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    Ross Crockford
    Every year, dozens of old buildings end up in the landfill. We need to get smarter about how we replace them.
     
    IN MARCH OF 2018, a call came into the Focus offices, asking us to hurry down to Despard Avenue, a leafy, sidewalk-free street in Rockland. A crew was at a beautiful old house there, the caller said, and getting ready to tear it down.
    The house was a 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom bungalow, built in 1933. Many of its period details, like its mullioned windows, had already been removed, but the house was still distinctive, topped by a series of gently curved roofs, like a Chinese temple. A neighbour said it had been owned for many years by a doctor who’d lived in Africa, and had recently died. 
    The crew fired up an excavator and started pulling down the house, smashing its wood framing into splinters.
     

    Photographed in 2017: a unique, 1933-built bungalow, for sale on Despard Avenue.
     

    A few months later, the bungalow mostly ended up in the landfill. The replacement house was three times the size, erasing any claims for greater “energy efficiency.”
     
    A beardy guy named Kevin, who lived in a new place down the street, said that when he’d gone out for a walk, the old house was still standing. Now, on his return, it was half-demolished. Kevin said the house had needed work. What kind? “It was old,” he simply replied, although realtors’ photos suggested the house was in immaculate condition. 
    An elderly neighbour stopped by. Kevin asked him, “Well, what do you think of that?” 
    “I don’t know. What can you do?" the neighbour replied. “But that roof looks like it’s in better shape than mine.” 
    This scene gets repeated dozens of times every year. In 2019, the City of Victoria issued permits to demolish 39 single-family homes, and local municipalities issued 182 such permits across the Capital Region, according to federal statistics. Over the past decade, some 375 houses have been demolished in the City of Victoria alone. The annual numbers peaked in 2015, when 53 houses in the City were torn down — inspiring residents to sign petitions and deliver presentations to Victoria’s councillors, urging them to do more to protect character homes. But the destruction has continued. 
    Blame our overheated housing market, and rules that amplify its effects. The large demand for the limited supply of land relatively close to the water, and/or downtown jobs, has pushed up prices so much that the few people wealthy enough to buy into Victoria often also have the money to tear down an old house and build new — something our property-tax system actively encourages. 
    The BC Assessment Authority evaluates properties according to what it considers “the highest and best use of land,” which means putting the biggest, most expensive building upon it possible. Old homes generally don’t qualify, as BC Assessment presumes that buildings steadily depreciate with age, and undergo “functional and economic obsolescence.” If an old house gets torn down, it likely was “no longer contributing to the value of that property,” one assessor told Focus: the buyer realized they could do more with the land. “The system isn’t set up to protect individual houses,” the assessor said. “It’s set up to reflect markets.” 
    (In keeping with this bizarre logic, a heritage designation on a house actually reduces its property’s overall financial value. “If it impacts the ability to tear it down and build something new, the market’s going to reflect that,” the assessor said. “Any time you have a restriction on a property, it’s going to be worth less.”)
    The situation is worse in the City of Vancouver, where around 1,000 houses get demolished every year. In 2017, UBC architecture professor Joe Damen and data analyst Jens von Bergmann created a “teardown index,” identifying Vancouver houses most likely to get replaced because they have a low “relative building value” compared to the land they sit upon. Many of these doomed houses were built before the 1960s, but Damen and von Bergmann argue that in this market, even homes only a few years old will get flattened too: “Despite their high price, their value of these buildings relative to overall property is low, suggesting today's new single family home is tomorrow’s teardown.” They predict a quarter of all single-family homes in Vancouver will be demolished by 2030.
     

    Coming to Victoria? Analysts predict a quarter of all Vancouver single-family homes will be torn down by 2030 because the apparent value of those buildings is low relative to the cost of land.
     
    The casualty isn’t just the loss of built heritage. Damen and von Bergmann say this constant replacement also destroys affordability: because new homes are expensive to build, they jack the value of their respective properties even higher, turning more of the city into an exclusive enclave for global wealth. (This inflationary spiral might be broken if houses were being replaced by apartments, but the vast majority of demolitions occur in areas zoned residential, where one single-family house is simply replaced by another.)
    Constant replacement is also terrible for the environment. Developers sometimes claim old houses should be replaced because new homes are more “energy efficient,” but that’s deceptive. In a 2018 paper, Damen and von Bergmann calculated that once you factor in the energy used in constructing a modern house — which the high cost of land often incentivizes the owner to build to maximum size, requiring more energy to heat — it would have to stand for 168 years to produce less carbon dioxide than the leaky old house it replaced. “The results show that at the scale of both the individual building lot and the city,” they concluded, “the environmental benefits of tearing down and replacing even very poorly performing buildings are dubious at best in Vancouver.” 
    But that pattern got repeated on Despard. The 1,600 square-foot, 1933 bungalow was replaced by a rectanguloid of nearly 5,000 square feet. The new building is assessed at $1.77 million and the land at $1.47 million for a total of $3.24 million, making it one of the 10 most expensive residential properties in the City of Victoria.
     
    Waste another big issue
    Unaffordability and energy overuse aside, perhaps the most obvious stupidity of demolishing old homes is that their remains typically get treated like garbage, and not as a bank of materials to be reused in new housing. As recent back-and-forth arguments in the Times Colonist have noted, the Capital Regional District is planning to cut 73 acres of forest to expand the Hartland landfill — partly, it turns out, to accommodate a growing volume of construction and demolition waste. 
    “The only material to have increased in waste generation compared to all other years since 2001 was wood and wood products, now representing 61 kg/capita [annually],” a 2018 report to the CRD noted. “This is primarily wood from construction, renovation and demolition activities. All other primary materials have either stayed consistent or have decreased in the overall weight arriving at Hartland.”
    A solution to this waste problem has emerged, though — and you can see it in action at 1015 Cook Street, where the Unbuilders are systematically taking apart a two-storey house built in 1908, and rescuing nearly every bit of material used in its construction.
    “We hit 95 percent on every house, that’s 95 percent salvage and recycle,” says Dan Armishaw, the Unbuilders manager for Vancouver Island, standing in what used to be a dentist’s office, surrounded by items his crew has already set aside. 
    The stained glass will be reused in The Charlesworth, the five-storey, 31-unit rental apartment block slated to replace the old house. The kitchen and bathroom fixtures will be donated to Habitat For Humanity. The windows, doors and mouldings — painted wood usually goes in the landfill, Armishaw notes — will go to Demxx, a massive heritage resale warehouse in Coombs. Even the old stucco scraped off the walls outside will get recycled into concrete.
    But upstairs, in the house’s two former apartments, Armishaw’s crews are getting ready to extract the house’s real treasure: the dense, old-growth lumber used in its framing and walls. 
    Armishaw pries off some strips of lath to reveal the Douglas-fir studs underneath. This is true dimensional lumber, he says, likely milled in the 19th century. “This is the wood that made BC’s economy what it is. To throw it away, it’s like throwing our history away.” Perfectly preserved inside the walls, it could be reused in furniture, or even to frame new houses.
    Armishaw says he prefers to see old houses renovated instead of deconstructed, but this site, just south of Fort Street, suits greater density, and the house can’t realistically be saved. (Nickel Bros. looked at moving it, but decided the house wasn’t in good enough condition and too many utility cables were in the way.) “This building has to come down,” Armishaw says, “but at least there’s peace of mind knowing that people in the community are going to get a piece of that heritage, and that the wood used to build that house can be put back into circulation.”
     

    Signs of improvement at 1015 Cook, where the Unbuilders are dismantling a house built in 1908.
     

    Dan Armishaw reveals old-growth lumber that the Unbuilders will salvage. A forthcoming City of Victoria bylaw, modelled after those in Vancouver and Portland, could mandate such deconstruction.
     
    Demolishing a big house might cost $10,000, while deconstruction can run three or four times that. “We’re six people on a site for a few weeks, instead of a machine operator for a few days,” explains Adam Corneil, the Unbuilders founder. But the extra cost is worth it to owners. In some cases, they can donate the building’s materials through Unbuilders to Habitat For Humanity, which gives the owner a hefty tax credit. In other cases, Unbuilders wholesale what they salvage, which reduces their bill, and gives the owner an appealing story.
    Corneil got the idea for the company in 2014, when he was mainly building new passive-solar homes in Vancouver with single-use products. (“Even though I was building energy-efficient homes, they weren’t really aligning with my values,” he says.) One project involved gutting a heritage house, and the wood he took out was so beautiful that he reworked it in a shop and reinstalled it in the finishes. “That’s all the owner could talk about when the job was done — they didn’t talk about their fancy kitchen and their marble, they just talked about the reclaimed wood. And at the same time, every house around me in Kitsilano was being demolished,” Corneil recalls. “So I said, ‘We’ve got to make a business out of this.’”
    That business will soon get a boost from the City of Victoria. Last November, staff unveiled the City’s zero-waste strategy, aiming for a 50 percent reduction in landfill disposal by 2050. Some of its forthcoming actions have already been mentioned publicly, like a ban on styrofoam takeout food containers, but another includes “new requirements for contractors, property owners and developers to recover waste materials during construction, renovation and demolition,” with the goal of making reuse and deconstruction commonplace. City staff are crafting a bylaw, likely to come later this year.
    In 2014, the City of Vancouver introduced its own bylaw requiring reuse and recycling of demolition materials for pre-1940 homes; in 2018, it expanded the bylaw to include pre-1950 homes, and require deconstruction for pre-1910 and heritage-registered houses. 
    “It’s a good start, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough,” says Corneil. “The ‘recycling’ bit is greenwashing, because what occurs in the industry is smashing all that lumber, and then taking it to a facility that mulches and incinerates it” — releasing its stored carbon and contributing to climate change. Corneil wants to see deconstruction required for pre-1940 homes, as it is in Portland, or even pre-1950 ones, because they still contain old-growth lumber. “I’m pushing the City of Victoria very hard to follow suit,” Corneil says. 
    Whether Victoria’s bylaw will make a significant dent in our region’s volume of waste is unclear, as other levels of government still seem afraid of running afoul of the construction and waste-removal industries. In its draft Solid Waste Management Plan, which anticipates the expansion of Hartland, the CRD only outlines vague, long-term strategies to reduce construction and demolition waste, such as “develop and disseminate educational tools to support material diversion,” “promote green building standards,” and “investigate” bans on dumping clean wood and mixed demolition loads at the landfill — even though the Regional District of Nanaimo has banned such dumping since 2014. Back in 2009, federal and provincial environment ministers, including British Columbia’s, committed to developing Extended Producer Responsibility programs — the eco-fees currently levied on items like paint and batteries to pay for their recycling or disposal — to cover construction materials, but no such measures have appeared.
    “You can do whatever you want in the interest of sustainability, if you’re not concerned about housing affordability,” says Casey Edge, executive director of the Victoria Residential Builders’ Association, when asked about the City’s plans. “We’ll see what the City of Victoria wants to do with mandatory dismantling of homes, but it’s not going to increase affordability, which is the biggest concern right now when it comes to housing in our region.”
    “We’re cutting old-growth forests at an alarming rate, and we’re throwing old-growth timber into the landfill at an alarming rate,” replies Victoria mayor Lisa Helps. “So [the prospective bylaw] is about more than zero waste, it’s about reclaiming, reusing, and looking at environmental protection at the same time.” Helps says it’s not clear if the bylaw will issue a mandate, or provide incentives, but like with its plastic-bag ban, the City will consult with local businesses to ensure they’re on board. “At a certain point, this will just be the new normal.”
    As for affordability, Helps says that should be improved by the City’s forthcoming “missing middle” bylaw, which could permit triplexes or fourplexes to be built on current single-family lots — although others say such blanket “upzoning” merely increases the value of land even further, and accelerates the demolition of existing homes.
    In any case, arguments about the fate of old houses are sure to continue. The bungalow on Despard Avenue may be gone, but a 1928-built home across the street, on a 13,000 square-foot corner lot, is currently up for sale.
     
    Ross Crockford lives in a suite in a house built in 1910. According to its latest assessment, the building is worth one-eighth the value of the land it occupies, likely making it a future teardown.
     
    Judith Lavoie
    More Langford citizens are expressing resentment over City Hall’s modus operandi.
     
    THE RAIN PAUSED AND, along a quiet side-street in Langford, residents are venturing out. There are no sidewalks, but a caregiver is pushing a wheelchair towards Veterans Memorial Park and a small dog strains at the leash, pulling a woman down the street.  
    Fairway Avenue, the site of a contentious redevelopment proposal, is the latest Langford neighbourhood to mobilize against what residents see as out-of-scale development. In addition to complaints that two multi-storey towers are being shoe-horned onto a site which held five single homes, there is an undercurrent of concern about lack of council transparency, difficulty in obtaining timely information, and a perception that too much influence is being wielded by developers in the fast-growing city.
     

    Location of the proposed development (Image provided by City of Langford)
     

    Artists rendering of proposed development (Image provided by City of Langford)
     
    Langford has grown to more than 45,000 residents from 18,840 in 2001. The City projects it will have 56,000 residents by 2026, a growth rate of 123 percent within 25 years.
    In many ways, Fairway Avenue represents the remarkable changes seen in Langford over the last two decades. On one side of the street, single family properties back on to the imposing trees of Royal Colwood Golf Course, but, across the street, properties back on to Goldstream Avenue, which has become a busy, urban artery. 
    Development became inevitable with the Official Community Plan designation of the area as “city centre,” a zone that has no height restrictions (the property still has to be rezoned). Still, residents were horrified when, at an informal meeting last summer with development consultant Mike Wignall, they were told the proposal was for two 12-storey buildings, one fronting on to Goldstream and the other on to Fairway, with all access from Fairway. 
    J. Scott, who has lived on Fairway for 17 years, sprang into action helping form Fairway Neighbours Unite for a Livable Langford, a group that has written countless letters, organized a 246-name petition against the development, contacted the Province about the makeup of committees, and lobbied staff and councillors. 
    By the time the proposal reached Langford’s Planning, Zoning and Affordable Housing Committee on Monday, January 11, the proposal was for a nine-storey and a six-storey building and, by the end of the meeting, developer DB Services, agreed to two six-storey buildings. 
    Scott is grateful for that concession, but said the group will continue to push for four storeys on Fairway. 
    Caller after caller to the phone-in committee meeting voiced concerns and, at the conclusion, Councillor Denise Blackwell, committee chair, said staff will be asked to look at concessions such as a sidewalk along the entire length of Fairway, instead of only in front of the development, and the possibility of an entrance/exit on Goldstream – something Fairway residents are adamant is needed to prevent the quiet street from becoming a busy thoroughfare. 
    “It should not be a life-threatening experience to walk down Fairway Avenue,” Scott said, pointing out that wheelchair-bound residents of The Priory, a complex care centre, frequently use the street, in addition to neighbourhood children and dog-walkers. 
    An additional niggling worry for residents is that the developer, Design Build Services, is the same company that developed Danbrook One, a 90-unit Langford highrise that was evacuated a year ago after being deemed unsafe. 
    However, Blackwell said the fault with Danbrook One lay with the engineer, not the company. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to just say because they built Danbrook One they shouldn’t be allowed to build anything else,” she said in an interview. 
    The Fairway plan will go to council for first reading Monday, January 18 and then to public hearing, but some residents have little faith the changes will be sufficient to stop the neighbourhood being obliterated. 
    Chris Peterson told Focus he had planned to retire on Fairway Avenue, where he has lived for six years, but is now reconsidering. 
    “What can you say about Langford Council—committed to no tree left standing and a concrete jungle of ugly looking condos,” Peterson said. 
    “We understand development will happen and accept that, but, when everything around you is three or four storeys and council says it doesn’t see a problem with a new six or 12-storey building blotting out your access to sunlight or the total loss of privacy at your family dwelling, then it is time to ask what gives,” he said. 
    Like others, Peterson questioned why cumulative impacts are not considered during rezonings and pointed to plans for another large development at the end of Fairway Avenue. 
    But, Blackwell said, as that plan has not yet come to councillors, it could not be part of the discussion. 
    “Developers put in proposals all the time, but that doesn’t mean that what they are proposing is going to be the final product,” she said in an interview. 
    That was little comfort to Peterson. 
    “Council always has time for developers, but, if you are a private citizen, complaining about a proposal, council is quick to let you know they don’t care or your complaint isn’t relevant to the proposal,” he said. 
     
    Citizens resent being left in the dark—and out of decisions
    Like others in Langford who have fought the scale or density of developments, the Fairway group has found the major obstacles are obtaining timely information and unearthing what was discussed at meetings. 
    “I got my notice on Thursday afternoon which was three days before the [Planning and Zoning] meeting and you’re supposed to have 10 days,” said Scott, who was then told she needed to have her submission in by the previous day to have it included in the agenda package. 
    Fairway resident Petra Bezna said she received a notice the same day as the meeting. 
    “There are no details and the map of the development on the back of the letter is not very helpful in my opinion.” she said. 
    Scott said the first time the neighbourhood saw the plans was three days before the Monday meeting. “It’s unacceptable, we have been asking to see the plans since last spring,” Scott said.
    True to form, Langford Council released its agenda package for the upcoming January 18 council meeting late on Friday, January 15. Running to 572 pages, Scott noted that it includes public hearings for no less than five developments, three of which are contentious (e.g. 11- and 12-storey buildings planned for Costin and Carlow)—plus numerous bylaw changes including one to rezone the Goldstream/Fairway properties as “city centre,” allowing for two multi-storey buildings. Scott was dismayed to see that the package still portrays the buildings as six and nine storeys—rather than the two six-storey ones the developer agreed to at the committee meeting .
    There is simmering resentment at the lack of information and records, apart from bare-bones minutes, and even those are not available until shortly before the next meeting. 
    “They don’t put an agenda up for Monday meetings until 3 pm Friday and then City Hall is closed, so you can’t ask questions,” said a resident of South Langford, where a group is battling for green space and traffic mitigation after finding out about a proposal to put 25 duplex lots on a semi-forested area, with traffic routed through a previously quiet cul-de-sac.
    A Whimfield Terrace resident, speaking at the Planning and Zoning Committee meeting, said hundreds of Langford residents are frustrated because they feel that, by the time a proposal goes to committee, City staff and developers have worked together and the development is a fait accompli. 
    “People just don’t feel like our voices matter and I would really encourage the planning committee, City staff and council to consider that residents would like to have a say in how their community is being developed—not just the developers,” she said. 
    Blackwell responded that residents’ views are taken into consideration, pointing to the height concessions on Fairway, but acknowledged staff work with developers to hone proposals before they come to committee. 
    “Our staff is very professional and very good and that’s one of the reasons why we pay so much attention to their reports,” she said. 
    Public delegations are usually referred to a standing committee, rather than full council. But Langford’s standing committees do not meet the requirements of the Community Charter, which says standing committees must be made up of a majority of councillors, said Scott, who asked for the Planning and Zoning Committee meeting to be postponed because the discrepancy. 
    Langford’s standing committees have only two councillors and, adding to the discomfort, the makeup of the Planning and Zoning Committee has come under criticism by residents for the preponderance of appointed members associated with the development industry.
    In an email to Scott, Marie Watmough, Langford manager of legislative services, said, although the committees are referred to as standing committees, they operate as advisory committees, which require only one councillor, and the City is in the process of changing the website references. 
    Lauren Mulholland, spokesperson for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs said the ministry is aware of concerns about committee structure and has contacted Langford staff to offer support. 
     
    Langford lags on livestreaming and recording meetings
    At the heart of much of the discontent is the difficulty in obtaining information if someone cannot phone in to committee and council meetings—or wants to refer back to what was said. 
    Unlike most municipalities, Langford does not livestream or tape the awkwardly-timed 5:30 pm meetings, and despite a $4.8-million grant from the provincial COVID Restart Fund to ensure municipalities were able to keep residents informed during the pandemic, Langford voted at an in camera meeting in December to delay debate about live-streaming until this year’s budget discussions. 
    Under growing pressure, Mayor Stew Young, who has led Langford since 1993, agreed earlier this month to ask staff to post audio recordings of council meetings—but, that does not extend to committee meetings. 
    Mulholland said the ministry is aware of citizens’ concerns. “Local governments are required…to make best efforts to keep the public informed and able to participate in their council and board meetings, including committee meetings,” she said in an emailed response to questions. 
    “Local governments must also review or develop a resolution with respect to open and electronic meetings and state how they will continue to meet the principles of openness, transparency and accountability in the current circumstances,” she wrote. 
    Langford’s opaque behaviour exasperates John Treleaven, chair of the Grumpy Taxpayer$ of Greater Victoria. “They are increasingly at odds with what motivated, educated residents and taxpayers expect as a modus operandi,” he said. Treleaven believes it would benefit councillors to livestream meetings and allow the public to see how they balance decisions.
    “It seems to us that Langford does what it can to make the voice of the community easier to ignore,” he said. 
    And he was appalled that council met in camera to discuss transparency and livestreaming. “How in God’s name can you meet in secret to discuss transparency. To me that’s a red flag that something is fundamentally wrong and it should be called out…There is no institutional memory in a format that is easily accessible to taxpayers,” Treleaven said.
    Blackwell, who voted in favour of livestreaming, said that she was told the meeting was held in camera because it was a new service. “We did ask the question,” she said. 
    It is strange that Young wants livestreaming to be part of budget discussions given the provincial grant and directives that are clearly geared to access, Treleaven said. “So, you have the money, the need is obvious—be a hero. It’s 2021,” he said. 
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    On the eve of renewing aquaculture licences for farms in the Discovery Islands, it seems more of an absolute definite maybe, with a new plan…by 2025.
     

    Young wild salmon swim around a salmon farm’s open-net pen in the Discovery Islands (Photo by Tavish Campbell)
     
    IN THE POLITICAL WORLD, news releases are carefully crafted to offer leeway for government shifts. The evolution of statements on the future of BC’s salmon farms is a case-study in allowing wiggle room.
    Last year, during the election campaign, the federal Liberal Party’s campaign literature promised to “work with the Province to develop a responsible plan to transition from open-net pen salmon farming in coastal waters to closed containment systems by 2025.”
    There was elation among those who had argued for years that fish farms were threatening shrinking stocks of wild salmon because of the transfer of sea lice and diseases from farmed fish, while the salmon farming industry pointed to economic and employment losses, technological problems, and the additional costs of closed containment.
    Then came the mandate letter issued to Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan to “work with the Province of British Columbia and Indigenous communities to create a responsible plan to transition from open net-pen salmon farming in coastal British Columbia waters by 2025.”
    Hmm—note the disappearance of closed containment systems.
    In November came an announcement from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) that “the Government of Canada is committed to developing and delivering a real and concrete solution for transitioning open-net pens in coastal British Columbia waters.”
    So, what does transitioning mean? And transitioning to what?
    It is a slippery word, said Aaron Hill, Watershed Watch Salmon Society executive director. “Does it mean you’ll have the farms out by 2025 or you will have a transition plan in place by 2025? We don’t know yet,” he said.
    And does transitioning mean getting salmon farms out of the ocean?
    Well, not necessarily right out of the ocean and not necessarily by 2025.
    Jane Deeks, press secretary for Minister Jordan, said nothing is set in stone and multiple options for transitioning will be considered.
    “I can’t say what is going to be done by 2025. We’re not going to rush the process. It needs to be done really well and responsibly in a way that takes into consideration all of the factors and jobs at stake,” she said.
    BC Salmon Farmers Association says salmon farming supports 7,000 direct and indirect jobs in coastal communities and contributes about $1.5-billion annually to the provincial economy. A report commissioned by the Association says that, with clearer government policy, the industry could invest $1.4-billion in technology and infrastructure and create 10,000 new jobs by 2050.
    Terry Beech, parliamentary secretary to Jordan (and MP for Burnaby-North-Seymour), made it clear at a news conference last month that options now under consideration are wider than moving farms on land and could include “area-based management” that would look at the timing of wild salmon runs and cumulative impacts, as well as looking at new technology.
    The key must be sustainability, Beech said.
    That could include hybrid systems such as a semi-closed containment system, now being tested by Cermaq Canada in Clayoquot Sound. The system is fitted with a polymer lining that wraps around the net pen and eliminates lateral contact between wild and farmed fish.
    Salmon farmers are also looking at increasing the time salmon spend in land-based systems before being transferred to ocean pens.
    The joint federal-provincial study released earlier this year, State of Salmon Aquaculture Technologies, which will help inform the transition plan, concludes that both land-based pens and hybrid systems are technologies ready for commercial development in BC.
    Other systems such as floating closed containment systems need more evaluation, it says.
    Beech acknowledged it is going to be tough to find a balance, but emphasized the need to not simply protect wild salmon, but to restore runs to historic levels. “We know that the long-term success of the economy is completely reliant on the long-term success and health of the environment,” he said.
    At the same time, almost half the fish consumed by people today comes from aquaculture and aquaculture could be a clear driver of a future blue economy, Beech said. “I am passionate about making our aquaculture sector as sustainable and viable as possible,” he said.
    Beech will be in charge of consulting with BC First Nations, the aquaculture industry and “environmental stakeholders,” with an interim report going to Jordan this spring, 
     
    The big test: will Discovery Island fish farm licences be renewed?
    The Watershed Watch Salmon Society’s Aaron Hill said delaying action for yet another report is frustrating because wild salmon cannot wait: “They’re now just starting the consultation process, which is something they should have gotten going a year ago. The outcome is just going to be a report by next spring and next spring a record low number of small, young wild salmon will have to swim past the usual gauntlet of salmon farms and all the viruses and parasites that they spew out. Another report won’t be much help in getting the lice to stop chewing their faces off,” he said.
    Fraser River sockeye returns hit a historic low of less than 300,000 fish this year.
     

    Fraser River sockeye salmon may be going extinct, judging by 2020’s record low numbers
     
    Biologist Alexandra Morton, a tireless advocate for wild salmon, has done extensive research on the effects of sea lice and pathogens spreading from salmon farms and believes Beech understands the impact of the farms and the importance of wild salmon to British Columbians and especially to First Nations.
    “But this is a difficult situation, particularly in COVID where no job loss can be seen as being promoted by government,” said Morton, who has lobbied strenuously for closed containment. She points out that, in Norway, where most parent companies of BC operators are located, closed containment is now seen as the way to protect the industry. “The sea lice and the viruses are attacking the farm fish [in Norway] so badly, they have to get them out of the water,” she said.
     

