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Sept/Oct 2016.2

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  1. The so-called vandals make a reasonable point. Despite dire warnings for decades, we are still behaving and emitting like our convenience trumps a livable planet. A SELF-PROFESSED GROUP OF CLIMATE ACTIVISTS calling itself “the Tyre Extinguishers” (the movement started in the UK) recently let the air out of the tires of 34 SUVs in Victoria and Oak Bay. As demonstrations go, it was a small but effective example of asymmetrical protest. The tiny investment of effort by little-known protesters yielded a full-on media-amplified eruption of exposure. Well-heeled Tweed Curtain apologists expressed affront, outrage, umbrage, dudgeon and pompous, Colonel Blimp-like huffing about the imminent collapse of civil society. Yes, that’s a long list of overblown adjectives but purple-faced hyperbole deserves absurd overstatement in ironic response. The local media dutifully and predictably joined the pile-on, pontificating on the environmental fifth column—precisely the response for which the shrewd provocateurs doubtless hoped. Op-eds lectured on the folly of over-reacting to exaggerated global warming claims. These predictable nostrums come from retired fossil fuel industry executives, former bureaucrats upset by the disorderly conduct of disrespectful protesters, business leaders warning of the perils that the homeless, the marginalized and the damaged pose to the economy and so on. The Extinguishers were denounced as vandals. Note that word’s origin in the imperialist Roman slave state which got rich plundering its neighbours. Those resisting Caesar’s colonial plundering—the Vandals, for example—became the verbal antithesis of “civilization”. Next the Extinguishers were labelled “creatures of the night,” a delicious stereotype cribbed directly from Hollywood B-list horror movies about vampires, werewolves and other soul-stealing apparitions from the Dark Side. Um, some perspective please. This was not Friday the 13th in Uplands. The incident involved letting the air out of a few tires. And the protesters even politely left a flyer explaining the political rationale behind their deliberate and symbolic inconveniencing of a few unlucky and randomly chosen SUV drivers. As far as “vandalism” goes, letting the air out of 34 car tires hardly ranks with the angry and disaffected folk going around actually slashing tires, of which there have been hundreds of examples over the last five years, sometimes a hundred in one night. Slash 70 tires in Oaklands and it’s “Meh, urban life.” Let the air out of a few tires in Oak Bay and it’s “Light your hair on fire, civilization is threatened!” But wait, somebody lets the air out of your tire, you get it re-inflated and that’s that. Somebody sticks a knife in the sidewall and you are buying new tires at $150 a pop. So there’s “vandalism,” and there’s “vandalism.” It’s probably a good idea for serious media to try to distinguish between the two forms of mischief. However misguided or misplaced one might consider the Tyre Extinguishers tactic, this modest stealth protest did not represent the Night of the Living Dead experience invoked by terms like “creatures of the night.” What it did represent was effective (if expedient) street theatre. Targeting the stereotyped demographic of Oak Bay certainly got more media traction than targeting Gulf Islanders would have. (An aside: vehicle registration statistics indicate that Gulf Islanders actually own and drive more SUVs than folks who live in Oak Bay.) The deflation got people actually talking about something that our mainstream media generally doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about—the negative impact of consumers’ personal choices upon their own lives. Want to address those responsible for global warming? Look in the mirror. Single use plastics? Mirror. Food mono-cultures? Mirror. Factory farming? Mirror. Traffic congestion and urban sprawl? Mirror. Individual consumers buy and burn fossil fuels by the billions of litres every year. That’s what enables, empowers and enriches the big oil companies which sell them. The revenue that provides big oil with immense profits—that’s our money, transferred to them in exchange for fossil fuels so that we can burn them in our over-sized, overweight cars. In this case, the activists (clearly on the right side of history) drew attention to the continuing decision by consumers to drive heavier, aerodynamically inefficient SUVs (gas guzzlers, the protesters labelled them), a decision which is having a disproportionate impact upon the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming. The media’s aversion to finger-wagging about this choice is understandable considering how important automotive advertising revenue is to its beleaguered bottom line. SUVs and pickups are 70 percent of the auto market Before I go further, however, I should confess that I, too, am part of the consumer problem. I drive an SUV. But wait, I protest (or rationalize depending upon point of view). Mine is but a small four cylinder job, I need it for work because I travel frequently on rough roads and require the high clearance. Not to mention being able (important at age 75), to sleep in the back, dry and snug, and thus avoid the inconvenience of setting up and breaking down camp in the pouring rain. And what’s more, I only drive the darn thing when necessary, fewer than 5,000 kilometres last year when the Canadian average is 15,000. So even though my vehicle pollutes more than a compact sedan, it actually pollutes less because I drive it much less. Or so my rationalizations go. These are, indeed, all the standard rationalizations for the fallacy of Incremental Thinking. The fallacy is that since one’s personal impact is tiny compared to the whole, it is therefore justifiable. In fact, it’s the combination of many such rationalizations that create the monstrous problem we now face. Apologists for the status quo will argue that BC only contributes about two percent of Canada’s fossil fuel production so it’s not that harmful. This is like arguing that it’s ok to throw gasoline on your neighbour’s burning house by the cupful because the arsonists are pouring it on by the barrel. The problem, of course, is not just the “them” of Oak Bay SUV drivers who drew the sanctimonious wrath of the Tyre Extinguishers. The problem is the larger “us” whose addiction to convenience drives the decisions. We are the problem because we like SUVs. We buy a lot of them. We have been buying more and more of them in larger and larger models, a process to which the profitability of both the auto industry and the media is closely tied. Auto manufacturers and retailers annually spend more than $10 billion a year on advertising—that’s about 25 percent of the total spent on advertising. And those advertisers have been highly effective. They have helped shift the market away from less expensive sedans. Ten years ago one in five new cars sold was a passenger sedan. By 2022, the market share for the more fuel efficient sedans had declined to one in 10. SUVs and pickup trucks now comprise about 70 percent of the entire auto market. In 1975, smaller car-sized SUVs were 0.1 percent of the market. By 2021, their market share had grown 1,700 fold. Today these SUVs command 11.7 percent. But larger SUVs, designated by the auto market statisticians as Truck SUVs, had expanded market share over the same period from 1.7 percent to 41.4 percent. By comparison, pickup trucks market share is now 17.1 percent. Auto manufacturers responded to this consumer shift enthusiastically. In 2008, General Motors ceased production of eight sedan model lines. Ford Motors had plans to shift 90 percent of its North American production liners to SUVs by 2020. According to the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency, SUV manufacturing now comprises 50 percent of all new vehicles produced. And SUVs have been getting bigger and heavier in the process of responding to rising consumer demand. In 1975, the average sedan outweighed the average pickup truck by 20 kilograms. By 2020, the average pickup and truck-size SUV outweighed the average sedan by more than 700 kilograms. Pickup trucks are even worse when isolated from the averages—they have increased in weight by almost 28 percent. At the same time, the weight of the diminishing numbers of passenger sedans has actually declined by 14 percent. Buy an SUV instead of a compact sedan and the average weight differential is now 42 percent. The heavier and less aerodynamic the vehicle, the more energy it takes to move it. And that’s a big part of the emerging problem consumers pose. Because, while there have been gains in improved fuel efficiency for internal combustion engines, they’ve been dramatically offset by the inefficiencies of weight and aerodynamic design. When business reporters at Associated Press compared the top 10 SUVs with comparable passenger sedans, the SUVs were 14 percent worse in fuel consumption on average. For example, the most fuel-efficient SUV tested in 2019 was 18 percent worse in fuel consumption than the most efficient sedan. The research compared the Honda CR-V compact SUV with a Honda Civic with the identical power train. The SUV was at least 20 percent less efficient than the sedan; on the highway, where wind resistance at higher sustained speed is more of a factor, the SUV was 24 percent less fuel efficient. A similar comparative study of the Toyota Highlander and the Camry sedan with the same engine found that the sedan had a 42 percent advantage in fuel efficiency. This is worth remembering when clamour about the rising pump cost of gasoline and the burden of carbon taxes starts affecting politicians’ judgment. If we drive an SUV or a pickup, we chose the higher cost of fuel to move it. Transportation is the single biggest emissions source So, the Extinguishers have a valid point when they make SUV drivers—like me—the target of their complaints about global warming and greenhouse gas emissions which, in BC, have increased by 20 percent since 1996. Transportation is still the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in BC at 38 percent of the total of 12.8 megatons of carbon dioxide emitted in 2020. That’s larger than the emissions from the next two sources on the list—the oil and gas industry and the manufacturing and heavy industrial sectors—combined. According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, the typical passenger car produces 4.6 metric tons of pollution in a typical year of driving. Burn four litres of gas, your car will pump 8,887 grams of carbon into the atmosphere. Put another way, every kilometre driven sends more than 250 grams of carbon out the tail pipe. So, multiply that by the 3.7 million passenger vehicles in BC—and consider that based on statistics compiled by the Insurance Company of BC showing that the rate of vehicle ownership in the Capital Regional District is growing twice as fast as the human population—one can see that the Extinguishers have a pretty solid point. On average, car owners in BC drive a cumulative total of about 48.5 billion kilometres per year. Multiply that by 250 grams of carbon per kilometre and the simple calculator on my iPad gives me a consistent error message—too big to calculate, In denouncing the protesters, the usual and predictable arguments for driving SUVs were trotted out. More headroom and leg space for passengers; greater safety for passengers in case of a collision; winter driving; off road driving; more cargo space. All these arguments have been addressed by researchers and found wanting. They are based for the most part in the magical thinking of incrementalism and its rationalizations. Yes, there can certainly be more seating room for passengers in large SUVs compared to compact and sub-compact passenger sedans. But this is comparing apples with oranges. Compare larger sedans with SUVs and the seating advantage dwindles. Safety for SUV passengers proves to be a myth. The laws of physics dictate that people driving a heavy vehicle will indeed be safer in a collision—with a lighter vehicle. However, if 70 percent of the market is buying heavier vehicles, that supposed safety advantage evaporates. Drivers who think they are safer in an SUV are simply gambling that they’ll collide with a lighter compact sedan. It’s a self-interested decision to increase their perceived safety by sacrificing the safety of passengers of the lighter car. Yet the odds don’t support the decision. The odds are that in any collision they’ll most likely collide with another SUV or with a pickup truck. And new research indisputably shows that any safety advantage in a collision is offset by the propensity of higher rates of death and injury in SUV rollovers. A study of the accident records of 72,000 children recently concluded that the higher risk of roll-over offsets any potential benefit from the size and weight of SUVs in accidents. Contrary to widely-held public perception, SUVs do not contribute to greater safety for child passengers compared to sedans and, indeed, SUVs are twice as likely to roll over in accident because of their higher centre of gravity. A few car owners in Oak Bay and Victoria were indeed inconvenienced by having their tires deflated. No dispute there. But once again, it’s a proportional issue. The inconvenience of having to call BCAA to have tires re-inflated seems minor in comparison to the inconvenience that SUVs pose to the 1,900 people in BC who will die prematurely of respiratory failure this year (and next year, and the year after that) because of exposure to the aerosolized fine particulates emitted in car exhaust. SUV’s, remember, produce more of this pollution than smaller sedans. The typical passenger car averages about 4.6 metric tons of carbon emissions in a year of driving. There are more than 205,000 of them registered in the Capital Regional District, many of them larger, heavier, less fuel-efficient SUVs. On average, we drivers emit almost a million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. We were warned—decades ago If, as the United Nations science agency studying global warming warns, we are running out of time to avoid a climate tipping point beyond which catastrophic effects will be inevitable, the Tyre Extinguishers have a reasonable point, however it might irritatingly contradict our desires for convenience and the magical thinking by which we seek somebody else to blame for our self-inflicted dilemma. Almost 50 years ago, when I first started writing about this and the threat seemed almost unimaginably distant, scientists were asked by a federal government committee about the magnitude of the threat. They were informed in an official report that only thermo-nuclear world war exceeded the danger posed by global warming. Over that half century, politicians did little. Politicians did little because we, from whom their political power is delegated, didn’t want to do what would inconvenience or annoy us. Now, with Europe in flames, disastrous floods and fires across North America, droughts afflicting the world’s prime food producing regions, and thousands dying in heat domes, mega storms and attempts to flee stricken regions, we are told that time is running out. Instead of buckling down to the grim task of self-sacrifice and changing our behaviour, we cast about for somebody else to blame—big business, big oil, politicians. The truth, of course, is that we and our demands for convenience, we’re the ones most to blame. We could stop our denialism and scapegoating. We could swap our super-sized SUVs for smaller hybrids and electric vehicles. We could stop whining about gasoline prices and support higher gas taxes to incentivize that switch. We could pressure politicians to provide greater financial incentives to switch from big, heavy SUVs to less polluting vehicles. We could demand investments, even if up-front costs seem high today, in clean and efficient mass public transit that will seem cheap tomorrow—like reestablishing rail on existing public rights-of-way down Vancouver Island that could link every community centre from Campbell River to Victoria. The Tyre Extinguishers, however irritating their tactics might be at the individual level, have a reasonable point. They are not the real problem. We are. See more at https://www.tyreextinguishers.com. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  2. While it needs re-invention, the Royal BC Museum serves critical purposes and needs a safe, secure physical facility. OUR ON-GOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENT with the dysfunctional Royal British Columbia Museum appears to now be entering its Schrödinger’s Cat phase—simultaneously dead and alive as a provincial government seeking to be all things to all people dithers over political optics. The problem for government is that the museum is a mess and whatever it does to fix the situation now seems destined to give affront to someone: First Nations who see it as a racialized repository of stolen artifacts; folks who think it a memory lane where they can wax nostalgic about a golden past that never was; business folk who equate museum with mini-Disneyland theme park; scientists and historians trying to deal with government attempts to commercialize and monetize public collections of specimens and archival documents; and, of course, cynical opposition politicians see it as a convenient cudgel with which to belabour government. Organizationally, the RCBM has undoubtedly been a political trainwreck. The CEO hired in 2012 resigned in early 2021 after an independent study denounced it as a “toxic workplace characterized by a culture of fear and distrust.” This evaluation was itself triggered by the resignation in 2020 of Lucy Bell, a respected and well-liked member of the Haida First Nation and the museum’s head of Indigenous collections and repatriation, a program for returning artifacts to their rightful owners as part of the reconciliation process. She said she’d been subjected to continuous discrimination, white privilege, bullying and micro-aggressions from senior managers. Many museum staff signed a letter supporting her view. Next, Bell’s successor, Troy Sebastien, a Ktunaxa, bailed as Indigenous curator when his contract expired in 2021, describing the place as “a bastion of white supremacy.” “I am happy to leave that wicked place behind,” he posted to social media at the time. Then there’s the muddle of sorting out a perceived mission for the museum to reflect the post-colonial world that will—hopefully—emerge over the rest of the 21st Century. And finally, this whole ramshackle problem is taking place in structurally unsuitable buildings. They pose a substantial seismic danger to the public, to museum staff and, equally important, to the irreplaceable collections of archival documents, art works, specimens and historic objects in the custody, whether temporary or permanent, of the museum. Frankly, while the physical plant tends to be listed after all the other problems, it should be given priority because if there’s a failure there, all the other complaints will be moot. Let’s get one thing straight, though, this museum is a mess precisely because of government’s past political meddling—that includes the very same opposition politicians howling now about government ineptitude. Opposition leader Kevin Falcon was deputy premier and finance minister in Liberal governments that over 15 years allowed the backlog in filing archival records to reach a mind-boggling 33,000 boxes of documents. That shoddy oversight was amplified by imposition of inappropriate goals and expectations, chronic underfunding and crass deployment of the museum as a marketing tool for tourism, operating on a revenue-generating business model rather than something central to the province’s cultural identity. These chickens finally came home to roost in the form of internal meltdowns over direction and purpose, accusations of colonial attitudes, and systemic institutionalized racism that ran counter to government’s vaunted post-colonial reconciliation objectives. Thus, the plan announced in mid-May was for an ambitious reset—to rebuild the whole decrepit institution from the ground up. The Royal BC Museum, Victoria, 2006. Photo by Ryan Bushby (HighInBC), Creative Commons First, to house it in a seismically safe $789 million complex that addressed the need for reimagined public exhibits in the capital’s core. Second, to create safe storage for preservation and management of more than seven million objects including 110,000 boxes of documents, 180,000 historic maps and five million photographs. Third, to provide facilities necessary for state-of-the-art management of its science collections from fossils to fleas and for the research they generate to which they are essential. But then soon-to-depart Premier John Horgan abruptly announced on June 22 that he was slamming the brakes on this long overdue plan to demolish and replace seismically unsound structures which official studies acknowledge put the public, museum staff and the collections themselves at serious risk should there be a major earthquake in or near the capital. “I always try to act in the best interests of British Columbians,” the premier said, wearing his best “mea culpa” expression from the public relations apology playbook. “That involves listening. That also means taking responsibility when you make the wrong call.” Sorry to be the ray of sunshine at this expedient political self-flagellation fest, but the wrong call was cancelling a vitally important renewal. And it was made for entirely the wrong reasons—to appease, deflect and defuse political criticism. Yes, First Nations complained that they weren’t adequately consulted in the runup to the decision to rebuild the museum. Fair enough. Further, broader consultation on how to repatriate or display artifacts is clearly necessary. But planning how First Nations needs should be met in a redesigned museum has nothing to do with replacing the structurally unsafe buildings in which those objectives cannot be met. This is like saying we won’t replace the falling-down house until we agree on where to put the furniture. So, First Nations complaints alone weren’t the only thing behind Horgan’s sudden reset of his reset. Nope, this was a largely political decision triggered by fear of the zero-sum nay-sayers who emerge from the woodwork in droves every time there’s a prospect of some major public investment in culture. The zero-sum fallacy The zero-sum fallacy comes to us from game theory. It sees situations in which one person’s gain is balanced by another person’s loss; spending on one thing necessitates not spending on something else. If everything is perceived as a win-loss equation, then there can’t be a win-win outcome. But as every government that runs a deficit today against expanding surpluses tomorrow well understands, zero-sum thinking is based in a fallacy. Yet we hear it all the time: “Not one penny for a new concert hall for the symphony as long as there are homeless people!” the sanctimonious argument usually goes, the add-on assumption being that music is a frill that poor people don’t care about. Buy people do care, though. Three out of four Canadians attend live performances each year and such performances contribute about $3 billion to national GDP. “Not another dime for writers’ grants as long as people are using food banks!” This argument assumes that literature is a dispensable luxury like chocolates, not a necessity of civilization; that food for the mind is less important than food for the body. “The budget is tight. Reduce spending on frills—cut the school music program (theatre program, art program, creative writing program, classics department etc.)!” Well, we’ve just been through this one in Victoria area schools. And now, right on cue, here is the latest earnest iteration of the zero-sum fallacy: “Spending $789 million on a new Royal British Columbia Museum is a waste of money that could be spent on health care.” Sorry, but this argument is like saying let’s not fix the leaking roof when we can spend that money on travel insurance. This fallacious zero-sum thinking makes it easy for pundits to whip up opposition to any big ticket spending. All that’s required is to characterize the spending as a profligate frill and then juxtapose it with some other urgent need. And so, opportunistic mainland politicians begin diligently flogging their anti-culture, anti-intellectual, anti-tax ideology, obviously seeking favour with what they hope will be some kind of populist libertarian uprising against the reigning New Democrats, not to mention all those entitled folk in Victoria who vote for them. In this zero-sum calculus, money spent on arts and culture represents a subtraction from the health care budget. Well, no, it doesn‘t represent a subtraction, unless you also consider spending on fire-fighting represents a subtraction from funds better spent on the homeless—after all, what use are fire stations to people who don’t have homes? Or that annual homeowner grants are subtractions from medical funding—anyone for transferring those funds to the health budget? Yet our social landscape is rife with this selectively applied simple-minded libertarian nonsense. Olympics and traffic exchanges make $789m sound like a bargain Last time I looked, polling suggested 70 percent of British Columbians, mostly on the mainland, have now decided that spending money on a new museum that injects more than $50 million a year directly into South Vancouver Island’s economy is money wasted. Mind you, the $7 billion price tag of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver—which a subsequent report found neither boosted tourism much overall nor enhanced the international image of Vancouver or Whistler—is proudly held up as a triumph of value for money. And now we’ve got the Province ponying up $260 million to cover the costs of Vancouver hosting a few games in the 2026 World Cup for soccer. Got that? Spend maybe $50 million a game for events that last 90 minutes or so—about one-third the cost of building a new, safe museum complex. So, no, the polling doesn’t prove that this popular dog-in-the-manger anti-museum sentiment is right. Indeed, it’s a reminder that the masses—not to mention we in the media—have a sorry history of being profoundly wrong. Meanwhile, popular approval for $100 million for one exchange that moves traffic jams a few blocks closer to the city core, no problem. Need $1 billion for highway improvements that reduce commuter time by 15 minutes for millworkers who want to live in Nanaimo and work in Campbell River, yay! (The mill has since closed, by the way.) How about $16 billion for a third dam on the Peace River that has since morphed into the most expensive hydroelectric project in Canadian history, is plagued with geo-technical problems, and has been described by a former CEO of BC, Hydro as a gigantic game of Russian roulette? Or the $21.4 billion you and I will now be coughing up to complete the TMX pipeline which will double the export of dilbit from Alberta’s oil sands—not to mention doubling the tanker traffic that will have to carry it to market through the heart of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve. Compared to such projects, all this zero-sum complaining about spending what’s needed to replace an unsafe, inadequate and ill-planned structure that currently houses most of BC’s critical archival history, many of the artifacts in which that history is embodied, and which enables public access to that history, is just profoundly misguided nonsense. All museums need to re-invent themselves—from a secure physical place Yes, there are problems with the museum as an organization. Its internal management culture has been criticized by its own staff as racist, misogynist, dysfunctional and so on. But those internal problems—a legacy of the failed oversight by the same politicians who now wail about the problem—have been clearly identified. There’s a new chief executive and a new management approach that presumably seeks to address them. Yes, the fuss raised about this is important, but it’s also been reframed as an indictment of the urgent need to replace the museum’s lousy structures in a media side-show that’s now been expediently appropriated by some opposition politicians. The long-term issues that must be addressed and which the redevelopment plan clearly intended to address have to do with both the physical plant and with the museum’s philosophical imperative to reimagine its mandate—what it can and should be for the rest of this century. In this regard, the RBCM’s problem is the same one faced by all museums as the world emerges from the arrogant assumptions of racialized Euro-centric imperialism into a post-colonial world that strives for greater cultural and ethnic egalitarianism. Like all significant museums, the RBCM is challenged by the entirely reasonable demand that it now redefine its role in the whole society it serves—and seeks to reflect—and which has changed rapidly around it. Serious museums are finished as curiosity cabinets; as trophy cases for imperialism; as self-aggrandizing cultural and historical propaganda tools. And they should be equally finished as the for-profit tourist theme parks that some business leaders and politicians wish they’d emulate. Theme parks feed back to the public its own cherished fantasies about itself; good museums tell it the truth, sometimes the unpleasant truth, as, for example, the Museum of London does in squarely facing the relationships between the city’s prosperity, the sugar trade, empire and the slave trade upon which it was all founded. What exact form the RBCM should take for the culturally diverse, pluralistic, inclusive society of the 21st Century is still a work in progress. And, yes, it’s up for robust debate. Whatever form it takes, though, it still must meet some basic needs. First, it must be structurally safe for the people who work there and for the average of 800,000 annual visitors to its exhibitions—that’s more visitors than the entire cruise ship schedule delivers to Victoria each year. About 35,000 of those visits every year are by school children. The current seismically unsafe structures pose a constant hazard to those in the building whether working there or visiting, and to the contents they are supposed to protect. Anyone looking at the large open areas, extensive overhangs, vast arrays of glass and the display of large, heavy artifacts in the RBCM’s exhibition building can see why that is so without needing a degree in civil engineering or emergency measures planning. Major seismic upgrades to urban building codes were redesigned and mandated on the West Coast after a devastating Magnitude 8.1 earthquake centred 250 miles west of Mexico City caused 3,000 buildings to collapse, seriously damaged 100,000 other buildings, killed 10,000 people and injured 30,000 more. But the RBCM exhibition structure was built and put into service 18 years before those building codes were revised to address the significant threat of earthquakes in this region. The provincial government says that trying to seismically retrofit the building, which would involve stripping it to its core to evaluate safety of both frame and foundations, would cost more than demolishing it and rebuilding with up-to-date state-of-the-art seismic applications. We now know that several large faults capable of generating major earthquakes of the same magnitude that severely damaged downtown Christchurch in New Zealand in 2011 pass either directly under or adjacent to Victoria’s city core. New research published last year concludes that what we have discovered about these faults “increases the seismic risk assessment results by 10 to 30 percent.” And, of course, there’s still the prospect of a huge subduction event off the west coast of Vancouver Island like the one that killed 230,000 people in the Indian Ocean in 2004 or the one that killed 16,000 people in Japan in 2011. It could release over 1,000 times more destructive energy than that released by the Christchurch earthquake, threatening Victoria’s downtown not only with the prolonged shaking but also with inundation of low-lying areas. We’ve an extensive history of large earthquakes in this region. A 7.4 Magnitude event on a fault in Washington State just before Christmas in 1872 caused such severe shaking in Victoria that people fled buildings. Another on Vancouver Island in December, 1918, woke people in the night as far east as Kelowna. A 7.4 on Comox Lake in 1946 caused a great deal of damage—it knocked down 75 per cent of chimneys in mid-Island communities and was felt as far away as Portland and Prince Rupert. In 1949, there was an 8.1 off Haida Gwaii and in 2012 there was a 7.7 there. And, of course, here was a Magnitude 9.0, possibly greater, off the West Coast on the evening of August 26, 1700, that destroyed whole indigenous communities and sent a destructive tsunami as far as Japan. Other central functions demand new space The second crucial function of the museum (and a legislated mandate) is to “secure, receive and preserve specimens, artifacts and archival and other materials that illustrate the natural or human history of British Columbia.” Those materials, numbering more than seven million items, include the critical records of government and archived court records. Those records, it’s worth pointing out, have recently played a central role as First Nations research land claims, their dispossession of lands and disenfranchisement. They will be crucial to any future process of decolonization, reconciliation and reconstruction of equitable economic inclusion. After the work of the legislature and the courts, the records of these proceedings and an unfettered public access to those records are the most important component of democratic government. Without those records there can be no political accountability and without accountability you can’t have a democracy. Yet the museum itself warned us years ago that: “Much of our collection and archives are stored underground and below sea level. They are at significant risk from earthquake and flooding.” The buildings might collapse and then they might be inundated by a subsequent tsnami. Independent risk assessments published every year note that the proportion of collections for which risk can be adequately mitigated declined from 88 percent in 2012 to 80 percent in 2022. Over the past decade, the number of artifacts, specimens and documents considered at serious risk has increased by 10 percent; 20 percent of the collections are at risk. To be sure, some of those priceless and irreplaceable collections are already destined for new, more secure management facilities in a more seismically safe location in Colwood and some have been dispersed to other storage. But for the museum to fulfill its other legislated mandate, which is “to serve as an educational organization,” and for the public to continue have safe and open access to the collections—however they may be reimagined for future educational display—there must be a new, exhibition space. To maximize ease of access it should be built in the city core. It deserves to be rigorously designed to the most modern standards; ones that can best withstand a great earthquake and keep anybody in the building as safe as possible. This time it should be done right. That demands doing it from the ground up. Our provincial government, commendably, appeared to grasp this reality—until it decided that appeasing the zero-sum faction took precedence over doing the right thing. If the premier can soldier on with the Site C dam and its critics, he can soldier on with the new museum and its nay-sayers. Frankly, $789 million for a world class museum is peanuts compared to $35 billion for a couple of fossil fuel projects which have a lifespan of less than a century and contributed to ther climate change that cost BC taxpayers more than $1 billion in damage last year. As for the zero-sum critics who think it’s ok to play seismic roulette with BC’s priceless and irreplaceable cultural heritage, they should be reminded of Oscar Wilde’s observation that cynics are those who know the price of everything—but the value of nothing. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  3. From driving a garbage scow to reporting for newspapers, Jim Hume had a rich and varied life. His son Stephen Hume shares some memories. JIM HUME, WHO COVERED POLITICS and politicians in this province for 70 years, starting with Byron “Boss” Johnson in 1952 and ending with John Horgan in 2022, died April 13. He was well known to Victoria readers after more than half a century of writing about who governs us and how from the provincial capital, occasionally frustrated and mystified by an apparently widely-held idea that a democratically-elected government is somehow not us but somebody else. He was also my father, so this is not an entirely objective account. And your narrator’s a bit unreliable, too, considering the self-serving way we all edit memory. Joyce Hume, Stephen Hume, Jim Hume — 1947 before emigrating to Canada. When public personages die, obituaries tend to focus on the official and often officious record of career achievements. Jim had many of them: lifetime achievement award from the Jack Webster Foundation, lifetime member of the press gallery, Queen’s Jubilee Gold Medal for public service, a writing career that spanned eight organizations, some of which he outlived, including The Nanaimo Free Press, Penticton Herald, Edmonton Journal, Victoria Times, Victoria Colonist, subsequently the Victoria Times-Colonist. He was a go-to stringer for Time Magazine in its mass market heyday (circulation 3.3 million), recruited by the legendary Time correspondent Ed Ogle with whom he became friends. His celebrity trapline ranged from actor John Wayne to Nobel Peace Prize winning Prime Minister Lester B.—“Mike” to his friends—Pearson. He, however, always urged the young reporters he mentored not to set much store by the official record. Every story has two sides, he’d advise, the official version and the unofficial version. The official version is usually spoon-fed to you by bureaucrats, cabinet ministers, communications officers, corporate flaks and people with axes to grind, oxen to gore and secrets to leak to someone’s benefit or cost. It’s usually as smooth as soft ice cream served up for convenience of use. The unofficial version, on the other hand, is most often found at the margins, in the dark corners and in the back eddies of events. It’s sometimes distasteful, prickly, irritatingly inconsistent and demands time and effort to verify. Jim Hume as a young reporter hamming it up in the Alberni office of the Nanaimo Free Press mid 1950s. Jim Hume working (trench coat lower left) the street for The Edmonton Journal in 1963 during a tumultuous municipal election campaign. He was a believer in knocking on doors, wearing out shoe leather and asking people what they’d seen, heard, felt, thought. The official version is indisputably part of the record, he said, but that doesn’t discredit or obscure the unofficial version, the imprecise human rather than the precise institutional side of the story. Thus, his reporter’s alternate trapline included secretaries—a lot of secretaries; small town mayors; beat cops; barbers; third line hockey players; basketball referees; beer parlour waitresses; priests who didn’t mind an occasional dram, eccentrics like the Nanaimo black sheep of a famous family who made cannons for fun and whose moonshine rum made its way into at least one judges’ bottom drawer. That trapline consisted of all the folks who heard and saw what was said and what was done both off and outside the official record. He wrote for readers, never to impress editors or premiers or corporate presidents. There are, he enjoyed pointing out, many more retail clerks than there are vice-presidents of sales—so he wrote for the clerks and left his publishers to deal with the complaints of disenchanted vice-presidents. Perhaps in this context the human aspect of Jim Hume’s own story is more fitting than a list of benchmark achievements. Jim was born in 1923 in the back room of a labourer’s brick row house in Nuneaton. A farm market town in the English Midlands whose history reached back to Mercia, it had transformed into a factory centre during The Great War when a famous regiment was mustered and barracked there. He, nevertheless, came into a world that didn’t yet have most of the technology we now take for granted. The first self-contained household refrigerator was only invented the year he was born, not a trivial event—deaths from salmonella poisoning declined by 98.7 percent during his own childhood as cold storage took hold and food safety improved. Indeed, childhood was a dangerous journey when he was born. Of every thousand children born in 1923, more than 140 failed to survive, killed by poverty, malnutrition and communicable disease. Over his own lifetime, infant mortality fell by 94.7 percent. He was born before antibiotics. Infectious diseases that are now easily treated claimed five of his own siblings before they left childhood. Both children, Edward and May, and his father’s first wife, Polly, aged 27, all died of TB between 1903 and 1907. “The White Plague” as TB was then called, claimed Phyllis, the first child of his own mother, Ann Startin, and father, Thomas Dodds Hume, in 1918. It took an older brother, Tom, whom he adored. It killed his little brother, Douglas, whom he cherished. Only Jim and an older sister, Doris, lived to see adulthood. The other invention of his birth year was the traffic light—a curiosity since few people yet owned automobiles. When he went to visit his grandfather’s farm in Weddington, another farm village, one that hadn’t yet industrialized, he rode there sitting on the tailgate of a pony cart. He earned spending money delivering coal to neighbours in a wheelbarrow but dutifully turned his earnings over to his mother to supplement the small wages of his disabled father, who had been severely wounded in a 1915 First World War slaughter that yielded 600,000 casualties. In his future, awaiting invention, lay the reporter’s spiral notebook, the ballpoint pen, the polaroid camera, Scotch tape, tape recorders, television and television news, the atomic bomb—he would later visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Auschwitz, Dresden and he’d revisit Coventry, where all that remained of the 900-year-old cathedral where he sang as a choirboy was a charred shell. He’d been in Coventry the night its cathedral burned. The bombing mission was code-named Moonlight Sonata, one of the Orwellian euphemisms of slaughter that he came to despise. He had been present, he later said, for the advent of a new concept in warfare: total war, in which unarmed civilians became the front lines. Cities themselves became targets to be incinerated in deliberately induced firestorms, at first during weeks of bombardment then, on August 6, 1945, vaporized in a split second. And he wrote about the strange selectiveness of memory in the official record—how Hiroshima’s 70,000 dead are engraved into our collective sense of the past because they died in a flash but the 100,000 who died the night of the Tokyo fire raid, code-named Operation Meeting House, another of those banal euphemisms, recede from our recall. What he saw and was called upon to do as a teenager—abandoning the wounded in precarious circumstances because a living stretcher crew was deemed more valuable saving others than being risked for a dying bomb casualty; stepping over the body of a neighbour’s little daughter in the rain-filled gutter because getting to the living wounded took precedence over the already slain—confirmed his belief that making war could never be reconciled with his deeply Christian beliefs. He became a pacifist and a conscientious objector, secure enough in his convictions to go to prison for them and doing field labour. He never wavered in that conviction. When he was born, electric lights were still a rarity. On misty winter nights he watched a lamp-lighter bicycle through the streets, igniting the gas lights with a wick on a long pole. The internet wasn’t invented until after he had qualified for his old age pension, yet there he was at the time of his death, managing his own website, www.jimhume.ca, posting to social media platforms and exchanging e-mails with his editor, contacts and readers. He was thought, at the time he died, to be the oldest working journalist in Canada, maybe the world for all anyone knows. At 98 he wrote every week about life in Victoria, British Columbia and Canada, the country he chose to make home in 