work for free, but, says McKinnon, “a lot of those people will come up at the end of the day and thank us. Every year we find new things.” Though Luther and his colleagues would like to see expansion of the bioblitz to other municipalities in the CRD, they also recognize that their expert volunteers create a kind of catch-22. If interest were greater, they might not be willing to do all the work for free. Bioblitzes provide a key method of tracking the diversity of distinct ecosystems. They are usually volunteer-run, grassroots efforts without ties to government funding (of which there is little), and take place within a short time period. “We wish there was some international or national organization that could step in and tell people how to do this,” Luther says. Instead, he, Milne and McKinnon plan their events from the bottom up, which aids a feeling of community but makes the coordination and dissemination of information gathered harder down the line. The Metchosin Bioblitz allows amateurs to accompany experts as they count species in the field. It’s a kind of collaboration that Luther wishes would happen more often in North America. For Luther, there are currently two main approaches to natural science. In North America, he writes in his 2016 book Boundary Layer, science is affiliated almost exclusively with universities and government; to be credible, one has to be academically trained. In Europe, however, citizen science forms a large part of the naturalist work done in the field. Passionate amateurs are encouraged to contribute their knowledge of species and ecosystems, and they’re respected for doing so. “If there was a way of getting that going here,” muses Luther, “that would be lovely.” Involving citizens in science, however, means less ground can be covered during the day a bioblitz takes place. To attempt to streamline the event, Luther, Milne and McKinnon tried a different approach this past spring. Rather than sending professional biologists out with resident volunteers, a team of six naturalists travelled together by car to specific sites throughout Metchosin. They ultimately recorded a different species every 40 seconds over six hours. The final count this spring was 2300 distinct species, including many that had never before been identified in the area. Still, the count was collaborative, with a botanist finding a bluebird and a birder discovering a rare violet. Key to the success of Metchosin’s Bioblitz events, however, is the collaboration between volunteers and scientists and, surprisingly for such a quantitative activity, a feeling of connection with the natural ecosystems that surround residents. “It’s more fun than Christmas,” says Milne. Though the data gathered during Metchosin’s events helps local government clarify the biodiversity value of an ecosystem, the point is also to build understanding about the natural world. “We have to try to respect and preserve this environment in order to have somewhere for all of us to coexist,” says Milne. The Metchosin Biodiversity Project has a budget of a few hundred dollars; results are posted online and passed to local government, parks and Whistler’s bioblitz organizers. “As councillors, we’re often talking about biological value,” McKinnon tells me at the Broken Paddle café in Metchosin’s village centre. “It’s very practical to be able to say ‘this is where these species are living.’” The best example of how species information translates into practical information for residents, says Milne, might be the Propertius duskywing butterfly, which overwinters in last year’s oak leaves when they are left lying under the trees. When people rake leaves off the grass, they destroy nesting sites for these rare butterflies. “It’s not the oak trees that are the [whole] ecosystem,” clarifies Milne. The more residents can learn about the interdependencies of these species, and how many we share the region with, Luther concurs, the more an ethic of protection can be built. The species lists can be used when Metchosin’s council makes decisions about possible development projects. It’s also used by the properties that the teams roam over when making their discoveries—William Head prison, the Department of National Defense lands at Rocky Point—and as an inspiration for future bioblitzes. Both Parks Canada and Government House have expressed interest in doing their own identification events. The group has visited schools and they offer templates to share with communities that would like to start their own projects. This November, residents can participate in the project’s final 2016 activity. In the Pacific Northwest, fungi aren’t as visible as other species in the spring. So this fall the Biodiversity Project will hold their fourth mycoblitz event. Scheduled for early November (check their website for final dates and locations) this year’s blitz will feature a scavenge for local mushrooms, a talk on local species, and an opportunity to peruse the findings, which will be laid out and identified by expert mycologists from as far away as California. Says Luther, with a smile, “As an analogy, imagine you’d collected a house full of junk, and then an antiques collector came through and pointed out all the rare objects. That’s what it’s like. We’re told we have something special.” Maleea Acker is the author of Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star, 2012). She is currently completing a PhD in Human Geography, focusing on the intersections between the social sciences and poetry.

A Canadian attempts to understand American explanations of Donald Trump SO, YOU SPEND HALF YOUR WAKING MOMENTS trying to work out the difference between “cloudy with sunny periods” and “sunny with cloudy periods?” Well, lucky, nuance-free you! If the sky falls, it’s all your fault, you… you hippie. And speaking of falling skies, even in this transmundane publication, no self-respecting catastrophist could fail to confess to spending obsessive amounts of time reading and fretting about the foreboding political weather south of our border—code, of course, for news and commentary about Donald Trump, who is both Republican presidential candidate and personification of the crazy vibration, the soul echo, the steadily coalescing angry Om emanating from a worryingly large percentage of US society. I poach from a recent James Fallows piece in The Atlantic: “Trump’s speech is no longer looked at as carrying actual content. Instead, it has become pure gesture, layered with dog whistles and emotional words that modify no actual nouns or verbs, merely indicating moods and relationships rather than explicit ideas.” Of course. Trump doesn’t want to be president of an accommodationist United States that goes quietly into the night, or slinks offstage, or mediates reality. He wants to be president of a United States that is numero uno, calls the shots, grabs the prize—a country with big brass balls and sheer ego. A country, in other words, cocky in victory, not unlike… why, Donald Trump! I could swap Fallows for The Atlantic’s Senior Editor David Frum, or for the NY Times’ quartet of terrific opinion writers David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Tom Engelhardt, and Thomas Edsall, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, Media-Post’s Bob Garfield, Joel Kotkin in the Daily Beast, the Guardian’s George Monbiot, and many others in the commentariat. Pitched at the tone of gnawing worry and genuine existential panic, recent columns by such writers reveal an unsettling ditto: “Dangerous World.” “Are We on the Path to National Ruin?” “Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?” “The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy.” “Revolt of the Masses.” “Why the World is Falling Apart.” Why is the world falling apart? Writing about the loss of a binding social identity, in the US and elsewhere, New Perspectives Quarterly Editor Nathan Gardels (a friend and colleague of our former prime minister, the senior Trudeau) labels it a “mutiny against globalization so audacious and technological change so rapid that it can barely be absorbed by our incremental nature.” After all, what, in such a context, do normative and normal even mean? Gardels adds: “the greater the threat—of violence, upheaval or exclusion—the more rigid and ‘solitarist’ identities become.” That is, you have to stand back far enough from this election to study not the man, but the historical moment. Trump the presidential candidate is nothing—a “bizarre political footnote,” a writer in Salon calls him. But like Hitler, Mussolini and other oratorically skillful demagogues who found their opportunity and caused endless mischief, Trump, with his eponymous, self-amplifying real estate and his freedom to promote his life in some heady realm of self-glorification, tugs at the souls of millions who want to consider him only as a personification, a champion, of some pop-infused American Promise. Their promise. And what does Hillary have to throw against that? Policy. A political world almost immobilized by its own complexity. A reminder that the game is rigged by big capital. Stewardship over a more mature, gravitic and less hopeful stage in national identity. Oh, you can’t translate those whispers in Mandarin you’re hearing? They’re saying “We’re Number Two, but not for long!” David Frum in The Atlantic, channelling his inner Canadian, fusses there are now “so many marginalized Americans who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control.” Any Canadian would resonate with Frum’s threnody; but what else could one expect from the American social experiment dedicated, as it is, to a long-developing imbalance between appetite and obligation? There’s something doom-y, fourth-act-y in the air south of us. The case for a social climax is ripening. The pressure’s up and the social particles are moving faster, orbiting eccentrically and drifting toward collision. Increasingly, media reports of violence—mass killings, cop-shootings and all the rest of that gruesome menu—are passing beyond news and into the realm of metaphor. You say you don’t understand? You mean, folks are not murdering and graphically face-eating their neighbours in the front yard in your part of town? Catch up, huh? Okay, a bit less hyperbolically, the meaning of what is going on right now may be seen as a mainstream revolution, an open revolt, taking place in America against an economic aristocracy and all of the institutions, policies and programmes through which it operates. That Trump, a high-flying (in his own plane) billionaire should personify the revolt, and not the aristocracy, is perverse, but not entirely beyond explanation. Putting his pathological self-absorption and other loony traits to the side, Trump makes it clear that he opposes the entire trans-national framework that supports and protects the interests of capital not labour, the banker not the worker. I was just reading an Economic Policy Institute study revealing that the top 1 percent of American income earners captured 20.1 percent of all the US income in 2013 and took home 85.1 percent of total income growth. “In the face of this national problem, we need national policy solutions to jumpstart wage growth for the vast majority,” the study thunders. That kind of fist pounding and 20 bucks gets you home in a taxi, but it’s also why the keys to the White House seem to dangle within Trump’s reach. Jill Lepore, offering notes from the Cleveland Democratic Convention in a political diary for The New Yorker, quoted a delegate—presumably, a Sanders supporter—who didn’t believe the US will last much longer if Hillary Clinton is elected, and who imagines the country is poised for a descent into anarchy. “It won’t take as long as four years. I give it two or three, tops.” Now, all of this column’s moody content has a purpose: It’s not the colour, but the setting. The NY Times’ Ross Douthat cites surveys registering a “general dissatisfaction with the American trajectory” and a public that doesn’t feel sweeping optimism about the country’s future. Ask yourself: Is this just a shocking, novel moment in history, a blip, a ping, a nervous dream we will soon wake from, or is this some spreading social virus, a new game with new rules, worrying not just for its near-term impacts but also because it pushes us toward some precipitous, risky, unknowable and sweeping social future, one of history’s corner-points? In other words, a new normal may come eventually, but for now it’s a new crazy between normals. I say again, it’s the why of Trump, not the man, that’s interesting: The historical inevitability, the accident that had to happen now, the social expression America has been building toward. Trump himself? Just a “ludicrous outrider of the apocalypse.” Writing six hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, analyzing the mutations and reversals of Florentine and Italian politics in the 1400s, noted recurrent oscillations between “order” and “disorder.” He theorized: “When states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.” In a spasm of late springtime worry, I registered the domain, trumpisanasshole.com, but did nothing with it, mostly because everyone knows Trump is an asshole and the domain increasingly seemed like nothing more than a franchise to re-state the obvious. And while I truly don’t want to see Trump in the White House, I’m not sure that Hillary, or anyone else, can raise an imperial hand before history’s rising tide. James Kunstler, my favourite we’re-all-gonna-die-nik (he makes me look sunny), suggests broadly: “The techno-industrial fantasia is drawing to a close. The financial structures of everyday life look more fragile than ever. We are heading into a long-term contraction of activity, productivity, and population and the salient question is how disorderly will the long emergency of the journey be to that new disposition of things? What we face is discontinuity, the end of old spent dynamics and the beginning of new dynamics.” It would be foolish to believe that the trends noted in this column will be contained by US national borders. The economic and social tectonics ripple out far beyond the American geography. These aren’t things we’ll be simply reading about in the “Elsewhere” section over morning coffee. It must be an absolute coincidence that “jump” and Trump rhyme, but right now, in my view, things in America and elsewhere are all jump, no parachute. A founder of Open Space and Monday Magazine, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an affordable housing concept and, with others, has initiated the New Economy Network.

