Leslie Campbell

March 2017 America is slamming its door on refugees. Will Canada open its wider? MY ROUTE THROUGH THIS STORY is circuitous. It sprang from my growing unease about the refugee situation as news arrived almost daily through the early months of 2017—news about the US Administration’s plans of mass deportations, a de facto Muslim ban, and stories of desperate people risking frostbite or worse to escape the US and claim asylum in Canada. Along my meandering path, I interviewed a law professor, immigration workers, private sponsors, and a refugee and his daughter. But any meandering of mine is simply trivial compared to the stories of the refugees themselves. Suliman Dawood and his family—wife Eman, son Fidel and daughters Samah and Salina—hail from Iraq, near Baghdad, though Dawood himself was born in Palestine; he is a refugee twice over. A university graduate, Dawood had taught history, and then, for 25 years, ran a small furniture-manufacturing business. But when more and more civilians in Iraq started losing their lives in 2005, he began making plans to get his family to safety. Dawood tells me, “It was no longer safe for us.” The last straw was when seven of their good friends and neighbours were killed by a bomb while walking nearby streets: two adult sisters and their five children. His daughter Samah, now age 20, tells me a bit more about the fateful decision: “If Dad had stayed, they would have killed him.” Besides being Sunni, Dawood, as a Palestinian, had another strike against him. He had to walk away from his business. In 2006, they made their way to Aleppo in Syria, another dangerous, war-torn place, staying for two years. Dawood says the children became traumatized, developing phobias to any loud noise. He was especially concerned for Fidel who has a disability. “He had no chance in Iraq or Syria” where there are no schools for those with disabilities. As a family, they decided to head to a refugee camp in the hope of a better life elsewhere. They ended up living in Al-Hawl refugee camp in the desert on the border of Iraq and Syria for over two years. In the refugee camp, run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the family made it clear to authorities it was willing to go to any country that would take the whole family. They were thrilled when Canadian Embassy officials told them Canada would accept them. They were sponsored by the United Church and the Islamic Association, arriving in Canada five-and-a-half years ago. In 2016, Suliman and Eman Dawood became proud Canadian citizens. The family lives in a modest townhouse in Fernwood. He works for Chix Poultry and has only good things to say about his employer, Victoria, and Canada. His son Fidel attends Garth Homer daily; his daughter Samah attends Camosun and is looking forward to earning a diploma in Community, Family & Child Studies. Dawood’s older daughter has settled with her husband in Alberta; Suliman and Eman are now proud grandparents. “In Canada, one can keep going forward,” says Dawood. In parts of the world he is familiar with, he explains, “you can move forward a bit only to go back to zero.” Samah explains that the rules everyone follows here are good and applied equally—unlike in parts of the Middle East. Dawood says, “Everybody is equal…all people have the same opportunity if you want to work, study, or to get medical care.” ONE ASPECT OF LIFE that isn’t so rosy for refugees such as Dawood is that family members end up scattered around the globe. Eman’s family is in Cypress and Sweden; Dawood’s many siblings live in Australia, Texas, Turkey, Tunisia, Norway, and Iraq. Fortunately, none of his siblings are living in refugee camps. But his cousin Mohammed’s family is. They have been stuck in a refugee camp in Lebanon for three years. The Dawoods last saw their cousins years ago in Damascus. One of the young cousins subsequently got arrested after taking part in a political protest against the Syrian government. Subjected to torture, after six months in prison he died. “His mom, she cried until now,” says Dawood. Shortly after that tragedy, in 2013, almost all of Mohammed’s extended family in Syria was killed during a chemical weapon attack in Damascus. Fearing for their safety, the family fled, eventually arriving at a UN refugee camp in Lebanon. That was three years ago. Since then the father Mohammed managed to make the lengthy journey to Denmark with one daughter. Though he had hoped to be able to bring his whole family there, there is no guarantee that even he will be allowed to stay (he entered illegally, and his asylum claim is in limbo). One thing that is clear: Denmark is no longer accepting any young adult males, so even if Mohammed is accepted, the two older sons, Rasheed, 26, and Tareq, 19, need to find a different place to call home. (I am using only first names for security reasons.) Mohammed was understandably relieved when Dawood agreed to help the two older boys come to Canada. Meanwhile, the young men, their mother and 11-year-old brother Omar continue to reside in Chabriha, the refugee camp, in a tiny apartment roughly the size of Dawood’s kitchen. While safe, the camp’s refugees tend to be resented by the local community and there are few opportunities for work, though Rasheed has found a part-time job. The hope is that the mom and Omar can join the father sometime in Denmark, after she’s assured her older sons will be given refuge in Canada. As Suliman, Samah and I sit contemplating the choices and compromises this family must make, and the uncertainties they face, we all shake out heads in sadness. Dawood has informed the boys that “we don’t know how long it will take…it all depends on our government.” He tells me Rasheed says it’s ok, as long as things are moving forward. NATALIE HUNT, A YOUNG VICTORIA MOM who got to know Fidel Dawood and then the whole family when she was working at the Garth Homer Centre, decided to help bring Rasheed and Tareq to Canada. Last summer she, Dawood, and a few other friends formed the Salish Sea Refugee Sponsorship Group, to sponsor the young men in partnership with the Inter-Cultural Association (ICA). As Carla Funk, one of Hunt’s neighbours and a member of the group puts it, “when you learn the histories of these families, it’s like peeling back the onion. There are so many stories of loss, and such epic journeys.” Hunt, whose current job is at the Access Justice Centre, shows me the thick raft of paperwork she’s just finished working on—for the third time. Despite the fact that the young men are approved through the UN Commission on Refugees and have been vetted by the Canadian government, there is still a lot of vetting going on it seems. Says Hunt, “You have to present a coherent story from A to Z; it’s really hard to do!” This means accounting for their individual whereabouts and activities for their whole lives, with no gaps, which can be particularly difficult to do for people fleeing dangerous regimes. And, she noted, because paperwork in the past was sometimes filled out inconsistently by officials, each of those inconsistencies—whether it be dates or name spelling—have to be reconciled. “When we started the process, we were told it would take about six to eight months [to get the men here],” says Hunt. The group has now been informed it could take one to four years and are concerned it will likely be at the longer end of the spectrum because these are young adult males. While they are near the top of the pile of the local ICA-approved sponsorships, there are about 16,000 ahead of them Canada-wide. Meanwhile, members of the sponsorship group keep in touch with Rasheed and Tareq almost daily by Whatsapp or Skype. “It’s important for them to know we care,” says Hunt, “especially now that it might take longer.” The women admit they haven’t had the heart to tell them the latest time estimates. While the group has raised $17,000 towards the $40,000 required to help them through their first year here, they are also raising a smaller contingency fund to help right now, mostly with the boys’ English lessons and dental work (much lower in Lebanon than here). They sell the book Stepping Stones for $20 (pocketing $10) and they have a facebook page (search “Salish Sea Refugee”) which will be announcing upcoming fundraisers. They’ve even got potential jobs lined up. “We also have to be realistic,” says Hunt sadly. “They may never be able to come.” Says Funk, “That’s why we’re developing a solid plan B. If they can both hone their English skills and get work experience, and get a certificate of some kind for the younger brother, those are marketable, and their resilience in the world, no matter where they end up, will be improved.” If the boys don’t manage to be accepted into Canada, the tax-deductible funds raised under the ICA umbrella will go to another refugee family who is. SINCE NOVEMBER 2015 when the recent surge of refugees from Syria started to arrive in Canada, Greater Victoria has welcomed 415 refugees (170 of which are at least partially privately sponsored)—not a lot, but more than usual. Sabine Lehr, manager of private sponsorship of refugees with the Inter-Cultural Association, like others on the frontlines of refugee resettlement, understands how important it is to help bring refugees’ families together. She says, “Almost every person recently resettled to Victoria has other family members that had to flee their home countries and who are now living in neighbouring countries in difficult circumstances.” For that reason, the Canadian Council on Refugees is calling for Express Entry Family Reunification, noting that though refugees in Canada can apply to bring their immediate family members to Canada, “sometimes they are forced to wait years to be reunited with their spouses and children overseas, who can be in situations of danger and persecution.” The delays caused by bureaucratic barriers obviously take a particularly high toll on children. The Council, a national non-profit umbrella organization, also complains that Canada’s plans for 2017 are disappointing. For one thing, Canada is taking only 7500 Government-Assisted Refugees (GARs)—which is less than the average of years from 2000 through 2015. GARS are financially assisted by the government for one year. Canada will accept 16,000 Privately Sponsored Refugees (PSR) in 2017—but there’s already an estimated 45,000 PSR applications in process with 6400 of those now waiting for more than three years. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has said that their goal is to eliminate the backlog of private sponsorship applications by 2019 and reduce wait times for new applications to about 12 months. Unfortunately, as the Council points out, the 2017 targets “[cannot] accommodate applications submitted to respond to the many requests for family reunification for recently arrived Syrians and other refugees.” It predicts that it will be 2018 or later before recently-applied-for refugee family members (such as Rasheed and Tareq) will be able to come to Canada. This is despite family reunification being a stated goal of Canada’s federal government. The reality on the ground is often heart-breaking. Even in the “economic immigrant” category, I know of many women working as caregivers here who have waited for 4, 5, or 6 years after they spend 2 years becoming Permanent Residents to be allowed to have their children and spouse join them here. Donald Galloway, a UVic law professor who specializes in immigration, warns me to be wary of the government’s numbers on family reunification. While the official stats, he says, show 65,000 “family class members” admitted last year, about 45,000 of them are spouses or common law partners sponsored by permanent residents or citizens here. “It operates primarily to allow citizens to select their spouse from the global pool and be able to bring that partner to Canada.” This is very different than the type of reunification needed by many refugees, torn apart as they flee conflict zones. Recently the Council on Refugees launched the “Wish You Were Here” campaign, along with issuing a manifesto on family reunification, now signed by over 80 Canadian organizations. In part, the manifesto states: “We deplore any immigration or refugee system that is indifferent to the hardships caused by separation of families, and we call for the removal of any and all barriers to family reunification. We underline the costs of family separation, most importantly for those kept separate, but also for society at large which is also the loser when families are kept apart by the immigration system.” Says Galloway, “We encourage people to apply but the government is not providing adequate infrastructure to consider their applications in a timely manner.” In both Canada and the US, says Galloway, the vetting of refugees is “incredibly rigorous,” involving a two-year detailed examination of identity, work history, relatives, connections, and medicals for all family members. Our aspirations, he continues, clash with the bureaucracy’s ability to implement a way to realize them in a humanitarian and fair manner. The result, he says, is “huge backlogs and family rupture rather than reunification. We put people through horrific trials.” ALL THIS IS PLAYING OUT against the backdrop of a US Administration apparently bent on criminalizing immigrants and refugees. Dawood says his brothers in Texas have asked him if they should come here. As we chat over tea, Dawood asks me what I think about their well-being in the US. Hmmm. We both try to reassure each other that, since they were accepted by the US as refugees years ago, they must be safe, mustn’t they? Professor Galloway is not surprised that there is panic in the US, resulting in frightened people risking life and limb to cross over the US-Canada border. Because of the dangers to these already traumatized people both in their homelands and now in the US, 240 Canadian law professors, Galloway among them, have urged Canada’s federal government to “immediately suspend directing back refugee claimants at the Canada-US border under the Safe Third County Agreement.” This Agreement, explains Galloway, applies only at official ports of entry. In effect, it encourages people to sneak into Canada (potentially endangering their lives) in order to claim asylum. Options to suspend temporarily all or part of it are built into the Agreement in order, says Galloway, to “allow time to take stock of what’s going on. It also…allows each country to admit refugees from the other on a discretionary basis, and that discretion can be exercised on a case-by-case basis or…[by government directive] to border officials.” Given the new US measures, and the chaos and panic there, Galloway and his fellow legal scholars feel a three-month suspension of the Safe Third County Agreement by Canada is the most rational response. Harvard Law School also wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau in February, asking for suspension and citing a report the School compiled showing that the US was no longer safe for many refugees: “Based on erroneous assumptions about the criminality and extremist tendency of the immigrant population, President Trump’s Executive Orders represent a dramatic restriction of access to asylum and other immigration protections in the United States. They call for a new regime of large-scale detention, expanded expedited removal without due process, deputizing of state and local officials to detain individuals suspected of immigration violations, and aggressive criminal prosecution of unauthorized entry, a means by which many seek access to asylum protection, as recognized in Article 31 of the Refugee Convention.” The Trudeau Government, however, has so far indicated it has no intention of suspending the Safe Third County Agreement. Galloway predicts a legal challenge of the Agreement in the courts. He tells me that it won’t be the first. In 2008, the Canadian Council on Refugees went to court arguing that the situation then in the US was not safe. The judge agreed, says Galloway, “citing the US detention conditions, expedited removal, and the way the Americans interpret their international obligations.” That decision was ultimately successfully appealed on procedural grounds, which have since changed (it was ruled inappropriate for the courts to hear the case because no particular individual was involved). “As the Harvard report indicates, things are even more serious than they were in 2008,” says Galloway, and the question of safety could easily be addressed again. A more welcoming stance to US asylum seekers might well burnish Canada’s already good reputation on the global refugee front. Our acceptance of 25,000 Syrian refugees last year—and allowing them to become Permanent Residents on arrival—was, says Galloway, a beacon of light as other countries push refugees away or refuse to give them any status. He also praises Canada’s rather innovative approach of allowing private sponsorship of refugees, something the UNCHR has recommended other countries emulate. Certainly many Canadian citizens have become more aware and empathetic, understanding both the need for greater humanitarian assistance, and the enrichment that flows to Canadian society from opening our doors to more refugees like Suliman Dawood and his family. Up against the 65 million people who are currently displaced world-wide by conflict and persecution, however, we need all the innovative measures and good will we can dream up. Leslie Campbell is the founder and editor of Focus. Her grandparents all immigrated to Canada from Scotland.