    Alexandra Morton sampling farm salmon (Photo courtesy Sea Shepherd)
     
    Morton also noted that the aquaculture branch within Fisheries and Oceans has considerable influence and seems intent on barrelling ahead to promote and protect the fish farming industry. However, on the political side, there appears to be an understanding that Fraser River sockeye are actually going extinct and action is necessary.
    The biggest test will come on December 18 when 18 federal aquaculture licences for farms in the Discovery Islands expire.
    A DFO spokesperson said that, since September, the department has been focusing on consultations about the licence renewal with the seven First Nations with traditional territory in the Discovery Islands. “The outcomes from the consultations will inform the minister’s decision regarding the renewal of aquaculture licences,” she said.
    Almost one-third of BC’s wild salmon migrate through the Discovery Islands and, in 2012, the Cohen Commission report on declining Fraser River salmon stocks called for the prohibition of Discovery Islands fish farms by September 2020 unless there was proof they posed “only minimum risk of serious harm to the health of migrating Fraser River salmon.”
    However, in September, DFO concluded the farms presented little risk to Fraser River salmon stocks, even though studies had not looked at the effect of sea lice.
    The lack of consideration of sea lice drew an outcry from conservation groups and while further consultation with First Nations in the Discovery Islands area was announced, the process came under fire for not including First Nations on the Fraser River who depend on wild salmon.
    Fish farms should never have been put it such a critical area, said Morton, who is hoping the dramatic drops in wild salmon numbers will help persuade the federal government to cancel the Discovery Islands licences. “But I have learned not to have confidence in anything around salmon, people always seem to cave in,” she said. “Now, the salmon of British Columbia are hanging in the balance.”
    In September, more than 100 First Nations, wilderness tourism operators and fishing groups demanded that the farms be removed and, in early December, the First Nations Leadership Council called on DFO to fully implement the precautionary principle and revoke the Discovery Island licences. (The precautionary principle recognizes that, in the absence of scientific certainty, conservation measures should be taken if there is a risk of serious harm to the environment or resources.)
    Chief Dalton Silver, UBCIC fisheries representative, said only between one and four per cent of out-migrating juvenile salmon return to spawn and, with this year’s historic low returns, the returns four years hence are likely to be dire. “We cannot afford to wait any longer. We need to act now and protect and rebuild from what’s left of the remaining salmon stocks,” he said.
    The other part of the salmon policy equation is the provincial government, which grants tenures and, in 2018, the BC government adopted a policy that, from 2022, the Province will grant tenures only to fish farm operators who have negotiated agreements with the First Nations in whose territory they want to operate.
    Now, wild salmon advocates are watching to see whether Premier John Horgan’s newly-minted government will put protection of wild salmon at the top of the priority list. The appointment of Fin Donnelly as Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Aquaculture is viewed as an encouraging sign and Donnelly’s mandate letter includes “working with the federal government to develop new strategies to protect and revitalize BC’s wild salmon populations.”
    That sounds good, said Hill, but, in the past, the NDP government has sometimes shown a regressive approach to wild salmon. “My main question is, will Premier Horgan let him do his job,” he said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Learn more:
     
    Leslie Campbell
    TLC needs another $45,000 to finalize purchase of 27 acres of the the Millstream Creek Watershed.
     

    A forest view in the Millstream Creek Watershed. (Photo by Dianna Stenberg)
     
    THE LAND CONSERVANCY OF BC’s latest fundraising campaign is focused on protecting a key 27-acre Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem in the Millstream Creek Watershed. Located in the District of Highlands, the lush and diverse property is comprised of a mature forest and three different wetland types (sedge marsh, hardhack marsh, and skunk cabbage swamp). 
    Dominated by Douglas-fir, other trees include western red cedar, grand fir, arbutus, Garry oak, and red alder. The understory flourishes with salal, dull Oregon-grape, ocean-spray, bracken fern, sword fern, trailing blackberry, western trumpet honeysuckle, and Oregon beaked moss.
    The Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem is the smallest and most at-risk zone in BC because it has been so altered by human activities. Less than one percent of the CDF remains as natural forests. Species-at-risk, including the Northern red-legged frog (SARA listed species of Special Concern) are found within its boundaries.
    While the Millstream Creek Watershed property on its own is valuable as a nature sanctuary, its importance really resides in the connectivity it provides for wildlife and protection of the local watershed. With two creeks (Earsman Creek in the east and an unnamed creek in the west) and numerous ephemeral streams that flow into Mary Lake, the parcel functions as a water source for the sensitive lake system found to the south. Protecting this parcel will help maintain a healthy intact watershed for these lakes, and allow for crucial wildlife corridors to the adjacent 42-acre Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary and established Capital Regional District (CRD) parks in the area.
    In 2016, the Greater Victoria Greenbelt Society purchased 42 acres around Mary Lake from the estate of Peter and Violet Brotherston for about $2 million, with Tsartlip First Nation joining as partners in 2018. Cathy Armstrong, executive  director of TLC, says, “Our piece [27 acres] was needed to complete the Sanctuary,” as it will conserve and protect the lands around the lake.
    All of the Nature Sanctuary land was originally used by the Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum, Esquimalt and Whyomilth (Songhees) peoples for hunting, gathering food and medicinal plants and spiritual practices.
    Due to donations from the community since the campaign was announced this fall, the initial goal of raising $75,000 by December 31 has been whittled down to $45,000. Donations are being matched 4-fold by an anonymous donor. So a $500 donation becomes, in effect, $2500. The federal government has also contributed funds towards the overall purchase.
    Armstrong is especially excited that salmon spawning streams can be rejuvenated and restocked with coho. “Mary Lake can be a breeding and nurturing place for the fry,” says Armstrong. Yet another partnership is involved in this endeavour: “Peninsula Streams Society is key to re-establishing coho in the watershed, beginning with the newly constructed Millstream Creek Fishway,” says Armstrong. 
    The Fishway project includes building five fish ladders, the first of which was constructed in the summer of 2020, allowing migrating fish access to over 6.5 km of habitat upstream of the Atkins Road culvert. Brian Koval, biological coordinator for Peninsula Stream Society describes the project thoroughly in a video (see below), pointing out that the Atkins Road culvert was impassable till this summer. In all, as the video illustrates, 13 step pools with weirs were constructed up to the huge culvert, which was lined with concrete to further help the fish heading upstream. Four more ladders are coming, as well as plantings of native plants on eroding banks and some trash removal (volunteers welcome). Ian Bruce, executive director for the society describes it as the organization’s biggest project ever. Once all fish ladders and other restoration work is completed, coho (initially from local hatcheries) will have access from Esquimalt Harbour right upstream to Mary Lake with the deep pools, gravel, and vegetation they need to thrive.
    With TLC’s financial problems well behind them the organization has purchased a property every year since 2017. “We do so carefully and slowly,” says Armstrong, “making sure we have all the resources we need to fund an endowment.” She sees the purchase of this watershed property as a rare opportunity to protect an undisturbed parcel of critically imperiled Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystem on southern Vancouver Island, 
    The sanctuary will be just that with only limited access by the public. A number of hiking groups have toured the property with Armstrong who says that the fall weather only seems to have enhanced the beauty of the property, with the strong-running creeks, a waterfall and lush green vegetation, all habitat for many birds, frogs, and deer.
    “TLC envisions a future for the site that protects the vast biological diversity found within its boundaries while including educational opportunities for participants in the land trust’s existing Passport to Nature Program and Deertrails Naturalist Program,” says Armstrong. 
    Support for the Millstream Creek Watershed acquisition can be arranged by calling TLC at 1-877-485-2422 or by giving online today at www.conservancy.bc.ca/millstream. Any amount is welcome. Also contact TLC if you’d like to arrange a tour of the property for your group.
    Besides the TLC’s website, further information on the Mary Lake Sanctuary can be found at https://www.marylakeconnections.ca.
    Leslie Campbell is the editor of FOCUS.
    Learn more about the Millstream Creek fish ladders:
     
    Judith Lavoie
    Residents worry as Capital Regional District prepares to spread sewage biosolids at Hartland Landfill.
     
    THERE’S A GUT REACTION to the idea of spreading processed human poop on land, whether to grow bigger trees, better tomatoes, or cap off a landfill. Suspicions remain even after sewage sludge is treated to remove pathogens and pollutants.
    Following sewage treatment at the Capital Regional District’s new McLoughlin Point Wastewater Plant, “residual solids” in the form of sludge are piped to the new Residuals Treatment Facility at Hartland Landfill. There, the sludge is treated by anaerobic digestion, dried, and turned into Class A biosolids, a granule-like substance, along with biogas which is used onsite.
     

    The new Residuals Treatment Facility at Hartland Landfill
     
    The CRD has developed a plan to spread the biosolids on about five hectares of the Hartland Landfill, contrary to an earlier commitment to prohibit land application. While CRD staff insist the plan is safe, residents near Hartland are increasingly anxious that, despite treatment, toxins flushed down Greater Victoria’s toilets and drains will blow on to nearby properties—or leach into fields, gardens or wells. 
    Some living in the area of scattered small farms and acreages are worried that chemicals such as flame retardants, PCBs and other hormone disrupters will find their way into the environment. A particular concern is PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances found in items ranging from frying pans and rain-jackets to dental floss—known as “forever chemicals” because they are almost indestructible.
     

    Hartland Landfill, location of new Residuals Treatment Plant, forested area and surrounding neighbourhood and lakes (click to enlarge).
     
    A group of citizens in the vicinity of Hartland formed the Mount Work Coalition. It has condemned the lack of consultation around the reversal of the CRD’s previous ban on spreading treated sewage residual on land.
    In 2011, the Capital Regional District voted to prohibit spreading such biosolids on land, because of concerns it could contaminate farmland and food with chemicals, heavy metals and pharmaceuticals. Directors reaffirmed that decision in 2013.
    But earlier this year, with a new $775-million sewage treatment system on the verge of completion, the CRD board, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to partially lift the biosolids ban.
    The change of heart allows about 700 tonnes of biosolids to be spread on closed areas of Hartland Landfill as a short-term contingency plan starting in 2021. For between four and six weeks a year, the biosolids will be mixed with wood chips and sand and used to fertilize trees and as a dump cover to help capture methane gas, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
    The rest of the year, biosolids will be trucked to the Lafarge cement plant in Richmond and used as fuel in cement kilns, with the CRD paying the company about a million dollars annually. The plant shuts down for maintenance twice a year, which is when the biosolids will be distributed on land at Hartland.
    The CRD had planned to simply landfill biosolids while the cement plant was closed, but that proposal was nixed by the Province which told the CRD to find a beneficial use for the product.
    With provincial grants at risk, the board opted for land application at the dump until a better solution is found—ideally a local “beneficial use” of the product. 
    The current plan was approved by the Province in September, and the CRD is working on a Long-Term Biosolids Strategy, which will require provincial approval by June 2024 and “will include comprehensive public consultation,” said a ministry spokesperson. 
    Hugh Stephens, a Willis Point resident and spokesman for the Mount Work Coalition, scoffs at the idea that the land dispersal is a temporary solution. “Once you spread it, it’s spread. No one is going to get down on their hands and knees and put it back again,” he said, suggesting alternate solutions such as sending the biosolids to a biochar plant in Prince George or using mines or remote areas for disposal.
    CRD director Mike Hicks, who represents the Willis Point area, voted against the plan to spread biosolids on land. “I don’t support it and I am not alone. I thought we could store it for a couple of months, but I was told it was too explosive to store,” said Hicks who is concerned particles could become airborne. “Absolutely there’s a concern and as the crow flies, Butchart Gardens is totally within striking distance,” he said.
    Hicks admitted it is difficult to assess which of the scientific studies bear the most weight. “But, I adopt the attitude of ‘why risk it?’” he said.
     
    BOTH SIDES POINT TO SCIENTIFIC STUDIES bolstering their viewpoints, and there seems a startling lack of research consensus.
    For example, a 2016 “Open Letter on the Danger of Biosolids,” from four scientists emphasizes the lack of information about many of the chemical contaminants that remain after sewage treatment. The scientists conclude that the supposed benefits are more than offset by risks to human and environmental health: “An unimaginably large number of chemical and biological contaminants exist in these materials and they persist in the product up to and after land disposal,” says the open letter from Sierra Rayne, John Werring, Richard Honour and Steven Vincent. 
    “Governments are playing Russian roulette with sewage sludge. Over time, there is a high probability this game will be lost at the public’s expense,” they conclude.
    Their letter was quickly followed by a rebuttal from four Canadian university professors, with backgrounds in biosolids research, who accused the opponents of stoking fear and equating chemicals, at any level, with unacceptable risk.
    “As any thinking individual knows well, any chemical can be harmful to humans if exposure is high enough; two acetaminophen tablets can cure your headache, but too many taken at once may harm or kill you,” it reads. “The weight of evidence, when examined fairly and from an unbiased perspective, does not support a moratorium on biosolids. It would simply be wasteful to disregard the benefits that can result from responsibly and safely recycling this important resource.”
    Biosolids are widely used in the United States and the US Environmental Protection Agency has endorsed land dispersal, but, illustrating the ambivalence, the EPA is currently seeking applications from researchers to study “potential risk from pollutants found in biosolids” and to develop standards and policies for biosolids management.
    Complicating the research, the effect of biosolids spread on land varies with the type of soil, amount of water and concentration. Moreover, jurisdictions have a variety of standards and use different chemicals to treat the sludge. 
    Glenn Harris, CRD senior manager of environmental protection, said land application of biosolids occurs around the world and problems rarely occur. He noted that organizations that have endorsed spreading biosolids on land include the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Commission on the Environment. “Globally, they all say that land application is safe if it is done properly,” he said.
    Stephens of the Mount Work Coalition, however, said, “There are lots of studies to indicate that there’s potential for airborne pollution and it has been shown to be dispersed for up to 25 kilometres,” and notes that the dump is less than a kilometre from Prospect Lake School and from Durrance Lake, a popular recreational area.
    They also worry about agriculture in the vicinity. Said Stephens. “These residuals get into the soil and there’s all kinds of documented cases of crops grown with polluted soil and how it gets into the food chain.”
    Stephens said residents also fear that pollutants, ranging from pharmaceuticals and heavy metals to microplastics and dioxins, will get into the water table in an area where most homes rely on well water. 
    Fears were exacerbated in October when a temporary pipe failed and 130,000 litres of sewage sludge leaked from the Residuals Treatment Facility at Hartland Landfill and escaped through a culvert into Mount Work Park.
    “The CRD says it has a membrane down, so it can’t leak, but that membrane has already leaked several times with leachate coming out and once it gets into the water table it will get into the drainage and then into Tod Creek or Durrance Lake,” said Stephens.
    As the CRD has not yet started producing biosolids, the exact makeup of the sludge is not known, but decades of monitoring wastewater quality gives a pretty good idea, Harris said.
    Concentration of most contaminants will be at a negligible level and environmental regulators have concluded that trace concentrations of contaminants such as pharmaceuticals do not pose unacceptable risks, Harris said.
    UBC engineering professor Dr Don Mavinic, considered one of BC’s top experts on sewage treatment, told Focus in 2016, “The fact is that there really isn’t any effective technology out there in the marketplace yet to deal with these other contaminants [such as pharmaceuticals, caffeine and endocrine disrupters, the latter found in many household and industrial products]. It’s coming, but it isn’t there. This is a very young science…the jury is still out.”
    Opponents to the CRD plan also point to the Halifax Project study, conducted between 2012 and 2015, that linked cancers to low dose exposure to chemicals in the environment. “There is no such thing as a safe amount of exposure,” says a fact sheet compiled by one of the Coalition members.
    The CRD’s Harris admitted that metals are not destroyed or degraded through any treatment process. “However,” he said, “given the low levels of metals in our wastewater, the quality of the biosolids produced at the Residual Treatment Facility will more than meet Class A standards.”
    Harris said ferric chloride will be used as a coagulant for treating the sewage at the wastewater plant (and some will remain in the sludge) and there is no anticipated risk as the material occurs naturally in the Earth’s crust.
    “We see the benefit of this. We know it is completely safe,” said Harris, emphasizing the practice is widely used around the world, including in BC and other regions of Canada.
    Land application of biosolids is regulated by the provincial Organic Matter Recycling Regulation and a graph on the Environment Ministry website shows some countries, such as Finland and Sweden, using 100 percent of biosolids for land application.
    Hartland already has dust suppression measures and anything blowing off site would have such minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals or pollutants that they would be almost undetectable, Harris said.
    Groundwater traps collect leachate from the dump, which is then collected in ponds and piped back to the McLoughlin Treatment Plant, he said.
    “We have a pretty extensive monitoring program to ensure nothing goes off site,” said Harris, who believes the opposition comes from a perception of risk versus true risk assessment and risk management.
     
    THE MOUNT WORK COALITION has concerns beyond the land application of biosolids, including a proposal to switch trucks heading to the landfill from Hartland Avenue to Willis Point Road and the expansion of the garbage pit at Hartland, which would mean logging and blasting about 30 hectares within the landfill boundaries over the next 80 years. 
    The CRD announced on November 18 that it is developing a new solid waste management plan to reduce how much material is sent to Hartland Landfill and guide how the region’s waste is managed.
    The Coalition says the proposed expansion plans would remove the last stands of old-growth Douglas fir on the Peninsula, though the CRD describes the area as primarily a young, second-growth Douglas fir forest.
    “Tree removal will begin in approximately 2030 to prepare this space for future landfilling unless the region significantly reduces its waste per capita rate or new technology for waste management emerges,” Harris said. The tree-removal will be offset by reforestation of closed areas of the landfill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he said.
    The Coalition wants the CRD to look for more innovative solutions. Incineration, gasification and waste reduction should be top of mind, instead of digging a bigger hole, Stephens said.
    Finally, given the exponential growth of Langford and the Malahat area, the Coalition has urged that a landfill closer to Westshore be considered.
    For more information, check these relevant websites: https://www.mountworkcoalition.org and https://www.crd.bc.ca/project/biosolids-beneficial-use-strategy .
    People can view the draft plan of the CRD’s new solid waste management plan at crd.bc.ca/rethinkwaste and provide comment using an online form until January 15. There will be a live-streamed information session on the CRD’s YouTube channel on December 14.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Sabrina Yu
    Refugees on Vancouver Island have a unique service to help them heal from trauma thanks to the leadership of Adrienne Carter.
     
    LAST YEAR, as medical student at UBC and future physician, I embarked on a research project to better understand the resettlement challenges that refugees have when coming to Vancouver Island, and the issues that physicians face in meeting refugee health needs. My research led me to the Vancouver Island Counselling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees and its founder Adrienne Carter.
    At the age of 12, Adrienne Carter became a refugee when her family fled Hungary to refugee camps in Austria before coming to Canada. Not only has she overcome tremendous challenges in her own life, but she has used these personal experiences to fuel her professional passions as a therapist, social worker and co-founder of the ground-breaking charitable organization Vancouver Island Centre for Immigrants and Refugees (VICCIR).
     

    VICCIR co-founder Adrienne Carter
     
    During 15 missions with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Carter had helped to establish mental health projects for those traumatized by war and natural disasters. At home in Victoria in 2015, she recognized that refugees settling on Vancouver Island from places such as Syria and Sudan have devastating and complex issues like those that she helped to address while working abroad. She decided to apply her expertise and experience to support those arriving on Vancouver Island by enlisting the help of volunteer therapists.   
    Many immigrants, especially refugees, have suffered overwhelming experiences, including loss of their home, their country, and loved ones. Some have been exposed to shocking violence, including torture. The manifestations of unprocessed trauma are multifaceted: immigrants and refugees may suffer flashbacks, somatic aches, anxiety, and depression that impede their ability to lead a productive and peaceful life at school, work, and home. 
    To illustrate challenges that the VICCIR team faces in filling a gap that bridges both the complex psychological and medical needs, Carter told me about a young Sudanese refugee who had been working with VICCIR but was worsening. Unbeknownst to his team of counsellors and interpreters who had been struggling to locate him, the client had been admitted to the psychiatry ward in Victoria. Without any familiarity to his surroundings and unable to speak English, the client was in extreme distress. It wasn’t until his team of counsellors found him that he was able to understand how and why he came to be admitted, finally accept an examination and his medications. 
    While medical needs such as immunizations and dental care are adequately identified and addressed within the public health system, the mental health sector that already faces waitlists and shortages of services is overwhelmed with the additional issue of providing culturally appropriate translation. Despite the clear and pressing need to address and provide quality care, some doctors are unable to accept refugee patients because of the difficulty arranging translators. Even programs for children and youth who are not refugees are overburdened.
    Carter quickly found beginning a therapeutic relationship is impossible without opening a conversation in one’s own language. She realized finding and funding professional translations for dozens of languages would be a formidable task. The solution was to involve refugees themselves, encouraging them to turn to their own communities to recruit interpreters. The process was surprisingly simple as volunteers came forward eagerly, many of whom had personal experiences in displacement, conflict, and poverty. 
    Behind the scenes, innumerable hours are dedicated by members of the team. Even before clients are identified and referred by schools, sponsors, physicians, and public health nurses, funding and planning has taken place. Government funding subsidizes only 10 counselling sessions for first-year refugees; VICCIR goes beyond that to continue providing services for as long as clients need them—most are not able to pay but still receive an average of 45 sessions pro bono. 
    Regardless of family size, the centre provides individual and family group counselling for multifaceted mental health challenges related to armed conflict, abuse, displacement, and grief. Often, a group of counsellors trained in different modalities will work with the family unit, with each member receiving a combination of therapies to address the challenging nature of their issues. This holistic approach recognizes the intense stress placed on family and social relationships, and helps both individual family members and the unit as a whole heal together. 
    Beyond these services offered in-office (and online during COVID), VICCIR works with school teachers to help struggling students. They organize workshops to assist mental health workers, provide consultation to settlement agencies, collaborate with police and community services concerned with domestic violence. 
    In addition to the wide range of expertise that VICCIR counsellors possess in different modalities (Somatic, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Art Therapy, Narrative, etc.), there is an emphasis on support for the healthcare team to manage the emotional toll that trauma counselling itself can have. VICCIR provides training to its interpreters to work with counsellors, and following each session they have an opportunity for debriefing and consultation. Supporting and preparing members of the team in culturally sensitive and trauma-relevant practices has enabled the therapeutic relationship to be far more effective. 
    Since its inception, VICCIR has helped over 300 clients, with enthusiastic contributions from the community in setting up and sustaining its work. Originally operating out of a church basement, it has become a registered charity receiving grants to continue their work and has expanded into an accessible space in downtown Victoria for its 18 counsellors, 10 interpreters, and 2 consulting psychiatrists. 
    Research has shown that trauma and violence experienced in childhood have far-reaching adverse effects on all aspects of life: school, interpersonal relationships, health outcomes, even future generations. Studying trauma survivors has yielded insight into how trans-generational changes can either impart or prevent further maladaptive coping behaviours in offspring, depending on the environment and interventions. 
    From Carter’s perspective, this research parallels her real-life experiences working with trauma. There is no expiry date for processing trauma, and the consequences of suppressed experiences manifest in all aspects of a client’s life. The commitment of the counsellor-interpreter teams to each client is to help them process their emotions, develop resilience, and restore a sense of meaning to relationships and roles within the community. In Carter’s mind, VICCIR has made a lasting difference not only because of the interpreters and their training, but also forming relationships in the clients’ own language, providing services to all members of the clients’ family for as long as it takes, and extensive cultural and trauma processing training. 
    In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, VICCIR has successfully moved its work online and is now responding to referrals from other provinces. The centre has been working with researchers from the University of Victoria, hoping to document the positive impacts that the centre has had on clients and disseminate their findings to the larger academic and medical community. VICCIR has demonstrated that the efforts of a community in rehabilitating refugees is paid back many fold as productive and healthy refugees are able to, in turn, contribute as students, colleagues, and neighbours. 
    In 2019 alone, 80 million people fled war, persecution, and conflict globally, 68 percent of which came from just five countries—Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. 107,800 refugees were resettled to 26 countries in 2019, with Canada accepting 21,150. Both the conflicts that refugees have fled and the resettlement challenges that they face, necessitate the improvement of existing resources for transition and integration. 
    With the federal government’s previous and continuing commitment to accept refugees fleeing conflict and displacement, communities must respond to the complex needs of this uniquely challenging population. The VICCIR model has the potential to inform policy and procedure for newly arriving and settled refugees and alleviating the immense barriers experienced by family physicians and specialists in communicating with refugees and understanding their needs. 
    Researching the fascinating story of the community surrounding VICCIR Services led me to understand that services such as mental health counselling should be able to be accessed by everyone regardless of language and cultural obstacles. Seeing the way that therapists and volunteer interpreters have come together to bring these much-needed programs to Vancouver Island refugees has taught me that starting small in my own community can make a world of difference.  
    Sabrina Yu is a medical student at UBC. She acknowledges Dr Mary-Wynne Ashford for being a wise advisor and supportive mentor, and Dr Jonathan Down for his input. For more information about  the Vancouver Island Counselling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees, see https://www.viccir.org/.
    Matt Simmons
    BC government gives Pacific BioEnergy green light to log rare inland rainforest for wood pellets.
     
    Matt Simmons is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
     
    SEAN O’ROURKE WAS HIKING in BC’s globally rare inland rainforest this spring when pink flagging tape indicating a planned cutblock caught his eye. Finding flagging tape is nothing new, but when he looked closer, he realized the tape had the name of a nearby pellet company on it—Pacific BioEnergy. 
    The company operates a plant in Prince George where it turns waste wood products—sawdust from mills, tree bark, wood shavings and clippings—into pellets to be burned to produce heat or electricity, replacing coal and fossil fuels. More than 90 percent of Canadian wood pellets are shipped overseas to Europe and Asia, according to the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. 
    But the ancient cedars and hemlocks in the rainforest in Lheidli T’enneh First Nation territory, about 60 kilometres east of Prince George, are most certainly not waste wood.
     