Kathy Page’s new collection of short stories explores the transformative power of one-to-one encounters. IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE, our world has grown so big. Our care and concern is called on by people from around the planet, and we are mentally and emotionally stretched in endless different directions. Locally, too, as Focus showcases, there’s no shortage of capital “B” Big issues to be aware of and involved in. Being engaged is one of the great parts of living in a vibrant community like Victoria, but it’s sometimes easy to lose one’s boundaries and bearings amid the tide of so much outward pull. So I found it incredibly refreshing, especially as I was planning my wedding, to take time to breathe deeply within the covers of Kathy Page’s new book The Two of Us (Biblioasis, September 2016). In this collection of short stories, Page invites us to settle into a series of closer relationships, more homey twosomes, and to expand our awareness inside that smaller and deceptively simple dynamic by questioning who we see, who we are and what we might become. Tucked away on a winding Salt Spring Island road, Page’s peaceful home is the perfect spot to talk about (and experience) the power of the one-to-one. Attention focuses, stories unfold, and the pattern of listening and responding teaches you something about the other and yourself. That transformative kind of intimate interaction is at the heart of Page’s stories in this 200-page collection, each of which relates to what she calls “the most fundamental thing”: the relationship between the self and another. Whether it’s a father and daughter exploring a cave, a visiting professor negotiating culture and communication with her contact in a foreign country, a hairdresser and client who is facing cancer, a young girl and a dog “big as a wish,” spouses, squatters, strangers, Page’s characters find themselves in pairs—some momentary and some lifelong—in which there is an opportunity to change one another and be changed. “How relationships work fascinates me,” Page tells me: “How a relationship is structured and built, and what that does to you.” Originally from Bromley, England, Page has published seven novels, including a Governor General’s Award finalist and nominee for the Orange Prize, as well as the short story collection Paradise & Elsewhere, nominated for the 2014 Giller Prize. But she has also, she says with a smile, had to improvise her day job and is trained as a carpenter and joiner as well as a counsellor and psychotherapist—drawing on an interest to know how she came to be who she was. She has worked in settings that vary from Vancouver Island University to Estonia, a men’s prison and a therapeutic community for drug users. What she has developed is a sharp-eyed and open-hearted curiosity about self and others. “I’m interested in difficult characters, in when I run up against a difficult person. I find it surprising,” she explains with a lock of her intense but serene sky-blue eyes. “I’m interested to explore them without judgment.” That non-judgmental curiosity not only saved her from resentment when partnered with a somewhat stony carpentry mentor back in England but has made her a writer that pairs probing insight with gentle but direct handling. For instance, she tunes into the kind of prickly honesty of thoughts and feelings many of us would feel guilty admitting and would never have the guts to say out loud. She presents an older woman who both loves and is bored—even appalled—by her husband and his now slowness in just putting on his shoes. And a husband, awaiting his wife’s genetic testing results, asks himself: “What if there is bad news? How will I be for her? What will I do, what will I say to her as she turns to me?” He wonders if he will change himself into what is needed or just run. Page reminds us of the simple but important truth that we are mystery. We are always more than one thing at a time, and who we are and how we get there isn’t visible at the surface. “From the outside, no one would guess any of this, not in a thousand years,” one young man thinks while reflecting on his various abilities. In another story, a nervous, tongue-tied man turns out to be a surprising lover—“in the flesh, so articulate.” In a short two-pager, a child considers dragonfly nymphs, how “inside, they produced glittering wings, lungs, and enormous eyes” before splitting their skin and emerging new. She wonders: “Suppose we were just the beginning of something else?” Skills, sorrows, incredible transformations—Page reveals the hidden and encourages us to look for it, to look differently at the people in front of us or beside us in our own lives, to understand, to forgive, and to wonder about our own new beginnings. A trip into her world is, as one of her characters says, “a day for seeing things.” Sometimes, Page explains, she begins with just a person or a predicament, other times with something as simple as a staircase. “With short fiction you can improvise,” she says. “It’s freeing. Novels sweep you up in momentum. Short fiction is more like a plunge into the lake” where, Page hopes, you come up and out with a bit of a shock. “You can then sit back and keep the whole thing in your mind.” Her swimming image recalls a description of free diving in the book’s final story, centred on a swim coach and his prized protégé—a description that applies perfectly to Page’s own writing: “Depth is about the water pushing in on you and separating you from the familiar.” Page’s skill lies in separating us from the familiar by taking us deep into the everyday, making the seemingly typical or unremarkable newly remarkable, from the clink of milk bottles against a step to the slightly moldy smell of damp summer towels and the lake’s response to its swimmers: “The thick green water breaking into golden streaks and swirls with each dive, then resealing itself, perfect each time.” “All those things suggest human life,” Page says passionately, “and every human life is full of stories. Everywhere you look or listen, there’s a whole rich story.” A plunge into the intimacy of The Two of Us, Page hopes, helps readers to feel they’re in a different place in the end, even if it’s just a change in what we’re able to notice as we come back up for air ready again for the wider world—“more alive,” she says, “and aware.” Newly married writer, editor and musician Amy Reiswig is extra appreciative of having a new perspective on the power of pairs.

Hard-hitting Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical about mental health and family opens the season at Langham Court Theatre. WHEN NEW SEASON ANNOUNCEMENTS came out this spring, I was delighted to see that Langham Court Theatre had programmed the contemporary American musical Next to Normal as its 2016-2017 season opener. A rock musical, with book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey and music by Tom Kitt, it’s a somewhat surprising and risky choice for Langham. That said, over past years I’ve admired a number of the more out-of-the-box shows our local and longstanding community theatre company has offered Victoria audiences. A couple of examples are 2011’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh or last year’s August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, both of which were dark and daunting dramas (albeit with plenty of black comedic elements) that Langham tackled very well. I would have considered Next to Normal to have been of interest to the Belfry Theatre, our resident professional company in town. Or I might have had to travel to Vancouver, Seattle or elsewhere to catch a road tour production. It is exciting that Langham has taken it on and we have a chance to see it right here. Next to Normal is a 2009 Broadway musical about a “normal” suburban middle class family trying to navigate through the challenges of both grief and mental illness. Mother Diana is trying to cope with bipolar disorder with its manic highs and depressive lows. Husband Dan has been supporting her for many years but is beyond weary with the role of caregiver. Daughter Natalie is an ambitious and talented young musician who worries about her parents whilst navigating through a new romantic relationship with fellow student Henry. When Diana suffers a breakdown and an attempted suicide, she is offered electro-shock treatment and the family has to deal with her consequent loss of memory. Hovering over all of this is their son, Gabriel, in a kind of absent presence. Finally, Diana has to make a difficult choice in order to move her life forward, letting go of some painful memories and relationships in order to do so. The musical won a number of New York theatre awards, including Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Leading Actress for Alice Ripley as Diana. But the musical also won a Pulitzer Prize, the first one awarded to a musical since Rent in 1996. Only a handful of musicals have been given Pulitzer Prizes which are more usually bestowed on dramatic plays. This speaks very well to the dramatic content of the book of Next to Normal as it sits alongside other Pulitzer musical winners South Pacific, Sunday in the Park with George and A Chorus Line. This year saw yet another Pulitzer musical win, the hugely popular Hamilton: An American Musical. All of these well-regarded shows have a psychological depth of characterization and significant themes blended into their musical structure. The historical development of the American Broadway musical is a fascinating one. The song and dance revue style performances of the early 20th century have morphed over time into a more hybrid form. At its best the Broadway musical can transcend its own crowd-pleasing limits and be as transformative for audiences as the greatest dramas, or even operas. Think of Gershwin, Sondheim and a few others, perhaps including the red-hot Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of Hamilton in this regard. So this is clearly not your usual romantic or otherwise lighter musical plot. Next to Normal sits alongside contemporary musicals such as Rent (addressing AIDS), Spring Awakening (sexual awakening) and Fun Home (based on an autobiography by a gay daughter discovering her father’s closeted homosexuality). These rock musicals offer audiences a mash-up of dramatic characters struggling with life-and-death issues and delivered in popular musical styles. I was curious how and why this season’s production co-chairs Roger Carr and Keith Digby had selected this demanding but very moving musical. Keith Digby (on his and Carr’s behalf) responded to my email interview questions by letting me know his thoughts on the appeal of the show: “It’s a high energy, let’s-get-this-season-really-going-gangbusters, rock musical. It’s also a compellingly told, highly accessible story of a family in crisis with words and lyrics with heart and depth. Hence the 2010 Pulitzer to go with its 12 Tony nominations and 4 wins. Previous productions have shown that it transcends age and gender divides.” The production’s director Gregg Perry echoes Digby’s thoughts, telling me, “The show has a constant flow of engaging music and emotion. It succeeds as a musical that draws the audience inside the experience of the family, shares the pathos and the hope. It feels real, leaving us neither deflated nor triumphant. Instead, we have shared a genuine human experience that many of us can identify with.” When asked what their previous experience of the musical had been, Digby relayed that he had listened to the soundtrack (as have I, and composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey have crafted many effective and memorable songs) as well as seen YouTube clips of the Broadway production. Perry tells me, “I happened to see the [Nanaimo-based] Schmooze Productions presentation of the show in November last year. Jennifer Kelly played Diana and her voice was a treat to hear and she knew the play inside out.” Successful casting of this musical, with its high level of drama and emotional intensity, will be key. Digby commented on this aspect of the production by saying, “Casting this musical, granted all in it can sing well, actually takes the same talent and sensitivity as any other play that deals with a major human theme. I expect that director Gregg Perry will agree with this thought: You cast people who can play the roles believably and who will engage audience members and move them. The text deals with the theme and situation. Each actor plays the urgent needs of his or her character, moment by moment. This is also a text one can trust, so just do it.” Indeed Perry does agree and tells me, “We all have to be crazy to tackle this one! The music is quite challenging with a variety of odd time signatures. And there is no break in the action during each act. It is quite intense all the way through.” I also wanted to know what Digby and Perry hoped their audience at Langham Court Theatre might take away from seeing Next to Normal. Digby replied, “I hope and believe that the audience will love it and engage with its characters and story as much as I do. I believe that, in terms of numbers, it will be a big hit for us as well.” Perry said simply yet directly, “They can’t help but be moved by the emotional pain and courage.” We will all have the opportunity to meet this “normal” family as they struggle with the universal dramatic themes of love and loss, and sing their hearts out to boot. Next to Normal opens September 30 and runs until October 15 with tickets available at www.langhamtheatre.ca or 250-384-2142. Monica Prendergast teaches and researches drama/theatre education at the University of Victoria. The second edition of her award-winning textbook, Applied Theatre (with Juliana Saxton), is available now from Intellect Books.