January 2017 The Capital Region’s population is expected to grow to 442,000 in the next 20 years. Where are we going to put everyone? ON NOVEMBER 23, 2016 a majority of the Capital Regional District directors agreed that it was time to accept the long-time-coming new Regional Growth Strategy. The Province requires regional districts to have one of these planning guides, but it also insists that it be unanimously endorsed by each of the affected municipalities and electoral districts involved. So it’s not done yet, and in fact indications are that some municipalities—likely the Highlands and Victoria, and perhaps others—will reject it by the end-of-January deadline. If that happens, the legislation allows the Province to step in and order binding arbitration. From the start, the task has been both incredibly important to get right, and incredibly difficult—some would say impossible given our region’s history, present shape, and contrasting visions for the future among its “fiefdoms.” Over the years, it has morphed from a Regional Sustainability Strategy back to a Regional Growth Strategy. Compromise may be central to governance in a region such as ours, but some lines in the sand seem to have been drawn and were in evidence at the November 23 meeting, when a key clause about water services was being finalized. Delivery of water services—in the form of piped water—is viewed in urban planning circles as a crucial tool for shaping growth patterns. Where infrastructure allows water to flow, development follows. And that of course engenders more traffic and increased demand for other expensive services, whose cost is born by taxpayers throughout the region and Province. Here’s what UVic’s Environmental Law Centre wrote in a submission on the Regional Growth Strategy: “The primary way to maintain effective growth management is to limit both sewer and water servicing. It is well proven that once servicing is extended into rural areas zoning follows and densification occurs on a case-by-case basis. There is no justification for extending servicing within the context of a regional sustainability strategy that is focusing on decreasing GHGs, creating compact complete communities, and connecting the green infrastructure of the region, when plentiful opportunities exist to accommodate development in serviced areas.” Mike Hicks, director for the vast Juan De Fuca Electoral District, doesn’t share that perspective. At the November meeting, he was focused on the rights of his Port Renfrew-area residents to water—and to development. The Port Renfrew area sits on rock, he said, so well water is unreliable. “Without water...there’s no development.” Several members of Port Renfrew’s development and business community made presentations at the meeting citing their problems with water and how that made their investments risky and endangered jobs and growth of the community. Victoria councillor and CRD Director Ben Isitt, a long-time opponent of urban sprawl, in explaining why he couldn’t vote for the clause extending water services, noted that “entire hillsides have been blasted away [in the Port Renfrew area]...it’s been anything but a light touch that’s appropriate in rural areas…The [development] model being pursued there needs to be reigned in.” Isitt noted “the Province, through the legislation, has recognized that there’s a regional interest in land use patterns, in protection for biological diversity and ecological systems, and that decisions around how infrastructure expands, how development occurs, should be made at the regional level.” Hicks, obviously emotional about it, replied: “Director Isitt brings it on home for me. [His objections have] got nothing to do with water; it’s got to do with land use, and Regional Growth Strategies, and having a big whip from Victoria down to Port Renfrew. We’ve got a little town that’s trying to make it. People say it’ll be the next Tofino, and they struggle with these meetings and this water and big developers…I don’t know how we can embrace David Suzuki and talk about water for everyone and turn around and say we won’t give it to the people of Port Renfrew.” He asked CRD directors to “Please recognize the right of Port Renfrew residents to control their destiny.” In the past Hicks has threatened to challenge the RGS in court if it refuses to allow for piped water to these communities. Perhaps such threats influenced the framers of the new Regional Growth Strategy (RGS). While CRD staff gave a report in which they stated, “Ultimately, [extending water services] is a political decision,” they still made a recommendation allowing for significantly more access to water than the previous RGS, despite, they noted, the opposition made clear at a public hearing in October. Saanich Councillor and CRD Director Vic Derman, another opponent of sprawl, described himself as “flummoxed by the staff recommendation,” when other compromises existed. He said it almost guarantees the RGS will have to go to arbitration. Alice Finall, mayor of North Saanich, noted that some are already calling the RGS the “Rapid Growth Strategy.” After some discussion, a slim majority of the CRD board voted to accept the RGS with the new provision for water services in the Juan de Fuca lands. As mentioned, the refusal of any one council in the region to endorse it could send it to arbitration. AT THE NOVEMBER MEETING, Vic Derman condemned the RGS on climate change grounds: “This document and the supporting document of the proposed climate change plan for the region are very tepid and very mild…We have mortgaged future generations—we are making it impossible for them to meet their needs. We are putting them into a hideous situation. This document doesn’t recognize that. It doesn’t take us far enough fast enough. It doesn’t canvas the tough questions. This document doesn’t meet our needs...not even close.” Derman, who recently authored a report on climate change for the CRD environment committee (which he chairs), met me for tea at a White Spot within walking distance of his Saanich home. He feels there has been a lack of leadership in terms of letting the public know clearly the consequences of failing to act boldly enough on the region’s growth, especially in relation to climate change. The original RGS, adopted in 2004 after years of deliberation, set the course, he feels. It did attempt to limit growth to eight major centres—only one of which was in the West Shore. But in order to get it passed, compromises were made. The obvious example of such a compromise was agreeing to Langford’s demand to make its municipal boundaries its “urban containment boundary”—meaning all of its 42-square-kilometres of land was able to be developed and serviced. Recall that in 2002 Langford’s council was pursuing rezoning for Bear Mountain, allowing for up to 1500 housing units and necessitating a new connector from the Trans-Canada Highway up Skirt Mountain. It hasn’t ended there. Mayor Stew Young, exercising power continuously since 1993, and his pro-development council have approved big box stores that draw traffic from all corners of the region. They’ve offered fee reductions and tax holidays for developers. The result? Langford’s previously forested and agricultural lands, along with the many ecosystem services they provided, have been extensively blasted apart and paved over. Most recently Young announced a 10-year tax holiday for any provincial office or tech company that opens in Langford. “I’m going to push this so hard. We need to put businesses where the people are,” Young told the Times Colonist. Allowing Langford its rampant growth strategy in 2004, “was the price to getting an agreement,” reflects Derman. Perhaps in light of what happened in Langford, this time there seems less willingness to compromise. The new document (already about six years in the making) doesn’t fully recognize the urgency of climate change, says Derman. “Pretty much all the scientists agree we have already put enough carbon in the atmosphere to cause a 1.6 degree increase”—meaning we need to suck carbon out of the atmosphere in order to meet the Paris Agreement target. Moreover, notes Derman, at one degree of warming, you start to get feedback loops, like the melting of the permafrost which jacks up the temperature more. He tells me of a new study in Nature showing how soil will release more stored carbon as global temperature increases—another feedback loop. New data on the West Antarctica ice shelves, reviewed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, indicate that sea level could rise by three metres by 2050—spelling catastrophe for many cities around the world, not to mention inland cities as they try to cope with an influx of sea-rise refugees. Over tea, Derman reiterates what he told fellow CRD directors at the November meeting: “The only thing that could possibly be more urgent to act on would be if a large asteroid was hurtling toward us.” While cities don’t have as much authority as upper levels of government, they can set policies that will reduce automobile traffic, which in the CRD’s case is the source of 55 percent (and growing) of its greenhouse gas emissions. Under the business-as-usual scenario, the CRD’s Regional Transportation Plan (2014), a companion to its RGS, projects 100,000 new auto trips in peak periods. “[C]urrent travel patterns are not sustainable and current trends are not encouraging,” it states. Automobile use was found to be increasing, particularly between the West Shore and Core. In the West Shore, “87 percent of peak-hour trips are currently made by car.” Yet such auto-dependent patterns seem assured by the RGS’s own population projections. It forecasts that the West Shore’s share of regional population will grow from 20 percent in 2011 to 26.7 percent by 2038, while the Core communities shrink from 69 percent to 62.6 percent. (The Saanich Peninsula holds steady at 11 percent.) Derman feels the Regional Growth Strategy “fails to ask important questions—and probably the biggest one is where should we put people in the future? I don’t think the answer is in the Western Communities.” I ask Derman about Mayor Young’s determination to bring jobs to Langford. “That just won’t work…The worst growth pattern is obviously sprawl,” he says, “but the second worst is nodes of density that are dispersed, because everybody doesn’t live where they work…as soon as you have dispersed nodes that are quite far apart, all you do is have a lot more travel between them. So it becomes much more expensive, it becomes more energy intensive, it’s bad for climate change, and it’s also bad for the second real big problem, congestion.” Derman says the congestion problem is a direct result of the land use pattern we chose. “Doubling down on it—by allowing more growth in more dispersed areas—is not a particularly good idea.” Indeed, given that the CRD’s core communities—Oak Bay, Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt and View Royal—have a population of 240,600, odds are very good that any ministry or larger business has far more employees among them than in Langford (population 35,000) or even Langford/Colwood (population 54,000 total). The risk of “solving” the congestion to the West Shore, says Derman, is that it may encourage more people to drive. “The highway was supposed to last 30 years,” recalls Derman, “but it filled up in 11.” And it, along with the infrastructure services for residences, are all subsidized by all the Province’s taxpayers.” If you really want to address both climate change and local quality of life, including congestion, he argues, the aim has to be a truly regional compact form of community. He knows it works—on a number of levels—and can be done. He spent part of September in Amsterdam, a city of close to a million. “It’s three or four times the population size of our region. I was staying on the Western edge of the more developed area, and for me it was 8 minutes of rather easy cycling to the centre of town…They have a much, much more compact form.” He never saw a traffic jam either. In his report to the CRD’s environment committee, Derman got specific about where development should be directed: “In our region, the Shelbourne Valley, the Douglas Corridor, the Fort Street Corridor and corridors between the City of Victoria and Esquimalt offer excellent opportunities to develop expanded complete communities in close proximity to the Downtown core.” Derman wishes the $85-million devoted to the Mackenzie interchange had been been used instead to help finance some sort of LRT or modern streetcar