     Sean O’Rourke amongst old-growth Red Cedar in the Inland Rainforest north of Prince George (Photo by Conservation North)
     
    O’Rourke, a field scout with Conservation North, a grassroots organization advocating for the protection of old-growth forests in northern BC, took photos of the flagging tape to show his colleagues. He later combed through the publicly available harvest data to confirm the Province had indeed issued permits to Pacific BioEnergy to log the old-growth forest. 
    While wood pellets are often touted as a renewable energy source, Conservation North director and ecologist Michelle Connolly challenges that claim. 
    “If the raw material for harvested wood products or pellets is coming from primary and old-growth forest, it is not clean or green or renewable in any way, shape or form,” she said in an interview. 
    “Destroying wildlife habitat to grind forest into pellets to ship them overseas to burn, to feed into an electricity plant so that people can watch Netflix or play video games really late at night—we can’t allow that to happen,” she added. 
    The planned cutblock is set to be logged this winter for pellets, but Conservation North is asking the BC government to provide legal protection to all primary forests—those that have never been logged—in the northern region. 
     
    Rare ecosystem home to massive trees, endangered caribou, vast carbon stores
    After O’Rourke showed his colleagues his photos, they went to the rainforest together to explore the areas slated for logging. The group walked for almost two hours to get to the flagged boundary. The forest is surrounded by clearcuts and second-growth stands of lodgepole pine. Connolly described it as an oasis.
    “There are low carpets of moss and beautiful fallen old trees,” Connolly said. “The stands that we’ve seen have really large western red cedars and western hemlock, and we occasionally came across massive Douglas firs that are really large for this area…it would take at least three people to wrap your arms around them.” 
    More than 500 kilometres from the coast, the inland rainforest is one of the rarest ecosystems in the world. Temperate rainforests far from the sea are only found in two other places on the planet: in Russia’s far east and southern Siberia.
    The rainforest supports a variety of animals including moose and endangered caribou. The stands of old-growth trees have been absorbing carbon from the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the soil also stores huge amounts of carbon.
    The rich biodiversity of these old-growth forest ecosystems is threatened by logging, according to a report published in June. 
    As The Narwhal reported last year, much of what remains of the inland temperate rainforest is at risk of clearcutting. Connolly said there is “little to no social licence” to harvest these old-growth trees. 
    “We talked to a lot of people who hunt, who trap, who fish, who guide, and among those people, we’ve sensed a lot of dismay about what’s happening,” she said. “We’re kind of at the limits of tolerance up here.”
     
    BC government ramps up support for pellet industry while plants run out of raw materials
    The Province’s promotion of the pellet industry focuses on using wood that would otherwise be wasted or burned in the forest to reduce the risk of wildfires, but rarely mentions the use of whole trees. 
    “The pellet pushers [including the present NDP government] originally said they would use only logging and milling debris as the source of wood fibre for pellets,” Jim Pojar, a forest ecologist wrote in an email. 
    However, a recent investigation by Stand.earth found that pellets made of whole trees from primary forests in BC are being sent to Europe and Asia. 
    “No mature green trees should be cut down and whole logs ground up to produce wood pellets for export, especially if the trees are clear cut from globally rare and endangered temperate rainforest,” Pojar said.
    Connolly said a lack of legal protection allows the provincial government to greenlight logging whole trees for pellets—and the government’s language around the industry hides the fact that old-growth is being cut down.
    “My understanding is that this is allowed because these forests don’t have any other use,” she said, meaning that they aren’t suitable for making lumber. 
    “The BC government has some really interesting language around justifying pellet harvesting,” she said. “What they say is that they’re using inferior quality wood.
    This isn’t the first time a pellet facility has logged trees to meet its production needs. As The Narwhal reported earlier this year, both Pacific BioEnergy and Pinnacle Renewable Energy, another large-scale pellet company, use whole trees to produce pellets.
    Over the past few years, BC has been ramping up its support for the wood pellet industry, but as sawmills shut down across the province, pellet facilities are running out of raw material. 
    Recently, the Province handed out a number of grants to support projects that take trees that would otherwise be burned on the forest floor in massive slash piles and convert them to pellets. Pacific BioEnergy has received more than $3.2 million from the Province through the Forest Enhancement Society for projects related to its operations.
    Connolly said the Province’s push to support the pellet industry is problematic. “We’re kind of rearranging the deck chairs, you know? They’re making little modifications of things they already do, instead of actually looking at the value of keeping the carbon in forests.”
    The Ministry of Forests could not comment on this story because government communications are limited to health and public safety information during election periods.
    Pacific BioEnergy was also not available to respond by publication time.
     
    Ecologists say burning pellets is not carbon neutral
    Wood pellets, sometimes referred to as biomass or bioenergy, are often touted as carbon neutral and sustainable, but critics claim that’s a dangerous misconception.
    Burning wood to generate energy is less efficient than burning fossil fuels, which means more wood is needed to produce an equivalent amount of electricity, according to Pojar. More carbon dioxide is sent into the atmosphere from pellet-fuelled power plants than traditional coal or natural gas plants, he pointed out. 
    The pellet industry and its supporters argue that replanting trees will eventually sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which means burning pellets for heat or energy is carbon neutral. But even if that is true, it could take hundreds of years for those replanted trees to grow big enough to offset the emissions produced by harvesting, transporting, processing and burning the wood. 
    In a 2019 report entitled Forestry and Carbon in BC, Pojar outlined myths and misconceptions about emissions and the forestry industry. “The CO2 from the combustion of biofuel is released almost instantly, whereas the growth and regrowth of wood takes several decades at least (mostly more than 75 years in BC)” 
    Connolly, who was an editor of the report, said the green narrative around the pellet industry and industrial logging is misleading.
    “It’s so ridiculous to claim that somehow logging is good for the climate,” she said. “What we’ve seen happen is that the BC government and industry have co-opted climate change to argue for more industrial logging. In this case, it’s for pellets, but they’ve been doing the same thing for harvested wood products for the last few years.”
    As climate change, industrial logging and other resource extraction projects continue to impact forest ecosystems, maintaining intact primary and old-growth forests is essential, she said. 
    “BC claims to be exploring all emissions reductions opportunities, but they are not,” she said. “They’re ignoring basically the biggest, best and cheapest opportunity, which is protecting nature. If we’re going to meet our climate commitments, keeping primary forests intact is an important step and what all of us should be asking is, ‘Why are they totally ignoring this?’ ”
    Matt Simmons is a writer and editor based in Smithers, BC, unceded Gidimt’en Clan territory, home of the Wet'suwet’en Nation. He is the author of The Outsider’s Guide to Prince Rupert. This story was originally published in The Narwhal under the Local Journalism Initiative.
     
    Conservation North’s short video interview of trapper Don Wilkins on liquidating BC rainforests for electricity in other countries:
     
    Rochelle Baker
    It goes against independent science and will endanger the survival of juvenile salmon, say ENGOs and First Nations.
     
    By Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
    OPPONENTS OF OPEN-NET SALMON FARMS are disputing a recent finding by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that farms in Discovery Islands waters pose little risk to wild salmon.
    Environmentalist groups and conservationists claim DFO ignored crucial independent science to downplay the risks to imperilled Fraser River sockeye salmon in favour of the aquaculture industry.
     

    Young wild salmon swim close to open-net fish farm in the Discovery Islands area (Photo by Tavish Campbell)
     
    The DFO studied nine different farm fish diseases and concluded they pose minimal risk to wild sockeye. However, the federal agency failed to consider scientific findings about the harm arising from sea lice, which can concentrate in farms and potentially endanger the survival juvenile salmon transiting the region, said Stan Proboszcz, science advisor with Watershed Watch Salmon Society.
    DFO boldly misled Canadians when finding Discovery Islands salmon farms—situated along a critical migration route for juvenile salmon—don’t threaten wild fish, said Proboszcz, a past DFO risk assessment steering committee member. “Their pro-salmon farming bias and disregard for BC’s wild salmon could not be more clear.”
    “It’s a joke,” said Proboszcz, adding DFO also failed to do a synthesis assessment that would evaluate the combined risk all the pathogens and sea lice pose for wild fish.
    DFO insists steps have already been taken to control sea lice problems. There’s already an extensive range of research available on sea lice which DFO relied on in February to update a sea lice management regime, said Andrew Thomson, DFO’s Pacific regional director of fisheries management.
    There are measures fish farms can take to control sea lice problems, and once they are in place, the farms meet the minimum risk threshold, Thomson said.
    This claim is misleading, said Proboszcz, adding DFO does require farms to manage one species of sea lice, Lepeophtheirus salmonis, which tends to infect wild pink and chum salmon. However, DFO doesn’t require them to mitigate Caligus clemensi, a species that unduly affect sockeye salmon.
    As a result of DFO’s findings, Federal Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan decided Monday the 18 fish farms, which raise Atlantic salmon, will remain open pending discussion with area First Nations.
    The farms were in danger of being shut September 30, a deadline set by the Cohen Commission report investigating the precipitous decline of Fraser River sockeye.
    The 2012 report identified a number of factors threatening sockeye including climate change, over-fishing, and loss of habitat.
    But it also focused on the potential danger fish farms might pose to migrating smelts and recommended the fisheries minister should remove open-net pen farms in the Discovery Islands unless DFO could prove they posed minimal risk to the health of migrating Fraser River sockeye.
    Jordan’s decision takes place as Fraser River sockeye salmon returns—which used to number in the millions—are predicted to be 293,000 fish, the lowest number since records began in 1983.
    DFO’s stance is contrary to independent scientist and peer-reviewed studies that indicate sea lice from fish farms threaten wild salmon, said Jay Ritchlin, David Suzuki Foundation director general for western Canada. “Science has established that fish farms  can  raise sea lice levels, and that these parasites can kill young salmon,” Ritchlin said. “If you want to protect  struggling salmon populations, you should start by getting these fish farms out of the water.” 
    DFO’s determination of low risk to sockeye from the Discovery Islands fish farms is not based on absolute findings, Ritchlin added.
    Seven of nine of the risk assessments admit some degree of uncertainty, with two reporting a high level of uncertainty, he said.
    Ritchlin agreed with Proboszcz that examining each disease individually doesn’t give a full picture of the risk salmon face.
    Given the precariousness of salmon runs, the fisheries minister should take a precautionary approach and pull the farms if the science is uncertain, Ritchlin said.
    NDP DFO critic Gord Johns agreed DFO has minimized independent peer reviewed science, particularly around the threat of sea lice and Piscine Orthoreovirus (PRV), a type of virus prevalent in net pen salmon that could put migratory salmon at risk of various diseases and pointed out the agency is in a conflict.
    “It’s abundantly clear that DFO cannot both be a promoter of salmon farming, and a protector of Pacific wild salmon,” said Johns, MP for Courtenay-Alberni.
    The federal government should declare a salmon emergency and establish a plan to remediate the Fraser River, a vital watershed for so many communities and First Nations, he said.
    “It’s extremely alarming to see a minister sit idle, when we’re watching a collapse of wild Pacific salmon happen right before our eyes,” Johns said.
    The salmon farmers jumped to defend DFO’s findings. DFO’s peer-reviewed risk assessments clearly show ocean-based salmon farms pose minimal risks to wild salmon in the Discovery Islands, said Shawn Hall, spokesperson for the BC Salmon Farmers Association. “Sound science will support stability and shared values our industry is bringing to the coast today and into the future,” Hall said in a press release. Salmon farming is part of the economic fabric of the province, he added. And the industry is working closely and openly with Indigenous people to create a shared future of economic opportunity and environmental stewardship, Hall added.
    Aquaculture operators are looking forward to participating fully in the upcoming consultations with area First Nations, he said.
    Bob Chamberlin, a former chief of the Kwikwasut'inuxw Haxwa'mis First Nation, said he had little faith in the upcoming consultations between DFO and the seven First Nations in the Discovery Islands region. “For me to hear the government say that they will have an outcome from all this by December, really shows what a farce this is,” said Chamberlin. Plus, all First Nations impacted by the loss of sockeye salmon need to have a say on fish farms, he added.
    A broad coalition of more than 100 BC First Nations, wilderness tourism operators, conservation organizations, and commercial and sport fishing groups all called on the federal government to cease open-net pen operations and move them on land last week, said Chamberlin, spokesperson for the group.
    “My question is, ‘who the heck is the federal government listening to?’”, Chamberlin said. “Because it’s not British Columbians but three fish farm companies.
    DFO isn’t operating in the interests of the environment or fulfilling its duty to protect wild salmon, he added. “And I think that’s something that Canadians really need to be upset about.”
    Rochelle Baker is a Local Journalism Initiative/Canada reporter with the National Observer
    Judith Lavoie
    Seven years on, Victoria area kitchen scraps are still taking a long, costly journey to compost facilities.
     
    CHUCK THAT APPLE CORE into the kitchen container designated for organics, take the can outside and tip it into the green bin in time for garbage pickup, feeling satisfied knowing your household food waste is being turned into compost that will help grow more fruit and veggies.
    The routine is familiar to most Greater Victoria residents who, after 2015 when the Capital Regional District banned kitchen scraps from Hartland Road Landfill, slowly came to see the benefits of separating organic waste.
     

     
    However, in Greater Victoria, that apple core is starting a long, carbon-emissions-full journey. While efforts have been made to bring kitchen scrap processing closer to home, they appear to be years away from fruition.
    The apple core will first travel to Hartland Road where it is tipped on to a loading station, then trucked up-Island to Fisher Road Recycling at Cobble Hill. While most kitchen scraps are composted on site, when the Fisher Road facility reaches capacity, the remainder is put on a barge to the mainland and trucked to a composting facility in Cache Creek in northern BC.
    Russ Smith, CRD senior manager of environmental resource management, agrees it is not ideal to have Greater Victoria’s kitchen scraps travelling around the province, but it’s certainly preferable to scraps ending up in the landfill and more realistic than expecting all residents to do their own backyard composting.
    “It’s the pragmatic middle ground that is better than landfilling, but not as good as the ideal of backyard composting with everyone doing their own—and, of course, you have a lot of multi-family condo dwellers where they don’t have those opportunities,” Smith said.
    In 2013, there was an ill-fated attempt at local processing when the CRD contracted Foundation Organics to deal with kitchen scraps on a Central Saanich farm. It was forced to pull the operating licence in less than a year after neighbours complained about the smell. Since then progress has crawled along at a snail’s pace.
    It seems to have taken five years to make the next move towards local processing. In 2018, the CRD invited expressions of interest from proponents wanting to establish a processing facility “within or in close proximity to the Capital Region.” A facility could be built either on two hectares of cleared space at Hartland or on other sites, says the request for initial bids
    The current system of processing outside the region “requires extensive transportation and is inconsistent with the Region’s long-term objective of managing the kitchen scraps locally to the extent possible,” it says.
    More than a dozen responses were received, but the shortlist has not yet been compiled. Meanwhile, a new request for proposals for hauling and processing kitchen scraps closes this month with the successful bidder holding the contract until March 2025.
    That allows the successful bidder on the main contract time to construct a new facility, said Smith, who is expecting a staff report to go to the CRD board next spring. “Even if we get very clear direction in the spring of 2021, by the time the procurement finishes and construction starts you are certainly looking into 2023 and likely into 2024,” he said.
    A stumbling block is that no decision has yet been made by the CRD board on whether to opt for composting or the more expensive choice of building a biogas plant at Hartland. Biogas is produced when organic matter biodegrades without oxygen. The gas can then be filtered and, if done on a large scale, can be used to generate electricity or refined and fed into the gas grid.
    The cost of building a biogas plant at Hartland was estimated by CRD staff at between $25- and $40-million, compared to $2- to $8-million for composting. The capital cost could drop to zero if composting was done at a private site owned by one of the bidders.
    In addition to deciding what kind of technology should be used for kitchen scraps, there’s also the problem of getting municipalities to commit to sending their scraps to a new facility as operators need to know they would receive sufficient material
    Currently the CRD sends about 12,000 tonnes a year to Cobble Hill, but Victoria and Saanich have separate contracts with Fisher Road Recycling.
    Victoria collected about 2,000 tonnes of food scraps through its green bin program in 2019 and is expecting to collect more this year because of 25 zero waste stations installed around the downtown core and in City parks.
    City staff “continue to work closely with CRD staff on regional solid waste management initiatives,” said an emailed statement from the city.
    Saanich is the only local municipality to accept yard trimmings in the organics cart and collects between 8,000 and 9,000 tonnes annually. About 30 percent of that is food waste and the mix with garden waste provides the ideal carbon and nitrogen mix to make top-grade compost, said Jason Adams, Saanich operations supervisor.
    Adams, who has an extensive background in recycling, wants to see the CRD get on with a decision. “They just need to build it and get on with it and the tonnage will follow,” said Adams, who would like to see a model based on economics, rather than subsidies, and is hoping the CRD avoids an “over-engineered” system.
    One advantage of the many delays has been that the technology of composting has evolved over recent years, Adams said.
    Technology is a cause close to the heart of Peter Brown, a member of Malahat Organics, a consortium which made a bid to the CRD in 2018 proposing a rotary composter, meaning the material is contained inside a large drum—a method that controls odours and dust.
    “You put the kitchen scraps in one end and this thing very, very slowly rotates and it comes out the other end about seven days later and you have got beautiful compost. We’ve got an absolutely crackerjack proposal for the CRD and it would cost them nothing,” said Brown, who is puzzled by the delays.
     

    Example of a large rotary composter used to create compost from kitchen scraps
     
    The proposal envisages the facility being set up on Malahat Nation land, which is zoned light industrial.
    The CRD would pay a tipping price, which would be less than they are currently paying and the operators would require a guaranteed amount of tonnage each year. At the end of the contract, the facility would be transferred to the region at no cost.
    Hartland currently accepts kitchen scraps at $120 per tonne, but it costs the CRD about $145 a tonne for the composting.
    It is frustrating that it has taken so long to consider the proposals and, in the meantime, between the discrepancy in costs and trucking some of the scraps off-Island it is costing the region money, Brown said.
    “Isn’t it crazy?…It’s our money that’s going out into the wind and, in the last few years since we submitted our proposal, you could have had the plant operating right here,” he said.
    Brown fears that CRD staff are slanting recommendations towards biogas rather than composting even though a biogas plant is expensive and will take up a large chunk of land at Hartland.
    “Compost is a wonderful thing if it’s done properly like with these rotary composters that give you the very best quality compost. It’s valuable, not something to be sent away,” he said.
    Highland councillors Gord and Ann Baird also fear that there is a tilt towards biogas in staff reports and last year, in separate presentations to a CRD committee, both questioned why the Hartland site is apparently already being prepared for biogas.
    “The pathway towards more biogas production goes contrary to eliminating hydrocarbons as a fuel source as laid out in IPCC reports and the Climate Emergency declarations,” said Gord Baird, who is running for the BC Green Party in Langford-Juan de Fuca.
    There is no social licence for the old methods of composting, with all its shortcomings, but there is a social licence for new methods with no odour, no dust and no access to vermin, said Baird, who calculated that the value of finished compost, sold at $50 a tonne, would far exceed the value of biogas produced by anaerobic digestion.
    Jutta Gutberlet, University of Victoria professor in the Department of Geography, agrees that compost is a valuable resource and believes the ideal solution would be decentralized composting centres, which would eliminate the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
    “This could relatively easily be done with community gardens,” said Gutberlet, a director of the Community-based Research Laboratory.More space is being provided around Victoria for community gardens and the compost could be used on site, Gutberlet said.
    “They would not just produce organic composts, but they could become centres where people meet—centres of community, which is something we also need in our neighbourhoods,” she said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    Despite the homelessness and opioid crises, BC Housing has failed to employ Woodwynn Farm during its 2 years of ownership.
     
    THE ROLLING MEADOWS and picturesque barns of Woodwynn Farm on West Saanich Road remain in a serene time-warp. There’s no outward sign of activity despite a two-year-old pledge by the provincial government to establish a therapeutic recovery community on the 193-acre site.
    While the acrimonious Central Saanich controversy that divided the community and occupied countless hours of council time has faded to a whisper, simultaneously, the opioid crisis has tightened its grip on the province. In July a near record-breaking 175 deaths occurred with calls for more treatment beds and options beyond detox for those struggling to remove themselves from an increasingly toxic supply of street drugs. In the past 6 months, overdose deaths have numbered 750, while those from COVID-19 hover just over 200.
    So, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, with reduced treatment options and escalating homelessness problems, what has happened to the promise to turn the historic Woodwynn property into a therapeutic recovery community?
     

    Richard Leblanc, founder of the Creating Homefulness Society, at Woodwynn Farm in 2017.
     
    Selina Robinson, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, said, at the time of the purchase in July 2018, that the farm would provide a therapeutic environment for people experiencing mental health challenges and substance-use issues. “The purchase of Woodwynn Farm means we can provide more services for people living in supportive housing who will benefit from access to extended therapeutic care,” she said.
    Fast-forward to 2020 and a ministry spokesperson told Focus that planning for the site is on hold until discussions are held with Tsartlip First Nation and Ministry of Indigenous Relations. “The Tsartlip First Nation expressed interest in being part of the discussions around the use of the land and the Province recognizes the importance of Woodwynn Farms to the Nation,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
    Tsartlip Chief Don Tom did not return calls from Focus.
    In the meantime, BC Housing has completed $160,000 of renovations, including new roofs and demolition of the pig barn, according to the ministry. The Province budgeted $6.9 million to buy the farm, with $5.8-million going to the purchase price and $1.1-million for renovations, fees and consulting costs.
    The Province bought the 78-hectare property from the Creating Homefulness Society, which was mired in debt after trying in vain to persuade Central Saanich Council and BC’s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) to allow on-site housing for 40 residents who would work as temporary farm hands while receiving addiction treatment.
    The society’s original plans called for 98 people to be housed at the farm, but, between neighbourhood and council opposition and ALR regulations that stipulate any housing must be necessary for farm use, the idea foundered.
    The Province skirted the housing problem by saying there would be no housing on site, but BC Housing would be working with Central Saanich and regional housing providers “to make this opportunity available to supportive housing tenants” (i.e. people living elsewhere).
    At that time, Our Place expressed interest in helping operate a therapeutic recovery community, but has received no recent information about provincial plans, said Grant McKenzie, Our Place communications director.
    McKenzie expressed skepticism about the project’s success. “Unless you are allowed to build some housing on that property to house people in therapeutic recovery and farming the land, not much is going to happen with it,” predicted McKenzie. The property would be useful, but busing people in would not be successful, he said. “I would say it’s probably a non-starter because [council and the ALC] would oppose it…The neighbours don’t want to see homelessness existing,” he said.
    Richard Leblanc, founder of the Creating Homefulness Society, no longer has any input into the future of Woodwynn, but, as the overdose death toll rises, he believes a properly run therapeutic recovery centre could be saving lives.
    The power and strength of a therapeutic community program at Woodwynn should be helping those who are struggling, he said. “It should be helping people deal with the root causes, rather than shuffling people around,” Leblanc added.
    However, there is no obvious solution to the remaining impasse over housing. Echoing McKenzie, Leblanc believes people should be living on site for an extended length of time and it is not realistic to bus people in. “The odds of a person showing up the second or third day in a row are almost zero,” he said, adding that people need to see rehabilitation successes among their peers to give them a sense of hope and the impetus to make changes.
    It is a wasted opportunity on so many levels, Leblanc said sadly.
    *December 18 UPDATE: The BC government has turned over the Woodwynn Farm property to the Tsartlip First Nation which once harvested medicines and hunted in its former cedar forest.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Ross Crockford
    Contest appears to be Andrew vs. Hardman, as other prominent candidates bow out.
     
    THE CITY OF VICTORIA’S by-election for a seat on Council, likely to occur this autumn, will look quite different from how it appeared in March, before it was cancelled due to COVID-19.
    Two prominent candidates in the spring by-election campaign won’t be running this fall.
    Rachael Montgomery, a registered nurse who had suspended her campaign to rejoin her colleagues at Island Health, told FOCUS that she plans to continue working in health care. “At this point, I’m not making any plans to run,” said Montgomery in an email. “I am excited with the work we are doing within healthcare and I’m committed to supporting our people and communities from within the healthcare system.”
    Jeremy Caradonna, who works in the province’s Climate Change Secretariat and teaches environmental studies at UVic, is entering provincial politics instead. His electjeremy.ca website has been retooled for a campaign to become “the next MLA for Victoria-Beacon Hill,” and a sign-up page instructs readers to join the B.C. Green Party, so they can vote for Caradonna in the riding’s nomination race. In an August 14 email to supporters, Caradonna wrote: “I hope to retain your support as a candidate for provincial office. When I began my campaign for city councillor, I never imagined I would be running provincially in the same year. But a lot has changed in 2020.”
    Consequently, the contest for a Council seat is shaping up as one mainly between former broadcaster Stephen Andrew, who has already revived his campaign online, and community researcher Stefanie Hardman, under the banner of the Together Victoria elector organization. Hardman confirmed to FOCUS in an email that she will be running again, but said that “out of resepect for an appropriate electoral process, I have not been actively campaigning during this interim time.”
    The narrowed field of prominent candidates — and recent events — will surely change the dynamic of the campaign described by FOCUS back in March. Montgomery, a former secretary of the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, and Caradonna both had backing from environmentally focused voters, and it’s hard to predict who those voters will support instead. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations and concerns about policing might draw some voters to Together, which successfully lobbied City Council this summer to eliminate police street checks, and to hire fulltime staff for a new Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Stephen Andrew, on the other hand, has been conducting online forums and surveys registering neighbourhood concerns about homeless camps in City parks, and a recent surge in violent crime. He says 80 people have signed up to volunteer on his campaign in the past two weeks.
     