1948. He loved all three deeply and although he travelled widely, he never doubted his decision as a young man to emigrate from war-shattered England, where he’d watched whole cities burn, to what he once thought seemed the tranquil Eden of Vancouver Island. His view of Eden changed dramatically in later years as he dug into the racist, imperialist, colonial history of greed, avarice, plunder and cruelty that he came to see as the unacknowledged stain upon the many progressive triumphs of the place. “In the face of injustice,” he liked to say, “to be silent is to acquiesce to the crime.” The crime, which he came to see as BC’s original sin—he was never entirely separated from the biblical oratory of a world view shaped in a deeply religious youth—was the brutal dispossession of the people who already lived here by newcomers arriving from Europe and Asia . The residential schools and what they represent—an attempt by an occupying government, enabled by religious leaders, to eradicate culture and language; to separate children from their parents spiritually as well as physically; to crush the soul of whole social groups; all done in the prideful rationalization that this would improve their lot—came for him to epitomize that sin. And to his mind nothing exemplified the sin of the residential schools, he said, so much as the casual indifference of police, priests, school authorities and government to the disappearance and deaths of four little boys who froze to death at Fraser Lake one January night trying to flee a school that had opened there in 1922 and was characterized by brutal corporal punishment, sexual abuse and maltreatment. More than 40 children died there before it closed in 1976. He wrote about residential schools, about his awakening to the cruel reality of that past, our shared past, which arose from his education by—and lifelong friendship with—Tse-Shaht elder George Clutesi, whom he met while he was a reporter for the long-defunct Nanaimo Free Press and George was working as a janitor at the notorious and also long-defunct Alberni Indian Residential School. Jim was not a pessimist about the possibility of reconciliation or about the need for it. Without reconciliation, he came to believe, British Columbia and Canada could never be whole. To forgive and to be forgiven requires facing the truth, he said. When he visited Coventry again shortly after the dedication of a new cathedral, built in part with the help of men who had flown the bombers that destroyed it, he came back with the Litany of Reconciliation adopted by the congregation. I have it on my desk, a reminder from him that our future salvation comes not from anger and retribution, but from forgiving those who wrong us and from forgiving ourselves for the wrongs we do while being strong enough to acknowledge them and striving to make them right. The Litany of Reconciliation asks forgiveness for “the hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,” and for “the covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,” and for “the greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,” and for “our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee.” All those things were much on his mind as he contemplated the changing political, social, economic and environmental landscapes of his beloved British Columbia toward the close of his life. Actually, the truth of it is that the decision to come to British Columbia was not his, but his young wife Joyce’s—my mother’s—and in an odd way I was the cause of her insistence. I was born one bitterly cold night in the midst of an epidemic. He wasn’t permitted into the hospital for fear of spreading contagion to the newborn. The hospital itself specialized in treating severe burn patients, my mother told me shortly before she died, and there were still wounded soldiers convalescing in its wards. Those soldiers asked to see the new baby. So I was wrapped in a tiny blanket and, while my mother slept after a gruelling labour, I was whisked away by the nurse. When she returned, my mother said, my feet dangled, blue with cold. She remonstrated. The apologetic nurse explained: She’d taken the baby to the wards and the men, so far from home, some grievously injured, had all wanted to hold my tiny feet in their hands. A glimmer of new life, perhaps, for those who had been marinated in the opposite. The next day, those men collected their special fruit rations, Choice Grade red delicious apples from Canada—I got one every Christmas until I turned 12 and never wondered why—and gave them to my mother as a gift. When my parents discussed where to emigrate—Australia or New Zealand where she had relatives; South Africa where he had relatives—she made the decision for an unconsidered (by him anyway) option: Canada, from whence the apples had come—the Okanagan, to be precise. And that’s how they, and I, arrived in BC on the first train down the Fraser Valley after the 1948 floods, then across the moonlit Strait of Georgia on the midnight CPR ferry to Vancouver Island. Jim Hume with Joyce and four of their sons on a fishing trip on Saanich Inlet ca. 1953. The only job my father could find was driving a reeking garbage scow from the foot of Johnson Street out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to deposit the city’s overnight garbage on the outgoing tide under a halo of squawking gulls. Each morning in the wan winter light he’d motor past the stately legislature buildings where he would later spend much of his working life sifting through the detritus of politics. “Same job, different location,” he liked to quip after a dram or two. And he did like a nip of scotch. If he’d been religious, self-righteous and stuffy in his early life, he told me, work as a reporter and with working people had knocked all the starch out of his attitudes. One of his oldest friends told me the story of my father’s first drink. He was a young sports writer with the Nanaimo Free Press covering the Timbermen, a lacrosse team which was starting a successful run for the Canadian championship and the Mann Cup. Jim Hume, kneeling far left, with Velox Rugby Football Club, which now competes as Westshore in BC’s premier league. Hume founded the club with coach Gordie Hemingway in 1968; it had an undefeated season on Vancouver Island in 1970, the year this photo was taken. In the protocols of sports coverage, the reporter rode with the team, the coach got to ride in his own car. Driving home from a win, the slightly prudish young religious reporter was offended by the coarse language, off-colour jokes and locker room bragging about women. During a “leak” stop by the side of the road, he asked the coach if he could ride with him the rest of the way. The bemused coach agreed. The rest of the way led to a pub and a postgame beer. “Look,” the coach said. “If you’re going to cover this team all the way to the Mann Cup—and we are going to win the cup—you’re going to have to come in here and listen to what they have to say. You don’t have to drink beer, drink tomato juice.” So, he went in. The team drank beer—a lot of beer—and he drank tomato juice—too much tomato juice. Another round came and he said no more juice, too acid. “Look,” said the team captain, “we’ll just cut your tomato juice with a bit of beer to make it less acid.” As the night progressed, less tomato juice and more beer. The team won the Mann Cup as promised. The coach became a lifelong friend and so did the team captain. And he went on to discover the pleasure in a good scotch. Indeed, when I was moving things from his apartment after his death, my brother Nic found his earthquake bug-out bag in the hall closet. In it was a high-end First Aid kit, no rations and half-a-dozen mini-bottles of booze. If the old stretcher-bearer was ready to step into the breach with First Aid supplies if needed, it wasn’t going to be without a nightcap. Jim’s 91st birthday: L-R, sons Nic, Stephen, Jim, Andrew, Timothy, Mark, Jonathan Every year, until he was too old to drive, he’d climb in his car and travel to a different, distant part of the province. He knew somebody in every community—horse loggers, town administrators, retired and near forgotten lacrosse stars, hereditary chiefs, rodeo cowboys on the way up and hockey players on the way down. He’d like to think he was one of them. And so he was. The official witness to their unofficial stories. Stephen Hume, following in his dad’s foot steps, has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  4. The truck convoy may try to occupy Victoria in the name of freedom but what it’s really about is denying democracy. WHILE THE WHEREABOUTS OF of the truckers convoy are at present unknown, there’s still a chance that the disgruntled “Honkies” will descend upon Victoria to deliver its message of “love, truth and transparency to counter the false narratives fed to us all through the media.” The organizers of the Canada Unity Freedom Convoy’s BearHug BC operation say they want to unify their fellow Canadians against the lies of vaccine mandates and other public health measures. (I can’t take credit for that amusing “Honkies” tag. It was coined by a perceptive columnist writing in a Black newspaper in Tennessee who was thoroughly exasperated by the weird fetish for air horns that appears to so excite the toddlers indulging themselves in trucker tantrums.) The constant tooting of the Honkies, while draping themselves in the sorrowful sackcloth and ashes of what they claim is a legitimate protest being suppressed by Canada’s repressive government, demonstrates a profound failure of imagination. The poor turn-out of the anti-vaxxers on Saturday, March 26, 2022, at about 2pm, may indicate that BearHug BC is a bust. (Photo by Leslie Campbell) Victoria has already had an early foreshock of the impending stupidity. A flag-flying pickup truck mired bumper-deep in Beacon Hill Park says about as much as one needs to say regarding the kind of folks attracted to this sanctimonious Crusade of the Righteous Empty Heads. Let’s just say that thinking things through was obviously not high on someone’s agenda. There’s a degree of well-meaning leftish hand-wringing about trying to understand the “Honkies” motivation—there’s the argument that this protest represents left-behinds in a changing economy; or that it’s a civil liberties issue on behalf of oppressed truckers of conscience; or that it’s ordinary folk fed up with being condescended to by better-off urban elites. But no, this “BearHug BC” convoy, supposedly a “humanitarian effort” out to “unite our communities in love and truth” actually meets none of those descriptions. Ninety-percent of truckers chose to get vaccinated. Besides the health benefits, it was the regulatory requirement for crossing the Canada-United States border—in both directions and imposed by both governments—at the height of a pandemic that has now sickened 3.3 million Canadians, killed more than 37,000 and at its last peak left hospitals perilously close to being overwhelmed with admissions. The number for Canadians who died of other ailments because they couldn’t get beds already occupied by pandemic patients awaits a full tabulation. Right now, though, the pandemic fatality list is equivalent to the death toll from the Dieppe Raid disaster—if there was one every two weeks for two years. Dieppe, for those who don’t much care for history, was one of Canada’s bloodiest military defeats in WW2. And we don’t yet know the on-going bill for long-haul symptoms that may impair a million Canadians who got sick with COVID-19. Meanwhile, it’s a monumental stretch for owners of $200,000 trucks to cast themselves as threadbare workers while vilifying as high-living elites those secretarial and service sector workers who must to take in roommates to share sky-high rents and who drive compact cars worth less than a tenth of the value of the big noisy rigs the “Honkies” drive. In Fort St John, for example, one of the northern towns from which some of the supposedly impoverished and oppressed truckers claim to hail, census data shows the median family income is over $107,000 a year. In Victoria, home of those insensitive elites the “Honkies” plan to educate, the median family income is $64,000. The “Honkies,” it seems, more resemble self-entitled folk who somehow conclude that chewing up a Victoria park strikes a blow for “freedom.” Convoy’s Orwellian logic Let’s cogitate on that Orwellian logic. In other places, people who protest disappear—into a prison or worse. Here, protestors can say what they like wherever and whenever they wish, so long as they don’t put the safety and security of others at risk, threaten and intimidate other parties or defy a court in which they can nevertheless defend themselves even if they do defy it. Hopefully the BearHug BC burlesque show won’t tolerate displays of the American flags that commemorate a culture of racist beatings, lynchings and slavery. It says anyone expressing messages of hate and division are not members of the BearHug movement and don’t represent the values of Canadian Unity. Such is the mission statement, at least. And one hopes that Victoria’s cenotaph won’t be desecrated as was the national monument in Ottawa, raised to honour the more that 100,000 Canadians—among them the 961 slain in the Dieppe disaster—who gave their lives defending the democratic freedoms of the very people who now protest loudly that it is they who are the oppressed. Police on Saturday, March 26, 2022 at Humboldt and Government Streets, ready to turn back BearHug BC vehicles, saw little action. (Photo by Leslie Campbell) That’s not us waving racist symbols, vandalizing cenotaphs and so on, the “Honkies” say, presumably having learned that the public is not amused. Perhaps. But hey, as the foreman used to warn when I was building haystacks for a living: “Lie down with dogs and you get up with fleas.” So who knows what the latest convoy and its assorted hangers-on will bring to the Capital Region? Hopefully not the purveyors of received wisdom from the American right, historical illiteracy and constitutional ignorance. Timing—and target—off A reasonable person might assume the objections to public health policy are now moot. After all, the things to which the protestors most purport to object—vaccine mandates, mask mandates, business closures and social distancing expectations—are all largely lifting even as the pandemic eases. This is thanks in no small part to the decision by more than 90 percent of British Columbians to do their bit for each other by getting vaccinated and masking up instead of indulging in confrontational belligerence. But now James Bauder, a founder of Canada Unity says the aggrieved plan to descend upon Victoria where they will make loving pests of themselves for “two, three, four months, however long it takes.” Canada Unity’s primary mission appears to be less concerned with unity than with irritating otherwise reasonable Canadians who tend to dismiss claims that making it harder for working people to get to work will magically bring us all together in denunciation of the work of Dr Bonnie Henry. In this Orwellian world, forcing the majority to surrender its freedom to get to work safe and unencumbered so that the community-minded many can then be coerced to share the narrow view of the self-entitled few is declared a unifying experience. Canadian Unity purportedly objects to the temporary measures provincial and territorial public health authorities imposed—there are 13 of these independent, constitutionally mandated authorities in Canada—to regulate locally determined needs for vaccination, mask use and the circumstances of exposure in public spaces to a potentially lethal communicable disease. This is not exactly new public policy. It has been done many times in the past to deal with lethal diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, cholera and tuberculosis. Indeed government, if it deems its decision to be in the greater good, reserves the right to do everything from expropriating your house to facilitate a highway widening for the benefit of truckers, to selling the mineral rights under your Alberta farm and requiring you to provide pipeline access to oil well pump jacks. It makes you wear seatbelts while driving, to produce proof of age when out for a drink, and tells you where you can and cannot smoke in public places. Oh, and it mandates how fast you can drive your car past school grounds, too. Even today travel advisories warn that you can’t visit some countries without producing proof of vaccination for selected diseases—meningitis, yellow fever, tuberculosis, encephalitis and so on. The “Honkies,” apparently not having bothered to read the constitution which clearly says health is entirely a provincial jurisdiction, took Ottawa hostage in January to complain that the federal government hadn’t overturned Alberta’s exclusive jurisdiction to impose mask mandates and New Brunswick’s or Saskatchewan’s exclusive jurisdiction over vaccination requirements. But alleged federal intrusion into constitutionally-mandated provincial jurisdictions is precisely what is supposed to be driving Prairie alienation. Now similar protests are bound for Victoria, purportedly to resist temporary local measures that are already being lifted. So what gives? What gives is that this whole Hee-Haw theatrical performance, to borrow one of “Honkydom’s” beloved expressions, is actually a false flag operation in the sense that it’s not really what it claims it is. The protest is not really about vaccine mandates. That became became evident when pandemic restrictions began to ease even as protestors doubled down and became more recalcitrant. It is about other things, though. What it’s really about: an attack on democracy First, the vaccine mandate protest evokes a sense of entitlement on the American religious right that causes it to think it has the moral authority to interfere in Canada’s domestic politics. Half the initial protest’s funding was funnelled in from the US along with Q Anon slogans and those Confederate flags (not to suggest that Canada doesn’t have plenty of home-grown racists and wacko conspiracy theorists of its own). Second, there is the anger of populist Prairie social conservatives and the western rump of a Conservative Party still infuriated at being twice refused by those effete urban voters in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Greater Victoria (and even to a lesser extent in Edmonton and Calgary where the Conservative margins of victory dwindle with every election). Alberta, Saskatchewan and the BC Interior—which BearHug BC claims to represent—continue to be dominated by rural Conservative Party voters only because electoral distribution so disproportionately favours rural ridings dominated by resource extraction. For example, Fort McMurray’s 110,000 people get the same representation run government as Edmonton-Wetaskiwin’s 158,000 people. This is equally true in BC where the growing polarization between northern and Interior regions and the intensely urban South Coast is distinct. For example, Skeena-Bulkley Valley’s 88,000 people have the same representation in parliament as Victoria’s 117,000 and the 108,000 of Cariboo-Prince George have the same weight as the 120,000 of Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke. As the late University of Victoria political scientist Norman Ruff observed just before he died in 2017, there are really two British Columbias. One, the rural regions where the BearHug BC protest comes from, is marked by its dependence on a natural resource economy that steadily dwindles in importance—just think about job losses and mill closures in the forest industry due to automation and corporate efficiencies. Basic forestry is now about 2 percent of the provincial economy while professional, technical and scientific services are about 6.8 percent. Mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction are about the same as information, culture, arts, entertainment and recreation—around 4.4 percent each. The BC of logging trucks, Ruff astutely observed, “still looks backward for its future, the other (urban, cosmopolitan Victoria and Vancouver) continues an exponential growth in diversity and enjoys a transition to an entirely new economy.” One of the forces behind the truckers’ convoy phenomenon, it appears, is a deep resentment that those pluralistic, progressive, latte-swilling city dwellers who are increasingly non-white enjoy the benefits of these vast economic transitions while those in rural regions find their once prevalent socially conservative values increasingly marginalized. The language of BearHug BC, for example, is suffused with Christian allusions but the urban BC of Vancouver and Victoria now has the fewest inhabitants who self-identify as Christian. The fastest growing religions in urban BC are non-Christian—Sikh, Hindu, Muslim or just no religion at all. About 41 percent of urban residents on the South Coast told Statistics Canada they don’t follow any religion at all. The self-identified Christian population, on the other hand, has declined by four percent over the last decade. For two federal elections in a row, these urban voters—ethnically and socially diverse, educated, secular, heavily populated by professional women and adopting the more progressive values held by workers in the emerging information economy—have rejected a succession of angry, white, male Conservative leaders appealing to a reactionary socially conservative western political rump in the resource extraction sectors of the old economy. Opposing protection for gay people from coercive conversion therapy, denying the reality of climate change and immigration bashing plays well in the rural reaches of “Honkiedom” but it’s a party-killer in immigrant-rich urban ridings with concentrations of gay voters and highly educated information workers who don’t doubt the reality of climate change—or the resource sector’s contribution to it. A national daycare program may be anathema in rural resource ridings but it certainly appeals to progressive female voters in town. More than two-thirds of Canadians, including 45 percent even within the Conservative Party stronghold of Alberta, voted against these social conservative rural values and the electoral future looks bleak for those who think their political future lies in recreating the good old days. And so, having been thwarted at the ballot box and rumpified into a shrinking rural Canada—82 percent of Canadians are now urban—by their unappealing platform, these factions next decided to take their grievances outside the electoral process. Along came the “Honkies,” the Freedom Convoy’s leadership including at least one prominent and politically active Alberta separatist. The movement seemed determined to undermine and attack the progressives who had refused their old-fashioned values at the ballot box. And who was cheering them on? Why the Conservative Party and its far right splinter, the People’s Party of Canada. “I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them,” current Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre told Postmedia. “They have reached a breaking point after two years of massive government overreach.” But wait, that vaccine mandate for truckers was only imposed as a temporary measure on January 15 of 2022. And none of the dire warnings from the rural right came to pass. There wasn’t a mass exodus from the trucking industry because most truckers weren’t affected. There weren’t bare shelves in supermarkets, food shortages and hunger for Canadians because the protest barely disrupted the supply chain. And Canada’s largest trucking company said the vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US border had an imperceptible impact on its freight business. Nonetheless, Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen who, initially, at least, although she subsequently distanced herself, rallied to the truckers’ rebellion against the so-called Ottawa elite. This is the same Bergen for whom the opposition leader’s residence at Stornoway just had to be renovated to the tune of $20,000 before she moved in for a couple of months. The view that this protest was less an assertion of rights and more an attack on democracy has more than a smidgin of merit. At one point there was a zany proposal that the federal government just resign and replace itself with the Governor-General, the appointed senate and unelected members of Canada Unity. When Bauder announced that trucks loaded with self-sustaining supplies—including 16,000 hamburgers!—were on the way to Victoria, it sounded more like the logistics of an occupation intended to disrupt life than a simple anti-government protest. And, indeed, an occupation seems to be exactly what Bauder hoped for in a video posted online: “We’re going to be occupying that area for two to three months,” he said. Why an occupation of Victoria? Well, Bauder was frank about that, too. “This is a very intense, deeply rooted NDP-Liberal stronghold down there,” Bauder was quoted as saying in mainstream media interviews. “And they’ve had their way for too long. It’s time we get down there and show them what the laws are and not your opinion, folks.” So the truckers are coming to Victoria to give them a spanking for not voting conservatively enough, a bit of tough love for the big city wusses from the big boys in their big rigs. “Folks, there is so many laws that our government has violated, the media is supporting the breaking of these laws, and society has got to start getting back to the right side of the law and defending ourselves legally via lawsuits,” Bauder said. “We’re going to be really, really active.” Well, it’s one thing to say government has broken the law, it’s another thing to prove it. Just like it’s one thing to say a protest is illegal, it’s another thing to prove it. That’s precisely why we have independent courts, to examine the evidence and see whether the claims of wrong-doing have legal merit. An alternative type of protestor stood at the intersection of Government and Belleville during the March 26, 2022 anti-vaccine mandate event. (Photo by Leslie Campbell) But it is worth reminding BearHug BC that Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms clearly balances individual rights against the common good. So, in all charity and good will to the “BearHug BC” crowd, the people of Victoria aren’t a jury and the place for assertions of law-breaking is the courts, not the streets of the capital. Unless, of course, there’s a different agenda, a much more self-interested political agenda. In which case dear truckers, just come, protest as many before you have done, make your point and depart. Don’t hang around as uninvited guests, who, as many a mother has told us, are like fish, okay at first but after three days they really start to stink. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  5. A tribute to books, and the people who help us access and explore them, during Freedom to Read Week. ODDLY ENOUGH, FOR SOMEONE who’s spent 60 years extruding about eight million of them into print, I was a slow starter when it came to words. My mother told me how she had waited anxiously for that first “MaMa” or “DaDa” from her first baby. I remained silent. Beyond the usual non-verbal expression of imperious infant demands that first word didn’t come. And didn’t come. And didn’t come. And then it did. “Hippopotamus.” What? Hippopotamus? Well, that was it, she insisted—and the story made her chortle, even more than half a century later. Mysterious for sure but darling baby’s first word was, well, yes—the name of that ponderous, ungainly African river beast. Where it came from she couldn’t be certain, she said. Most likely I’d absorbed it from bedtime stories. Some included the adventures of Popo the Hippopotamus, a children’s book by Georges Duplaix. Popo was published in the mid-1930s when my mother was a little girl. The Nazis had just begun burning great heaps of books that weren’t suitably Aryan on their enthusiastically-stoked bonfires in the great university towns across Germany. We were ambling through Doris Page Park in Cordova Bay. She was giving me a local botany lesson interspersed with reminiscences about her days as a young mother. A week later with surprising suddenness she was dead. My mother was, I later realized, bequeathing me memories from my childhood that I might not have and that would otherwise depart with her, the on-going risk of oral history. The memory of her snickering over her now-old-age-pensioner-baby’s first pompous word entered my mind again while reading about the resurgent rage for book bans sweeping through society yet again as a peculiar populist righteousness takes hold from Abbotsford, BC, to Zapata County, Texas. FREEDOM TO READ WEEK has arrived again to mark chilly February and we should all pay close attention at a time when some British Columbians complaining about perceived constraints on their freedom in a relatively free place like Canada give themselves permission to rough up and denounce reporters as “dirty, filthy human beings” for having the temerity to tell the rest of us at what’s going on. “This is what happens when you have your brains scrambled by misinformation,” Brent Jolly of the Canadian Association of Journalists astutely noted of the protestors in a Canadian Press report. Intimidating reporters is a well-ploughed field for those less interested in finding truth than in controlling how it’s defined. The method of control is to limit the narrative, become the gatekeepers of acceptable ideas and get exclusive power to churn out the disinformation, half-truths, dog-whistle innuendoes, demonizing stereotypes and outright lies that characterize the sewer culture of The Big Lie. That lie asserts that non-approved journalists are the enemy, government is a giant conspiracy, doctors and nurses are charlatans and books not certified by self-appointed authorities as fit to read are bad for your moral health. Attempting to prevent people from reading a book or even a newspaper or magazine is really an attempt to kill the writer, not physically but nevertheless serves as an existential attack on the writer’s soul. At last count, there were 850 titles on the would-be censors’ list for removal from school libraries in Texas alone, including a graphic edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel about an America in which a faction of Taliban-like Christian zealots sizes power and repurposes women as breeding stock for powerful elite males. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a graphic family memoir which depicts the savagery of the Holocaust as a chilling metaphor in which Nazis are cats, collaborators are pigs and their victims, in this case Jews, are mice who suffer unspeakably. Maus was banned not because it portrayed the mass extermination of six million people as a monstrous failure of humanity but because some readers were offended by cartoon images of mice being stripped naked before being executed on an industrial scale. Ironically enough, also on the list of oft-challenged books is George Orwell’s 1984, another dystopian story about authoritarian strategies for controlling the narrative through censorship, fake news, propaganda and the rewriting of history. Now think of China’s President Xi Jinping having the Communist Party’s history revised so that in the newly rewritten version a quarter of it is now about his decade in power. On the Texas list, there’s an unsavoury obsession with titles dealing with sex, gender, power and race issues, right down to requests that biographies of black American women like Michele Obama and Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph be consigned to the trash because their success stories might make white kids feel uncomfortable. If Texas were just a benighted intellectual armpit in which a majority of folks were so fearful of their inability to present alternatives to ideas they find upsetting that they feel compelled to ban them, that would be one thing. But, of course, Texas is far more complicated than the zealots would have us believe and the problem of censoring unfavourable ideas is actually part of a much broader assault on thought that spans society from far right to far left and actually includes most positions in between. The book banning virus pops up everywhere, including here in BC. BOOK BANNING ATTEMPTS IN BC range from labour unionists upset by what they perceive as “anti-logging” attitudes in children’s books on the Sunshine Coast to books about same-sex parents in Metro Vancouver. Challenged books range from reports of hanky-panky in the province’s starchy upper crust to one about an estranged dad abducting his own kids. Does that ring any bells from recent headlines? It should. In 2019, the most recent year for which I could find tabulated results, there were about 10 parental abductions every month. But the book was denounced as “hate literature against men.” From self-avowed fascists to the devoutly religious to the progressive left, our Age of Umbrage now means everybody seems to have something that the strong-minded minority wishes removed from library shelves before it contaminates the presumably weaker-minded majority of folk who may be exposed to it. Those who read something or, frequently just read about something, and take umbrage are apparently immune to contamination by the ideas they so ardently want suppressed. After a century of it, we’ve become desensitized by the desire of the self-appointed custodians of what’s proper to shield the rest of us from, say, the allure of adultery in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; from Molly Bloom’s occasionally salacious innermost thoughts in Ulysses; from the recounting of a childhood assault in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; from the casually brutal racism of small town American south in To Kill a Mockingbird; from the curse of hormone-driven teenage angst portrayed in Catcher in the Rye and so on. But the would-be sanitizers of thought for the greater good want to wield a wide eraser. Among the prominent Canadian writers that have been challenged to remain on school shelves are: Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes because it uses “Negroes” in the title—never mind that Hill is Black himself, his book is about the Black Loyalists who fled the American Revolution to settle in Nova Scotia at a time when the word was the polite term or that the book won Hill the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and a slew of other awards, including praise from Canada’s Black community. Margaret Laurence for The Diviners which won a Governor-General’s Award. The recurring charge here is that her novel exploring themes of colonialism, mixed-race identity and the struggles of being both a single mother and a woman with a sexual life in a controlling patriarchal society is too explicit in its language. In other words, her characters speak like real people, not with some bowdlerized rhetoric ostensibly used by religious social conservatives, who, in my actual experience often have quite salty vocabularies of their own and seldom speak like CBC announcers. Oh, and Laurence is also on the ban-this-book list for depicting teachers as, um, having sex out of wedlock. Gosh, as though that never happens. It happens to the religious, too—half of avowed Christians surveyed now say sex between unmarried couples is ok and some surveys find that actual behaviour among young unmarried Christians tracks their attitudes. Times change. They always do, which is why the censors have a moving target. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just a bête noire for the outer fringe of the American religious right, whose yearnings for social control it activates, it’s been the target of would-be censors across Canada who object to it as anti-Christian. It’s not anti-Christian, of course, it’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when fascist authoritarianism is infused with Christian fundamentalism and then crystallizes its extreme values into a cynical, hypocritical oppression of women. Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, as mild and generous a personality as one was likely to meet, made the hit list for The Lives of Girls and Women which depicted women as having—and even wanting to have—sex lives, which we all know is simply not the case, leaving the arrival of another 140 million babies every year an unexplained mystery. Mordecai Richler fell afoul of those who would protect our young from literary taint with The Apprenticeship of Daddy Kravitz. Parents demanded that it be removed from high school libraries because it exposed their kids to “vulgarity, sexual expressions and sexual innuendoes” in its portrayal of a working class Jewish kid from Montreal trying to make it in a WASP culture. Presumably, the objectors’ kids and the kids they play with all spoke proper elevated English and weren’t interested in well, um, you know what! The logical conclusion, of course, would be if you don’t want your child reading this material, then don’t let your child read it. But that’s not the real agenda, of course. The real agenda is to prevent other people’s children from reading it. Why? Because exposure to ideas that challenge the complainants’ world view might bring it into question. Those who are most insecure about the foundations of their beliefs are often the most vehement about limiting their own and other people’s exposure to ideas that challenge or, heaven forbid, contradict those precepts. Some, like British journalist and man of letters Holbrook Jackson, who died at just about the time I arrived in Victoria for my fateful encounter with Popo the Hippopotamus, are of another view. “Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice,” he observed. I didn’t grow up in a household like that, thank heavens. I was encouraged to read anything that caught my interest—including classic comic books, which were viewed with withering contempt by my parents as bowdlerized fables for the simple-minded. But back to the hippopotamus in my tent. POPO, WHO WORKED IN A CIRCUS, resembled—the pictures did at any rate—Babar the Elephant who started life in Histoire de Babar in 1931, the French children’s book that became a global cultural phenomenon. Babar has since sold more than eight million copies, been translated into 16 languages and has spun off movies and television series that are now broadcast in 30 languages in more than 150 countries and remains a lucrative franchise for a giant Canadian media conglomerate that was perspicacious enough to secure rights. Written in the sickly afterglow of brutal colonial empires already being dismantled following the Great War, Babar the Elephant, is based on a charming children’s yarn first concocted for her children by the author’s wife. Babar has not been without controversy because of its early accompanying illustrations depicting African people through the ugly racist prism of self-perceived colonial overlords. Then there’s Babar’s mission, bringing French civilization to the animals of the African jungle in the form of Parisian fashion. Ok. Even out here in our post-Victorian outpost on the fringes of a largely-decayed empire we’re still susceptible to being “civilized”—Babar-like—in the form of haute couture and culture as defined by higher tastes in Paris, New York, London and Berlin, the perceived centres of high civilization, although the latest Liberty of London blouses and their price tags generate less contention than obnoxious imagery in near-century-old kids’ books. Babar endures because, despite its flaws, the core story is benign, accessible, generally benevolent and seems malleable to the values of each age through which it passes. The unpleasant echoes of discredited standards from another time are subsumed into the better values that many appear to believe worthy of celebrating, even in an era grappling with the urgent task of creating a post-colonial world, the on-going colonial projects of China regarding Tibetans and Uyghurs and Russia and Ukraine notwithstanding. But back to Popo again. It had to be a library book that embedded the word hippopotamus in my unconscious. I’d never seen one except in a picture book. My parents, newly-landed immigrants in 1948, were pretty well skint. My dad had found work as a deckhand on the scow that went from the foot of Johnson Street out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca to deposit Victoria’s overnight garbage on the outgoing tide. Later he did some itinerant logging for small contractors (who seemed to have a knack for going broke just before the final pay day), worked briefly in the BapCo Paint factory, delivered bread to the backdoors of Uplands for McGavin’s and so on. My mother had me, at 18-months, my baby brother, and very little money. But she did have a library card. And thus I had Popo, among the many other titles that swept through the cottage on Whiteside Avenue in the days when it was surrounded by farm fields and considered the rural countryside: Pirates in the Deep Green Sea, The Water Babies, Peter and Veronica (the 1928 title, not the 1969 book, by which time I was already on to Catch 22), The Hick-Boo. That’s what I chiefly remember from childhood, books; many books. And encouragement to read whatever was going. Among my earliest memories is awaking in my sick room—what the illness was I don’t remember but it was serious enough to worry young parents—to the susurration of wind in the lilacs outside the widow, the play of light on the ceiling as it came through the leaves, and the rise and fall of my father’s voice. He was reading to me from Homer’s Odyssey. He says he doesn’t remember that moment but I do, the story of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast while the Sirens sang to him. What was that about? I didn’t figure that out for quite some time but it made for a good story! “You can go anywhere if you can read,” my dad would tell me. “There’s no place you can’t go and you can go there whenever you like!” Which was nice to know when the family budget for a holiday extended to a picnic in Beacon Hill Park. And it was true. Books took me to Africa to look for King Solomon’s Mines, across the Pacific in an open boat, into the Arctic tundra and the snowy Himalayas of the Yeti and Shangri-la. Later, living in Port Alberni, the air redolent with eau de pulp mill, my mother would deposit me at the library while she did her Saturday shopping. I was in Grade Four. I had worked my way through Freddy Plays Football—only later did my father point out the anti-semitism—the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Tod Moran who still wanders the Seven Seas in an itinerant tramp freighter, and the other musty kid lit relics from an earlier age that lingered in the small town stacks. The librarian took pity. She must be long dead now but I remember her halo of grey hair and the steel-rimmed glasses. She beckoned me to the desk and with great ceremony issued me the card that let me take out books from the adult section. “Make sure you tell your dad,” she said gravely. “If he objects, tell him I’d like to talk to him.” With some apprehension, I told my dad. He called my mother. They examined my shiny new card and, I swear, they were as pleased as I was that I had advanced upon my reading journey. Never once did they challenge my reading of any of the books I subsequently lugged home. Not even a well-thumbed copy of The Decameron, although that raised my mother’s eyebrows. I owe them and my librarian a great debt. I never forget it, especially now when we’re asked to help our librarians—whether in schools or public libraries—withstand the rising attempts to constrain our hard won freedom to read. Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, labour unions, politicians, feminists, fascists and anti-facists, racists and anti-racists; in the Age of Umbrage every faction with an axe to grind argues that the world would be better with fewer books and wants some title or other cancelled because it either might hurt somebody’s feelings or might lead weaker minds than theirs astray. Ban all the books that offend somebody and we’ll eventually be restricted to reading the labels on cereal boxes. No Bible, no Qur’an, no Shakespeare, no Harry Potter, no Fifty Shades of Grey—just the bland labels on our Quaker Oats boxes. Oh, wait, sorry, objections have been raised to the cereal labels, too. Some of us, it seems, take affront at the French. See the Freedom to Read website for more information. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. Top photo credit: A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of “un-German” books on the Opernplatz in Berlin, 1933. Unknown photographer. Creative Commons.