An arts oasis faces challenges without CRD funding—so throws a dance party. ART IS A FORM OF LIFE SUPPORT. That’s not hyperbole. There’s enough bona fide quantitative research—and plain old anecdotal evidence—supporting this truth. Every small and large municipality in this administratively pixellated region has collectively invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in studies and public meetings to craft Official Community Plans (OCPs). These OCPs clearly demonstrate that citizens prioritize public funding of the arts as a vital part of their neighbourhoods and lives—and that dollar for dollar, no investment of civic resources offers a better return than building an arts infrastructure. Yet the government-dispersed funds in the West Shore keep flowing toward… sports. This is the exasperating reality the dedicated visionaries of the Coast Collective Arts Centre (CCAC) face as they create the kind of multi-faceted, essential and accessible arts resource clearly defined in their West Shore municipality’s OCP, yet cannot access the significant coffers of the Capital Regional District (CRD) Arts Development Service grants, since Colwood doesn’t contribute. Cindy Moyer, executive director of Coast Collective, points out the window. “If we were two minutes that way, in View Royal, we would be eligible for those funds.” Walking into CCAC’s new home, a generous expanse of pristine, modern, well-lit gallery space incorporated into a brand-new hotel complex adjacent to the Juan de Fuca Rec Centre, one could imagine they were visiting an auxiliary wing of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. After moving last winter from their charming but impractical heritage-home startup digs at the Havenwood Estate in Esquimalt Lagoon, their presence in this elegant and efficient space signals that this eight-year-old arts organization has fully matured. Everything about the CCAC is top-notch; the art on display is stringently juried, skillfully executed and professionally presented; the gift shop’s elegant, diverse and affordable wares are all produced by the artist members of the Collective, who live in every one of the 13 municipalities that make up “Victoria.” A bright and spacious workshop offers artists of all ages and levels of ability year-round opportunities to learn new techniques. Everything about the place says “public institution.” And yet it is a private enterprise, run by dedicated, regular people—with little or no pay, and no safety net. “The Coast Collective is the only non-profit art centre of its kind in our community,” explains Moyer. “We bring the arts alive for the public in a free-access gallery, showcase Vancouver Island talent, and contribute to the livelihood of hundreds of local artists and artisans. Now, in this new location, we can welcome people though our double glass doors, even with walkers or wheelchairs. We couldn’t do that before. Having accessibility for people with mobility issues was a deal-breaker. We’re also well-served by public transit. This location is better on all levels.” This summer, within days of an August board meeting where the top agenda item was the CCAC’s potential demise come December, the organization’s first-ever gaming grant came through, securing their future—but only for the coming year, and no further. “We asked for $50,000, and got 30,” says Moyer; “30 was the absolute minimum amount we needed to keep going for another year.” The next big push is to petition Colwood to grant a permissive tax exemption on the property tax portion of CCAC’s lease at Westridge Landing—shaving a possible $10-12,000 off their annual rent payments. Until CCAC is able to access more consistent sources of public funding, they must continue, as they have since their start in 2008, to earn their own way, relying on a steady stream of workshop participants and gift-shop sales. While no one would expect the Royal Theatre or the AGGV to cater solely to Downtown-core-dwellers, neither would one expect a resource like CCAC to be utilized only by residents of the West Shore. But this is the unique conundrum of our region: with all of the fragmentation brought on by having so many separate municipalities in a relatively small geographic area, how do you get people to overcome their perception that it’s “too far” to go “way out there,” even if it’s only a distance of 10 or 15 kilometres? Perhaps a party will help. “Raise the Roof” is planned as a fundraiser for CCAC on October 15, featuring beloved local Latin-funk band Groove Kitchen, whose bass player happens to be Moyer’s husband. The band will play from 8pm till midnight, with light snacks served at 10pm. The organization is banking on healthy ticket sales, as well as generous bidding for silent auction items, which feature a diverse array of artists’ works and donations from area businesses. If a few folks from Victoria find out that they don’t have to pack extra provisions for the short jaunt to Colwood, and have a great experience to boot, perhaps they’ll make a habit of it. As a collective community who benefits from a thriving and diverse arts landscape, we’d all be healthier for it. “Raise the Roof” fundraiser for Coast Collective Art Centre, featuring Groove Kitchen. Saturday, October 15, 8-pm-12am, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 91, 761 Station Avenue, Langford, BC. Tickets $22.40, www.coastcollective.ca or 250-391-5522. Coast Collective Gallery & Artisans Gift Shop hours: Wednesday to Sunday 11am-5pm, #103 - 318 Wale Road, Colwood. Victoria writer and musician Mollie Kaye would like to see all of the arts resources in our region honoured, recognized, enjoyed, and supported financially.

Lindsay Delaronde’s collaborative photography project uses images to defy the language and attitudes that marginalize indigenous women. LANGUAGE PLAYS A POWERFUL ROLE in the history of colonialism, racism and sexism. Even small words have major implications: there is a big difference between, say, the history of Vancouver Island and a history of Vancouver Island. The former leaves no room for alternative tellings or voices, while the latter acknowledges that as the whole point. That single mark carries with it a powerful paradigm shift. Even the way we refer to a place is meaningful: the part of Vancouver Island in which these words were written is, after all, unceded Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations territory. Place names carry weight. And then there are those words that, in an utterance of single syllables, can deliver the blows of colonialism, racism and sexism with visceral force. Words like squaw. When someone says it, “they are stereotyping native women,” explains Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, an Iroquois/ Mohawk artist living and working in Victoria. “They are saying, ‘You are a low- class citizen. You are the other.’ It implies oppression, marginalization, exploitation and sexualization,” so much so that, since the turn of the 21st century, it has been removed from place names around North America. With “Project Squaw,” a unique photography-based initiative three years in the making, Delaronde has examined the word and the long shadow it has cast. “It’s looking at that word, looking at the history of it,” she says, from “first contact with fur traders and explorers [who ‘took’ First Nations wives]…continuing to all the problems that come with the Indian Act and Bill C-35, where they took away a woman’s status if she marries out. All of these legislations and laws and policies based on an indigenous woman’s identity, on what she is and what she isn’t. This power.” Delaronde’s aim is to offer alternative manifestations of identity and power. “I have a tension, a conflict in my art,” she observes. “It’s not about going into battle, but about creating a place of change. This project is really about providing space and working with virtues that are particularly related to our cultural teachings around respect and love and joy,” she explains. Its concept combines all aspects of Delaronde’s education, intertwined with an art practice that reaches back to childhood. Born in Montreal in 1985 and raised on the nearby Kahnawake First Nation, Delaronde experienced domestic violence and trauma in her youth. She always turned to art-making, including traditional forms such as beadwork, for solace. “Art is my place of healing,” she says. “It is a sacred place. It is something you partake in and you go into a different realm. You have power there; you have control. You have personal agency. You can reconstruct things, deconstruct things. And that process is very mindful and focused and was very much a contrast to my home life. So art has been a means of understanding myself and the world.” At 16 years of age, Delaronde attended the Fine Arts program at Dawson College in Montreal, then came west to do an undergrad degree at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design. At the end of her final year, she moved to Victoria, where her daughter, now 9, was born. She completed a Master’s of Fine Art at the University of Victoria in 2010. Throughout her education she studied and worked in a wide variety of media, from printmaking, drawing and video to performance, exploring her own voice and role as an artist. All the while, Delaronde has been aware of the impacts of colonialism personally and culturally. “Looking at those larger themes and trying to find [her] role in that,” she completed the Master’s in Indigenous Communities Counselling at UVic, which combines First Nations and Western counselling methods. Realizing how an art practice helped her in her own healing, she has been finding points of cohesion. “As time went on, I was really interested in narrative therapy, person-centred therapy,” she relates. “I was looking at my own cultural background in terms of what does group look like, community-based gathering. Looking at different ceremonies and rituals. We don’t heal in isolation. Our worldview is about coming together and doing ceremonies so we could be visible; we could be seen. We could be part of community. The individual healing is the group healing—one is the other,” she explains. “Project Squaw” takes this into account. It is a collaboration between Delaronde and 32 First Nations women ranging in age from 22-56 years, whom she photographed in a style and setting completely of their own dictation. It will appear at UVic’s Legacy Gallery downtown from October 8 to December 24 in an exhibition titled In Defiance. In it, each woman will have “individual narratives and stories, but the viewers will see this collective, a community voice that will counteract the term squaw. It’s ‘in defiance’ of that word.” Important in the process was the full control each woman had over how they were represented, given that the project deals with deeply personal responses to sexuality, female identity and the body. Also important to Delaronde was that she be the first to be photographed. “You can’t ask somebody to do something that you are not able to do yourself,” she states. For the participating women, she saw herself as facilitator, her counselling education coming into play. Through discussion and collaboration, she helped each woman in the group—community workers, mothers, educators, scholars and more—find the power in their vulnerability, both in the final image they chose for the exhibition and the personally written statement that accompanies it. That power is visible in the confrontational gazes of those who face the camera head-on. No matter where their eyes are directed, these women claim, act in and declare their spaces, which include rivers and fields, forests and mud puddles. Seen in context with their statements individually and collectively, no meanings need be inferred. “The woman has already defined herself—she’s telling you; she’s showing you,” Delaronde states. The frequent natural settings give way to an underlying theme of the female body as connected to the land, both as givers of life and receivers of violence: “Violence against women is directly related to the exploitation of the land as commodified, objectified, sexualized.” Describing her role in this project as “a great honour,” Delaronde is understandably protective of how these images are understood and received. “There are people who are part of this project that have family members who are missing, who are murdered, so this history is very alive and real in a lot of us. When we are looking at being sexual, the repercussions of that have been fatal,” she says. “Violence against indigenous women is a fact—it happened and it’s happening. Looking at the word squaw was a touchstone for everything that followed, sifting through what is real, what is authentic, asking who am I really, underneath all of these labels,” Delaronde concludes. “In Defiance is looking at the stereotype; it’s looking at what Canadian culture thinks of native people; it’s addressing it, and then it shows something else.” Something that can be put into words like consent. Safety. Honour. Agency. Authenticity. And other small words with major implications. In Defiance is on from October 8-December 24, 2016, with an opening reception October 21, 7-9 pm and “In Conversation with Lindsay Delaronde and Sarah Hunt” on October 22, 2-4 pm. Legacy Art Gallery Downtown is at 630 Yates Street, 250-472-5619, www.legacy.uvic.ca. Aaren Madden is a Victoria writer with an education in Art History and Museum Studies. As such, she spends a lot of time thinking about the power of words—and the power of pictures.