on the Douglas Corridor. Over our tea, we discuss a bigger public transit idea, a circular core route that hits UVic, Downtown and Uptown. This is where the vast majority of people in the CRD already are. Helping them manage comfortably and affordably without a vehicle seems more logical than an LRT to Langford. Derman says he might support an LRT to Langford, but only in return for guarantees of serious restrictions on development. “If we spent the better part of a billion on LRT and it caused a huge new expansion of roads, and only lasted 10 years, what a disastrous waste,” he says. WHILE THE REDUCTION OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS is a huge benefit of compact, complete communities, it certainly is not the only one. To more fully grasp some of the others, I met with Todd Litman. Fittingly, I can walk to his home office. We both live in the central core—he in Fernwood and I in Rockland. It’s a pleasant 15-minute walk on a sunny, crisp day. Though he lives in Victoria, Litman works all over the world as a transportation and smart growth consultant. The author of numerous research papers, he has focused on analyzing the many socio-economic benefits of compact communities. His latest report, “Selling Smart Growth,” lists improvements to fitness and health, personal finances, real estate industry profits, local economic development and property tax revenues among them. As we sip jasmine tea, he tells me, “People who live in compact neighbourhoods, besides spending a whole lot less on transportation, have much lower traffic fatality rates. Since traffic fatalities are the main cause of death of people in the prime of life—that is between 5 and 50 years of age—there really is a huge public health and safety benefit if people are able to live in a more compact, walkable community.” Unfortunately, our policies contradict our aims to be more sustainable and liveable. In particular, governments at all levels tend to do a poor job of charging people the full costs of living in rural areas, says Litman. “It costs far more to get services to rural areas. And people who move out there…complain they are not getting their fair share when in fact they are getting more than their fair share.” Changing expectations have a lot to do with it. In the past, Litman points out, “people knew that if they moved out to the countryside, they wouldn’t have quick emergency response times, and they’d have to drive their kids to school, and the local school wasn’t going to have as many services. And a lot of the roads would be gravel roads—and you’d accept that.” People now tend to expect urban-type services throughout the region—and complain about it when that doesn’t happen. He gives the example of someone commuting from Sooke to a job in the core and expecting the government to spend millions to add capacity so he or she can avoid the Colwood Crawl. “They complain because the roads are congested and the funny thing is they don’t recognize that they are the cause of that congestion.” Creating and maintaining more distant roads, sewers, water, community centres, and libraries, providing fire protection, policing, and public transit costs all taxpayers significantly more per rural household than delivering them to core residents. “In practice,” says Litman, “we usually split the difference—providing somewhat inferior services but spending more on them.” In a recent study, Litman enumerated the costs: “sprawl increases annualized infrastructure costs from $502 per capita in the smartest growth quintile cities up to $750 in the most sprawled quintile cities. This analysis indicates that sprawl’s incremental costs average approximately $4556 annually per capita, of which $2568 is internal (borne directly by sprawl location residents) and $1988 is external (borne by other people).” Another set of policies that “contradict” the aims of growing in a smart way, and which Litman has done a lot of research around, is parking regulations. While we have no laws requiring a home for every person, we do have laws requiring one for every vehicle—in fact, between two and six spaces per vehicle when you factor in what businesses are forced to provide. Typically, parking accounts for about 10 percent of the cost of a house, says Litman, while each parking space in the community costs $500-$1500 per year for surface parking, and twice that in underground or structured lots. “Many cars are worth less that the space they are provided,” he says. And it’s worse out in the suburbs. In one of his reports, Litman writes: “In high density urban areas each automobile requires about 80 square metres of land for roads and off-street parking facilities. In lower-density, sprawled areas each automobile requires about 240 square meters of land for roads and parking, which significantly exceeds the amount of land devoted to most urban houses.” “Zoning codes, in effect, assume we’re all drivers and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he tells me. The highest amount of parking per square metre is generally demanded of restaurants and bars. “On the one hand,” says Litman, “we have all these programs to discourage drunk driving…On the other hand, virtually all municipal governments assume that most people who are going to a bar will drive there.” The parking requirements force pub developers to move further out to the fringe where land is less costly—thereby further encouraging car travel. “The very thing we want,” Litman laments—“that is, more compact, infill development—becomes economically infeasible due to the parking requirements.” Downtown Victoria is the exception. Its commercial buildings aren’t required to provide parking. And this very lack, claims Litman, helps make the Downtown “the most valuable, attractive, walkable...vibrant” area of the region. When I mention the grumbles about parking Downtown, he insists, “People can find parking—they just can’t find free parking.” He’s also encouraged that Downtown’s residential developments are averaging only .4 parking spaces per unit (very low by North American standards). By contrast, in suburban areas, he notes, each single-family dwelling is averaging 2 or 3 parking spaces (even multi-family apartments and condos in these areas average 1.5 per unit). We need a mind-shift, he says, that it’s not OK to subsidize parking. “If we were rational, we would manage parking space more efficiently, and free it up for affordable housing.” Litman feels that another mental shift we need to make is to recognize that the ideal family home is not necessarily a single family house. Families can live well in apartments. It’s only in the past 50 years or so that compact housing types became stigmatized. This rings true for me. As a teenager in 1970s Winnipeg, I had friends who lived with their families in big, old, inner-city apartments. I thought it was cool. Our new RGS includes “improving housing affordability” as a goal. But municipal development policies tend to deny families affordable housing in urban environments—we force them to “drive until they qualify” and then spend hours and dollars commuting on roads we all have to subsidize, says Litman. The majority of the land available for development is zoned only for single-family housing, he says, adding, “Neighbourhood associations work very hard to exclude compact, affordable housing types, including townhouses and especially apartments.” The most cost-effective housing (taking into account land, construction and operating costs), says Litman, tends to be wood-frame, mid-rise multi-family buildings, without elevators. “If we wanted affordable housing for families, we would make it really easy for developers to build these. Instead, zoning codes make it virtually impossible in most neighbourhoods.” We sometimes allow high-rises, which certainly add density but these are more costly per square foot due to concrete use and elevators, so generally cannot provide the larger, affordable suites needed for families. Townhouses, low and mid-rises (up to 6 stories) and garden suites are the best bets in his view. He’s in favour of secondary suites as well, though given the amount of housing needed, they are not going to make a big dent. “We’re talking about a shortage of tens of thousands of housing units. If you already own a home, you are OK. It’s the young people who are just trying to get started—especially families with children that we do a terrible job of welcoming,” says Litman, adding that it’s also difficult for university students, artists, seniors living on a pension, or anyone without a lot of money. “Unfortunately we’re just not adding to the stock.” He says the type of infill development needed has become almost impossible due to the success of the neighbourhood associations that oppose that kind of development. He believes the majority of new housing should be in the core, and that all housing should be developed in accordance with smart growth principles—“which means that the vast majority of houses are within walking distance of services and schools and parks and there’s good sidewalks…and good transit services.” Like Derman, Litman likes the idea of a more efficient core transit system, whether LRT or more bus lanes. “The big benefit of buses [or LRT] is they can save families from owning a second car,” he says, which not only saves them a lot of money, but saves all those car-related expenses that taxpayers absorb. “Anything we can do to create a community where the typical household doesn’t need two cars…makes it better for everyone in the whole region,” he stresses. IN SOME WAYS THE NEW REGIONAL GROWTH STRATEGY appears to acknowledge both Derman’s and Litman’s concerns. After noting projected growth of the CRD by 94,900 people to 441,800 in 2038, it states: “It continues to be clear, however, that even modest population growth would undermine the regional vision if it were accommodated as it has been since the 1950s, through further urban expansion into farms, forests and countryside. Further, an expanded regional footprint would significantly contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions.” It’s in the lack of details and specific implementation measures that it fails. At the October public hearing, Vicky Husband, a long-time resident of the Highlands who accepts the limitations of living in a rural setting, characterized the RGS as “weak and unenforceable.” She said, “It must include clearer targets and criteria for CRD board and municipal decisions to realize the vision it describes.” Vic Derman agrees, saying it reminds him of New Year’s Resolutions: “I should lose weight; pass the chocolate pie. There’s all these motherhood statements.” To transform away from a car-centric region, certainly what’s needed are bold new measures, rather than motherhood statements. Yet even the RGS’s population growth projections express a willingness to let growth blossom in the West Shore. Combined with the provision of piped water to the Juan de Fuca district, critics like Husband say the RGS is boldly heading in the wrong direction. As mentioned at the outset, one of the main tools available to control growth is limiting water (and other services) to outlying areas. Appeals to fairness and “water as a human right,” however, have led to “more permissive” water servicing allowances. I asked Todd Litman about this “human right” rationale. He said, “That’s actually an insult to anyone who deals with true human rights…what we’re talking about is the difference between having a pipe of water coming into their house or a truck. It’s not like they’re going to be dying of dehydration. They are relying on wells; they moved out there and knew that at some times of the year, their well is insufficient and so they need to get a truck to come in...There are people in the world who really have a shortage of water and for people of Juan de Fuca to claim that that’s a violation of their human rights is really kind of silly.” After the 2004 RGS, it was Langford that, by getting its way, ended up taking the region for a rapid and dispersed growth ride. Derman told me some have suggested that because of that “the horse is already out of the barn.” So why not let Juan de Fuca have it’s piped water? Derman put it this way: “So you had 25 horses in the barn. You left the door open and 10 escaped. Does that mean we should let the other 15 escape as well?” Leslie Campbell can’t help noticing all the possible sites for infill development in her long walks around Victoria. She welcomes your comments and input on this story and the issues it raises.