  6. Some food for thought on the life of the bard Robert Burns. MIGHT AS WELL BEGIN WITH A DISCLOSURE. I am, indeed, as my name indicates, of Scots ancestry—on both sides, too—not that I had any choice in the matter and therefore can’t take credit one way or the other. And, like many another citizen of Victoria, I do appreciate the poetry of Robert Burns, preferably enjoyed in the company of a good peaty Scotch (at this time of year putting a tang of smoke into an Atholl Brose that’s been steeping since November). I also like the occasional kipper. I’m no a fan of haggis or deep-fried Mars Bars, though, and, no, I don’t own a kilt and never will. More on that later. Another niggling confession: I was in fact born in England, as was my father, and his father before him, among the Sassenachs. That’s the not-very-affectionate Gaelic term for the English, as aficionados of the hit television series Outlander will know. In my defence, I was removed from England before I even knew where I was, and although I’m an immigrant to lək̓ʷəŋən territory, I nevertheless can now claim to have settled here in Victoria in the first half of the last century, before about 95 percent of its current living population arrived. My great-grandfather, his wife and their ancestors, however—as I have never for one second been permitted to forget—all hailed from around the River Tweed south of Edinburgh and just north of Bamburgh. Fans of that other hit TV series The Last Kingdom will recognize Bamburgh as the the model for the fortress of Uhtred, the conflicted Anglo-Saxon strangely reinvented for TV as a Viking war lord with an identity crisis in the time of Alfred and Athelstan. From there, and from the adjacent and unsparing North Sea coast, my ancestors ventured forth boldly as master mariners, fishermen, shipbuilders, and (sotto voce in the telling of family history) mercenaries, cattle rustlers, horse thieves, murderers, abductors of women, blackmailers, pillagers of isolated farms and eventually as displaced persons and economic refugees. Every story, even the sunniest family story, has two sides as we journalists quickly discover and must report, which is presumably why we frequently don’t get invited to extended family dinners: “Hey, guess what I found out about Great Aunt Salome!” And it’s why so many of us roll our eyes at the gilding of history during the public adulations of famous figures like Burns. Experience tells us the monumental feet are almost certainly made of clay. This small meander is just by way of acknowledging my own cultural connections before some personal musings on the peculiar, romanticized mania over Burns, the Scots poet, farmer, philandering seducer, collector of pornographic verse and seldom-acknowledged social iconoclast which convulses Victoria every January around this time. HERE IN GREATER VICTORIA, the Burns Night agenda at time of writing, pandemic notwithstanding, was still for pipers to go piping, readers to give poetry readings at his monument in Beacon Hill Park, and tipplers to tipple bracing Scotch whisky at distilleries. There were stacks of haggises at Fraser Orr the Butcher’s, there was commemorative beer brewed by Twa’ Dogs Brewery. Pub nights were planned, not to mention well-lubricated suppers and even better lubricated formal dinners at which well-heeled members of the establishment in Montrose doublets and velvet gowns rise to pay homage to a poet whose poems dismissed their pursuits as greedy, self-righteous, pretentious, high-minded hypocrisy. Portrait of Robbie Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists What’s most interesting is how disconnected the icon of Scottish cultural chauvinism has become from the reality of Burns the 18th Century versifier and the significance of what he said. “Wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us; To see ourselves as ithers see us!” Burns wrote in To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church. Odd how so many of us go to dinners in his honour and think somehow he was writing about somebody else, not us. The social critic of elitist class snobbery who blew up poetic convention by writing in the colloquial language of ordinary Scots rather than the prissy, pedantic English style that prevailed, is now celebrated by people who clearly don’t really read him with care and tend to get prissy and pedantic should the riff raff of reportage express an opinion in that regard. For example, now is when Scots, honorary Scots, Scots-by-marriage, wannabe Scots and self-identified Scots of many ethnicities pay homage to Burns by donning their Highland finery. That finery was once the far more basic garb of peasants who didn’t get to dine on white linen with silver settings and would be amazed to see their cuisine of turnips, cabbage, oats and sheep offal so exoticized by people who drink $80 Scotch and pay $80 a kilo for steak. It gets weirder. The kilt, for example, is widely thought (not without dispute, naturally) to have been invented by an English industrialist to replace the more cumbersome attire worn by the displaced crofters who were forced to come in from the fields to work in his factories. The Montrose doublet-sporting owners of the fields thought sheep, which ate only grass, made better and less costly tenants and so they cleared the whole lot of crofters off, which proved extraordinarily convenient for English factory owners in need of cheap labour. The kilt has since been appropriated from the poor workers on the factory floor and fetishized as manly ceremonial attire for royalty, regimental brass hats and those aspiring to some romanticized notion of that same Scottish aristocracy which cleared the farmers off their lands to make way for sheep and then shipped the refugees off as cheap indentured servants and field hands for English plantation plutocrats or to be cannon fodder in England’s many wars—both real and proxy, military and economic—of brutal colonial expansion. If you want colonial symbolism writ large, look no farther than folks in doublets, ruffles and kilts toasting the Queen in proper English rather than the earthy Scots dialect used by Burns. Throw a celebratory dinner in honour of Hugh MacDiarmid or Edwin Morgan, among the architects of Scotland’s literary renaissance in the vernacular, and a few professors and their graduate students might show up. You wouldn’t expect, as Burns enthusiasts do, fans of Chinese ancestry showing up in kilts, or tipsy politicians and CEOs standing on their chairs to toast the arrival of a boiled sheep’s stomach stuffed with a mash of lungs and porridge, or ardent women’s rights advocates swooning over “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose” on behalf of one of history’s most accomplished “love ’em and leave ’em” experts. That’s because most of those who wish to be seen celebrating our literary rock star know not so much about him. I’m certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “the people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns.” For example, Burns mocked orthodox religion. And at just about all the formal occasions celebrating Burns, there’s a stuffy toast to the Queen—kind of a required observance when you have politicians, RCMP brass and naval commanders on public display. Yet Burns was contemptuous of royalty, its agents and what they represented to him. An “insolent beef-witted race of foreigners” was the way he characterized his 18th Century royals and their ilk from which the present crew directly descends. He was scarcely kinder to patriotism and its military servants. Both, he said, were beneath contempt and an insult to God. “In wars at home I’ll spend my blood, Life-giving wars of Venus,” he wrote in his not-so-often quoted poem Some Lines on the Occasion of National Thanksgiving for a Great Naval Victory. “I’m better pleased to make one more Than be the death of twenty.” As I’ve noted, Burns took up “this make love not war” philosophy with vigour and it must have been infectious (if one can use that term without irony these days) judging from the number of women who welcomed the great charmer into their beds. BURNS APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN SMITTEN by every woman he met, married or unmarried, high society lady or barefooted milk maid, and he must have been remarkably charming, perhaps roguishly outré, considering how many appear to have reciprocated. Strangely, I recall none of this side of Burns from my high school English classes at Mt Douglas Senior Secondary. Mind you, my favourite English lit teacher at Mt Doug abruptly departed after a parent complained that we had been encouraged to read and discuss Mordecai Richler’s novel The Apprenticeship of Daddy Kravitz because, horrors, there was sex in the story. I mean, there was already sex at Mt Doug, not to mention pot—it was 1965 for Pete’s sake—and we all knew about it. I often wonder what that shocked parent subsequently made of Game of Thrones on prime time TV. Nor can I recall hearing any of the poet’s more bawdy verse—look it up for yourself, I’m not repeating it here for the same reasons—recited at Burns Banquets, either. I recommend Burns’ Complete Poetical Works. Browse it and you’ll find poems addressed to no fewer than 100 women. There are love poems, admirations, homages and romantic infatuations for: Mary, Bessie, Chloris, Clarinda, Mrs Riddel, Miss Fontenelle, Miss Burnet, Jean, Jenny, Mrs Oswald, Maria, Peggy, Rachel, Wilhelmina, Lesley, Jane, Margaret, Deborah, Mally, Lucy, Phillis, Euphemia, Maria, Miss Ferrier, Lady Elizabeth Heron, Polly —I’d go on but I really don’t feel like typing another 75 names. Just to put this in perspective, in1786 Burns was involved with Jean Armour. She left. He took up with Meg Cameron, then he got back with Jean, then he settled out of court with Meg, then took up with Agnes M’Lehose, then settled a paternity suit with Elizabeth Paton, then got involved with Clarinda, a married woman in Edinburgh. In 1788, while Jean is giving birth to his twins, Burns is writing two letters a day to Clarinda. But in April, he does the right thing by Jean and marries her and then, in November, Jenny Clow bears him a son. In 1789, he settles a paternity suit with Jenny Clow but he’s since met Frances Grose—she bears him a son in August of the same year. Then comes 1790, another busy year. He meets Ann Park, she bears him a daughter on March 31, 1791; Jean Armour presents him with a baby boy on April 9. He breaks things off with Agnes M’Lehose and a year later in 1792, Jean Armour gives birth to his daughter. By 1793, he’s enamoured of Mrs Maria Riddell, whose husband is away in Jamaica, but in 1794 she dumps him after he attempts, during a recitation, to demonstrate The Rape of the Sabine Women with more drunken ardour than she thinks proper for a proper Edinburgh society soirée—perhaps a cautionary tale for local Burns Night revellers in 2022. Oh, and Jean Armour bears him another son. All is forgiven by Mrs Riddell in 1795 but on July 21, 1796, he dies, aged 37, presumably of exhaustion. His funeral takes place on July 25 and while Burns is being lowered into the ground in his coffin, Jean Armour gives birth to his last son. It’s not that the priapic poet was simply callous, tempestuous as his love life appears to have been. His passions just seem to have been more robust than straight-laced convention could contain. He was formally pilloried by the local church, officially condemned as a fornicator and then responded with savage satires mocking the hypocrisy of sanctimonious church leaders prepared to send one soul to heaven while condemning 10 to hell to serve their own self-important vanity. Statue of Robbie Burns and Highland Mary in Beacon Hill Park Mary Campbell, possibly the Highland Mary of some of his tenderest lyrics, purportedly so-named because of her heavy Gaelic accent, seems to have been on his conscience. He met her in church, apparently seduced and may have abandoned her and yet, the poetry suggests, was still grieving years after her sudden death at age 23 in 1786 during “a malignant fever which hurried my dear girl to the grave in a few days.” Or, at least, that’s one story. Contemporary scholars are doubtful of it. Perhaps it’s true, or perhaps she’s a conflation of several women with whom Burns was involved. Most likely, like Burns himself, the inspiring ghost of Highland Mary is another myth concocted to amplify the larger myth of the poet and his cultural importance. Yet Jean Armour later said that on the third anniversary of Mary’s death, Burns became extremely agitated, went out of a long walk from which he didn’t return until daybreak when he abruptly sat down and wrote the poignant To Mary in Heaven. In any event, the two myths—the famous (or infamous) bard Rabbie Burns and his maybe muse Highland Mary—are still here in Victoria 228 years later, still being celebrated for all the wrong reasons, their bronzed faces gazing wistfully at one another atop their plinth in Beacon Hill Park while folks who know nothing about them, toast something, exactly what isn’t clear. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  7. The first child of European descent born in the Interior of BC, was guided into life with the help of a Secwepemc midwife. WHAT USED TO BE CHRIST’S MASS, second only to Easter on the medieval Christian calendar, is now pretty-much a global commercial phenomenon far more suffused with the secular than the spiritual—and yet the mythic outline of the story endures, perhaps because it offers profound lessons that transcend materialism, commerce and self-interest which can speak to those of all religions, creeds, beliefs or non-beliefs. So, as we all embark on a national journey toward reconciliation, still tested by simmering tensions over our colonial past, by immigration and shifting cultural tropes, by the manifestations of apparent differences of faith, ethnicity, wealth and social class, consider this a small Christmas story from British Columbia’s own creation myth—the discovery of gold in 1858 that unleashed a torrent of greed and avarice that utterly transformed the social, political and cultural landscape of what is now our shared province. Pedants might argue that this can’t really be a Christmas story because it occurred one mid-October day 159 years ago. But then, the original Christmas that we nominally celebrate didn’t take place in late December, either. As far as we can tell by studying the historical and astronomical records, that first Christmas perhaps took place around mid-October, too. It had migrated to December for reasons of politics, propaganda and expedience, conveniently draping itself as a Christian overlay upon pre-existing pagan celebrations—the earlier Roman festival of Saturnalia and Northern European winter solstice rites. How do we guess that? Thank the astronomers. Their computers determined that a rare conjunction of two of the night sky’s brightest objects, Jupiter and Saturn, occurred in October of the year 7 Before Common Era, or what used to be called Before Christ until science decided that dating methods were better detached from religion. The actual celestial event resonates with the story of the Christmas star, which, according to the story, led three wise men to the birthplace of the infant Jesus, where they then presented him with expensive presents. In that story, the heavenly beacon also served to signal his arrival to shepherds and, presumably, anyone else who was paying attention to the night sky on that chilly October night. There’s a bit more corroboration in the records that survive from the reigns of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Imperial Rome, and Herod the Great, the descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals who was reduced to local kinglet under the thumb of mighty Augustus. But back to that original story which occurs during a Roman census. The Christmas story tells of a young family—Joseph, a carpenter, and his new wife, Mary—travelling the roads when the young woman goes into labour. A nearby inn, jammed with similar wayfarers trying to fulfil their bureaucratic duty to register their existence with the Imperial authorities, has no room. Yet the compassionate inn-keeper lets the couple take shelter in his stable, warmed, at least, by the steaming heat of the livestock. And there, in the humblest of surroundings, the infant Jesus who, in the medieval rendering at least, is destined to be the king of kings, is born. BC’s story has interesting congruencies. IT’S THE TALE OF ANOTHER Augustus, August Schubert, his name only the faintest echo of that Roman emperor who founded an empire that lasted a thousand years. Our Augustus, too, is a simple carpenter—a feckless one, judging from the record—and he’s also travelling with his young wife, a gritty Irish woman born Catherine O’Hare, the youngest of nine children, in 1835 in County Down. She emigrated to the United States as a 16-year-old, one of the “famine Irish” fleeing the great potato blight which killed a million people and sent another two million into diaspora, many of them dying in cholera epidemics on the way. Catherine worked as a maid and spent her off hours learning to read. She married Augustus, about 10 years her senior, when she was 20, and in 1860 they emigrated with their three children to the Red River Settlement in what’s now Manitoba. When word arrived of a rich gold strike in distant BC, Augustus decided he was going to make his fortune. He signed on with a party of 150 “Overlanders” who were travelling from what’s now Winnipeg to Fort Edmonton and then over the Yellowhead Pass to the Cariboo gold fields. But Catherine was not about to be abandoned with three small children while her husband went prospecting. She insisted so strenuously that the party reversed its rule that no women could join the expedition and made a place for her. She didn’t trouble the expedition leader with the information that she was pregnant—after all, he’d assured them it was just a six week journey across the prairies by Red River ox cart, then they’d drift rafts down the Fraser River to the diggings and get rich. But the journey took six months and it was cruel. Drought, flood, thirst and hunger punished the expedition over the first 1,600 kilometres. At Fort Edmonton, Catherine sold the family’s cow. “Crossing the Pembina River,” 1862 sketch by William George Richardson Hind, who accompanied the Overlanders, travelling from Fort Garry [Winnipeg] to the interior of British Columbia in search of gold. Courtesy Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1963-97-1.85R) Nuns at St Ann’s mission begged her to stay with them but Catherine insisted on staying with her husband. They pressed on. They built eight bridges across icy torrents, lost pack horses that fell into canyons, crawled narrow trails above precipices carrying their children on their backs. It was August 21 when the last of their pemmican ran out, a long, hungry week before they reached the headwaters of the Fraser River at Tete June Cache. Rafts broke up and capsized in the thunderous rapids, men drowned. Augustus, Catherine and the children took another route to the Thompson River. They got lost. They were starving. They foraged for berries, snared squirrels and ate wild rose hips. They stumbled into a deserted First Nations village, learning only later it had been devastated by the smallpox epidemic which carried off thousands in 1862. But they found an abandoned garden and were able to dig up enough potatoes to keep them going for another four days until, nearing Kamloops, Secwepemc people gave them salmon and huckleberry cakes and pointed them in the right direction. On the banks of the Thompson River, near what’s now Kamloops, Catherine went into labour with her fourth child. Two Secwepemc woman took her into their lodge. They gave birthing assistance to the stranger whose language they didn’t share and together, on October 14, 1862, ushered into the world Rose Schubert. And thus, the first child of European descent born in the Interior of BC was welcomed into the hands of her First Nations midwife, a metaphor that should guide us into the uncertain future. Area where Secwepemc women helped settler woman give birth along banks of the Thompson River. This is a view of North Kamloops looking north from Thompson Rivers University (photo by AC Macaulay, Creative Commons) Catherine, it’s said, first thought of naming her new daughter Kamloops but decided on Rose because of the wild rosehips that had kept them alive during the last desperate days before they were saved by the Secwepemc band. Like the Christmas story that still resonates at the heart of all those other trappings, secular, religious, commercial or familial, the story of that birth at Kamloops, the story of Rose, Catherine and her unnamed but not forgotten Secwepemc midwives; of the refugee finding refuge; a story of love and determination, hope and perseverance, kindness and tolerance, sharing and goodwill to strangers—that story offers us a lesson for our own time. It reminds us that these are the true gifts we should celebrate with one another no matter the troubles or what the differing values and beliefs of those we encounter along the way. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  8. The rise of the e-bike—often sharing space with pedestrians while travelling at 25 kilometres per hour—may necessitate a rethink of local transportation plans. FIFTY YEARS AGO, I came to think I was the only adult in Yellowknife riding a bicycle. I never saw anyone else riding on my cycling treks. I’d buck the sharp wind that gusted off the not-so-distant Arctic barrens to punctuate my circuits around Frame Lake and then Jackfish Lake, juddering past Max Ward’s old bulbous-nosed Bristol freighter, frozen atop its modernist stela in some eternal bush landing—or maybe it was an eternally over-loaded take-off, which might have been more in keeping. The bike was a canary yellow CCM 10-speed. It was heavy. It had to be to withstand the washboard surface, potholes and clouds of grit that occasionally whirled off the Giant Yellowknife gold mine with its verdigris puddles and sickly-yellow trickles of who-knew-what. Sometimes I’d ride out past the airport with the shiny silver DC-3 of Northwest Territorial Air that occasionally served as a courtroom for Justice Bill Morrow, and the golf course where a crashed C-47 fuselage had served as the clubhouse until the US Air Force arrived to reclaim it. The “greens” were oiled sand and mulligans were formalized because ravens would routinely swoop in to steal balls. Almost 1,200 kilometers of gravel road separated me from the next pavement, laid down in northern Alberta to ease the movement of drill pipe to the Keg River oil play. Or I might ride out the Ingraham Trail—named for the same Vic Ingraham who built Victoria’s iconic hotel of the same name and whose pub was beloved of the baseball, soccer and rugby set for post-game beers. I’d dodge the battered Ford F-150 drivers who’d do bemused double-takes at the spectacle. I’d cycle out past the mine site until the tailings gave way to stunted spruce and granite outcrops, or, feeling lazy, I’d just head for Rat Lake down 52nd Street where I lived in a walk-up and used the otherwise useless balcony as a winter-long freezer for the caribou I shot that fall. The snows arrived in October and the days would narrow toward their nadir in December, dwindling to a few hours twilight. I’d hang the old bike on a hook and forget about it until the drifts vanished in early May, when I’d extract it for another summer’s riding. When did my propensity for taking these long, slow, contemplative rides start? I remember the first when I was about 12. I took my 10-year-old brother out to consecrate his new bottle-green birthday bike, a Raleigh three-speed, by riding a dusty lakeside track in the Interior. As I remember, the ride was punctuated by many stops to swim. He fell off once but didn’t cry, and we had a splendid expedition picnic of peanut butter and Cheese Whiz sandwiches. Our mother, usually more inclined to goats’ milk, had secretly packed us a sinful surprise, a couple KIK Colas which we guzzled surrounded by patches of wildflowers. My brother hit a rock on the way home and bent his front rim, which did not thrill my father. I BEGIN WITH THESE CYCLING ANECDOTES to get something out of the way from the get-go. I am a cycling enthusiast. I have been for a long, long time. I don’t obsess about it. I’m not much for the fancy spandex duds, accessories and competitive spirit. But I’m all for getting on a bike and going somewhere, or nowhere for that matter. So this is a caution, not a criticism of the Capital Regional District’s master plan to build out infrastructure—with the ambition of increasing cycling from the current 3.2 percent base in Greater Victoria to 25 percent—as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get us all involved in a healthier physical lifestyle. Just be careful what you wish for. The old yellow CCM has long departed. So has its successor, another CCM that I rode until it literally fell apart. But I still have a 60’s vintage Bill Clements road bike, although the drop handlebars have been jettisoned for something kinder to my shoulders, and its sleek lines are marred by a grocery basket, and—back to the future!—I also have a Raleigh 18-speed that my wife thoughtfully rigged with saddlebags for my 16-kilometre sorties to the grocery store and back. So, really, I’m all for more investment in bike lanes that separate cyclists from motor vehicles; for prioritizing cyclists over motor vehicles where that’s practical and so on. What I’m not in favour of is the canonization of cycling as a virtue-signalling entitlement that demonizes drivers for their ecological insensitivity and unintentionally marginalizes pedestrians as inconvenient dodderers who selfishly occupy spaces better reserved for somebody silently hurtling past them from behind at an intimidating 32 kilometres an hour. The Lochside Trail is shared by recreational walkers, runners, commuter and recreational cyclists using pedal and e-bikes (photo by Stephen Hume) Which is certainly how I felt while out for a walk the other day on a “shared” path when the rider of an electric bike with tires like a motorcycle gave me the finger as he flashed past close enough for me to feel the breeze. His curse drifted back: “Move over, you old @#$%&@! Stick to your walker!” I have a thick skin. After more than half-a-century of reporting I’ve been called just about everything you can imagine and quite a few things I’m sure you can’t. Some surly young immortal yelling insults over his unhelmeted shoulder is the least of my worries. That moment of road rage, if you can call it that, got me thinking, though. If it was an isolated incident, I’d dismiss it as the rudeness of somebody having a bad day. But it actually happens frequently when I’m out afoot sharing the “shared” space. And when I ask friends and acquaintances, they concur with my perception: going for a walk is beginning to feel less safe as power-assisted cyclists arrive in greater numbers travelling at greater speeds. THIS TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE almost everywhere. Studies in Israel, Australia, Norway, China, the United Kingdom, in Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Adelaide all confirm growing levels of apprehension among pedestrians who are seniors and those with hearing, mobility and visual disabilities. Participation surveys suggest that in many urban landscapes these categories of pedestrians feel they are gradually being pushed out of public spaces where they can walk safely. One significant factor seems to be inexperienced cyclists who discover they can suddenly perform like triathlon stars simply because they have the money to buy a power-assisted electric bike—which they can then take into mixed-use spaces with no training, little regulation and virtually no accountability. Their power-assisted bikes, which are almost silent, frequently travel narrow paths shared with pedestrians at the speed limit for cars on urban streets. Marketing ads tend to show elderly folk leisurely cruising along, the power used only for the occasional hill. They don’t show the reality of bike cowboys zipping past startled pedestrians. Yet research determines that the average e-bike user travels at about 25 kilometres per hour, a clip that wouldn’t be sustainable for any but the fittest recreational pedal cyclist. And these powered vehicle aren’t registered and they don’t have to carry liability insurance. Because of the usage protocols on shared-use paths, they approach pedestrians—who may not be able to hear them coming—from behind at the speed of rush hour road traffic in Metro Vancouver. Cyclists and pedestrians on the E&N Trail (CRD photo) These realities tend to be submerged in the bland, corporate mission-statement rhetoric that suffuses planning documents like the strategic masterplan. But this issue is not going away and it’s going to get worse as more commuters are attracted to electric bikes and the convenience of shared-use routes. We need some clear, dispassionate, tough-minded thinking about the trade-offs. How should we deal collectively with the rapidly expanding phenomenon of power-assisted bicycles and the nature and structure of infrastructure required to accommodate them? For that to take place we need a lot more objective data, not just surveys by city planners and proposals from various lobby groups. Frankly, there’s not much relevant data out there. I thought over the nature of the offence in my own most recent incident. I’d moved over a step to my left to make my way around a patch of ankle-deep mud. I wasn’t about to take the inside route around the mud hole. The bank was steep. It had soft edges. I’m pretty fit for my age, but I’m also a realist and I don’t tempt fate with unnecessary challenges to my much decreased agility, less certain balance and loss of strength. The cyclist, when I’d glanced over my shoulder, seemed distant. He approached at a much faster speed than I’d judged. Not surprising really, he was coming toward me at the speed of a world champion sprinter. As he closed from behind, I heard not a sound. Another disclosure. As is the case for about half those my age or older—I’m 75—I suffer significant hearing loss, particularly in the higher frequencies. So, again, not surprising that I didn’t hear him coming. Regulations say cyclists are required to signal intention to pass. Perhaps he did. I didn’t hear it. But then, regulations say the law requires cyclists to wear helmets and that law isn’t universally respected or enforced either. Some of the safety conventions that we’re all sanctimoniously urged to adopt are clearly deemed optional by a lot of us. I’ve been reading with great interest the vigorous conversation in various arenas about how we use this shared pedestrian-cycling infrastructure in the Capital Region. Lochside Trail in November (photo by Stephen Hume) Would it be better if pedestrians walked on the left while cyclists rode on the right so that walkers could see on-coming traffic? Well, there’s a certain logic to that since the Motor Vehicles Act—once again seldom enforced—compels walkers on roads without sidewalks to walk on the lefthand side so they can face and therefore see on-coming traffic they might not hear. Others counter that it would be a recipe for chaos in shared pedestrian-cycling spaces. That’s a reasonable argument, too. Chaos on shared-use footpaths in the United Kingdom is the source of lively if tiresome debate there with cyclists blaming pedestrians and pedestrians asserting their ancient right-of-way, complaints about scofflaws who don’t leash their dogs and about parents who don’t control their toddlers and from parents regarding the stupidity of cyclists who don’t slow down when there are small children ahead and so on. In other jurisdictions, there’s now a move to once again disentangle vulnerable pedestrian traffic from the hazard of faster cyclists just as shared space was itself first devised as way to separate vulnerable cyclists from faster motor vehicles. AMPLIFYING THE CONUNDRUM is the advent of the electric bike. It’s marketed as a green solution for commuters. It entices the less-fit who find recreational biking daunting. The public has embraced the technology. There are now 250 million electric bikes in China. Globally, electric bike use grows by about 130 million a year. Unfortunately, what little data there is indicates that the rise of the electric bike is not without its downsides. It has increased hazards for pedestrians—particularly for seniors and children—and for cyclists, too. Politicians seem uncertain about how and what to regulate, and what they do regulate they don’t seem inclined to enforce. Enthusiasts frequently dismiss concerns as the fretting of entitled geriatrics. Yet one recent Australian study found that a shocking eight percent of pedestrians using shared bicycle paths had been knocked down. One-third of walkers said they’d been frightened by a cyclist passing too closely at a high rate of speed. It proved worse than the pedestrians reported. Researchers evaluating the data subsequently concluded that for every cyclist colliding with a pedestrian on shared-use paths there were actually 50 near-misses. When researchers concentrated on seniors who walked, they found high levels of anxiety. Perhaps this is because the burden of serious injuries in collisions involving cyclists and pedestrians is born mostly by pedestrians, especially those over 60 who are more fragile. In collisions, cyclists were most likely to suffer soft tissue injuries. Seniors suffered severe head injuries and broken bones ranging from skull to pelvic fractures incurred as they struck the ground. Even though the actual risk of physical injury from a collision between a fast-moving bike and a pedestrian remains relatively low compared to other risks, the fear-factor is already having a significant impact on seniors’ behaviour in shared-use public spaces. Another Australian study found that pedestrians have become much more likely to take pre-emptive avoidance action on paths they must share with high volumes of bike traffic. Although pedestrians nominally have the right of way and supposedly take priority on shared-use paths, more than 70 percent now feel they are required to keep close to the edge of the path and to walk single file. This precludes the social aspect of an elderly couple going for an afternoon walk. Almost 20 percent said they felt compelled to step off the path every time a cyclist approached. Pedestrians over 70 were more likely than other groups just to try to avoid cyclists entirely “suggesting this group perceived a higher level of danger.” So here comes another unintended consequence of the increased blending of pedestrian and cycling traffic (complicated by the added threat of electrically powered vehicles) on shared paths. Pedestrians now express the same concerns about cyclists that cyclists directed at drivers—inattention, hostility, dismissal of their concerns as entitled whingeing. And cyclists “obstructed” by pedestrians sound remarkably similar to aggrieved drivers complaining about the inconvenience of cyclists. The problem, it appears, is simply being moved from one venue to another. For seniors over 75, many of whom have agility and mobility issues due to everything from arthritic conditions to calcium-deficiencies and brittle bones, walking comprises 77 percent of their total physical activity, one group of researchers found. Geriatric medicine has long advocated that the elderly remain active and mobile as long as possible as a way of forestalling an inevitable loss of physical function and the high public cost disabilities associated with ageing. Denying these seniors access to walking because they are deemed an inconvenience to cyclists and because they feel menaced by increasingly fast electric bike traffic they have difficulty hearing seems likely to be counterproductive in terms of broader public health objectives. Numerous studies show that walking on public footpaths increases steadily with age. The older people get, the more they take up walking as a safe, inexpensive recreational exercise with tangible health benefits. But the studies also show that this trend peaks at about age 60. Then it collapses by about one-third—just at the point where this segment of the population begins to express growing apprehension of danger from the the speed and silence of newly emerging electric bike traffic. “You don’t hear them,” one pedestrian complained of electric bikes to a New York newspaper earlier this year. “They have the momentum of a motorcycle…They go faster than the fastest cyclist…They go faster than some cars.” A peer-reviewed study by social scientists in Israel made the same point: “E-bikes and motorized scooters are virtually imperceptible by ear” which makes them dangerous to pedestrians, particularly seniors and young children. The Israeli scholars noted the dearth of statistical data on the electric bike phenomenon but said their findings led them to conclude that “e-bikes along with motorized scooters have become a significant national health, economic and social burden.” Israel recorded a sixfold increase in the number of injured patients due to electric bike and scooter incidents between 2013 and 2015. China saw electric bike-related injuries jump fourfold between 2004 and 2010. “Some argue that walkers who don’t like sharing paths with cyclists can simply walk on footpaths instead,” observed one major Australian policy analysis. “Aside from the fact this overlooks the absence of footpaths in some areas, seniors, children and those with limited mobility should not be deterred from walking or using open space and recreation areas by inadequate or inappropriate infrastructure. “Walking is by far and away the most significant form of exercise for seniors…Curtailing recreational walking would have significant negative implications for public health.” In Greater Victoria, census data shows there are about 100,000 people over 65. That age segment will grow. The median age by 2036 is expected to increase to 51 years of age. So this conundrum for planners is not going away soon—but there is a chance to get out in front of the issue. Statistics Canada calculates that about 20.3 million Canadians walk recreationally compared to 6.2 million who cycle for fun and only 900,000 who use bicycles to commute to work or school. Where should the priority be? Appropriating safe space from walkers to accommodate cyclists’ needs for safer space while adding a clearly more risky element to the cycling mix doesn’t appear to solve the problem, it just shuffles it down the line. Once again, I’m a cyclist. I like to ride my bike, especially away from traffic. But perhaps this move to integrate pedestrians with fast, silent electric bikes deserves a cautious re-think. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  9. With 243,000 unvaccinated kindergarten-to-grade-fivers in BC there’s a lot of room for COVID-19 to wreak havoc—and no need for euphemisms. ONE DEATH IS A TRAGEDY. A million deaths is a statistic. So observed the brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, that self-styled “man of steel” of the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin, of course, like many a cold-blooded political zealot before and after, dealt mostly with his regime’s generation of statistics. He did not trouble himself overmuch with the tragedies. Government policy-makers, who mostly tend to see themselves as benign benefactors, also prefer to work largely with statistics. Bureaucrats use the generalizations inherent in statistics both to distance themselves from the specific consequences of their decisions and to obfuscate, deflect, redirect and obscure what’s actually going on. Often, it’s because they think we might not respond the way they’d like us to respond—with the calm and dispassionate disinterest that minimizes the political risk to their elected bosses. And they—and we—know exactly what they are doing, which is why we have freedom of information laws, however feeble, to purportedly help us at least try to obtain the knowledge that is rightfully ours (we paid for it, after all). But the information is often mislabelled, misdirected, shuffled into different jurisdictions, hidden behind cost-of-extraction barriers or simply filed in such a way that makes it difficult for the uninitiated to retrieve, buried in an avalanche of relatively undifferentiated numbered files, for example. That’s where I find myself now, wading through chart after chart, table after table, spreadsheet after spreadsheet and jurisdiction after jurisdiction just attempting to figure out the early consequences of British Columbia’s school opening plan. The effort is undertaken in the context of a recent and alarming local surge in British Columbia’s COVID-19 cases at a time when the New York Times reports dramatic declines in new daily infections (down 28 percent), hospitalizations (down 20 percent) and deaths (down seven percent) across the United States. As October began, however, BC still seemed on a steep upward trend in new infections, although the rate of hospitalizations was flattening and deaths were actually declining. Yet, as a report late last week by CTV’s Penny Daflos pointed out, as a proportion of population this province has people sick with COVID-19 in numbers that are nearly quadruple those of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. The question is whether miscalculations by BC’s government are behind the surge here. After all, 17 percent of infections are now among children under age 11 and 30 percent are under age 18. These age groups are now important drivers of BC’s pandemic momentum. COVID-19 cases among BC school children seem to have risen more sharply and far more rapidly than in Ontario, which has four times BC’s school enrolment. The increase here was steepest for elementary schools. The BC rate of new infections for unvaccinated kids aged five-to-nine increased 73 percent between school opening and the end of September. The 9 - 11 age group saw a 53 percent increase. A presumed upside seems to be that statistically, the younger the patients, the less severe the symptoms. Nevertheless, the infection rate for kids under 10 was the highest per capita for any age group—not surprising perhaps, since it remains the largest unvaccinated group in the province. There are about 243,000 kids enrolled from kindergarten to grade five. They are not yet eligible to be vaccinated. That’s a lot of room for a fast-moving, highly-contagious virus to rapidly expand its reach. Additionally, there are those under five years of age, the kids not yet in school. The last census count showed another 237,000 children aged 0 - 4, many of whom are at risk of infection by older siblings returning from the classroom. On September 28, BC’s public health officer described this upward trend in school-aged children and those younger as “concerning.” How concerned should we be? Research normally lags real time events but one study reported by the American Academy of Pediatrics in early September found that children under the age of four are actually more vulnerable than older kids in the unvaccinated grouping. In fact, children in this age group have had the highest rates of pediatric hospitalization. Between late June and mid-August, as the Delta variant of the virus spread, the study discovered, their rate of hospitalization increased 10-fold. Of the children hospitalized, it said, about 23 percent were admitted to intensive care, the number requiring a ventilator increased 67 percent and the number who actually died in hospital over the same period doubled. Looked at another way, the hospitalization rate for children under 10 is about 2 percent—statistically small. That reassuring statistic comes of combining two numbers. For children aged 5 -1 1 the rate is 0.3 percent. But for children under 5 the rate is 1.7 percent. Those statistics indicate that in actual numbers, the risk for children still appears to be very low. Statistically, about 1,000 children were diagnosed with COVID-19 during the last week of September. Only 5 needed hospital care. In BC there are about 500,000 kids under 12 and therefore not vaccinated. Let’s do a little mind experiment. If 95 percent of them were to catch COVID-19 and “only” two percent of those who did get sick were to go to hospital, that’s 9,500 children needing hospital beds. If 23 percent of those in hospital were to require intensive care, that’s about 2,200 children. Hopefully, it never comes to this. A critical part of planning, however, is to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. While the scenario just sketched may be an outlier, it certainly seems possible. Clearly, “only” is a statistical euphemism. If it’s your child heading for hospital with a one-in-four chance of going into intensive care and perhaps dying, there’s no “only” about it. Thus the statistics of the many give way to the tragedies of what individual parents face in real time rather than the cerebral abstractions of risk evaluation models. MY FIRST WEEKEND OF OCTOBER began with a cautionary message from some parents in Alberta. In their kids’ elementary school, I’m told, classroom attendance by just two children with unvaccinated parents resulted in 70 rapidly spread infections among an enrolment of 350 students. The school was forced to close. By comparison, at a middle school attended by an older sibling where there’s a high vaccination rate among the 12 to 15-year-olds, only one COVID-19 case has been recorded since school opened. Obviously, vaccinations are the key. So far, though, we still can’t vaccinate young and very young children. A strict precautionary approach would seem most prudent. Admittedly, circumstances are much worse in Alberta than they are in BC. And yet, there’s not much satisfaction to be taken from those statistics, either. As of October 1, federal data shows that BC ranked second among Canadian provinces for the infection count over the previous seven days. We find 17 percent of all Canada’s cases in a province where 81 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated. Only Alberta, with 11,445 cases—38 percent of all the cases in Canada—tallied more cases than BC. So the two western provinces representing about 25 percent of the country’s population went into October reporting about 55 percent of the entire country’s COVID-19 cases and 50 percent of the deaths. The CTV report points out that infection rates here for new cases, hospitalizations and deaths now exceed rates in Ontario by almost 400 percent. For every 100,000 residents of Canada’s most populous province, there are 34 people sick with COVID-19. Here in BC, it’s 127. In Ontario and Quebec, the fall surge in COVID-19 cases that began at the end of July with a return to school by large numbers of as-yet unvaccinated kids has begun to tip mercifully downward. Here on the country’s western fringe it’s still trending upward. Why? “It’s plausible that is due to what we’re doing in schools,” one physician and epidemiologist at the University of Toronto told CTV. Framed another way, perhaps the engine driving increases here is what wasn’t done in the schools here soon enough or vigorously enough. In BC, policy-makers focused on curbing the spread of the virus by vaccination. Schools were deemed safer than almost anywhere else. Kids weren’t considered a major vector for viral spread. Back in early August, the BC Teachers’ Federation was urging a proactive universal mask mandate in classrooms, even for primary grades, and it wanted a major re-do of school ventilation systems to include extensive use of high grade air filters. The province addressed ventilation by upgrading central heating and air conditioning. There was a partial mask mandate but a full K-12 mandate wasn’t imposed until October 4 when government apparently caved to growing parental pressure. But early on, Ontario acknowledged the role of airborne transmission and its importance with the highly transmissible Delta variant, the U of T epidemiologist observed for CTV. That province responded with a full mask mandate from the get-go and installed specialized stand-alone air filtration units in every classroom. So the question seems fair: Has BC’s pandemic management policy for schools been too cautious and reactive when it should have been aggressively proactive? IN HIS ESSAY Politics and the English Language, George Orwell compared bureaucratic rhetoric and its reliance upon generalizations, averages, euphemisms, platitudes and high-mindedness as a kind of intellectual and linguistic snow falling unobtrusively—but purposefully—“blurring the outlines and covering up the details.” George Orwell, c. 1940, by Cassowary Colorizations, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org We’ve had plenty of exposure to inconvenient details recently: dead children buried in unmarked graves at residential schools; the faces of the homeless—sorry, the “unhoused;” the circumstances of teenagers who end lives just beginning when they cannot obtain timely psychiatric treatment; the increasingly grim facts of how climate change will impact all of us and how deeply invested our government is in perpetuating the use of the fossil fuels behind it. Not to mention the pesky details of who’s in hospital with long-haul after-effects of COVID-19 infections and exactly how many of them there are. Only thanks to impertinent media scrutiny do we now know that government was under-reporting this phenomenon by about 50 percent every day. And so, on a Thursday it was 332 in hospital, then on Friday it was suddenly 484 with the explanation that the additional 152 cases were previously unreported because they had a different label—“discontinued isolation.” In Victoria, officials rushed to provide 50 additional housing units where homeless people—oops, “the unhoused”—could properly isolate after contracting COVID-19, but it took a leak of public health documents marked “for internal use only” to prompt that response. It turned out, the nosy reporters discovered, that on the day the documents leaked, people without shelter or in temporary housing actually made up one-third of all Island Health hospitalizations on that day and that hundreds of cases involved people living in 22 shelters and on the streets. Look, the health ministry, public health agencies, administrators for health regions, frontline social service and health providers, provincial and municipal politicians are all stressed by what, for this generation of government, anyway, is an unprecedented crisis. We all get that. Parents are stressed. Employers and employees are stressed. We all want this to be over. We also know it won’t be over without all of us doing our bit. But this is a democracy. Adults are expected to think for themselves. Perhaps we should start insisting a little more loudly that bureaucrats be less involved with massaging a blizzard of statistics that often seem opaque and even contradictory and just become a lot more forthcoming with the prospective tragedies. After all, the tragedies, not the statistics, are what the rest of us mostly have to live through and then must carry with us for the rest of our lives. What happened, what’s happening now, what’s most likely to happen if we do this or if we don’t do that is not beyond the grasp of the general public. Ominous news is not going to cause a panic. History demonstrates quite the opposite. Just give us the straight goods, however gloomy, and let’s all get on with doing what has to be done. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  10. A small, noisy, illogical minority is endangering our health care system and the rest of us. THE NOISY CLAMOUR against public health precautions gets noisier while the moderate majority contemplates a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections surging through the unvaccinated population this winter. Just as the Alberta provincial government’s official triage strategy for deciding who gets scarce hospital emergency beds and who gets sent home to die was leaked—to great public consternation—another protest of unmasked anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-proof-of-vaccination factions convened in Edmonton. There was a protest in the BC capital too, where politicians had just said no to an Alberta request to transfer critical COVID-19 patients to BC as available beds in Alberta dwindled. COVID-19 admissions were flooding into Alberta’s intensive care units at a rate that grew by 16 percent the previous week. Rally at the BC Legislature, September 18, 2021 (photo by Leslie Campbell) BC declined on grounds that while Alberta’s health care system seemed poised to collapse—at current rates of infection all the province’s remaining intensive care beds could be filled in two more weeks, some experts said—BC’s own supply of intensive care beds was already moving steadily toward the same danger zone. Remaining available beds were the margin preventing a similar public health disaster here. So, preparation for a possible airlift of patients from Alberta to distant Ontario—all that nasty “let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark” rhetoric now parked for some sunnier day—got underway. Alberta’s health care unions bluntly asked the government to seek federal aid from the military and from the Red Cross. Rallies, specious claims and the surveillance society It didn’t take cynics long to point out that given COVID-19’s 14-day incubation period and the way the new Delta variant is ripping through the unvaccinated population (about 90 percent of all new infections are in that group) that the unmasked and unvaccinated mingling at mass rallies are likely going to start falling ill and looking for emergency beds in around two weeks, just about the time that stress on the system might trigger that triage protocol. Triage is a term that comes to us from the ghastly horrors of the First World War. A deluge of severely wounded from battles which could see 60,000 casualties in a single day descended upon primitive field hospitals and forced medical officers to divide the casualties into three streams. Those who could still walk got sent on to the next hospital down the line. Those with severe wounds but a better chance of survival went into the field hospital. Those deemed to have less of a chance got sent to the “dying tent,” where they were abandoned to their fate. The idea that a rich, advanced economy is now possibly on the cusp of triaging patients who could have easily avoided serious illness is a bizarre revelation, but there it is. The current protest movement seems to be largely composed of folks who perceive science as an oppressive tool employed by highly suspect intellectual elites. Not least among the dissenters are those who challenge the legitimacy of the “germ theory” that has been a foundation of medical practice since the scientific method discovered that if obstetricians disinfected their hands before delivering babies, maternal deaths from childbed infections declined sharply. And that when sewers were separated from drinking water, cholera epidemics abruptly disappeared. Others dissenters advance specious claims—the COVID-19 vaccine causes fertility problems for women; it causes men’s testicles to swell; the vaccine causes the same disease pathology as COVID-19 does; it’s a sinister government plot against racialized minorities; and so on. Then there are the earnest libertarian constitutional conspiracy theorists. They argue that being asked to show that you’ve been vaccinated for a disease that’s now killed one of every 500 people in the United States (and adds about 8,000 a day to the 4,550,000 it’s already killed world wide) before being allowed into crowded space is an assault upon protected freedom. The freedom to give somebody else a potentially lethal disease presumably trumps the right of the uninfected to mitigate the chance of infection. And there is just plain delusional paranoia—how else does one characterize claims that a molecular-level vaccine injected in liquid form by transparent hypodermic needle while you watch is secretly embedding a microchip that will report your activities back to government? News Flash: Government doesn’t need to embed a microchip in your arm to monitor your activities. It can already listen to you, observe you and track your movements using your smart phone’s microphone, camera and GPS functions. Your smart TV, the computer chip in your car, the chip in your bank card, the chip in your credit card, the chip in your computer, your tablet, your modem. So many chips. All of which can be compromised. Should it so desire, government can use your Facebook account, your Netflix account, your Amazon account, Yahoo, Google, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Skype, YouTube, Apple, your tax returns, your pension funds, your medical and pharmaceutical claims, your driving record, your shoppers’ rewards cards. Even your library card is tracking you. My library account, for example, not only lists what I’ve read, it tells me how long it took me to read each book, interrupts with finger-wagging notifications about when the book is due, how long it will take me to finish if I will just buckle down to it and how many people are lined up awaiting the book over which I’m so inconsiderately lingering. Has it stopped me borrowing books? No, because I’ve decided the trade-off is worth it. Just as people flock to social media because they value convenience of communication over privacy—vaccine conspiracy theorists included. The surveillance society has been here for some time, alas. It doesn’t need to stealthily embed microchips in you; you’ve already embedded yourself in the personal data-gathering matrix. Indeed, the best way to avoid Big Brother intruding into your life isn’t refusing vaccination—or spitting on nurses—it’s to stop using all that convenient technology. The same technology used to plaster social media with angry rants against invasive government while organizing rallies where protesters gather and take selfies which can be harvested by authorities and then scanned by facial recognition software. A small minority The hard take-away from the September 15 public health briefing is that 81.7 percent of the COVID-19 patients in BC hospitals are unvaccinated. The same data shows if you are unvaccinated your chances of going into hospital are 43.5 times greater than if you are vaccinated. Those odds are not ones I’d happily bet at any race track. And yet, across Canada, the highly vocal minority so vehemently opposed to proof of vaccination requirements for certain activities—deemed by public health authorities to place other vulnerable people at risk of infection—was at it again on social media and in person this week. Rally at the BC Legislature, September 18, 2021 (photo by Leslie Campbell) In Ontario, the target was once again hospitals. In Vancouver, at least, the protest shifted to city hall. In Victoria it was at the legislature. But in Kamloops protesters swarmed school corridors where virtually all the kids are also unvaccinated. Let’s get this straight from the get-go, though. Although protesters inflate their importance, they represent a small minority. In all of Canada, adherents probably number less than the population of Calgary. The number of Canadians voluntarily vaccinated so far—and that number rises every day—is roughly 85 percent of the population. So about 15 percent remains unvaccinated. But of this percentage about 10 percent is under 12, can’t yet be vaccinated and isn’t likely on Facebook fomenting an anti-vaccination revolution. So that leaves five percent unvaccinated, of whom who knows how many are actually opposed to vaccines and how many are just needle-phobic, uninformed, ill-informed, caught up in the political exhilaration of saying “No!” or perhaps simply find it inconvenient or think they’re unlikely to be exposed and get sick. Meanwhile, Canadians in the actual majority are fed up with anti-vaxxer antics that are clearly imported—right down to the slogans—from the United States where public health responses to the pandemic have been uncoordinated, marked by government policy that that verges on medical lunacy, blizzards of lies, dissimulation, fake news and good old incompetence. British novelist Martin Amis, writing a collection of essays about his sojourn in America, titled his book The Moronic Inferno. Enough said. An Angus Reid poll taken last week indicates that the vast majority of Canadians conclude that their right not to be exposed to a lethal virus trumps those of people who think their rights entitle them to go anywhere under any conditions regardless of the risk they pose. Requiring proof of vaccination not new or odd There have always been vaccination requirements curbing participation in certain activities, not only in Canada but in the 122 other countries, from Australia to Zambia, which at this moment reserve the right to refuse entry to anyone who can’t produce proof of vaccination for certain diseases. You need a vaccine card to get into Costa Rica for that tropical beach vacation, for example. Not only that, you must produce proof that you have medical insurance that will cover up to $50,000 in COVID-19 medical treatments and enough money to cover your quarantine period. Seems reasonable considering that the average cost per hospitalization for a COVID-19 patient in Canada—the vast majority of whom appear to be unvaccinated—is estimated at $23,000. And for those who go into an ICU bed—again, mostly the unvaccinated—the cost per patient is estimated at $55,000. Thinking of some winter snorkelling in Belize? You need an official card showing you’ve been fully COVID-19 vaccinated for at least two weeks. The Galapagos? Ecuador wants proof of full vaccination status. So how, exactly, does this differ from BC universities saying that if you want to sit in a crowded lecture theatre you need to reassure your fellow students, teaching assistants, professors and cleaning staff that you’ve been fully vaccinated? Yet of these requirements, one set is arbitrarily framed as a constitutional invasion of personal freedoms while the other becomes merely the inconvenience necessary to take international winter vacations in a warm climate. Typical signage at rally at the BC Legislature, September 18, 2021 (photo by Leslie Campbell) Nor are these COVID-19 requirements a recent invention. Many countries require proof that you’ve been vaccinated for yellow fever before entry. Others want proof of polio vaccinations and for meningococcal meningitis. Indeed, on my left arm is the faint white scar left by a smallpox vaccination. I had to be able to prove that I’d had one to get into Canada as an infant immigrant almost three-quarters of a century ago. Smallpox was just one of the 86 reportable diseases on Canada’s list for public health regulation dating back to 1924. The current list has 57 reportable diseases. All can be regulated when and if authorities deem it necessary. These diseases range from AIDS and HIV to viral hemorrhagic fever and yellow fever. Regulations governing many of them have been dropped as their risk, thankfully has diminished with vaccination programs, public sanitation, improved hygiene and better public education. So, when those convinced that vaccination mandates for COVID-19 are some kind of exceptional invasion of their civil liberties, they clearly haven’t read their own Charter of Rights and Freedoms very carefully. Nor have they read the long-established federal Quarantine Act, which offers some jaw-dropping penalties for those who might think of flouting it. Here’s Section 15(2): “Any traveller who has reasonable grounds to suspect that they have or might have a communicable disease listed on the schedule…or that they have been in close proximity to a person who has, or is reasonably likely to have, a communicable disease listed in the schedule…shall disclose that fact to a screening officer…” And here’s Section 72: “Every person who contravenes subsection 15(2)…is guilty of an offence” liable to a maximum fine of $500,000 or a three-year prison term or both! Aggressive public health powers have been around since before Canada was formed in 1867. There were mandated quarantines for cholera, for smallpox and there were official if primitive vaccination campaigns, one of which was conducted by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in an attempt to limit the impact of a smallpox epidemic. So is it surprising that more than three-quarters of Canadians now support restrictions on unvaccinated individuals preventing them from attending crowded public events? While that level of support for mandated vaccination proof falls off when it comes to requiring proof of vaccination to attend work, even there two-thirds of Canadians still want restrictions. And frustration is clearly growing. Angus Reid polling shows 77 percent of Canadians think government should use its regulatory powers to keep public spaces safe from unnecessary exposure to unvaccinated individuals who are the greatest risk to others, if only by their far greater propensity to become infected. The elderly, for example, even though vaccinated, remain vulnerable to breakthrough infections that are the more lethal the older that they are. Polling shows Canadians—almost half—think that those who decline or refuse vaccinations should move down the priority list as hospital resources are flooded with seriously ill but unvaccinated individuals. Ethically, that’s not really a defensible argument. We don’t deny medical treatment to smokers or other substance abusers. Although it is noteworthy that alcohol abusers who are in need of liver transplants and won’t stop drinking don’t get the same priority as those who do stop drinking. Nevertheless, we don’t deny emergency services to drivers who don’t wear seatbelts or cyclists who don’t wear helmets. The financial and moral burden of the unvaccinated The willful refusal to vaccinate raises another ethical issue, the matter of cost, both financial and moral. In BC, data indicates that unvaccinated individuals are 34 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. And data from September 15 showed that of the 661 new cases in BC, 68 percent involved people who had not been vaccinated. Of those who went to hospital, 81.7 percent had not been vaccinated. As mentioned, the average cost per hospitalization for a COVID-19 patient in Canada is $23,000, and $55,000 for those who go into an ICU bed. Of the 70,000 COVID-19 cases who have so far been hospitalized in Canada, almost 69,000 were unvaccinated and they have so far cost the taxpayers at least $1.5 billion in medical care. (Some of these cases occurred before vaccinations were available.) Canada did well in keeping costs down by vaccinating fast, in greater numbers and across a broader cross-section of the population, thus lowering the burden on the health care system. In the US, the demand for hospital services by the unvaccinated—about 10 times the rate for vaccinated patients—cost more than $5 billion since June alone. Most of this cost, point out medical economists, was almost entirely avoidable. The US Centre for Disease Control, which has been closely tracking, says the number of preventable COVID-19 hospital cases in the US ballooned from 32,000 in June to 187,000 in August, almost all of it attributed to unvaccinated patients. “Based on approximately 530,000 hospital admissions with confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis in June-August 2021, we estimate 98.6 percent of hospital admissions with COVID-19 during this period were among unvaccinated people.” Next, the moral burden: In Alberta, in order to redeploy trained staff to emergency and intensive care beds, government cancelled all elective and non-critical surgeries. At the province’s children’s hospital, only “life and limb” operations were still being done. All because of the surge in unvaccinated COVID-19 patients who, if they’d gotten vaccinations in a timely fashion, mostly wouldn’t be in hospital. Procedures cancelled ranged from orthopaedic surgery to brain operations. Patients expressed deepening anxiety and stress as long-scheduled procedures were postponed indefinitely. Now, hip replacement surgery is considered elective. But if you’ve spent time with somebody dealing with the agonies of severe osteoarthritis in the hip joint, constant fear of falling on stairs, severely restricted mobility and the need for constant—however unwanted—pharmaceutical pain relief just to be able to sleep, it quickly becomes clear that “elective” is a relative value and that for the patient awaiting surgery it’s less an issue of choice than an imperative. Doctors putting together their triage plans to determine who lives and who dies, plans to airlift patients between provinces, other provinces saying “No room at the inn!” to friends, neighbours and relatives, children being told that long-awaited surgery to correct a deformed limb or seniors needing hip replacements told to put up with their suffering for whatever it takes of whatever time they have left—it didn’t have to be this way. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  11. Looking at the experience of other provinces and nations with school children in the past few weeks gives us some clues to what to prepare for in BC. HERE WE ARE IN THE SECOND WEEK of the school year. The pandemic deepens. The numbers of as-yet-unvaccinated kids exposed to the COVID-19 virus is rising. Hospital intensive care units fill up and the insufferable and distracting culture wars over vaccination mandates get noisier. On the Island, the first week back saw schools in 10 communities linked to at least one case of COVID-19 says BC COVID Tracker. The independent website is run by parents and claims to monitor official notifications on a volunteer basis—valuable since the Province now only reports full-blown outbreaks. Four schools in the Greater Victoria region had reported exposures. Others extended from Mill Bay to Campbell River and Port Alberni to Nanaimo. This isn’t surprising. Almost 30,000 COVID-19 infections in children have now been identified by the BC Centre for Disease Control. They appear on the agency’s surveillance dashboard. Most are aged 18 and under—but more than 10,000 cases are among children under 10. Children are one of the largest remaining unvaccinated segments of the population. That makes them a prime vector for the virus as it moves into fertile ground. No wonder there’s parental concern similar to that which manifested in Sointula. There, as school opened, parents yanked 28 of 34 students out of their small school until a teacher who declined to wear a mask for what the North Island Gazette said were medical reasons could be temporarily reassigned. This parental concern is not unreasonable. In Israel, which was the model for fast and extensive vaccination early in the pandemic, a new study now finds that of 13,864 children aged three to 18 who were diagnosed with COVID-19, more than 10 percent developed long term symptoms. The effects lingered up to six months after the primary episode. If the rate of incidence tracked in Israel were to emerge in BC, we’d face thousands of kids grappling with the “long haul” version of the disease, many of them infected in a school environment that is charged with keeping them safe. The same survey found that 30 percent of the parents of infected children who developed COVID-19 in Israel also reported that they experienced a degrading of their “neurological, cognitive and mental health abilities.” And, yet another report by Reuters says that a British survey found that 14 percent of children who test positive for COVID-19 display symptoms associated with the coronavirus for months afterward. Then there are reports from the United States which has just passed a grim COVID-19 milestone. The virus has now killed one out of every 500 Americans. Most of the dead are in vulnerable high risk groups. But observers there now note that the US hospitalization rate per 100,000 children was 0.3 at the end of June but by mid-August, as fall school terms began, the rate suddenly spiked five-fold to 1.4 per 100,000. The percentage is still small. It’s the trend that is worrying. The spike appeared to track the emergence of the Delta variant that’s been troubling epidemiologists because of its high rate of transmissibility. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, a couple of gold-standard medical organizations, said that children’s cases are now increasing exponentially in the US, with 750,000 new cases added over the month of August and another 250,000 cases in the first week of September alone. So, parental apprehension about the graduated—some say hasty—opening of schools just as what’s now looking a lot like an aggressive fourth wave of the pandemic gathers momentum doesn’t seem entirely misplaced. In Ontario, the Province has reported more than 300 known active cases in schools. Some districts report hundreds more students who are not showing symptoms but who were sent home to quarantine for two weeks because of positive tests. These followed school-environment exposures. A number of schools in eastern Ontario were already cancelling classes during the second week of school because of exposures and outbreaks. In Quebec, 600 schools have reported education-based cases. In Atlantic Canada, New Brunswick confirmed 11 schools with confirmed outbreaks and closed a high school. Prince Edward Island had no sooner opened schools than it began closing them again in Charlottetown, the island province’s biggest city, because of an outbreak that the chief health officer describes as “a serious situation with COVID-19 transmission…involving children.” In Saskatchewan, the teacher’s federation urged the provincial government to impose more stringent public health controls to grapple with rising infection rates among children. The union asked for smaller classes, broader indoor mask requirements and a vaccination mandate for everyone one eligible—children over 12, teachers and staff. The federation’s president described the situation as “dire” and called for a requirement that there be mandatory isolation for any students, teachers or staff testing positive for the virus. Even Alberta, where schools aren’t officially tabulated as experiencing an outbreak until 10 percent of the student body is sick and absent, some schools were already declaring that they had outbreaks. Is this trend going to get worse? In Alberta they appear to think so. At a special news conference September 15 the province’s upbeat premier Jason Kenney, who not long ago was promising “The Best Summer Ever” and defeat of the virus, seemed subdued when he announced sweeping health-care restrictions to start a day later in response to what’s a developing health care crisis. The usually pugnacious premier didn’t just blink, he flinched. On the heels of his announcement, Calgary’s three largest post-secondary institutions abruptly cancelled all in-person classes for the remainder of the week. And The Calgary Herald reports that 40 Alberta schools are now being investigated for outbreaks while parents complain of a growing information void around how many positive cases are actually affecting schools and how close they may be to closing. ARE THESE EVENTS in school systems elsewhere a possible portent for BC? One hopes not and nobody can say for sure but COVID-19 modelling and experience with what happens to respiratory illness rates when people begin to congregate indoors during the cold winter season, hints that they might be. In many of these school cases, some public health experts have said, the children were apparently infected at home, then carried the virus to school where it spread rapidly to other children, who then carried it back to their own homes to infect siblings, parents and relatives. At least one event involved a school bus. BC’s authorities say school buses are safe and require only regular seating for the 110,000 students who ride them twice a day, sometimes for several hours in total. One route in Northern BC, for example, requires a round trip of 230 kilometres. Meanwhile, exposures on school buses are now being reported from Oregon to Ontario. Not surprising, then, that in Alberta, nine post-secondary institutions have now arbitrarily ignored the province’s advisories. They simply unilaterally imposed much stricter regulations governing access to classes. Not only must faculty and staff be fully vaccinated, so must students—and students are to be required to provide verifiable proof of vaccination to attend class. Is it time to start thinking about mandating vaccination and proof of such for all students over 12 in all BC schools from university down? Judging from the Province’s own statistics, the majority of parents have already embraced vaccination as a safe and effective protection against the worst effects of a COVID-19 infection. As of the first week of school, almost 80 percent of adults in the province were fully vaccinated, but the school-aged population between 12 and 17 lagged at 67 percent. Good, but not good enough by the government’s own targets. The ministry of education’s website is cheery and upbeat about all the benefits of returning to the classroom with the safety protocols it’s put in place. They include masks indoors from kindergarten to Grade 12, flexible regulations that permit the deployment of rapid response teams as necessary. And it cites studies that schools in BC were not a significant source of COVID-19 transmission. These studies found during the 2020-2021 school year that 90 percent of school-associated cases were acquired at home or in the community, not the school. But that was before the Delta variant, with its jaw-dropping 10-fold increase in transmissibility, came roaring onto the scene to upset models and projections. Delta variant is now the most prevalent strain circulating in BC. It is responsible for almost 100 percent of COVID-19 cases in both children and adults. About 17 percent of cases in the province and two percent of hospitalizations now involve patients under 18 years of age, says the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. “Children get less sick from COVID-19 than adults—but rarely they can get quite sick. And we still don’t know if the Delta variant is more severe for children,” says Dr Laura Sauvé, a paediatric infectious disease specialist, on the hospital’s website. What’s been occurring in other provinces suggests that BC’s optimistic approach might need a cautious re-think. And in the meantime, since the kids are congregating at school, maybe that’s the place to locate province-wide pop-up vaccination clinics in addition to inviting those who want to be vaccinated to travel to community drop-in clinics, public health clinics and so on. Maximizing vaccination coverage for the remaining 30 percent of teenagers seems like the most effective and painless way to further limit transmission, amplify school safety and reduce anxiety for parents. Some school districts are setting-up COVID-19 vaccination clinics—there are three scheduled for Mission over the next week; clinics were scheduled for Vernon, Armstrong and Keremeos; Cranbrook and Kimberley also planned clinics. And most of BC’s post-secondary institutions have already provided students with on-campus clinics and held vaccination drives. They seem to have been generally successful. This is good news for anxious parents, but it could be better news if it were rolled out as a comprehensive provincial program rather than a piecemeal, regionally-driven program—which is what seems to have emerged. And perhaps it should be developed as a strategy for the next pandemic. Because there will be a next time, maybe even more stressful than this time. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. (Image at top from Province of BC)
  12. As per capita rates skyrocket throughout BC, requiring proof of vaccination for students to attend class is not a violation of their civil liberties. AS COVID-19’s HIGHLY-CONTAGIOUS DELTA VARIANT rips through British Columbia’s still-considerable unvaccinated and only partially-vaccinated population of almost 1.3 million, the provincial government has finally blinked on its rosy reopening plans. Not surprising, the way the actual case counts are rocketing up. The BC Centre for Disease Control dashboard Monday, August 30 showed a count of 1,853 new cases over the weekend. Recall that on July 5, the 7-day average was only 38 new cases. So here we are after several months of cautious opening up with a 1,666 percent increase in the moving average for actual number of cases just a week before school starts. The blink was appropriate. But it’s still just a belated blink, symbolized, perhaps, by Premier John Horgan’s casual if controversial wink at the rules by appearing with six other maskless diners at a restaurant in Vernon where infection rates have just increased from 12 to 195 per 100,000—that’s a 1,525 percent increase. Here on Vancouver Island the increase is the lowest in the province, yet it’s still up 1,350 percent in a few weeks. In Northern BC, the infection rate increased a jaw-dropping 16,333 percent with almost 40 percent of cases among First Nations although they represent only 17 percent of the overall population there. Frankly, government should be taking the blinkers off entirely, as faculty at the University of Victoria warned last week. Allowing university students to attend campus unvaccinated with no requirements for rapid testing to track potential exposures shows lack of concern for risk to faculty, staff and other students, said Lynne Marks, president of UVic’s faculty association. Worse, it doesn’t appear to deal with the dynamic of either university or high school campuses in which classes shuffle and reassemble every 50 minutes—and at universities these classes can be in excess of 300 students. A typical university class can have 300 students. Think about that. An 18-year-old first year student with three large lecture classes and a couple of regular sized classes can mingle with maybe 2,000 strangers a week in an environment where nobody knows who is and who isn’t vaccinated, social distancing is minimal and who knows what standard the ventilation meets. Let’s see, a 300-student class that meets three times a week is a potential for at least 270,000 contacts among strangers outside their social bubbles—a week! This is like turning on a giant social Mix-Master for exchanging viral loads among virus carriers. Research now indisputably shows that even vaccinated people with no symptoms can be carrying 10 times the viral load of people who were infected by the less contagious original virus in the first wave, History is rife with accounts of generals losing wars because they continued applying the tactics that won past campaigns to the battles being waged by different foes with new weapons and new strategies. Nobody deserves to be the victim of yesterday’s generals in tomorrow’s fight against this rapidly changing, highly opportunistic virus. Earlier BC government modelling proved far more optimistic than reality, as shown in graph presented by Ministry of Health on August 31, 2021 The fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is not a replay of the first, second or third waves. Rather than signalling that the end of this dreary campaign is in sight, this fourth wave more likely represents another holding action in a long game that’s already brewing. What comes next isn’t easily predicted. From the initial scary encounter with the virus—Italian hospitals in chaos, bodies lying in the streets in China, and mass graves from New York to Barcelona—we’ve now got what the World Health Organization classifies as four additional “variants of concern” and four “variants of interest.” They emerged from the 216 million infections world-wide which are now rising by 676,000 new cases a day. The variants have been piggy-backing around the planet on jet planes which we’ve decided must keep flying to keep the economy ticking over. The precautionary principle & half a million unvaccinated students Nobody anticipated the aggressiveness of the Delta variant that is now the principal cause of infection, hospitalization and death in Canada. And now we have a fistful of new variants to start thinking about. Lambda, a mutation from South America which is already showing up in Texas and California, for example. Its contribution to the worrying mix is an apparent ability to evade the protections that come from the vaccines now in main use. Will it, like Delta, emerge as another aggressive threat? Who can say? But it might. And giving it and perhaps other unidentified permutations of COVID-19 an opportunity to spread and further adapt among a large population of unvaccinated school and university students while assuming that measures taken to bend the curve during the third wave are the way to stop them in the fourth wave just seems like an invitation for a fifth wave. We’re all tired of the impositions, the inconvenience, the economic burdens, the isolation, the physical and emotional stress. Everybody gets that. But we’re also only 16 months into this. If this were World War Two, we’d be eight months away from Pearl Harbour, with four more years of grief awaiting us after that. So perhaps instead of griping, denying, evading, obstructing, lying to ourselves and whining about it, we should suck it up as our parents and grandparents did and start buckling down to what needs to be done to face what might be a long, painful and unpleasant grind. The latest (August 31, 2021) projections from Government of BC shows that cases and hospitalizations pretty much depend on vaccinations rates We were supposed to be back to normal by the time schools reopened. Instead we’re now back to masks indoors for all teenagers and adults with a new safety regulation added—proof-of-vaccination requirements for attending some non-essential public gatherings from indoor weddings to large-scale sporting events. But not schools. There’s been a nod to caution by requiring masks in the classroom—well that’s a move in the right direction—but still no imposition of strong rules for appropriate social distancing and enhanced ventilation in classrooms. One grim epidemiological flow chart from California where public health authorities are worriedly monitoring the arrival of the Lambda variant, gives a glimpse of the risk. A single unvaccinated elementary school teacher read to her class without a mask and infected half her students who then took the virus home and infected their parents. The spread of the virus in the classroom was directly associated with students’ proximity to the teacher. In a few days, 26 people had been affected. The Centre for Disease Control in the United States, referencing the California incident, said it encourages school authorities to “do the right thing to protect the children under their care.” It urges multi-layered mitigation strategies which included: universal masks in schools “to prevent outbreaks and reduce the risk of children bringing the virus home to others who are vulnerable;” improved ventilation in classrooms to reduce infectious particles circulating through the air and, a side benefit, to reduce exposure to other respiratory viruses that can mask or resemble COVID-19 symptoms; and, finally, vaccination for everyone who qualifies. In BC that’s every student over 12—because “when our children who are not yet vaccinated are surrounded by vaccinated people, they are more protected.” In BC, with about a week to go before classes commence, we still have roughly 655,000 kids under 17 who are not fully vaccinated and another 184,000 in the college and university age group. Of these, about 425,000 are not vaccinated because they are still too young to qualify for vaccination. The precautionary principle here points pretty clearly to the value in a plan for vaccinating as many unvaccinated kids as possible in order to protect the large body of students—and by extension their parents, teachers, coaches, dentists, and so on—that can’t yet be vaccinated. What we don’t want is an aggressive virus with its emerging subsets of mutating variants swirling around in a pool of half a million unvaccinated individuals. Which leads to the question—why aren’t we making vaccination a requirement for all those eligible if they want to attend or teach a class the same way we make it a requirement for other activities? Indeed, schools are an ideal place to organize mass vaccination of 12-17 year olds as we’ve done for measles, polio, mumps and so on. And the way to do it is to vaccinate on site, delay the start of classes for two weeks while kids’ immune systems kick in then bring them back to appropriately ventilated and socially distanced classrooms. Is this a pain in the neck for administrators? Sure, but for administrators the priority is the safety of their charges, not the convenience of the administrative process. Is it expensive? Sure, but we spent $18 billion and 20 years prosecuting a war in Afghanistan that was a complete failure. Requiring vaccination is not a violation of civil liberties Trips to the mall, the hockey rink, your local diner, the library and so on will all now require proof of vaccination before entry—although some businesses are objecting that they shouldn’t have to ask people for their health care status on privacy and enforcement grounds. This is a bogus, self-serving argument, though. Establishments routinely ask patrons to produce proof-of-age before serving them alcoholic beverages. If they serve underage customers alcohol, they can be arbitrarily closed and patrons who lie about their age to obtain a drink can be charged and fined. Restaurant kitchens are subject to public health inspections and if they are deemed not to meet strict standards or to pose a risk to customers, they can be closed on the spot. All work places are subject to safety checks. If they are deemed unsafe, they get closed and the workers sent home. And insurers routinely ask clients for a full declaration of health status and can unilaterally void insurance if the information provided is false. Somehow providing accurate information about your health status for travel insurance you can enjoy a beach holiday in Florida is no imposition but providing it to protect kids in a classroom is an affront to civil liberties. It’s not. So the argument that requiring vaccination—or even asking about it—status is some kind of new violation of civil liberties just doesn’t fly. The question for government, faced with growing evidence that unvaccinated individuals are a health risk to everyone, most immediately other unvaccinated people but also to many of the already vaccinated, is why it isn’t simply mandating vaccination as a classroom requirement for everyone who qualifies for a jab. And please, spare us the sanctimonious privacy/civil liberties mantra since government already collects more data than it can use on all of us from which drugs we purchase to compiling every traffic offence to having police rip medical masks off protesters at Fairy Creek—that couldn’t be to make sure they are identifiable to facial recognition software, could it? Just asking, since it seemed pretty methodical in the videos I’ve watched. However, reassuring as the government’s ability adapt to changing circumstances may seem, it’s been as much a case of the politicians and their advisers following the public as it has of them doing what we elect them to do—actually leading us. Before the province adjusted its alignment we’ve already had private organizations from sports franchises to retailers simply stepping up and saying “No mask, stay home.” Over the last week of August, with a return to the classroom looming, the Province says the number of registrations for vaccinations by people under 40 has more than doubled. At that rate, another 165,000 people will be vaccinated by September 7, when schools open and students return to campus lecture theatres. That’s the good news. The bad news is that teachers, students and staff are still saying the provincial government isn’t providing the kind of strong, assertive leadership that’s required to avert increased danger for at-risk school teachers and college and university faculty and staff if they are forced to mingle in crowded classrooms and lecture theatres where there’s no requirement for social distancing. As a piece in Focus on Victoria recently observed, about one in 10 of these falls into groups made vulnerable to much higher risk because of age and the underlying medical conditions that exacerbate symptoms, even for those who are fully vaccinated. But there’s concerning evidence of growing numbers of breakthrough infections for fully vaccinated people, most seriously among older groups with underlying conditions but also for children previously considered at very low risk. The New York Times reported last week that a survey of children’s hospitals across the United States finds a growing concern among health care experts there that “children not yet eligible for vaccination in places with substantial viral spread (are) now at higher risk of being infected than at any other time in the pandemic.” Most children still display only mild symptoms—that’s not in dispute. But that doesn’t mean the blinkers should be on for the other ominous signs that are emerging. As The Times reported, for the first time in the pandemic “The crush of COVID-19 at Children’s Hospital (in New Orleans) grew so intense this month that the state called in a federal “surge team” of emergency responders” from the government’s national disaster medical system.” So here we are, a week before school starts. Teachers say: Schools need safety upgrades to classroom ventilation; vaccination clinics on site; comprehensive testing; N95 or medical standard masks for staff and students. University faculty say: Modelling by scientists teaching BC universities points to rapid increases in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations; current plans for reopening are inadequate and universities should have the authority to demand vaccinations for students, faculty and staff where deemed necessary. University unions say: Requiring vaccinations for students in classrooms is the most important step necessary to protect both students and staff. They point out that students have the option not to attend classes they feel are unsafe but university employees don’t have the option. Dr Bonnie Henry, however, says the government’s “complicated, risk-based assessment” means a vaccination mandate is not warranted for school attendance. Basically, the government is saying: “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” Clearly, a lot of well-informed folks don’t think they do. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. He has been vaccinated.