A FEW YEARS AGO, Dr. Ben Bell, with his wife and partner Dr. SuAnn Ng, purchased a state-of-the-art ceramic mill which allows them to create crowns, onlays, inlays, veneers, and bridges all in-house. By avoiding the use of outside labs, they not only can save clients time and money, they have more ability to customize and control for quality. “The ability to have the crown ready for the patient in one appointment avoids the intermediate phase of wearing a temporary crown for two weeks and then returning to the office for the final crown to be cemented,” explains Dr. Bell. An optical scanner and digital technology allow him—in consultation with his patient—to design the ideal crown which is milled onsite. The same scanner is also helpful during implant procedures. The first choice is always to save a tooth, says the dentist, but sometimes, despite all efforts of both patient and dentist, that just isn’t possible. Implants are also being sought by many who have relied on bridges and dentures for years. “They are choosing to go to implants because they are more stable and functional,” says Dr. Bell. “Dentures often rub and shift which irritates the tissue while the patient is chewing. Bridges often trap food underneath them.” In the past five years, he notes, implant crowns have become more natural-looking, stronger, and they integrate with the bone more quickly—which can shave months off the time between implant and crown placement. The team’s CBCT scanner allows the dentist to see a 3D image of the bone which means dental implants can be placed with more precision, thereby lowering any risk of injury and complications. (It also enables root canals to be done more confidently.) “That scanner,” says Dr. Bell, “helps me sleep better at night.” Integrating the 3D CBCT image and the Cerec optical scanner image can often significantly reduce the number of visits necessary to replace a tooth, says Dr. Bell. “In the past we often needed approximately 4 appointments to replace a tooth with an implant, now, in many cases, we place the implant in one appointment and the next time we see the patient we are able to attach the tooth to the implant.” Dr. Bell insists on using premium implants from companies that have long-established excellent track records. It’s all about minimizing risk of future problems, because when an implant fails it can mean a long process of addressing infection that gets into the jaw bone. Dr. Bell, who has been placing implants for 10 years says, “You have to be extremely committed to the art and science. Placing implants requires dedication to continuously upgrading your training to stay up to date with the advances.” Indeed: The money invested in state-of-the-art equipment and the time devoted to continuing education are significant. On average, Dr. Bell exceeds 100 hours of continuous education training per year, more than 3 times the college requirements. Dr. Bell has received training at some of the most widely respected dental training institutes in the world including Spear Education in Arizona; he is a graduate of the Kois Center in Seattle, and a mentor with the Cerec Doctors Institute. “The technology is changing so rapidly in dentistry,” says Dr. Bell, I believe that we have a responsibility to stay current to ensure that our patients receive optimal care. One of the reasons that we do all these procedures in-house is so that our patients can have continuous care from the same clinicians from start to finish. Another reason is that by offering more specialized procedures, we make advanced dentistry more affordable to our patients.” With Dr. SuAnn Ng teaching clinical oral radiology, pathology, and local anaesthesia at Camosun College, and not to mention keeping busy with Dr. Bell and their two young children, they are both pleased to have Dr. Andrew Sweet in the office these days. Dr. Sweet also provides a wide range of dental services including crowns, root canals, extractions, surgeries and Invisalign orthodontics. Dr. Benjamin Bell & Dr. SuAnn Ng General & Cosmetic Dentistry #220 – 1070 Douglas St (TD Bank Building) 250-384-8028 www.myvictoriadentist.ca

April 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | PEEKING BEHIND CAMPAIGN CURTAINS Campaign finance reforms are welcome but the Province refuses to restrict donations. 10 Murray Rankin | AN EARTH DAY MESSAGE Stephen Harper’s indifference to climate change could mean Canada will lose the opportunity for clean energy investment and jobs. 12 Leslie Campbell | AT A GLANCE The sewage treatment and deer cull issues. 14 David Broadland | THE FOX IS IN THE CHICKEN HOUSE Victoria City Council has been fooled again on the Johnson Street Bridge project. 18 Katherine Palmer Gordon | SAVING GRACE At a March longhouse ceremony, a cabinet minister promises change, but First Nations are still wary. 20 Judith Lavoie | PETROSTATE CLAMPDOWN Critics of proposed “anti-terrorism” legislation see it as part of the Conservative’s push to quell opposition to petroleum-related projects. 22 Derry McDonell | A-WORD CONVERSATION BEGINS Academics weigh in on the amalgamation question. 26 Aaren Madden | A HAPPY NOTE Using light and shadow, technique and subject matter, Clement Kwan paints to bring joy to viewers. 40 Monica Prendergast | PORTRAYING RACE ON STAGE An upcoming production of Madama Butterfly encourages discussion of how to represent race properly in theatre. 42 Amy Reiswig | SUPER UNEQUAL BC Through statistics and personal stories, Andrew MacLeod delves into the realities and costs of poverty in BC. 44 Gene Miller | VICTORIA: iCAPITAL OF CANADA? The task of positioning Victoria as a centre for innovation and investment demands, among other things, desire. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | GOOD NEWS FOR PLODDERS More is not better, and actually, more could be worse, says one cardiologist.

May 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | CAUTIONARY TALES ON THE ROAD TO BOLD AND INNOVATIVE It’s political will—not ideas—that we’ve been missing in reducing homelessness. 10 Elizabeth May | 2015: the year that must change everything. How we can make up for nine years of lost time? 12 David Broadland | THE WHISTLE BLOWER’S TALE Did Saanich staff conspire to spy on the newly-elected mayor? 18 Judith Lavoie | SHAWNIGAN LAKE BATTLE ESCALATES With legal costs already over $1 million, the traumatized community continues its fight against a contaminated soil dump. 20 Briony Penn | LORI AND GOLIATH A scientific communicator takes on big oil and its so-called regulator. 24 Derry McDonell | A-WORD CONVERSATION CONTINUES Former BC Premier Mike Harcourt tells a pro-amalgamation crowd that citizens will have to lead the way. 26 Aaren Madden | OYSTERCATCHER GIRL Anne Hansen paints joyful natural images as antidote to social injustices. 40 Monica Prendergast | PLAYS WITH SOMETHING TO SAY Social commentary abounds in the upcoming UNO Fest. 42 Amy Reiswig | THE MYSTERY The complexities of our relations with other animals are explored in a new anthology. 44 Gene Miller | ENRIQUE’S FATAL ERROR There’s nothing like a crisis—even if it’s someone else’s—to remind us that the true meaning of life is survival itself. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | RATS! They love the Garden City too.