September 2016 The gap between incomes and housing costs has grown so wide that bold action is long overdue. WHEN I MOVED HERE from Winnipeg 30 years ago, I quickly found myself a modest one-bedroom apartment on Quebec Street in James Bay. A three-story walk-up, my pad featured hardwood floors and a southern exposure. It had a tiny galley kitchen, a balcony, and a parking space. I loved it; it was the perfect nest from which to fly about my new city and start my life over. It cost me $315/month. Having settled the housing facet of my life, I moved on to finding a job, doing freelance writing, taking some classes, and volunteering with local organizations. I couldn’t have done any of it without a secure home whose rental rate allowed me to afford the other basics along with a few frills, like writing and art classes, and listening to some great music at Harpo’s. Contrast my welcoming environment to what people at the low end of the income spectrum face now: a rental vacancy rate of 0.6 percent—one of the worst in Canada—along with out-of-reach rents. My Quebec Street home was torn down years ago to make way for a strata-titled townhouse complex. But a search of rental listings yielded a similar apartment—without the hardwood floors and free parking—for $1250/month. The tales of woe I am hearing personally range from students losing a shared rental house when the owner decided to cash out, to a family from the Comox Valley with two university-age children struggling to find a house to rent. Lisa Morgan says she is hoping for something around $2000/month, but after months of looking, she’s found the only suitable homes in terms of location and space all fall in the $2800-3000 price range. As the search continues, the family is camping out at the grandparents’ home in Brentwood Bay. Daughter Morgan will commute to UVic. Another, much younger family, with their infant, was “renovicted” from their rental home recently. Unable to find an affordable replacement despite both parents working, they are moving into the unfinished basement of their parents. With only one kitchen and bathroom, “adjustments” are having to be made by all parties. At another end of the spectrum is an active septuagenarian who owns a home with reasonable mortgage fees, but is considering selling and moving to Mexico because there seems no other solution in the face of needed costly repairs and rising utility bills. Sixty percent of Victorians rent their home. Renting is the only way many young people, singles, seniors and families can afford to house themselves. They all add to a city’s diversity, vibrancy and potential. So it seems in everyone’s interest to help them feel more welcome in our city. IN RESEARCHING THE ISSUE of affordable housing, I kept coming across the name of Marika Albert—the author (often with others) of reports for both the CRD and the Coalition to End Homelessness. She also served on the City of Victoria’s Housing Affordability Task Force and is currently the managing director of the Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria. During an August meeting, Albert and I discuss this community’s housing challenge, focusing particularly on rentals. Together we look at the graph (below) from the 167-page Capital Region Housing Gap Analysis & Data Book that Albert helped compile. The graph puts the problem into stark relief, illustrating a fundamental mismatch between where our population is in terms of income, and the cost of available housing. Only 13.7 percent of the region’s homes are affordable for 50 percent of its households. The income at the upper end, just left of the dotted red line is $59,999. Put another way, there are only 22,000 units priced at 30 percent of the gross income of 79,000 households. And there’s an oversupply of housing for those in upper income groups. Since these figures are from data from 2011 to 2014, the gap is likely even more dramatic now. The lower-income people who cannot find housing that “matches” their income are, says Albert, therefore overspending and experiencing a lot of stress and its attendant problems, and in some cases homelessness. Albert and other members on the City of Victoria’s Housing Affordability Task Force looked particularly at ways to generate more housing for households in the $18,000-$57,000 per annum range. “We really focused on immediate need and trying to resolve the real crisis or the tension that we have now. We talked a lot about inclusionary zoning, densification and diversified densification. How do we fit more people in an area, but without necessarily having to build massive towers? How do we fill in the corners of our neighborhoods a bit more?” The task force came up with a list of things the City should consider, and these have informed the City’s Housing Strategy 2016-2025. Among the recommendations already prioritized in the Strategy are removing the minimum unit size (currently 335 square feet); reducing parking requirements for units (which can add $25-40,000 in costs to developers, which is passed on to tenants); removing the rezoning requirement for garden suites; and reviewing the Housing Reserve Fund guidelines for grants to developers of affordable housing projects. (Non-profit providers have expressed concerns that the $10,000 per unit cap on grants may soon limit their ability to build units that are affordable for people in the low-to-moderate income bracket.) Other recommendations of the task force that will be looked at further down the road include fostering the conversion of older motels to apartments, and contributing City-owned land at no cost or at reduced market value for the development of affordable housing projects. (The City of Vancouver recently committed to building 400 affordable rental suites on its city-owned lands.) Albert says, “I think that municipalities are in a position to be a bit more assertive [with developers] around what they see as their community needs. We have developers wanting to build here. Ultimately, it’s going to be lucrative for them.” She feels some progress has been made, but too often it’s just not enough. “It’s sad. It’s like, ‘Really? Just 10 [affordable units in a large complex]? What’s that going to do?’ I find it frustrating because I think a lot of effort has been put into lobbying for more units, changing how we do that whole process and then it’s just, ‘Oh, we’re just going to do this fast route, 10 units and then that’s it.’” She is, however, excited to see that the City of Victoria is endorsing the creation of an “inclusionary housing density bonus policy” for the Downtown core. Inclusionary zoning essentially means that if housing is built in that zone, it has to represent the income distribution of the area—thereby maintaining its diversity. Albert believes, “The more diverse your community is the more it thrives. Jane Jacobs has talked about that a lot in her work.” DESPITE HER WORK AND ADVOCACY at the civic level, Albert admits cities do not have the tools or money available to them that upper levels of government do. When it comes to the bolder measures needed to address the profound disconnect between incomes and housing, those upper levels need to come to the table. On the income side of the equation, she notes, household incomes have been stagnating. “We are losing our purchasing power. Income assistance rates haven’t gone up since 2007.” Another graph we examine shows that the rate of the increase in shelter costs and the rate at which wages are going up have decoupled in the past decade. On the ground, this translates to a person working full-time at BC’s minimum hourly wage of $10.45 spending 50 percent of their income to rent a bachelor apartment at the 2015 regional average of $716/month. Looking at another scenario, a family of four would require both parents working full-time at $20.05/hour to afford the basics, including a 3-bedroom apartment with utilities and insurance amounting to $1488/month all-inclusive. Those wages, by the way, would not allow for vacations, savings, or debt servicing. “We can’t just address one side of the coin,” says Albert—“especially for people who are on low incomes, who are living on disability, who are trying to scrape by in a rental market that has no vacancy and is becoming more expensive.” Increasing minimum wage, income assistance and disability rates, of course, points us in the direction of the Provincial government. With an election in May, the Liberals—along with both the NDP and Green parties—do seem to be paying attention to the dearth of affordable housing, which a recent poll found to be the top concern of British Columbians. The government’s actions thus far, however, have been aimed at cooling the over-heated real estate sales market, especially in Vancouver (e.g. a tax on foreign buyers) or, as in Victoria, funding much-needed new transitional supportive housing to address homelessness, a crisis made so visible by the tent city on the Province’s Law Courts grounds. The Province is also the level of government where rent controls can be enhanced and legislative measures to deal with burgeoning renovictions can be implemented. The Province’s Tenancy Branch has received almost 5000 applications to dispute eviction notices in the past year, which likely represent the tip of iceberg (who has the time and money to file a complaint when hunting for a new place?). The penalty for landlords who are found to evict someone “in bad faith” is two months’ rent, which they can make back in no time, given the market and the loopholes in the Residential Tenancy Act. The Province has far more tools at its disposal than the City to help those caught in the squeeze illustrated by our graph. With a provincial election come May, citizens have some influence as well. THE OTHER DIRECTION TO LOOK FOR BOLD MEASURES to tackle housing affordability, of course, is the federal government. In one of the reports Albert worked on, I had noticed a graph showing the age of this region’s rental apartments. It made clear that between 1961 and 1980 there was a building boom in purpose-built rental apartments; in fact, the ones still standing represent 43 percent of all rental units in the CRD. In the City of Victoria itself, of the current 17,000 or so purpose-built rental apartments, “nearly 70 percent of these units were built between 1950 and 1975 under a series of Federal tax measures and construction incentives,” states the City’s Task Force report. Albert explains that during that era, “We had a national housing strategy. The federal government through CMHC was investing in the building of purpose-built rentals—both market rentals, but also subsidized units…There was actual incentive for developers to build them.” By the mid-1980s, however, the feds had lost interest in subsidized housing and discontinued funding any social housing projects. Then came the Province’s turn to lose interest and halt their funding. One result: Where homelessness was virtually unheard of in the 1980s, by the 2000s people were sleeping in doorways and parks. There are now 235,000 people homeless in Canada. The Trudeau Liberals, during the election campaign, acknowledged the need for the feds to re-engage on the housing front in a bold way: They promised to “prioritize investments in affordable housing and seniors’ facilities, build more new housing units and refurbish old ones, give support to municipalities to maintain rent-geared-to-income subsidies in co-ops, and give communities the money they need for Housing First initiatives that help homeless Canadians find stable housing.” They also said they’d remove all GST on new capital investments in affordable rental housing. And “conduct an inventory of all available federal lands and buildings that could be repurposed, and make some of these lands available at low cost for affordable housing in communities where there is a pressing need.” In all, the federal Liberals promised that $20 billion would be invested in social housing over the next decade. In Victoria recently, federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos said a national housing strategy could be in place before the end of the year. He also announced $150 million in federal funding over the next two years for housing in BC, $51 million of it for repairs and upgrades to social housing units. So the feds are re-engaging with the issue—though with many promises to keep. And the Province, heading into an election next spring, is starting to engage as well. But in those years in which they were both missing in action, things got awfully difficult for many Canadians. Leslie Campbell is the founding editor of Focus. She now lives, almost affordably, in a co-op heritage house in Victoria.

July 2016 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.

March 2016 Mayor Helps’ forceful push to a billion-dollar sewage facility at Rock Bay takes some twists and turns—and ain’t done yet. LATELY, A NUMBER OF PEOPLE, from seniors to sewage activists, have wondered aloud if Mayor Lisa Helps is moving too fast. Her penchant for “getting things done” is one she readily admits to, from planting potatoes in February to “stampeding” her fellow CRD colleagues towards a decision on a sewage treatment plan. I met with Mayor Helps on Sunday, February 21, at City Hall. I had requested an hour for an interview but was given 30 minutes with the assurance by her executive secretary that, “The Mayor is extremely good at covering a lot of information within 30 minutes.” She was right. In her casual, commodious office Helps told me she tries to spend 75 percent of her time on “getting things done.” That means “working with council, getting decisions made, and then really working on the execution of our mission and mandate of the strategic plan.” Asked what she finds most satisfying about being the City’s chief, she said, “the partnerships formed in the past year.” She mentioned the Province, neighbourhood associations, Tourism Victoria, the Greater Victoria Development Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, and then returned to theme: “If you have strong partners you can get more done, you can get more resilient change made...” And the hardest thing? “I move very quickly, both in my thought processes and I’ll say, ‘let’s do this and let’s get going,’ so one of my challenges is, going at a pace…where there’s actually that room for collaboration…I understand that if we want to bring people along it does take time. I just like to march full on ahead, but it can’t always work.” Turning to her role as chair of the CRD’s Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee, I asked her how she feels about the charge in that morning’s paper by Brian Grover, a Victoria resident who has prepared and appraised large water sanitation projects for the World Bank. He wrote that she is “stampeding” her fellow directors towards a sewage treatment plan involving Rock Bay. She embraced the characterization with enthusiasm: “We’ve been working on this since 1989. Anyone who says it’s rushed, I don’t buy that…yes I am ‘stampeding’ us to a decision. I absolutely am, because we need to make a decision and we need to get something done. There’s still room, after we make a decision, for all sorts of innovation—especially if we can show the Province