    The City of Victoria is required to hold a by-election to fill the Council seat formerly held by Laurel Collins. COVID-19 protocols will push the cost to more than $400,000
     
    On July 29, the provincial government released new guidelines for by-elections under COVID-19, requiring each municipality to come up with a plan that considers the health and safety recommendations of the Provincial Health Officer and WorkSafeBC. These could include physical distancing and/or plexiglass barriers to take sworn declarations from candidates or voters, expanded mail-in voting and advance polls, curbside voting, and sanitizing voting booths and ballot-counting machines after every use.
    Door-knocking campaigns and in-person candidate forums typical of past elections will also be nearly impossible.
    City of Victoria staff will present a report to Council in September describing how this might work, and identifying possible dates for the by-election. Given the time City staff will need to prepare for the vote, it likely won’t occur until November at the earliest.
    The socially-distanced by-election will also come with a hefty price tag. The City earlier budgeted $170,000 for the vote, but City finance director Susanne Thompson told councillors on August 6 that she expects it to cost $250,000 more than that.
    The City is required to hold the by-election according to Section 54 of the Local Government Act, which allows a municipality to defer a vote only if an elected official resigns less than a year before a general civic election. Laurel Collins officially resigned last November, and the next civic election isn’t until October 2022.
    According to Victoria’s City Clerk, candidates who were part of the cancelled spring by-election will have to file new nomination papers for the fall contest, and new candidates will be able to join the race.
    “In terms of the by-election, the Ministerial Order that was passed in March cancelled the entire election process, including the rescinding of my appointment as Chief Election Officer,” Chris Coates said in an email. “What this means then is that the entire process starts from the beginning and is a brand new process. Any candidates must start from the beginning as well, so that means it is not limited only to candidates that filed during the cancelled election.”
     

     
    This summer, candidates in the cancelled spring by-election filed campaign finance disclosure statements with Elections BC. Together Victoria spent $39,873 on its spring campaign, and got $35,971 in donations, including $2,099 from former councillor (now MP) Laurel Collins. Montgomery spent $28,010 and got $22,269 in donations, including $1,200 from downtown businessmen Gerald Hartwig and Rob Reid, and environmentalists Carolyn Whittaker and Naomi Devine. Andrew spent $8,578 and got $11,468, including $1,000 from lawyer Kevin McCullough and realtor Scott Piercy. Caradonna spent $9,151 and took in $7,816, mainly from smaller donors.
    Elections BC told FOCUS in an email that campaigns in the fall by-election “will be re-starting from zero in terms of spending, fundraising and disclosure.” Candidates will be permitted to re-use their signs from the spring campaign, but “any materials from a previous election used in a new election must be disclosed at their fair market value.”
    FOCUS asked all nine candidates who ran in the spring if they will try again this autumn. Neighbourhood advocate Riga Godron says she will run, focusing more this time on “how the by-laws around daytime park camping are being enforced, (or rather not being enforced)” and “fully funding the Victoria police to perform the important duty that they are responsible for, most notably public safety.” According to statements she filed with Elections BC, Godron spent $13,323 on her spring campaign, and received donations of $2,424.60 from her husband and each of her three young children.
    Military veteran Keith Rosenberg says recent events have “doubled [his] resolve to run for and change the city council,” and that “a lot of people are ashamed of what our current city council has let our city become.” UVic lab instructor Alexander Schmid also says he will run again, expanding the focus of his campaign from transportation, public trust, and the role of neighbourhood associations to include “rational health measures and support for public safety.” Rosenberg spent nothing on his spring campaign, and Schmid spent $709.
    Previous candidates Peter Forbes and Gordon Mackinnon did not reply to emails. Forbes spent $217 on his spring campaign, and Mackinnon spent nothing.
    Online pundits have also wondered if political consultant Mike Geoghegan, who ran in Victoria’s 2018 mayoral election, might take a crack at Council this time. Geoghegan, currently working on contract for the Tŝilhqot'in National Government in Williams Lake, told FOCUS in an email: “I am still very interested in politics and hope to be making an announcement with regards to that within the next few months. But it will not be at the municipal level. So no I will not be seeking any municipal office in either Victoria or Saanich in the foreseeable future.”
    Ross Crockford is a Victoria journalist and former lawyer.
     
    Judith Lavoie
    Pipeline opponents continue the battle from treetops and in insurance company boardrooms.
     
    LEGAL CHALLENGES to the Trans Mountain pipeline are at a standstill, following the July Supreme Court of Canada dismissal of an appeal by several First Nations. However, opponents vow the battle is not over and are mustering supporters to continue fighting as construction nears some of the most controversial portions of the route.
    Years of protests and legal skirmishes were instrumental in Kinder Morgan developing cold feet and pulling out of the project in 2018. The Trudeau government then stepped in and bought the pipeline, which, when the expansion is completed, will almost triple the amount of diluted bitumen that can be carried from Alberta’s oilsands to a marine terminal in Burnaby.
    Costs of twinning the existing pipeline are escalating and are now estimated at $12.6 billion, on top of the $4.5 billion purchase price paid by the federal government.
    As budgets dive deeply into the red while governments struggle to pay for COVID-19 relief, some groups are pushing for the government to abandon Trans Mountain.
    “Canadians don’t want to see their hard-earned tax dollars wasted on a white elephant. It’s time to change course while we still can and invest those billions in clean, sustainable economic recovery projects,” according to Dogwood, which is running a letter writing campaign aimed at federal politicians.
    Pipe installation began in Alberta last year and Trans Mountain officials have said they expect construction to be underway along every section of the route by the end of this year.
    That is a plan that opponents are determined to derail.
    Tim Takaro, 63, a former Vancouver doctor and health sciences and environmental health professor at Simon Fraser University, is staging a treetop camp-in on an aerial sleeping platform in the cottonwood trees close to the Brunette River on the Burnaby/New Westminster border.
     

    Tim Takaro’s treetop sleeping platform
     
    Activists say the project calls for the trees to be felled before September 15. Takaro, with the help of supporters on the ground who provide supplies and who, if necessary, will take over the sit-in, says he will do anything necessary to delay the construction because he is convinced the pipeline must not be built.
    “We are in a climate emergency. This emergency is even more dire, in fact, than the COVID-19 pandemic that we have been so responsive to,” 63-year-old Takaro said in a video. “We need renewable energy and an energy supply that is not planet-destroying as our current fossil energy supply is,” he said.
    Reports detailing the climate-killing effects of the pipeline have not been addressed by the National Energy Board, Takaro added. “So, I now find myself in a tree, 25 metres off the ground, blocking construction.”
     

    Tim Takaro
     
    Will George, a member of the Tseil-Waututh Nation and the group Protect the Inlet, is among Takaro’s supporters.
    “We, at Protect the Inlet, will support anyone willing to do direct action, as our window gets smaller and smaller to stop the construction of the pipeline that, if completed, will increase tanker traffic through our waters by 700 percent,” he said.
    Tanker traffic increases in sensitive areas of the Salish Sea and its effect on endangered resident killer whales have been among the most visceral objections to the pipeline by British Columbians.
    Sven Biggs, Stand.earth Canadian oil and gas programs director, in an appeal for donations, said a construction delay could halt the work for an entire season because crews have only a few weeks to drill close to the Brunette River before salmon spawning season. The river supports chum and coho salmon and the endangered Nooksack dace.
    “The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has ruled that Trans Mountain must complete this work in what is known as a ‘window of least risk to fish’ which runs between August 1 and September 7,” Biggs said in an email.
    “A whole host of strategies could delay construction past the September 7 deadline,” he said.
    Meanwhile, a coalition of groups is calling on companies to stop insuring the pipeline because of Indigenous rights violations and its contribution to climate change.
    It is a tactic that is already having some success. Zurich, one of the pipeline’s main insurers, is dropping out and several other companies have signalled that they are having second thoughts about backing major fossil fuel projects.
    A letter signed by 140 organizations was sent this month to major insurers such as Lloyds, Liberty Mutual, Chubb and AIG, calling on them to drop their coverage of Trans Mountain. “Trans Mountain puts Indigenous communities, drinking water and our shared climate at grave risk. We urge you to rule out insuring Trans Mountain and exit the tar sands entirely,” the letter says.
    Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs president, said in a news release that companies insuring Trans Mountain are accelerating climate change and violating Indigenous rights. “Now is not the time to finance a huge expansion of some of the world’s dirtiest oil. The pipeline does not have the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of all Indigenous communities across whose land this pipeline passes,” he said.
    A Trans Mountain spokesman said the decision by Zurich not to renew was anticipated and changes in insurance companies are a common occurrence. “There remains adequate capacity in the market to meet Trans Mountain’s insurance needs and our renewal,” she said.
    However, as the world slowly transitions away from fossil fuels and awareness of Indigenous rights takes root, opposition to the pipeline may be enough to send shivers of doubt through the boardrooms of major insurance companies.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Stephen Hume
    Local residents are outraged by the disruption of wildlife and peace, and fear the introduction of COVID-19 from the revellers.
     
    RETIRED HOUSEHOLDERS, some of whom have lived on the Cowichan River for half a century, say intoxicated recreational tubers who don’t practice social-distancing are turning their quiet, rural gardens into a rowdy carnival midway from hell.
    “They seem to think the river is a roller coaster ride on which they can get drunk because it doesn’t hurt to fall off,” says Joe Saysell, a retired logger and fishing guide. “It’s getting really out of hand. They are getting more and more brazen all the time.”
    Rosemary Danaher calls it “the Booze Cruise.”
    She says up to 3,000 people, many with tubes rafted together, boom boxes blaring music and riders consuming large quantities of alcohol, will drift past her deck on a sunny weekend day.
    “The traffic is so heavy I can’t even swim—I wouldn’t want to, so many of them are drunk and wee-ing in the river. They’ve really got to do something about the complete lack of toilets.”
     

     
    Last Sunday, she said, one large group of tubers came ashore on her neighbour’s property and treated the householders to the spectacle of young women squatting, pulling aside their bikini bottoms and urinating on their lawn. Other residents complain of finding human feces in their shrubbery.
    Mavis Smith, who lives near Little Beach where tubers pull out after drifting about two-and-a-half hours downstream from Cowichan Lake, just says: “ARRRGHH!!!”
    She says neighbours are plagued by people leaving garbage and cutting through their yards to get back to the narrow stretch of Greendale Road where they’ve parked their cars.
    Chris Morley, a retired biologist who moved to what he thought was blissful rural solitude 30 years ago, says the parking so congests the narrow, winding road that it’s often blocked to emergency vehicles. “Last week an ambulance was called and it couldn’t get through. One of my neighbours was blocked and they couldn’t get into or out of their home. About 5 pm on Sunday [July 26] I walked to a neighbour’s place a little less than half a kilometre up Greendale Road. It was jammed with cars parked on both sides. It was to the point where no vehicles could get through at all.”
    Aaron Frisby, who rents out tubes at Cowichan Lake, runs a shuttle bus service so that people who want to drift the river don’t have to park near the pull-out point. He concurs that parking along Greendale Road is “absolutely a problem.”
    Frisby says his tube rental company has provided a shuttle service for tubers, even those who don’t rent from him, but the congestion is even restricting his company’s ability to responsibly operate its minibuses. “In the past we have had a shuttle-only service for people bringing their own tubes and due to COVID-19 we have had to heavily restrict that because of shuttle capacity. What this has caused is people to find their own transport and park at Little Beach. It’s affecting our service too as we are struggling to get our buses in and out.”
    Frisby says his tube rentals are limited to a maximum of 20 leaving every half hour in order to maintain proper social distancing but householders downstream complain that once on the river, tubers raft-up to drink and party as they float downstream.
    “Social distancing is not occurring,” Danaher complains. “They get on the water [at Cowichan Lake] and start roping tubes together to make rafts of 15, 20, 25 people, then they start drinking as they float down the river.” So far this year, she says the biggest raft observed consisted of 53 tubes tied together.
    She says the on-river congestion scares off wildlife like the blue herons and kingfishers which vanish from her stretch of river during tubing season. Saysell and Morley concur.
    They point out that the Cowichan is one of only three rivers in BC designated a Canadian Heritage River of national historic and environmental significance, is a BC Heritage River and is the core of Cowichan River Provincial Park.
    For more than a century it’s been a destination revered by anglers who came from around the world to fly fish for prized brown trout and steelhead. Daily catches on the river were once posted in the major newspapers in New York and London.
    “There’s now virtually no wildlife from my place to Cowichan Lake, it’s all been driven off,” says Saysell. “And cans that litter the river bottom are death traps for crayfish which are crucial for the large trout.”
    Morley says he’s observed tubers taking buckets of crayfish from the river and says the noise and congestion are stressing the larger game fish, which are already stressed by warm water conditions and seek refuge in the cold water in a few deep pools on the tubing route.
    “We are still seeing wildlife and fish right up to the weir [at the river’s mouth in Cowichan Lake]. Lots of activity up at our dock and morning runs see lots of wildlife on the way down,” counters Frisby of the tube rental firm.
    Of equal concern for householders, though, is fear that the heavy tourist traffic and what they perceive as inadequate attention to social distancing protocols will bring the COVID-19 pandemic into the heart of their rural community of mostly vulnerable seniors. “I believe there is a high probability that tourism locations like ours will be the root cause of the second wave of COVID this summer,” Danaher says.
    In late July, provincial public health authorities confirmed that a cluster of COVID-19 cases linked to parties in Kelowna led to broad community transmission of the virus and that there are now 130 new cases linked to the partying, half of all active cases in the province as of the BC Day long weekend. “We now know the situation has shifted to a more broad community transmission beyond these initial cases in downtown Kelowna,” an official from Interior Health confirmed to media on July 29.
    Danaher says she has a right to enjoy the tranquility, privacy and safety of her property but that it’s being compromised by the economics of tourism and that there seems to be a double standard for urban and rural residents. “If I were to descend en masse [into town] with a group of irate river homeowners and we were to trespass, urinate on people’s lawns and flash genitals in the process; if females were to take off their bathing suit tops, scream at the slightest opportunity, throw beer cans and garbage around and use the F-Bomb after every third word, we would no doubt be faced with a series of fines for unacceptable public behaviour and hauled off to jail. However, our ever-increasing Booze Cruise visitors seem to think this sort of gross behaviour is perfectly fine in the country.”
    Morley says he noticed a big change this year. “Until this year it was mostly families, very quiet, very little alcohol. This year it seems to be mostly young people, late teens to early 30s, and lots of alcohol. The yelling and screaming is just unbelievable.”
    Danaher points out that it’s a small, rural community and many of the householders are retired people who fall into high risk groups. “We really don’t need hordes of young people bringing the virus into a high risk area just because they think it won’t affect them. We simply do not know where these folk have been, who they’ve been with and what they’ve been doing, so the chance of COVID-19 being introduced into our high seniors population is real and alarming,” Danaher says.
    Morley agrees. “Social distancing? Totally out the window,” he says. “I can see big implications going forward with COVID-19.”
    That’s a correlation that makes Frisby wince. “My concern is that some are going to attack this issue as a COVID-19 issue. There are absolutely issues with idiots on the river but this is not a social distancing problem.
    “Tubers are outside and keeping away from each other, he says. “There aren’t many activities you can do during a pandemic, but tubing is a safe one, which is why it is so popular. We just have to find a way to get everyone to respect the river and residents.”
    But the social distancing issue for outdoor recreation is clearly a concern for public health officials as well as worried residents. Sharp upticks in reports of new daily infections appears to be related to outdoor partying in BC, Alberta and Ontario.
    BC’s Provincial Public Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry confirmed in her official briefing that most of BC’s current surge originated in Canada Day events at Kelowna. And elsewhere, from Hong Kong and Australia to Europe, infections appear to be increasing again where social distancing was relaxed after new cases had almost vanished, a reminder that the risk is far from over.
    Meanwhile in Lake Cowichan, in what looks a bit like barring the barn door after the horses have bolted, at least as far as complaining residents are concerned, Acting Mayor Tim McGonigle issued a warning in a media release July 27:
    “The town is working with the local RCMP to get a handle on the inappropriate activities of a few unruly visitors who are ruining the enjoyment of many visitors and residents,” he said. “If you are looking to come here and rowdily let off steam, so to speak, don’t bother.”
    He urged visitors to not gather in large groups and expressed concern for the safety of citizens. “Their lives should not be put at risk simply because of your desire to have fun with little regard for following required COVID-19 protocols.”
    Frisby agrees that a stronger police presence would help curb a lot of the behaviour associated with alcohol consumption on the river. “Ten years ago, there was this exact same issue on the river, where there was a party culture to tubing,” he says. “The RCMP did a great job curbing this by ticketing those with open alcohol and even going to the lengths of having a human chain on the river confiscating alcohol from tubers.”
    Which raises a question: If the activity on the river that concerns residents has been a subject of vigorous community discussion and provincial, regional and municipal authorities have a well-established kit of tools for managing the problem, why weren’t the alcohol, parking, littering, trespassing and crowds in a vulnerable residential district dealt with weeks ago at the beginning of the season rather than in the middle of it?
    Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
    David Gooderham
    David Gooderham describes a hearing on July 7 at the BC Court of Appeal that was likely the first time in Canada that detailed evidence of the gravity of the unfolding climate peril has been presented in a courtroom.
     
    JENNIFER NATHAN, a science educator, and I, a retired lawyer, were convicted a year ago of criminal contempt of court for acting to halt the construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. Before the start of our trial, we applied at a two-day hearing on December 3-4, 2018 in the Supreme Court of British Columbia for leave to raise the common law defence of necessity, and for permission to call expert evidence at our trial about climate change and the emissions implications of continuing to expand Canada’s oil sands industry. The presiding judge, Justice Affleck, dismissed our application. Six weeks after the hearing, the judge’s written decision was released. We were convicted at a further hearing on March 11, 2019, and launched our appeal to the Court of Appeal for British Columbia the same day.
    The hearing of our appeal was held on Tuesday, July 7, 2020 in the BC Court of Appeal, in Vancouver. The three-judge panel was Chief Justice Robert Bauman, Justice David Harris, and Justice Joyce DeWitt-Van Oosten. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the hearing was conducted by Zoom conference, with public access by video link.
     

     At the one-day hearing, between 10 am and 12:30 pm, I made the oral submission by video link to the Court on behalf of Jennifer Nathan and myself. In the afternoon, Crown Counsel Leslie Ruzicka argued the case for the Prosecution. 
    I think George Rammell’s remarkable drawing, shown above, conveys some of the unfathomable character of the occasion of our hearing. Compared to many appeal hearings, there was very little questioning from the judges; there were no exchanges of the usual kind. Of course, from the courts’ perspective, for other good reasons, it was not an occasion for any engagement or lightness of touch. Jennifer and I were there convicted of criminal contempt of court. It was very quiet, the three judges listening—in Georges’s drawing the judge on the top left listening intently, the other two justices harder to see because of the lighting and relatively low definition of the Zoom video.
    At the conclusion, the Court reserved judgment. As is usually the case after an appeal hearing, the Court will take some time to consider its decision and then issue a written judgment. We anticipate that the Court’s Reasons for Judgment will be released within approximately the next two to six weeks, although the timing is uncertain and it could be at an earlier date or later. As soon as the Court’s written decision is released, we will make it available on our website. (https://dagooderham.com/legalaction/)
    There were two main issues addressed during the hearing:
    One, I think the main issue, is whether the trial judge, Affleck J., made an error when he made his key finding that climate change is not an “imminent peril” in the legal sense. He found there is a “contingency” that governments and businesses may adopt what he described as ”societal measures” that will avoid any “dire outcome” (I am borrowing the language used by Affleck J. in his judgment in paragraph 55). Because he made a finding that such societal measures may be adopted in future, he concluded that a very grave outcome is not a “virtual certainty” but is just in the realm of what is “foreseeable or likely.” He took the view that unless we can prove that a dire climate outcome is “virtually certain,” the common law defence of necessity cannot succeed.
    Our case is that the trial judge’s finding about the existence of such a contingency was not based on any evidence contained in the record. In short, he drew an inference—about both the intentions of governments and businesses to act and also about the economic and technological viability of unidentified future “societal measures” that he envisioned might solve the problem within the very short and unforgiving timeline remaining - an inference that we say has no foundation in any of the evidence that was presented to him at the trial.        
    In consequence, the appeal hearing (in terms of our approach to the hearing) required that we undertake a very detailed review of the actual evidence, the evidence contained in the record that we presented to Affleck J. We had to demonstrate, in effect, that there is nothing in the record that could have provided a reasoned basis for Affleck’s finding.
    The record of evidence in this case consists of the detailed written summary of the proposed evidence that we sought to call at a full trial. It is found in the Appellants’ Outline of Proposed Evidence (a link to that 119-page document is on our website). The adjudicative record also includes affidavits sworn by Jennifer Nathan and myself.
    At the hearing, our oral submission to the Court of Appeal, which took about two hours, was heavily focused on reviewing the details of the evidence in the Outline that we had originally presented to the trial judge in December 2018, including on matters of climate science (i.e., the atmospheric carbon concentration level and its current rate of increase); baseline projections of global emissions to 2030 (all of which unfortunately show global emissions are going to continue going up to 2030 and beyond); and a summary of the results of a series of other reports from the IPCC and other sources (including, in particular, the UN Emissions Gap Report 2017) all showing unequivocally that global emissions must in absolute terms go down 25 to 50 percent by 2030 (those figures represent the reductions required from all countries on average by 2030) to have any realistic chance of staying within the 1.5 degrees C or even within the 2 degrees C warming limit. We also referred to other evidence showing that, in many of the poorer countries like India, emissions are going to continue increasing at least to 2030—because those countries do not have the means to quickly reverse the trend of their rapidly increasing emissions.
    We pointed to evidence in the record showing that any prospect of achieving the enormous reductions needed by 2030 would have to depend on even deeper cuts by a relatively small number of rich advanced economies, like Canada, which do have the capital and technological capacity to achieve much deeper emissions reductions in the short term, but have chosen not to do so.
    On that point, our submission addressed the sorry record of Canada’s emissions, and we cited multiple reports showing how rising emissions from expanding oil sands production since 2005 are driving our national emissions far above even Canada’s existing modest reduction target. It is a very dark story.
    This was probably the first time in Canada that a detailed presentation of evidence showing the gravity of the unfolding climate peril has been presented in a courtroom, and certainly the first time at the appeal court level. (The National Energy Board inquiry during the Trans Mountain Pipeline approval process simply refused to accept any evidence about climate science or emissions). The terrible subject has been largely kept out of the judicial system. Of course, the Carbon Pricing Reference cases over the past two years in the Courts of Appeal of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario did address climate change obliquely, but they were really cases about which jurisdictions (Federal or provincial) have the constitutional power to impose carbon taxes. And none of the Carbon Pricing decisions came anywhere close to touching the questions about how bad it is, or whether Canada’s efforts are remotely on track to make any contribution to avoiding a grave outcome. (On this point, our Reply Factum addresses the very limited scope of what the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal’s judgment had to say about climate change and the nature of the threat, in its Carbon Pricing Reference decision.)
    For more detail on our science and emissions evidence, a useful summary of that is found in our main Factum (Appellants’ Factum) filed November 18, 2019, at paragraphs 9 to 55 (pages 2-14). Our oral submission on July 7 followed the sequence of the sections (I - VI) laid out in those 12 pages.
    The second major issue on the appeal concerns the question of whether Jennifer Nathan’s conduct and my conduct in disobeying the court injunction was “involuntary conduct” within the special meaning of that term in the earlier cases. I will not expand on that issue here. However, that question is fully addressed in our Reply (Appellants’ Reply Factum), at paragraphs 6 to 16 (pages 3-6), under the heading "“Voluntary” conduct and moral choice.”   
    Lastly, in advance of our hearing we filed the Appellants’ Supplementary Factum that addresses two foreign law decisions. The most important is Urgenda v. The State of the Netherlands. The judgment released by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands in January 2020 is the first ruling by a senior level court in the EU or US concluding that climate change is an “imminent peril.” It affirmed an earlier ruling by the Hague Court of Appeal in 2018. The original trial in that case was in 2015. The Court of Appeal decision is only about 20 pages and is very readable. It provides a good analysis of the climate science evidence, from the perspective of the legal process. Our website has a link to an essay I prepared a few months ago about the Urgenda case, and how closely the Dutch courts were guided by the science in arriving at their decision. Links to the judgments in that case are given in List of Authorities, on the back page of our Supplementary Factum.
     
    David Gooderham practiced in civil litigation in Vancouver for 35 years, retiring in 2012. For more information, including background and eventual outcome of the appeal, please see https://dagooderham.com/legalaction/
    Russ Francis
    Next BC general election is a “high public heath risk” event
     
    SO FAR THIS YEAR, by-elections in Victoria, Lytton and Rossland, as well as a Kamloops referendum on a new arts centre have all been cancelled because of public health concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic. New Brunswick postponed its municipal elections—scheduled for last May 11—till 2021. And Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was expected to announce a general election last spring, but has since said it will be held in October, 2020 because of COVID-19.
    Few medical experts presently forecast the end of the pandemic by October 16 of 2021, when BC is due to head to the polls. BC chief electoral officer Anton Boegman also appears doubtful that things will be back to normal by then. At the June 11 tele-meeting of the elections advisory committee, Boegman said it is “highly likely” that the next by-election or election in BC will occur during the pandemic.
     