June 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | MEDIA AS WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION Whistle blowers, citizen activists and persistent journalists are the antidote. 10 David Broadland | THE WHISTLE BLOWER’S TALE: PART 2 The spyware installed on Mayor-elect Richard Atwell’s computer was only one of three IT strategies that targeted him. 14 Judith Lavoie | DRAFTING THE REGION’S FUTURE While Mike Hicks fears the Regional Sustainability Strategy’s teeth will bite his community, others say they aren’t sharp enough. 16 Katherine Palmer Gordon | MORTON VS DFO You’d think Fisheries and Oceans Canada would be on the side of wild salmon. Think again. 18 Leslie Campbell | INGMAR’S WORRY Do articulated tug barges, each carrying millions of gallons of hydrocarbon fuels, pose a threat to our coast? 20 David Broadland | KALYNCHUK’S LEGACY The CRD is fighting to prevent release of a record that could show how badly they estimated one of the costs of sewage treatment. 22 Ray Grigg | THE FUTURE IS PLASTIC World Oceans Day on June 8 is a good time to ponder our use and abuse of plastic and how it impacts the environment. 26 Aaren Madden | REVISITING THE SIXTIES SCENE Legacy’s new exhibition illustrates a formative time in Victoria’s modern art history. 38 Mollie Kaye | IMMERSION IN THE SOUND Ensemble Laude presents two concerts in June, displaying the power of choral music. 40 Amy Reiswig | A HEALING PLACE A visual and literary homage to Tod Inlet, its history, nature, and people. 42 Gene Miller | SEDUCTION BY THE TECHNOCRATS Amalgamation may destroy that which makes this place meaningful. 44 Briony Penn | POETIC JUSTICE A sense of humour and humility are essential as settlers wade into the rich intertidal zone of decolonization. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | OVERCOMING GODZILLA Despite federal neglect, local youth are taking meaningful action.

July-August 2015 Focus.pdf 4 Leslie Campbell | A LIFE-SAVER Will Victoria take responsibility to provide safe consumption services? 10 Ray Grigg | CANADA’S SHAME If Vladimir Putin is politically “troublesome,” Stephan Harper is his environmental equivalent. 12 David Broadland and Daniel Palmer | INVESTIGATIONS into INVESTIGATIONS News of a secret investigation involving Saanich’s interim CAO Andy Laidlaw may throw the District into more turmoil. 18 Briony Penn | WAR IN THE WOODS II? Eight planned cutblocks in the Walbran are raising the temperature among those concerned about BC’s old-growth forests. 22 Katherine Palmer Gordon | GETTING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report calls for a massive shift in how Canada conducts itself in relation to Aboriginal people. 26 Aaren Madden | WHERE THE WHALES COME IN Marika Swan finds personal guidance and artistic inspiration in her people’s spiritual connection to whales. 40 Monica Prendergast | A DELICIOUS SUMMER THEATRE MENU Shakespeare, queer, the Goose, the Fringe and more. 42 Amy Reiswig | BUILDING A HOUSE TOGETHER Two books expand the conversation on how, together, indigenous and settler people can create a new story. 44 Gene Miller | AGGRESSIVE RECYCLING BEATS AGGRESSIVE PANHANDLING Contemporary circumstances, including shrinking governments, demand that we, the human family, be socially innovative. 46 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic | THE AGE OF IRRESPONSIBILITY What’s happening on our roads is a microcosm of what seems to be ailing society in general.

The Province’s failure on First Nations burial sites is leading to more Grace Islets and potentially another Gustafsen Lake. IN THE EVENING OF March 17, 2015, the Tseycum longhouse in Saanich was permeated with a sense of profound relief. The desecration of 18 ancestral graves on Grace Islet, a First Nations’ burial site in Saltspring Island’s Ganges Harbour, had finally been stopped. Hundreds of people gathered together in the longhouse not only to express their thankfulness that the desecration had ended, but to share their grief over the spiritual insult done to their ancestors. Provincial Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Steve Thomson was also there, but for a different reason: to apologize for the fact that the violation of the burial ground not only occurred under his watch, but with his approval. Nine months earlier, with a Heritage Conservation Act (HCA) permit in hand issued by staff at Thomson’s Archaeology Branch, a property developer had begun building his retirement home in the midst of Grace Islet’s graves. First Nations, horrified at the wilful destruction of their ancestral cemetery, pleaded repeatedly with Thomson to revoke the permit and protect the site instead, which the government had the authority to do under the HCA. Their protests were brushed aside, however, and onlookers watched in acute dismay as building materials were piled on the tiny islet and construction began in mid-2014. Threatened with an Aboriginal title lawsuit, Thomson finally caved in, paying more than $5 million to buy the island and stop the building work from continuing. That was too late, however, to prevent significant damage occurring to the graves, and searing emotional and cultural injury to the people whose ancestors had been so disrespected. An apology was the least that Steve Thomson could offer. Thomson also promised: “I give you my sincere commitment to work with you to ensure that something like this never happens again.” He reiterated the commitment to Focus shortly after the Tseycum event, stating that he had instructed his staff to review how the HCA is implemented with respect to First Nations burial grounds, specifically to avoid any future “Grace Islet-type situations” (see “Saving Grace,” Focus, April 2015). One might think that—faced by a roomful of people hanging on his every word, and by such palpable grief—Thomson would keep his word. But, 18 months later, it looks very much like he hasn’t. Thomson’s communications staff did not respond to requests for an interview with him. Focus received only a short email instead, insisting that a review has taken place and that as a result, the Archaeological Branch has “tightened up procedures” and “is paying closer attention to areas that may contain burial sites.” That closer attention may include “more frequent site visits by a branch archaeologist, and greater detail required from proponents for any planned development.” In other words, as far as anyone can tell, nothing has been put in place to ensure a “Grace Islet-type situation” cannot be repeated. It also seems no First Nations were involved in the “review,” despite Thomson’s promise to work with them. Dr Judith Sayers, a member of the Hupacasath First Nation, is co-chair of the Joint Working Group on First Nations Heritage Conservation, established in 2007 by the provincial government and First Nations Leadership Council to help improve the protection of First Nations cultural and heritage sites. You’d think Sayers of all people would have been involved in a review. But Sayers says: “As far as I am aware, nothing has happened.” Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs President Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who witnessed Thomson’s promise at Tseycum, says he is also not aware of any review at all taking place, let alone one that involved First Nations: “That’s very disappointing to me.” If Thomson’s goal was to prevent another “Grace Islet-type situation,” Phillip believes Thomson’s failure to keep his promise makes the opposite outcome inevitable. Indeed, there may be more than one such situation already brewing. In New Westminster, a school built over a burial site which is believed to contain the remains of a Tsilhqot’in chief is about to be torn down. Tsilhqot’in Nation has already put the Education Ministry on notice that they will not permit any desecration of his grave to occur. Further east, in the Similkameen Valley, the ancient remains of five people were uncovered and seriously damaged on February 29 this year when an unsuspecting Cawston property owner began clearing part of his land. He reported the incident immediately, and the Lower Similkameen Indian Band (LSIB) was called in to recover what they could of the scattered bones—fewer than half to date, according to LSIB Chief Keith Crow. “We’ve been able to repatriate maybe 400 bones so far, but that means there are at least 600 left there, if not more.” Crow says that the existence of burials on the Cawston site has been known to government since as early as 1952. Despite that, efforts to have the area protected under the HCA have been unsuccessful to date. “I just want to take care of our poor ancestors,” he says in frustration. “These are our great-great-great grandparents. They were properly laid to rest on that place and it is our sacred duty to ensure we look after them.” On April 25, Crow’s frustration at the lack of action by government to help protect the site boiled over. In a scathing letter to the Premier, Crow aimed a warning shot across the government’s bows: “Oka, Ipperwash, and Gustafsen Lake all proved very costly and involved the deployment of hundreds of police and the Canadian military. LSIB is prepared to begin a highly publicized protest unless you take immediate action.” The 1990 Oka crisis involved a land dispute in Quebec that lasted more than ten weeks and resulted in the death of a police officer. In 1995, it was Ojibway protester Dudley George who was killed by police at Ipperwash. The Gustafsen Lake standoff in BC, a protest by First Nations over an ancient sacred site, took place the same year and lasted a month. The cost of RCMP involvement was the highest of its kind in Canadian history. Crow’s implied threat that the government faces a similar scenario at Cawston didn’t achieve the result he hoped for. On June 7, LSIB issued a further press release stating: “Premier Clark told Chief Crow that her government would engage in a meaningful and responsive way. That has not yet happened. Our patience is running thin. Failure to act is not an option.” Nonetheless, by the last week of July there was still no movement. To his dismay, Crow was told by a provincial official that nothing would happen “this close to an election.” (The next BC provincial election is in May 2017.) On July 27, the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA)—of which LSIB is a member and Stewart Phillip Chair—wrote again to the Premier, as well as Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Minister John Rustad and Steve Thomson, urging them to re-engage on this “escalating” matter. This time they left no room for doubt about their intentions: “Direct action is the next step in moving this issue forward.” Asked by Focus for the government’s response, Thomson’s ministry staff replied by email: “The Province shares the concerns about the recent discovery of human remains and is currently working with the LSIB, the ONA and the landowner in a collaborative manner on solutions to protect the remains. The next meeting between all interested parties is scheduled for the end of August.” If it’s aggravating for journalists to receive that kind of non-response from government, it must be triply so for Crow. He says LSIB is committed to finding a solution to protecting the remains and is using every effort to engage government, but doesn’t feel it’s reciprocated. It was LSIB who organized and planned the August meeting, not the government, and if he’d had his way, the meeting would have been held much sooner: “I find it frustrating that it seems no-one else is taking this seriously except for the LSIB.” Crow did not comment on the likelihood of protest action occurring if discussions at the August meeting failed, but as things stood at time of writing, the potential for a positive outcome was not promising. Grace Islet wasn’t the first situation of its kind—think Bear Mountain, Nanaimo’s Departure Bay, and Musqueam’s Marpole site in Vancouver. Given the government’s apparent unwillingness to respond to First Nations and implement any meaningful changes to the way the HCA is implemented, it seems likely that it will not be the last. And the next one, whether it is at Cawston or elsewhere, could have even more serious consequences for government. Stewart Phillip believes that direct action may be the only alternative left to First Nations pushed to the wall over the mistreatment of their forebears: “It seems there will have to be a full-pitched battle before the Province will act to find a resolution and protect these ancestral remains.” Katherine Palmer Gordon is a former BC Chief Treaty Negotiator and the author of six books, including We Are Born With the Songs Inside Us (Harbour, 2013). She is currently working on New Zealand’s final treaties with First Nations there.