and the federal government that we are moving in the right direction. We will get more flexibility, but we can’t do nothing and we can’t say it’s moving too fast.” Her next “to do” on the sewage front is to secure $83 million in PPP Canada funding. The deadline is March 31, and prior to that the Province has to approve the CRD’s amended plan. Towards that “Amendment #10,” a decision on siting for the sewage treatment facilities needs to be made, and that’s what Helps intended to get done at the next meeting of the sewage committee. DOCUMENTS FOR THE February 24 sewage committee meeting showed that CRD staff were recommending using Rock Bay lands for a central tertiary treatment plant. Capital cost: $1.13 billion. Things have been headed towards Rock Bay since the last civic election, which resulted in a change in the make-up of the CRD board and committees. How the Rock Bay site became a possibility, let alone the preferred one, is murky. Much of the decision-making about it likely took place at in camera meetings and have something to do with First Nations claims. In February 2015 it was announced the $138-million remediation of toxic soil on Rock Bay lands owned by BC Hydro and Transport Canada were almost completed, clearing the way for their transfer to local First Nations. At the time Helps said, “The City looks forward to partnering with the First Nations as they move forward with economic development…This area holds the key to the future of our city.” By November 2015, Rock Bay had become the “it” site for sewage treatment on the east side, with all of the seven options put forward involving at least some sort of plant at Rock Bay. People have complained about such a key area for urban growth being devoted to sewage treatment, predicting that the result will be industrial and repelling. But Helps is an optimist. “Whatever happens at Rock Bay, there will be rezoning required and rezoning will be for wastewater, commercial, retail, residential,” she told me. “So you can think about something like Dockside 2.0. I see huge benefits to the residents of Victoria and to the residents of the Burnside Gorge neighbourhood who will be very involved in whatever is developed.” As critics and some CRD directors have pointed out, however, Rock Bay is far from any existing wastewater infrastructure. So $250-million worth of new pipes will be needed, causing years of disruption along Cook Street and other arteries between Rock Bay and Clover Point. Businesses along the route are already worrying about bankruptcy, according to City of Victoria Councillor Geoff Young. As well, the land at Rock Bay has been priced at a hair-raising $67 million. Unlike McLoughlin Point, it’s neither owned by the CRD nor zoned appropriately. There are many hurdles to leap before it’s approved by the community. Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen made all these points and then some when he led the charge to reintroduce McLoughlin Point into the equation at a February 24 sewage committee meeting. He cited the dramatic cost differences—two to three times per household in each municipality—between the two plans. McLoughlin has been costed at “only” $783 million. The additional hundreds of millions for the Rock Bay options would, argued Jensen, “suck capital out of this region” for years to come. And that’s before factoring in what he called the “$200-million footnote” of the Rock Bay proposal. Its costs were calculated only to 2030, whereas McLoughlin was costed out to 2045. Anticipating objections about Esquimalt having rejected McLoughlin, Jensen asked, “What’s more important: process or taxpayers?” Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins called Jensen’s initiative to reoccupy McLoughlin Point “appalling” and “sad,” and predicted such a motion would be confusing to the public and funders: “I can’t imagine what they are thinking.” In a stroke of political genius Director Colin Plant suggested an amendment that broadened Jensen’s motion, allowing for McLoughlin or Macaulay, plus Clover Point and another plant on the Westside as possible sites for treatment plants. It passed with a clear majority (voting against it were City of Victoria Councillor Marianne Alto, Desjardins, Chief Andy Thomas and Chief Robert Sam). Besides derailing the simple Rock Bay versus McLoughlin plan of the “McLoughlinuts,” this maneuvre opened a can of worms for Helps’ plan to “get it done.” It was clear Rock Bay might not be as popular as the new list of options in the Plant-amended-Jensen motion. Resistance to Rock Bay in the community has been firming up for months. But, determined to keep Rock Bay in the mix and find something a solid majority of her committee could agree on, Helps came back a couple of days later with a brand new motion, one she believed “captured the mood” of her committee. It certainly captured the confusion of her committee, which increased as directors attempted to wrestle it into a shape they could “get to yes” on. At times, directors confessed to being lost in the thicket of amendments. No one seemed to know whether the original motion or amendments were being referred to staff or what was being voted on. Helps has no trouble maneuvering her mind through all the layers and intricacies of this kind of grinding committee work, but an outsider might well see it as too clever by halves. The end result was a bulky, amorphous set of motions, the main one of which directed staff “to undertake value engineering and come back to the CALWMC with more detailed cost estimates” on six sites for various forms of treatment. ASAP. There was a sense that this might be progress. Or it might be where the process was in April, 2010 or almost anytime in the last seven years. Options up the ying yang. If you have that dizzy, going-in-circles feeling, you’re forgiven. One thing was clear, even to directors. This new “plan” wasn’t in good enough shape to impress the federal government. As City of Victoria Councillor Ben Isitt said, “I don’t think it would be prudent to communicate the fairly eclectic state of the plan” to funders at this point. Stay tuned for the next meeting of the Core Area Liquid Waste Committee on March 9. FEAR AROUND THE LOSS OF FUNDING is driving the agenda on sewage treatment. Besides Helps’ expressed anxieties around coming up with a new plan for the March 31 deadline, Desjardins, who is also chair of the CRD, warned her fellow directors: “We are being watched by the funders.” Coupled with Mayor Helps relaying Tourism Victoria’s fears around Washington State possibly restricting state employees from being reimbursed for travel to Victoria until the completion of a “primary” sewage system, the fear-mongering—bordering on paranoia—stood in stark contrast to the fighting words of those citizen-activists who speak at the opening of every committee meeting. Mehdi Najari, for instance, referencing the “mandate” of the committee, pointed out: “Your job is not to be an enforcer for senior government wishes. Your job is to protect the citizens of your region…Prime Minister Trudeau said of infrastructure, it has to be environmentally beneficial, it has to be based on science…the most economical…and it has to be based on innovation. This proposal that you are suggesting is none of them.” He labelled the public participation process “fraudulent” and leading to fewer and fewer people attending the events. “We are tired of being used as props for your propaganda [for a decision you have already made],” he concluded. AT THE FEBRUARY 26 MEETING, Teresa Coady, chair of the Technical Oversight Panel, presented that body’s final report. It’s big surprise was recommending against anaerobic digestion as the way to reduce sewage sludge. This type of treatment has been part of the plan for years—so much so that PPP Canada funding seemed to be tied to it. Yet no one at the meeting raised any questions in this regard. The TOP, instead, suggested “energy efficient drying” of sewage coupled with gasification or some other thermal processing option after tertiary level treatment. TOP only looked at the Rock Bay plan. Coady’s other surprise was an allusion to the Jensen/Plant motion a couple of days earlier allowing for treatment at McLoughlin or Macaulay and Clover Point. She said if McLoughlin or Macaulay is back on the table—that is, a large site near outfalls—this would be preferable as it would save money and disruption. Further obscuring a clear direction forward is whether the CRD will commit to “integrated resource management.” Helps, as chair of the sewage committee, was instrumental in the formation of a task force on IRM and establishing the tight timelines it had to investigate options and issue a report. IRM would bring together sewage sludge with solid municipal waste (food scraps, yard waste and whatever else ends up at the Hartland Landfill) into one “stream” subjected to a treatment like gasification. Theoretically, it has the advantage of creating usable resources—water, heat, energy—that could potentially offset some operating costs while reducing pressure on Hartland. Chaired by Saanich Councillor Vic Derman, the IRM task force report was presented at the February 24 sewage committee meeting. Described by task force member Young as “flimsy,” the report outlined four presentations by private companies, all with limited (or no) experience integrating municipal solids with liquid waste. Young labelled them “experimental,” while Isitt called them “emerging rather than proven technologies.” One company had done only “lab scale” tests on kilograms of material. Another, the Ark Reformer, “has no completed projects in operation,” according to the report. Yet Derman and other directors were impressed and believe such technologies might result in $250 million in savings and significant reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions. The CRD staff report on the task force’s report was less enthusiastic, as were some directors. Isitt raised concerns about how IRM would interfere with realizing the goal of zero waste because the technologies all require solid waste to be blended with the sewage. View Royal Mayor David Screech observed, “When we formed a task force I presumed that we would not just be getting feedback from politicians who had listened to private industry make pitches and that we would be getting solid professional advice back. It’s absurd we are even thinking of making a decision based on that.” A motion to receive the report for information was rejected by five directors, including Screech. In at least one past meeting Screech called rejecting such motions “absurd.” Watching democracy in action, it does seem, at times, a bit absurd. Absurdly pointed. Helps had earlier told me she thought IRM was “the way to go,” that “the next step is to do a request for statements of interest to the private sector…What we’ll be looking for from the private sector is financially-backed innovative solutions. Someone might say I’ve got the best technology for gasification that can integrate all these resources. Great but we’ll want to know what’s your financial backing? If it’s financially backed it’s almost the same as proven; if there’s someone willing to lend, to invest…so that will be one of the tests.” Helps is an optimist on the tech front, too. She’s sure the price of a single tertiary plant in Rock Bay will come down from its estimated price of $1.13 billion. In our conversation she told me, “That’s what the original plan was costed at in 2007 and through refinements and design optimization it came down to $783 million.” When I pointed out that was mainly due to the project simplifying from several plants to one, she responded: “Think about how much a cell phone cost in 2009 and how large it was and how little it could do. There are new technologies that have been designed and developed and financially proven since the original plan was costed.” Isitt, too, has used the cell phone analogy in reference to sewage treatment’s unpredictable but no doubt glorious future. After many years of waiting for that glorious future, a lot of us are doubtful. THE JOSTLING AND UNCERTAINTY around sites and technology at the CRD should raise larger questions about exactly why we are going along with federal regulations that scientists say don’t take Victoria’s unique circumstances into consideration. Why don’t our political leaders fight harder for evidence-based policy making? What unspoken fears, agendas and partnerships are at work? Whose agenda, for instance, was behind Washington State’s threatened mini-boycott? It could have been met with a blast of science, but instead Helps cowered. Along with marine scientists saying Victoria has been mistakenly classified as “high risk,” a recent peer-reviewed scientific study found that increasing treatment level to secondary treatment at five plants between Victoria and Vancouver would have a “negligible effect” on environmental conditions in the Salish Sea (see Focus, January 2016). The evidence raises other questions about land-based treatment. Our waste cannot be “disappeared.” No matter what technologies we subject it to, there are effects on the environment, including unintended ones. Dismissing those who raise the lack of an evidence-based rationale for land-based sewage treatment with clichés like “That train has left the station,” fails to note that trains almost always return to the station. A more useful dictum would be: “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.” When I asked Helps about the high risk classification, she said, “I’m not really interested in the debate about ‘do we need to do it, do we not need to do it?’…The mandate from Ottawa is you’re high risk, get it done by 2020.” She’s accepted her marching orders. Yet if that billion-dollar mandate is derived from a mistaken classification, isn’t it the responsibility of CRD officials to point out the mistake, to lobby strenuously for a reassessment of the risk level—and isn’t it time to commit to a comparative, environmental cost-benefit assessment of different forms of sewage treatment? In 2012, Nils Jensen put forth a motion at the sewage committee asking 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.” (He flip-flopped on this later.) It was viewed as a delaying tactic and defeated. The people at the table then were as fixated on getting it done as they are now. But isn’t it a missing piece of the puzzle—a foundational piece—without which citizen distrust festers? Helps told me, “I sat face to face with Minister Sohi and said ‘there is some debate locally about whether it is a high risk receiving environment; what do you think?’And he said, ‘Well, I’ll defer that to the Minister of the Environment, but my opinion is you have a mandate to get this done.’ We haven’t received anything from Minister McKenna to the contrary, so my imagining is we have a mandate to get this done.” My imagining is that Mayor Helps could exert her impressive will and smarts and get us a science-based mandate. That would be worth getting done. Leslie Campbell interviewed Mayor Helps about a number of issues and had no intention of focusing solely on the sewage question—until she witnessed the February sewage committee meetings. This story is an unintended consequence of that.