    BC chief electoral officer Anton Boegman
     
    “It goes without saying that the best approach, when public health risk is highest, is likely to defer or postpone an election,” said Boegman, according to meeting minutes. “When the public health risk is lower, however, it is possible to hold an election in a safe and accessible manner, and one in which voters do not have to choose between exercising their democratic franchise and protecting their health.”
    “As an election is an event in which millions of British Columbians participate, it is a high-risk event from a public health perspective,” Boegman told the meeting. “Many election processes will necessarily need to be adapted in order to keep voters and election workers safe, as well as to maintain the necessary accessibility to the ballot box and the overall integrity of the electoral process.”
    Consequently, Elections BC is actively preparing, in case the election occurs as scheduled on October 16 next year. It is now tracking down sources for protective equipment, and for large quantities of vote-by-mail packages. Based on recent US experience, as many as 40 percent of votes could be cast via mail. Elections BC is also considering providing a face mask to every voter—not an easy thing to do in these days of short supply. Voters may each be handed their own pens, to take home, rather than have staff wipe down each pen after use. And to reduce election-day numbers, it expects to add more in-person early voting days.
    “Which adaptations are essential will to some extent depend on the state of the pandemic in our province at the time of the electoral event, and on the public health guidance of the Provincial Health Officer [Dr Bonnie Henry],” said Boegman.
    One traditional facet of campaigning will almost certainly be absent: Door knocking. But without trooping round the neighbourhood, how is a candidate supposed to get the signatures required to be even nominated? Asked an unnamed meeting participant: “Could this be done online?” Answered Boegman: “We have flagged this as an issue already, and we have no solution as yet.”
    Under the Election Act, the cabinet decides when to hold an election. However, once it has been called, Boegman can delay it because of special circumstances, said Elections BC communications director Andrew Watson in an email to Focus.
    For those still wanting to vote in person, Elections BC is ordering two-metre distancing, a 50-person limit in voting places, a preferred 5 square metres of open space per person, a maximum group size of 6, the provision of hand sanitizers, and increased cleaning of voting stations.
    The spacing requirements means that preferred voting places will be large—like school gymnasiums—and will have separate entrances and exits. Current distancing requirements are sure to be in effect during voting, said Boegman. “The population will likely not have sufficient immunity by next fall to rescind the distancing directive.”
     
    Russ Francis is convinced that Alberta’s recent decision to permit open-pit coal mines in the Foothills is based on the same implied, perverted logic used to justify BC’s $6 billion handout to LNG Canada: To boost jobs, we must wreck the planet
     
    Judith Lavoie
    Some rural residents feel plagued by neighbours who use their properties as dumping grounds for construction waste—and a council that takes little action.
     
    DAY AFTER DAY, for almost a decade, dump trucks have rolled onto a rural property in Metchosin to drop off piles of fill, changing the topography and driving copious complaints from neighbours exasperated by the industrial intrusion.
    Now, next door neighbour Jo-Anne Cote is hoping that, instead of trying to survive another summer of noise and dust, an order from the Agricultural Land Commission (ALR) to stop the fill dumping will offer respite.
    Cote said enjoyment of the acreage where she and her husband have lived for 34 years has been marred by activities at the neighbouring Sooke Road property—which she describes as “Mordor,” the volcanic plain from The Lord of the Rings.
    “It’s a dust bowl,” Cote said, describing how problems started when all the trees and shrubs were removed, ostensibly to build an airstrip to help with a farm operation about 10 years ago.
     

    Satellite image of the Cosburn property in Metchosin
     
    An application by owner Stan Cosburn then morphed into a plan for a turf farm. In 2011 the Agricultural Land Commission and District of Metchosin granted permits to dump fill on 2.7 hectares within the Agricultural Land Reserve and 3.6 hectares outside the ALR to improve farming capability.
    As construction in neighbouring Langford heated up, the trucks started arriving. But over the years, there has been no sign of a turf farm.
    “I finally came to the snapping point a year or so ago,” said Cote. “The noise was driving me insane all summer long…all you are hearing is heavy equipment and dump trucks and the beep-beep-beep of reversing vehicles and the squeaky bulldozer.” She was frustrated by the apparent lack of action despite numerous complaints.
    The 2011 turf farm notice-of-intent permit, which allowed the filling, expired July 2019 and, after Cosburn requested an extension and submitted a business plan, ALC staff visited the site in March.
    “There is no turf farm there now and they were still filling,” said Avtar Sundher, ALC director of operations. “The request for an extension was declined on April 9 this year and we told them to cease all fill activities on the ALR portion of the property and then to reclaim the site with a reclamation plan by a professional agrologist,” he said.
    The remediation plan must be submitted by July 31, and, if the plan is approved, work must be underway by October 31, said Sundher.
    Meanwhile, the municipality of Metchosin is looking at fitting the non-ALR portion of Cosburn’s property into the remediation plans so the entire area can be topped off with soil.
    Cosburn could not be contacted, but his application to the ALC describes the fill as “clean mineral soil and suitable organic matter” and, according to the municipality, he has abided by regulations. Since 2011 plans for the turf farm have been overseen by Madrone Environmental Services Ltd, a company hired by Cosburn.
    Soil deposit regulations have changed over the last two years as Metchosin, in common with other municipalities close to areas of rampant development, has tried to control amounts of fill—which usually consists of stumps, rocks and other material removed for building sites.
    “We are trying to tighten up our bylaws to negate some of the issues we have had in the past. We have had a lot of illegal dumping in general, but we have been trying to put the brakes on it,” said Councillor Sharie Epp.
    Construction waste, which can include material such as drywall, nails, asbestos or wiring is supposed to be taken to Hartland Landfill, but Metchosin residents fear it is sometimes ending up in unregulated dumps running under the radar.
    Adding to the suspicion that construction companies do not always follow the rules, piles of garbage bags of construction waste, which tested positive for asbestos, were dumped around the municipality earlier this year, leaving Metchosin on the hook for $5,000 in clean-up costs.
    Recently Metchosin changed the bylaw that used to allow each property owner to bring in 2,000 cubic metres of fill (soil, gravel, rock, sand), reducing it to a maximum of 250 cubic metres a year or 500 cubic metres on larger properties, and all requests for large deposits must go through council. Eighty cubic meters of fill can still be brought in without a permit if it’s not in the ALR or other sensitive areas. There are also fees attached. A deposit of 250 cubic metre of clean fill would cost $525.
    However, Metchosin is a small municipality with limited staff. Like other small  municipalities, its bylaw services are complaint driven and contracted to the Capital Regional District. With many large properties hidden from view, getting a grip on dumping is a game of whack-a-mole and some Metchosin residents believe the District has become a convenient place to dispose of development debris cheaply.
    The ALC order is a small victory for neighbours of the Sooke Road property, but some say it represents only the tip of a fill-dumping iceberg.
    Friction between those who live in Metchosin because of the green, rural environment and “free-thinkers” who want to live in an area where they believe they can do whatever they want on their own property is at the root of much of the conflict that ends up on the desks of Metchosin councillors.
    Nicole Shukin, a member of metchosinH2O, an “adhoc, but very active, group of environmentally-minded citizens,” said council seems reluctant to act, even when faced with evidence of illegal activities.
    “Residents who’ve been submitting formal complaints about illegal dumping have seriously lost confidence in our district’s willingness or ability to enforce its bylaws in a manner that would deter, rather than enable, large-scale and ongoing violations,” she said.
    Shukin described a shadow industry forcing the rural community to deal with unauthorized clearcutting, trucks using roads not designed for industrial use, and fears that wells and aquifers are being contaminated by construction waste that has not been inspected to ensure it is clean fill.
    “Literally mountains are being blasted to bits in Langford and it needs to go somewhere and it seems to be filling up the gullies and lowlands in many areas of Metchosin,” Shukin said.
    Ken Farquharson, vice-president of the Association for the Protection of Rural Metchosin noted that one problem is that the dumping will sometimes go on for years before council acts and the changed landscape is then accepted as un fait accompli.
    Councillor Andy MacKinnon, a biologist and forest ecologist, said council is addressing complaints, “but not to the satisfaction of residents.” Much of the action is in camera, he explained, because the problems deal with specific individuals and property issues. “But I do share the frustration of a lot of the residents in terms of what can be done in some of these situations. Rewriting the bylaws was an attempt to make it simpler to monitor and prosecute, but most of the infractions that have raised people’s ire are with people who simply pay no heed to the bylaws whatsoever,” MacKinnon said. Prosecutions, he noted, apart from the cost, require an extremely high standard of proof. “You can write better bylaws and, if people follow them you will get better practice, but if people pay no heed, it doesn’t matter whether your bylaws are good or not; it becomes difficult and expensive and uncertain to enforce,” he said.
    Shukin is a resident of La Bonne Road where neighbours complained for eight years about dumping on a property on Ash Mountain that is now the subject of legal action by the District.
     

    Private property on La Bonne Road on which fill has been dumped
     
    The La Bonne Road Residents Group, in a synopsis of complaints lodged with council between 2012 and 2016, list problems from illegal tree-cutting and unauthorized construction of greenhouses, to the dumping of “an estimated 10,000 cubic metres of soil mixed with construction debris, garbage, drywall.”
    In 2018, after the dumping on the property was halted, the gully was covered with boulders, and the municipality conducted soil testing on the property because of concerns by nearby residents that the aquifer and wells had been contaminated.
    Due to legal proceedings, however, lawyers say the results cannot be released. Legally, if tests revealed environmental concerns or health threats to nearby residents, they would have to be informed, said a spokesperson.
    Accepting fill can be lucrative for landowners who want to fill in gullies or flatten hills, with prices to dump clean fill ranging from $5 to $7 per cubic yard. And if property owners are willing to accept under-the-table demolition material, the savings on dump fees are substantial. A 2019 study conducted for Vancity found a dump truck load of mixed construction waste can cost between $1,100 and $1,400 to dispose of legally, but that some property owners are accepting loads for a $200 payment “despite the threat of fines that can reach as high as $10,000.”
    Mayor John Ranns said the concerns of some vocal residents do not reflect the current reality and bylaw changes mean there are now fewer problems with soil dumping—both legal and illegal—than in previous years.
    “It’s very frustrating. We do have illegal dumping, but not much. We have made numerous revisions to the soil deposit bylaw and, at the moment, it’s pretty much being adhered to,” he said. “There isn’t anything contaminated. It all has to be checked and verified now by qualified professionals. It has to meet proper profiles and we have to see the weighbill,” he said.
    Also, some property owners have created good farmland because soil has been brought in to fill gullies and top off rough forestland, added Ranns. “It’s not that all soil deposits are bad, it is just that there have been one or two people that have taken advantage of it,” he said.
    The issue could surface again over a 50-hectare Sooke Road property where an application last year for a soil recycling facility for up to 15,000 cubic metres of soil brought opposing residents out in force. The application for a Temporary Use Permit has been dropped, but, if the idea is resurrected, Ranns anticipates that residents could be asked to consider amenities, such as potential parkland with a soil recycling plant, versus private 10-acre lots.
    The property had a history of illegal dumping and, in 2016, a large fire was set in an effort to clean up the mess. That means a lot of suspicion has been generated, Ranns admitted, but the proponent, Brian Baker of Tri-X Excavating, has pointed out that material now coming onto the property is clean fill and it would be a waste to landfill it. “He’s going to be applying for industrial zoning on this property. He wants to do things legally,” said Ranns. “You can run it through a screener and then resell it. To me soil recycling is something that is quite badly needed in this region,” he said.
    Which comes back to how developers deal with rubble and soil from building sites—a question the ALC frequently faces near high development areas like Langford. “When you look at all the development in the area, digging into the ground for basements, there is all that dirt,” Sundher of the ALC said; “Wherever there is construction, especially residential or high rise buildings, there’s a big hole that is excavated and all that soil needs to go somewhere.”
     
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    Victoria still has no residential treatment beds for those coming out of short-term detox—yet the new therapeutic recovery program is undersubscribed.
     
    AS VICTORIA RESIDENTS ARE FACED WITH DAILY EVIDENCE of the ravages of addiction, especially when combined with homelessness or mental health problems, there are calls for more treatment beds in the community.
    Victoria’s grim tally of overdose deaths, combined with neighbourhood crime and confrontations as people move from the Pandora Avenue and Topaz Park camps into hotels, is forcing addiction and mental health problems into the spotlight.
    In the first four months of the year, more than 60 people in the Island Health region died of overdoses, including 28 in Victoria. Last month, a public health overdose advisory was issued by Island Health as the number of fatal and non-fatal overdoses grew because of increasing toxicity of the street drug supply.
    Niki Ottosen, who hands out sandwiches to people living in Beacon Hill Park and runs the Backpack Project, which delivers backpacks filled with necessities to people in need, believes the missing piece in the program to move people into hotel rooms, in an effort to stop COVID-19 spreading through the street population, is new detox beds. No new detox or treatment beds have been announced, she noted.
     

    Nikki Ottonsen, founder of the Backpack Project in Victoria (Photo: Backpack Project)
     
    “I’ve had to bring people to detox. It’s seven days and then they go into 30-day stabilization, but sometimes they get out of detox, after seven days withdrawing, [and] they don’t have space for you to go to 30-day detox, so then you have to go back out to wherever you were and hope you don’t have a relapse before they have a space for you,” Ottosen said. “That is the huge missing piece. We are setting people up to fail if we think we are just going to put them up in hotel rooms, or maybe get them into modular housing later, without extra supports in our community,” she said.
    Kelly Reid, Island Health director of mental health and addiction services agrees more services are needed. The goal of Island Health is to provide a continuum of care for people with addictions, but, according to Reid, the answer is not as simple as supplying more treatment beds. “It sounds like a reasonably simple question and then you dig into it and it is so complicated,” Reid said.
    People with addictions and mental health problems need different supports to create a readiness to go into treatment, he explained, and having basic needs met—whether housing, food or access to a doctor—can lead to more interest in recovery. “It’s not easy and when you are living on the street and having to work so hard to even find food and the basics of life, it is particularly hard to go through a treatment process,” he said.
    Reid believes that while replacement drug therapies and the slow move to a safe supply of drugs should help set the stage for the next step, providing a safe place to live is vital in getting people to a place where they are willing to make changes to their lives. “I really believe that when people have housing and they have nutrition and they have hope and they have social connections that they can imagine a different path forward,” he said.
    Usually people who make the decision to go drug-free can get into a detox bed within four or five days, Reid said, but, if you are not seen as high urgency, the wait can be one or two weeks.
    From there, some people go to one of the three “supportive recovery homes” in the community, including two for women and the 22-bed Douglas Street Community 90-day supportive recovery program run by the Portland Hotel Society. Such facilities offer “low to moderate supports” to newly detoxed substance-abusers as opposed to the intensive therapies offered in residential treatment programs, which are not available in Victoria. Financial help is sometimes available for people to access ones on the mainland.
    Some of those seeking recovery need to go to a fully-staffed stabilization unit for a month. Others, following their 7-day detox, simply go home and are linked to counsellors.
    Reid admits there can be a gap between programs, which is why increasing capacity is part of the goal. “We want to be able to provide treatment as soon as somebody is ready to accept it, and we are not there yet. There are still waits in some parts of the system and sometimes the opportunity passes,” he said. “In the ideal world I guess if we had a residential treatment facility in Victoria it would add to our continuum. It’s one that would be very welcome,” Reid said.
    But even available beds do not guarantee that people will be willing to complete a tough recovery program.
    New Roads, a therapeutic recovery centre in View Royal run by Our Place, offers spaces to people who have experienced homelessness, those who are leaving prison, or people who are willing to enter the two-year program as an alternative to jail.
    The 50-bed centre opened in late 2018, but currently has only about 20 residents, partially because of COVID-19 complications, but also because people are sometimes reluctant to make such a long-term commitment.
    Grant McKenzie, Our Place communications director, said persuading people to make the leap from detox into therapeutic recovery is more difficult than initially imagined. “We are dealing with a very damaged population and it can take a long time to get them to the point where they are ready to go into therapeutic recovery,” he said. Even those who enter the program, do not necessarily see it through.
    The centre accepts people who would have been sentenced to three months or more in jail, but often, after three months of getting food, exercise and sufficient sleep, they believe they have recovered and leave.
    “Within 24 hours they are back using. There’s a challenge there that we are working on, but it’s not as simple as saying ‘here’s a recovery bed and off you go,’” McKenzie said. “You are dealing with a lot of trauma and abuse and you’re trying to dig down and get people to look inward and grow,” McKenzie said.
    If people stay for two years, the chance of success is about 70 percent, but, if they stay for only three months, success rates plummet.
    Mackenzie said that in addition to services now available in Greater Victoria, there is a great need to put more resources into mental health. “We really need mental health supports where people are assessed and the medications they are on are assessed. There are a lot of people out there with undiagnosed schizophrenia or undiagnosed bipolar and they are self-medicating with street drugs,” he said.
    In addition, a growing problem is the number of people who have brain damage after overdosing and being brought back by Naloxone.
    While some people do well in a home where medications can be monitored, others would thrive in a locked institution with 24/7 supervision, said McKenzie, adding that, because of past abuses in mental health institutions, it is a difficult concept to accept.
    “It probably wouldn’t be [someone’s] choice to go in there, which is what makes it so controversial, but I really think you could save lives,” he said.
    For a list of the types of assistance the BC government provides substance users, see this site. For withdrawal and detox services at Island Health, start here.
     
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    May 12, 2020
    Or will pandemic-induced debt just make it worse?
     
    AS OUTREACH WORKERS tick names off lists of campers at Topaz Park and Pandora Avenue, trying to bring order to the hurried plan to move homeless people into hotels, others are drifting in to the area, hoping to be included in the relocation.
    Although Topaz and Pandora, with about 360 people, are the outward face of homelessness in Victoria, tents can be found scattered around Beacon Hill Park, along side-streets, and outside Rock Bay Landing shelter.
    The shifting numbers are among the complications faced by the Coalition to End Homelessness and its partners as they conduct assessments before moving people into hotels, where they can practice physical distancing and self-isolation, in an effort to stop COVID-19 from gaining a toehold in the homeless population.
    A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing said in an emailed statement that efforts are being made to reach as many people as possible.
    “We’re working across government and with all partners to implement extraordinary measures to protect everyone in BC from the risks of two public health emergencies—the fentanyl poisoning crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re working on an accelerated timeline to keep people safe and connected to the care they need through these crises and beyond,” she said.
    It is uncertain how many people in Greater Victoria are in need of homes. Some are newly homeless and others, who were previously living under the radar, are finding it difficult to make a living from binning, bottle collecting, the sex trade or panhandling in today’s era of closed shops and restaurants.
    “The numbers are crushing,” said Reverend Al Tysick of the Dandelion Society, one of the partners in the relocation effort.
    “It is going to be difficult for the Coalition to End Homelessness to house everyone. They’re going to do their best, but to do it in this short time is extremely difficult,” he said.
     

    Reverend Al Tysick of the Dandelion Society
     
    The last homeless count found 1,500 people in Victoria without stable housing, but, over the last year, Tysick has seen a spike.
    “Rents have gone up, people have been kicked out and they haven’t been able to find a place. [Rents are] well over what we’re paying on welfare and disability,” he noted.
    Numbers then bumped up again this spring after shelters were forced to reduce capacity when they could not maintain the prescribed pandemic distancing.
    The Province, under the Emergency Program Act, has leased 324 rooms in five hotels in Victoria and set up a 45-bed emergency response centre at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre. On May 10 the ministry website showed 106 people from Topaz and Pandora had moved to new accommodation.
    However, it has been difficult finding experienced staff to provide wrap-around supports and sufficient spaces in Victoria. Shane Simpson, Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction has extended the deadline for moving people from Topaz and Pandora from May 9 to May 20.
    “While we have been working with the hotel sector and service delivery partners towards the May 9 target in Victoria, it is now clear that more time is needed to ensure each person leaving Topaz Park and Pandora Avenue is moved into the accommodation that best meets their needs,” Simpson said in a news release.
    “No one will be asked to leave these encampments without being offered a suitable temporary housing option,” he said.
    Simpson also acknowledged that there are people outside Topaz and Pandora who need housing help. “We are not ignoring them. This discussion will continue,” he said,
    In total there are more than 2,750 spaces across the Province for people without homes, according to BC Housing.
    Apart from the immediate problems of finding space for the fluctuating number of homeless people, the major question is how they will all be housed once the pandemic is over.
    The Province and City of Victoria have pledged that, after the three-month contract with hotel owners is up, no one will be forced back into homelessness.
    There is speculation that the Province could buy some of the hotels, which were almost empty after tourism ground to a halt. Advocates are also pushing for construction of modular housing, spread through southern Vancouver Island communities, while the provincial emphasis is on the goal of building 4,900 new supportive homes in BC over the next decade.
    “That work will happen in the weeks and months ahead, but the priority now is on the immediate health and safety of people experiencing homelessness in these public health emergencies,” said an emailed statement from a Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing spokeswoman.
    In Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver, where 261 people had moved by May 10, activist Chrissy Brett, a veteran of Victoria’s 2015/2016 courthouse lawn camp, was fielding numerous questions about potential housing from camp residents.
    Like other advocates, she believes that, provided adequate supports are in place, the plan to move people into hotels or community centres will help. But she worries about those left out or those dealing with past trauma and addictions who are unable to adjust to life in a hotel where there are rules to be followed.
     

    Activist Chrissy Brett
     
    A possible model would be a type of refugee-style camp run by organizations such as the Red Cross, Brett suggested. “It’s not that I’m advocating that tent cities are where it is at, but, if you look at San Diego or San Francisco or Seattle, they are now creating these sort of camps,” she said. “They are made to live in with showers and bathrooms and everything people need to live properly. Why are we not looking at those as short-term measures?”
    Brett would also like to see housing for Indigenous people, seniors and those not battling addictions made available at sites such as Woodwynn Farm, the Central Saanich property bought by the Province in 2018 for use as a therapeutic recovery/training centre (it does not offer housing on site).
    Tysick would love to believe that, after decades of neglect, the homelessness problem is about to be solved.
    But realism kicks in.
    “I am waiting to see this magic wand,” said Tysick, pointing out that, for decades, the problem has been ignored or, at best, chipped at around the edges.
    “Let’s be really clear the only reason this is being done is COVID-19. Period. End of story,” he said.
    But, when this crisis is over, will attitudes and political will have changed?
    Tim Richter, president and founder of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said modern-day homelessness was created by federal government policies in the late 1980s and 1990s.
    “It wasn’t on purpose obviously, but it’s a product of the policy choices that were made when the federal government withdrew from affordable housing investments almost completely and cut social transfers (to the Provinces) that funded welfare and health care,” Richter said.
     

    Tim Richter, president and founder of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness
     
    Now, organizations working to fix the problem need the support of the provincial and federal governments and a more ambitious, more aggressive investment in housing than Canada has seen in recent decades, he said.
    Change will come if the public demands it, Richter believes. “We are in a really unique window of time right now where the public is feeling what many people experiencing homelessness feel. They feel isolated and they understand that housing is healthcare, so they are much more empathetic to the plight of people experiencing homelessness,” he said.
    “In a crisis like this, things that, on a policy basis, may have seemed a little crazy a month ago, aren’t crazy any more. I think big, bold changes in social policy are possible,” he said. This is the time for people to speak out, Richter said.
    “Canadians need to say we are not prepared to accept homelessness of any of our neighbours as inevitable and we’re not prepared that people should be at this sort of risk from a pandemic for no other reason than they don’t have a place to live,” he said.
    However, there is a possible flip side to government attitudes post-pandemic, said Tysick, who wonders what will happen when bills for the Canada-wide pandemic financial aid start to roll in.
    “Look at the amount of money the government is putting out for COVID across the country, not only for homelessness, but for unemployment and business and other initiatives,” Tysick said.
    “I am proud of our governments for doing it, but, once it’s over, will they say ‘yes, let’s build two or three buildings for 400 people.’ I don’t think so. I think we are going to be hearing about the debt and how difficult it’s going to be to pay off that debt for the next 10 years,” he said.
     
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Ross Crockford
    May 6, 2020
    Langford waives public hearings, a practice threatening to become common across the region
     
    THE CITY OF LANGFORD is already famous around the capital region for its rapid-fire, debate-free Council meetings, but it seemed to set a new speed record on Monday night (May 4). In a half-hour, socially-distanced conference call, Langford’s Council approved a parks maintenance contract, a five-year financial plan, an alternate property-tax collection scheme — and gave final approval to several contentious developments, without holding a public hearing for any of them.
    The biggest of those developments involved 50 acres of mostly forested land on either side of the Trans-Canada Highway and immediately east of the Leigh Road overpass, once belonging to the reclusive Victoria property owner Clara Kramer. Langford’s Council voted unanimously on Monday to rezone the Kramer lands as a “mixed-use employment” district, permitting anything from apartments and offices to car dealerships and liquor stores.
     

    On May 4, Langford rezoned 50 acres containing Garry oaks, a wetland and a mobile-home park, to permit commercial development — but without a public hearing
     

    Langford's official notice
     
    Letters of opposition appeared in the agenda package for Langford councillors, however. TLC The Land Conservancy warned that the property included a wetland, and a significant stand of engangered Garry oaks. But the most troubling messages came from elderly residents of a trailer park south of the highway, afraid that the rezoning and development would force them to move, and upset that they couldn’t voice their concerns at a regular public hearing.
    “Most of the residents have either vision or hearing problems or no computers so it makes it difficult to keep informed of what’s going on during the meeting,” one resident wrote. “I think it’s very unfair to go ahead with this meeting without giving all of us a chance to be involved.”
    “50 percent of my neighbours are in their 80s and 90s and feel the same, the difficulty of moving represents a nightmare,” wrote another, asking the Council to only rezone the section north of the highway and defer rezoning the trailer park for several years. “Please consider my suggestion, and let us die in our own homes.”
    Langford’s councillors approved nearly all the rezonings during their phone-in meeting without any comment, but Denise Blackwell, the chair of Langford’s planning and zoning committee, did say something about this one: “I’d just like to add that it’s too bad we couldn’t have this in public because of the circumstances. But based on our information from the province on how to conduct these, and the urgency with regard to some of the questions that people are asking, we need to go ahead at this time.”
    (Langford Council doesn’t webcast its meetings, but you can hear how quickly it approves rezoning bylaws from a recording of part of the May 4 phone-in meeting linked here.)
     

    Letters (above and below) from TriWay residents. “Let us die in our own homes,” wrote one, pleading with Langford to defer rezoning of the trailer park.