Tourism operators on the coast have been forced to watchdog forestry operations since government introduced self-monitoring. JOHNSTONE STRAIT, around Robson Bight, is one of the most scenic and busy sections of the Inside Passage for Vancouver Island tourism in general, and for whale watching in particular. Across the water from the Bight, in Boat Bay on West Cracroft Island, is Spirit of the West Adventures’ base camp. There owner Breanne Quesnel is juggling her busiest time of year for kayak guiding, looking after her two under-two-year-olds, and fielding my questions on an issue she has been watchdogging for the last five years. Quesnel has been monitoring harvesting operations by TimberWest, the company that holds the Tree Farm Licence in the area. It all started in June of 2011 when she found cutblock boundary marker ribbons near her licenced camp. Since then she has been researching, meeting with government and TimberWest, and offering recommendations on how best to conserve local viewscapes. Managing viewscapes is a legal requirement of BC’s forest practices that has been around for a long time. WAC Bennett popularized the concept because he knew that visitors to Beautiful BC actually came to see trees—not stumps. Since those days, it has become a more exacting science than just keeping a strip of trees between the highway and the clearcut—and an increasingly contentious issue. Quesnel and others involved in tourism in the area know that clients choose other destinations when they start seeing too many big, ugly clear-cuts. Focus spoke with Quesnel back in 2013 when she went public about concerns not being addressed by TimberWest or the district manager of the North Island Central Coast Forest District—concerns also voiced by the Sea Kayak Guide Alliance of BC, the Wilderness Tourism Association, the North Island Marine Mammal Association and others. Three long years later, triggered by TimberWest’s submission of a cutting permit application, Quesnel filed a complaint with the Forest Practices Board (FPB). She argued the concessions to visual quality were inadequate, the process flawed, and government wasn’t acting in a timely manner. The FPB is an independent board that investigates complaints with forest practices and makes recommendations to the regulator, the Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, and companies holding licences to log Crown land. Quesnel’s chief frustration lay in the lack of opportunity for the public to review and comment, specifically on cutblock layouts. The mechanism by which a company can legally get away with no input from the public is by requesting an “extension” or renewal of an existing Forest Stewardship Plan (in this case a plan developed more than a decade ago). There is no legal requirement for public input on an extension. A Forest Stewardship Plan is a regional plan that describes how the area will be managed for a variety of values. It is the only legally-binding planning document under the Forest and Range Practices Act (FRPA). Quesnel describes it as “so vague, it allows forestry companies the ability to push through cuts just about anywhere once it is approved or extended.” The public has no recourse except a cumbersome legal appeal process in which they need to prove that stopping the logging plans would not unduly impact the supply of timber on the coast or the economics of the logging company, and that the public benefits outweigh any constraints or impacts on the licencee. As Quesnel asks, “How does a member of the public prove these tests?” The answer is they aren’t supposed to. The onus is on the professionals to weigh up the varying priorities of serving the interests of the company, the government and the public. THIS IS CALLED "PROFESSIONAL RELIANCE" and it finds its way into much of our legislation these days. The Province recently rescinded it for the real estate industry, but it’s alive and kicking in the Forest Range and Practices Act. In theory, it allows government to cut costs and “get out of the way” of business. In his previous employment with UVic Environmental Law Centre, lawyer Mark Haddock, now a lawyer for the Forest Practices Board, wrote in a 2015 paper: “Just over a decade ago, the British Columbia government embarked on a significant regulatory experiment. It adopted an ambitious goal of cutting or deregulating one-third of the regulations, coupled with an equivalent reduction in the size of the public service. Natural resource management and environmental protection laws and agencies were a prime focus for this initiative as government believed resource companies were significantly over-regulated.” To assure the public that standards wouldn’t diminish, the responsibility of managing our forests for aspects such as wildlife, tourism and water—as well as timber—was to be put in the hands of the professionals instead of government. Professional reliance is preferred by business for its flexibility and lack of regulatory controls, but it has been characterized by many as the fox guarding the chicken coop. Government’s role was converted to reviewing the “results.” Results are what you see once the harvesting is done; they provide evidence of whether the professionals did their job—or not. Under this deregulated system, the responses of the FPB to Quesnel’s concerns were predictable: 1) that there was little more that the district manager could do other than encourage her to continue to discuss concerns with TimberWest and, 2) that TimberWest did voluntarily reduce some of the visual impact of the cutblocks to accommodate non-forestry business interests. Is Quesnel assured that the experiment is working? As she points out, “Well you can’t stand the trees back up!” The Ministry’s own study on the effectiveness of managing visual quality objectives (VQOs) found they were only achieved, across the province, an average of 61 percent of the time. The most stringent category of visual quality (which represents 13 percent of scenic areas) was effective less than half the time. After five long years of gathering a large body of evidence in a field she’s worked hard to learn, Quesnel now wonders: “Why do members of the public have to do all of this? And where are all the foresters on this issue? I can’t even dig a pit toilet here without getting an archaeological impact assessment and they are blasting a road behind us?” Mike Larock of the Association of BC Forest Professionals supports the professional reliance system, pointing to 90 percent compliance in terms of government monitoring. He sees the Association’s key priority as educational, working closely with government advisory and appeal boards, watchdogs and members of the public. He notes that every allegation raised by any of these groups is investigated. Around 10 complaints are reviewed annually. He says there have been some suspensions of licences (unconfirmed at time of press). In the online case digests, it is evident that in the majority of cases offending firms didn’t end up with fines. And the number of citations in 2014, listed in the Association’s annual report, was zero. A minimalist approach to penalties also appears to be the policy of the Ministry. With a results-based system, if a district manager is alerted that legislated standards might not have been met, he or she informs the Compliance and Enforcement (C & E) branch who monitor “the results.” West Coast Environmental Law did an analysis of the Ministry’s C & E branch, called Few Inspections—Low Consequences. Since 1999/2000 the number of inspections has dropped from 34,046 to 7,976. Despite so few inspections, inspectors are finding the same number of non-compliance actions. However, the amount of fines collected has plummeted from $561,511 to $72,585. TIME RYAN, CHAIR OF THE FOREST PRACTICES BOARD, has concerns similar to those of Quesnel’s. “I have heard many of these issues myself and have seen the efforts [members of the public] make to gather the information, and I agree, they shouldn’t be in that position.” The FPB has reviewed numerous complaints about impacted viewscapes. In a 2014 complaint brought forward by the Council of Haida Nations, for instance, the FPB found that the results on the ground for visual quality were not in compliance and, more importantly, that the Ministry’s C & E branch itself “did not provide an adequate rationale or a reasoned decision for stopping the investigation, nor was the pace of the investigation satisfactory. Government’s enforcement of Forest Range and Practices Act was not appropriate.” To that end, the FPB has made various recommendations over the years to the Ministry to improve the process. Chief amongst them was stopping the practice of approving “extensions” of Forest Stewardship Plans that preclude any public review, and increasing the discretionary powers of district managers so that if they see the runaway train coming they can do something about it. As the FPB wrote in a December 2015 report, “In recent years, the Forest Practices Board has seen situations arise where forestry development was putting local environmental and community values at risk, yet district managers could do little to affect the development and protect the public interest.” The FPB has also prepared reports on contentious issues like visual quality, endangered ecosystems and professional reliance. It cites the Haida Gwaii visual quality complaint report, and the Mount Polley mine disaster report as examples that “point to the need for a review of all parties’ roles and responsibilities in supporting professional reliance, including effectiveness and monitoring.” Key to effectiveness is a genuine penalty for the non-compliers. In one of the first cases of its kind for visual quality, the Ministry’s C & E branch successfully brought a non-compliance case against Interfor. It concerns the visual quality objectives of Stuart Island, one of the Discovery Islands, another high- profile tourism area south of Johnstone Strait that Focus reported on in 2013, alerted by another tireless tourism operator, Ralph Keller of Coast Mountain Expeditions. Keller’s experience was similar to Quesnel’s with no real opportunity for input and huge investments of his limited time. After investigation of the complaint by the FPB, the case was heard and it was found that “Interfor had erred on the side of risk instead of on the side of caution” and that the company “had failed to take all reasonable care to avoid a contravention.” A penalty of $20,000 was levied. When Interfor appealed to the Forest Appeals Commission, the FPB provided its evidence and Keller and others were invited as witnesses. Interfor’s appeal was turned down this summer. (Legal costs assuredly exceed the $20,000 penalty.) One of the findings in the Interfor case was that a forester involved failed to do a “proper peer review because of his earlier involvement with Interfor in the design of the cutblock” and was found not to be independent. INDEPENDENCE LIES AT THE HEART of concern over professional reliance. How can foresters whose work is controlled by so few companies be independent of them? Haddock put it this way in his report: “In some cases the same individual can be the evaluator, planner, approving professional and the supplier of goods and services. In many cases that professional may be an employee or contractor of the proponent, with duties of loyalty that may conflict with optimal environmental outcomes.” And then there’s the matter of discipline and penalties. The Association of BC Forest Professionals’ Mike Larock could not comment on any disciplinary action for the foresters named. He said they would be looking at the case and that they take objectivity very seriously under their professional legislation, the Foresters Act. The FPB’s Tim Ryan feels the economics make it challenging to ensure consistent standards and practices across a big landscape where there are lots of complicated technical problems. The Association of BC Forest Professionals operates on a budget of $2.3 million to cover the education, monitoring and disciplining of 5000 members over the entire province. Larock admits, “We are stretched pretty thin.” Ryan’s own agency has not had any increase in funding for 10 years and operates on $3.8 million. Is this enough to provide independent education, monitoring, investigation and enforcement for a profession overseeing an industry generating $15.7 billion dollars in sales? Keller feels the Interfor/Stuart Island case may make a positive difference. Interfor had already had a case brought against them earlier for another infraction in Pryce Channel and so a second strike against them could be more damaging. In 2015, the Forest Practices Board made a recommendation that the cases of non-compliance should be made more public on an easily accessible website to act as a deterrent. Keller couldn’t agree more. “The professional reliance around how well the companies do is hollow since monitoring and enforcement is underfunded, understaffed and underpublicized. Most members of public are so cynical they don’t even bother writing complaints any more,” he said. The Association of BC Forest Professionals’ Mike Larock says the decision on Interfor’s performance on Stuart Island was welcome and “will shape the management of visual quality objectives.” When Focus asked Interfor about its next steps in light of the case, its Director of Economic Partnerships & Sustainability Karen Brandt responded: “Before the Tribunal’s decision, Interfor and tourism groups had already begun to work together to improve communications and collaboration. Interfor is now a member of the Discovery Island Tourism-Forestry Group, shared its 10-year harvesting plans with tourism operators, hosted open houses and developed new operating procedures and training for staff to guide visual management. The recent Tribunal decision provides further learnings to improve independent peer reviews.” Quesnel does feel things might be improving, citing the forester from Interfor for finally bringing maps to the table for their Tourism-Forestry Group. Still, she cautions, “While all of this is going on, logging is actively taking place. None of the companies have agreed to halt plans until agreements can be reached with the tourism sector.” And what of the Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations? Is it listening to the Forest Practices Board? In a letter addressed to its chair, Deputy Minister Tim Sheldan wrote, “Now that FRPA has been in effect for over a decade it is appropriate to acknowledge and address areas of learning and longstanding concerns. And begin integrating them into our administration and implementation of the Act and framework.” The Forest Practices Board chair Ryan believes the government is beginning to take a more “aggressive” stand on the over 270 Forest Stewardship Plans up for renewal. “We will see some improvements,” he predicts. Sheldan stated that “province-wide expectations are also being set for the submission of new plans that will be subject to full review and comment by the public and stakeholders. Achieving a new standard will take time and collaboration.” Quesnel, Keller and many others frustrated with the system will be watching with sharp eyes as to whether genuine change is afoot or simply more delaying tactics. Meanwhile the two tourist operators are confident that the business case for logging is losing out to tourism values in their regions. Quesnel calculates “our one business generated more income in less than four years than [forestry generated] from the entire cut—which can only be done every 60 years or so.” Briony Penn is the author of the new book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan. She recommends Daniel Pierce’s Heartwood videos on forestry issues on the Island.