  13. Massive new fossil fuel infrastructure would contribute greenhouse gas emissions for many decades to come, argues Environmental Law Centre A $5.6 BILLION PETROCHEMICAL COMPLEX proposed for Prince George should go to public hearings as part of an impact assessment conducted by an expert independent panel before any provincial approvals, say environmental law scholars at the University of Victoria. Calgary-based West Coast Olefins Ltd wants to tap into a natural gas pipeline through northern BC to extract liquid ethane, propane, butane and natural gas condensate as feedstock for manufacturing plastics and synthetic rubber for export to Asian markets. It would represent a dramatic expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in British Columbia, one of three co-dependent plants. They would include: a natural gas liquids recovery plant; an ethylene plant to produce a million tonnes of polymer-grade ethylene a year; and the polyethylene plant producing plastic. Following controversy from a citizens’ group in Prince George worried about possible air pollution from the proposed plant and local First Nations concerns, the company said it hoped to relocate the project 140 kilometres north to McLeod Lake where it was in talks with the McLeod Lake First Nation about negotiating a potential benefits agreement should the project go ahead. But talks fell through and the company subsequently dumped that plan and said it wanted once again to build in Prince George. Prince George already has a long history of serious industrial air pollution (photo Creative Commons) Both the Lheidli T’enneh Nation in Prince George and the McLeod Lake Indian band have since publicly opposed the proposed development and rejected future negotiations. In a 26-page letter to George Heyman, the minister of environment and climate change strategy, Calvin Sandborn, legal director of the university’s Environmental Law Centre, says the proposal contradicts provincial climate objectives. With every major long-term investment in infrastructure whose existence depends upon fossil fuel use into the future, it becomes more difficult for all of us to deal with the climate emergency, Sandborn’s letter points out. The letter was delivered to Heyman Wednesday morning, August 25th. Tuesday the US government ordered a delay in development of a $9.4 billion plastics and petrochemicals complex in south Louisiana in response to environmental concerns and community backlash. It is calling for an extensive environmental assessment following objections that the complex would double toxic emissions in the local area and release up to 13 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equal to the pollution pumped out by three coal-fired power plants reported The Guardian newspaper. The letter to Heyman observes that Prince George already has a long history of serious industrial air pollution because of strong inversion effects that trap pollutants in the city’s air shed and cites a 2011 study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health estimating that as many as 81 deaths a year could be attributed to fine particulate air pollution. It cites objections from First Nations and from Prince George citizens who are worried about impacts upon air quality, occupational health issues for workers associated with petrochemicals, risks of fire and explosion, potential impacts upon water quality and fish habitat and the proposed site of the complex which it says is too close to the Fraser River. All these deserve an independent assessment, the letter says. “Approval of this complex may be one of the most consequential climate change decisions your government ever makes.” It says the proposed complex poses “profound risks” to the global environment because expansion of plastics manufacturing infrastructure “could lock in greenhouse emissions for decades to come” at the same time that the Province has pledged to reduce emissions dramatically. And the development would be an incentive spurring expansion of fracking and other natural gas production activities, add to the plastic pollution already linked to widespread environmental harm, undermine provincial and federal efforts to reduce plastic waste and undermine efforts to encourage plastics recycling. Ken James, the CEO of West Coast Olefins, did not respond to a request for comment made last Tuesday. But “there are a lot of us here who are worried about the potential consequences such projects might bring, says Zoe Meletis, a geography professor at the University of Northern BC. She speaks for Too Close 2 Home, a Prince George citizens group concerned about potential environmental consequences for the city of 74,000 about 800 kilometres north of Vancouver. “We have a lot of questions and concerns as there has been so little public discussion and information shared,” said Meletis. Meletis said the group approached the Environmental Law Centre at UVic for help preparing a request to the Province for a more comprehensive and public environmental assessment because “we want to know more about the exact nature of the many sites that are part of WCO’s long term vision for the two sites, and all of the costs, benefits and impact those are likely to entail, particularly when overlaid on top of everything Prince George and area are already dealing with, for example air pollution, particulate matter etc..” The letter to Heyman warns that limiting an environmental assessment to one element of the complex—the ethylene plant—risks being uninformed about the full potential impact of the proposed project. “You have to see the entire thing—the whole petrochemical complex—to come to any rational conclusion,” Sandborn’s letter says. “British Columbians must have an assessment of the overall project, to see what real-world, cumulative impacts are likely.” In fact, it argues, the $2.8 billion ethylene project requires a second facility—a $1.3 billion natural gas liquids recovery plant—to provide its feedstock and a third facility—a $1.5 billion polyethylene plant plant which would turn the ethylene into plastic pellets for export to overseas plastics fabricators. The three projects and their impacts have to be assessed as a whole not as individual projects, the letter says, because if billions of dollars have already been spent on an extraction facility those sunk costs are highly likely to skew assessments of subsequent projects. “The pressure to complete an ‘overall project’ that is halfway there will be substantial.” And government has an obligation to transparently obtain a fully objective assessment of whether the proposed project is congruent with the Province’s oft-stated commitment to fight climate change, reduce plastic waste and enhance recycling of materials to create a circular economy. The letter argues there is evidence that the proposed project will seriously undermine all these stated government objectives, which makes an independent expert review imperative. An independent panel is needed to consider other potentially serious impacts on Indigenous people, local citizens and the region’s environment, Sandborn argues. And, he says, there’s a risk that creating a massive petrochemical complex there would both foreclose a more prosperous and sustainable future for Prince George and put the Province at risk of having a major asset stranded and made worthless as the rest of the world pivots aggressively from fossil fuels to mitigate the growing climate emergency that as brought repeated summers of unprecedented fire and drought to BC. “We are very wary about the two sites being ‘too close to home’ in terms of proximity to neighbourhoods, agricultural lands, and greenspaces that we value,” Meletis says. “We know that oil and gas is a dying industry, and that plastics are part of the push to eke out a final stage or rebranding of that industry. “Why should Prince George suffer ill effects for a plastic product that we are going to send elsewhere? How does all this fit with recent ongoing efforts to make our city and region more sustainable, diverse and resilient in the face of climate change? “Just because people of Prince George have learned to live with the ‘smell of money’ in terms of pulp mill and other emissions, it doesn’t mean they want the same for their kids and grandkids.” Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  14. Even in our perfect Eden we are experiencing drought, ravaging fires, disappearing salmon and a viral plague. SO, HOW ARE WE LIKING the unwelcome drop-ins by a variant of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Let’s see, here in our “perfect Eden”—as the first Europeans to lay eyes on the landscape of Garry oak and wildflower meadows described what they promptly paved over and turned into an endangered ecosystem—we’ve had recent unannounced visits from Pestilence, Drought, Fire, Flood, Heatwaves, Wind Storms, Deep Freezes and that rider on the pale horse we generally don’t like to talk about, Death, who generally canters in to clean up after the others. It’s been a busy time in Eden for Thanatos over the last 18-months what with (by mid-August) at least 1,800 dead from COVID 19 in BC—and that’s an almost certain undercount; 500 more heat deaths; wildfire deaths; flooding deaths and so on. Forest fires and smoky air are just a couple of the apocalytic outcomes of global heating (these flames from the Chutanli Lake Fire, July 30, 2018 were fuelled by clearcut slash) It used to be that the Horsemen show up every couple of generations, sometimes longer. Now they are as persistent as spam robocallers or ill-disguised overseas call centres demanding pre-paid gift cards if we want to avoid prison sentences for tax evasion or unpaid duties on stuff we never ordered. War and Famine haven’t yet rung the doorbell but don’t worry, the main takeaway from the UN’s latest depressing memorandum on global warming and what we’re generally not doing about it provides ample evidence that the heavies are almost certainly waiting in the wings for their own grand entries. Indeed, the Pentagon now classifies climate change as the source of “catastrophic and likely irreversible global security risks” for what’s generally conceded to be the most powerful military machine assembled in human history. And the Centre for Strategic and International Studies characterizes climate change as a strategic “existential threat” to global food production and distribution. There’s big science behind these big fears of growing global instability, too. One major paper published in the journal Science back in 2013 correlated increases in interpersonal violence and intergroup conflict directly with major changes in rainfall triggered by global warming—whether in prolonged droughts or floods. Too much or too little—dramatic swings from wet to dry and back again have major impacts of food production and distribution. In the meantime, here in Eden, we cope with tens of thousands of fire-dislocated environmental refugees, hundreds of vulnerable people dying in urban ovens, a plague disrupting everyday life, and whole economic sectors facing massive job loss because of our environmental mismanagement, of which there is a great deal. It ranges from rapacious harvesting of natural resources (“Trees pay for our hospitals!” “Fish pay for our highways!” “Coal pays for our universities!”); to heedless me-first pollution (“That’s jobs you smell, not pulp mills!” “LNG exports mean jobs, jobs, jobs!”); and the corruption of public policy by private interest groups that empower regulatory capture of the very agencies which supposedly protect us from environmental excess. How long, then, before the Horsemen all decide not merely to visit every few years like that badly-behaving party-animal relative we all dread, and instead just move in permanently? Not long, says the data tabulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As I write, we’re told that the present heatwave, the second scorcher in a month, has put 150 million people at risk across North America as extreme weather generates lethal temperatures that in turn spawn tornado swarms—one mid-western state got 14—and are driving huge wildfires, one of them now the largest in California history. Here in BC we’ve had 1,231 wildfires since April 1, 253 were burning last week. So far they’ve blackened an area about twice that of Luxembourg. It’s not just here, either. Conflagrations have swept through Greece and Turkey and are laying waste to Siberia. Entire underground subway systems were drowned during floods in China and rainstorms of mind-numbing intensity roared through Germany carrying away whole town centres in flash floods. Oh, yes, Campbell River got a flash flood, too. Campbell River's flash flood in August 2021 (photo by Mike Maxwell) On top of all this we learn that the Gulf Stream may be about to stop carrying warm water from the tropics to New England, Atlantic Canada and Western Europe. If that happens, Halifax is going to feel like Iqaluit in mid-winter and Trafalgar Square in London may feel more like Red Square in Moscow. The message in last Monday’s IPCC report really does signal an apocalypse that’s coming for all of us. IPCC's latest report warns of Code Red for Humanity “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” one of the report’s authors told Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press last week. This July now goes into the books as the hottest in human history. I kind of guessed that when my thermometer hit 39 degrees on my back deck the other day. The rivers are running dry, particularly in regions where logging has denuded hillsides and the stream beds that filled with migrating gravel now look more like paved roads. Severe drought conditions grip southwestern BC from the Okanagan to Vancouver Island. And the south Okanagan has announced a Class 5 drought, which is the worst on the scale, with water rationing and serious risks from irrigation farming—that would be orchards, vineyards, mixed farms, etc. The salmon are disappearing—the total return of steelhead to the once-abundant Chilko River system has just been tabulated, I’m told. The count was 19 steelhead—that was the complete return of the prized game fish to an area larger than 32 of the member nations of the UN. And salmon runs in general, one of the miraculous gifts of nature, are now in collapse almost everywhere from California right around the North Pacific to Japan. Bears, eagles, orcas, seals, sea lions, sea birds are starving and dislocated as they try to adapt to the fish famine even as powerful lobby groups agitate for a restoration of trophy hunting of grizzly bears, and culls of seals and sea lions so that the vast recreational fishing industry can enjoy business as usual. Gardeners demand culls of urban deer that have fled to the suburbs in search of safety and browse from the wastelands we’ve made of their wild range. The extinction of trout populations is deemed a fair price for the tax revenue generated by open pit coal mining. Wells run dry in the already arid and vastly overpopulated Gulf Islands. Entire lakes that supply water to the even more densely populated Sunshine Coast are drying up. Water rationing is now in place from California to BC. Indeed, one of the dire warnings in the IPCC report is a confirmation of what earlier models forecast. As more energy gets injected into the vast machinery of the atmosphere in the form of heat, swings in the water cycle can only become more extreme, more erratic, more frequent and more intense. The laws of physics compel. You can’t bargain, negotiate or deny them away. The new norm that’s emerging is for once-in-a-century events to start happening every 10 years, then every five, then every year. As air heats up, it expands and that creates more space for moisture, which means higher humidity (this is why the tropics are muggy and the Arctic experiences dry cold), which makes heat waves far more unpleasant and also means that when that atmosphere cools there’s the potential to shed rain in Biblical volumes. But the corollary to more frequent rainfall extremes in places that already get a lot of rain is extended hot spells and prolonged, more intense drought in the dry season. If this scorching, smokey summer spell of abnormally low water on the South Island seems inconvenient, consider that you may look back on this one with nostalgia as the good old days. As one web wag puts it, think of today’s scorcher as the coolest summer of the rest of your life. The new normal is going to be a lot more brutal than you imagine. This is just the foreplay. Forests surrounding our urban centres on Vancouver Island and which thread through our Shire-like urban sprawl from Coombs to Hornby and from the Discovery Islands to the Outer Gulf Islands are as dry as a tinderbox in the midst of what’s now the second worst drought in recorded history (it would be the worst but for one brief afternoon spray of rain that evaporated as it hit the ground). Those of us on the city margins await a dreaded spark—one Island fire was deemed to have been started by a broken piece of glass that focused the sun’s rays—to set off some conflagration like those that have already consumed small towns like Lytton, Paradise, Monte Lake, Greenville and Fort McMurray. Which brings me back to what we’re not doing about it. Well, hats off to the fire fighters, smoke jumpers, rap attack crews and pilots who are trying to limit the damage but a big raspberry to the woman in the white SUV who left me gaping as she cruised down a road in the Saanich Peninsula last week, puffing away on her cigarette, window down, flicking her ash and who knows what embers into the breeze. I’ve spent enough hair-raising—perhaps that should be razing—time on fire lines to know how quickly an ember in the dry grass transmogrifies into a 50-metre high wall of flame coming toward you at racehorse speed while whole trees explode in puffs of vaporizing flame. One recent fire whose dynamics were analyzed by comparing satellite images was found to be consuming a hectare every 10 seconds. One has to see a fire tornado to fully absorb the power of a forest fire under optimum fire conditions. And, if you actually look at the fuel load of dry grass and underbrush in our urban parks, gardens and untended ditches, patches of scrub, vacant lots and even unwatered back yards, you quickly realize that the urban fire conditions are optimum. In a way, perhaps that heedless SUV smoker serves as a fine metaphor herself—for those of us who don’t seem to have quite grasped the magnitude of what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change signifies for what’s coming if we continue to suck our collective thumbs and wait for somebody else to do something about it. That light ahead is growing, the IPCC is clearly warning us, not because we are nearing the end of the climate mitigation tunnel but because the global warming freight train is barrelling toward us so fast. Because it’s a fully loaded freight train and is moving so quickly, it can’t stop. The momentum it has will run right over the spot we now occupy. Our best hope is to try steering it onto a siding where it can slow down as it runs out of fuel. That “runs out of fuel” phrase is the important bit. As long as we’re simultaneously playing rabbit frozen in the headlight while furiously stoking the speeding locomotive’s boiler—yeah, I know, it’s a mixed metaphor but bear with me—that train is going to barrel right over us and everybody behind us, too, a whole generation of young people, their children, their children’s children and their children’s children’s children. The IPCC report warns us to expect “very large” temperature increases across the temperate regions of North America. We are going to know more frequent and far more intense heatwaves than the one that recently cooked a billion marine creatures in BC’s intertidal zone and brought temperatures sufficient to barbecue a steak to sidewalks in the Interior. The charred ruins of Lytton and Monte Lake are just the opening act in a show that’s coming soon to a major suburb near you. Sea level rise is accelerating and will continue to do so for centuries to come. This does not bode well for neighbourhoods at sea level. Oak Bay, Sidney, Parksville, Richmond, Mission and Chilliwack—are you paying attention? You’ll soon be out of time. Fresh water resources are dwindling. BC has always thought of itself as having a surplus of fresh water. The illusion has been fostered by the glaciers and the winter snows in the Interior mountains. They serve as a bank, storing fresh water from the winter and releasing it into the rivers that carve though the arid Interior rain shadow during the summer. This cool water flow in summer and fall is what has sustained salmon runs. But as it dwindles, water temperatures rise and oxygen levels fall. In recent summer they have frequently approached the lethal level for fish, amplifying the effects of parasites and pathogens and in some cases exceeding the physiological boundaries that dictate fish survival—not so different from the plight of those humans who perished in this summer’s heat wave (although fish can’t purchase air conditioners or escape from the heat in the local supermarket). There’s an economic price tag here, too. Less water from winter snow and ice means less potential energy to be stored in the hydroelectric reservoirs which supply 95 percent of BC’s electricity needs So what to do? Well, let’s start with what not to do—throw up your hands and do nothing. The runaway climate change can’t be stopped but it can certainly be slowed and that buys time for adaptive policies that we perhaps haven’t even thought of yet. Special interests that benefit from exploiting fossil fuels keep saying we have to focus on adapting. Indeed, we do. And one way of adapting is to reduce our profligate use of fossil fuels for inefficient transportation, technologically primitive heating, convenient but expedient recreation, cheap entertainment and so on. It’s true that in the short term we can’t simply stop using coal, oil and gas. But we can certainly use a lot less. Which means addressing those who want us to use more coal, more natural gas, more methane and so on. How do we get there? Go big, not small. Put the same kind of effort into the transition to clean, renewable energy that will help us avoid a runaway greenhouse effect that we put into developing an atomic bomb to incinerate cities. “Think globally, act locally” is one of the mantras of the environmental movement. It has merit, incremental improvement is good. But when the IPCC report told us it was delivering a “Code Red” for humanity, it was warning us that we’re almost out of time. Put another way, bike lanes in Victoria are certainly good but it’s equally certain they are not good enough. In fact, they primarily are a way for politicians to appear to be doing something. Getting cars with internal combustion engines right off the streets of Downtown is better. Truly adaptive thinking is figuring out how to enable people to travel to Downtown to shop, dine and enjoy themselves without using their cars. That means a major radical rethink of our attitudes toward public transportation and how we deliver it. Cost recovery models may be the exact opposite of what we should be considering. In the big picture, the cost of cars on the road may far outweigh the cost of subsidies to public transit. The usual clamour of denialism from vested interest groups arises whenever a report like the IPCC’s comes down but the denial seems irrelevant now, marginalized and clearly delegitimized. Of much greater concern should be the political policy makers who so often seem willing captives of the agencies they are supposed to regulate. So one thing everyone can do is tell elected representatives that we’re done with greenwashing and talk, talk, talk about reducing carbon emissions while carbon emissions continue to climb. Scientists are warning us of an existential crisis; we need our leaders to lead. And if they can’t lead, we want them to get out of the way and make room for somebody who can. That message needs to be delivered forcefully. Deliver real, quantifiable solutions or depart. Delivering that message to leaders is something constructive that everyone can contribute to managing the climate crisis. There’s an election coming. Get involved. Hold the folks asking for your vote accountable. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  15. The lack of restrictions in schools and universities don’t jive with Health Canada’s sensibly cautious recommendations around COVID 19. UNLESS THINGS CHANGE DRAMATICALLY over the next few weeks, British Columbia will launch a massive experiment in pandemic management strategy involving about a million children, teenagers, young adults and their families and teachers. It begins when students, at least a quarter of a million of them completely unvaccinated, return to crowded classrooms—some university classes number 300 students or more—with (so far) few requirements for masks or social distancing. With a month to go before schools reopen, about 85 percent of kids under 17 were still unvaccinated. About 40 percent of those aged 18 to 29 still had not been fully vaccinated as of August 9. BC’s allowance of crowded lecture halls with no requirement for masks or vaccinations is contrary to Health Canada’s recommendations around COVID 19. Some students, parents and teachers want masks and a more conservative approach to classroom safety protocols. Some even advocate that high schools and university students require proof of vaccination before admission to classrooms and university events. One recent poll found that 77 percent of British Columbians want mandatory vaccination as a prerequisite for university attendance and even more—about 80 percent—think the same should apply to attending sports events or to flying anywhere in the province or, for that matter, to the rest of Canada. But so far the province is standing by its announced position that these additional safety measures are not necessary and that a continued gradual easing of restrictions is the proper response. It says it’s finding a balance between public safety and opening up the economy. Anticipated rules might change, though, after an announcement August 16 that the province had recorded 1,434 new cases in the previous three days—about 50 percent higher than was reported a week previous. The number of hospital cases had increased by over 50 percent, with those admitted to intensive care doubling over the past week. The present calculation is that high vaccination rates in BC’s adult population—the government certainly deserves its praise for that—and rising vaccination rates among the population aged 12 to 29 (which currently has the lowest vaccination rate but is also least susceptible to serious illness) will nevertheless blunt both the rate of transmission and the lethality of the virus for those who do get infected. The best case is that transmission of COVID 19 stalls and, while we don’t exactly return to normal, at least we get back to a semblance of normal. That is the plan. But as every wise general knows, few are the plans that survive engagement with the enemy. The threat to the reopening plan is what looks suspiciously like a troubling fourth wave. New infections have been increasing on an exponential growth curve, doubling every 7.5 days. Most of the new infections are among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated provide a fertile field for the virus, particularly the aggressive delta variant which now comprises most infections and is about ten times as transmissible as the first. Even the vaccinated who are exposed to the delta variant but develop no symptoms can carry heavy viral loads which can then be transmitted to others, including those who are vaccinated but for some reason have less robust immunity. FACED WITH THE PROSPECT of a return to business as usual in classrooms where few are vaccinated, masks are optional and classrooms are expected to be used at maximum levels, parents and teachers and university faculty associations are protesting the moves and urging stronger precautions. At Simon Fraser University, the biology department simply defied the administration. The chair of biological sciences at SFU ruled that masks would be required in all biology classrooms and lecture theatres and that staff would have the right to refuse unvaccinated individuals entry to biology offices and labs. The student society at SFU told media it’s detecting a lot of anxiety among students, not because they fear disruption but because making masks optional, eliminating social distancing requirements and failing to limit capacity in most classes, lecture halls and at campus events puts them and their teachers at greater risk. At the University of Victoria, the faculty association asked for mandatory vaccinations for faculty, staff and students. The graduate students there moved unilaterally to require masks for entry to their society’s buildings and offices and the UVic Students’ Society says it supports the faculty association’s request. Unions at the university representing teaching assistants, sessional instructors and other staff at UVic want a mask mandate and urge that vaccination be required for residents and workers in student housing. (I should disclose here that I’ve taught—and still sometimes teach—the occasional university course in journalism, creative non-fiction, research methods and so on.) As with many policy decisions based on big picture statistics, the devil is often in the details. For example, while most teachers and faculty are vaccinated and therefore assumed to be safe, many younger university students still are not, most teenaged secondary students are not, few junior secondary students are vaccinated and no students under Grade Seven are. So they are at primary risk for infection which makes them a greater threat to their older teachers and their own generally older contacts from partners to frail elderly parents. There’s growing evidence in the research literature that the older one is, the greater the risk of lower immunity, even if vaccinated, simply because immune systems degrade over time. So, older teachers have a higher risk. How much higher? Well, we don’t really know because we haven’t had sufficient time for the baseline research. We do know from emerging research, though, that five out of every 100 people in the general population could still get infected even after two doses of either of the leading mRNA vaccines now in widest use in BC. And we know from research that these “breakthrough” infections are most likely in persons over 65 and among those who have underlying medical conditions that put them a greater risk of serious complications—whether actual disorders or therapies which compromise the immune system. Diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, congestive obstructive pulmonary disorder, being overweight and so on are all indicators of greater risk. Okay, how many teachers are in these higher-risk age and health brackets? Well, according to an age profile of the teaching profession tabulated by the BC Teachers’ Federation, there are about 5,500 teachers in the province’s schools who are over 50. And one compiled by the Canadian Association of University Teachers for 2018 on a discipline-by-discipline basis found that more than 10 percent are over 65. Of these, statistical averages suggest about 20 percent of teachers aged 50 to 64 will have high blood pressure and for those over 65 it jumps to about 40 per cent. On average, about 23 percent of those over 50 will have diabetes. So one in five teachers in a school or university classroom is at elevated risk of a serious outcome should they contract COVID 19, even if fully vaccinated. That’s a minority, but it is a significant minority. Remember, less than half BC’s population aged 18-29 and less than a quarter of those aged 12-17 had been vaccinated. As of July 30, almost half the new cases in Canada, virtually all involving the delta variant, were in people under the age of 29. A reopening of campuses with no mask or social distancing requirements in classrooms means that the least vaccinated age cohorts—in which symptoms are expected mostly to either not present or to be mostly mild—will be unavoidably mixing with several age cohorts which are at considerably higher risk for serious adverse effects from an infection even if they are fully vaccinated. Federal safety guidelines affirm this concern, which may alarm the groups affected but doesn’t appear to worry the provincial government. Here’s what Health Canada was saying the last time I checked its website. The caveat “last time I checked” is required because, as the federal public health office observes, circumstances are fluid and “the risk of getting COVID-19 is evolving daily and varies between and within communities. Overall, the risk to most people in Canada remains high.” “Deciding what personal preventive practices, like masking or physical distancing, you can safely ease up on and when and in what settings depends on several things,” Health Canada advises. “The decision isn’t just based on whether you’re fully vaccinated.” It says other factors are age and personal health status and warns that the potential for severe illness following infection increases with age, underlying conditions (like high blood pressure or diabetes) and the age and health status of those immediately around the exposed person. “The impact of you being infected is greater when you’re with older people and/or people with certain medical conditions,” Health Canada says. “This is because they’re at higher risk of severe illness.” Thus we have one group that’s not largely vaccinated or is only partially vaccinated and is therefore more exposed to infection, even if the outcomes are mostly mild or asymptomatic, and another population which is mostly vaccinated and therefore has greater protection but which also has components that are at higher risk if infected, not only in themselves but to others in their immediate circle who likely have elevated risk due to age and medical status—very old parents, say. The 95-year-old parent of a 65-year-old teacher, for example, is about 600 times more likely to die from contracting COVID 19 than is a 22-year-old student. Not surprising, then, that teachers, university professors, students and parents are all expressing anxiety at what seem to be contradictory messages from the BC government and from Health Canada. Canada’s top public health agency is saying that we shouldn’t be engaging in what it calls “least safe activities” on the basis of age, personal health, medical conditions and the age and health status of those around us. It defines “least safe activities” as large indoor gatherings, especially where masking and physical distancing are not undertaken and/or being physically close to an unvaccinated or partially-vaccinated person when the virus continues to circulate in the community. A first-year lecture with 300 students jammed into a lecture hall with no requirement for masks doesn’t seem to meet Health Canada’s “keep your distance” benchmark. Nor does exposing a 60-year-old public school teacher with diabetes or asthma or high blood pressure to a classroom of unvaccinated kids who aren’t required to wear masks. And it gets more complicated. A just-published study of 50,000 vaccinated patients by the famed Mayo Clinic found that the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine with comprised the first dose for most of BC’s higher risk population had declined to 42 percent effectiveness against the newly emerged delta variant which now represents 95 percent of the new cases in here. And in Oregon, 20 percent of July’s documented COVID 19 infections were among already vaccinated individuals. The upside to that gloomy news is that the number of breakthrough infections that are serious is small—for now. Yet another variant could change that. The present strain of COVID 19 rampaging through vast numbers of unvaccinated people in our neighbour to the south provides an ideal natural laboratory for developing new vaccine-resistant strains which, as we well know, pay no attention to borders. All of which helps explain, perhaps, why Health Canada is warning that notwithstanding vaccination, if you are older and/or have pre-existing medical conditions, you are at greater risk of severe illness if you are infected and you may not get as much protection from vaccination compared to a younger person. For this reason, the agency says, you should “keep wearing a mask and avoid getting close to others in public even if you are fully vaccinated.” But BC’s plan for all teachers to return to small, enclosed classrooms with students who may not be vaccinated and for whom not wearing a mask is an option for personal choice, seems to ignore such advice. A recent report in the New York Times quotes epidemiologists warning that seniors and people with immune systems compromised by advanced age and/or underlying medical conditions “could be particularly vulnerable in a surge, even if they were fully vaccinated, because their bodies might not produce a strong immune response from the vaccine.” None of this is to suggest that vaccines aren’t the most important and valuable weapon for suppressing that exponential growth curve and minimizing detrimental health effects from infection. But it’s a bit more complicated than simply basing policy on the assumption that a vaccination is the silver bullet in this campaign. Sending potentially vulnerable teachers back into classrooms with students who are not fully vaccinated and for whom wearing a mask is a personal choice is to ask those teachers to risk become potential transmission points to others who might be at even greater risk of severe illness or even death. Setting up mass vaccination clinics for returning university students who already say they want mandatory vaccinations and telling them to wear masks in classroom settings doesn’t seem particularly onerous. After all, students and faculty can’t drive to campus without proof that they have a driver’s licence; they can’t park on campus without a permit; use the towels in the athletic facilities without paying a fee; take books out of the library without first obtaining a card; or attend classes without putting on their pants. Asking them to get vaccinated and wear a mask doesn’t seem unreasonable. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. He has been vaccinated.