January 2016 The encampment at the law courts grounds provides evidence of our collective failure to meet the need for housing. THE HOMELESS CAMP at the Provincial law courts grounds might be getting most of the attention these days, but the whole latter half of 2015 experienced gusts of action on the homeless front, starting with Mayor Helps’ and Councillor Ben Isitt’s proposal last summer to devote a corner of Topaz Park to a regulated tenting area for the homeless—something angrily rejected by local residents. Then the mayor hosted a shelter workshop in September with the somewhat controversial idea of paying homeless people $20 to participate; over 350 showed up. Next, she and Victoria council urged the CRD Hospital Board to approve borrowing of up to $30 million towards housing the estimated 400 chronic shelter users in Greater Victoria. After some hesitation, the Board approved the motion in December, conditional on obtaining similar funding from the Province. Also in December, Cool Aid obtained an option to purchase the old Mount Edwards Court Care Home, hoping to convert it into supportive housing for 100 homeless people. It is seeking government and community funding towards the $9-million cost. Rob Reid, who chairs Cool Aid’s “campaign cabinet,” is optimistic, believing there’s been a “maturing of understanding” about the issue. Such maturation may help explain why the Province declined to call in the cops to dismantle the camp as it blossomed forth tents and tarps. Instead, when it hit a population of 40 in November, the Province installed three portable toilets and came up with $400,000 for a four-month shelter. The City has now provided a vacant building along with $45,000 to renovate it, and the United Way is putting $25,000 into services. I VISITED INTENT CITY, as some are calling it, several times in December. There seem to be two huge benefits of the camp for residents: First, it means they can stay in one place and not have to sneak around in the dark to set and break camp. In City parks, a bylaw allows camping only from 7pm to 7am—and that right was only clarified after a long legal battle. It’s hard for us non-winter campers to fully appreciate the difficulties implied in the bylaw. Sherman Sherwood says it’s so dark at 7am during winter that he often loses crucial belongings—a hammer, some rope for his tarp—simply because he can’t see them. Another camper, 61-year-old Doug, tells me he’d been sleeping in local parks including Beacon Hill for years now despite his arthritis and police harassment. But packing up and getting on the move before the 7am curfew is “just too much.” The second blessing the residents enjoy—and probably the most important—is community. Instead of being alone in some bushes in the dark, they are together, making connections and decisions about how to conduct their lives together and also in association with the wider community; they are interacting and feeling part of something bigger. It’s safer as well. One camper’s life was saved by his neighbours when he overdosed. Intent resident Chris Parent, who had been sleeping outside without even a tent, using cardboard and finding places “slightly secured from the elements,” prefers to be outdoors, “as close to nature as possible.” But the camp allows him to also be in a community. “It’s full of good people,” he says. “Their lights are beginning to shine a little bit more,” because of the help they are giving each other. Joseph Reville, too, says, “This is kind of awesome because we’re learning to connect with each other. Not every one is on the same page,” he admits. “Drugs are a part of what’s out here…Without the security of a home and all the good things that come with it, it’s easy to slip really quick…and people [on the street] have no way to hide their addictions.” Reville is in recovery from an addiction to hard drugs. He lives in the “clean” zone of the camp and for the most part it’s working well. After a stabbing and fatal overdose in late December, however, he hinted he’d be happier if the hard drug users left. Reville is one of Intent City’s residents who are “trying to raise a voice for housing.” An artist, Reville’s been homeless off and on since 1994. Bed bugs drove him out of his last home. He views the camp as providing “a platform for a long overdue conversation in Victoria” and is excited by the possibility of developing a template for other cities. Reville thinks clusters of microhousing on public lands would be ideal. “They could have cool little themes, different flavours to go along with the neighbourhoods they adjoin. Microhousing could be a tourist attraction,” he says. What’s needed in general, he says, is “out of the box thinking …and something that doesn’t take two years to implement. There are buildings all over the city sitting vacant. Let’s restore some heritage buildings and some old real estate and get people housed and start some crazy programs. What if we handed over some of the jobs to people who wanted to transition from [street life]…cleaning parks, removing graffiti…we’re capable.” Don Evans, executive director at Our Place, at one of Intent’s daily morning circle meetings, updates residents on plans for the new shelter. He mostly listens, assuring the campers he wants to work with them. Some who speak at the circle are adamant about staying out of shelters. They’ve had bad experiences. They cite the drug users and dealers—“triggers” for their own addictions. Later, at a press conference announcing the location of the new shelter, Evans says the campers will select who goes into it. It will be open and staffed 24 hours a day, meaning residents won’t have to worry about packing up or losing their belongings. Meals will be provided. Tents may be set up to provide private spaces. Pets will be allowed. There will be a lounge area, TV and showers. Security will be put in place. Some residents will get hired to do some of the work. As far as shelters go, it sounds like an out-of-the box approach—but it is only for four months. And many are disinterested in going into this or any shelter. For himself, Reville dismisses shelter use as “a merry-go-round” instead of real progress towards stable housing. Given Victoria’s .6 percent vacancy rate, he says, a lot of workers are ending up homeless. “This city runs on blue collar workers…my tent mate wakes up everyday at 6am and trucks off to Sidney to go work in a café.” Kathryn, on the other had (she prefers to not publicize her last name), will forego any shelter because she likes living outside. A veteran of the street at 60, she has raised children she’s proud of and operated a business in the past. She tells me she initiated the camp after setting up her tent there for four days and realizing no one had asked her to take it down. “It doesn’t belong to the City—it’s Crown Land. I was jubilant,” she recalls. She viewed it as a way to help her street community come together. However, she now feels it’s grown completely out of her control, with too many young people who “haven’t worked things out” moving in. “It’s become something I didn’t envision,” she says. She’d like to create a small community of about 30 people on some acreage outside the city, basically a campground with hookups for electricity. The 30 could pool their housing allowance ($375) to lease the land, create a garden and a common kitchen house. She’s actively looking for the ideal site. But Kathryn is worried about those who are not doing well outside. Besides those in the camp, city parks and doorways, she tells me there are a lot of seniors living in their cars in Victoria, isolated, afraid of exposure, and too proud to ask for help. REVEREND AL TYSICK of Victoria Dandelion Society characterizes the 40-bed shelter as “a political smokescreen.” He notes there are 80-100 people in the camp and another 200 on the street. The total 370 beds or mats offered by local shelters are full. “The answer is housing and the government knows it. A new shelter is not even close to a real solution,” says Tysick. What’s being offered by the Province, he says, amounts to “the crumbs that fall off the rich man’s table.” He points to the abandoned Central Care Home on Johnson Street with 147 rooms—“the government could buy it and move people in tomorrow.” Meanwhile, Cool Aid is trying to do something along those lines for 100 homeless at the old Mount Edward care facility. But the “Dr. Joe Haegert Centre” will need both government and community support. It has raised $1.5 million from donors already and is aiming at another $500,000 in donations by the end of March and is applying for the balance from municipal, regional and Provincial governments. Government involvement in providing housing is essential. Victoria has the lowest vacancy rate in Canada. That and BC’s low minimum wage ($10.45/hour) and social assistance rates ($527 for a single adult) point to obvious structural barriers to finding people stable housing in the private market. Even rent supplements (part of the mix these days) are seen as a band-aid. Stephen Portman of Together Against Poverty Society points out landlords have legions of people to choose from so are unlikely to rent to those showing up pushing a cart and looking rough, without references or with a criminal record. And subsidized housing in the CRD has a waitlist of 1500. The picture is not encouraging. Budgets for all levels of government suggest their priorities lie elsewhere. (Think bridges and sewage treatment locally.) INTENT CITY RESIDENTS enthuse about the kind-hearted Victorians who have visited and donated food and other supplies. One day when I visited, a group of students from Reynolds Secondary came with their teacher to deliver hot baked potatoes (donated by Galey Farms and cooked by the students) wrapped in foil. They were a big hit. Chris Parent says he has actually gained weight because so much healthy food has been provided by Victorians. He tells me of Janice and her husband who decided to give up their personal Christmas in order to help the campers. Then there’s neighbour Dale Seibel who, at one of the daily circle meetings, announces he is organizing a hot lunch as well as blankets from a Downtown hotel. He had already rounded up donated goods from businesses in Cook Street Village. At the same circle meeting, Kelsey, a graduate student at UVic, consults with the campers on a wishlist that university students and faculty can supply. Mary from Christ Church Cathedral checks in, reminding campers of the pre-Christmas lunch coming up. Yet, there are also signs of intolerance towards the homeless. The parent advisory council of Central Middle School has expressed opposition to having the new shelter across the street; and worries have been vocalized about Cool Aid’s proposed supportive housing facility being so close to Christ Church Cathedral School. Another test of acceptance will come when the chosen 40 campers move into the temporary shelter. It’s expected the rest of the campers will be evicted and forced to scatter to city parks and doorways. But the City of Victoria could choose to not enforce (or even rescind) the camping bylaw that criminalizes homelessness. It could recognize that the camp serves its residents’ need for safety and community and provides the rest of us (including the Province) with evidence of our collective failure to address the need for housing for all citizens. It took Leslie Campbell a couple of days to thaw out after one two-hour visit to Intent City. She admires the hardiness, compassion and intelligence of the people she spoke with there.

June 2015 Do articulated tug barges, each carrying millions of gallons of hydrocarbon fuels, pose a threat to our coast? INGMAR LEE HAS A MISSION BORN OF SERIOUS WORRY. The long-time environmental activist has been trying to raise awareness about the “articulated tug barges” that transport various fossil fuels through the Inside Passage to Alaska. From his home on Denny Island, near Bella Bella, Lee maintains a facebook page (10,000 Ton Tanker) where he posts regularly. It started a few years ago, he says, when he began noticing and then tracking (via www.marinetraffic.com) the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart and its two 300-ft 10,000-ton capacity petroleum-tanker barges which run directly past Bella Bella, and on through BC’s protected Inside Passage and Great Bear Rainforest. These articulated tug barges (ATBs) are carrying various fuels for Alaskans—bunker oil, heating oil, gasoline, aviation fuel, diesel. ATBs are twinned vessels—a tug designed to fit into a large notch built into the transom of a petroleum barge. The tug then steers from the stern of the barge instead of towing it. An extra wheel house is mounted on a tall pedestal to enable a view over the bow. Lee says this only provides limited direct forward visibility. These ATBs, which can carry up to 14,000 tonnes of petroleum product, are allowed in what's referred to as the "voluntary exclusion zone," including the Inside Passage, which applies to loaded oil tankers servicing Alaska from Washington. (Transport Canada also prohibits tankers of over 40,000 tonnes deadweight from using the southern portion of the Inside Passage). Lee points to the Exxon Valdez’s devastating spill of 35,000 tonnes, whose effects are still felt, as a comparison. “They are carrying one-quarter or more of the spill volume released by the Exxon Valdez and would utterly destroy this coast,” says Lee. CEO Captain Kevin Obermeyer of the Pacific Pilotage Authority out of Vancouver explained in an email to Lee why the oil-carrying ATBs are given special treatment: “Tugs and barges as well as ATBs are seen differently from an Aframax tanker in that the tugs have additional redundancy with twin engines, twin propellers and often twin rudders compared to the single rudder, single engine and single propeller of the usual Aframax tankers visiting our coast. As a result, the tug and barge industry are treated differently due to the differing risk.” But Lee argues the route through the Inside Passage poses significant dangers to coastal ecosystems. With its often rough seas and narrow, rocky passages, “this is an enormous oil disaster just waiting to happen,” says Lee. In the wake of the oil spill in Vancouver’s English Bay, Lee’s concerns about spill response—in a far less accessible area—are understandable. Lee points to a 2011 incident involving the Nathan E. Stewart and its barge, DBL 55, when they narrowly avoided catastrophe during a raging storm off Cape Fairweather, Alaska. The “incident report” of the US Coast Guard noted, “This is a potential spill.” The crew reported that a series of 30-foot seas had washed over the vessel, and water entered the engine’s air intakes. Power was lost in both engines. According to the Coast Guard report, “The tug has 45,000 gallons of diesel and 500 gallons of lube oil on board. The cargo on board the fuel barge is reported to be 2.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, 1028 gallons of aviation fuel and 700 gallons of other petroleum products.” The stricken ATB was eventually towed to safety by another tug. Harrowing video from the wheelhouse of the Nathan E. Stewart can be found online. The Nathan E. Stewart is owned by the US-based Kirby Corporation. Kirby’s Pacific Division vessels trade from San Diego to Barrow, Alaska. “Other than a stop at Chevron’s Burnaby refinery, or Kinder Morgan’s Westridge,” says Lee, “they seem to have no stops in Canada.” It is hard to pin down the precise number of petrochemical-laden barges traversing the Inland Passage each month. Matt Woodruff of Kirby Corporation declined to give numbers. Pacific Pilotage Authority’s Obermeyer surveyed the waiver holders and concluded “there is on average one ATB movement a week.” Lee estimates that the Nathan E. Stewart plies the route four times in a six-week period. Kirby’s Woodruff did tell Focus, “Our present west coast fleet consists of barges ranging from around 35,000 barrels to around 100,000 barrels [14,000 tonnes] in capacity.” The company’s latest quarterly report lists 69 coastal tank barges and 73 tugboats, though many of these are used on other routes. The company, whose slogan is “Putting America’s Waterways to Work,” pioneered the use of deep notch articulated tug-barge units for oceangoing service. Woodruff told Focus that “All Kirby tank barges are double hull vessels.” On March 30, 2015, Lee met with Pacific Pilotage’s Obermeyer in Vancouver. “I asked the Captain point blank to please close the loophole waivers which are allowing US tankers to ply back and forth up and down the sheltered water of the BC Inside Passage. In all other cases, tankers must enter and exit Canadian Pacific waters only through Juan de Fuca. Obermeyer said he was considering making it required to post a Canadian pilot on the bridge of such traffic, but as far as making the BC Inside Passage off limits to these 10,000-ton capacity tankers, he said I’d have to take that up with Transport Canada.” Which Lee did. Yvette Myers of Transport Canada only assured him that, “Effective January 1, 2015, all oil tankers and barges must meet international standards for double hull construction under the Vessel Pollution and Dangerous Chemicals Regulations (the Regulations). I should also confirm these Regulations apply in full to the articulated tug barges you refer to in your correspondence.” But even double hulls are not perfect. Lee points to an incident in March 2014 involving an ATB owned by the Kirby Corporation. The Miss Susan, after crashing into a bulk carrier in Galveston Bay, Texas, disgorged 820 tonnes of bunker oil into the bay, making it the largest oil spill in Galveston Bay in two decades. According to Galveston County’s Daily News: “The collision resulted in the spill of more than 168,000 gallons—or 4000 barrels—of heavy fuel oil into the bay. The oil found its way into Gulf of Mexico and washed up on beaches from Galveston to Matagorda County.” Lawsuits have been launched by commercial fishers affected by the spill. Transport Canada’s Myers also noted that, “The Pacific Pilotage Authority has established compulsory pilotage areas to ensure that pilots with knowledge of the local area are onboard vessels when in sensitive or busy waterways.” But as Obermeyer admits, 26 waivers have been granted including some to the ATBs. While these ATBs may not carry crude oil or dilbit, on which most recent concern around tankers has focused, Lee argues they still pose a huge risk to coastal ecosystems. Some of the fuels carried on these tanker-barges are viewed as “non-persistent” (e.g. gasoline, aviation fuel and light diesel which dissipate rapidly through evaporation); others are viewed as persistent. The International Tanker Owners Federation states: “As a rule, persistent oils break up and dissipate more slowly in the marine environment and usually require a clean-up operation. Persistent oils include many[or] all crude oils, fuel oils, lubricating oils and heavier grades of marine diesel oil. These oils pose a potential threat to natural resources when released, in terms of impacts to wildlife, smothering of habitats, and oiling of amenity beaches.” Though specific cargo lists of these ATBs are not made public, the US Coast Guard incident report regarding the Nathan E. Stewart’s misadventure showed it was carrying lube oil, one of the most persistent petroleum products, as well as diesel, which, depending on the grade, can be highly problematic. The recent spill in English Bay was of highly toxic Bunker C fuel oil—an estimated 2800 litres (about 2 tonnes). Globs of the oil have been found on beaches 12 kilometres from the spill site. Obermeyer says a survey of the waiver-holding ATBs indicated “none of them carry bunker C. They only carry refined petroleum products.” Lee fears the ATB traffic could be acting as a “placeholder” for the federal Conservative’s tanker plans for this coast. “By allowing these tankers it keeps the precedent alive that tankers are normal on this coast.” He’s also become disillusioned with both Transport Canada and the Pacific Pilot Authority, seeing them as apologists for the barge-tanker traffic. In a new video produced by PacificWild’s Ian McCallister, Lee suggests, “There is a very simple solution to this. Kirby is taking the cheap way out to use the Inside Passage…these fuel deliveries need to travel offshore with a tanker. We need to get these tankers out of the British Columbia Inside Passage, offshore like all the rest of the tankers.” Leslie Campbell is the editor of Focus Magazine.

