Other Writers Words

Newspapers need to stop taking the easy way out

2008-10-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

Editor

This is my first time in my 40 years I have been compelled to write a newspaper. I have been dealing with my mental health issues and for the last three years have received help and support from an organization which has supported and helped many other in our community.

I have been reading both the Times and News for a few years watching for recognition of this organizations contributions to the community of Abbotsford.

From personal experience I know this organization is client centered, providing not just services but a fellowship and belonging which next to shelter and basic needs is necessary for Self-esteem and Self-worth.

To a certain degree this not receiving recognition is a fault of the organizations priorities. Employing a PR person to arrange for newspaper stories and recognition of their numerous contributions to the community and the people they serve is simply not a priority for this organization as it has better uses for its money and time.

Apparently my view of what newspapers are supposed to be about is skewed. I have always assumed that publishers, editors and reporters where aware of and in touch with what was going on in their communities and what organizations were contributing to the welfare of citizens within their communities. I thought local newspapers would inform the community at large about these organizations services and contributions to the health of the community.

Instead it seems that our local papers simply rely on and write about what an organizations PR shill chooses to submit to them.

Leaving an organization which provides amazing long term successful mental health recovery services and programs in our community not getting the recognition they deserve from our local media.

I agree with James W Breckenridge’s article about the fact that if you add up all the claims of people housed by organizations in Abbotsford we should have a negative number of homeless on our streets.

A number of organizations are pumping out turnstile numbers to access funds and grants, taking funds away from organizations that actually provide people with the fellowship, belonging and long term support that is necessary for recovery. Because if an organization is not providing the services to be successful long term they have a turnstile endlessly counting the same services and people over and over.

I count today; tomorrow when you come back I will count that as 2: when next day comes that will be 3; and so on and son on.

Same with housing, Wondering why they are able to help so many, yet the numbers on the street haven’t changed. What are the successes based on? Even if an individual is able to find housing for a month, but has no other fellowship or sense of belonging to anything else besides the street they will simply find there way back where? To the street, Why? We fed them gave them shelter all the necessities right. Why did this person throw all that away? I will explain this and its simple you can give a person all that you feel they need but if there fellowship and belonging has not changed they will return to the one they had.

A successful count should be only be long term only has meaning in the long term. Having a person housed for 12 months with a newly developed sense of fellowship and belonging in the community should be a bare minimum consideration for being able to say they have a success.

There needs to be some kind of accountability when these organizations say they have helped xyz number of persons in need.

I am not saying that these organizations are not in need, they very much are. I would just like them to be honest and upfront - if you simply fed or shelter someone then say we successfully served xyz with a meal and shelter for xyz number of days. But do not say that this is recovery or rehabilitation because it is simply not true.

I believe, based on my personal experience, that any organization that does not develop a peer system or fellowship with the persons they serve will fail. Whether it is addictions, mental health, or homelessness they will fail.

Somewhere some basic psychology has been lost. One of the first things you encounter in psychology, that has been around forever is Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to self actualization.

Most successful organizations in the recovery field have a peer support system; examples of this are AA sponsors, MH Peer Support Workers, Mentors. For some reason the most inexpensive and successful treatment of persons in need has been lost, replaced by politicized, expense formulated costly services that have complicated matters and left out the basic need for fellowship.

Fellowship provides belonging, when we are validated and accepted only then do people have a sense of self-esteem or worth. Organizations need to heed this approach to be successful.

Newspapers need to stop taking the easy way out, start paying attention to what is happening in the community and informing the public what the actual situation is. Only in this manner can the public make informed judgments and decisions about these pressing social problems.

Ray Patrick

Community divided over Ed's grassy boulevard home

2008-08-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

Published: Saturday, August 02, 2008

Home for Ed Chase is a patch of grass near the corner of 96th Avenue and 160th Street in Surrey.

He and his dog, Daryl, who is old and whose hind end is paralyzed, sleep there and spend their days there out in the open, or under a big, gaudy beach umbrella when it rains. It is a busy intersection, cornered by a high school, a Chevron station, a Husky station, and the Parkland Fellowship church, which owns the patch of grass Ed has homesteaded.

Ed and his dog, and the wagon Ed pulls Daryl around in, and Ed's tarp, and Ed's few belongings, are all visible to the passing traffic.

In both a physical and moral sense, Ed's patch of grass has become a battleground. At the centre of that battle is Ed. On either side of him are arrayed two opposing sides: those who do not mind his presence and want to help him, and those who want him gone. Here, compassion clashes against the need for civic order, which is a fight played out a thousand times a day over the homeless.

But this isn't the Downtown Eastside with its hordes of street people; this is a middle-class neighbourhood in the farthest reaches of Surrey, and Ed is an anomaly here. He stands out in stark relief to the suburban landscape, and his presence, and the polarizing effects it has had on the neighbourhood, are being played out with all the elements of some New Testament parable.

Ed is 47. He was born in Saskatchewan. He's drifted around - Toronto, the Yukon, the Prairies - and he first came to B.C. when he was 19. He's worked in construction and odd jobs.

"I'm a lifetime loser," Ed said. "A jack of all trades and a master of none."

He fell into homelessness five years ago. He told a disconnected story about being evicted for late rent, and then losing his van to ICBC, and then, more recently, having his car towed away. He slept in nearby Tynehead Park for 2 1/2 years, and when his gear was confiscated, he slept on picnic tables.

The authorities asked him if he wanted to go into a shelter.

"They wanted to put me in a shelter but I don't want to live with anyone else. And I had my dogs."

(He had two dogs at the time, Daryl and Ray. More about Ray in a moment.)

When he was rousted again, one of the neighbours in the area approached Brian Stewart, the pastor at Parkland Fellowship, and asked if Ed could park his car in the church's parking lot. Stewart said yes, and Ed started sleeping in his car on the church property last November. The church, Stewart said, offered to help Ed find a place and even help him financially. But again, Ed, like many homeless, was resistant to that. In May, the police and bylaw people visited the church and told Stewart Ed's sleeping in the car was illegal. At the same time, Stewart said, the church had concerns about Ed and his dog's presence in the parking lot because of his proximity to the church's daycare. Ed moved his gear out to the church's boulevard.

The church, however, did not force Ed to leave the property entirely. They were Christian. They were not about to turn their backs on the social leper.

"As a church," Stewart said, "we want to be redemptive in this community."

For the first few weeks, Ed's presence on the boulevard was uneventful. But he wore out his welcome at both gas stations, which have now banned him from their properties. In the meantime, Ed said, the city and police conducted what he considered a campaign of harassment against him, repeatedly confiscating his tents and belongings.

It reached a crisis point on June 28. Ed got into a fight with a customer at the Chevron station. Ed - who is convinced the provincial government has exacerbated the homeless situation with its policies - was holding up an anti-government sign in a one-man demonstration, something he does often. Words were exchanged. In Ed's telling of the story, the customer grabbed him and started punching him. A second man tried to break up the scuffle, only to be punched in the mouth by the man fighting with Ed. It was then that Ed's dog, Ray, whom Ed had on a leash, bit the man fighting with Ed on the leg. (The second man would later say the dog was only trying to protect Ed.)

The SPCA later seized the dog, and there is the possibility the dog could be put down or re-adopted. The City of Surrey has also informed Ed he must pay a $5,000 fine to get Ray released. Meanwhile, Ray's fate, and Ed's ownership, has now become a cause célèbre among animal rights activists. A Facebook website has more than 500 people demanding Ray's release.

All this has split the community. While the manager of the Chevron station was quoted in an earlier Surrey Now story as calling Ed "a pain in the ass" who has harassed customers and abused his earlier kindnesses like free coffee and sandwiches, and who wants him gone, two employees at the Chevron station, Cynthia Soady and Cindy Oakson, both said they liked Ed and felt he poses no threat.

"I like him," Oakson said. "But I think being on the street, and fighting for his cause, is really wearing him down. I think a lot of people are against him because he isn't working (Ed collects welfare), but I don't think he's capable of working. I do think we do tend to over-enable him a little bit, but I have a belief system that believes in compassion."

Oakson said she believed most of the neighbourhood felt the same compassion she does. And Stewart, at Park Fellowship, can attest to evidence of that compassion: many people, he said, have offered their help to Ed, offering him food and supplies. One neighbour even offered his backyard for Ed to sleep in. But Stewart has got plenty of calls, too, he said, from those who want Ed gone, and blame the church for allowing him to stay.

"We're caught in the middle," Stewart said. "But we believe, with God's help, there is a solution here. And if we kick Ed off the property, so what? That doesn't solve the problem."

As for Ed, he said all that was important to him was getting Ray back.

"If I get Ray back, I'd leave."

He didn't say where, exactly.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com or 604-605-2905

Homelessness in Metro Vancouver up 20 per cent since 2005

2008-04-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

Homelessness in Metro Vancouver up 20 per cent since 2005

Frances Bula and Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

METRO VANCOUVER - Homelessness continues to increase across Metro Vancouver, especially in the suburbs, according to preliminary numbers from the latest homeless count announced today.

There are now close to 2,600 people in shelters and on the streets any given night in this region, almost a 20-per-cent increase from the last count done in 2005.

But the numbers didn't go up as much as people thought they would and it's far less than the increase between 2002 and 2005, when numbers almost doubled, said Alice Sundberg, co-chairwoman of the Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness, which directed the count.

That is giving people such as Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts some hope that increased services and aggressive efforts to reach out to the homeless are beginning to slow the flow a little.