  16. Reflections on our rightful place on Earth. Earth rises above the moon’s horizon, as captured by Apollo 9 A CORRESPONDENT WHO IDENTIFIED as a member of the Haida Nation recently commented on a piece I wrote for FOCUS about the role of renaming in the process of decolonizing our thinking about this province, one still draped in the symbols of oppressive colonial authority, from place names to architecture to public art. It was a thoughtful comment and raised points about which I’ve been reflecting and trying to think through responses that are respectful and equally thoughtful, entangled as they are in a perplexing complexity. First there’s the observation that: “You and your people were not invited here.” Well, there’s no disputing that. I wasn’t invited. And yet here I am. The implication of the statement, of course, is that since I came uninvited, perhaps I should disinvite myself. But the uncomfortable fact is that for three-quarters of a century I have known no other place. I’m here and for me, really, there is nowhere else to go. I didn’t come here of my own volition. I came as a tiny infant. I wasn’t consulted and I was offered no choice in the matter. And this is even more true of people who aren’t part of Indigenous communities but who were born here—my brothers were all born here, for example, so they aren’t from somewhere else, they’re from here—as are our children, our children’s children and in a few cases, our children’s children’s children. Others who are not Indigenous have even longer lineages in what’s now BC. Some can trace their genealogies back to the early 1800s. Telling somebody with perhaps seven generations of ancestors born here that they’re not invited may be satisfying to say but in pragmatic terms it doesn’t really move us in a meaningful way toward a lasting or just solution. I’ve run into challenges to the legitimacy of my presence here before. And not only from some members of Indigenous communities whose expressions of resentment and anger over the whole ugly, abusive legacy of colonialism I certainly understand and, to some extent, accept as inevitable and perhaps even just. In the larger context, though, I believe allowing anger and resentment to shape what we say or do is almost always counterproductive. Anger, if you permit it to own you, never leads anywhere good. Even our bodies, faced with constant inflammation, cease to function properly. So, I believe, it is with the spirit. For example, consider the exculpatory, deflecting “whataboutism” and defensive rhetoric that has arisen from some non-Indigenous quarters of mainstream society upon having the cruel injustice of the residential school system drawn to its attention and then being asked to think about accountability. Who should be held accountable? What should redress look like? That angry response leads nowhere except into an unsustainable and dysfunctional swamp of denial. There’s no denying the reality of what happened, nor is there any excusing it. Denial prevents us from dealing with what happened. These were children who we victimized. Children! Blaming the victims for drawing our attention to the injustice of their victimization by us is unconscionable. Misguided non-Indigenous response I’ve also been told by non-Indigenous people who were born in BC that as an immigrant I have no right to comment upon events here and that I’m unwelcome and that I should either shut up or get out and “go home.” A few even offered to come and physically assist me in departing—“I’ll come and punch your lights out,” said one cheery note from Port Alice. Some of this I found amusing, since in most cases it turned out that I’d actually been in the province half a century longer than had the folks saying that as a newcomer I had no right to be here. Most of this ill will erupted into my in-basket whenever I wrote about resource exploitation issues, or shoddy environmental standards and the impending crises of global warming, loss of biological diversity, or the need for less rapacious harvesting of forests, fish and minerals. A significant number of these non-Indigenous correspondents, however, took greatest affront at my writing about the obligation upon the dominant culture to face up to the need for justice for First Nations; to address their indisputable rights not to be economically marginalized, socially victimized by stereotypes; to govern themselves locally instead of being governed by distant bureaucrats in Ottawa; to have what has been done acknowledged instead of consigned to a collective national amnesia; and to expect redress rather than a gloss of “what-aboutism” and excuses. I understand the source of that resentment. It comes out of fear, uncertainty, historical ignorance, a sense that there were powerful forces at work marginalizing individuals who had no power to resist what threatened their families and their livelihoods. Just as I understand the resentment expressed by some Indigenous voices at the heedless non-Indigenous majority which has enriched itself by appropriating and exploiting resources to which it had no unilateral right and which until recently seemed incapable of bearing witness to its own wrongdoings. Which brings me to the second point made by the note from Haida Gwaii: “You and your people are not welcome here.” The expression of that feeling, however understandable to me or satisfying for the speaker, doesn’t advance the conversation very far. I’m here—that’s a simple fact. I’m not welcome—well, that’s a feeling about a fact. A fact that has to be addressed before we can get to addressing the feeling about it. The numbers The fact is this. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. And neither are the 5.1 million other British Columbians, 4.8 million of whom are not Indigenous, and who, whether welcome or not, are not going anywhere either. Indeed, the math indicates the real growth of non-Indigenous numbers in BC is going to continue to exceed the real growth of the Indigenous population here in illahie (meaning ‘country’ or ‘earth’ or ‘land’ in Chinook) for the foreseeable future. The birth rate for the Indigenous population is high, about four times higher than that of the non-Indigenous population, but it is nevertheless subject to the tyranny of numbers. There are about 8,200 Indigenous births in BC each year, but there are about 32,000 non-Indigenous births. Add to that the net population increase of 10,000 from inter-provincial migrants and immigrants to Canada and the difference is even greater. By 2031, at those rates, the Indigenous population will have grown from 270,000 to 352,000 people. Over the same decade the non-Indigenous population will have grown by about five times that—around half a million—and the overall population will have grown from 5.1 to 5.9 million. Even though the First Nations population has now surpassed what it’s thought to have been around the time that the colonial era began (and is now 10 times what it was at its nadir), the culturally dominant non-Indigenous majority is probably going to remain numerically dominant for centuries to come. One thing seems clear. In a society with such disproportionate asymmetry between Indigenous culture and the mainstream, a progressive engagement is essential. Angry yelling at one another, retreating into self-justifying bubbles of cultural solitude, will simply mean that natural entropy will lead to the dominant culture unilaterally imposing its interpretation of how things should be, likely without even thinking about it. The only thing we can change is the future The pragmatic reality is that the past is messy. It’s filled with both despicable people and saintly ones; with great injustices and with ethical triumphs. We discover wicked acts among our ancestors and virtuous ones; there are the venal and there are the incorruptible; the misguided and the wise; there’s structural privilege and there’s altruism. But the past is also changeless. As a wiser writer than I once pointed out, the past is a foreign country. We can read reports about it from a few who have been there but we can never go there ourselves. We can’t change it. The only thing we can change is our future. So how do we do that? Where do we go from here? What can we change in our immediate future, the same future which will become our children’s past? How do we make the future better than the past from which our troubled present derives? These are knotty, difficult questions. Yet that’s where we need to focus our energy, even if for some of us the engine of that energy is anger or resentment. The worst side of us will always urge us to angry rhetoric that’s often intended more to wound than to engage; or to excuse and absolve ourselves of past injustices rather than take collective responsibility. But remember this—the best side of us will always strive to do our best for each other and for the home we are going to have to share. Okay, as the Haida writer observed, I wasn’t invited. And I and my people are not welcome here. I hear that. But since we’re here to stay, and we’re not going away, what next? And who, exactly are “my people”? Well, one of “my people,” at least in my immediate family, is First Nation by birth with ancestry in northern BC that goes back at least 10,000 years, probably far longer. And then, of course, there’s me, fresh off the boat but nonetheless here longer than about 90 percent of BC’s population—at my age there aren’t many who have been here longer than me. Quick generalizations (and I’ve made a few myself in my time), generally, are a bad place to start a conversation. We hear disgruntled rhetoric from everywhere in these parlous times. Claims that Canada has no legitimacy because it was founded in an undeniable injustice; that Canada should be dismembered because of ancient wrongs perceived in Quebec or because of recent wrongs perceived in Alberta, or, indeed, even that Vancouver Island should separate from British Columbia because it doesn’t get a fair shake from the mainland; claims that the fabric of Canada’s identity is threatened by people who are of different race, culture, religion, even sense of personal self. Muslims, Jews, Asians, Americans, Blacks, Christians, atheists, First Nations, white people, the transgendered—the list of grievances is long. But all this griping leads to a question. If not Canada, what? If not British Columbia, what? If not a culturally diverse nation, what? The question brings to mind the old aphorism that dishevelled, unruly, frustrating, irritating, maddening democracy is the worst possible choice for a government—until you consider the limitations, impositions and inherent injustices that all the others represent. Canada, at least, has the power and flexibility with which it may remake itself as a better version of what went before. So, how do we go forward in this complicated time to make our shared home a better place? Do we burn it all down, as some propose? If we do that, what do we build in the ruins we create? And how do we do it in a way that means justice for all and not just for some? Do we ignore past wrongs? Then how do we ever reconcile with those who were wronged—or who wronged us? The notion of ownership is an invention The last point made by my critic from Haida Gwaii had to do with ownership. If I own property in BC, the writer observed, the title to it only derives from laws passed by Queen Victoria. Perhaps I should instead write a piece making awkward legal arguments as to how I’m the rightful owner of what the writer describes as “my people’s land.” Well, there’s indeed truth in that statement, although in my case I actually live by choice on treaty land and while there’s disagreement about what the two parties understood their original agreement to mean, further complicated by the passage of more than 150 years and the vast demographic, social, political and economic changes that none of them could have imagined, there’s a process for sorting those differences out by discussion, negotiation, good faith and, if necessary, the law, which however imperfect is what we have. Several years ago, I had the privilege of being invited to be one of the formal witnesses at a conference jointly hosted by the Songhees First Nation, elders and cultural leaders from other First Nations around Victoria, and scholars from the University of Victoria to discuss what it meant to be treaty people. I found it a remarkable and heartening coming together of wise men and women who were, indeed, trying to make respectful sense of who we are and what we want to become together. The notion of ownership is an invention. It’s a way of trying to create an illusion of certainty for ourselves in an existence in which the norm is uncertainty. Ultimately, none of us owns anything, we just prefer to think we do because it gives us a feeling of certainty, Yet we are all only sojourners for a brief time and we’re all heading for the same exit, however much we surround ourselves with the material possessions, personal relationships, families, communities, tribes, nations and empires with which we create an illusion of permanence. Live long enough and we’re destined to lose everything: what we own, the people we love, our memories and the consciousness that’s the sum of our perceptions. Naked we come, owning nothing, and naked we depart, taking nothing. Am I the rightful owner in moral terms of Indigenous people’s land? No. Am I the owner according to the legal conventions of the moment? Yes. Could those conventions change? Perhaps, if we can agree on how. For example, joint sovereignty is not exactly an unusual concept. Our political landscape is already layered with overlapping jurisdictions—federal and provincial, provincial and municipal, legal and social, private and public tenures. In terms of overlapping Crown and aboriginal titles, why not add a small tax to all private and residential properties and direct it as a reliable, predictable revenue stream to the First Nations that have underlying claims to original title? We do it for libraries, schools, volunteer fire departments, sidewalks and street lights. It needn’t be onerous. Frankly, adding a couple of mills to the property tax rate and directing it to First Nations governments probably wouldn’t even be noticed by most property owners. But those are details. There’s a more important question. Do I have a right to my place on Earth? Yes. And where is my place? Well, it’s here regardless of any wrangling over who owns what and to what degree. A conundrum perhaps best answered by two young Dene hunters I met in the sub-Arctic bush more than half a century ago. They were gutting and butchering a caribou they had just shot. I remember them grinning at me, up to their elbows in entrails, while I asked them about the magma pool of hostility that had recently welled-up in the resource-reliant non-Indigenous community in response to the filing of a land claim against the entire Mackenzie River Valley where both oil and gas pipelines and a highway were planned. One of them looked up laughing and said: “They think we want to own the land. That makes them mad. We can’t own the land. Nobody can own the land. The land owns us.” I’ve thought about that wisdom many times since, the way it frames the prevailing illusion that any of us actually owns anything. We don’t, of course. All of us are just passing through, brief sojourners in the vast rolling tapestry of life. Everything we think we have must be surrendered and lost. The people we love most. Property. Material possessions. The beauties of sunsets and wind storms and seasons unfolding. All this will pass from our hearts, from our memories and finally from our minds and our ability to even sense their existence. Perhaps, as some believe, spirits return. Perhaps, as others believe, they don’t and we simply dissipate into the everything and the nothing that comprises the universe. Nobody knows. Our ideas of ownership, property, permanence, certainty are all illusions. We do have a duty though. A duty to good stewardship on behalf of those who will be here after we have departed, a duty to kindness to those with whom we share our brief journey, a duty to justice, a duty to do our best to act in good faith. We’re all in the same canoe In this time of fire and flood, vanishing species, environmental refugees in the tens of millions—including here in BC in our present moment—the looming imminence of catastrophic climate change that is reshaping the global ecosphere, perhaps we’d all do better to heed what a Tseshaht elder told me many years ago. I was not long out of high school. It was the year after Canada’s 100th anniversary and in a flash of youthful enthusiasm after hearing him speak at a public lecture, I decided I had to go to Port Alberni to talk to George Clutesi about art. I persuaded my 19-year-old girlfriend to drive me there in her ancient and unreliable Volkswagen Beetle and she bravely took me over the hump from Nanaimo in a blinding snow storm. I’d first met him as a nine-year-old. He was a friend of my dad. George was a janitor at the Alberni residential school where he’d once been an inmate for 11 years. At least, that was the day job that supported his writing, art, and shepherding a resurgence in dance and song. Emily Carr had bequeathed him her unused canvases, paint and brushes when she died which tells you the esteem in which he was held. While he was working at the residential school—despite being told not to by administrators—he began re-introducing a new generation of children to their traditions of song, dance and art. He invited his two unexpected young visitors in and talked for a long time about art both in the context of Tseshaht traditions and of its place in the larger world of European and Asian art. But the one thing that he said that has stuck so vividly in my memory that I can still hear him saying it, his old dog snoring on the rug and the rich scent of a roasting tyee salmon wafting out of his kitchen, was this: “We’re all in the same canoe,” he said. “We can learn to paddle it together or we’ll capsize it and we can drown together.” Learning to paddle together into the future, that’s the objective of reconciliation. What does reconciliation look like? I don’t know. Different people have different ideas about that. Which vision is right? I don’t know. That can only be determined by agreeing what it looks like and talking out how to get there. Finding consensus can only come of talking it through. Reconciliation, it seems to me, requires finding what we have in common and celebrating those things while learning to accept, respect and tolerate our differences. The canoe is already at sea. There’s a big storm coming. Everybody in our canoe has a right to be here. Where it goes is up to us. Paddle together or drown together. Seems like a pretty straightforward choice. Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.
  17. ON THE THIRD DAY of the astonishing and historically unprecedented heatwave that brought Death Valley level temperatures to the Interior of British Columbia, I ventured onto my back deck to do some emergency hand watering of wilting plants. There I discovered that the plastic overflow trays under the plant pots in which I grow my kitchen herbs had simply melted. So had the gaskets and glue in the adjustable head on the water wand I’d neglected to hang up. Every seam now sprayed disconcerting leaks. Elsewhere on Vancouver Island people reported vinyl blinds melting, windows frames warping, window panes overheating and blowing out, the tempered glass in car windshields simply disintegrating. And on July 13, news media reported that BC Hydro cables to Vancouver Island were damaged during the timeframe of the heatwave, causing a reduction in power delivery. BC heatwave as illustrated on the Weather Network It wasn’t just here, of course. In Oregon people reported it got so hot the infrastructure began to melt. The plastic insulation on power cables sloughed off. Asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks heaved and buckled. Wags fried eggs on car hoods for their Twitter feeds. But it wasn’t so amusing for others. Heatwaves kill In the aftermath, BC’s coroner has reported at least 719 sudden deaths, many of them apparently associated with heat-related medical emergencies for seniors in sweltering rooms without adequate ventilation. There are likely more deaths yet to be tabulated. But the number confirmed so far was equivalent to an Air India disaster a day over the heatwave weekend. Why authorities didn’t anticipate this grim consequence as the disaster unfolded and overwhelmed ambulance services is a reasonable question. Only 20 per cent of British Columbians have air conditioning, so it wasn’t rocket science to predict that low income seniors in older housing would be extremely vulnerable to the heat. I haven’t seen the distribution figures but my informed guess would be that statistics will ultimately show a correlation between the deaths and poorer neighbourhoods. Poorer people can’t afford the air conditioners that the wealthy buy during heatwaves. The World Health Organization has been issuing grim warnings about the lethal consequences of heatwaves. It says they killed more than 166,000 people between 1998 and 2017. One summer-long heatwave in Europe killed 70,000 people in 2003. Another that lasted 44 days killed 56,000 in Russia in 2015. A 20-year medical study published in the medical journal The Lancet says that extreme temperature variations caused by global warming now cause more than five million deaths a year. A paper published June 4 in the respected science journal Nature analyzed data gathered over 28 years from 732 locations in 43 countries. It attributes 37 per cent of deaths related to heat exposure around the world between 1991 and 2018 to global warming caused by humans. While more air conditioning might help keep individuals who have them alive, air conditioning itself has consequences beyond this obvious benefit. The International Energy Agency (IEA) points out that if the rest of the world were to begin running air conditioners at a similar level to the US, which spends $30 billion a year to power air conditioners, that alone would add about two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere. That’s because air conditioners are colossal electricity hogs. One IEA analyst told The Guardian newspaper in 2019 that during the previous year’s heat wave in Beijing, 50 per cent of that vast city’s electrical budget (much of it from burning natural gas, though other parts of China rely on coal) was diverted to powering air conditioners. Smashed temperature records call for decarbonization In the June heatwave, Lytton became the hottest place ever recorded in Canada at 49.6 degrees. It was just one of 59 heat records set around the sweltering province from Victoria—at 38.3, hotter than Hyderabad; Port Alberni—at 41.3, hotter than New Delhi; Fort Nelson—at 35.8, hotter than Mumbai. Just across the border from Osoyoos—at 45 degrees, already hotter than Uttar Pradesh, itself sweltering under a June heatwave across North India—a satellite sensor recorded a ground temperature near Wenatchee of 63 degrees. That’s the reading you get from your instant thermometer when the steak on the grill hits medium rare. Many of my media colleagues responded to these temperatures across BC, Washington and Oregon as a freakish event, a one-in-a-millennium marvel, the stuff of exclamatory headlines and breathless news clips, then shock and recrimination at the entirely predicable human toll. But examining my melted plastic trays, I concluded that we just got a glimpse not of an exception but of the hellish new normal about to descend upon us courtesy of the relentless physics of global warming. Though “climate change” or “climate emergency” is the politically preferred language these days, they seem almost Orwellian euphemism and dissimulation, suggesting we can have our cake and eat it, continuing to enrich ourselves with fossil fuels and enjoying the conveniences they bring while enthusiastically talking the talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. John Horgan and the New Democrats and the hapless Liberals and whoever they pick as a new leader can talk themselves blue about their green commitments, an endless blah, blah, blah of mission statements about carbon emission caps and magical thinking about electric futures, but their inability to fully embrace decarbonization means we should expect all this to get worse, not better unless we intervene as citizens. The truth is, our politicians are not stupid; they know what has to be done; but they don’t have the stomach for it. BC’s energy resource development heading in wrong direction Despite our self-congratulatory self-image as the greenest province, British Columbia remains a leading producer and exporter of that dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal. In the last 10 years, the province has produced and exported close to 300 million tonnes of coal. Loaded into hopper cars, that’s one giant coal train that would circle the Earth at the equator. Coal awaiting shipping at Westshore Terminal Then there’s oil, 100,000 barrels a day, making BC the fourth largest producer in Canada. And natural gas: five billion cubic feet a day, 32 percent of all Canadian production, much of it coming from a single field—the Montney Formation—in the Peace River district which contains 400 trillion cubic feet of gas, 392 trillion cubic feet of which remain as the recoverable reserve. This massive reserve is actually a driver of development and production in Alberta’s oil sands. Its natural gas liquids are used to dilute bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands so that it can be transported by pipeline and shipped by tanker. Mining that bitumen still generates 70 megatonnes of greenhouse gases a year. The Alberta government says it’s capping emissions—at 100 megatonnes. Thus, BC will be a critical enabler of the increased shipment of dilbit—diluted bitumen. Right now, about 300,000 barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products flow through the existing pipeline every day. There’s another way to think of this. Natural gas liquids supplied from BC are enabling the flow of 129,000 tonnes per day of greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta. How? Because one barrel of dilbit, refined and burned, yields about 431 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Thus, when the current twinning of the pipeline is complete and another 590,000 barrels a day begin to flow—a tripling of the export of oil—the greenhouse gas emissions being exported will increase to about 385,000 tonnes a day. Oh, and there’s liquefied natural gas (LNG), also high on the province’s development agenda. It’s touted as a clean alternative to burning coal or oil. That’s generally true, but the devil is in the details. LNG Canada’s project in Kitimat is now under construction (Photo by LNG Canada) Every 42-gallon barrel of LNG yields about 236 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The standard LNG tanker carries about 150,000 cubic metres of cargo. So each anticipated tanker leaving BC laden with natural gas will actually be shipping 223,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide for release into the atmosphere. Then there’s the methane—it’s the largest component of natural gas and it’s 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks during production and BC’s oil and gas industry is a major source of methane emissions in the province. There’s no getting around the relatively simple math on these matters, although it’s maddeningly complicated by the way government and industry report using different values, scales and terminologies, and by the different greenhouse gas emission coefficients for different products. A cynic might think that there’s some sinister reason for reporting in barrels, cubic metres, cubic feet, metric tonnes, gallons, short tons, long tons, litres, pounds and kilograms which require a mind-numbing array of conversions. But perhaps this is less a sinister attempt to complicate and confuse than it is representative of the heedless, unthinking, topsy-turvy evolution that got us into this mess in the first place. In any event, the politicians in our successive provincial governments have been the leading proponents of the magical disconnect between what we do and what we say when it comes to mitigating global warming. Part of it is because investors, governments—and by extension the rest of us—are deeply addicted to the revenues and convenience that flow from fossil fuel commodities which have come to permeate almost every human activity. Reducing our reliance on fossil fuels will mean massive inconvenience A genuine shift to green energy globally will have immense financial implications for oil producing countries. One study by a prominent think tank estimates a genuine pivot to green energy would mean a cumulative total revenue loss for oil-producing countries of $13 trillion by 2040. Some countries would lose 40 per cent of their total government revenue. So there’s clearly a significant conflict. Hence, we tolerate the spin from politicians. Like that from Premier Horgan, who talks the politically correct green line we demand while simultaneously mowing down old growth forests that actually do mitigate against global warming, all the while prosecuting and preparing to stuff into courtrooms those few who are brave enough to object. BC continues to mow down forests that mitigate against global warming (photo by Alex Harris) Let’s put a little of this into the context of physics. Burning one tonne of BC coal produces more than two tonnes of carbon dioxide gas, a principal greenhouse gas driving global warming. So burning 300 million tonnes of BC coal contributes roughly 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gas. Where it’s burned—whether in steel mills in Japan or thermal generating plants in China—is completely irrelevant. Pretending it’s not part of BC’s carbon footprint because it’s been exported to some other less environmentally responsible jurisdiction doesn’t matter—or help. As the recent heatwave illustrated, we all share the same atmosphere and what goes down is bound to come around whether in the form of the recent heatwave or the emissions of fossil fuel particulates that one research paper published last month estimates killed a million people in 2017. Wait a minute, I hear, how can burning one tonne of coal produce a weight of carbon dioxide greater than the coal itself? For those of us who should have paid more attention in high school chemistry class, the atomic weight of carbon is 12. The atomic weight of oxygen is 16. When carbon oxidizes, which is what’s happening when you burn it, one carbon atom combines with two oxygen atoms which yields a weight of 44 for carbon dioxide—about 3.7 times the weight of the original carbon. It’s all more complicated, of course. Coal isn’t pure carbon and different types of coal have different concentrations of carbon, but generally speaking, the laws of physics dictate that burning coal creates twice its weight of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, of course, is a volatile gas that disperses widely and thus has a greatly amplified effect, trapping heat in the atmosphere. So when we hear politicians pumping their own tires about their efforts to mitigate global warming while simultaneously promoting their success at generating revenue from commodity exports, the leading of which in BC are timber products—former sinks which stored carbon—and fossil fuels which amplify carbon emissions, we are actually being sold a talking point rather than a solution. And we accept this, of course, because actually reducing our reliance on fossil fuels for transportation, food production, energy to power everything would be massively inconvenient. For example, consider the ubiquitous cell phone. A cell phone has a particularly high carbon footprint due to the mining for the metals needed to make them; and also the massive amounts of energy used by immense data centres, servers and networks (upon which all our devices rely)—not solar energy, not yet, though there is a push in that direction. Use your cell phone for an hour a day for a year and the energy needed will contribute about 1.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Now multiply that by five billion users worldwide. Let’s say you decide to send me an email commenting on these remarks. You just added four grams of carbon dioxide to global greenhouse gas emissions. Doesn’t seem like much until you multiply by the 306 billion e-mails sent in 2020, which are expected to increase by 70 billion before 2025. Let’s say you like these remarks and forward them as an attachment to 65 people on your contacts list. Using a formula worked out by a BBC analyst, that amounts to driving a kilometre in a car. The average e-mail user contributes 136 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. In total, e-mails alone contribute as much carbon dioxide as seven million cars on the road. The lethal heat threshold Contemplating this background to our previously unprecedented but potentially soon to be commonplace heatwave got me thinking again about a troubling research paper I read last year in the journal Science Advances by three scientists from British and American universities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. The title of the paper was “The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance.” It started with the fact that when high temperatures are combined with high humidity there’s a lethal threshold beyond which human beings cannot survive because their bodies are unable to shed sufficient heat. The term used for this threshold is “wet bulb.” The condition takes its name from an experiment in which a thermometer is covered with water-soaked cloth over which air is passed. The lower the humidity index, the faster water evaporates, cooling the thermometer. The higher the humidity index, the slower water evaporates and the warmer the thermometer will be. This relationship between temperature and humidity determines the ability of the body to shed excess heat through the evaporation of perspiration. The researchers determined that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees marks the upper physiological limit beyond which the human organism cannot survive. Climate models, they report, projected that the first wet-bulb temperatures would begin to occur around 2050. But when they examined the actual weather station data from around the world, they found to their alarm that wet-bulb temperatures are already occurring in some coastal subtropical locations and that extreme humid heat overall has doubled since 1979. “Our findings indicate that reported occurrences of extreme TW (wet-bulb temperature) have increased rapidly at weather stations…over the last four decades and that parts of the subtropics are very close to the 35 degree survivability limit, which has likely been reached over both sea and land,” the researchers say. “These trends highlight the magnitude of the changes that have taken place as a result of the global warming to date.” Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College of London, pointed out in a Guardian article that in 2020, the 35 degree wet bulb limit was reached in both the Middle East and Pakistan’s Indus River Valley. Stop the magical thinking—cut emissions in half, soon It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to reach the conclusion that in a rapidly warming world, coastal places like Vancouver and Victoria may not be the climate havens their residents have liked to think. They may, in fact, be more susceptible to lethal combinations of intense heat and high humidity. Clearly, we need to aggressively undertake the kind of planning that apparently did not take place before the just-finished heat wave that fried BC, Washington and Oregon, and killed enough British Columbians to qualify as a major disaster—although models have been predicting just such events for some time. A key component of that planning is going to be up to us as citizens. It’s essential that we start telling our politicians to stop the magical thinking, stop the dissimulation and euphemisms and start talking seriously about what we have to do to address the coming climate events which, 50 years ago, scientists told our federal government posed a greater threat to the survival of humanity than thermonuclear war. Like Winston Churchill or not, one can’t help but admire his speech telling the British people that for the imminent war against the Nazi, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” That’s the kind of direct talk we need from our politicians and each other as we face up to what lies before us. We need to get our imaginations onto a war footing in response to what’s coming. That means getting serious about cutting our carbon dioxide emissions in half and in doing it over the next 30 years; reducing our personal carbon footprints; revising our assumptions about travel, diet, transportation, housing and the consumer society of planned obsolescence. It means actually thinking about the consequences of what we do, for example preparing and planning for cooling refuges for those in the population who cannot afford air conditioning. Magic and wishful thinking won’t let us evade the hellish future we’re creating. Only action will do that. And the place to start is with the politicians who are afraid to be decisive on the painful decisions that must be made. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  18. Vancouver Island’s residential schools saw death rates of up to 40 percent among incarcerated children. A SPONTANEOUS DEMONSTRATION OF PUBLIC GRIEF over the finding of 215 unmarked graves for children on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops created a display of children’s shoes, candles and stuffed animals on the front steps of British Columbia’s legislature. Security staff stealthily removed them overnight. People replaced the display in the following days. June 13, 2021 at the BC Legislature The legislature is supposed to be the people’s house. In fact it is the seat of enduring colonial power in a province that has the sorriest record in Canada for acknowledging a prior indigenous presence. The legislature apologized for—at best—another example of blundering, tone-deaf governance by a system that put thousands of such children into unmarked graves across Canada, hundreds of them right here on Vancouver Island. It was one more apology in a long list of apologies that seem increasingly empty the longer it becomes. On Vancouver Island at least 202 children died in residential schools. They died at Kuper Island (now Penelakut), at Alberni, at Tofino, at Ahousat and at Alert Bay. Others may have died as a consequence but remain unidentified—dying in hospitals, infirmaries or sanitariums outside the schools or sent to small, remote communities to die at home. Data from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation indicates that at the Kuper Island school alone, of the 264 First Nations children forcibly enrolled between 1890 and 1896, 107 were listed as having died. What had 12-year-old Edith Kruger experienced when she was moved to create this image of graves at a school in BC If this sounds like a death camp mortality rate—and it most certainly does to me—it is also a conservative estimate. Nobody knows exactly how many children died in residential schools or where the nameless ones, the forgotten ones, are buried. Redbreast, for example. Or Ackeepineskung. Nobody knows which schools they attended—or when they died or where they are buried, only that they were apprehended, taken away to be educated and vanished, never to be seen again. Some children are recorded only by a first name, like Arthur at Ahousat who died in 1913, exact day not known. Or Mona who died at Alert Bay. Some are known only to have died, with circumstances and date not recorded. Many never even had their deaths officially registered with the province, and searches for them in the archives draw only a blank. It’s as though, like students who vanished under Argentina’s ruthless junta, they never existed beyond that one name on an almost-forgotten list. Almost, but not quite. This is where almost ends, here and now. We conveniently tell ourselves that the “disappeared” students in Argentina or Chile were victims of brutal dictatorships that killed them for political reasons. Yet Canada’s residential schools were political, part of the grand government scheme for clearing the land for immigrant settlers. The federal government was encouraging a flood of settlers into the West to help it assert occupational sovereignty in reaction to American expansion westward. Consider: 107 of 264 children at a Vancouver Island residential school died in the school’s first six years under circumstances that include malnutrition, disease and harsh punishments. That’s comparable to the mortality rate in the notorious Japanese prisoner of war camps that resulted in highly publicized war crimes trials for the prison administrators. The residential school at Kuper Island Is it fair to compare a prison camp to a school? Well, if you are put in a place against your will, fed substandard food, not allowed to leave and subjected to corporal punishment if you try, it sounds a lot like the definition of a prison camp. The death rate for prisoners of war in the Japanese camps that so horrified their liberators exceeded 30 percent. At Kuper Island, judging from the statistics cited for 1896, the death rate for children incarcerated for re-education then exceeded 40 percent. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that in 1896, says the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation entry for Kuper Island, the students tried to burn it down. Or that more than half a century later two girls would drown trying to flee the place. Education weaponized for ethnic cleansing The architect of these humanitarian atrocities was Sir John A. Macdonald. Alberta’s pugnacious premier Jason Kenney was recently asked in an interview whether, given what we now know, Macdonald’s was the appropriate name to hang on a Calgary high school. Kenney seized the opportunity to pander to his political base by lamenting “cancel culture” and characterizing residential schools as an unfortunate “imperfection” blemishing the otherwise sterling reputation of a great leader who deserved celebration for his other accomplishments, foremost among them the very Confederation that some vocal Albertans on the farther right apparently wish to demolish. Let’s be clear. The brutal residential school system put in place by the Macdonald government was more than a mere imperfection, some unfortunate flaw in policy. The residential school system was a tool for the methodical abuse of human rights. Residential schools were education weaponized for moral brainwashing, ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. Those are strong words. But they aren’t my words. They are the words of a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, used to describe what the country’s highest jurist called the worst stain on Canada’s human rights record. And that’s a record already deeply stained by race riots, the internment of minorities, enforced sterilization of people with disabilities, misogynistic massacres of young women, and religious and racial hate crimes. “The objective—I quote from Sir John A. Macdonald, our revered forefather—was to ‘take the Indian out of the child and thus solve what was referred to as the Indian problem,’” said Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin in a speech in Vancouver in 2013. “‘Indianness’ was not to be tolerated; rather it must be eliminated. In the buzz-word of the day, assimilation; in the language of the 21st century, cultural genocide.” Prairie historian James Daschuk, who said his discoveries made him rethink everything he thought he knew about Canada’s creation narrative, wrote this in a Globe and Mail article in 2013: “A key aspect of preparing the land was the subjugation and forced removal of indigenous communities from their traditional territories, essentially clearing the plains of aboriginal people…Despite guarantees of food aid in times of famine in Treaty No. 6, Canadian officials used food, or rather denied food, as a means to ethnically cleanse a vast region from Regina to the then-Alberta border. With buffalo gone, starvation was employed as a tool for forcing indigenous populations onto small reserves. Government officials, Daschuk says, withheld food while it rotted in storage “while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness.” In the winter of 1883, Roman Catholic missionary Father Louis Cochin reported “gaunt children dying of hunger.” Even Conservative politicians were appalled at what they saw. Thomas Jackson, the MP for the Northwest Territories, saw starving, freezing Cree supplicants for food turned away by government agents. “In the case of one Indian,” he said, “within two months seven of his children died because they had not the necessaries of life.” Macdonald had described this policy to the House of Commons in laudatory terms. Refusing food until First Nations populations were actually starving was keeping costs down and weakening resistance to the colonization of the Great Plains. Residential schools were the second phase of this project to politically remake the West. The entire raison d’être of residential schools, cloaked in an Orwellian high-mindedness regarding their moral purpose was, put in plainer language, to erase indigenous culture—to deconstruct its economy, disrupt its social cohesion, extinguish its connection to the land, and abolish its language, its history, its literature, its religious beliefs, its traditions, ceremonies and, indeed, its entire sense of identity. Residential schools, Macdonald said, enabled the separation of children from their culture so that subsequent generations could be more readily remade as something else. “It has been strongly impressed upon myself…that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men,” Macdonald said in 1879. The residential school at Port Alberni The object was to make an entire people disappear not by killing their bodies but by killing everything about them that made them distinguishable from the dominant society. The schools were only marginally about education. Really they were a vast exercise in cultural gaslighting intended to brainwash children into a sense of profound shame over who they were and whence they came. Duncan Campbell Scott, esteemed as a Canadian literary icon, ran the Department of Indian Affairs. He acknowledged that the schools, where children were packed into dormitories under unsanitary conditions, were pestilential. Food was strictly rationed; one former student at Ahousat told a Vancouver Sun reporter in 1995 that 57 years earlier one of his school chums had died following a beating for stealing a prune from the kitchen. Ahousaht, BC, students in the school cafeteria. British Columbia Archives, PN-15589 “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in these schools, and that they die at much higher rate than in their villages,” Scott said. “But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian problem.” Canadians have chosen to look away—or seek scapegoats “Cultural genocide.” “Final solution.” “Disappeared.” “Died while trying to escape.” “Beaten to death for stealing a prune.” This is the context that frames residential schools and the unmarked graves of child inmates. So when the officials who represent the authority of the BC government—the keepers of its sacred precinct—carelessly removed that poignant public display from the legislature steps, they were symbolically delivering the same message that residential schools themselves sought to accomplish regarding indigenous narratives: erase them from public space. And really, why was anybody surprised? Like a generation of post-war Germans who professed not to have known about the Holocaust, Canadians have chosen not to look upon this dolorous narrative of national crime. Once again, that’s not my descriptor; it was the term used by Peter Bryce, the federal government’s own inspector who was utterly appalled by what he found, for example, one school where 69 percent of the pupils and former pupils had died. When his formal report met indifference from authorities, he took it to the press where it was a one-day wonder—front page of the Ottawa Citizen for one day, then off the radar—and then in 1922 wrote a book, The Story of a National Crime. It, too, was largely ignored by the broader public. Today, there appears to be a national awakening to this awful past of brutality, indifference and cruelty. But even now there’s a search for scapegoats. Blame past leaders. Pull down their statues. Blame former governments. Blame cancel culture. Blame the churches that ran the schools. Yet the truth is, there is no “them” to blame. There’s only “us.” Government was us. The authorities were us. The administrators were us. The churches were us. They did what they did to the victims for us. The big objective was to help us cover up, to evade responsibility and ultimately to help us absolve ourselves of the human rights crime upon which we have constructed our entire national edifice. Many of us are still in denial about this sin. But many more, it seems, led by young people, are now prepared for the painful conversation that comes with acknowledgment of what was done and who did it and on whose behalf. Personally I don’t care about pulling down statues of Sir John A. Macdonald or renaming Ryerson and McGill universities, high schools and streets. All that may be satisfying. But to me, the important thing is not the past, it’s the future. It’s what we do next to reconcile with those we have wronged and in many cases continue to wrong. When we think about Macdonald’s starvation policies, we should think about the 53 percent of First Nations children more than a century later who live below the poverty line in a country that became one of the wealthiest in the world by exploiting their former homelands. We should think about the 22 percent of indigenous families in 2021 who experience moderate to severe food insecurity. When we think about the fate of First Nations children in residential schools that were lethal dormitories of disease and illness, we should consider that today in Manitoba, although indigenous people are 10 percent of the population, they suffer 70 percent of COVID-19 infections. And First Nations families are 10 times more likely to be living in overcrowded housing, many with inadequate access to safe drinking water—of the 60 communities with water advisories in place, 47 percent have been in that state for more than a decade. The government still has no comprehensive regulatory regime for managing drinking water on the reserves it set up. The residential school at Alert Bay, circa 1970 When we think about the sad stories of two little girls drowning as they attempted to flee one residential school in mid-winter, or four little boys freezing in the snow after they sought to flee another in their shirts at minus-38 degrees, or the teenager reportedly beaten to death for stealing a prune for his six-year-old dormitory mate, we should think about the fact that anxiety remained the most prevalent mental health issue for aboriginal youth in 2016. The suicide rate for indigenous youth is three times that of the mainstream population; in some regions it’s 33 times the Canadian average and is the leading cause of death for children and adolescents. We owe it to Maisie—and 150,000 other children I planned to start this piece by saying that the events on the legislature steps brought to my mind the memory of Maisie Shaw. But to be honest, that wouldn’t be true, because since she came to my awareness more than a quarter of a century ago there’s seldom been a day when I haven’t thought of her. I never met Maisie Shaw. She departed this world almost 75 years ago just as I was coming into it. She’s a mystery, a revenant, an unknown. She’s been held up as a symbol of oppression, an icon of the brutality of residential schools for those determined to address the past, a metaphor for our collective failure to address the truth about ourselves. For me she’s an echo of the trauma from those days that will destroy this country if we don’t resolve it. Most important, she’s not a statistic, she’s not a number or a registration entry or a line on a list of names. She was once a person, embedded in a family like yours and mine. Maisie Shaw was a student at Alberni Residential School in 1946. She came from the tiny village of Nitinat on the remote West Coast. Her father was Walter Shaw, a fisherman, and her mother was Ella Williams. Maisie was born on August 26, 1932. In one of those odd occurrences of history, she shared her birthday with her father, who had been born August 26, 1905 in New Westminster. Her mother was born in Alberni in 1906. One of her brothers was born at Whyac where the Nitinat River reaches the sea, another was born at Clo-ose, a little farther down the coast. One brother died when he was one, the year before Maisie was born. Her mother died when she was five. And then she went to the Alberni school. What happened to her there is the mystery. Another former student, Harriet Nahanee, who died in 2007, said in 1995 that on December 24, 1946, when she was six, she had witnessed Maisie Shaw being kicked down a flight of stairs at the residential school and lying motionless on the floor with her eyes open and that she later died of her injuries; her body was sent back to Nitinat. The official documents tell another story: Maisie was admitted to West Coast General Hospital in Alberni on December 18 with an acute case of rheumatic fever; she died there on December 26 of a severe inflammation of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart, which is commonly associated with the illness. She was buried, a document said, in the Tseshaht band cemetery in Alberni. I went to look for her grave, but the undertaker listed on the death certificate had no records, and I was unable to find her burial site. When I called West Coast General to determine whether Maisie Shaw had been admitted on the date given on the death certificate, I was told records from that time had long been destroyed and the hospital itself had been relocated twice since then. Everybody associated with Maisie is now dead: Harriet, the school principal, the Indian Agent who signed the death certificate, the doctor who said she was his patient for a week, her parents, her brothers. All dead. Did Harriet Nahanee conflate events and people? There’s no doubt whatsoever that the Alberni school, like others on the Island, was a violent place. Students there were disciplined by corporal punishment. Some were repeatedly and brutally sexually assaulted by the school’s dormitory advisor over a 20-year period from 1948 to 1968; he was later jailed for 11 years and has since died. And memory is at best a malleable thing, particularly for traumatized children. Were official documents destroyed, falsified or altered? Also possible. Perhaps, though, seeking the details of Maisie Shaw’s fate reflects only an old reporter’s urge for precision, a way of trying to refute public amnesia. Ultimately the facts are less important than collectively remembering the historic truth of what was done to her and to 150,000 other innocents over a century of cruelty. On this coast First Nations were pushed out of their traditional fisheries and their lands were appropriated. Among the first acts of British Columbia on entry into Confederation was taking away their right to vote. First Nations were denied the right to own property; denied the right to practice traditional ceremonies and religious rites, denied the right to organize politically to address their land rights; and denied the right to hire lawyers. Finally, in the most intimate insult, their children were taken from them and sent to be brainwashed in prison schools where they were publicly whipped, forcibly confined, abused, raped and buried in unmarked graves. The message of the residential schools was simple: We can do anything we want and you are powerless to stop us. All these things are a matter of record. We haven’t had a national conversation about them because we haven’t wanted to face the truth about ourselves as a country founded on a national crime. The memory of Maisie Shaw and all the other lost children demand that conversation. It’s a conversation we cannot, must not, turn away from, however painful it becomes. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and Vancouver Island.