     
    Public hearings are arguably one of the most important procedures conducted by municipal councils. As the province’s online guide to local government notes, land-use decisions by elected municipal officials affect entire communities as well as individual properties; consequently, “In order to balance their broad powers, elected officials are required to provide the opportunity for residents and other interested parties to share their views on [rezoning] bylaws through a statutory public hearing process.” Several B.C. court decisions have deemed public hearings a “quasi-judicial” function of local governments, requiring councils to be impartial and adhere to rules of procedural fairness.
    But normal council meetings or public hearings are impossible under COVID-19. In March, after the province declared a state of emergency, public safety minister Mike Farnworth issued an order allowing councils to hold electronic or phone-in meetings. He failed to include public hearings, though, which drew some councils’ attention to a rarely-used provision of the Local Government Act:
    464 (2) A local government may waive the holding of a public hearing on a proposed zoning bylaw if
    (a) an official community plan is in effect for the area that is subject to the zoning bylaw, and
    (b) the bylaw is consistent with the official community plan.
    On April 4, the deputy minister of municipal affairs encouraged local governments “to consider whether it may be appropriate to waive public hearings,” and to “be creative in moving local government business forward.” Langford took that advice and ran with it: on April 6, it passed a sweeping motion directing staff “to waive all Public Hearings for any zoning bylaws which receive 1st reading on, or before, the World Health Organization rescinds the COVID-19 pandemic.”
    Last Friday, May 1, Farnworth finally issued an order permitting electronic public hearings during the province’s state of emergency, currently slated to last until May 12 (a date likely far closer than the WHO rescinding in Langford’s motion). But it seems Langford will continue to waive hearings in most cases. “We have to be respectful of our needs to protect the public and Council and staff from unnecessary exposure,” said Matthew Baldwin, Langford’s director of planning. “But secondly,” he added, “there really is no material difference to not doing the public hearings.”
    As Baldwin noted, under the Local Government Act, the municipality is required to post two notices of the waiver in a newspaper, as it would for a public hearing. (It does not, however, have to post a notice on the property itself, saving the developer several hundred dollars.) “The public is still aware that Council is considering the bylaws. They’re still aware that Council is going to talk about it on this particular night. And they can address Council in the public participation part of the Council meeting.” (Langford allowed public participation during its May 4 phone-in meeting, but no residents called in to speak to any of the rezonings on the agenda.)
    Baldwin said that if a rezoning requires an amendment to Langford’s official community plan (OCP), it will hold a “delegated” public hearing under the Local Government Act, in which councillor Blackwell will meet personally with any concerned residents. But few such hearings will be necessary, because Langford’s generous OCP has anticipated dramatic growth.
    Langford was able to waive a hearing for the Kramer lands because they were already designated “Mixed Use Employment Centre” in the OCP. Similarly, on May 4, Langford’s Council approved rezoning a lot on a cul-de-sac of single-family houses at 2681 Claude Road for a six-storey, 35-unit apartment building because that part of town is identified as “City Centre” on the OCP, defined as including “a wide range of high-density housing.” It also approved rezoning a “one- and two-family residential” lot at 595 Hansen Avenue to accommodate seven new townhouses — despite numerous letters and photos from neighbours showing current issues with parking, traffic and hazards for pedestrians — because Langford’s OCP said that area would support “a range of low and medium density housing.”
    In the past, Blackwell and Baldwin have told FOCUS that few residents participate in Langford’s public hearings because the City has resolved most issues raised by neighbours earlier in the development process. The letters tell a different story.
     

    Without a public hearing, Langford approved seven townhomes for this one-house lot, even though residents sent photos showing already crammed on-street parking and hazards for pedestrians (below)
     

     
    So far, most other B.C. municipalities have been comparatively reluctant to waive public hearings. The City of Delta, for example, has directed its staff to “recommend” waiving hearings for rezonings consistent with its OCP — but only if they are “routine in nature and where Delta has not received a substantial volume of correspondence in opposition.”
    On April 2, City of Victoria mayor Lisa Helps expressed interest in waiving public hearings for specific projects, especially those involving affordable housing, but City staff presented a report stating that “a decision to waive a public hearing must be made by Council for each application individually,” and merely recommended “exploring this potential option” in future reports.
    Locally, the most vocal debate about waiving public hearings so far has been heard in Saanich, which held a phone-in council meeting of its own on May 4.
    Saanich staff put two developments on the agenda, the first rezoning a single-family lot to permit four residences at 3281 Cedar Hill Road, the second rezoning to allow subdivision of a single-family lot at 4595 Cordova Bay Road. Staff suggested waiving hearings for both because the rezonings were consistent with goals in Saanich’s OCP to have “a range of housing types” in neighbourhoods, and “limited infill” housing.
    Both rezonings provoked letters of opposition. But the proposed waivers also prompted several neighbourhood associations to write to Saanich Council, pointing out that whether a project is “consistent with” an OCP can be a subject of considerable debate. They warned that waiving public hearings for these rezonings could set a worrying precedent, one that would “circumvent basic principles of natural justice and procedural fairness,” and called on Saanich to postpone the hearings, or come up with ways to hold them electronically.
    Saanich councillor Colin Plant, who said he was “shocked” to learn that it was even possible to waive public hearings, moved that both developments go to hearings, electronic if necessary. “It does fit the [official community] plan, and yet we have heard from the public they don’t feel that it necessarily does,” he said, regarding the first rezoning. “So as such, I want to hear from the public and have a fulsome discussion, even if it is in a new way of doing business.”
    “For me the public need to have input into these projects, and in the past, we’ve seen how public input has created a better project,” said councillor Judy Brownoff. “True democracy, it’s hard and challenging, but we really need to hear and listen to our public before we make any final decisions.”
    Councillor Karen Harper pushed back a bit, saying, “There’s a notion that the lack of a public hearing means a lack of public input, and I don’t agree with that notion. We receive input all the time and in all sorts of ways.” In the end, though, Saanich Council voted unanimously to send both rezonings to a public hearing, even though staff had not yet figured out how to conduct one electronically. Saanich CAO Paul Thorkelsson told councillors he would likely have a report on that next week.
    Ross Crockford is a Victoria journalist and former lawyer.
     
    UPDATE: On June 1, Langford’s council passed a motion rescinding their April 6 motion to waive public hearings, and henceforth will conduct electronic or phone-in hearings like most other municipalities. A staff report recommending rescinding the April measure said:
    Although waiving a Public Hearing and holding electronic Council meetings affords the public additional opportunity to address Council on the topic of a Public Hearing, the practice of waiving Public Hearings is sufficiently novel to the Public that it is the cause for some concern. Recent press suggests that the public expects that they will have an opportunity to be heard at a specific Public Hearing. In this instance, it may be prudent to give the public this opportunity. 
    It’s unclear if “recent press” referred to the above article: the recommendation was approved without further comment from the staff or councillors.
     
    Judith Lavoie
    May 3, 2020
     
    ANXIETY IS RIPPLING THROUGH Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood as residents hear through the unofficial grapevine that about 80 percent of the more than 350 of those living in tents in Topaz Park and Pandora Avenue will be coming to hotels in their community.
    The area, which is home to many families with children, already has two shelters and several supportive housing complexes. Residents have, as a result, experienced fallout from mental health and addiction problems in the past. Recent incidents around Topaz Park, where crime spiked after the camp was set up, have added to their concerns.
    It’s a delicate balance for both residents and those who have been living in tents since shelter space was reduced because of COVID-19.
    While there is widespread support for dismantling the camps, providing adequate housing, and helping those struggling with mental health and addictions, questions are being raised about what help is available to the receiving community.
     

    Rock Bay Landing, located in the Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood
     
    Residents in the Burnside-Gorge area neighbourhood recently discovered that four out of five sites for hotel relocations are in their area—although, according to Michelle Peterson, no one has reached out to the community to offer specific information or security help.
    Peterson, a long-time Burnside-Gorge resident, told Focus, “Every single one of the people I have talked to, no question, agree that these people need to be housed. That is not an issue. It is more the impact and the lack of support for the communities.”
    At a virtual meeting that included Island Health representatives, Peterson was told that many of the campers are feeling anxious and uncertain about the move, so will be helped by psychiatrists and mental health experts.
    “I told them I am hearing very similar feelings from residents in my community and there’s no supports for them. What are they going to do to support the neighbours?” she asked. Island Health has agreed to take the concerns to their executive, Peterson said.
    “This is a crisis and I think everyone understands that, but what people are worried about is what is the plan to help mitigate any negative impact, because we know that there is a percentage of that population who can be quite dangerous. They’re the ones who have active, significant mental health issues or active substance abuse issues or they’re violent to themselves or others,” she said.
    Given the crime spike in the Topaz neighbourhood, residents are asking for increased security, possibly additional policing, and assurances that 24/7 supervision will amount to more than someone sitting at a reception desk, Peterson said.
    BC Housing is not confirming which hotels in Victoria are providing the 324 rooms, but emphasized that people will be assessed and then connected to wrap-around care including doctors, outreach workers and psychosocial supports. Harm reduction supplies will be provided to people with substance use disorders.
    “BC Housing is engaged in active and ongoing conversations with neighbourhood and community associations in Victoria to raise awareness and provide information about our response to the pandemic and how we are assisting those who are vulnerable,” said a Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing spokeswoman in an emailed response to questions from Focus.
    “While we typically connect with neighbours and the public prior to new services opening in the community for those who are vulnerable, we recognize the need to act quickly in the current context. The hotels are temporary and will be vital to mitigating the spread of this virus, protecting those who are vulnerable and the broader community.”
    Peterson said a BC Housing representative is planning to meet with residents, but, so far, no one has come up with a mitigation plan and the lack of information is creating suspicion and polarization.
    “I understand why they don’t want to disclose the location, but, when they don’t provide information to the community and they stay silent and don’t reach out, it creates a significant lack of trust,” she said. “Then what happens is it creates more of a divide, more hostility, more conflict between the neighbourhood and the homeless population which is not what we want,” she said.
    By April 30, 51 people had been moved out of camps and into hotel rooms, with the Province paying the tab. The final cost will depend on the length of time the hotels are used, according to the ministry.
    The contracts with hotels are below the market rental rate, but are providing income for hotel owners at a time when COVID-19 has brought the tourism industry to a grinding halt.
    “We have not forced hotels to accept people. To date, all hotel spaces that BC Housing has secured have been freely negotiated with hotel owners without the use of orders,” wrote the spokeswoman. “These contracts are producing positive outcomes for everyone, including hotel owners, who are getting a fair deal, and their employees, some of whom are being contracted to help operate hotels.” BC Housing has committed to “professional and rigorous cleaning” of all the buildings once the contracts end and will cover the cost of any damages.
    However, for Peterson and other Burnside-Gorge residents, the remaining question is how much help the neighbourhood will be receiving.
    “There needs to be a plan on how to mitigate the impact in the short term, because we know there are going to be impacts,” she said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    April 25, 2020
    New pandemic guidelines giving medical professionals and pharmacists flexibility to prescribe and distribute drugs to those suffering from addiction need to be put into practice more quickly in order to keep everyone safe, say advocates.
     
    THE ALREADY-TOXIC STREET DRUG SUPPLY in BC is becoming increasingly poisonous and expensive as borders close and supplies from China and the US shrink.
    But, for most people suffering from addiction, quitting is not an immediate option and, although a growing amount of basement concoctions are being sold on the street, the urge to avoid withdrawal overrides all else.
    “You will have to go out, no matter what, and do what you have to do to get that substance,” said Guy Felicella, who spent decades as a heroin addict living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and is now clean, an advocate for a safe drug supply and a peer clinical adviser for BC Centre on Substance Use.
     

    Guy Felicella, right, an advocate for a safe drug supply (Photo courtesy guyfelicella.com)
     
    As COVID-19 physical distancing rules clear the streets, it is more difficult to make money from panhandling, bottle collecting or the sex trade. Advocates worry that people with addictions are struggling to find alternate ways to finance their habits.
    There is also concern that those searching for drugs are at risk of both contracting and spreading COVID-19.
    So it is to everyone’s advantage that new guidelines will give prescribers and pharmacists flexibility to prescribe and distribute drugs such as hydromorphone, stimulants, benzodiazepines, and substances to manage alcohol and nicotine withdrawal, according to Felicella and other advocates.
    Federal relaxation of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act was followed last month by innovative provincial guidelines designed to address two overlapping public health emergencies—the opioid crisis, fuelled by fentanyl, which has killed more than 5,000 British Columbians since January 2016 and, now, COVID-19.
    The new rules allow physicians and nurse practitioners to prescribe the drugs to people at risk of contracting COVID-19, those with a history of ongoing substance use, people at high risk of withdrawal or overdose and youth under the age of 19 who provide informed consent, provided there is additional education. Costs are covered by provincial PharmaCare.
    Rapid access addiction clinics can also provide assessments, and phone visits to prescribers and pharmacists are encouraged. The guidelines allow home delivery by pharmacy employees, pharmacists can extend, renew and transfer prescriptions and, in some cases, people will be allowed up to three weeks supply instead of having to go to the pharmacy daily.
    “We want people not to have to go into pharmacies every day, which puts themselves and other people at risk when they should be self-isolating,” said Judy Darcy, Minister of Mental health and Addiction. “We are trying to flatten the curve at the same time as stopping overdoses and these really unprecedented measures are meant to do both of those things,” she said.
    The guidelines were put in place as fast as possible and a massive effort is now underway to get the word out to all health professionals, Darcy said.
    However, implementation is slow as some physicians and pharmacists are not yet fully informed about the changes.
    It is frustrating, said Leslie McBain, co-founder of Moms Stop The Harm. “What you had was rollout of a good policy that I hope will continue to progress and evolve, but the infrastructure was not out there,” McBain said.
    She added, “If I was a person searching for safe drugs because I didn’t want to go out and buy them on the street, there was no way to figure out that pathway.”
    Bernie Pauly, University of Victoria School of Nursing professor and a scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use research, said it is essential prescribers familiarize themselves with the changes. “[They] need to not only know and understand the guidelines, they need to do it really quickly because people’s lives are at stake,” she said.
    Pauly and other advocates are anxious to ensure the changes stay in place after federal exemptions reach their sunset clause at the end of September.
    “I would hope we are able to show the benefits of this,” said Pauly, who also wants to see decriminalization of personal possession—something recommended last year by provincial health officer Dr Bonnie Henry.
    Felicella wants to see a further step with pharmaceutical grade heroin, fentanyl and cocaine made available without prescription.
    “What we have today is a medical version and it’s a great start and will help many people, but it is not where we want to stay,” he said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Judith Lavoie
    April 3, 2020
    With an estimated 1,500 homeless people in Victoria, increasingly worried officials are trying to find enough facilities to house them in a way that allows physical distancing.
     
    THERE IS INCREASING URGENCY to move the jumble of tents on Pandora Avenue into the safer environments of Topaz Park and Royal Athletic Park, as health professionals and advocates watch anxiously for signs of COVID-19 spreading to Victoria’s homeless population.
    So far, no members of the group, many of whom have compromised immune systems, have tested positive, but the risk is obvious. With parks regarded as a temporary solution, the overriding question is whether the virus will hold off long enough to allow indoor accommodation—where greater physical distancing is possible—to be found for hundreds of people.
    Tents sprung up along the 900-block of Pandora Avenue, outside Our Place, after drop-ins closed and shelter spaces were reduced because of the need for physical distancing.
     

    Tents on Pandora Avenue. (Photo by Ross Crockford)
     
    Many of those camping on Pandora are using Our Place services such as washrooms, paramedic services, and meals—which are handed out at the gate in disposable containers.
    The City, BC Housing, Island Health, Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness and the Dandelion Society are working together to move people initially into the specified parks, which have washrooms and running water and will allow for physical distancing.
    The plan to use parks as temporary campsites has brought objections from some neighbours who worry about drug use and increased crime.
    But the possibility of infection in the current crowded environments should concern everyone, not just the unhoused population, said Reverend Al Tysick, founder of the Victoria Dandelion Society. “This doesn’t just affect [this group]…We are all in this together. This epidemic does not distinguish between the rich and the poor, the drug addict and the woman in the nursing home,” Tysick said.
    “Once it hits our [homeless] community it’s going to spread like wildfire. People are already sick when they move into the community. This is serious stuff. Much more serious than we have ever seen before,” he said.
    It has not been possible to persuade Pandora campers of the importance of staying at a safe distance from each other, said Our Place communications director Grant McKenzie. It is difficult to explain social distancing to a group living in precarious circumstances, who are already dealing with losses from the opioid crisis, McKenzie said.
    “Many people here are suffering from addiction or using opioids, so they are really just looking at their day-to-day survival. Where is my next meal coming from? Where am I sleeping tonight? They don’t have the luxury of worrying about COVID-19, which is why social distancing is very difficult,” he said.
    Royal Athletic Park [see update in Comments] will be set up for 80 people with addictions or mental health problems, who are likely to need a higher level of service, but one delay is finding available front-line staff. “We are working as hard and as fast as we can,” said Mayor Lisa Helps at one of her daily briefings. “In a public health emergency, no one should be living outside. Period,” she said.
    “COVID-19 will hit the unsheltered population at some time,” Helps said, echoing the concerns of Chief Medical Officer Richard Stanwick who has emphasized that homeless people must have the opportunity to meet social distancing requirements and that, if they are displaying symptoms, they must be able to isolate themselves. 
    A federal grant of more than $1.3-million will be added to programs to address homelessness; and a search is on to find indoor alternatives to parks. 
    As of April 3, 102 homeless, who are healthy and do not require a high level of support, had been moved into motel rooms. Others, who were previously camping in Topaz Park, will remain there until indoor accommodation can be found.
    Ideally, that search should include premises in neighbouring municipalities as the downtown core attracts people from all over the region and several of Victoria’s facilities have already been rejected as unsuitable, said Helps. She acknowledged that 80 spaces at Royal Athletic Park will not be sufficient to meet the needs.
    Meanwhile, there seem to be more tents on Pandora than ever. And the numbers of facilities in motels and parks so far arranged do not add up to anywhere near the 1,525 homeless people found in the 2018 count in Greater Victoria.

    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
     
    Ross Crockford
    March 31, 2020
    Some doctors say we must test widely to find all carriers of the coronavirus. British Columbia isn’t doing that.
     

    ON MARCH 16, as many countries rapidly expanded their social-distancing measures to combat spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the associated disease COVID-19, the director-general of the World Health Organization told them that they needed to do more. 
    “The most effective way to prevent infections and save lives is breaking the chains of transmission. And to do that, you must test and isolate,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. And we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected. We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test. Test every suspected case.”
    Canada generally, and British Columbia in particular, claims to be following that advice. B.C. health minister Adrian Dix says the province conducts around 3,500 tests for COVID-19 every day. According to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, by March 31 the province had conducted 43,229 tests — 8,458 per million residents, a testing rate better than the 8,152 per million conducted by South Korea, considered a model country for managing the crisis.
    But some say that’s still not enough if we want accurate data about the prevalence of the virus, and hope to identify and isolate carriers who are only experiencing mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.
     

    A coronavirus testing laboratory in Leeds, UK (Credit: HM Treasury)
     
     Estimates of the number of such asymptomatic carriers varies greatly. One study of the notorious Diamond Princess cruise ship found that half of its passengers who tested positive for COVID-19 showed no symptoms. A recent study of transmission of the virus in China said that 86% of the infections there went undocumented — meaning that for every one person who tested positive, another six carried the virus but weren’t identified. “This high proportion of undocumented infections, many of whom were likely not severely symptomatic, appears to have facilitated the rapid spread of the virus throughout China,” the researchers said.
    Consequently, some argue that the only way to catch those asymptomatic carriers is to test healthy as well as sick people, like Iceland has done. As of April 1, Iceland had conducted 19,516 tests of its 364,000 citizens, or 5.3% of its population, the highest testing rate in the world. “The virus had a much, much wider spread in the community than we would have assumed, based on the screening of high-risk people,” said Kári Stefánsson, a neurologist and head of the Reykjavik-based biopharmaceutical company deCode genetics. Iceland has identified 63 positive cases for every 1,000 tests, a rate of 6.3%. British Columbia, on the other hand, has only turned up 23 positives for every 1,000 tests.
    Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C.’s provincial health officer, told FOCUS at a March 28 press conference that the province is testing some asymptomatic people — if it’s tracking the source of an outbreak, for example — but otherwise it’s concentrating tests on workers in the health-care system and long-term care homes, and people being admitted to hospital, to ensure that COVID-19 sufferers are separated from other patients. “A broad testing of well people in our community right now is not what we are going to be doing,” she said. “That is the strategy we will be looking at if and when we come to the downside of our curve, when we’re looking again at introductions coming into B.C. from other places. That’s part of the strategy that would be at that phase of the epidemic. But certainly not right now.”
    What’s more troubling is the fact that B.C.’s testing regime is also bypassing people who areshowing symptoms of COVID-19. On March 23, the CBC reported that at least 11 attendees at a memorial service in Vancouver were experiencing symptoms, and though some were told by doctors that they likely had the virus, they still didn't qualify for testing. 
    On March 28, Dr. Sean Wormsbecker, an emergency-room physician at New Westminster’s Royal Columbia hospital, posted a video (embedded below) expressing his frustration that “based on our current resources, we are very much undertesting the population.” He said he saw several ill patients that day who likely had COVID-19, but because they displayed stable lung function, he followed the Ministry of Health’s protocol and sent them home without testing. “And that scares me,” Wormsbecker said, concerned that such patients wouldn’t self-isolate because they didn’t know that they had the virus. He also said failure to test those patients means B.C. is “low-balling” its numbers, and that we’re not copying the nations that have identified carriers to flatten their rates of infection. “We can’t use those countries like Singapore or [South] Korea as a benchmark for what we can expect to come.”
     
     

    “I actually don’t agree with that,” Henry said on March 30, when asked about Wormsbecker’s comments. “Having been on the front lines with my colleagues in public health who are actually talking to these people, who are at home and who are self-isolating, most people are absolutely doing what we need them to do.” As she explained, the province’s testing strategyhas been to concentrate on the people most likely to have the disease, and those most likely to need hospital care. “And we are still maintaining the contact tracing, we’re talking with people who have this, who have mild enough illness that they’re able to stay at home. For the most part, that is working.”
    Strategy aside, the province is also likely limiting tests to conserve its supplies for the peak of the crisis. (FOCUS asked the Ministry of Health what’s holding up wider-scale testing, but the Ministry hasn’t replied.) Governments around the world are in a rush — and sometimes bidding wars — for the nasal swabs and chemical reagents used in test kits, and for PPE (personal protective equipment) such as gowns and masks, which if used for testing would take them away from hospital wards. It’s true that some countries like South Korea and the United Arab Emirates have been able to conduct large-scale testing, but that’s because they’ve been stockpiling equipment and chemicals ever since the MERS coronavirus hit them in 2015.
    Instead, it seems that locating those who actually have the virus in B.C. will be left up to a variety of ad-hoc projects. The City of Langford, for example, has created its own COVID-19 response team, asking all of its residents to take an online screening test, even if they don’t have symptoms, to “help us understand the COVID-19 health status of our community.” Langford mayor Stew Young told CFAX that the team has already sent doctors to the residences of 16 people for in-home testing, using a small number of test kits provided by the province. “What's going to win the war is test kits and home testing at the front line and keeping our hospitals for the severe cases,” Young said. “That is the way to do this.” (Dr. Henry doesn’t agree: when asked about Langford’s project on March 31, she said “it’s not a good use of resources to test people who are at low risk.”)
    Online projects are also springing up to assess local COVID-19 risks, such as FLATTEN, which asks Canadians to answer an anonymous online survey about their symptoms and contacts with COVID-19 patients, generating a “heat map” of the country organized by postal code. By March 31, 281 people had answered surveys in the V8V postal code, which covers James Bay and Fairfield — and 24 of them exhibited enough symptoms and/or connections to be considered “potential cases,” suggesting the spread of the illness could be wider than officially declared, even in Victoria.
    We won’t know without tests. New ones should be coming quickly: on March 27 the US government approved a new test that can provide results in minutes, unlike current tests which take days, and the manufacturer plans to start cranking out 50,000 of them daily.
    In the meantime, British Columbia, like the rest of North America, is about to head into the mouth of the COVID-19 storm. Very soon, we will know whether or not the province’s testing strategy has worked. 
    Ross Crockford agrees with Dorothy: there's no place like home.
    Judith Lavoie
    March 5, 2020
    Innovative programs are being put in place to help farmers address the high cost of farmland—but are they enough?
     
     
    IT’S AN EASY EQUATION IN MOST HOUSEHOLDS—if more people turn up for dinner, it means producing more food. But in the Capital Regional District, where the population is expected to increase 27 percent by 2038, only half of the region’s 16,000 hectares of Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) is growing food.
    In other words, as climate change makes food security and buying local increasingly important, much of southern Vancouver Island’s rich agricultural land is being developed for non-agricultural uses or simply under-utilized.
     

    Farmland being farmed, a relatively rare sight in the Victoria area
     
    ALR land represents seven percent of the CRD, with additional rural land not included in the ALR. Farm Credit Canada’s 2018/2019 report says that out of more than 700 farms in the capital region, less than half are growing food.
    Another report, the Foodlands Access Program feasibility study, produced by Upland Agricultural Consulting Ltd for the regional district, states: “The underutilization of farmland, both now and in the future, is a lost regional opportunity. With over 50 percent of the region’s farmers retiring in the next 10 years, there is concern that new farmers will not be able to afford to enter the sector to replace them.” The study noted, “The high cost of land is a barrier, not only to new farmers, but also to those wishing to expand their business. This is due, in part, to agricultural lands being purchased by non-farmers and held with low risk for speculative purposes.”
    As the southern Vancouver Island population grows, farmland is appealing to those who want to put down roots in a rural setting and are willing to pay between $100,000 and $200,000 an acre. While the cost of farmland across BC increased by 6.7 percent in 2018, on Vancouver Island it jumped by 21.7 percent, the highest regional increase in the country, according to Farm Credit Canada’s Farmland Values Report.
    Saanich Councillor Nathalie Chambers, who farms Madrona Farm in the Blenkinsop Valley with her husband David, has fought against development and dumping of fill in the soil-rich Blenkinsop Valley. Chambers believes the price of farmland and non-permitted activities, which degrade the soil and pollute watersheds, are the largest obstacles to saving farmland. And, she adds, “Mega-mansion carbuncles are totally contagious.”
    Linda Geggie, executive director of the Capital Region Food and Initiatives Roundtable (CRFAIR), agrees mega-homes are a problem. “A lot of people say that on most of the land on the Peninsula, the biggest crop is large estate homes,” said Geggie, who believes urban containment zones are a valuable weapon against development on rural land, especially when combined with stricter enforcement of zoning restrictions.
    “We need to contain sprawl, but the challenge is that there’s so much competition for that land, and there’s a lot of non-farm use now for those farmlands because we have a low stock of industrial land and we are in a housing crisis,” explained Geddie.
     