Surrey's counts indicated that 386 people were either in shelters or, predominantly, sleeping outside on the night of March 11, when the count was done. On one hand, that's grim news. On the other, the number of street homelessness is up only 15 per cent from 2005.

"We have the lowest increase in the region," Watts said. "I think that's because we've made a really concentrated effort with outreach. We've housed almost 300 people in the past two, 21/2 years, and put them into permanent housing."

So although the tap of homelessness is still turned on, the drain seems to be working better.

The early counts show that suburbs such as Burnaby, the Coquitlam region, and the Langleys showed the sharpest jumps in homelessness. At the same time, they had the fewest shelter beds proportionally to accommodate them, so that the majority of their homeless were out on the street.

Langley city Mayor Peter Fassbender said that picture will be drastically different in three years. A new centre that combines 30 shelter beds with 25 transitional housing units, along with a "feeding centre" and space for counselling and training, is due to open in June next to the Kwantlen University College campus. That centre, jointly financed by the city, township, Salvation Army, province and federal government, is Langley's acknowledgement that it must help.

"It's a big step. We have come to the place of saying we have to be part of the solution," Fassbender said.

In Coquitlam, Mayor Maxine Wilson said the area's three municipalities are looking for a location to put a permanent shelter. Coquitlam is also working with the YWCA on another project to build supported housing for women and children.

But Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan said he thinks it's reprehensible that municipalities are constantly made to feel that it's their job to solve homelessness, when it's the provincial government that cut housing programs and tightened up access to welfare.

His city is focusing on long-term housing solutions, building on a foundation of the second-highest number of social-housing units of any other part of the region. (Only Vancouver has more.)

The homeless-count statistics prompted responses from both Downtown Eastside advocates and Housing Minister Rich Coleman about what they meant and what the trends for the future are.

A coalition of advocacy groups held a press conference outside an up-for-sale rooming house downtown to highlight the ongoing problems of evictions and speculation in the Downtown Eastside, which they say are accelerating homelessness. And they accused the provincial government and city of doing little to address the problem.

But Coleman said he was actually relieved by the numbers.

"People were predicting it would be double or triple [the 2005 numbers]. The way I look at it now, we have 2,500 homeless and what have I got in the pipeline? Do I have 2,500 units coming? The answer would be yes."

But even Coleman cautioned that doesn't mean the problem is solved, because there are always more people becoming homeless.

That's something that certainly proved true in Vancouver where, in spite of Mayor Sam Sullivan's commitment to reduce homelessness by 50 per cent in time for the 2010 Olympics, the number of street homeless actually increased by 32 per cent, so that there are now almost exactly the same number of people on the street (about 780) as in the city's numerous shelter beds.

The count also fueled debate about what is causing the significant increases in suburban homelessness.

Sundberg, from the regional homelessness steering committee, said she believes it's a case of homeless people now being able to stay in their home communities because there are finally some services there for them.

David Eby, a homeless advocate with the Pivot Legal Society, said he thinks the numbers are going up in the suburbs because people from Vancouver are being driven out of the city by the continuing losses of the city's cheapest housing in the Downtown Eastside.

Corrigan said he thinks the numbers increase, especially in cities like his, are driven by a deliberate plan in Vancouver to "push these people out into the suburban municipalities, trying to clean up for the Olympics."

Those actually out on the streets see it a little differently.

Chris Fontaine, whose battered face fits his life story of bad luck and bad decisions, has been homeless in Surrey for about 18 months.

"It's a crappy life to live. But, hey, I get by," Fontaine said Tuesday while staying at The Front Room shelter in Surrey - a last-resort place for people whose addictions and mental illness make it difficult for them find housing elsewhere.

It's no surprise to Fontaine that a homeless task force recently found about 390 homeless people in Surrey over a 24-hour period.

"I can believe it. They come from Vancouver, Burnaby, New West - they all come to Surrey," he said.

"There's better resources here. It's a better area. More drugs, I guess. There are at least 40 guys that I know who are down here from the Downtown Eastside."

The 33-year-old single man hopes to find a cheap apartment but knows the odds - and his own past - are stacked against him.

"You need a rental history and my rental history around here ain't so good."

For now the Front Room, with its 40 beds, is home.

"The people here at the Front Room - they care about us a lot. They give us hope."

Up to 15,500 Homeless: Report

2008-02-03T15:55:00.000-08:00

Tally of BC homeless by health profs far higher than housing minister's.

View full article and comments here http:///News/2008/01/31/MoreHomeless/

By Andrew MacLeod

Published: January 31, 2008

TheTyee.ca

The number of homeless people in British Columbia may be triple the estimate Housing Minister Rich Coleman provided to The Tyee last week, according to a new report by health professors at UBC, SFU and the University of Calgary.

In B.C. there may be as many as 15,500 adults with severe addictions or mental illness who are homeless, says the 149-page report, Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illness in British Columbia. The report is dated October, 2007, and was released to The Tyee on Jan. 30, 2008.

The authors are SFU's Michelle Patterson and Julian Somers, Calgary's Karen McIntosh and Alan Shiell, and UBC's Jim Frankish. The report was prepared at the request of the health ministry's mental health and addictions branch. Other partners and contributors to the report include the provincial health authorities, the Employment and Income Assistance Ministry and Coleman's own Forests and Range Ministry.

To get their estimate, the authors used data and reports from the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Canadian Senate, the provincial government and academic journals. "No single authoritative source of information is available to derive these estimates," the report says. "However, a number of recent reports offered valuable insights into various levels of housing need."

Many at risk

The report says some 130,000 adults in B.C. have severe addictions and/or mental illnesses. About 39,000 are "inadequately housed," meaning they meet the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's definition of being in "core housing need." Of those, about 26,500 don't have enough support to help them stay in their home.

Somewhere between 8,000 and 15,500 are what the report calls "absolutely homeless," meaning they are living on the streets, couch surfing or otherwise without shelter. The report says the authors confirmed their figures with "local stakeholders and key informants." The report also says that despite impressions that homelessness, mental illness and addiction are urban problems, interviews with front-line workers found the same problems were "highly prevalent in rural settings."

The report's number—which includes only people with severe addictions and mental illness -— far exceeds the figure used by Forest, Range and Housing Minister Rich Coleman. Last week he said there are between 4,500 and 5,500 homeless people in B.C. at any given time. He said the figure came from BC Housing. The agency told The Tyee it based its estimate only on the communities that have done official homelessness counts.

NDP housing critic David Chudnovsky called Coleman's number "bogus." His own "conservative" estimate of 10,500 homeless in the province was made last fall based on homeless counts and numbers provided by shelters and other aid agencies.

High cost status quo

While creating supported housing for everyone at risk of homelessness would be expensive, the authors found the cost of doing nothing is even higher.

"If we focus on the absolutely homeless, non-housing service costs amount to about $644.3 million per year across the province," says the report. That includes the costs to the health care and prison systems as well as emergency shelters. "In other words, the average street homeless adult with SAMI [severe addictions and/or mental illness] in B.C. costs the public system in excess of $55,000 per year."

Providing adequate housing and supports would cut those costs by $18,000 per person each year, it says, saving about $211 million in annual spending.

The authors note they did not include the amount of money that homelessness may cause to be lost by businesses, tourism and cancelled conference or convention bookings. The report says, "The inclusion of these and other cost drivers would further enhance the case for change."

'Key actions' suggested

The report offers a dozen "key actions" that need to be taken to provide housing and support to people with severe addictions and/or mental illness. They include:

Adopting a "housing first" policy providing permanent, independent homes to people without time limits or requiring residents to get addictions treatment.
Creating more multidisciplinary treatment teams such as the Assertive Community Teams set to launch Jan. 31 in Victoria. The teams are needed to reach the "hardest to house" and get them better access to services and treatment.
Taking a "harm reduction" approach at housing facilities and accepting the use of drugs and alcohol on-site.
Creating more affordable housing and protect the affordable housing that already exists.
Continuing efforts to make it easier to apply for and receive welfare.
Hospitals and prisons should set policies so they no longer discharge people with "no fixed address" without knowing where they will go. "No one should be discharged from an institution directly to the street or a shelter without prior arrangement and follow-up."

Finally, the authors recommend immediately building or creating supported housing for the 11,750 or so people with severe addictions and/or mental illness who are already homeless. The number likely underestimates the need, they write, and should be taken as a starting point.

BC Housing's current goal falls far short of the need. The agency's most recent service plan says 1,462 new units of supported housing for homeless people will be added by 2009-2010.

"Without adequate housing and support, people with SAMI who are homeless often cycle through the streets, prisons and jails, and high-cost health care settings such as emergency rooms and psychiatric inpatient units," the Health Ministry's report says. "This is ineffective and costly in both human and financial terms." With help, it adds, they can stay in stable housing. "It is time to implement these evidence-based solutions for British Columbians in need."

Related Tyee stories:

Homeless, Housing Stats Disputed
Coleman's figures are 'bogus' says NDP critic.
No New Homes in Premier's Homelessness Plan
Coleman challenges cities to "step up."

Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee's Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. You can reach him at amacleod@thetyee.ca.

10,000 Homeless in BC

2008-02-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

More than 10,580 British Columbians are homeless this winter, according to a survey of estimates compiled by the New Democratic Party. And the ranks of the unsheltered are growing fastest not in the province's largest cities, but in B.C.'s booming exurbs such as Abbotsford and Whistler.

"We are sometimes fooled into thinking homelessness is a Vancouver issue," said MLA David Chudnovsky, the opposition critic who conducted the study. "But these numbers show that homelessness is a province-wide crisis."