  19. Greater conservations measure are needed if the fish—and fishing the river is known for—are to survive. FIFTY YEARS AGO, just as pale green catkins dusted with yellow pollen began to emerge on alders that scant weeks earlier had been merely a bleak, grey rattle in the wind, serious anglers like Art Webster would be getting out their split cane rods. We now inhabit the age of technical fishing, of mass-produced fibreglass, unbreakable alloys and the science of powerful, super-light carbon graphite rods. Anglers download coordinates from satellites to pinpoint favoured fishing holes and deploy digitized maps on hand-held computer screens to get there. A time in which anglers would walk three days to get to a good stretch of river and their prized rods were hand-assembled from bamboo strips—and not just any bamboo, either, not Tonkin or Calcutta, it had to be from Malacca cane—then hand-glued, hand-varnished, hand-rubbed to a luminous gloss, the blued steel and agate-lined guides hand-whipped to the rod with silk wrapping thread, well, that time can seem impossibly quaint today. So can the unwritten rules and occasionally stuffy conservation etiquette that proscribed certain unsporting and unmentionable conduct—one didn’t use “hardware,” one didn’t fish on spawning stocks, one didn’t bounce bait along the bottom and so on. But when the snowy summits had already begun shedding melt water from the glittering drifts and cornices more than a kilometre above, anglers still governed by a courtly Edwardian sensibility would check their floating fly lines for cracks and run them—metre by painstaking metre—through a basin of soapy water to wash off the winter grit. Screws would be tightened, leaders coiled, and the drag mechanisms checked and adjusted on their simple single-action reels. I know the routine because I once used to follow it myself, although my own rods have been in the rafters for years now and I doubt they’ll ever come out again. Photo from the Cowichan Bay archives of an angler with a chinook. The Cowichan once had runs of 25,000 of these very large salmon. Veteran fishing guides like Joe Saysell, who has lived on the Cowichan River for more than 70 years, would watch the resident belted kingfishers flashing in the spring sun, get their drift boats shipshape for the coming season and keep an eye peeled for signs of that first insect hatch dimpling the emerald current, signalled by the shimmering clouds of gossamer-winged flies drifting upstream on the invisible river of air that always runs counter to the flow of the water. “The thing is, we’d wait until April 16 for the upper part of the river to open and when the opening came, it always felt like winning the lottery,” Webster recalls. Lacrosse fans will better know Webster as the professional lacrosse star who came west from Ontario, won two Mann Cup titles playing for Victoria, and then won a fistful more as a coach. But spend a few minutes chatting about fishing and it’s clear his passion for the river runs as deep as his passion for lacrosse. “I’ve been fishing the Cowichan since the Victoria Shamrocks brought me out here [from Brampton] in 1978,” he says, and he fell in love with what’s long been considered one of British Columbia’s blue ribbon angling destinations with its long, slow pools, fast-moving riffles, deep holes and canyons and thundering waterfalls as it hurries from Cowichan Lake to its estuary on Cowichan Bay, 30 kilometres to the southeast, itself once a saltwater angler’s Eden for the vast run of huge slab-sided Chinook and aggressive coho salmon that would hold in the salt water awaiting the fall freshet before returning to the upper river to spawn. These days Webster and Saysell, a pair of icons from the halcyon days of fly fishing on the Cowichan, are part of a movement that’s lobbying the provincial government to put a stop to some of the most popular angling on Vancouver Island. They want the magical upper stretches of the river closed to angling from the end of October to mid-April. It’s difficult to argue their logic. Angling pressure on the extremely sensitive habitat is now so great, our knowledge of what’s happening so limited, the technology so efficient, and the possible consequences so dire that these wise old anglers say not to invoke the precautionary principle is irresponsible and, worse, profoundly unethical. “Look,” Webster says, “we don’t hunt grouse in the spring; we don’t hunt ducks or geese in the spring; we don’t hunt pregnant does; or elk, or moose. What would be left if we did that? Why is fishing on the upper Cowichan River any different?” Unprecedented pressure on vulnerable habitat It’s sure to be a controversial quest. October through March are the months when there’s the most intensive recreational angling on the 10-kilometre stretch of water from what’s called the 70.2 mile trestle, an old logging railway bridge, and the weir at Lake Cowichan, which holds back water for release in the increasingly arid summer months that are shaping into the new normal of global warming. But Saysell says winter fishing has simply got to stop or anglers’ love of the designated heritage river may wind up extirpating the very abundance and diversity that’s been bringing elite anglers from around the world for well over a century. Anglers come for prized but increasingly rare winter run steelhead, for rainbow, cutthroat and brown trout. Once-large but now much-diminished chinook and coho runs also return to the river each year, although a rebuilding program for chinook has been encouraging. Conservative observers like Saysell note, however, that while a couple of improved chinook returns may be hopeful cause for celebration they hardly represent a recovery at a time when stocks around the Georgia Basin are endangered or threatened, and steelhead returning to most other streams on the east coast of Vancouver Island are virtually on life-support. Veteran fishing guide Joe Saysell has lived on the Cowichan River for more than 70 years. “The Cowichan River has some of the finest trout fishing anywhere from late October to December,” announces one website still promoting the winter angling there. But that’s precisely the problem say Saysell, Webster and the Friends of the Cowichan, a local conservation group that shares broader environmental concerns. Because so many Island streams are in trouble, the enthusiastic marketing of recreational fishing simply channels more and more anglers and their professional guides to the upper Cowichan where they can still catch fish and where the experience provides an historic cachet that reaches back to that Golden Age when trophy catches were posted outside London’s exclusive Victorian clubs and were reported by the New York Times. That’s putting unprecedented pressure on vulnerable habitat precisely when the fish stocks are themselves most vulnerable. Letter urges more data collection and closure of critical spawning habitat In a letter from Friends of the Cowichan to Katrine Conroy, the provincial minister responsible for forests, lands and natural resources, Saysell points out that the opening on the upper river takes place right in the middle of critical spawning habitat for steelhead, chinook, coho and rainbow trout. Even worse, the heaviest fishing pressure takes place at exactly the time that already imperilled game fish are actually spawning the next generation of trout and salmon. Anglers in chest waders tramp through spawning beds where fish have just deposited their eggs; drift boats drop anchors that churn and drag through the redds where eggs wait to hatch; and the fishing pressure is both utterly relentless and intensifying. How much pressure is there? Nobody, apparently, really knows. It’s just open season. Anybody can fish there and seemingly without limit; whatever traffic the river will bear. “The upper river from the 70.2-mile trestle to the weir is where the vast majority of the chinook spawn. It is also where a large percent of the coho and steelhead spawn. And we also know that this area is where 95 percent of the rainbow trout spawn. The upper Cowichan River, below the weir at Lake Cowichan. “This area is one continual spawning redd at this particular time,” the letter says, “and is considered the ‘delivery room’ and ‘nursery room’ of the Cowichan River. Yet it is open for angling during the fall, winter and early spring, when fish are very vulnerable.” “People are getting out of their boats and walking through the redds,” Webster concurs. “People are just marching through. We have no idea how much damage is being done.” The Friends of the Cowichan letter raises that same question for the Province and for the minister in charge of managing what seems more like a bizarre mis-management policy. “How much damage to the redds are all the anglers doing by wading or anchoring on this fragile area, or how much damage is being done to fish that are in spawning mode (dark and laden with eggs)?” the letter asks.“We cannot say because there have not been any studies done on this subject.” Regulations haven’t caught up with technology Chris Morley, a fisheries consultant who has lived on the river for 29 of the 35 years he’s worked across BC and the Yukon, says he supports the concerns in the letter. Over the past decade, Morley says, he’s observed a steady increase in angling pressure on the upper river from both drift boats and shore anglers. “Based on my work experience and my observations on the Cowichan River, I believe that the upper river should be closed to angling during the winter months to protect spawning trout and salmon and their redds,” he says. “The Province should regulate the fishery appropriately to protect this resource.” There are some restrictions in place already. Fishing is permitted only with artificial flies on the upper stretch of river and it’s strictly catch-and-release. Yet Morley is doubtful about even that. There’s ongoing discussion and debate about mortality rates from catch-and-release angling, he notes, “however, there have been no studies done on the Cowichan to quantify these mortalities. “The Province should provide studies that can show some supportive data either for or against regulation changes. Until there are studies, we should err on the side of caution before it’s too late,” says Morley. Those concerns are echoed in the letter to the minister. It argues that technological advances in equipment call into question whether the current regulations restricting the upper Cowichan only to fly fishing are even relevant any more. “They are using extremely heavy lines, sinking leaders and extremely heavily weighted flies, which actually makes this angling bottom bouncing,” the letter says. It points out that the gear restrictions on the upper Cowichan were established in 1975 precisely to eliminate the practice of bottom bouncing which was then considered a factor in the collapse of trout and salmon populations there. “Technology has come so far today with the new weighted lines and new weights for flies that the method of fishing in the fall and winter in this area can no longer be described as fly fishing. The regulations and ministry are way behind the times and need to catch up.” Bob Hooton, one of BC’s leading steelhead experts until he retired from the provincial government, says a case can be made that wading anglers can have an impact on eggs and frequently hatched alevins, particularly if the foot traffic is concentrated in a small area at a vulnerable time. “Anglers, of course, will never be able to get on the same page with respect to an upper river closure. The typical demand is for science-driven decisions but no one is ever prepared to down tools long enough to facilitate the collection of the science demanded. “I’d be in favour of some thorough baseline data collection/assimilation on where, when and how much angling traffic of different types is occurring in areas alleged to be affected, assessing the juvenile salmon and steelhead abundance in those areas, closing the fishery for a year or two and repeating the same data collection. What are the chances? “There aren’t any clean answers here,” Hooton says. “If there were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” It’s just more traffic, more traffic, more traffic Ironically, Webster points out, when he first began fishing on the Cowichan River more than 40 years ago, there was then a complete winter closure for angling on the upper river between October and mid-April—to protect spawning fish. That closure was removed in 1988 under the government of Premier Bill Vander Zalm. “I was totally against them opening the river even at that time,” Webster says. “Now, with so much more pressure on the river than ever before—it’s just more traffic, more traffic, more traffic. I’m just glad there are no jet boats!” He says that at 68 he’s noticed one major change. Many younger anglers, some of them guides, appear to have never been schooled in some of the time-honoured etiquette of angling with the fly, the principal one being the duty to a deep and abiding respect for the river and its at-risk inhabitants. That, too, echoes a point made in the letter to Conroy. “In the past, anglers were considered conservationists as they did everything possible to protect fish, especially spawners. But today that does not describe the anglers who are fishing this area during December, January, February and March because real conservationists do not fish in spawning areas or over spawning fish. It is unethical to do so, yet this is exactly what is happening.” At very least, the letter urges the minister, current regulations should be amended to impose restrictions banning all but floating fly lines, banning use of weighted flies, and setting strict catch-and-release quotas that limit anglers to a single steelhead and four trout, although it acknowledges that with presently available resources, effective enforcement is not feasible. Rules that aren’t or can’t be enforced simply invite flouting of the rules. A far more effective protection for spawning fish on the upper Cowichan River would be a simple winter closure. “Since we do not have the science to justify keeping this section open during these four critical months, we believe that the ministry should close it until it is scientifically proven that no harm is being done to the fish and redds,” the letter says. “Err on the side of caution and conservation rather than angler opportunity.” Indeed, such a closure would leave almost 90 percent of the river still open to angling during the winter months, the letter argues, and it would represent both the right ethical and and the sound biological decision. All rivers need a sanctuary where fish can spawn undisturbed. Provincial fishing regulations recognize that for most other rivers in the province where there are seasonal and area closures to protect spawning fish when they are at their most vulnerable. ”Why not the Cowichan?” Saysell asks. It’s a fair question and it’s one the minister should answer. Promptly. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  20. Image: The proposed Telus building in downtown Victoria Humans celebrate birds—bird-watching is now more popular than golf and even gardening—but North American buildings may kill close to a billion each year. Go to story...
  21. Humans celebrate birds—bird-watching is now more popular than golf and even gardening—but North American buildings may kill close to a billion each year. PLANS BY TELUS TO TRANSFORM Victoria’s downtown with “an iconic architectural landmark” featuring a massive, 11-storey high wall of glass on lower Douglas Street are generating a robust conversation about environmentally sustainable development. On the face of it, the planners set out admirable objectives: the structure is to bolster biodiversity with “lush tree canopies,” “pollinator eco-systems,” and a slew of other concepts from the green mission statement word hoard—low carbon compliance, rainwater harvesting, carbon sequestration, deep operational carbon emission control, renewable power generation through solar panels and so on. Of course, it’s not the only new building coming to Victoria. There’s been discussion about plans for a dramatic 20-storey flatiron structure at Fort and Blanshard which, as envisioned, would need a variance to exceed height restrictions by six metres. I’m all for imaginative iconic architecture. I’m certainly not obsessive about preserving stodgy, pervasive colonial symbols that emulate and evoke historic connections to Victoria’s unsavoury past as the seat of power for imposing systematic, anti-democratic, cultural oppression. But some aspects of the proposed projects do give pause. Can the planned Telus Ocean be bird-friendly? There’s that enthusiastically endorsed “wall of glass,” for one thing. Architects have been mesmerized by the aesthetic possibilities of transparency and reflective cladding surfaces for half a century now, ever since a revolution in the properties of building envelope materials made immense glass towers a reality. Our embrace of glass is understandable: it’s beauty, however, poses profound problems for birds. Many years ago, in a distant city, I’d walk silent streets in the predawn gloom, passing among the nondescript brick walkups and grimy business low-rise business fronts until I crested a slight rise. Suddenly before me, on the other side of the deep river valley that bisected that city—just as the earliest birds greeted the world with their dawn chorus—I’d see the recently arisen, luminous, 40-storey pillars of glass that comprised the urban core. I loved the sound of the early birds calling from gardens and from the forested parklands of the valley and I loved the stunning visual impact in that first sight of the city erupting from the still-dark northern horizon. Stacked against the black heavens, those skyscrapers rising above the commercial district at their base never failed to make me pause in their eerie glow and to stare at the stark, unpardonable beauty of that manufactured landscape. Some towers were suffused with a warm, golden incandescence; some glittered with internal light as hard as diamonds; yet others were pillars of pale emerald or a faint aquamarine. Red warning lights blinked above them. Neon signs splashed colour. Traffic lights blipped through their endless cycles of amber, red, green. Headlights from the occasional taxi jittered through the windy canyons of steel, glass and concrete. I always felt a bit special at the sight, as though I’d been allowed in for a private, personal viewing of some vast kinetic art installation. Never once did it cross my mind that I was also looking at a gigantic, mindless killing machine that threatened the existence of my other source of beauty in that moment—the untutored, spontaneous symphony of wild birdsong. A hawk colliding with a building. Photograph by Deborah Allen But a killing machine that built urban landscape was and still remains. An annihilation machine, ruthlessly efficient, entirely heedless, constructed for our convenience at the immense expense of the feathered species that we celebrate as spiritual envoys from nature and as symbols of freedom unfettered by, as the poet once put it, “the surly bonds of earth.” The billions of windows in millions of residential buildings in Canada and the United States, the display glass of commercial buildings, the aesthetically-pleasing glass towers whose possibilities inspire architectural imaginations, are estimated by some scientists to kill close to a billion birds a year. Attracted into the urban landscape by the habitation glow that encompasses every human settlement in developed economies, birds in flight collide with glass that’s invisible to them. The meeting is almost always fatal. Bird-friendly design not top of mind in Victoria “Unlike humans, birds cannot perceive images reflected in glass as reflections and will fly into windows that appear to be trees or sky,” observes a report for the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) in Toronto, a city-wide initiative which has been grappling with the problem. “Clear glass also poses a danger as birds have no natural ability to perceive clear glass as a solid object. Birds will strike clear glass while attempting to reach habitat and sky seen through corridors, windows positioned opposite each other in a room, ground floor lobbies, glass balconies or glass corners. The impact of striking a reflective or clear window in full flight often results in death. “Experiments suggest that bird collisions with windows are indiscriminate. They can occur anywhere, at any time, day or night, year-round, across urban and rural landscapes, affecting migratory, resident, young, old, large, small, male and female birds.” Flat glass panels are especially dangerous for birds. Photograph by John McHugh, Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons FLAP hosts an annual dead bird layout to raise awareness about the dangers birds face in our built environment. Photo by Leighton Jones The concerned municipal planners and building envelope experts in Toronto point out in the report that the amount of glass in a building is the single strongest predictor of how dangerous it is to birds. As changes in production and construction techniques facilitated the greater use of glass, they note, cities have become ever-more dangerous for birds to navigate. “Today it is now common to see buildings with the appearance of complete glass exteriors. The increase of curtain wall and window wall glazing, as well as picture windows on private homes, has in turn increased the incidence of bird collisions. Today, the vast majority of Toronto’s new mid-to-high rise buildings contain more than 60 percent glass.” Developers of the Telus Ocean building appear to have committed from the outset to active exploration of mitigation strategies ranging from glass cladding modified to make it visible to birds, to the use of screens, latticework and louvres. Glass adjacent to vegetation is to be treated with elements that are visible only to birds, says a revised design submitted to the City late last year. And exterior and interior plantings are to be given “careful consideration” regarding location to reduce both the appeal of interior spaces to birds and possible confusion about available perches for birds in flight. There are also plans to reduce nighttime illumination that might prove hazardous to migrating birds. Although mitigation strategies like those outlined in the Telus Ocean application are both commendable and welcomed by environmentalists concerned about urban bird strikes, the overall magnitude of the problem remains immense. One concerned group, the Victoria Bird Strike Initiative wrote last November to regional municipalities urging them to pass bylaws mandating design to mitigate bird strikes as a required part of the application process for new buildings. The letter claimed North America has lost almost one-third of its bird population since 1970. Erin Dlabola, a former employee of the University of Victoria who said over a hundred dead birds had been found around only a few buildings on the campus, asked regional governments to get proactive about mandating design features that can substantially reduce fatal bird collisions. “When bird-friendly design is incorporated at the planning stage, it can be cost neutral, and complement other design goals like energy efficiency,” wrote Dlabola and co-campaigner Willow English. “In addition, there are ways to make existing buildings safer for birds using visual markers and other products and techniques.” “Those [municipalities] who responded were mostly positive,” Dlabola says. “A few municipalities we heard back from already had plans to implement bird-friendly design guidelines in upcoming community plans and or bylaws and it was good to see there was already awareness on this issue. “Next we would like to see bird-friendly guidelines mandated by municipalities because it is the most effective solution based on guidelines that have been implemented in other cities.” English said that in the City of Victoria, however, “the current wording of the design guidelines is not stringent enough to ensure that new buildings are bird friendly. “Of particular concern is the text encouraging large areas of transparent glass at ground level, and only asking for bird collisions to be considered on higher storeys. Most bird collisions occur within the first four storeys of a building, making this area the most important for bird-friendly design.” Ploughing through the City’s design plan guidelines, official community plans and other documents, however, doesn’t yield much in the way of easily discernible or rigorously expressed policy vision about what needs to be done to assertively address the problem. Search city websites in Toronto, Calgary, Ottawa or Vancouver and the issue is clearly top-of-the-mind for urban planners and developers alike. Search Victoria’s documents and bird-friendly design prescriptions are extraordinarily difficult to find—that’s a clear statement of priorities in itself. Indeed, do a web search for urban bicycle policy in Victoria and you are inundated with hits. Do the same thing for bird-friendly design, nothing, at least not in the first five search pages—another statement of priorities that seems odd in a city that often bills itself as one of the greenest in Canada. And yet, we love birds more than ever Let’s extend that mind-boggling billion bird collision fatalities a bit. The highest estimate would mean that since the turn of this century, in Canada and the US alone, about 20 billion birds have perished crashing into the entirely passive threat of windows they can’t see. To that colossal number, you can add another 10 billion killed by domestic and feral cats. Then there are the 3.5 billion birds killed by high tension electrical wires, the 1.5 billion killed by pesticides and rodent poisons and the 1.2 billion killed by cars. Add it all up and so far this century you get 36.5 billion birds killed by unwitting and unintentional human activity. More than half of those fatalities are caused by windows. Other numbers suggest that quite contrary to the dolorous reality of human-caused bird fatalities, most of us—ironically—appear to love the birds we destroy by the billion. Business and market statistics show that since the pandemic began, householders trapped at home by lockdowns have turned to the winged wildlife just outside their death-dealing windows for personal solace. Even before the pandemic, wild bird products comprised a $20 billion a year sector of the entangled Canadian and US economies. Since COVID’s arrival, sales of birdseed, birdhouses and feeders have leaped. Add the spending of bird watchers and their activities and one study estimates it exceeds $80 billion a year. There are 57.2 million birdwatchers in the US and another 7.5 million in Canada. Recreational surveys by various government and marketing agencies report that we now spend more time at birding than most other recreational activities. Canadians, for example, spent an average of 133 days a year watching, monitoring, feeding, filming or photographing birds compared to an average of 70 days we spent gardening. Bird-watching is more popular than golf these days When you start to crunch the numbers, it becomes a mystery why so many municipal governments and developers invest so much effort obsessing over golf courses when the real public need on the basis of interest alone, is for bird sanctuaries and for more undomesticated parkland that provides habitat for the birds that people are so eager to watch. Think about it. There are about 64 million birders in Canada and the US. That’s almost three times the number of golfers (24 million) in both countries. It’s almost three times the number of the total attendance for every National Hockey League team. It’s three times the total attendance of the National Basketball Association and almost four times the total attendance of the National Football League. And 17 million more people watch birds each year than attend theatrical performances in both countries. Bird watchers spend big money on their pastime. One economic study of birders in the US, before the pandemic, reported they spent $15 billion just travelling to birdwatching sites and spent another $26 billion on equipment. The 57,000 birdwatchers who visit the famous sanctuary at Point Pelee, Ontario, spend an average of $549—just to watch the migratory birds that will later perish crashing into the towers of Toronto flying north, and Detroit flying south. Out of sight, out of mind In the face of our appreciation of the aesthetic, spiritual and economic value of birds, one wonders why we don’t put a great deal more effort into rendering the urban landscapes that attract them less lethal. As far as I can determine, no diligent data-obsessive researcher has yet actually counted the number of glass windows or how many hectares of glass wall are created by our architectural fetish for cladding commercial high rise towers, up-market condominiums and apartment blocks in transparent and reflective materials. As noted above, the amount of glass in a building is the strongest predictor of how dangerous it is to birds. So not knowing how much glass there actually is remains a curious absence. About 56 percent of bird fatalities from collisions involve commercial glass—lower buildings are far more dangerous than skyscrapers simply because most birds do most of their flying close to the ground. The other 44 percent die colliding with residential glass. A simple, anecdotal check with window cleaners online suggests that the average home of 192 square metres has about 25 windows, (although about 25 percent of British Columbians live in larger houses with considerably more glass). Calculated another way, construction guidelines generally aim for a window or glass door in every room on the building’s external perimeter. The glass should be equal to at least 10 percent of the floor area of the room at a minimum. Most of us prefer more natural daylight and therefore more glass. In the Capital Region, according to census data, there were 172,559 private dwellings reported in 2016. A simple extrapolation from that—acknowledging that this is a conservative guesstimate because it doesn’t account for cladding and windows on commercial office, institutional and residential towers—projects at least 4.4 million windows across the near 700 square kilometres of Greater Victoria. Every one of those windows is a potential death trap for flying birds. Few are the householders who haven’t heard the thump of a bird colliding with a window, patio or other door. Sometimes we are left with the sad disposal of a dead bird, often we just hear the noise and never find the feathered corpse. We like to reassure ourselves that the bird survived the collision and flew away, but researchers at the American Bird Conservancy say that’s unlikely. A too common occurrence near buildings, though often hidden in the bushes “Birds suffer internal hemorrhages, concussions or damage to their bills, wings eyes or skulls,” they observe. “While they may be able to fly away temporarily, birds with even moderate injuries are much more vulnerable to predators and other environmental dangers.” The reason we aren’t presented with a constant litter of dead and dying birds, the researchers point out, is because they usually strike the glass at high speed, bounce off and land some distance away, often obscured by plants or other objects. And scavengers like rats, raccoons, crows and house cats will quickly carry off dead and injured birds. In fact, the scientists say, smart scavengers may actually check several times a day at a window where there are frequent bird strikes. Out of sight, out of mind, so we remain largely oblivious to the magnitude of the carnage, which Oklahoma State University researcher Scott Loss has characterized as “death by a million nicks.” All of which gives me pause whenever I read of striking architectural plans which feature more vast walls of glass surrounded by both external vegetation at the perimeter, rooftop gardens designed to attract pollinating insects and plants inside glass atriums. What’s the environmental ethic of designing structures that are aesthetically appealing to humans but may be lethal to the birds they attract? What to do? This isn’t to scapegoat architects or developers or householders, city planners or municipal politicians, it’s just to say we all need to start thinking differently about how we modify our urban environments. There are indeed ways to substantially reduce bird kill from window collisions but they demand that we rethink the balance between our aesthetic demands and the impact of those demands upon avian wildlife. Windows with clear glass are invisible to birds while reflective glass creates illusions of vegetation and sky into which birds will seek to fly at high speed. Changing the type and use of glass, angling windows to reduce reflection, minimizing the appearance of space as a pass-through, all work in different degrees and applications. So collaboratively designing buildings to mitigate risk should, in my opinion at any rate, be at or near the top of the agenda when municipal governments discuss development proposals. At the University of British Columbia, where an estimated 10,000 birds a year crash into windows and glass panels—a campus survey of just 45 buildings tabulated collisions averaging from 45 to 72 a day—researchers developed a strategy for mitigating bird fatalities. Among the solutions: increasing the visibility of new glass by acid-etching it with patterns; using ultraviolet patterned glass which birds can see; retrofitting existing glass with transparent film that’s invisible to us but visible to birds. Some are temporary and inexpensive, some permanent. UBC bookstore’s bird-friendly windows At UBC’s bookstore, for example, a large expanse of external windows is etched with the sentences from the favourite books of professors. The windows still allow light into the building and patrons can see out, but the dense pattern of text creates both an artistic feature appropriate to the building and a wall of visual noise that provide highly visible cues to approaching birds. The university’s forward-thinking Green Action Building Plan, adopted by the board of governors in 2018, incorporates a requirement for all new structures on the campus to have 100 percent compliance with bird-friendly design elements by 2025. Some of the fixes are low tech and low cost. Researchers at UBC and elsewhere report that, reducing vegetation near windows seems to reduce bird collisions with glass. So does certain structural angling of windows to reduce reflections that create an illusion of three-dimensional space. Both high-rise and low-rise buildings reduce bird collisions when they reduce or eliminate light emission at night from interior illumination. Meanwhile, there remains a great deal we still don’t know about the phenomenon: Interior illumination is associated with birds that migrate at night flying into the glass of commercial buildings at fatally high speeds—but is this also true for the many more residential buildings? There’s little data. Residential buildings outnumber skyscrapers—perhaps by a factor of almost 6,000 to one—so rethinking suburbia is as important a challenge as trying to reduce bird kill in downtown cores. And rural residences may be even more of a threat than suburban ones simply because they intrude more into bird habitats. Faced with choices between increased vertical density and broader urban sprawl, it seems clear that local municipal planners who talk a great deal about sustainability and biodiversity should, like their colleagues in other major Canadian cities, be engaging the public in a far broader, more vigorous conversation about what it means for the birds that surround us and bring so much pleasure and value into our lives. For more information see flap.org and UBC’s bird-friendly design guide. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  22. Image: A gray whale breaching The old whaling industry may be largely gone, but modern industry has polluted their habitat and massively increased shipping by larger vessels that kills them outright. Go to story