March 2015 Living with wildlife can be a community-building project. Oak Bay chose a different path. READING OAK BAY’S REQUEST FRO PROPOSAL for the contractor that will kill up to 25 deer, one gets a glimpse of the difficulties envisioned. Besides the required covered truck, steel-toed boots, smart phone, and data plan, the RFP warns applicants in bold: “Experience dealing with angry, aggressive or hostile people an asset.” The successful contractor, who can earn a maximum of $600/deer or $15,000, must set and bait each trap in the evenings through March 15. Before first daylight, any trapped animals must be “dispatched” with two contractors present. “The first contractor will collapse the trap while the second contractor puts their full body weight on top of the deer and collapsed trap, then holds the head still while the first contractor dispatches the deer quickly and humanely using the bolt gun.” If that doesn’t work, reshooting is advised; if another misfire occurs, the contractor is advised to reload “or utilize exsanguination.” A black plastic bag must be used to cover the head of the dead animal, which must be “under cover and in the back of the truck, away from public view and be bled within 15 minutes of euthanasia [sic], to reduce meat spoilage.” There are more instructions about getting to the butcher on time—within no more than an hour from killing—and transporting the entrails to the Hartland Landfill. There’s no guarantee the contractor will be able to kill 25 animals. The deer in Oak Bay are not going hungry so may decline the opportunity of dinner in a cage. And whatever number is killed, a portion of them will likely be males. As wildlife biologist Rick Page explained to me, males do not stay put—they have been tracked moving from Esquimalt to Queenswood in Saanich. Which means that any males trapped and “dispatched” may well have nothing to do with Oak Bay’s munched tulips. Killing them will do little to reduce Oak Bay’s resident deer population. No one knows what Oak Bay’s deer population really is, but, Page says, the deer population is not out of ecological balance yet. “If the population is 200 [likely the upper limit] and they remove 25, no one will notice any difference at all.” Some plants will still be eaten; some deer will still be injured or killed by car accidents. And those aggressive deer Mayor Jensen talks about? Chances are they’ll elude the traps. And chances are the community will still be in an uproar, especially in the lead up to next year’s cull. The mayor says “population reduction is a multiyear undertaking.” Former mayoral candidate Cairine Green says she’s never experienced such a divisive issue through her nine years on North Saanich and Oak Bay councils. The pages of letters in the Oak Bay News also attest to the divided community. The BC SPCA has condemned the cull, expressing concerns about the humaneness of the method and noting that, “Using lethal control measures in Oak Bay is not a sustainable or evidence-based option for managing deer in particular in this area.” THAT OAK BAY WOULD RISK community cohesion along with its reputation as a paradisiacal seaside village full of amiable people and charming gardens for the sake of killing 25 deer is a surprising turn of events. While the mayor trumpets “public safety” as the main motivation for killing deer, damaged gardens constitute the main type of complaint that has driven the whole process, at least in the urban areas of the CRD. Such complaints, along with those about farm damage in rural areas, led the CRD to develop a Regional Deer Management Strategy, a strategy that allows a lethal cull, but also suggests many other pre-cull remedies. Jensen and his council could have chosen to simply put more energy into public education and traffic and fencing projects to address complaints. Biologist Page notes, “There’s always going to be some deer here. Residents’ only option if they want to have a pristine garden is a fence and people need to get used to that.” Biologist Gayle Hesse, author of the Province’s foundational ungulate management treatise, concurs: “Fencing is the only viable option when damage cannot be tolerated.” Traffic accidents are also brought up to justify the cull, sometimes citing public safety, other times pointing out what a cruel fate it is for deer. Oak Bay had 13 deer-involved collisions in 2013 (ICBC), out of a total fatality count of 40. In 2014, according to Oak Bay public works department spreadsheets, total deaths had slipped to 37, with 17 of them being vehicle related. Three were fence-related, one was killed in battle, one by an arrow. A full 15 fall into the “unknown” category. It might be worth pointing out that deer—like human beings—die of old age and disease. We may not like finding a sick or dead animal in our back yard, but it hardly seems a valid reason to go out and kill more of them. As for the traffic issues, speed-reduction campaigns can work wonders. Over a four-year period, Ottawa reduced its 344 deer-related collisions by over one-third (to 214) through an award-winning “Speeding Costs You Deerly” campaign. In answer to Oak Bay’s assurances that it “strengthened its signage” to reduce deer traffic fatalities, Oak Bay residents Kerri Ward and Kristy Kilpatrick recently wrote to Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Steve Thomson: “Oak Bay has made no attempts at speed reduction or installing appropriate deer signage in the municipality. A total of six small and ineffective signs were installed in two locations where car/deer collisions are most frequent…The speed in these areas continues to be 50 kmh.” Ward and Kilpatrick’s letter also alludes to a more fundamental omission: “No survey of Oak Bay residents for their opinions or values on appropriate urban deer management has ever been conducted.” They point out that the Province itself recommended that “a survey of public opinion must be conducted.” But the most glaring failure of Oak Bay’s approach, say many, is the ignorance around the deer themselves. Sara Dubois, chief scientific officer of the BC SPCA, says, “It’s the biggest missing piece. We need to know where the deer are, why they’re there, what they are being fed, and why incidents happen.” She notes there’s a university with keen researchers and students right in Oak Bay’s back yard. The amount of money the CRD has spent without really learning anything about the deer astounds her. (The CRD’s budget is $220,000 not including staff time. Oak Bay’s budget is $25,000.) As Mayor Jensen himself admitted in October, “the CRD pilot program that Oak Bay has embarked on is truly uncharted waters.” THE PROCESS THAT LED TO the CRD’s Regional Deer Management Strategy began in 2011 and has been controversial ever since. In a June 2013 letter, Craig Daniells, chief executive officer of the BC SPCA, wrote of the CRD’s formation of a Citizens Advisory Committee, “having been a part of the process, the BC SPCA found the experience to be fraught with difficulties…including a lack of representation, individual bias, lack of attendance, as well as several committee resignations.” The two members who resigned from the Citizens Advisory Group (CAG)—museum consultant and archivist Kerri Ward and lawyer Robin Bassett—cited an “irretrievably flawed” process that relied on anecdotal evidence rather than science. A letter elaborating some of their complaints also noted lack of independence: “It was established early in the process that the CAG members were not allowed to either meet with or speak to the expert panel except through the offices of the CRD.” In an email, Ward told me, “there was never any discussions of science, research etc; every meeting was micro-managed by the facilitator.” The limitations of the process were reflected in the report which is prefaced by a laughably defensive preamble. Describing the issue as “emotional, economic and politically-charged” with “a lack of scientific evidence,” CAG Chair Jocelyn Skrlac and Vice Chair Robert Moody wrote: “It is, however, important to note that ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘convincing evidence’ are not antonyms, nor does ‘anecdotal’ mean ‘unscientific.’ Sometimes anecdotal evidence is not only all that is available (as in this case), but it can often be enough evidence to support a decision.” The anecdotes relied upon, along with provincial government-supplied information, led them to recommend mitigation measures as well as “population reduction measures” that included “capture and euthanize.” (Orwellian as it sounds, executing a healthy wild animal is called “euthanasia” in BC and CRD reports.) The Advisory Group rejected immunocontraception, an option which could potentially satisfy the goal of reducing the deer population without a lethal cull—and therefore avoid the intense community discord that culls everywhere seem to inspire. The CAG seemed to feel there were too many unknowns about it. But the same could be said of a lethal cull—or indeed the local deer population. Right here in Victoria there are at least a couple of biologists who know a lot about one immunocontraceptive. Ten years ago, Sidney-based biologist Mark Fraker purchased the patent rights for Spayvac for use on wildlife. Spayvac was developed at Dalhousie University in the early 1990s to treat seals. It uses pig protein to create antibodies that prevent sperm from binding to the female’s eggs. Similar contraceptive vaccines are used on wild horses in the US and zoo animals. The antibodies, being a natural product of all animals, has no environmental impact say proponents. In BC, case-by-case approval is needed to use Spayvac, says Page who is an advocate for Spayvac. “It’s only manufactured on demand and we haven’t asked the company to make it, but we have no reason to believe they wouldn’t.” He estimates a six-month to one-year lead time to obtain it, due mostly to regulatory hurdles. Page says, “For as little as $10,000 we can get started, but we prefer to have $25,000 for a pilot project.” The Province’s main deer management document (British Columbia Urban Ungulate Conflict Analysis, by Gayle Hesse, 2010) noted: “The cost of the immunocontraceptive vaccine itself is relatively inexpensive…The main cost of a fertility control project is associated with the cost of capture and vaccine administration.” Provincial Wildlife Veterinarian Helen Schwantje has estimated the drug cost to keep does infertile for six years at $200 each. Add in the trapping or tranquilizing costs and it comes in about the same price as the trap and kill method. Page says Schwantje was supportive of earlier experiments. She needs to apply to Health Canada for what’s called an “emergency drug release—a single piece of paper that goes to Ottawa which would rubber stamp it…A proper study is a more elaborate process.” On James Island off Sidney, Spayvac was used on the overly abundant fallow deer. Page says it was 100 percent effective—meaning the injected deer were still sporting the antibodies that prevent pregnancy after five years. No fawns were born over a six-year period. An experiment in Maple Ridge with 10 does proved similarly successful. Mark Fraker described it this way to the Victoria News in 2013: “Five years down the road after they were treated, there was only one born instead of 60…a 50-times reduction in fawns being born.” Schwantje and the CRD have suggested for an immunocontraceptive program to be effective, 70-90 percent of the does in the area must be given the drug—a challenging task. But Page says the math doesn’t bear that out—and the same logic should apply to a cull. It all depends on what your goal is, from eradication to stabilization. Any less fertility in does, which around Victoria tend to produce annual twins, should be helpful. (Killing bucks has little impact.) Page also notes the infertile does still occupy their space in that setting, so other deer will stay away. Sara Dubois of the SPCA agrees, saying contraception “won’t create a sink population,” unlike a cull which results in other deer moving into the territory. Page, who has worked for the Province in the past, thinks it prefers lethal culling because it’s considered “an operational method, not an experimental method...It’s supposed to just work.” But he adds, “Nothing—when you muck with the environment—just works.” And culling, he says, usually doesn’t work out very well at all. Dubois agrees, citing culls in Kimberley and Cranbrook. One reason for the ineffectiveness