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

"Smaller communities are starting to face this issue," said Deb Lowell, a spokeswoman for The Salvation Army in Abbotsford. "Homelessness now seems to be a problem right across the province, if not the country."

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

The survey estimated there are 400 homeless people living in Abbotsford, and another 184 across the Upper Fraser Valley. Similarly, the survey found 200 homeless in the Tri Cities, 180 in Burnaby and 100 in Langley.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

"If we're serious about ending homelessness, we need to know what the situation really is," Chudnovsky said. "Minister Coleman either did not know, or was not willing to share that information. So we gathered it ourselves."

Field counts were cited where available. For communities without such counts, Chudnovsky's team interviewed social workers with client lists -- people such as shelter operators and outreach staff -- and compiled the province-wide total from their local estimates.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"In Abbotsford, we have what economists would call an ideal economy: High wages. Low unemployment. Affordable living," said Ron Van Wyc, program director for B.C.'s Mennonite Central Committee. "So for a long time, I think there was a public perception that we didn't have a homeless problem here."

That perception weakened after a 2004 field count found 226 homeless people, and cracked in 2006 after a group of local homeless people crowded into a high-profile encampment that became know as Compassion Park.

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Leading the charge across B.C.'s bible belt is The Salvation Army. In Abbotsford, the Army's Centre of Hope houses a 150-meal-a-day soup kitchen, a 20-bed shelter, a 14-bed transitional housing facility and a provincially-funded outreach program.

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

"We don't have SROs in Abbotsford," Clayton said. "There are a few rooming houses that let bedrooms for $400 or $500 a month. One-bedroom basement suites start at $700." But with the province still paying only $375 a month for housing, "There's really no affordable housing to be had."

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

"I had a beat-up old Chevy van that I lived in for three years," said Wiede. He found places that tolerated parking overnight. "They never gave me permission," he said. "But they never kicked me out."

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

A bit more than half of Abbotsford's homeless are locals, according to the 2004 homeless count. Many of those were pushed into the streets by the same deinstitutionalization and addiction that have driven the homeless crisis across Canada.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

Clayton Fraser is a thickly bearded young man who said he'd slept on the streets of Vancouver, beneath the power lines of Surrey, and "in the ditch" as far north as 100 Mile House. He did not beat around the bush when asked why he prefers Abbotsford, where he's spent most of the past year sleeping in a park.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

Randy Clayton's phone rang during our interview. On the other end of the line was a woman from Aldergrove seeking information about shelters. The outreach worker pulled a photocopied list off the wall, and started reading her some place names and phone numbers.

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

B.C.'s suburbs and small towns are less prepared to cope with fast-growing homeless populations than are cities such as Vancouver and Victoria, which host a continuum of services ranging from detox clinics to long-term supportive housing.

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

A new hospital is under construction, and Abbotsford housing advocates are lobbying to convert the old building into new social housing. Van Wyc is also pondering whether some sort of a mobile home park might be pressed into service in the interim.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

Wiede is among Abbotsford's success stories. Unable to work after a back injury, and unable to survive on a $600-a-month pension, Wiede slipped into homelessness at the age of 60. He "wandered around this area" for two years before landing a room at Centre of Hope's transitional housing.

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

Wiede has since found a subsidized apartment across town, and has largely re-entered mainstream society. But his two years on the streets opened his eyes to a problem he said most of his new neighbours still can't see.

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

Homeless in Suburbia
Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee.

More homelessthan Atheletes in 2010

2008-02-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

Can Vancouver's Olympic pride be saved? First in a series.

View full article and comments here http:///News/2007/05/28/Homeless1/

By Monte Paulsen

Published: May 28, 2007

TheTyee.ca

"When the world arrives in Vancouver in 2010, what kind of city will they find?" asked Mayor Sam Sullivan in his inaugural address.

They will find a city in which there are more homeless Canadians shuffling in the shadow of BC Place than Olympic athletes parading inside the Vancouver stadium.

That's the conclusion of a three-month investigation by The Tyee, which found that unless Mayor Sullivan and B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell radically reshape their response to North America's fastest-growing homelessness crisis, the number of Greater Vancouver homeless will easily exceed the 5,000 athletes and officials expected to participate in the 2010 games.

And it could get worse. If affordable housing continues to erode throughout the region at the rate it has during Vancouver's recent SRO buying binge, there could be twice that many. Should that happen, there would be one homeless person for each of the 10,000 members of the international press corps expected to encamp at the new $800 million Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre.

During the coming days, The Tyee will publish articles that explain:

How the sudden loss of Vancouver's residential hotels accelerated a crisis that had been growing since Gordon Campbell's BC Liberals slashed welfare benefits
Why Housing Minister Rich Coleman's bold expenditure of more than $100 million provincial tax dollars will deliver very little additional housing
How local and provincial taxpayers could wind up spending more money taking care of the homeless than building Olympic venues
Why Mayor Sullivan's elaborate plan to privatize social housing is an untimely gambit that appears to have distracted his administration during a pivotal time
Where neighbourhood NIMBY groups have stalled the construction of sorely needed supportive housing
What governments, business, non-profits and Olympic organizers must do this year in order for Canada to avoid a lasting legacy of shame in the wake of the 2010 Winter Games

Today: A look at the numbers.

Over 2,200 homeless now

On March 15, 2005, a team of social workers counted 2,174 homeless people in Greater Vancouver.

Starting at 5:30 in the morning, they scoured shelters, drop-in centres, parks, and other locations frequented by the homeless to produce The 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count. The total number of homeless doubled since the previous count in 2002, from 1,121 to 2,174. More than half (1,291) were found within the City of Vancouver, followed by Surrey (371) and New Westminster (92). (A map of their findings is here.)

"All counts underestimate homelessness, because of the difficulty in finding those who do not use services or spend time where homeless people congregate," wrote the report's authors. Also, the one-day count did not consider people sleeping in detox facilities, recovery houses, hospitals or sofa surfers -- even though many of those residents have no fixed address. "Thus, the Homeless Count did not enumerate every homeless person in the region on March 15, 2005, and is an undercount."

But while the report does not claim to offer a complete count of homelessness, it does provide an accurate survey of the region's homeless population. Among its findings:

More homeless people were found on streets than in shelters; the number of street homeless rose by 235 per cent since 2002.

People of Aboriginal identity accounted for 30 per cent of the region's homeless population, while making up only two per cent of the total population.

When asked why they were homeless, 44 per cent cited lack of income, 25 per cent named addiction or other health conditions, and 22 per cent blamed the high cost of housing in Greater Vancouver.

Less than half of those counted had a steady income source. The rest survived on income from panhandling, bottle collecting, casual employment, or illegal activities.

Nearly three quarters reported chronic health conditions, such as addiction, mental illness or physical disability. Addiction was the most common; almost half of the homeless who responded to this question reported problems with addiction.

When asked which municipality they considered their last permanent home, 75 per cent reported somewhere in Greater Vancouver. Another 8 per cent reported their last permanent home was elsewhere in B.C., 15 per cent reported a location elsewhere in Canada, and one per cent reported a location outside Canada.

The next Greater Vancouver count will be conducted in 2008.

'Unprecedented demand'

Local counts have found higher numbers of homeless.

Judy Graves coordinates the Vancouver Housing Centre's award-winning tenant assistance program. She's worked in the Downtown Eastside since 1979, and has spent much of the last decade trolling the city's streets, parks and alleys for people in need of housing.

Graves conducted her own count in 2005. Using the same methodology biologists use to count wildlife, she found up to twice the number of Vancouver street homeless enumerated in the one-day count. Her next report is due late this fall.

"There are a couple of neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver where I believe we're seeing a decrease in the number who live outside overnight," Graves said. "In other neighbourhoods, especially outside of the urban core, we're seeing quite an increase in the number of homeless on the street."

The undercount may be even more dramatic in smaller communities. Like most suburban municipalities, Port Coquitlam has no service center at which homeless people would congregate. Not surprisingly, the 2003 regional count was able to locate a mere 10 homeless people in PoCo, and the 2005 count found only 35.

Then, last summer, a new service organization began working in the area. Within months, the group had identified 177 homeless in PoCo.

"I think the situation is comparable in Burnaby and Surrey," said Diane Thorne, an MLA who represents the Coquitlam-Maillardville riding and also serves as housing critic for the New Democratic Party. She estimated that the actual homeless population in Greater Vancouver's suburban communities is "10 times" the 2005 count.

Thorne noted that B.C. does not conduct a province-wide homeless count. The best available statistic is that between October 2005 and April 2006 a record 28,922 people were turned away from B.C. shelters.

"There is an unprecedented demand for shelter services, not only in Vancouver but across the province," Thorne said. "There have been enormous increases in long-term and repeat users."

Disappearing rooms

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the Vancouver homeless epidemic is deeper than the 2005 numbers suggests.

"Rooming houses and hotels are falling like flies," said Jean Swanson, a veteran Downtown Eastside activist now with the Carnegie Community Action Project.

Twenty-two residential hotels were sold in 2006, with a combined total of 1,178 rooms. By adding the number of rooms from which tenants were evicted to the number from which tenants were forced out by rising rates, Swanson counts 600 low-income rooms lost during the same year.

"If we lose 600 more this year, another 600 in 2008, and 600 again in 2009, that's 2,400 units of low-income housing likely to vanish before the Olympics," Swanson figured.

Likewise, intake workers at social housing centres report much longer waiting lists.

"It's just depressing," said Mark Townsend, who directs the Portland Hotel Society. "You feel like Solomon cutting up the baby, yeah? Shall you take this guy who's a problem tenant and no one will have him, or that one who's in a wheelchair and stuck somewhere?"