  23. The old whaling industry may be largely gone, but modern industry has polluted their habitat and massively increased shipping by larger vessels that kills them outright. WE’D CLAMBERED, SLIPPED and butt-skidded down-slope through mossy old growth, getting drenched in the chest-high salal where the littoral flattened abruptly. Just as we broke from the forest edge, the curtains of rain lifted and the breeze hissed through the canopy. A shoreline of rocky shelves punctuated by time-polished pebble beaches spread before us. The winter overcast shrouded the Strait of Juan de Fuca in battleship grey. We had paused to watch the sea slurping past slick ledges like a current of unpolished aluminum, when our momentary reverie was interrupted. A vast sigh. Then another. And another. Surging toward us along the shoreline, riding a current, breathing as rhythmically as a distance runner in performance mode, came a whale. I haven’t seen that many great whales in my life, at least not close enough to count myself skilled in identifying them. Orcas in their distinctive black and white I’ve seen in surprisingly close encounters, to be sure, and even, from my years in the Arctic, white belugas and mottled narwhals with their astonishing tusks—teeth tightly twisted into a single unicorn-like ivory spiral. But for me even the ubiquitous grey whales had been mostly faint columns of vapour spouting in the hazy distance off Tofino. The other blue water leviathans not at all. Logic said this one was probably a grey whale because of its proximity to the shore. Yet to my untutored eye it seemed far too big. It had an enormously long, dark grey back with a big spinal knob about two-thirds of the way to the flukes. Might it have been a sperm whale venturing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca for some unknown reason? Was it lost or disoriented? Was it on some mission into danger known only to whale kind? Probably not, but who knows? The sea is full of mysteries even as we explore it, chart it, traverse it, plumb its lightless depths, cruise it, commercially exploit it, and trash it with bilge pumpouts, oil spills, garbage, sewage and industrial pollutants. Walk even the most remote beach on the West Coast and you’ll find plastic. We’ve now been defined—or so we like to think—as lords of the anthropocene, the terraforming species that is changing the whole planet into a grid of linked urban nodes surrounded by vast modified hinterlands. Every living species now encounters the industrial reach of humanity. This wildlife ranges from checkerspot butterflies whose habitat has vanished because it conflicts with high value agricultural land to High Arctic polar bears stressed by bioaccumulating factory contaminants carried there on the jet stream from China. And from shamelessly over-harvested abalone that were once a mainstay food source for British Columbia’s coastal First Nations to Salish Sea orcas. Orcas so laden with industrial chemicals flushed out of the adjacent Cascadian megalopolis that they qualify as toxic waste when they die. A gray whale, photograph by Merrill Gosho, NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Masters of pollution Once, standing on a steep bluff during a visit to les Îsles-de-la-Madeleine—the Magdalen Islands to anglophones—a tiny, remote, erosion-prone archipelago where sands and sediments lodge upon an ancient salt dome that bulges up from below the Gulf of St Lawrence, I was struck by the beach below and its gorgeous iridescent shimmer. I scrambled down the crumbling bluff to get a closer look. It wasn’t the beauty of shells shining in the wan sunlight. It was a vast layer of plastic tampon tubes. They were flushed by the tonne into sewers far up the river and cast up on the ocean strand, just like the drifting sediment that made the place. Walk the beaches on the outer coast of Vancouver Island and you can’t cover a hundred metres without encountering amid the driftwood the yellow flash of plastic oil containers, the orange of detergent bottles, the white of styrofoam, transparent water bottles, blue nylon rope, tangles of monofilament. Nature, acting on its own imperatives, is indifferent to the materials with which it works. We tell ourselves we’ve mastered the ocean with our bottom-sounding radars, GPS navigation systems and space-based meteorological forecasts. We certainly seem to have mastered it with pollution, whether it’s tampon tubes on the Magdalen Islands or bottled water containers bobbing in the Sargasso Sea gyre in mid-Pacific. And yet, for all our illusions of command, every shipping season, we lose an average of 70 or more huge freighters carrying cargos of wheat, livestock, consumer goods, oil and chemicals, iron ore and coal. Some simply vanish without a trace, perhaps snapped in half by a rogue wave or suddenly breaking up due to some unforeseen structural defect; perhaps looted by modern day pirates then sold off to be broken up or repainted and reflagged—the industrial maritime version of the urban “chop shop.” The Salish Sea Whatever the species of that whale which burst so dramatically into our awareness, it certainly seemed to be going somewhere at a determined pace. We watched, mesmerized, as its wake dwindled on its eastward journey into the Salish Sea. The Salish Sea is perceived by the people who live within it and on its surrounding shores, as a pristine natural landscape that’s endangered by growth. A large segment of it is now a national park reserve. But, of course, we, and the national park itself, represent the very growth that endangers the wild world. Contrary to our magical thinking about ourselves, we’ve already turned much of nature into a kind of urban, industrial landscape. New satellite research published recently in the science journal Nature finds that human-controlled reservoirs now represent an astonishing 57 percent of all surface water variability on Earth—more than half of all the ebb and flow in freshwater systems on our planet from immense dams on the Nile River to our own water-poor Gulf Islands with their myriad wells tapping precious groundwater and their myriad household septic systems discharging effluent. There are 90,000 septic fields in Puget Sound, maybe as many—or more—in and around the Canadian part of the Georgia Basin. On the American side, only 48 percent of septic fields were up-to-date with inspections. There’s concern that septic fields are a major source of what the experts call non-point pollution, that is, a kind of generalized seepage of contaminants. In 2017, over 1,400 square kilometres of shellfish beds were closed for both commercial and public harvesting in the Georgia Basin and Puget Sound, two-thirds of them in the BC portion of the maritime region. The primary cause of these closures—a combination of urban runoff carrying, for example, the unmanaged feces from Metro Vancouver’s estimated 350,000 dogs; uncontrolled sewage that gets flushed through storm drains when sewerage systems are overwhelmed by malfunction or high magnitude rainfall events; and failing septic fields. In 2018, an outbreak of norovirus sickened 79 people and appeared to be linked to consumption of BC oysters. Faced with a serious threat to confidence in the province’s $60 million-a-year farmed shellfish industry, authorities struck an environmental working group to investigate. It reported that “up to 80 percent of septic systems in coastal BC are in ‘performance malfunction’—meaning there is potential for human sewage to leach into the environment.” “The full extent of septic failure is unknown,” the team concluded. “Consensus from the working group was that improperly maintained septic systems are most likely another source of human sewage and norovirus into the marine environment and into oyster beds….” So the Salish Sea, for which that whale we observed was bound, is already a remarkable example of what appears to be a natural marine environment but which, in fact, has already undergone enormous industrial modification to the extent that separating the urban from the wild becomes a difficult task. An Eden became a ghost camp for whales Just over 230 years ago, Captain George Vancouver went on deck to take the morning air just south of Quadra Island. He was bound south out of Desolation Sound, so-called because of the dearth of good anchorages, the prevailing weather and an apparent absence of inhabitants—his visit came less than a decade after the first known major smallpox epidemic to devastate coastal communities and he’d already witnessed the aftermath elsewhere. But his spirits lifted at an amazing sight. “Numberless whales enjoying the season were playing about the ship in every direction.” The number and types of whales he reported in the Strait of Georgia were more, he said, than all the whales he’d previously observed on his great voyage of exploration. Since that remarkable morning we’ve mostly extirpated the whales for whom the Salish Sea was once a playground of abundance and plenty. In less than a century we turned a cetacean Garden of Eden into a ghost camp for whales. The abundance Vancouver observed is the more remarkable considering earlier log entries on his voyage North from California. On April 10, 1792, he reported large numbers of whales of “the anvil-headed or spermaceti kind” were cavorting around his ship. On April 19, he’d witnessed “immense numbers” around the vessel, most of them “finners” as he called them using Greenland whaling parlance. To us they are fin whales, the second largest of the whale species. A fin whale, once found in “immense numbers” in the Salish Sea ( Photograph by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Two days later, after weathering an alarming gale and enduring torrential overnight rain, Vancouver’s crowsnest lookouts excitedly reported “strange vessels under sail” along the hazy eastern horizon. Only later did he discern that what they were watching weren’t ships at all, but whales so large that their spouts had been mistaken for billowing sails. These were likely blue whales, the largest animal known to have existed, a creature so big its heart is the size of a compact car. And if Vancouver’s “deception” seems unusual, on average, one of these whales would be about the same size has his 10-gun warship, Discovery. His ship was about 23-metres long on the keel, a blue whale averages 24 metres. Blue whale (NOAA Photo Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Yet between 1908 and 1967, a span shorter than my own lifetime, all the great whales observed in such abundance by Captain Vancouver had been eradicated from the Salish Sea. The records are both sad and stunning. In 59 years, whalers in BC waters killed 1,380 blue whales, 7,716 fin whales, 4,180 sei whales, 5,621 humpback whales and 6,514 sperm whales. Whaling had begun earlier, of course, but not until the 20th Century was it established on an industrial scale with fast steam-powered “whale catchers,” harpoon guns and explosive warheads designed to detonate inside the animal. Whales were butchered and their blubber rendered into oil—a sperm whale yielded about 40 barrels—at whaling stations on Texada Island, Hornby Island and Cortes. Uses ranged from industrial lubricants to soap to making margarine. Ironically, the frenzy of killing whales in BC waters reached its peak as the whole enterprise was failing globally—markets had superior quality substitutes and there was a rising tide of public distaste. Yet the residue of this bloody business is with us yet, found in the place names we now consider quaint and a lure for the tourists who expect the amenities that further urbanize the landscape we tirelessly market as an opportunity to experience the pristine—Blubber Bay, Whaletown, Whaling Station, Whaler’s Bay. As the Salish Sea’s whale population was exhausted, the industrial killing machine moved offshore. Other marine abattoirs were established on the West Coast of Vancouver Island and on Haida Gwaii. Historian Kate Humble pointed out in a 2015 article, for example, that one whaling station established on Piper’s Lagoon near Nanaimo was able to operate for only two years before the entire regional population of 95 humpback whales had been completely liquidated. BC’s whaling fleet was ruthlessly efficient. Humble estimates that the carcasses of approximately 25,000 whales of all species were processed at Sechart in Barkley Sound, Coal Harbour in Quatsino Sound, at Kyuquot and at Rose Harbour and Naden Harbour on Haida Gwaii. Look at a colour-coded map locating recorded kills off Vancouver Island and it resembles a sea of red, similar to that infamous Sea of Slaughter that writer Farley Mowat made a metaphor for heedless carnage on the Atlantic coast. Whaling in BC waters stopped in 1968 but not before many whale populations had been pushed to the brink of extirpation and even, in come cases, to outright regional extinction. More than half a century later, 19 of the 33 whale species that frequent Canadian waters are still officially listed as endangered, threatened or of special concern under the Species at Risk Act or by the federal government’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Blue whales, for example, are listed as an endangered species. There are likely fewer than 250 surviving in Canadian waters. The Pacific fin whale that Vancouver observed in such numbers is endangered. The Northern Pacific Right whale is endangered. The Pacific sei whale is endangered. While the migratory grey whale population is recovering on the West Coast after almost a century of rebuilding efforts, the small, distinct sub-population that stays to feed in waters off Vancouver Island while most of the migrants continue on to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands is still of special concern. The humpback whale has edged back slightly from the abyss of extinction—but even on the rebound from its population low of 1,400, it remains at only about a quarter of the population observed by Vancouver. Of BC’s orcas, one sub-population, the southern residents of the Salish Sea, is considered endangered. The other three populations—northern residents, a group that stays off-shore and a transient group—are all considered threatened. Shipping plays a leading role All these whales are at growing risk from the industrialization of their living space. There’s the constant din of ship traffic, amplified in enclosed waters with multiple vessels, which both disrupts whales’ communication with each other and the echolocation that enables them to locate food. There’s the risk of fatal entanglement with ocean fishing gear. And as with other urban wildlife and motor vehicles, there’s a constant conflict between wild whale populations and increasing volumes of marine traffic. The world’s shipping fleet has doubled in size just since 2005. There are now about 90,000 large vessels and at any given moment about 50,000 of them are at sea travelling the marine corridors charted for most efficient fuel use and for time management. Unfortunately, these corridors frequently intersect with the migration routes, feeding, breeding and social congregation areas of whales. Larger ship engines are required to propel larger vessels with greater payloads. Research indicates that there’s been a doubling of disorienting background noise in every decade for the last 50 years. The journal of Edward Bell, clerk of Captain Vancouver’s ship Chatham, records his fright on the night of October 23, 1791, while at sea off the coast of what’s now Tasmania. He was awakened in terror by “a violent shock as if the vessel had struck upon a rock.” But on rushing above decks to investigate, he discovered the 24-metre sloop-of-war had just collided with a large whale in the darkness. The species and fate of the whale with which Chatham collided isn’t recorded, but it was certainly at the beginning of a long, and dolorous record of accidental encounters between big ships and great whales, usually fatal for the whale. Fast, modern steel hulls with the momentum of hundreds of thousands of tonnes shatter whale skulls and break their spines; the huge propellors inflict lacerations and amputate fins and flukes. In 1951, the last of the endangered right whales ever to be seen in BC waters was killed when it was accidentally run over —the irony is monumental—by a whaling ship pursuing other prey. And then, on June 25, 2009, to the distress of walkers at the Port of Vancouver, the cruise ship Sapphire Princess berthed at Canada Place with a dead 16-metre fin whale jammed between the hull and its bulbous bow. Another dead fin whale came in to Vancouver harbour on the bow of another cruise ship, the Seven Seas Navigator, returning from a voyage to Alaska in 2015. And the problem increases. As the global fleet increases, so does traffic. Marine shipping grew by 300 percent between 1992 and 2013. In the warming Arctic, where there’s concern about the exposure of highly endangered bowhead whales to greater risk of collision, shipping along the already busy Siberian coastal sea lane increased 58 percent between 2016 and 2019. In less than a decade, estimates the International Whaling Commission, 21 blue whales were killed in shipping collisions off the coast of California. The number seems small compared, say, to collisions between deer and drivers in Victoria—until you realize that there may only be 2,000 blue whales in existence. In 2018 alone, there were 10 whale deaths due to shipping collisions off the West Coast, a 300 per increase. And as John Calambokidis, a biologist working with the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington, told a Washington Post reporter in 2019, what’s recorded is likely far less than what occurs. “One doesn’t mean one,” he said, “one probably means 10 or 20 are occurring. So when you have 10, that’s a pretty big multiplier.” Something to consider the next time you look out over the “pristine” Salish Sea with its 500,000 marine transits a year by everything from ferries to container ships to oil tankers to aircraft carriers. You are seeing a mirage, an illusion, a dream of a world that has fled, driven off by you and me and our insatiable appetites for convenience. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
  24. Photo: A Black-tailed Columbian buck in a Rockland neighbourhood Stephen Hume tells his own story of backyard deer, and asks some hard questions about our attitudes toward wildlife. We want your stories—and photos—too. Go to story
  25. Stephen Hume tells his own story of backyard deer, and asks some hard questions about our attitudes toward wildlife. We want your stories—and photos—too. CARVED FROM A CORNER OF OUR GARAGE is a tiny office. It’s monastic in its austerity. Writing table, chair, nothing else. I retreat there when a deadline presses and when I want to evade the incessant 21st-century distractions of e-mail pinging, phone ringing, Twitter tweeting, Flipboard flipping or the CBC and the New York Times urging me to some news item to which I must pay immediate attention. The first attraction of this small space is simple—silence. The only sound is the papery rustle of the breeze through a stand of reed-thin bamboo. This settler-society immigrant provides a light-filtering privacy screen for the large south-facing window. Beyond it is a dense, glossy, knee-deep tangle of native Oregon grape that’s now reclaimed half the garden beneath the canopy of dry-belt Douglas fir and arbutus. I long ago came to the conclusion that beating back what wants to be here and replacing it with exotic imports is more than hubristic insanity; in botanical terms it’s a full-on manifestation of precisely the colonized mindset from which we’re all ostensibly trying to move on. Soon the spiky leaves of the natural ground cover—its plump blue fruit provides a dozen jars of tart jam every summer—will be embroidered with the gleaming stars of fawn lilies, chocolate lilies, blue camas and inky columbine. Native fawn lilies, a favourite snack for black-tailed deer I know this for sure. The snow drops are already unfurling, the nodding onions are up and nodding, the wild currant is in bloom, its snowy little blossoms erupting amid the small, defiant fists of green buds just beginning to unclench against a sombre backdrop of mountain rhododendrons. When this seasonal machinery clicks into gear there’s no stopping the momentum. I can set my calendar by it, give or take a few brief February snow storms. A week seems forever in the Twitterverse but on the celestial time scale it’s barely a blip. This morning as I sat contemplating how to begin the piece I’d promised Focus on the rising tide of urban wildlife and how we respond to it, I reached for my coffee, looked up and found myself eye-to-eye with a doe, her delicate face pushed through the unappetizing fringe of bamboo we planted long ago precisely because deer won’t eat it. Wild deer in the garden and browsing suburban boulevards are a common sight these days, and not just out here in the dishevelled hinterlands. They are seen among the most manicured of upscale and urbane flowerbeds. To me the deer are a marvel, a reminder of our place not as rulers but as sharers of a natural world that includes them. To others, of course, they are a pest, invaders of the gardens that symbolize how we assert aggressive colonial control over the landscape, just as we do with our practice of naming streets, schools and public buildings after people who got rich and powerful by the very same colonial process that adulates them for exerting cultural, economic and political hegemony over the natural world. Municipal councillors and the writers of compelling letters to the editor frequently characterize the phenomenon of urban wildlife as a problem of populations out of control almost everywhere. The urban deer are subversions of the natural balance, although that balance is entirely unnatural considered in the larger context. Black-tailed Columbian deer hang out in a Rockland neighbourhood front yard. Are there as many as it seems? Too many deer in Oak Bay eating the dahlias! Wild otters are devouring the introduced ornamental koi in a traditional Chinese garden in Vancouver! Too many yipping coyotes and growling raccoons menacing tourists in Stanley Park, itself a manufactured fabrication of the wild, built on the site of long-expunged indigenous villages and populated with imported non-native squirrels! Too many sea gulls in Victoria! Too many bears in North Vancouver! Too many noisy, stinky sea lions eating the salmon at Cowichan Bay! Too many elk in Youbou and Jasper! Too many wolves in Wyoming! Too many Canada geese just about everywhere there are Canada geese. Too many badgers and too many foxes in British cities. Too many monkeys in Hyderabad. The list is long. A Roosevelt elk in a Youbou front yard The migration of wildlife from backcountry to downtown is a global and continental phenomenon, one of the fascinating developments of the 21st Century. “Synurbization” is the scientific term. It represents a growing recognition that cities themselves are a new evolutionary force, an explosion of new and strange types of artificial environments arising in the midst of natural landscapes to which wildlife had millions of years to adapt. Those are now under siege from resource exploitation, from commerce—ship noise is rendering some ocean tracts unendurable for marine wildlife—and from the expanding footprint of human population growth and its biggest doppelgänger, anthropogenic climate change. Now suddenly, in conjunction with dwindling native habitats there’s a portfolio of new ecological niches in urban environments for wild animals to occupy. Why would that surprise anyone? We humans are part of the process. Human relocation from undeveloped hinterlands to constructed landscapes occurred first and represents one of the most rapid and extensive species migrations in the evolutionary record. A century ago more than 80 percent of us lived rural lives, some of us hunters and gatherers—part of the natural ecosystem—others were agricultural intruders but still largely wedded to the natural cycles of those habitats. Today, fewer than 15 percent of British Columbians are rural inhabitants, and many of those are actually urban but on the scale of small towns instead of huge cities. It’s now the wild that intrudes into the domesticated and built spaces where most of us live and the wild is exotic. It’s not just Bambi moving into your neighbourhood Vancouver Island is an example of natural landscapes transformed by rapid human population expansion (almost a million people arrived in a brief century); vast industrial denuding of the original forest cover (over 80 percent of its old-growth forest cover has been removed); the altering of hydrology by damming of rivers, draining wetlands and carving through watersheds with a network of roads that now fragments about 67 percent of the landscape. Finally, urbanization itself in which 32 distinct population centres—one for every 1,000 square kilometres—create heat sinks, enmesh themselves in transportation grids, and transform the native flora and fauna with astonishing rapidity and reach. For example, while Island wolf and cougar populations decline, domesticated canine and feline populations favoured by the colonizing human population, explode. It’s estimated that one in five households on Vancouver Island owns a dog. That math says we now have almost 400 domestic dogs for every remaining wild wolf. There are now more than 500 domestic felines for every bobcat or lynx—although we know almost nothing about these trace populations of small wild cats. We know more about cougars but even there the ratio is now roughly 118 domestic felines for each of the big predators. Should a cougar, having had the ancient food sources in its natural habitat disrupted, start preying on the abundant domestic food source of dogs and cats, we are quick to call for conservation control which usually results in the killing of the cougar. One 2016 study of a 30-year data set found that in British Columbia more than 1,200 cougars—equal to more than 35 percent of the present provincial cougar population—were killed in conflicts with humans and their pets or livestock. Add hunting, trapping, road and train mortalities and it rises to 8,500. This pattern is significant because it’s not just Bambi who’s moving into your neighbourhood, either. Deer moving uptown have brought company. Their main predator, the shy and reclusive cougar, has followed its principal food source. Media is now rife with sightings in back yards, on patios and even in downtown parking lots. It’s something to contemplate when walking the dog off leash. If there are deer, there is most likely a cougar not far away, usually invisible but there, nonetheless, and while a human and a dog give it pause, a small dog alone in the underbrush might look more like an appetizing meal. 24 generations of fawns I thought of that as I exchanged glances with the deer at my window. I took note of the hand-sized discolouration on her right haunch. A couple of years ago she was one of a pair of fawns frisking around my back lawn. Now here she is, doubtless preparing to deliver another small spotted miracle, part of that larger cycle that surrounds us and to which too few of us pay much attention amid the distracted, increasingly frantic, sheer busyness of urban life. “I know you!” I thought. Her large liquid-brown eyes implied the same recognition. We gazed at one another. Then she demurely withdrew, her hooves tick-tocking down the walk as she headed for the back garden. I left my keyboard and followed to observe. She stopped to nibble the leaves of the old-fashioned stock that volunteers here and there. Some people are unenthusiastic about the dusty green straggle of leaves, spindly stems and unassuming flowers but I like them—they seem to survive just about everything. When you’re getting well into your eighth decade, the ability to endure and survive no matter what seems an increasingly admirable trait. She moved on to sample the tender tips of the watershoots freshly pruned from the Cox’s Orange Pippin and the Sunrise apple trees, piled up awaiting their trip to the compost, turned her nose up at the thimbleberry canes with their still sparse buds—perhaps that’s part of their strategy, don’t put out your leaves until the rest of nature’s buffet is already stocked—looked over and dismissed the lavender, stopped to browse on new grass on the lawn and ambled off into the salal. By my count, this will be the 24th generation of fawns to find safety in our backyard. Some of our neighbours are not so sanguine about the visitors. Fences have gone up, although as one bemused neighbour pointed out, your fence is not so hot if a deer gets inside and the dining options are suddenly restricted to your garden buffet until a breakout can be effected. The bigleaf maple that towers over the western side of the yard—I love it for the stunning wall of wind music and visual texture it provides from May to October—has begun to dismantle the tree house we built almost 25 years ago for a long grown-up child, a reminder of nature’s relentless resilience. Like other urban spaces we used to think of as belonging exclusively to people, the tree house has been repurposed by generations of raccoons. They use it as a nursery before trooping their little ones off into the wider world. Every few years we’re lucky enough to witness the procession. Not so lucky, perhaps, when they return to banquet in the grape arbour—they seem to have an unerring ability to arrive the night before I decide the fruit is finally sweet enough to harvest. The other day we had a river otter cavorting outside our window—there’s a marsh across the road and the otters rear their pups up in frog hollow before migrating down a seasonal creek. It connects to the marsh through a culvert that provides safe passage under the road for mother and babies, and the creek bed leads to the beach. Facts and context regarding Oak Bay’s deer population There’s an irony here. Road safety for humans is often cited as a reason for stringent animal controls directed at deer. These range from simply killing them to trying to manage local populations with experiments in chemical sterilization. Yet much of this deer anxiety seems misplaced. In Oak Bay, for example, where the rumpus over deer management has been prolonged and occasionally raucous, data gathered using GPS collaring and remote cameras in 2019 was able to identify a total population of as few as 72 deer, perhaps 128, mostly found in Uplands where there’s a large park—and big gardens—and the Royal Victoria Golf Course. This doesn’t exactly resemble the plague of black tailed locusts threatening to denude the landscape that some rhetoric suggests. Preconceptions are a powerful engine of perceptions, though. Thus the insistence by suspicious municipal councillors and members of the public that the data is wrong and that deer populations are obviously out of control, destroying gardens and parks and creating traffic hazards. And, of course, traffic safety is a genuine issue. It’s true that startled deer darting into a street or trapped on a highway by centre barriers can result in unwelcome collisions, most often fatal to the deer. But in risk analysis, perspective and context are everything. Another comprehensive study of deer carcasses recovered in Oak Bay alone in 2017 estimated that about 30 had been victims of traffic. Deer, like people, die for many reasons. Some of natural causes, some from disease outbreaks—for example, the fast-moving epidemic of a hemorrhagic virus that’s recently been claiming deer in BC—some killed by dogs, some as a result of other injuries, and some by traffic accident. Police shot about 60 injured deer across the entire Capital Region in 2018, although it’s unclear how many were injured by traffic as opposed to dogs or traumatic accidents with fences or other urban infrastructure. Context helps, though. We routinely euthanize deer injured by traffic because it’s more convenient. Humans we send to hospital emergency rooms. Interestingly enough, about the same number of pedestrians as deer are struck by cars in Oak Bay in a given year according to the Insurance Company of BC’s data for the city. That’s the average tabulated by ICBC from the last five years. Twice as many cyclists—almost 60—suffer collisions with vehicles in an average year in Oak Bay. Considering that 78 percent of cyclists and 86 percent of pedestrians are injured in collisions with motor vehicles, fretting over the threat from and to urban deer seems a bit of a displaced moral panic. Some complaints cite aggressive deer. This too is reasonable and true, particularly during the fall rutting season when large bucks can become assertive and territorial about their harems. In October 2016, a homeowner in Oak Bay reported a buck injuring a small dog that was on its own lawn and another woman jogging with her dog reported being knocked down by a buck. A Black-tailed buck with a full set of antlers can be intimidating to some. But is it any more dangerous than a dog? These are certainly alarming incidents for those involved, but once again there is a larger context to be considered. In fact, pedestrians and their dogs in Oak Bay are far more likely to be confronted and injured by another aggressive domestic dog than by a wild deer. Animal control agencies are not transparently proactive when it comes to records of dog bite incidents—nobody seems to want to pay for collection of the data—and the emphasis is on encouraging the adoption of pets in their custody. One can understand why dog bite statistics wouldn’t be top of the mind for adoption marketing, I suppose. But across the Capital Regional District, municipalities appear to average a dog bite incident every two days. The total number of dogs in Oak Bay hasn’t been consistently indexed, but based on one well-done 2012 study for a dog-owners’ association, there are about 12 dogs in the district for every deer. Once again, context is everything. Based on the deer count from the 2019 study, the human population density of Oak Bay is about 1,710 people per square kilometre, the dog population is about 150 per square kilometre, the deer population is about 12 per square kilometre. Comparing the risk from deer to the risk from fellow humans offers another perspective. On average, calculating from crime rate indexes, there are about 80 criminal assaults a year in Oak Bay. This is extremely low compared to other places—the district remains one of the safest places to live in Canada. However, the hazard residents face from their fellow citizens vastly exceeds any menace from deer. Despite concern about a perceived overpopulation of deer creating road hazards and menacing the public, in fact, Oak Bay residents face the same risk of colliding with a pedestrian, twice the risk of colliding with a cyclist or of being attacked by a fellow citizen or a pet dog and drivers face 10 times the risk of colliding with another car. Deer population on Vancouver Island has collapsed While there’s a perception that there’s an overabundance of urban deer, it masks another, more grim reality, which is that the native black-tailed deer population on Vancouver Island has collapsed. Fifty years ago, the Island’s black-tailed deer were estimated to have numbered up to 350,000. Today the most optimistic estimates put that population at 60,000. More conservative estimates say it may be only 45,000—or fewer. In any event, over the past half century, for every two additional humans added to Vancouver Island’s population, four or more black-tailed deer were subtracted. Vancouver Island has become a landscape of countless clearcuts that have greatly reduced and fragmented wildlife habitat, including for black-tailed deer. The clearcuts shown above are west of Victoria. These declines were all forecast by wildlife biologists as the backcountry food supply was disrupted by industry. First there was a sudden increase in forage as old growth forests were rapidly logged. Then there was a sudden decrease in available forage as fast-growing second growth forests matured. Logging then moved into winter browsing areas. Urban footprints expanded. Deer were never part of this social and economic equation. One particularly bitter winter about 100,000 starved to death without much notice by anyone. The survivors voted with their hooves and began migrating into urban areas where there was better, more abundant browse. Now, faced with an illusion of over-abundance where we’ve actually caused a catastrophic depletion, we’re attempting to dislodge that remnant population from its urban refuge. I doubt it will work. It hasn’t worked elsewhere. Maybe it’s us who should adapt Culls almost always result in breeding rebounds. Relocations are thought more humane, but studiers show they initially result in 50 percent or greater mortality—and then survivors often return or are replaced by others who migrate inward from the margins. Reducing breeding through contraception will likely encourage more in-migration to maintain population equilibrium in exploiting the available ecological niche and besides, it doesn’t address complaints about garden browsing or traffic interactions. Most urban complaints about deer and touted solutions are cosmetic. They have little to do with any comprehension of our place in and duty to the larger ecological framework. They are about perceived affronts to convenience and revolve around native deer browsing upon introduced ornamental flowers and exotic shrubs that symbolize the colonial order, the imposition of a sensibility from elsewhere upon what’s already here. As mentioned, by my count this will be the 24th generation of fawns to find safety in our garden. I’m grateful for their presence, although it doesn’t come without adjustments. They love tulips, so those flowers are gone. They ate the Japanese holly to a nub, so it’s now in a pot on the deck where they can’t reach it, replaced by native Oregon grape. Frankly, it’s not such a big deal for me. I like to garden but I’m less enamoured of the colonial footprint I’ve increasingly come to recognize. Deer have been evolving to adapt to North American landscapes for millions of years. It seems the height of hubris to be trying to eliminate deer for trying to adapt to the destructive changes we’ve made to their habitat in our brief sojourn. Maybe it’s us and not them who have the moral and ethical duty to adapt. Got a photo or a galling, appalling or appealing story about your encounter with urban wildlife? Send it along. We’ll run the best of them here and offer modest book prizes for the five we like best, chosen entirely at the judges’ whim and not subject to appeal! Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
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