    Linda Geggie
     
    Surprisingly, given the breakneck pace of development in areas such as West Shore, only 45.6 (of 16,000) hectares of ALR land in the region has been removed during the last decade. However, that does not mean the remaining land is being farmed. And even if it is farmed, the extent of the crop is often only enough to graze the limits of the farm credit, giving a significant tax break to owners. A few fields of hay or a couple of pigs can reach the $2,500 production figure that gains a farm tax credit on smaller properties. A November 2016 Globe & Mail investigation into farmland in the lower mainland noted, “Effectively, wealthy investors and speculators are receiving millions in tax breaks not meant for them.”
    Yet upping the sales limit for farm status could have unforeseen consequences, say advocates such as Geggie. “It really depends what you’re producing, because if you’re producing carrots, that’s a heck of a lot of carrots…You also have some farms that are just starting out—developmental farms—and it’s hard in your first couple of years to make a lot of income,” Geggie said. Still, she believes there could be more nuanced categories in the farm tax credit regime.
    The Province has struggled to control mega-mansions on ALR land. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham told Focus that, after tweaking an initial proposal, she believes proposed new rules that would allow secondary homes of 1,000 square feet and restrict primary residences to 5,400 square feet provide the correct balance.
    But if land is in the ALR, why are the owners not required to farm it?
    Not possible, responded Popham. “There are quite strict rules about what is allowable activity and what isn’t, but actually forcing people to farm is not something we can legislate,” she said. “What we can do is make farming more viable so that it’s an option they will choose,” she said.
     

    Agriculture Minister Lana Popham
     
    A series of initiatives to encourage farming, at provincial and regional levels, are making a difference, Popham said. “It’s like turning a giant cruise ship around. You’ve got to connect all the dots and get everything in place and then as soon as it starts to move, it really starts to move, and I really feel that is starting to happen,” she said.
    Part of that dot-connecting is a series of food-processing hubs around the province that make it possible for farmers to create value-added goods—such as baked goods, beverages, condiments, and broth. Three are already in operation, and more are planned.
    “They are really going to be places where people who wanted to start an entrepreneur business were stuck in a small space or home kitchen. Now they can move to a commercial area where all the boxes are ticked off…so they can get those products out,” Popham said.
    Creating markets for farmers is one of the keys, said Popham, and a recent game-changer has been getting BC products into the health care system. Health authorities spend vast portions of their budgets on food, and the Province is encouraging them to buy BC-grown food, such as berries, eggs, vegetables and frozen meals, Popham said. “It’s really working. There are all these new business opportunities that are popping up,” she said.
     
    THE AVERAGE AGE OF FARMERS in the capital region is 57, with more than half planning to retire over the next decade. Many members of the next generation are not interested in taking over the family farm, so protecting the land base and persuading others to farm the land are key challenges in the quest for regional food security.
    The regional district is working on an agricultural land use inventory. It is also in the final throes of creating a foodlands trust, which will see participating municipalities put municipally-owned land into the trust, to be protected as agricultural land. (And perhaps down the road, purchase farmland for that purpose.)
    The aim is for the regional district to then work with a non-profit land manager, such as CRFAIR, to lease the lands to farmers or community organizations.
    Community farms already exist in the region, including Haliburton Farm, Newman Farm, Lohbrunner Farm, Burgoyne Farm, and the Sandown Racetrack lands, Geggie pointed out. “There’s an interest, and the foodlands trust is a framework for moving that forward,” she said. “It’s a pretty exciting thing, because people really do value local food now…It’s such an important thing for sustainability in our region,” she said.
    The idea of a foodlands trust has been controversial because of fears it would give some farmers an unfair advantage. But Geddie noted the land would be leased at market rates, and tenant farmers would have long term leases, giving them security to make investments such as irrigation systems or greenhouses. It is one way to address the exorbitant value placed on any land in a hot real-estate market.
    “It’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it is a strategy—a tool,” said Geggie, who wants to see the amount of locally-produced food consumed in the area grow from less than 10 percent to 25 percent by 2025. (So far, eight of the region’s municipalities have indicated their support, though Esquimalt, Langford, Colwood and Oak Bay do not support it.)
    Along with protecting the land, there is a need to look at the types of food that can be grown in the era of climate change, Geggie said. “The diet that we are eating now is not the diet we will be eating in 10 years,” she said.
    Some of the more innovative crops are coming through the Young Agrarians land matching program, supported by the provincial government, which matches young farmers to landowners who no longer want to farm their land, or who want to lease part of their land.
    Young Agrarians in BC now have almost 290 hectares in production through 65 matches. In addition to the land matches, the organization provides education and support for new farmers, said Darcy Smith, Young Agrarians BC land program manager.
    “We have worked with everything from small-scale market gardens, to mushroom production to goats to a buffalo dairy,” Smith said. “People are turning back to farming as a career and lifestyle choice. They love working with the soil and looking after animals,” she said.
    Programs such as Young Agrarians and a foodlands trust are positive, but there is no magic solution to the local food production problem, especially when land costs are so high. Smith feels the first step is for people to be aware of where their food originates, and the importance of farming. Then, positive incentives, rather than new rules and regulations, are the best way to encourage people to continue farming or to consider it as a career, she said.
    “We all have to understand that this farmland is something that we, as a community, need to value,” Smith said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
    Stephen Hume
    March 5, 2020
    The clinic attracts Canada’s best aspiring public-interest environmental lawyers to work on cases for community groups.
     
    SHOULD YOU WANT TO TRACK DOWN one of British Columbia’s most important shapers of public policy regarding environmental protection, better have your GPS handy.
    There’s no glitzy storefront to brand the Environmental Law Centre at the University of Victoria. No swanky offices with plush carpet, oak panelling, and some elegantly-tailored watchdog receptionist. In keeping with its humble origins as a student initiative launched almost 25 years ago, it’s tucked away in a rabbit warren of austere cubicles, a Zen-like reminder that in the world of ideas, it’s the ideas, and not the trappings, that are the important currency.
    And the ideas for statutory and regulatory reform that emerge from this small, scholarly clinic have profoundly altered the legal and political landscape for generations of British Columbians yet to come. That’s quite a legacy for undergraduate law students with only their passion, brains, diligence and the judicious guidance of a few wise mentors behind them. As such, UVic’s ELC offers a refreshing antidote for the next time some grumpy elder from my generation holds forth about the failings of young people.
    On scales that range from the intensely local to the national arena, there’s no doubt that students who have passed through the ELC have worked critically important transfigurations in the administrative fabric of Canada’s environment. And they’ve gone on to work as federal litigators, to clerk with federal and provincial supreme courts, and to join leadingedge lawfirms working with environmental, civil rights, and First Nations’ issues.
    To find this quiet epicentre of change, visitors must navigate through the hushed expanse of the university’s newly-renovated Diana M. Priestly law library, with its vast high-tech access to more than a hundred extensive legal databases, and past a series of glass-fronted study and seminar rooms. Then—an abrupt change in atmosphere—through unmarked, metal crash doors and up a nondescript back stairwell graced with handrails of utilitarian steel pipe. Beyond the library’s upstairs book stacks with their 180,000 volumes, past the students lounging in a pair of moulded designer chairs and taking an introspective break with their AirPods, and down a drab corridor adorned with hand-scrawled directions, is the beating heart of environmental law reform in the province.
    Presiding over this unassuming heavyweight is a triumvirate.
     

    ELC'S Calvin Sanborn, Deborah Curran and Holly Pattison
     
    There is executive director Deborah Curran, a scarily well-informed expert in land and water law who is also an associate professor in both the law faculty and the university’s school of environmental studies. Curran does vital work in the centre’s background on governance, fundraising, liaison with the university, and program development.
    But in the foreground, Curran is also one of the centre’s big hitters. She has earned a reputation for a steely analysis of how those with environmental concerns can use something as simple as their own municipal bylaws to trigger powerful and effective protection for local ecosystems, particularly in terms of employing already existing regulatory tools to modify development so that it sustains and conserves healthy watersheds and clean water. She supervised one ELC study of urban storm water management that’s credited with transforming policy regarding urban rainfall runoff in Greater Victoria.
    Holly Pattison, a former UVic student herself, directs the ELC’s day-to-day operations and conducts financial oversight. But Pattison, who graduated from the university’s fine arts faculty, also multi-tasks as a writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker, and manages the communications that are so critical to any public policy agency in these days of spin, greenwashing and fake news.
    And last, but far from least, there’s Calvin Sandborn, whose formidable legal intellect on subjects as diverse as drilling regulations, the ethical duties of mining engineers, and the obligations of politicians to close statutory loopholes exploited at the expense of the environment, combines with a genial, avuncular style. He’ll bring his guitar to a legal seminar and deliver a not-bad rendition of some 60s protest song, invites human rights and environmental activists into his classes, and has pizza delivered to workshops on dry subjects like corporate media.
    Sandborn might be a poster-boy for effective environmental activism. He’s certainly a metaphor for the perils of environmental inaction. Born in Alaska, he moved to California as a young child and grew up at the centre of what became the 2018 wildfire inferno that erased whole towns—one of them the community of his childhood, Paradise, where 85 people died.
    “My entire childhood, turned to ash,” he muses.
    That which hadn’t already been drowned. He says his heightened awareness of the importance of environmental integrity coalesced around the fate of the Feather River, in whose canyons he spent one of those nostalgic Huckleberry Finn boyhoods. “I grew up swimming in the Feather River,” he recalls, “then they built the dam and flooded my swimming holes!” To make things worse, a politician came to town and scoffed there’d never been anything there before the damn dam anyway.
    That memory was a motivator in the ELC’s work to stop plans to log watersheds in the upper Skagit River Valley. Protecting the Skagit had been a joint Canadian and American environmental mission for an earlier generation of environmentalists, but then it came back for his students, some of whom hadn’t been born for the first go round.
    Student Caitlin Stockwell, he says, looked at the original agreement between BC and the City of Seattle. She found that BC, by approving logging in the “doughnut hole”—an unprotected patch of forest in the Upper Skagit set aside because of mineral claims and now surrounded by three state and provincial parks, a BC recreation area, and a US wilderness zone—was infringing upon Seattle’s rights under the 30-year-old international agreement protecting wilderness, wildlife habitat, and recreational resource values.“She finds that its provisions give the city of Seattle unilateral ability to take the BC government to court over the international treaty!”
    In 2018, on the basis of the ELC report, the mayor of Seattle politely reminded Premier John Horgan of this fact. Last December, the Province abruptly banned further logging in the ecologically sensitive valley on the US border.
    Sandborn, educated at a Jesuit university in San Francisco (“The Summer of Love was about to happen, and there I was in this place full of priests!”), cut his activist teeth on the civil-rights movement, anti-war protests, and efforts to organize California’s agricultural workers.
    He came to Canada to join his brother Tom, who had come north after ripping up his draft card and mailing it to President Lyndon B. Johnson. On arrival, Calvin promptly rolled up his sleeves and got involved helping organize farm workers in the Fraser Valley and setting up the now-iconic Downtown Eastside Resident’s Association that has successfully worked to reconfigure cruel stereotypes about the Vancouver neighbourhood and its often marginalized, low-income citizens.
    Curran, who was born in Kamloops and graduated from Trent University, had her environmental epiphany while working in Pacific Rim National Park when the Clayoquot Sound protests erupted. And Pattison, who came to Campbell River from Guelph as a teenager 43 years ago, was working in Victoria law offices when the flood of Clayoquot defences—the protest generated the largest mass trial in Canadian history—transfixed the legal community.
     
    IF THESE THREE REPRESENT the official face of the Environmental Law Centre, they are quick to point out that the real engine of environmental change is the ever-changing team of law students—about 30 a year—that cycles through its clinics, gaining experience in researching, writing, and advocating for the law reforms that have lasting community effects upon how we live and interact with our environment.
    For example, there was the work done by law student Neal Parker, who in the summer of 2017 investigated and reported on the growing problem of private landholders encroaching upon public access to publicly-owned waterfront lands on the Gorge waterway.
    Parker, under the guidance of Sandborn, found 11 public access points colonized as parking pads, misidentified with intimidating signage, developed as private recreation sites, incorporated into gardens, used as dumps for garden waste and construction debris, and blocked by structures, hedges, walls, car ports and private docks.
    Half a dozen of these effectively preempted public rights-of-way from members of the Songhees Nation a few blocks to the south, whose Douglas Treaty rights guaranteed them unfettered access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds on the Gorge in perpetuity.
    In Greater Victoria, Parker pointed out in a 77-page brief to both Saanich and Esquimalt municipal governments, that projected population growth of an estimated 100,000 people by 2040 means the inevitable loss of existing green space, at a time when it’s becoming even more valuable and important for urban livability. It also represents an attack upon the core values in some of the most successful marketing strategies and economic revival plans of forward-thinking cities in the world. It’s clear from what’s happening in cities like Austin, Texas; Lyon, France and even Winnipeg, which is upending its dowdy grey image, that cities embracing public access to green space are more livable, and that cities deemed more livable will be the economic winners over the decades ahead. Cities that don’t proactively develop public green space will have to reestablish it at great expense, if they are to compete with the Seattles, Portlands and Vancouvers.
    As a result of Parker’s work, those public access points have since been restored, Sandborn says.
     
    THE NON-PROFIT ELC, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in the fall of 2021, started as a dream, took shape as a hope, and was realized when professor Chris Toleffson, a specialist in environmental law, agreed to work with half a dozen students who wanted to study in the field. He became the ELC’s first executive director.
    “There was no funding,” Curran says. “It was run without funding until Calvin came on board as legal director [in 2004].”
    Sandborn didn’t even have an office to start. He was working from the students’ computer lab. Then entrepreneur Eric Peterson, who had made his fortune developing and then selling medical imaging technology and whom, with his wife Christina Munck, had created the non-profit Tula Foundation, provided the ELC with $1.1 million over a five-year period.
    “We had 10 years of angel funding with very few strings attached,” Sandborn says.
    Now there’s stable funding from BC’s Law Foundation, which provides 48 percent of the centre’s annual revenues, and from other philanthropic organizations, including the Oasis Foundation, Tides Canada, the Sitka Foundation, and the Vancouver Foundation. Small individual donors make up the rest.
    What the ELC does with this funding is provide students with a hands-on opportunity to learn environmental law, while simultaneously using it to empower individuals, small community organizations, First Nations, environmental and other groups. The students offer—at no charge—the statutory research and advice that enables the public to use existing legal frameworks to hold private, corporate, and administrative agencies accountable for ensuring that environmental regulatory requirements are met. Or, in other cases, to help press for reforms to environmental laws, and their enforcement, so that they serve the public, and not private, interest.
    Among their notable achievements, ELC students conducted research into the proximity of sour gas wells to schools, residences and other public buildings on behalf of the Peace Environment and Safety Trustees Society.
    Sour gas contains hydrogen sulphide, a compound so toxic that it paralyzes olfactory nerves at concentrations as low as 100 parts per million. Respiratory failure begins at 300 ppm, and at 800 ppm, 50 percent of those exposed will die within five minutes. The ELC students discovered that during one leak at Pouce Coupe in 2009, sour gas was released for 27 consecutive minutes before emergency shutoff valves cut off the flow.
    In 2013, ELC law student Jacqui McMorran, lawyer Tim Thielman, and Sandborn gathered information from DataBC and plotted it using Google Earth to locate active, suspended and abandoned wells capable of leaking sour gas.
    They reported that 1,900 children at 9 schools in 2 northeastern school districts were at risk from sour gas wells that, under provincial law, could be located a scant 100 metres from schools or hospitals. Worse, there were no minimum setbacks at all for pipelines carrying sour gas—although in 2010 the Province said it planned to establish safety zones of 2,000 metres.
    In some cases, provincial emergency plans for gas leaks were so primitive, they consisted of supplying classroom teachers with rolls of duct tape and instructions to seal cracks around doors and windows.
    After this inconvenient political bombshell, the provincial government announced it would increase the safety buffer for sour gas wells adjacent to schools and other public buildings from 100 to 1,000 metres.
    “Government seemed quite content to renege on their 2010 promise to extend the legislated safety buffer around schools—until we exposed the fact that the safety buffer had not been expanded,” Sandborn said at the time.
    “What about all the other issues that never get publicized? Day to day, who is looking after the public interest? Who is watchdogging the regulators to make sure that the Province doesn’t weaken regulations?” he asked.
    Luckily for the public, the ELC has been doing a first-rate job of watch-dogging. Among its most high-profile accomplishments:
    The ELC’s complaint to the federal government in 2013 regarding the muzzling of scientists on controversial issues like climate change. It triggered such a robust public response that government can no longer mute the voices of its own scientists just because their message is politically vexing.
    More locally, a complaint about metals contamination leaching from an old copper mine on the Jordan River beyond Sooke—it hadn’t even been checked for 20 years—prompted clean up efforts and a full scale remediation plan for later this year.
    But that’s just a start. In the aftermath of the Mount Polley mine disaster, in which the failure of a tailings dam dumped the equivalent of 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of contaminated waste into one of the biggest salmon rivers in the Fraser River watershed, the ELC produced a report calling for comprehensive mining reform. It found that BC taxpayers are liable for more than $1 billion in mine clean up costs, and called for the Province to begin fully checking and cleaning up 1,100 mines like the one that killed the lower Jordan River.
    ELC students and lawyers also assisted local residents in the Interior, whose drinking water was being contaminated by nitrates leaching into an aquifer from agricultural applications of manure to fertilize fields. That work led to a new provincial code for agricultural waste management but, perhaps more important, it also earned a ruling from the Province’s information and privacy commissioner that government must promptly and proactively release, without charge, all government records that are in the public interest.
    Working with the World Wildlife Fund, ELC students supervised by Sandborn and Curran prepared a study last fall calling for remediation of beaches around the Salish Sea that were once critical spawning habitat for forage fish that serve as foundation species for the chinook, and other salmon, upon which threatened resident orcas depend.
    The ELC recently called for regulation of single-use plastics, and recommendations for how to go about it. It follows a report two years ago outlining legal reforms necessary to address the growing problem of marine plastic pollution.
    There isn’t room in a short article like this to list all the work done on the public’s behalf, or to name the students who have passed through the ELC’s clinics and left their enduring mark upon the laws that frame our collective relationship with the world in which we live.
    There is room to observe that for something that began with a handful of students, one professor who saw their potential and another willing to work from a computer lab to help them realize that potential, the ELC’s 25th birthday party will represent an extraordinary milestone in the evolution of BC.
    Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.
    Ross Crockford
    March 5, 2020
    The April 4 by-election puts the City of Victoria’s youthful electoral organization to the test.
     
    LIKE MOST VICTORIANS, the residents of Avebury Avenue have issues. Bike lanes, poor transit service, affordability, property taxes, homelessness — I heard earfuls about all of them one recent Saturday afternoon, tagging along with Together Victoria candidate Stefanie Hardman as she knocked on doors in the Oaklands neighbourhood.
    A middle-aged guy in wool-felt slippers told Hardman he had to put a down payment on the house he’s in because he was exhausted by the instability of renting in Victoria. “There’s a lot of wealth around here, and I’d like to see it squeezed to provide more services,” he said.
    “Yes, yes!” Hardman replied. A cat stretched in the window, and the guy noted that many Victoria landlords prohibit pets, an exclusion that’s illegal in Ontario. Hardman gave him a brochure listing her campaign promises, including “End discrimination against renters with animals.” (A vote-getter, considering that six in 10 Canadians have pets, but a matter of provincial jurisdiction.)
    The guy liked what he heard. A Together canvasser asked for his email address and phone number, and marked him down as a “2” out of five — a likely supporter, certain to receive follow-up inquiries making sure he casts a ballot for Hardman in the City of Victoria’s April 4 by-election.
     

    Candidates in Victoria's April 4 by-election (as of the time Focus went to press): Stephen Andrew, Jeremy Caradonna, Stephanie Hardman, Rachel Montgomery
     
    It’s likely “the most interesting by-election we’ll see this year,” said CBC Vancouver’s municipal affairs newsletter Metro Matters recently. For one thing, the winner could hold the balance of power on Victoria’s council. During 2019, Together’s three first-time councillors Laurel Collins, Sharmarke Dubow and Sarah Potts sided with incumbents Ben Isitt and Jeremy Loveday to pass several controversial measures — voting 5-3 in February to limit increases to the police budget, for example, and 5-4 in June to require big condo developments to include 20 percent affordable rentals, despite warnings that the requirement would “kill” those projects. Now with Collins serving as Victoria’s MP and her council seat up for grabs, the “Together+2” majority is in question.
    Councillors in that majority have also famously annoyed the Province’s NDP government. As the CBC noted, Ben Isitt’s calls for free transit and regional police amalgamation, plus his public support for the February 11 anti-pipeline blockade of the legislature — which Stefanie Hardman endorsed online — have brought sharp rebukes from Premier John Horgan, indicating “an unease some on the centre-left have with the current incarnation of council.”
    “Given all the controversy over the past year,” the CBC concluded, “if Hardman ends up facing no serious competition it’s a clear sign that Victoria voters are reasonably happy with a council that has a more expansive notion of its jurisdiction than local government normally does.”
     
    IN PERSON, Hardman doesn’t seem like a threat to municipal-provincial relations: she’s clear-eyed and boundlessly cheerful. Raised in Toronto, where she studied urban planning, since 2014 she’s worked for various Victoria agencies as a community-based researcher, interviewing people affected by specific issues, and turning their concerns into reports designed to influence government.
    “So I have that background in community engagement, and then listening with an ear to shaping those experiences into policy, things that could happen at the municipality to improve people’s lives,” she says. Asked for an example of changes her research brought about, she cites one job as a “school travel planner,” working with Victoria schools, City departments and parents to improve transportation options for kids, which resulted in a new signalled crosswalk, and a “walking school bus” of kids strolling together to classes.
    The big issue for Hardman (and Together) is housing, which aligns with one of her recent jobs, preparing a report for the Community Social Planning Council on housing instability. Hardman says we need to dramatically increase the supply of low-income housing, and need to consider the elimination of residential, single-family zoning that may be coming in the City’s “missing middle” housing policy. “I can appreciate that these types of changes can be challenging, but I do think there are ways to engage with neighbourhoods, and come together to talk about how we can create the future of the city that we want to live in.”
    A renter herself, like 61 percent of the City’s residents, Hardman also wants the City to increasingly apply its new legal powers, granted by the Province in 2018, to prezone properties and areas exclusively for rentals. “That could help us to increase the supply of affordable rental housing, and rein in rents. I’d like to see that used.” (The City is already phasing this in, starting with the oldest rental buildings most at risk of being torn down and replaced with condos.)
    “I would like to look to strengthening the [City’s] tenant-assistance policy, and reducing renovictions and displacement,” she says. “I’d like to see stronger rent control, exploring the idea of rent control tied to the unit, rather than to tenancy agreements,” she continues — but admits that will require lobbying the Province to change the Residential Tenancy Act.
    That might not be easy, given Victoria’s tendency to irritate the premier. But cities are seeing the worst effects of the housing crisis, she says, and they have to speak up. “I do think it is the responsibility of municipal government to let other levels of government know what those experiences are, what we’re feeling here in our city, and what we think could help.”
    Together Victoria began to form after the 2014 municipal election, in which moderates Margaret Lucas and Chris Coleman won the last two Council positions, narrowly beating out NDP stalwarts Erik Kaye and John Luton, who ran independent campaigns. Various progressives in town figured that if they pooled their resources and volunteers and ran a limited slate of candidates, they would stand a better chance of tipping the Council in their favour. Then they held a series of open houses to crowdsource their platform of an “affordable, inclusive and thriving city,” to identify supporters, and to raise their profile. It worked spectacularly well: seemingly from nowhere, Together got all three of its candidates elected in 2018.
    Now it stands as the dominant electoral organization in the City of Victoria. During Together’s recent nomination process, which Hardman won in January, its membership swelled from 200 to more than 800. (To witness its developments, I joined too.) And they’re young, compared to the members of most political parties: mainly in their 20s and 30s, they raise funds and network at coffeeshop trivia-contest nights, not $500-a-plate dinners.
    Together has had challenges achieving the inclusivity it seeks, though. Its executive is almost entirely comprised of employees of the University of Victoria or various provincial ministries. Its membership doesn’t include many businesspeople, or seniors. And it’s only somewhat nonpartisan: former provincial Green candidate Kalen Harris is active in Together, for example, but the organization seems dominated by the youth wing of the BC NDP. One director has chaired the Victoria NDP’s federal riding association, others have worked for NDP members of parliament, and to arrange an interview with Hardman, I had to go through one of Laurel Collins’ constituency assistants. (Thanks to Together’s transparent financing, it’s already possible to report that Collins donated $1,199 to Hardman’s election campaign.)
    Together’s recently enlarged membership is also fracturing. During the run-up to Together’s nomination meeting, a group of frustrated renters signed up new members in the hope of electing a champion for the types of rights that tenants have recently won elsewhere in BC. (In Burnaby and New Westminster, for example, renovicted tenants have the right to return to a renovated building at the same rent they paid before.) But after Hardman won, Darren Alexander, one of the renter activists, blasted her and several Together principals in a 10,000-word online diatribe as the courtly members of a “professional managerial class,” more concerned about maintaining their contacts and connections in nonprofit housing networks than in organizing renters to demand change. (Instead, Alexander says, members of those circles mobilized renters in 2018 mainly to get Together candidates elected — a story recently covered by the online news site The Capital.)
    Karmen McNamara, a triathlete who ran unsuccessfully for the Together nomination, also says she’s “lost confidence” in the organization. “What we need at City Council right now is action and problem-solving, not more talking,” she tells me. McNamara says she signed up 219 new members for Together, but she doesn’t know who they’re voting for now. “Everybody needs to make their own decision.”
     