"We have just flat run out of empty rooms in Vancouver," Graves agreed. "We're at zero vacancy rate in those little rooms that were the last housing refuge for people. Anybody who's in the street now is going to have a precious hard time finding a place to go."

Homeless shelters are overflowing, despite the addition of 181 new shelter beds since 2000. The Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, a daytime drop-in facility, was pressed into service as an emergency shelter last November -- and an average of 50 women continue to sleep there every night.

And outreach workers are reporting more rough sleepers. The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, which operates nightly street patrols, is not only seeing more addicts on the streets, but is losing its own members to homelessness as well. Whereas only one-tenth of its members were without shelter as recently as 2002, now one-quarter of Vandu members are homeless.

"It's more dire, for sure," Townsend said. "Much more dire."

More homeless than athletes

After more than a dozen interviews with these and other housing experts, The Tyee has concluded that unless the city and province begin construction of additional supportive housing this year, there will be an estimated 5,600 homeless people living in Greater Vancouver by 2010.

There are two components of this projection:

The Vancouver count will triple to 3,800. In the fall of 2006, Pivot Legal Society forecast that Vancouver homelessness will triple by 2010. No credible rebuttal to that forecast has emerged. And after weighing the number of new units BC Housing currently plans to open in the next few years against the accelerating loss of existing SRO rooms, The Tyee concluded that the zero vacancy rate will remain and Vancouver's most vulnerable residents will continue to be displaced.
The regional count will roughly double to 2,000. It appears likely that the 2005 snapshot undercounted suburban homelessness by a greater margin than it did Vancouver. Also, as part of anti-drug efforts, some suburban municipalities continue to raze drug houses, bulldozing affordable housing in the bargain.

Swanson, Thorne and a few others regard The Tyee's projection as too low.

"If the attack on the rooming houses continues, I think we'll see much more than that in Vancouver," Swanson said.

"I expect regional homelessness to triple, at a minimum," MLA Thorne predicted. "I hope I'm wrong about that."

Graves, Townsend and others thought the number was accurate, or a bit high. Graves offered perspective.

"As recently as 15 years ago, there was no street homelessness in Vancouver. We did have shelters. We did have the odd coot," Graves said. She believes that Vancouver could vanquish homelessness again -- within a few short years -- if political leaders made it a priority.

"The causes of homelessness are complex," Graves said. "But the solution is kindergarten simple: Build supportive housing."

Related Tyee stories:

Seven Solutions to Homelessness
Each is working somewhere else, and will save money and lives here.
Province Snaps up Poverty Hotels
Plan to protect housing catches insiders off guard.
Shovelling with Mayor Sam
Stalled homeless units finally jarred loose. Pols scramble for credit.

Monte Paulsen is a contributing editor at The Tyee.

10,000 Homeless in BC

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

View full article and comments here http:///News/2007/11/30/HomelessCount/

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

Homeless in Suburbia
Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
2010: More Homeless than Athletes? (Series)
What it will take to provide needed shelter before the Olympics.
Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee. He welcomes e-mail and encourages respectful comment in the forum below

10,000 Homeless in BC

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

View full article and comments here http:///News/2007/11/30/HomelessCount/

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

Homeless in Suburbia
Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee.

This series about the roots of homelessness and possible solutions in B.C. is funded in part by the Tides Canada Foundation

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

2008-01-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.

If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through eternity. What, for example is a “typical” observer in such a setup? If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?

“It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,” said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, “How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?”

The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? The fundamental laws governing the atoms bouncing off one another in the egg look the same whether time goes forward or backward. In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week.

“When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology,” said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.

Boltzmann ascribed this so-called arrow of time to the tendency of any collection of particles to spread out into the most random and useless configuration, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics (sometimes paraphrased as “things get worse”), which says that entropy, which is a measure of disorder or wasted energy, can never decrease in a closed system like the universe.

If the universe was running down and entropy was increasing now, that was because the universe must have been highly ordered in the past.

In Boltzmann’s time the universe was presumed to have been around forever, in which case it would long ago have stabilized at a lukewarm temperature and died a “heat death.” It would already have maximum entropy, and so with no way to become more disorderly there would be no arrow of time. No life would be possible but that would be all right because life would be excruciatingly boring. Boltzmann said that entropy was all about odds, however, and if we waited long enough the random bumping of atoms would occasionally produce the cosmic equivalent of an egg unscrambling. A rare fluctuation would decrease the entropy in some place and start the arrow of time pointing and history flowing again. That is not what happened. Astronomers now know the universe has not lasted forever. It was born in the Big Bang, which somehow set the arrow of time, 14 billion years ago. The linchpin of the Big Bang is thought to be an explosive moment known as inflation, during which space became suffused with energy that had an antigravitational effect and ballooned violently outward, ironing the kinks and irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos with order.

Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal inflation, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes

A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann brains.

The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.

Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.

In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University, pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmann’s idea might work too well, filling the megaverse with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.

In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, “Before the Beginning.”

The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmann’s brain.

“In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmann’s brain,” Dr. Albrecht said, while admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the “invasion of Boltzmann brains,” as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”

But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”

You might wonder what’s wrong with a few brains — or even a preponderance of them — floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist in its promise and disappointment.

Another is that one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans don’t occupy a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings. If the odds of us being real instead of Boltzmann brains are one in a million, say, waking up every day would be like walking out on the street and finding everyone in the city standing on their heads. You would expect there to be some reason why you were the only one left right side up.

Some cosmologists, James Hartle and Mark Srednicki, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have questioned that assumption. “For example,” Dr. Hartle wrote in an e-mail message, “on Earth humans are not typical animals; insects are far more numerous. No one is surprised by this.

In an e-mail response to Dr. Hartle’s view, Don Page of the University of Alberta, who has been a prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate, argued that what counted cosmologically was not sheer numbers, but consciousness, which we have in abundance over the insects. “I would say that we have no strong evidence against the working hypothesis that we are typical and that our observations are typical,” he explained, “which is very fruitful in science for helping us believe that our observations are not just flukes but do tell us something about the universe.”

Dr. Dyson and her colleagues suggested that the solution to the Boltzmann paradox was in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words, they said, that the cosmological constant was perhaps not really constant. If the cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for fluctuations and Boltzmann brains.

String theory calculations have suggested that dark energy is indeed metastable and will decay, Dr. Susskind pointed out. “The success of ordinary cosmology,” Dr. Susskind said, “speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.”

But nobody knows whether dark energy — if it dies — will die soon enough to save the universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being overrun by Boltzmann brains.

The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without warning. There would be no time for pain, Dr. Page wrote: “And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.” But the object of his work, he said, was not to predict the end of the universe but to draw attention to the fact that the Boltzmann brain problem remains.

People have their own favorite measures of probability in the multiverse, said Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. “So Boltzmann brains are just one example of how measures can predict nonsense; anytime your measure predicts that something we see has extremely small probability, you can throw it out,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by, or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, “The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite.” Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..

In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe. “So maybe we don’t need to care too much” about the Boltzmann brains,” he said.

“If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”

“People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said

Correction: January 21, 2008

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about paradoxes that cosmologists face in trying to explain the origin of the universe misspelled the surname of a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who commented on the limitations of probability measures. He is Raphael Bousso, not Buosso.

Faith is cerebral

2007-12-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

Studies suggest the brain calculates math and ethics the same way

Whether it is a child's belief in Santa or a religious belief in the incredible miracle story, belief looms large at this time of year. Religion is the starting point, but this five-part series explores the many facets of belief, from the placebo effect to the neuroscience of belief and disbelief. Today, atheists on belief and disbelief.

Sam Harris may be the best-selling author of two books on the destructiveness of religion, but he has not given up on belief. Now a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles, Mr. Harris and his colleagues have just published research that, they believe, maps for the first time where in the brain decisions are made about what we believe and do not believe.

Mr. Harris said he wanted to understand the biological process that allows people to accept certain descriptions of reality as valid.

Test subjects were scanned with an MRI while being asked to decide whether they believed the veracity of a particular statement. The researchers then looked for which parts of the brain "lit up."

They discovered the part of the brain used for lower cognitive functions -- such as deciding whether something smells good or bad, or assessing pain -- is also used to decide whether a proposition is true or false.

"Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as 'true' or its rejection as 'false' appears to rely on more primitive [processing]," Mr. Harris and his team wrote in the journal Annals of Neurology this month.
In an interview, Mr. Harris said there are many studies in neuroscience that have "broken down the boundaries between higher cognition and more primitive emotional processing." But this appears to be the first study to show that at the physical level of the brain.

He said it at first seemed surprising that "such a creaturely preference is operative here." But he added it makes sense because evolution had to employ ways to make sure the decisions we made would help us survive as a species.

"Belief really is the hinge upon which so much of human activity and human nature swings," said Mr. Harris, author of The End of Faith and its follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation. "You are to an extraordinary degree guided by, or misguided by, what you believe. If you're a racist that is a result of what you believe about race. If you're a jihadist, that is built on what you believe about the Koran and supremacy of Islam. So belief is doing most of the work humans do. And it's an engine of conflict and reconciliation, so it really matters what people believe."

What was particularly surprising, he said, was that there were virtually identical patterns of brain activation whether someone was being asked to evaluate a straightforward proposition, such as two plus two equals four, or something that tested an ethical belief, such as whether torture is just or unjust.

"One obviously has very strong emotional association and one doesn't. So it is surprising that the coolest, calculated kind of reasoning we can engage in and the most emotionally laden in ethics could be so similar."