The use of fentanyl has exploded and more Victorians have died from overdoses in the first half of 2016 than all of 2015. IT'S A HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON at the office of Society of Living Illicit Drug Users (SOLID) on Caledonia Avenue, one of a dozen needle exchanges in Greater Victoria. As users come and go, the bustling office manager Jill Cater shows me around its four rooms, past racks of pamphlets, a small library, new overdose reports posted on the walls, and the needle lockup. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, SOLID provides outreach services, user counselling and education in the downtown Victoria area. “We are the only service provider on the Island that is completely peer-run,” says Cater. “To be on the board, one must be a current or former drug user. We don’t ask for names, so some folks come here who have nowhere else to go. We’ve never had a break-in and we’ve never called police.” That would hardly be necessary, because directly across the street sits Victoria Police headquarters. “We started in 2007, but it took them a few years to figure out where we were!” recalls Cater with a boisterous laugh. Things turn serious when talk tuns to the fentanyl-laced street drugs and the burgeoning overdoses and deaths. Assistant manager Wolf Madge brings out a kit of naloxone, a lifesaving antidote to fentanyl. He opens it to show its three vials and a syringe, and demonstrates how it works. “I’ve talked kids out of doing [fentanyl],” he says gravely. “Every time you use fentanyl you’re playing Russian Roulette.” Cater points out it’s not just kids. “Drugs have no class, or age, or race, or boundaries,” she says. “We know that some of the outstanding citizens you see sitting beside you in meetings use more fentanyl than people in the streets. They just don’t get caught.” The opioid is now showing up in recreational party drugs like ecstasy and cocaine, and at music festivals or concerts—prompting some organizers to employ fentanyl-detection equipment. Motives for usage vary. While some are thrill seeking, the drug is often used to dull the physical pain of a workplace injury or cancer, or the psychological trauma of childhood sexual abuse. “It’s a downer,” says Cater. “When I took fentanyl, unknowingly, it makes you feel comfortably numb, there’s no more pain within seconds.” Across the street from SOLID, Victoria Police Department Staff Sergeant and drug expert Conor King agrees with Cater about who is taking fentanyl, noting, “Fentanyl crosses all gamuts of society. It’s high school kids, blue-collar workers, university students, educated and uneducated, white-collar workers.” FENTANYL IS A PAINKILLER 50 TIMES STRONGER than heroin. Two milligrams, the size of two salt grains, can kill a user. Relatively cheap, and addictive for some, it appears mixed in nearly all street drugs now, with most users unaware they’re taking it. Greenish pills posing as OxyContin 80 mg tablets, which are crushed and mixed with water for injection, are the most common source of overdose fatalities. Its street names include beans, green apples, greenies, shady eighties, fake oxy, and Drop Dead. Early signs of fentanyl poisoning may include sleepiness, trouble breathing (it may sound like snoring), clammy and bluish skin, and unresponsiveness to a person’s voice. Finally, it can cause you to stop breathing. On April 14, BC’s provincial health officer Dr Perry Kendall prompted national headlines when he stated that fentanyl was a public-health emergency, a declaration usually reserved for a contagious disease outbreak. (Also in April, the rock star Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose.) Since then, the numbers have become even more startling. In August, the BC Coroner’s office reported 433 drug overdose deaths in the first five months of this year across the province, a 74 percent rise over the same time last year. Fentanyl showed up in toxicology tests in about 62 percent of those deaths, either alone or more often in combination with other illicit drugs. In Victoria there have been 34 deaths in the first 6 months of 2016—far outstripping 17 deaths in all of 2015. In this frightening new BC reality, if the trend continues, well over 600 people will die from drug overdoses this year—news that prompted the group Yes2SCS (Yes to Supervised Consumption Services) to plant 600 symbolic white crosses on Pandora Street’s Harris Green in June. MOST FENTANYL COMES FROM CHINA, where it’s produced in pharmaceutical labs. It can be imported on cargo ships, or across the American border hidden in truck compartments. The mail order business is also booming, partly because Canadian Border Services Agency guards are not allowed to open packages weighing less than 30 grams without the recipient’s consent. A Globe & Mail investigation found fentanyl is being shipped in the small packages of dessicant commonly found in vitamin containers. Pill presses are also being imported from China. A former deputy medical officer at Health Canada estimated that one kilogram of pure fentanyl costs less than $100,000 and produces one million tablets. At even $20 apiece, the profit is astronomical. In July, Premier Christy Clark publicly pleaded with Ottawa to restrict access to pill presses (which can churn out 18,000 counterfeit Oxycontin tablets laced with fentanyl in an hour), bring in stronger penalties for fentanyl importers, and give the Canadian Border Services Agency the power to search packages under 30 grams. Some fentanyl also reaches the street from pharmacy burglaries and possibly hospital theft. Users squeeze or scrape out liquid from stolen fentanyl dermal patches, a prescription drug used primarily in hospitals as a slow-release painkiller. By law, hospitals must report their narcotics losses to Health Canada within ten days. A freedom of information request to Island Health for the numbers since January, 2015 showed no losses from any Victoria hospital. But a similar request to Health Canada in Ottawa came back with a startlingly different result: Island Health had informed Ottawa that it had lost 1251 millilitres of liquid fentanyl solution in late 2015—in a category only called “loss unexplained.” Kendall says one cannot tell how likely it is it that any of the Royal Jubilee fentanyl made it to BC users or contributed to overdoses. He added this loss is a very small amount in the context of so many kilograms of fentanyl on the streets overall, but “still worrisome.” King says Victoria police were never informed of this particular Jubilee loss but, in general, “hospital drug losses should be reported to police.” By contrast, fentanyl losses from Cowichan and Nanaimo hospitals were reported to local RCMP. In response to Focus’ inquiries, Richard Jones, director of pharmacy services at Island Health, stated that Island Health was not required by law to report such losses to police, but “we are reviewing our policy on this matter.” THE FENTANYL CRISIS HAS LED TO the growing use of another drug—the antidote for fentanyl, naloxone. Also known as narcan, this antidote has been applied in many overdose situations, often by friends and families, and has saved countless lives in Victoria. While paramedics and firefighters carry and apply it, Victoria police as yet do not, though King says that might change. Since the start of BC’s Take Home Naloxone Program in 2012, Island Health has given out 1700 free kits on the Island, including 950 in Greater Victoria, to street outreach workers, agencies and pharmacies. “The first time applying it can be nerve- racking,” says Island Health Medical Health Officer Dr Murray Fyfe, “but it’s easy to learn in 10 minutes, and there are very good videos online showing how.” (A nasal spray version is coming soon.) “Usually we give two or three doses in here before the paramedics arrive,” says Heather Hobbs, harm reduction coordinator for AIDS Vancouver Island on Johnson Street which sees 100 users a day. Her staff also do CPR and artificial respiration, and have helped some people who needed five or six doses of naloxone before reviving. “When folks are revived by us, they are just embarrassed and confused after the naloxone, but not violent. Some are grateful, but others are upset you took their high away, not realizing their life was saved.” Beyond working to get more naloxone kits out to agencies, users and their friends, Victoria advocacy groups have pushed for many years for safe consumption sites. They look to Insite in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as one model. Such sites provide drug-users with a clean, safe space to use drugs under the supervision of health professionals. Supporters say they prevent overdose deaths and reduce the transmission of HIV. Another benefit is that drugs can be tested for fentanyl before use. But obtaining federal permission to establish a site is arduous. The federal government under Stephen Harper passed Bill C-2 which Dr Kendall and colleagues described as “a thinly-veiled attempt to end supervised injection services.” Many would like to see the Act repealed. The Trudeau Liberals expressed support for safe consumption sites during the election campaign but have since indicated they have no immediate plans to repeal Bill C-2. In July, however, Victoria was invited by the federal health minister to apply for an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to enable an injection site. Mayor Lisa Helps emphasizes that because the users here are so diverse, the Victoria plan should differ from Vancouver’s Insite. It would be “not one safe injection site, but safe consumption services at several locations across the region,” she says. Education—of the right kind—is also key. Hobbs says, “Young folks need more honest, realistic education, none of that old ‘Just Say No to Drugs’ stuff, which seems to be making a resurgence.” Officials seem to be getting the message. Posters are popping up in Facebook feeds and in local bars, part of a campaign by BC’s Drug Overdose and Alert Partnership (DOAP) “The key message is don’t use it alone,” Fyfe told Focus. This summer, Premier Clark announced the formation of a joint task force to tackle the fentanyl crisis, to be led by Dr Kendall and Clayton Pecknold, BC’s Director of Police Services, Policing and Security Branch. Yet Hobbs notes, “That new task force has no funding commitments or tangible action yet,” and worries too little money will go to it. “There are no pre-committed funds,” Kendall confirmed, adding, “When we have business cases for additional funding we will submit those requests.” A year from now, Mayor Helps, Drs Kendall and Fyfe, and the staff of SOLID are hopeful new drug consumption sites will be in place and reducing the overdose rate. Yet Sergeant King appears worried by the future. “I’m fearful that it’s going to get worse, with more fatalities,” he says, adding the situation could improve if the new anti-drug laws requested by Premier Clark are passed. Heather Hobbs at AIDS Vancouver Island, too, seems pessimistic. “I don’t see it getting better any time soon. It’s everywhere. Fentanyl is the new norm.” Stanley Tromp is a longtime investigative reporter. He specializes in freedom of information requests, wrote a book on world FOI law, and last year was a finalist for a Jack Webster award.