of culls is that deer are smart and won’t enter the traps after being exposed to them for a season or two. In the US—where urban deer herds are three to ten times higher than local populations—the next step after the trap and bolt gun method fails, says Page “is usually sharp shooters, professional hunters that go through the city at night.” Understandably, that comes with its own problems and opposition. A big advantage of a contraception program, in Page’s mind, is that the deer are tagged—allowing for valuable information gathering which aids in future deer management. Dubois is in favour of anything that produces good quality information. An adjunct professor at UBC’s Animal Welfare Program, her PhD work focused on public values and attitudes towards wildlife and the effectiveness of wildlife policy (she also managed the SPCA’s Wild ARC in Metchosin for four years). She says good information allows you to track down the cause of the problem and target individual trouble-makers—whether they are black bears, wolves, coyotes or deer—or, though she doesn’t say it, humans. Dubois mentions Winnipeg researcher Erin McCance’s fascinating research using GPS collars to map deer movements. She found virtually 100 percent of the human-deer conflict and many deer-vehicle collisions, could be traced to artificial feeding of deer. Educating the people feeding deer helped solve some of the problem; $500 fines help deter others. Oak Bay’s fines have recently been increased to $300 for a first offense, and $500 for subsequent ones. No fines have been issued though Dubois tells me she knows some Oak Bay residents regularly buy deer feed from local merchants. AS OAK BAY CARRIES OUT ITS LETHAL CULL, a small New York State community is carrying out an innovative immunocontraception program with the aim of reducing its deer population by 35-45 percent over 5 years. Only two square miles in area, up to 120 deer live in Hastings-on-Hudson, along with its 7900 human inhabitants. Traffic accidents involving deer were increasing, as was damage to gardens and the native fauna in parks. Mayor Peter Swiderski first assumed a “net and bolt” cull was the answer to community deer woes. But after listening to residents, he realized, “With captive bolt, there would have been a polarizing battle every year that wouldn’t have done the village any good.” At a public meeting on the topic he explained: “A cull in a community as dense as ours and as culturally averse to a cull as ours is just not an option. So we put that to bed and are now going to engage in an immunocontraception project.” To assist in “the first birth-control study of a free-roaming deer population in an open, suburban area in the US,” the community engaged Allen Rutberg, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University. Rutberg doesn’t like culls for two reasons: “netting and bolting free range deer is at best difficult to carry out humanely and at worst is brutally cruel…It also stirs up personal animosity among members of the community.” In the program’s second year now, the community is being aided by volunteer wildlife vets and the Humane Society to dart female deer with a tranquilizer shot from a dart gun from about 30 feet, then inject them with a contraceptive, and tag them. A host of community volunteers helps in other ways. They aim to get close to 80 percent of the does. It has not been without its challenges. Last year, its inaugural, the project was hindered by deep snow and only eight does were immunized. (Legally, the drugs can only be given there during February and March.) Mayor Swiderski estimated it would cost about $10,000 in the first year, and about half that in subsequent years. He sees it as a good investment. He told All Animals magazine last spring, “If it works, we will have done a great thing, not only for us but for a thousand other communities. If it doesn’t work, we won’t have killed any creature, we won’t have split the community, and we’ll also know it doesn’t work in this kind of community.” Rutberg, in a thoughtful essay about how killing programs cause strife for communities, contrasted them to his recent experience in Hastings-on-Hudson: “Nearly three dozen people showed up at an organizational meeting last month to volunteer to help track deer, secure darting sites, stock feeders with bait, and measure deer impacts. The community set up a website for reporting deer observations, and a local high school student wrote a program to display the observations on a map….[The project] opens a door to learning and transforming attitudes about nature, and building appreciation for wildlife.” I don’t relate Hasting’s story to suggest deer contraception is the answer for CRD communities. Hasting’s situation may be different in key ways from Oak Bay’s. We have so little solid information here we don’t even know if we have a problem, except for the strife. What we do know, says Sara Dubois, is that “A real opportunity for leadership was lost by Oak Bay.” Editor Leslie Campbell sees the deer question as a fascinating way to explore our relationship to other animals. She has a high fence around her vegetable garden.

A pre-COVID-19 class at Iyengar Yoga Centre of Victoria THE NON-PROFIT Iyengar Centre of Victoria has been a remarkable success story. Since its inception in 1976, it has grown to offer over 40 classes weekly to 450 people. For the last 20 years, it has done so from beautiful, large studios on upper Fort Street. Based on the teachings of Yoga Master B.K.S Iyengar, the Centre takes great pride in its rigorously trained teachers and offering one of the most comprehensive programs of Iyengar Yoga in North America. Of course, that has all changed, at least for a while. On March 16, the centre shut down in response to the pandemic and needed public health actions. General Manager Wendy Boyer tells me that the closure meant an immediate loss of revenue of $49,000. “March is a big month for us. We had to cancel classes plus the annual five-day workshop with Jawahar, our teacher from Mumbai, who attracts about 70 students.” Iyengar Yoga Centre’s General Manager Wendy Boyer Boyer, who has taught since 1996, tells me they sent out an “appeal letter” after closing, reminding students that as a registered charity, their class fees could be donated for a tax receipt. “We received overwhelming support,” says Boyer. Within hours of the appeal, about 50 had responded and so far, people have donated about $10,000. Still the closure meant that Iyengar’s 21 teachers, all contractors, along with four part-time staff, were out of work. Right now only Boyer and office manager Britta Poisson are still working (remotely). They have been very busy. Says Boyer, “Britta and I are still working on admin—mostly refunding to the students because of cancellations. Also connecting through our online channels: e-bulletins, website blog, Facebook and Instagram.” And, like so many businesses, the Iyengar team has been figuring out how to host classes on line. They will launch the first couple of classes, live-streaming from the teachers’ homes, at the beginning of May. Fortunately, Boyer enjoys learning new technology so is excited. But she recognizes that experimenting with technology is a big step for others. “It takes time to transition to the virtual world.” So they will start slow and evolve from there. Boyer feels that even when the studio opens, some may choose to continue with online classes, so it’s a good investment of their time. Boyer tells me the online classes will be very affordable, adding, “We just basically want to help people keep up their yoga practice, to communicate the Iyengar method and philosophy, and help them get set up at home.” The teachers will show students what props they can use at home—for instance, books for blocks— “the way we used to do it,” notes Boyer, before things got so professionalized. “That said the Centre is eager to open our studio as soon as it is deemed safe to do so.” Boyer says they are looking into the federal government’s wage subsidy; they are also hoping to see some relief on the rent front, but so far have only been offered “deferral” by their landlord. Because of the likely need for some degree of physical distancing into future months, Boyer is thinking through ways they could accomplish that—such as having smaller class sizes, asking people to bring their own props and gear, and avoiding use of the change rooms. The first online classes will be Tuesday and Friday from 10 -11:30am with Ann Kilbertus and Ty Chandler. Check the website for how to register. Leslie Campbell is Focus’ editor.

This is the first in a series of interviews with Victoria businesses and non-profits about how they are weathering the pandemic. DESPITE STEPHEN WHITE’S WELL-ROUNDED, long-time experience working in arts organizations, he’s never experienced anything quite like the shake-up caused by COVID-19. For 20 years, White has headed up Dance Victoria, a dynamic non-profit which brings world-renowned dance companies to Victoria. The organization also supports the development of dance through commissioning new works, puts on a 10-day dance festival offering free dance classes, and rents out dance studios. Dance Victoria’s Executive Producer Stephen White The five-member management team at Dance Victoria has been holding daily morning meetings, online of course, for the past couple of weeks. To begin with, White tells me, the focus was primarily to make sure everyone in the organization was safe through the end of June. “Our General Manager Bernard Sauvé has been building the budget so we can retain all core staff.” While the last performance of the season, Ballet BC’s Romeo & Juliet in mid-March, was cancelled, virtually all those who had bought tickets donated the value back to the company, for which White and crew feel incredibly grateful. His greatest anxiety is around Victoria’s small business community. “We’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of sponsorship from the small business community—they’re having the biggest struggle now so our sponsorship campaign is up in the air,” says White. “We’ve never really been successful at getting large corporations as sponsors, so we’ve always been really happy to have so many small businesses as cash sponsors.” Small business sponsorships have also helped grow DV’s audience. Tickets provided to sponsors have enabled business owners to invite clients and friends. “Once people have been introduced to live dance performance, they’re likely to return—so it’s been an effective audience development tool,” says White. DV also relies on donations. With the volatility in the market, White can’t help but wonder if those who rely on investment income will as readily donate to Dance Victoria in the future. Such individual patrons and small business sponsorship together normally constitute about 25-30 percent of DV’s revenues. About 50 percent comes from ticket sales; 15 percent from government; and another 10 percent from studio rentals—which have gone to zero since the “stay home” orders. “But when one’s back is against the wall,” notes White, “it’s time to innovate…it’s causing all of us to rethink our business models,” which he feels is a good exercise. White admits to concern over a possible “residual reluctance for people to gather in large groups, even after we get a green light and restrictions are lifted.” Yet he still feels the work DV has done to build an audience for dance in Victoria will work in their favour. “I am feeling really grateful for the strength of that community, how engaged they are with dance,” says White, noting that visiting dance companies regularly express how impressed they are with the engagement of the local audience. White and crew are now focusing on their next season, feeling some relief that it doesn’t start till November (with Compagnie Hervé Koubi). However, one of DV’s major fundraisers, Cherish: A Glamorous Evening of Fashion and Philanthropy, happens in October. Last year it provided $80,000 in revenues shared equally with Victoria Women’s Transition Centre. Because it relied on scores of cash donations from small businesses, plus silent auction contributions, the team is re-thinking options. Says White, “We are wondering how we can return the loyalty of the small business community.” Leslie Campbell is the founding editor of Focus—a 32-year-old small business and media outlet in Victoria. She, too, has never experienced anything like this pandemic.