Mr. Harris's study concluded with the poetic notion that "truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense and that false propositions may actually disgust us."

He said other studies have shown that when something disgusts us, the area of the brain known as the anterior insula is most active. In his study, it was the anterior insula that was most active when a proposition was rejected.

"The feeling of doubt, of not buying a statement, is on a continuum with other modes of rejection -- the epitome of which is disgust."

His next task will be to study how the brain evaluates religious beliefs and he expects that his results will be much the same as his latest study.

"I think on the basis of this study I expect to see that belief is belief is belief. Evaluating the belief that Jesus was the son of God is importantly different than evaluating the belief two plus two equals four. [But] there's going to be a common final pathway that governs whether the belief is accepted or rejected. There's something held in common between these modes of thinking."

clewis@nationalpost.com

2007-11-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness T
The City of Victoria released its homelessness report on October 19. http://www.victoria.ca/cityhall/tskfrc_brcycl.shtml

High Cost of Inaction
http://www.victoria.ca/cityhall/pdfs/tskfrc_brcycl_inactn.pdf
From the report. Reference citations are provided for these figures.

It costs taxpayers more than $50,000 per year to support each homeless resident in British Columbia.
With a homeless population growth factor estimated at 30 per cent, compounded for each year of inadequate housing stock and supports, Victoria’s homeless population could double by 2010.
The Victoria Police Department has identified a group of 324 homeless residents—many of whom are mentally ill and suffer from substance use problems or a dual diagnosis—who are responsible for 23,033 police encounters over a period of 40 months, at a cost of $9.2 million to the City of Victoria.
The City of Victoria has spent over $1.4 million already this year in expenditures associated with homelessness; including clean-up costs, needle pick-up, damages to sensitive ecosystems, security and responses to complaints.
Without proper access to health services, homeless residents rely on emergency and acute care health services—66 per cent of all homeless residents admitted to hospital by Vancouver Island Health Authority have a mental health or substance use related condition.
The Task Force found that there are over 200 organizations in the Greater Victoria area currently engaged in addressing the needs of homeless, addicted and/or mentally ill people in our community. Over 20 funding agencies already spend an estimated $76 million annually on housing, mental health and addiction services.
By not addressing the needs of the homeless population in Greater Victoria, we are spending at least $62 million in other services, such as policing, prisons, hospital services, emergency shelter, clean up, etc.
A study conducted by the province of B.C. in 2001 showed that the cost of service use under the status quo was 33 per cent higher than the cost of housing and supporting individuals.

Help for the homeless
$7.6 million pledged to help deal with homelessness, mental illness, addictions
Carolyn Heiman
Victoria Times Colonist
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The Vancouver Island Health Authority will supply $7.6 million for measures to ease Victoria's homeless crisis, including new detox beds and specialized outreach teams.

The announcement was made yesterday, moments after the unveiling of the City of Victoria task-force report "Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness", aimed at finding ways to reduce the number of people living on the street.

The largest chunk of cash is earmarked for 15 adult detox/residential treatment beds ($1.7 million) and creation of four community/treatment outreach teams, at a cost of $3.35 million. The teams, a cornerstone recommendation of the task force, will offer support and treatment for clients where they live, be that in parks, on the street, in shelters or in supportive housing.

A "housing-first" strategy, in which priority is given to finding homes for people on the street, regardless of their mental-health and substance-abuse issues, is the other cornerstone of the recommendations.

The outreach teams, to be established in the next year, are to include mental-health, substance-abuse and social-service specialists with shared caseloads and low staff-to-client ratios. They will be on call 24 hours a day. One team will focus on individuals with significant criminal records and a history of behavioural problems.

The expert panel on the task force said similar outreach teams were credited with reducing hospital admissions in Ontario by 62 per cent after one year, and 83 per cent after six years.

Victoria police found that 324 homeless residents -- many with mental-illness or substance-abuse problems or both -- were behind 23,033 police encounters over a period of 40 months, at an estimated cost to the city of $9.2 million.

Supporting the teams will be two new case managers assigned to help those leaving the hospital and correctional facilities, at a cost of $200,000.

Dr. Perry Kendall, provincial health officer and chairman of the expert panel, said the current system for delivering services is complex and difficult to negotiate, especially for people with mental illness and substance-abuse problems. Because they're required to move from one service to another, they often fall through the cracks. He noted a study of injection-drug users showed that half had obtained treatment in the previous year, while 30 per cent tried unsuccessfully to obtain treatment.

The health authority also earmarked $1 million toward building the $4.6-million Downtown Health Access Centre, a Victoria Cool Aid Society project planned for its Johnson Street building. The centre will provide one-stop health services to homeless people. It replaces a program that Cool Aid board chairman Andrew Benson said is "bursting at the seams" at its Swift Street location.

Benson said he is pleased with the VIHA commitment but anxiously awaiting word on applications for another $1.5 million from the province and $500,00 to $700,000 from the Capital Regional District before construction can begin in March. The balance would be raised through donations.

A home and day detox program will receive $240,000, while a similar amount will go to train 10 homeless people who are ready to rejoin the workforce for jobs with the health authority.

The funding announcement also earmarked $600,000 to help the hard-to-house homeless, who will take up residence at a new 45-bed facility on Pandora Street. The facility, run by Our Place Society, is scheduled to open in November.

Kendall said the current system lacks co-ordination between mental-health and addiction services. Clients trying to obtain mental-health services are often rejected because they have addictions, while the same is true for those with mental-health problems trying to obtain addiction services.

VIHA yesterday earmarked $100,000 to train outreach workers to support clients with both mental-health and addiction problems.

cheiman@tc.canwest.com

Economic boom not putting food banks on the shelf

2007-11-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

Economic boom not putting food banks on the shelf

Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2007

OTTAWA - Canada is on a roll. The jobless rate is near record lows, oil prices are soaring, the loonie is flying high, and the federal government is awash in surplus cash. The good economic news has not, however, erased the country's hunger problem.

A new national study, titled HungerCount 2007, says 720,231 people, a number just shy of the population of New Brunswick, were forced to turn to one of the country's 673 food banks in March to feed themselves or their families.

The tally was down slightly from last year. But it was up almost nine per cent from a decade ago, and no province or territory can boast that food banks have outlived their usefulness, says the Canadian Association of Food Banks, which has conducted the annual survey since 1989. The survey, released_Thursday, covers only one month

Although there have been fluctuations from year to year, the number of users has remained "unacceptably high" at more than 700,000 for each of the past 11 years, the survey found. Moreover, people with jobs comprise the second-largest group of food bank users, after those on social assistance.

"This is a sad reality when we live in such a prosperous country," Katharine Schmidt, the association's executive director, told a news conference on Parliament Hill.

Schmidt said the $60 billion in tax cuts announced last week by the federal government, including a one-point cut in the GST and a dip in the tax rate on the lowest-income earners, must be followed up with, among other things, more generous federal tax benefits for working people and parents, and an expansion of the Employment Insurance program to cover more people and to give them better benefits.

Even in booming Alberta, food banks reported a steady stream of clients again this year, many of whom reported having jobs. Camrose and District Food Bank reported, for example, that 90 per cent of its clients received most of their income from employment.

Food banks helped 38,837 Albertans in March, or 1.1 per cent of the provincial population, the report said. Of the clientele, 43 per cent were children, 27 per cent reported earning wages and 35 per cent said they were on social assistance.

In the nation's capital, the Ottawa food bank said the number of schools seeking meals for hungry children has grown dramatically to 17. The food bank has also started providing 12,000 meals to children during the summer months.

Nationally, the survey said children accounted for almost four of 10 people using food banks. Single-parent families account for 28 per cent of the clientele, two-parent families 22 per cent, single people 37 per cent, and couples without children 12 per cent.

People on social assistance were the primary users of food banks at 51 per cent. Employed people accounted for 13.5 per cent, people on disability supports accounted for 12.5 per cent, pensioners accounted for six per cent, and people on Employment Insurance benefits accounted for five per cent.

For the first time, the association surveyed the housing situations of people using food banks and found that 86 per cent were renters and eight per cent were homeowners.

Peter Tilley, executive director of the Ottawa Food Bank, said the annual studies illustrate a sad reality that food banks, once thought of as emergency assistance for people needing some short-term help, have become a crucial part of the country's social safety net for hundreds of thousands of people.

"It's a shame we made a business out of poverty," he said with a grim smile, referring to the network of food banks across the country, most of which, he stressed, rely almost exclusively on volunteer labour.

James Breckenridge and The Missing Checkered Sock

2007-10-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

from Something Cool News

Like most people with a functioning brain, I too have wondered about the mystery of the disappearing sock. You know, the one you put in the dryer with a bunch of other socks and yet, without exception or explanation, it always goes missing. No matter where you look or what you do, the sock goes missing. Every time. Some of the greatest minds of our generation have been unable to explain the enigma of the disappearing sock.

Except, it would seem, for one James Breckenridge. Breckenridge, the subject of this week’s mini-documentary Changing Lanes, had the opportunity to espouse his wisdom to me at a Starbuck’s in Abbotsford where he had been invited to partake in a coffee with his good friend Vince Dimanno. It was within the confines of this little establishment that he explained his theory to me, also an invited guest.