BC growers worry they will be cut out of the equation as governments move towards legalization. PRIME MINISTER JUSTIN TRUDEAU'S promise to legalize marijuana could cripple an underground economy in British Columbia that experts at Simon Fraser University’s Sauder School of Business estimate is worth $2 to $5 billion dollars a year. “Cannabis is the economic backbone of most small towns across this province,” says Theresa Taylor, co-founder of “Craft Cannabis,” a BC-based group of small marijuana producers who supply dispensaries, medical marijuana patients and recreational users. The self-described “farmer’s daughter” is a second- generation pot grower from Grand Forks who claims she is not unique. “In my small town, I know many people who keep their legitimate businesses afloat by growing cannabis.” A study for the Cannabis Growers of Canada estimates up to 100,000 British Columbians are employed in the BC bud business, but its executive director, Ian Dawkins, says those jobs could go up in smoke. “Right now, we are absolutely excluded from this conversation by the federal government.” Dawkins says MP Bill Blair (the former Toronto Police Chief and current Parliamentary Secretary of Justice in charge of legalization) has refused to meet with his group. “Where would you ever have a trade organization of our size being completely frozen out of deregulating our industry?” asks Dawkins. He points out that Blair has sung the praises of Ontario’s licensed pot producers, while vilifying medical marijuana dispensaries by suggesting they sell potentially dangerous products. Dawkins says, “The federal government is trying to create a monopoly for the benefit of a few wealthy corporations, based in Ontario.” Currently, Health Canada’s Medical Marijuana Access Program allows 33 licensed producers to grow and/or sell cannabis via mail order to the 28,000 Canadians who have government-approved permits to consume it. More than half of these large operations, with facilities ranging from 50,000-100,000 square feet, are in Ontario and have hired politically well-connected advisors, including former Prime Minister John Turner and former BC Justice Minister Kash Heed. Venture capital companies like the publicly-traded Canopy Growth Corporation and US-based Privateer Holdings are buying up federally-licensed producers, in anticipation of expanding into recreational production, where sales are estimated to be three times higher than the legally-sanctioned market. BC’s small growers (who currently dominate the underground market) are anxious about what Taylor calls “Prohibition 2.0,” where new federal regulations create a monopoly for large, licensed medical marijuana producers, backed by corporations with deep pockets. Dawkins says that will hurt thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens. “If you go to Port Hardy, Trail, Castlegar, almost everyone works in cannabis. Forestry, mining and all these secondary industries have left these places, so people have turned to cannabis. It’s been employing people in BC for decades and if the feds change to a larger, licensed- producer model, what they’re doing is taking five, six, seven billion dollars of economic activity from rural British Columbia and transferring it to factories in Ontario. They will be destroying jobs. You can’t just move billions of dollars out of the province without an effect.” Much will depend on a federally-appointed Task Force on Marijuana Legalization and Regulation. It will make recommendations ranging from who can grow and sell cannabis, oils and edible products, to how, where and whether they can be sold, as well as who can consume them for medicinal and recreational purposes. The expert panel of mostly law enforcement and medical professionals will report to the federal Ministers of Justice, Public Safety, Health and the Attorney General by November. Federal legislation is expected next spring. Despite its tight timeline, the Task Force has pledged to meet face-to-face “with municipal and provincial governments...and other stakeholders, including those groups with expertise in production, distribution and sales.” BC bud lobbyists hope that means the task force will grant them some face time. Meanwhile they are trying to convince the provincial government to ensure that small producers and dispensaries which are currently illegal have a place in the new federal regime. Dawkins believes they are getting some traction. “The BC Liberals have been much more receptive to us than their federal counterparts. They understand jobs. This is not theoretical to them. They don’t want to go into an election in 2017 having lost hundreds of jobs in every riding. They know they have to figure this out and if they don’t, I am also meeting with the NDP and the Green Party who are very interested in turning this into a provincial election issue.” The Premier, BC’s Solicitor General, and the Minister of Health would not comment on the politics of creating cannabis policy, but the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General provided a written statement, saying it has “created an inter-ministry committee of assistant deputy ministers from Health, Justice and Public Safety to identify concerns and to develop a provincial strategy.” It states: ”We agree with Prime Minister Trudeau that there needs to be appropriate restrictions in place around sale and distribution.” It does not elaborate on which “appropriate restrictions” it is considering or which level of government should enact them. “We can’t speculate what the outcomes will be but will monitor the federal government’s plan as it is developed.” BC’s Green Party has wasted no time in supporting the small producers’ position, with its leader, Andrew Weaver, calling on the federal government to take a minimalist approach to legalization. “The feds should simply remove cannabis from their Controlled Drug and Substances Act and stay out of the business of saying who can or can’t produce it,” he says. “We favour policies that support a craft cannabis industry that is provincially regulated, tested, taxed and is local.” The NDP’s public safety critic, Mike Farnworth, admits his party has no official policies on marijuana legalization yet, but he and the party’s health critic, Victoria MLA Carole James, have met with regulators in Washington State and have talks planned with BC cannabis groups this month. Farnworth says in broad terms, “The NDP supports a provincially-regulated system that is responsive to BC producers and protective of consumers.” A report by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce predicts the federal and provincial governments will collect $5 billion dollars a year in tax revenues from the sale of legal marijuana. Farnworth is warning the Province not to view it as a cash cow. “If governments get greedy and the taxes are too high, you aren’t going to get rid of the black market,” he says. Perhaps the Province is signaling the same concern by stating it is “waiting for federal legislation before reviewing provincial tax treatment.” Craft Cannabis wants Victoria to be proactive by helping black market growers make the transition to become licensed, taxpaying businesses. “There are a lot of stereotypes that exist about cannabis cultivators, but we’re just farmers,” says Taylor. “And many will need a bit more support in becoming legitimate businesses because they’ve never had to track their product from seed to sale.” Taylor says the public health discussion has so far focused on negatives and unproven assumptions. She accuses many in the medical community, including BC’s provincial health officer, of overstating the dangers of cannabis. “Dr Perry Kendall has campaigned for a ban on edible marijuana products even though no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose,” says Taylor. The statement by the Solicitor General’s Ministry considers Kendall one of “British Columbia’s representatives on the task force, which government is relying on to provide a crucial public health perspective.” Travis Lane, CEO of the Victoria-based Internet Dispensary, hopes it won’t be the only public health perspective considered by federal and provincial legislators. Lane says, “Craft cannabis producers have their products tested in the same federally-approved labs used by the licensed producers. We don’t irradiate our cannabis, unlike federally-approved medical marijuana factories. We sell organically-grown products and conduct random testing for pesticides and metals which Health Canada does not require for medical marijuana.” Lane believes the feds should abandon regulating “medical marijuana” in the future, unless private insurers and provincial pharmacare programs agree to pay for the medicine and research is funded. Craft Cannabis predicts if “a Reefer Madness mentality” prevails, only big corporations like Shoppers Drug Mart and government-owned liquor stores will be allowed to sell medical marijuana. Taylor says BC dispensaries “have created self-imposed regulations that include product testing, labelling, best-practices and a code of conduct that forbids sales to minors and bans consumption of cannabis on their premises.” The City of Victoria has followed Vancouver’s lead by creating bylaws and regulations that mirror how most dispensaries already operate. Judging from its statement, the Province seems happy to let Ottawa handle that hot potato. It says, “The federal government is responsible for any changes to cannabis policy and how it chooses to respond to the decisions by Vancouver and Victoria will have to be addressed by it.” BC’s small producers believe if the federal government opts for a highly-regulated regime, it will lead to the concentration of large production facilities in Ontario, and an ongoing underground market here. They are calling for a regulatory regime run by the Province that they claim would better support small communities across BC and generate new tax revenues from its largest, albeit illegal, agricultural product. BC “pot-repreneurs” like Travis Lane say they’re taking a public stand to fight for their survival, and are hoping the federal and provincial governments will do the same. Says Lane, “The governments need to understand we’re not going to stop growing because they regulate us out.” Lisa Cordasco is a former CBC Radio news reporter and morning show host who has made Victoria her home for the past 25 years.