    IN McNAMARA’S CASE, she’s now campaigning for Rachael Montgomery, a Registered Nurse, mom, and environmental activist with the Surfrider Foundation who says she’ll bring more collaboration to City Hall.
    “When a patient comes in,” Montgomery says, “I don’t ask them what political leanings they have, I ask, ‘What do you need right now?’ And I work with a team of experts to solve that problem.”
    Montgomery worked in the Royal Jubilee Hospital’s oncology ward, and eventually assumed management of the eighth floor of the hospital, supervising some 200 staff. Currently she’s on leave from the corporate department of Island Health for her election campaign — and applying her medical evaluation skills to the City’s issues.
    To deal with the acute problem of housing, for example, she prescribes simplifying the process for homeowners to add suites or units to their properties, “so neighbourhoods can gently densify the way they want, rather than how they’re being told to.” She admits that won’t be enough to cure the problem, so she’s been meeting with developers, and withholds judgement on the council’s requirement to include 20 percent affordable rentals in big condo projects: “I want to make sure we’re actually seeing those outcomes,” she says.
    During her campaign, Montgomery has also gone on a ridealong with VicPD, and spent time with Victoria’s Assertive Community Treatment teams, which are comprised of health-care workers and police officers to address mental-health emergencies. “If I come with any bias, it’s as a frontline worker,” says Montgomery, who is dismayed that some Victoria councillors hold an “ideological” opposition to the police. So would she simply give the police the budget increases they demand? “Of course not. I’m a manager, I know how to manage a budget.”
    Montgomery started campaigning in December, and since then she’s spoken to hundreds of residents on the doorstep. No single issue dominates those conversations, she says. “What people want is some good, commonsense, practical decision-making that they feel a part of.”
    Jeremy Caradonna, another independent candidate, has been at it even longer, campaigning since November. He’s had over 1,000 conversations with residents, and says many are telling him that local politics has become “too divisive” and that they’re opposed to municipal parties. “They see it as a slippery slope, into the hyperpartisan politics we see in Vancouver.”
    Caradonna is an experienced communicator: he holds a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, wrote Sustainability: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014), and quit a tenured professorship at the University of Alberta to get his hands dirty running Share Organics, a Victoria business with 12 employees. (“I know how to calculate operational costs, unlike many of the current councillors,” he says.) He currently works as a policy analyst in the Province’s Climate Action Secretariat, but still teaches a course at UVic on the local organics industry, and grows vegetables that he sells from a farm stand in front of his house in Fernwood.
    Like other candidates, Caradonna says affordable housing is one of the big issues he will tackle on council. “We lack supply. Here we didn’t build housing for 30 years, and now that our population is growing, the problem is coming home to roost. So it’s about making it easier for people to have secondary suites, it’s about building the ‘missing middle’ — those three- to five-storey buildings close to urban villages. The overwhelming majority of Victorians don’t want skyscrapers, they want densification in scale with neighbourhoods.”
    Caradonna, a father of two school-age girls, says his other main issue is climate action. He fully supports the construction of bike lanes, but says the City needs to thoroughly improve its bus service, and get on board with rail transit. Half of our greenhouse gases come from aging buildings, so he wants a City program helping residents switch from oil tanks and natural gas to heat pumps, cutting our emissions dramatically. “My vision for Victoria is that this is the leading progressive jurisdiction in the country, and that we push the envelope.”
    Policy-wise, there might appear to be little daylight between him and Together — in fact, Caradonna says many people on his campaign team are also Together members, but they’re backing him instead. “I think it’s going to be a close race, and it all depends on who gets out their electorate.”
     
    JUST BEFORE FOCUS WENT TO PRESS, a few more candidates announced themselves, including UVic lab instructor Alexander Schmid, building contractor Peter Forbes, and former broadcaster Stephen Andrew. “I’ll bring a balance, a certain level of professionalism that I don’t think exists in some members at the council table,” Andrew says. “We’ve been the laughing stock not just of the region, but the whole country. That’s simply unacceptable to me. We’re a compassionate city. We have tremendous opportunities. And that’s what we should be talking about.”
    In the 2018 civic election, Andrew finished in ninth place, just shy of a Council seat, as part of the NewCouncil slate fronted by Stephen Hammond, who led the “Mad as Hell” opposition to Downtown’s 2016 tent city. Almost immediately after announcing his run this time, Andrew faced online attacks that he “hates” the homeless, a claim that saddens him.
    “I’ve been homeless twice in my life. I’ve lived that experience. Anybody who criticizes me should walk a mile in my shoes before they do that.” As he points out, he’s won awards from Our Place and the BC Public Health Association for his reporting on homelessness. “My concern is that we build housing but do not staff it sufficiently, because many of these people need support.”
    Andrew believes several current councillors “have no clue” about many issues they comment upon, whether that’s the difficulties of parking Downtown, the economics of condominium development, or the pressures faced by VicPD. “You have [councillors] who are standing in the middle of these protests, who are the same people saying we have to reduce the police budget,” Andrew says. “I’m not saying don’t protest, but they have no idea how much it costs.”
    Andrew admits he’s starting later than others in the race, but promises he will run a significant campaign online — and he already enjoys greater name recognition than most of the other candidates. Victoria’s by-election will likely prove even more interesting than originally predicted.
    Ross Crockford tips his hat to anyone who takes on the complex, difficult job of a municipal councillor.
    Ross Crockford
    January 5, 2020
    To satisfy the Millennials’ need for housing, Victoria’s mayor aims to permit fourplexes “as of right” on single-family lots.
     
    DOWNTOWN HAD SEEN MANY BIG PROJECTS over the past decade, but nothing like this. On December 3, Starlight Developments revealed its plans for a block and a half of Harris Green — replacing the existing Market on Yates, London Drugs and other businesses with 100,000 square feet of new retail space, topped by five towers up to 25 storeys tall and containing some 1,500 rental apartments.
    The unveiling took place at a land-use meeting run by the Downtown Residents’ Association, and the members had questions. What will happen to the businesses there now? Starlight said it would phase the construction so they could move to other parts of the development with minimal disruption. Who will police the proposed half-acre of green space? Starlight said it would create a “governance model” with the City of Victoria. With all the parking underground and entrances only on View Street, how will it handle the traffic? Starlight said it would conduct traffic-demand studies and adjust its plans accordingly.
     

    Starlight Developments proposes to build 1,500 rental units in Harris Green
     
    The audience sounded generally favourable toward the project, if exhausted by the prospect of more blasting and beeping trucks, and their questions sounded reasonable to my aging ears. But then I went home, and on the Vibrant Victoria internet forum, I encountered a very different impression of the evening.
    “The room was 90 percent senior citizens who blathered on and on about how there is too much construction in Victoria and new towers block their views from the condo they bought last year,” fumed a forum poster nicknamed “victorian.” As far as they were concerned, the meeting was “mostly just boomer complaints about how terrible it is that Victoria is not in the 1960s anymore.”
    I posted my own account of the event, and asked victorian to meet to discuss our differences of perception, but they declined. The “boomers” simply didn’t care about “a failing housing market, lack of rental homes, or [having] a vibrant and economically successful city,” victorian replied. “Unfortunately, the size of the post-war generation and the long lives they are expected to live will continue to hold our city, province, and country hostage for quite some time into the future, and it’s time for those of us who have more future ahead of us than behind us to fight back.”
     
    ONE MIGHT DISMISS SUCH AGEIST HOSTILITY as the gripe of a solitary crank, but similar frustrations are being voiced worldwide. As the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders noted recently, one common trait of the young protesters who rattled Hong Kong, Beirut, Santiago, Moscow, and other cities in 2019 is that they do not feel in any way represented by the older leaders who run their countries.
    “Their anger represents a positive force of change — and a register of this decade’s failure to fully deliver the fruits of 30 years of worldwide human improvement to the next generation,” Saunders wrote. “Most of these protesters do not enjoy the lives and livelihoods that they and their parents had expected to be available for them. Many want something completely new — a new political system, a new way of managing the economy, a new ecological commitment.”
    Canada has largely avoided such conflict because we continue to enjoy a buoyant economy, and elect youngish politicians who claim to be listening. But a generation gap is opening up here too. The Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 and comprising some eight million Canadians, retain the lion’s share of economic wealth and political influence, while making increasing demands on government pension plans and health care. Millennials, mainly Boomers’ children born between 1981 and 1996 and numbering around 7.4 million, on the other hand, increasingly argue that they’re facing stagnant wages, crumbling infrastructure, climate change, and massive personal debt due to the high costs of education and housing. (Justin Trudeau, born in 1971, falls squarely in Generation X.)
    “The movement we are part of is about intergenerational solidarity, which means people of all ages looking out for each other — and our particular focus in that is fighting for young people, and giving young people a chance,” says Eric Swanson, the Victoria-based executive director of Generation Squeeze, an advocacy nonprofit with more than 35,000 supporters across Canada. “We have a lot of people coming to us as they hit that crunch, where all these things start happening at once, and people are forced to make tough decisions, forced to leave the community they love and prefer to live in, forced to delay starting a family or perhaps not having one at all, forced to take on multiple jobs or precarious work, and through all of that living with increasing anxiety, from personal debt that you have to take on now to buy a home, anxiety around your or your children’s future when it comes to climate change,” says Swanson, who’s 36, and has a one-year-old daughter. “That’s why we need governments at all levels to start responding more urgently, and in a more coordinated fashion.”
     

    Gen Squeeze executive director Eric Swanson
     
    Gen Squeeze was founded in 2014 by Paul Kershaw, a professor at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health who often publishes research showing how Millennials have been getting the short end of public finance. In one paper, Kershaw calculated that Canadian governments spend up to $40,000 per person age 65-plus, but only $11,000 per person under 45; in another, Kershaw estimated that young Canadians pay 20 to 62 percent more in taxes to support retirees than they did four decades ago, even though many seniors are wealthier than at any time in national history. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the executive vice-president of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons once accused Gen Squeeze of “trying to start an inter-generational war.”) Increasingly though, Gen Squeeze’s research and advocacy has been focused upon dampening the crippling price of housing in Canadian cities, Victoria included.
    To that end, Swanson says Gen Squeeze has been working to “dial down harmful demand” on urban housing. It lobbied Vancouver and Victoria to restrict short-term rentals, and helped persuade the B.C. government to pass the Speculation and Vacancy Tax — and apply it to the entire capital region, much to the frustration of Langford mayor Stew Young. (“We are seeing provincial data revealing global capital coming here [to buy housing] too, not just in metro Vancouver,” Swanson says.)
     

    The Gen Squeeze message
     
    More controversially, Gen Squeeze has also encouraged municipalities to “dial up” the supply of housing, by supporting large housing developments opposed by neighbourhoods — leading to accusations that Gen Squeeze is just a stooge of wealthy corporations. (Along with VanCity Credit Union and the Vancouver Foundation, Gen Squeeze’s funders include the developer Wesgroup and the rental owners’ association LandlordBC.)
    “We need to build a lot of homes,” Swanson replies. Although publicly-funded housing and co-ops are part of the solution, he says, private developments also increase supply. But will many private units actually be affordable? In the spring of 2018, Swanson urged Victoria’s council to approve a project at 1201 Fort; now it’s being sold as Bellewood Park, with condos priced from $665,000 to $1.9 million.
    “We need to build more housing Downtown, near urban cores, employment centres, and amenities, and be comfortable with the fact that it’s going to take some time for that housing to become affordable, as the unit ages,” Swanson says. “Simultaneously, we need to recognize that a lot of the problem in the end price is the underlying land value.”
    To drop those values and spur housing, Gen Squeeze advocates increasing taxes on unimproved and underused land, and decreasing income taxes — an idea first proposed by the 19th-century economist Henry George, and which it’s currently researching for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Gen Squeeze has also called for a luxury tax on residences worth over $1 million, and eliminating the exemption on capital gains from the sale of a principal residence, a loophole that costs the federal government $6 billion a year. “Nobody does anything to earn that money,” Swanson says, although he admits cutting the exemption means “we will have to invest more in seniors as well, because a lot of people are banking on home equity to fund their retirement.”
     
    SUCH ARGUMENTS SEEM TO BE increasingly influential — especially in the City of Victoria, where Millennials hold a growing share of political power.
    According to the federal census, in 2011 nearly the same number of Millennials (18,270) and Boomers (17,070) lived in the City of Victoria. But by 2016, the numbers had tipped decisively in favour of Millennials (23,165) over Boomers (18,100). They will likely tip even further in the 2021 census, given Victoria’s hot economy and boom in apartment construction.
     

     
    That trend might explain why Together Victoria got all three of its first-time, Millennial-aged candidates elected to council in 2018, and why Mayor Lisa Helps was re-elected. (Helps was 38 when she first won the mayoralty in 2014, making her one of the younger mayors in the City’s history, but the youth record likely goes to Alexander R. Robertson, who was 30 when he became mayor in 1870.) And since then, the council has fast-tracked concerns that often split public reaction along generational lines: bike lanes instead of cars, expanded services instead of low taxes, and new housing instead of heritage, trees, and quietude.
    The next big fight over new housing is coming soon. On November 21, the council directed City staff to come up with a plan to increase the stock of lower-cost, “missing middle” housing, such as multi-unit houses and townhomes — and during the discussions, Helps indicated that she wants to eliminate single-family residential zoning across the entire city, as Minneapolis did this past year, to get such housing built.
    “I’d like to see us go at least as far as Minneapolis, where they have triplexes as of right [on single-family lots]. I’d like to see fourplexes as of right,” Helps told her staff. (Video of the meeting here; start at 1:51:00.) “There was a big stir in the North America-wide planning community when the headline was that Minneapolis got rid of single-family zoning. From staff’s report it doesn’t seem quite that drastic, but I think we need to do more with the land that we have.” 
    (One critique of such blanket “upzoning” is that it jacks land values even higher, and only produces expensive townhomes in desirable neighbourhoods, not the affordable housing that cities need. So Victoria’s council, to its credit, also told staff to build an “affordability” requirement into its “missing middle” plan. City staff will present their draft recommendations this coming spring.)
    Urban municipalities are now pushing for similar upzoning in cities across North America, in an attempt to address a housing crisis generated by a multitude of factors, including an economy producing a lot of downtown-based, tech- and service-oriented jobs — mainly employing Millennials — and outdated transportation infrastructure that prevents commuting from cheaper housing farther away.
    Over the past three years, Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington D.C. have all upzoned parts of their cities to permit greater housing densities, especially along transit routes. And in November, the City of Vancouver directed its staff to draft bylaws that would automatically permit six-storey rental housing on arterial roads and four-storey rentals on side streets near parks, schools and shopping.
    “At best it’s an incremental improvement, but once we get this type of bylaw on the books, then it’s relatively easy in subsequent years to extend that,” says Adrian Crook, the founder of Abundant Housing Vancouver, a volunteer-run YIMBY (Yes, In My Back Yard) advocacy group. “I think that’s how we get zoning reform. It’s not a single pen stroke, it’s a bunch of them.”
    Of course, another attraction of upzoning to municipal governments is that it eliminates the lengthy consultations and public hearings that are required to rezone residential properties for higher densities. Crook, who was in Victoria recently to speak about the YIMBY movement to the Urban Development Institute, cites a recent battle over 21 rental townhomes in Vancouver’s high-end Shaughnessy neighbourhood, which concluded in a public hearing with dozens of speakers, consuming 10 hours of city council time. (The council rejected the proposal and a 13,000-square-foot mansion is being built on the lot instead.)
    “That is the problem with our current housing-approval process,” Crook says. “The people who can potentially benefit from those 21 rental townhomes, they may not even live in Vancouver right now, and they’re not going to be motivated to show up at a council meeting. But the surrounding neighbourhood is highly motivated, because they perceive harms to be directly visited upon them. So that’s what we’re constantly fighting.”
    Crook, who’s 43, says it’s “reductionist” to claim the two camps split entirely along Millennial-Boomer lines, but he admits that those demanding density and new housing are generally younger, while the oppositional “incumbents” in residential neighbourhoods are older. “They’re a generation that was raised on Jane Jacobs, and fighting freeways,” Crook says. “That’s a good fight, but now they see any type of growth as a bad thing.”
    Crook has seen it in his own family. “My mother lives in Port Moody, in the house I grew up in. She very much fits that Sierra Club-model of environmentalist, but she voted in the current council because she thinks there’s been too much development and change in Port Moody. She loves the Skytrain and West Coast Express, but doesn’t want the areas around the stations developed,” Crook says. “It’s a really weird, contrarian perspective, to want all the amenities but nobody living around them.”
    Ross Crockford was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom, and lives in a triplex that predates his neighbourhood’s single-family zoning.
    Judith Lavoie
    January 5, 2020
    Residents are concerned about possible bias and the sacrifice of green space as Langford continues housing push.
     
    “ONE DAY A FOREST, the next day a clearcut,” shrugged a Costco shopper, staring at a denuded patch that seemed to have appeared overnight above Langford’s big-box stores.
    The 20-hectare patch, slated for a mixed commercial and residential development, went through the usual processes at Langford City Council—including a public hearing—but for many it is hard to keep up with the breakneck pace of development in one of BC’s fastest-growing cities.
    New housing has transformed landscapes, from sprawling rural to small-lot urban, in areas such as Happy Valley and Latoria Roads. There is no sign of a slowdown, despite growing discomfort that the unremitting push to build housing means the loss of natural landscapes. Those concerns are exacerbated by suspicions that developers are controlling the agenda to the detriment of those pleading for larger lots and retention of contiguous green space.
     

    A new development in south Langford
     
    Langford’s Official Community Plan calls for 40 percent open space on previously undeveloped land. But wiggle room allows open space to drop to 25 percent if there is a significant community benefit, such as affordable housing or a school site. Critics say those requirements are often waived, or green space is divided into fragments, with playing fields or recreation facilities making up much of the mix, as opposed to more natural parkland.
    “They [council] often don’t follow their own requirements. They constantly make exceptions for…the benefit of the developer, not for the natural resource,” said South Langford resident Mike Turner.
    The “clearcut-blast-build” formula, followed by promises to plant saplings, cannot replace the loss of critical and endangered habitats, said a member of Citizens of South Langford for Sustainable Development, one of the recently formed groups asking for a more environmentally and socially sustainable approach to development.
    “Langford development requirements do not need to undermine the integrity of our natural ecosystem; instead, they should complement each other,” said Tim Allan, a member of the group. “The community has made it clear that preserving natural parkland is important…Council and developers need to hoist in that message, keep the lines of communication open with the community, and more deliberately integrate natural parkland into their planning,” he said.
    Langford incorporated in 1992 and the City’s aggressive push to provide housing has taken the population from 18,000 in 1996 to more than 40,000 today.
    Mayor Stew Young, who has been in charge since 1993, proudly proclaims Langford’s come-hither approach to developers, saying reducing red tape and delivering fast approvals remains one of council’s highest priorities. Langford is renowned for completing rezoning applications in six months, minimizing the time that developers are left in limbo holding expensive land, which helps them keep housing costs more affordable.
    According to Langford staff, the pushback from a few residents is weighed against the needs of a broad cross-section of citizens who need homes, along with the need to increase the tax base—which provides amenities ranging from sidewalks to arenas.
    Langford planning director Matthew Baldwin said there is some friction in South Langford because it is transitioning from the haphazard pattern of development pre-incorporation to a more organized, urban form of development. That means small-lot or condominium development in areas with more spacious homes or surrounded by green space which is used by the community. But it is impossible to roll back the clock 40 years to a time when there was no development pressure or housing crisis, Baldwin said. “You can’t do it that way any more because the fundamental economic underpinnings of land value and construction costs would make that home prohibitively expensive.”
    Speedy approvals of developments in Langford have come in for criticism (and will likely increase given the removal of the new 11-storey Danbrook One’s occupancy permit, forcing 86 households to move just before Christmas). Much of the approval work is done behind the scenes as municipal staff work with developers to fine-tune applications before they go to council.
    “Quite often we have robust discussions at planning and zoning and resolve a lot of the issues,” Baldwin said, noting, “By the time things get to a formal public hearing, there are often no more issues, as people feel their issues have been addressed. Members of the public who had concerns are aware that those concerns have been addressed, and then they may decide not to attend the public hearing.” He pointed out that no one turned up when there was a public hearing for 3,000 residential units on Bear Mountain.
    Councillor Denise Blackwell, who chairs the Planning, Zoning and Affordable Housing Committee, said background work by staff aims to bring unambiguous proposals to council. “By the time an application gets to the committee stage, it is usually just a matter of tweaking the proposal, adding certain conditions that suit the particular circumstances or address unforeseen concerns raised by neighbours,” she said, adding that, since incorporation, the total area of protected green space has increased from 8 percent to more than 20 percent. “Council has also worked to acquire strategic park lands, develop active recreation for all, and continues to support efforts of the region as a whole to protect green spaces through the CRD’s Regional Green/Blue Spaces Strategy,” she said.
    However, the City’s friendliness towards developers troubles some residents, dealing with what they see as a council that does not prioritize the environment. A group in the Latoria Road area was surprised when told by council that they had to deal with Draycor Construction Ltd to address concerns about a proposed development.
    Council was dismissive when the group first turned up at a council meeting, said Laurie Anderson. “We don’t agree with the lot sizes that are being proposed, and there are a lot of environmental concerns…They just dismissed us and said we had to speak with the developer,” she said.
    There is increasing concern that developers, many with long-term ties to the community and council, hold undue sway.
    The Planning, Zoning and Affordable Housing Committee, which provides advice to council, but does not have decision-making authority, is made up of two councillors and five appointed citizens including Kent Sheldrake, co-owner of Draycor Construction Ltd.; Art Creuzot, owner of Luxbury Homes; and Malcolm Hall, owner of Lifestyle Ventures development company and Solo Suites airbnb hotel.
    The six-member Board of Variance, which operates at arm’s length from council and deals with matters such as relaxation of zoning regulations or tree-protection requirements, includes Cliff Curtis owner of TBJ Properties; Jim Hartshorne, owner of Keycorp Developments Ltd and Westhills Land Corp; land development consultant Rachael Sansom; and Ron Coutre, owner of SouthPoint Partners Ltd and president of Westshore Developers Association.
    A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing said no complaints have been received about the makeup of Langford committees. But some residents are alarmed by the perception of bias.
    A presentation on behalf of developers of the property behind Costco was made by Hartshorne, chair of the Board of Variance; a controversial rezoning application for 734 Latoria Road, made by Kevin Parker, co-owner of Draycor Construction, whose partner Sheldrake is a member of the planning and zoning committee, was approved with 17.5 percent green space, despite public opposition.
    The selection criteria used by mayor and council is unclear, Allan said. “Given its current membership, the Planning, Zoning and Affordable Housing Committee appears to be overwhelmingly weighted to favour development. With such an apparent bias, it is difficult for it to reflect the broad views from the citizens of Langford,” he said. Some members have served several consecutive terms and will continue to the end of 2022, Allan noted.
    “The [committee] needs to have a cross-section of representation from not only the developer community, but also public housing representatives, seniors, business, Chamber of Commerce, environmental groups, just to name a few,” said Allan.
    Turner pointed out that committees are usually balanced between interests such as citizens, First Nations, government, and environmental groups. “I would say that any committee making recommendations to government needs to be balanced between all the special interests that have a stake in whatever they are discussing. So to have it dominated by one group that has a clear, vested interest more than any other group is not appropriate,” he said.
    J.Ocean Dennie, founder of the Friends of the T’Sou-ke Hills Wilderness, is worried that plans to punch an alternate route to the Malahat will result in a sprawl of development, and he has little faith that Langford will protect wilderness values. “What it comes down to is who is sitting at the table, who is making the decisions and who is pushing the agenda. As concerned citizens, a lot of the time we just don’t have that information. We don’t have time to keep up with the backroom deals,” he said.
    Lawyer Matthew Nefstead, who was hired by West Coast Environmental Law to help those fighting for more Latoria Road green space, wrote in his analysis, “The fact that most, or all of the non-elected members are property developers who have dealings with the Committee and the City and who do not appear to declare conflicts of interest, presents—in my opinion—a reasonable apprehension of bias.”
    But Blackwell said some members of the committee are semi-retired and, as chair of the committee, she asks individuals to recuse themselves if there is a perception of conflict of interest.
    The argument heard from Langford staff is that council wants the expertise provided by developers and, for environmental input, relies on registered professional biologists or professional foresters. “I don’t think it would serve anyone on the committee or council or the public at large to have one qualified professional questioning another qualified professional’s opinion,” said a staff member.
    With controversy over the makeup of committees, there is a push for more transparency from Langford council—one of the only municipalities in the Capital Regional District that does not webcast meetings. “Why are there no cameras recording the meetings?” asked Terrie Wilcox, who mobilized a group of neighbours worried about overdevelopment in the Goldstream Avenue area, where plans call for redevelopment of St Anthony’s Clinic, including a 15-storey condominium building.
    Wilcox worries that development is racing ahead of infrastructure, and most of the input heard by council is from tradespeople and developers. “I agree with development due to the housing shortage, [but] Langford is moving far too fast with very little change, if any, to infrastructure,” she said, pointing to road dust on her patio table from incessant traffic.
    Like many Langford residents, Sarah Forbes agrees that housing development is needed, but the “pitchy-patchy approach” of separate developers is resulting in isolated communities connected by commuter corridors.
    “With the large-scale development, we could have some really world-class communities if we had a more sustainable approach to development. It’s a huge opportunity that is being missed,” said Forbes. “I do support development. We need to grow as a community, but we can do better…We have this great opportunity to grow this whole city, and we could develop it more sustainably with real sustainable practices in mind,” she said.
    Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
     
    This story has been edited to reflect the correct name of  Danbrook One, the development in Langford which had its occupancy permit revoked. An earlier version had referred to the development as Donwood One.


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