“In order to understand where these socks go,” he said, “we need to conduct a study, raise some funds so we can get a bunch of dryers which we can then experiment with. Once that process is complete, we need another set of dryers to try and replicate our results. After that, we need to invest in acquiring some experts to analyze those results. And then…”

It went on like this for a little while until the search for the missing sock was costing something like three billion dollars. It was a parable of course, a metaphor for the way government works. Rather than simply solve a problem, the wisdom of our modern day politicians seems to be to first study the problem, hold a never-ending series of conferences, write a number of reports and assessments and then start all over again, costing the taxpayers innumerate sums of money yet getting no closer to an actual solution to whatever the original problem was.

Now, two things struck me as I listened to James speak on this weighty subject. Firstly, how right he was. And secondly, how he was even able to tell this story given his current situation. For those not in the know, James is homeless and has been living in his car for the past few weeks. He was laughing and making wisecracks as he spoke, and I recall wondering how a man reduced to sleeping in the front seat of his car could find anything funny. Yet there he sat, chuckling at his own joke.

See, if I were James Breckenridge I’d be a very angry, angry man. This is a guy who has championed the homeless and worked tirelessly for them during his time at the Salvation Army Shelter where he works. And when not working, he has written extensively on his blog and to local newspapers, doing everything he can to raise awareness on the issue. Even now, homeless and alone, he is working on a way to get to Kamloops to attend a housing conference there or some such thing. He’s going to class to learn how to better help other people even as he himself needs help. Who is this guy?

And what result has James garnered for all this virtuous work? A giant goosegg, that’s what. He wrote a letter to local newspapers – a letter that was actually published – but not one of his friends/acquaintances stepped forward to offer him a place to live. These are the same people James tries to help when he can and defends when someone speaks ill of them. Even though some of them have a couch or a spare room they could lend, they remain silent and allow James to sleep in his 1987 Plymouth Duster.

The media hasn’t been any more accommodating. How do they repay him for all his insightful writing that he does for free? They also ignore his plight. The newspapers know he is homeless and living in his car – they published the letter that he wrote telling them so. Did they dispatch a single reporter to cover this development? Did they try and raise awareness about what he was going through? No – instead they remained silent, leaving it to SomethingCool News to tell the story.

Which, of course, we were more than happy to do. The point of it all is that we really shouldn’t have to, just as James really shouldn’t have to call a Rest Area along the freeway home. In a community that bills itself as caring and “Christian”, this kind of thing really should not be allowed.

It’s a point James understands well. “You know that thing that really pisses me off?” James said to me, taking a sip of his coveted coffee. “If I went into a local church, raised my hands and said, ‘Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!’, all of sudden everyone would come forward to help me. But because I don’t do that, I end up sleeping in my car. How’s that for a caring community?”

It reminds me something I read recently – a story in the newspaper about a church that was luring kids into church by allowing them to play the ultra-violent video game Halo 3. In justifying this, one of the pastors said, “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell. If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it. My own take is that we can do much better than that.”

So….lure the kids into the church, let them play a violent video game and then tell them that doing so is wrong? It’s the kind of blatant hypocrisy James knows well. Once the “sin” of being homelessness is forgiven, then all is good. Then people can help. But until the homeless beg for forgiveness, they’re ears, eyes and mouth are closed.

The pastor at the Halo Church said that God wants ministers to be “fishers of men.” Elaborating further (and using a more disturbing tone), he said, “Teens are our fish. So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Evidently, it’s not just the teens that are the fish, but the homeless as well. And until they start tugging on the bait, well, they’re just going to have to get used to sleeping outside, or as it is in James’ case, in their cars.

But James isn’t angry about that and instead makes a joke about it. I don’t understand how this man is able to turn so many negatives into such positives, but he does. For him, being a fish is an alright life, not one that he necessarily wanted or chose, but then why be depressed about it? Whether he’s angry or sad, he’s still going to be homeless, so I guess in his mind, he’s better off thinking about disappearing socks. I mean, if no one else seems to have any emotion on the subject, why should he?

Fred Johns

Nice to read someone was paying attention.

2007-10-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

I was sent the link http://www.james-strocel.com/2007/10/21/homeless-in-abbotsford/

As you can tell I liked the comments - it was very nice to see someone was paying attention as they read.

It’s been said that in many ways Abbotsford is a big city that thinks it’s a small town. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way that it deals with its big city problems. Ironically, it may be a sense of civic pride that keeps us from addressing these issues properly. Homelessness? Prostitution? Drug problems? Not in our fair city. Such problems become even harder to talk about when you’re caught between two extremes of rhetoric on the problem. Either you’re a heartless monster for not wanting to support poor decision making, or you’re a bleeding heart communist for displaying common compassion.

Somewhere in between is James Breckenridge, the writer and maintainer of Homeless in Abbotsford. If there is a face to the homeless problem in Abbotsford, or anywhere else in North America, this man is it. He has to deal directly with the problem of expensive housing, mental illness, and an intractable city hall. He offers us not only rhetoric against homelessness, but innovative hands-on solutions to a complex problem. The post titled “Who is/Who are the homeless” outlines exactly how complex and intractable homelessness can be. I was particularly fond of his proposals to allow the homeless free access to showers and bathrooms at our public recreation centers. It seems to be cost effective, and the ID card system would provide access to services that would help get people off the streets for good. These and other posts outline how magic bullets are impossible, but small scale solutions can do so much.

As I read Mr. Breckenridge’s posts, I wondered how many people knew about the solutions he was writing about. It turns out, many of his ideas come from successful programs in other municipalities. I believe that the reason people hold back on doing more for the homeless is that they are afraid that their time and money will be wasted on short-term solutions. If there is more information and more options for people to direct their funds and their compassion, maybe we can provide an environment where advocates for the homeless can have less frustration and more success.

Maxine Wilson, Mayor of Coquitlam

2007-10-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

At first, he’s just another man sitting in the trash. His face is layered in dirt, his clothes are in even worse shape and judging by his choice of associates, he is a man who has truly hit rock bottom. Sitting on a log near Coquitlam River, he is sandwiched between a woman who seems to be constantly twitching and another man who is clearly drunk. And yet something separates this man from his company – his eyes seem slightly more vibrant and for a moment, it seems almost like he doesn’t belong here.

That’s because he doesn’t. (Indeed, does anyone?) This man has a home, an apartment somewhere – or so he says. He admits he used to call this forest home, but those days are behind him. He boasts that he is one of the lucky ones that escaped this life of despair, but has ties here still which brings him back to his former stomping grounds from time to time. But the real surprise comes when he is asked how he got his house. He smiles and then says proudly, “The Mayor got it for me.”

As this conversation is taking place in Port Coquitlam, one naturally assumes it is the Mayor of PoCo that is responsible for helping this man, but that assumption would be wrong. The man explains that it wasn’t Scott Young that helped him out, but the Mayor of a neighbouring city that helped out. “Maxine Wilson helped me,” he says, referring to the Mayor of Coquitlam. Then he adds, scathingly, “She actually cares about people.”

Does she now? I think to myself. It's rare to hear someone who used to be homeless say something nice about politicians, so this indeed something unique. The man seems to suggest that Mayor Wilson is different than other mayors, as evidenced by what she did for him. But I have only this man's word to go on - I've never spoken to the Mayor of Coquitlam. I have a feeling that is about to change.

***

The walls on her office seem to suggest a connection to people. On all sides of the giant desk that Mrs. Wilson sits behind whenever she is actually in her office, are pictures of her surrounded by giant clumps of humanity. In one picture, she is seen smiling with a group of Asians, in other she is seen grinning with her City Council. But perhaps the most telling portrait of Maxine Wilson is the one of her and her daughter as the watched the last election results come in. Her daughter is clasping her hand over her mouth and Maxine is looking on expectantly. It’s a picture a newspaper photographer captured and sent to Maxine who proudly posted it on her wall.

“How old do you think my daughter is?” she asks me as I study the picture closely. She’s a very young-looking girl, with a youthful face that could easily fit into any high school hallway. I venture a guess of sixteen. She laughs. Turns out the young woman is actually in her thirties. “Everyone gets that wrong,” she says.

She sits down in one of the seats that surrounds a small table in the other end of her office. I sit down next to her and begin explaining why I wanted to interview her, which means telling her about the man in the forest. When I had called her the day previous, I had left a message with her secretary that I wanted to discuss “homelessness” and that she could return my call whenever it was convenient. Less than an hour later, my phone rang and it was her.

Right away, she expressed her interest in the interview. “How does tomorrow sound?” she asked me. I was caught off guard, but maybe that’s because I am permanently scarred from my Mary Reeves ordeal. I said that it was fine. “How does 1:30 work for you?” I politely asked if I could bump that up to 2:00. “Sure, that’s fine. Whatever works best for you.”

I couldn’t conceal my surprise and quickly agreed to the interview. A phone call made to Scott Young last week was still not returned (but would be an hour later) and already I had an interview set up with the Mayor of Coquitlam for the next day. And remember, Mrs. Wilson and I had never met, and she had probably never even heard of SomethingCool News. Colour me impressed.
I mentioned Scott Young’s name at the start of the interview, explaining that I had spoken to him many times regarding the homeless problem in PoCo and expressed my view that until any sort of conviction appeared, he deserved the benefit of the doubt. She seemed to agree.

“People are products of their environment,” Wilson said calmly. “Scott’s had a difficult life. He’s a very easy Mayor to work with and remember, I am a woman saying that. He’s got some issues and he has to deal with them.”

What she didn’t agree with so much was PoCo’s policy of dealing with the homeless – i.e., tearing down their camps 85 times so far this year. “What PoCo is facing – and what we face – are residents who are afraid for their safety and are worried that they will be robbed so they phone the City and want something done,” she said. “But the only thing that will ever change it is to change the societal attitudes from being ones that are fear-based to realizing that we all have needs and we all need to support each other.”

Indeed, one resident of PoCo who watched the SCN mini-documentary The Displaced, wrote, “I live in this area and if your going to do a story about this then get all facts straight. The majority of these people are also drug addicts and we as residents are being affected greatly because they break into our homes, vehicles and steal and or vandalize our belongings. Drug deals are made in front of our children and homes. So tell the down side we as residents have to endure in the area; this is a huge problem and they create it!”

Those must the societal attitudes Mrs. Wilson is talking about. PoCo’s solution has been to destroy the camps only to watch them spring up on the other side of the trail. Maxine suggests a different solution: “The way I see we attack this is person by person and find the champions who will spread the word and mobilize so gradually people in the community help each other to be supportive.”

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this all sounds like another episode of Sesame Street. It’s just another Mayor spouting off a feel-good message about humanity coming together and facing all challenges and blah blah blah. It’s the stuff someone who has never experienced the problem says from their comfy office armchair. I thought that too, but then I remembered that guy in the forest.

“Sure, I know a few people I have helped,” Mrs. Wilson replied when I inquired about this man. “I give suggestions all the time as to who people should connect up with. You know I never intended to get involved with politics, but through my years I have come to know a lot of people form a lot of different agencies.” She chuckles. “My staff always jokes that I am a walking encyclopedia because I know who to connect to what.”

She decides to give me an example. “We just had a family traumatized because their son is a cocaine addict who is facing trial. The mother has two other kids and she wasn’t able to manage her own life or the rest of the family’s and she didn’t know what to do. I know Diane Sowden from the Children of the Streets Society. I gave her Diane’s number and told her to call her and to tell her that she needed help. And she did. The next time I saw her she was beaming and her son was there too. So they are going to help their son and get past all that.”

I ask her if she feels gratified and fulfilled having partaken in such a success story. She doesn’t smile or nod – she just shrugs. “That’s my job,” is all she says and patiently waits for me to ask my next question.

There’s a lot going on in Coquitlam – the problem of homelessness may not be as bad as PoCo’s but it could one day be. It’s for that reason, that Coquitlam is working on getting some churches together to help provide shelter for some of them over the winter months and has a long term plan to lease land from the City to help house women and children who are living on the streets. It’s a place she hopes those who want help will finally be able to get it.

“My idea is not to trap anyone in a cycle of dependency,” she elaborates. “We want to help every person that wants it. We are all co-dependent, symbiotic. We all need each other. Each person should be given the chance to be as resilient and independent as they can manage.”

I tell her about the disturbing information I came across when filming the mini-documentary – that there may be a pregnant woman living in the forest. She counters that she has heard there may as many as forty women living in the woods. About the pregnant woman, she asks, “Who can she learn to trust again and how can she learn to stay together with her family? It doesn’t do us any good to blame anyone – each of us must step up to the plate and take personal responsibility. These people are not numbers. Each has a different story and needs to be supported.”

Like the man in the forest? “That’s right,” she says, again refusing to congratulate herself. So I ask again how it makes her feel to know there is one man who feels he owes Mayor Maxine Wilson something. “It means that one person ahs been able to progress in life,” she responds passively. “But there are many more we need to support. I’m not great. I’m just another ordinary person. There are so many other people out there who are doing good things, much greater than what I am doing. I’m just an average person who as an accident of circumstances ended up being Mayor.”

She paints herself – like the pictures on her wall do – as a woman who is just part of something much larger. “We all need to pull it together,” she continues. “We all need to make sure that everyone is included in our society. Put simply, if you see there needs to be change, change it.” I notice for the first time she looks nothing like a Mayor is supposed to. And then she says, “That’s all of our jobs.”

Foresight?

2007-09-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Editor, The News:

In your Sept. 4th edition, you ran a letter from Wendy Gorner, who is so impressed with Abbotsford’s foresight in its Plan A projects, but she wanted to caution council to be careful not to have the same cost overruns as Mission Leisure Centre.

I was just wondering what planet she is from. Mission Leisure Centre had cost overruns that were in the neighbourhood of $4 million, mostly due to rising construction costs and typical things that can happen during construction of a project of that duration. The total costs were in the $8 million range, and Mission taxpayers were screaming.

In comparison, the latest estimates for Abbotsford’s Plan A have gone from $85 million to over $120 million, and these projects are not even into the building stage yet.

There are many unseen costs, like a $7,000 per month retainer that we have been paying Global Spectrum, and things like business meetings, junkets and propaganda have been phenomenal.
I am amazed when we get a newspaper report that says excavation will cost an extra $100,000 for a toxic spill. Then, it’s $200,000. Well, now it’s $1.2 million – this on property that the city bought for over $10 million when it already owned other sites that were debatably better locations.
Abbotsford has depleted its reserves and is making many cutbacks in services, which shows more and more in our very meagre parks system and roads.

If there is a higher tax rate in any city in British Columbia, I can’t find it, and certainly that’s not what Bruce Beck told us when he, John Smith and Jay Teichroeb were ramming this down our throats last year, with the whirlwind blitz that we all paid for.

If this project does have similar problems to Mission (and cross your fingers it doesn’t), there will be another tax increase that will put us into the ultra-ridiculous category for tax brackets. The way our council is throwing money around makes me think they are very out of touch with everything.

While I am the first person to see something other than residential development in this land of sold farms, I wonder at the reasons for building the very controversial “entertainment complex,” which still has no anchor tenant.

So please excuse some of us “naysayers,” Wendy. We can’t all share your admiration of council’s “foresight.”

Anne Graham, Abbotsford

No Public Washrooms

2007-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

Those who know Fred Johns or are regular readers of his weekly webzine (www.somethingcool.ca) know that Fred is, at best or at kindest evaluation, a little weird. I shared how it was I found myself filming a soiled batch of paper towels. I now share Fred's words on this matter.Personally I am sure that, or at least I maintain, that finding myself in those circumstances is all Fred's fault and that I am just a sweet, innocent, NORMAL bystander sucked into the twilight zone by Fred's presence.

It was a fairly interesting set of circumstances that led James Breckenridge to be in a situation where he would be filming a patch of paper towels soiled with human waste, and yet there he was anyway. It wasn’t the first batch of makeshift toilet paper he had ever seen; what made this particular batch stand out from all the others was the fact that he had a video camera in his hand instead of paper towel himself.

It’s no secret that James Breckenridge used to be homeless. He even wrote a blog about it. But for all the posts he wrote and for all the discussions on the subject he had, nothing could quite compare with the experience of staring down at the spot where another human had wiped their ass in an open clearing just behind a popular Italian restaurant in downtown Abbotsford. No words were needed to describe both the injustice and despair that the soiled towels represented - the crap on them did that well enough on its own.

James openly admitted to being forced to do a similar thing once or twice himself. “I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said, standing a few feet from the dirtied towels. “That’s mostly due to good planning – I was always sure to be in the library or something once during the day so I could use the washroom facilities. But, I’ll admit it, there were times I had to find a bush or the dark side of a building so I could urinate and do my business.”

James isn’t embarrassed to discuss this topic, nor particularly uncomfortable, which puts him in the minority. Most people aren’t too interested in talking about how the homeless defecate, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have to. It’s a taboo topic, one not openly discussed. Conversations about food and shelter tend to take precedence, but this doesn’t erase the physical needs of people without homes and proper washroom facilities. Homeless people are still people and as such, need to urinate and defecate like everyone else.

In Abbotsford, that’s particularly challenging. The majority of businesses in the downtown area have signs with the words “Washrooms for Customer Use Only” clearly inscribed on them. The library at Jubilee Park requires a key for entry. And there are an odd number of local gas stations that have washrooms that are suspiciously “out of order”.

Why such concern? It seems some of the local homeless seem to do nasty things while using the restrooms. “They tend to try and flush needles and stuff down the toilets,” a librarian at the Jubilee Park library said. “They mess the place up and leave it for us to clean. And it’s not safe for our workers to have to go in their and pick up needles and things. That’s why we require people to use a key.”

It’s a no-brainer too that local restaurant owners are uneasy about homeless people coming around and scaring their precious clientele. “It’s pretty simple actually,” one restaurant owner (who requested that his name and his restaurant be left out of this article) said. “People don’t come here to see homeless people. They come to eat in a friendly, fun and safe environment. They don’t want to be bothered by people who drink and use drugs so we don’t allow those kinds of people to use our washrooms.”

All fine and good for the customers, but what about the people that really need to pee, or, in safespeak, do a #2? “If you’re homeless in this town and you look it, you can try and use the public washrooms in the library,” Breckenridge said, recalling his own experiences as a homeless person. “Otherwise, you’re like the bears on those TV commercials, shitting in the woods.”

There is no shortage of working toilets along Abbotsford’s main business corridor, but few of them are ever in use. This is what irks Breckenridge so much, especially in a town with so many Christians who frequent the numerous local churches. “The Christians in this town appear to think that sleeping and shitting in the woods is perfectly acceptable for those homeless animals,” he said. “Now how Christian is that?”

Washroom facilities do exist at the local Salvation Army and people do not require a key to use the bathrooms at the Clearbrook library, way the other end of town. But the only other place in the main downtown district that would allow anyone to use their bathrooms was a tiny little comic store one street off the main drag.

“Why wouldn’t I let someone use the bathroom?” the owner of the store asked me when I told him his decision to open his bathrooms to the public was a bit of a rare one. “When you gotta go, you gotta go, right?”

Part of the reason he is so kindly is because there’s really nothing of value in his store where the bathrooms are located. “I have some .50 cent comics back there,” the owner said, “so if someone makes off with a couple of those, they’re almost doing me a favour.”

Most businesses, this owner said, do have valuable stuff near the washrooms, like merchandise and money, which is an added incentive to keep the homeless people out. “But it’s pretty safe here and I know as well as anyone what it feels like to have to go but having nowhere to do so. So I guess this is my way of showing a little community spirit.”

Now if only the rest of the community would get on board. There does seem to be a logical solution to this problem that would appease both the business owners and the homeless – public washrooms in parks. Even port-a-potties would do, wouldn’t they?

The librarian at the Jubilee Park location says that was already tried. “They had a port-a-potty in the park,” she recalled. “But then they burned it down. So now they have nothing.” She shrugged. “Whose fault is that?”

Whose fault, indeed. It’s a tough scene to imagine: it’s cold, probably dark and a homeless person finds him or herself alone with nowhere to take a crap. They have managed to scrounge up a clump of paper towel which is all they have to wipe their ass with. It’s hard to fathom the indignity a person must feel when they lower their ripped and torn pants and are forced to defecate, exposed to the world, with no privacy, the same way a coyote or a dog must.

“Thus it is that the homeless are forced to either hold it in indefinitely or urinate and defecate outdoors like animals,” Breckenridge said. “Perhaps, with even less dignity than animals considering there are businesses out there whose sole function is to clean up after people’s dogs.”

Who takes care of the human crap? Likely the homeless themselves, who are too embarrassed to leave it for someone else to find. Save for this one homeless person, who left the batch of soiled paper towels, perhaps for someone to find. And someone did find them – a journalist with a video camera and a former homeless man. As this odd pair stands above the dirty mattress the homeless person slept on and peers over at the nearby soiled towels, an idea forms. The former homeless man trudges off into the thick brush but returns a few moments later, with an item procured from a local convenience store.

“I think I’ll leave a little present,” James Breckenridge says, placing a roll of toilet paper atop the mattress. “For next time,” he says.

The Ronald B. Mickelson Army Story

2007-08-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a health story of physical and psychological maltreatment of a middle age man with a chronic illness:
My name is Ronald B. Mickelson and my reason for writing you today is to bring your attention to the consideration and discrimination that I have received from the Salvation Army Church for the last year while being medically treated for a chronic illness of the liver.
There seems to be little appreciation or knowledge of the day-to-day suffering one goes though with the Hepaticas C virus. When I began my medical treatment, I was living at the semi- independent living quarters and was a volunteer and employee at the Salvation Army’s Centre of Hope here in Abbotsford, B.C. Their administration staff was aware of and kept well informed of my medical progress and how to manage the difficult side effects with this illness. I would like this incident chronicled by you for examination and support.
I am simply the man who has been through this experience resulting in emotional trauma and very painful memories. It is very possible that the Salvation Army will be doomed to repeat these kinds of errors again if not held to some kind of godly resolution of this situation for their decisions.
I have 12 months of correspondence between the Salvation Army and myself in the form of e-mails, faxes and letters. Some of the topics you will read are: 1) a fight between myself and the independent living quarters supervisor( short time recovering addict ) that could have and should have been avoided 2) that myself and a Salvation Army staff supervisor were denied access to my personal belongings and was refused access to my daily medication needed for my chronic illness of the liver 3) was placed on the street with nowhere to go and was refused emergency shelter that endanger my heath and well being 4) That I tried to end my life as a result to all of this .5) How Major Ron Cartmell met with me in a back of a coffee shop where he tells me that* the Salvation Army dropped the ball *with me .Hour later he comes by my house and passes me $40.00 to help with the costs incurred for their oversight.5) The Divisional Command of British Columbia Major Stan Folkins promises me a public apologize at the Salvation Army Cascade Church . Which he does not carry out. You will also read a few twists and turns about the Centre of Hope regarding how and why this all came to exist.
You may contact me at ronaldb_55@yahoo.ca for a more in depth report
and investigation on this material of principal and health.
Sincerely,

Ronald B. Mickelson

To contact Pastor Woodland of the Salvation Army: david.woodland@shawcable.com

MLAs should go on strike to see if we would miss them.

2007-05-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

by Regina Dalton

Our local MLA Mike de Jong was on TV recently, calling NDP leader Carole James ‘hypocritical’ for her stand on the Liberals’ salary and pension bill.

The report also showed de Jong’s leader, Gordon Campbell, decrying ‘gold-plated pensions’ when he was opposition leader.

De Jong is a tad perplexed since James has cleverly managed to put the spotlight back where it belongs – on the greedy and hypocritical Liberals themselves.

Why can’t MLAs be like all other self-respecting workers and go on strike until we, as taxpayers, come up with a reasonable rate of increase for them?

Then we could find out whether we would actually miss them or not.

More taxes needed?

2007-05-11T18:34:00.001-07:00

Regarding the Abbotsford News headline “Mountain part of city by July?”
April 26 2007. The story is misleading readers and should be a major concern of tax paying residents.
Area H would represent aprox 1/5 the land mass of the municipality, taxpayers of the city should be aware the cost to service and govern this land is much more than the one time grant of $250,000 from the province, who admits this will be used to coordinate the conversion of bylaws between the FVRD and Abbotsford. There has been a further $250,000 offer towards a fire hall. This is peanuts considering the long term costs that will be passed to the people. $250,000 will not even buy a fire truck let alone a fire hall. City council would be foolish to accept this burden.
The 4 inch by 5inch ad placed in the Abbotsford news giving notice to the residents can hardly be considered fair notice to the taxpayers. I see why there hasn’t been much public awareness. This small map hardly reflects the fact that this is 10,000 acres. Most would see the ad on the “city page” as just another development proposal.
The question mark at the end of the headline suggests there are many unanswered questions.
Does the city manager believe the residents are so naïve, this huge expansion of city boundaries “there will be no costs to them?”
“No more Public meetings?” The city has made 3 failed attempts to annex area H in the last 4 years and has not had any public meetings.
Why have all discussions at city hall been secret?
There is no business case or legitimate rational for this expansion to wit the last 3 failed proposals. Once full municipal taxes are collected from area H the city will stand to gain a whopping $58,000. Maybe enough to pay for garbage collection?
How about Fire hydrants, snow removal, Policing, Planning, Municipal water, Sewer, Natural gas?
Why does the city refuse to commit to continuing a Supreme Court of British Columbia lawsuit launched by the FVRD vs. HIGHLAND QUARRIES to protect the Clayburn Creek head waters and ground aquifer? According to this latest proposal the city will negotiate passed in soil removal fees, estimated to $60,000 when fully implemented indicating they do not want to stop gravel extraction in this sensitive water shed.
This, in effect will give license to mining companies to continue expansion adding more truck traffic to these rural residential roads, that have been declared by the Ministry of Transportation as “far from ideal, rutting and potholes will be more sever with additional truck traffic, there will be car/truck conflict, no shoulders, sections of the road will suffer major damage due to large trucks.” In 2002 The FVRD contracted a geotechnical assessment by Thurber Engineering of Vancouver. The report states “In our judgment North Sumas Road area hazards require attention and cannot be maintained properly without redesign and reconstruction” Portions of this road are unsafe even for rural residential traffic and are subject to continual failure.
I hope the good citizens of Abbotsford are prepared in my estimation to spend over $10 million to bring this road to a minimum rural residential road standards. Further, if gravel mining is to continue/expand there will need to be a commercial truck route built as identified in our community plan.
Who will Govern the Majestic Sumas Mountain Regional Park? I represent Area H on the FVRD Parks committee, Area service committee, Executive committee, just to name a few and it appears to me there is no possibility, of transferring this park to the GVRD as is the intention of the city. 18 months ago the city withdrew from the FVRD Parks relinquishing their seat at the table and giving up any opportunity to be involved in the decision making for the 3500 acre Sumas Mnt. Park stating they wished to save $80,000 per year. At that meeting, I conveyed my concerns that if they proceeded in this direction the requisition from the GVRD would increase by aprox. $160,000. This was denied by the mayor, however within six months the new GVRD parks requisition increased by more than $150,000 per year. How can this be called good planning to save money?
Be assured I have asked all of these questions and others repeatedly, with resolutions from the FVRD Board of Directors demanding the city clearly communicate its intentions with them, and the Director for Area H. To no avail, not even a phone call to discuss the needs of the local residents. This only touches on some of the real concerns however, space does not allow.
I suggest the taxpayers of Abbotsford take up the challenge of City Manager Gary Guthrie, in his words “Revolt.” 10% of the city’s registered voters need to sign a petition to get your council to bring this huge download from the province to a referendum. This will force them to discuss this in public, and explain how a 10,000 acre land grab fits within the 2004 Regional Growth Strategy, Imagine Abbotsford dialog, and address urban sprawl.
When a politician is waving the red flag with the right hand you should look to see what the left is up to! As Councilor Cadwell states “she was led down the garden path” so to are the ratepayers on the annexation of Area H. If the people demand accountability from their city officials, by gathering enough support for a referendum on “Area H” download, the ballot could possibly include a second vote on Plan A? We have until May 26.
Lastly, why are you mla,s not protecting you interests?

Respectfully, Keith Warrener Days 604- 614- 0144 Eves. 604- 855- 9961
Director, Area H, FVRD Email kwarrener@fvrd.bc.ca

"Olympic" evictions declared illegal

2007-03-20T15:20:00.000-07:00

March 19, 2007

Vancouver – Pivot Legal Society and a coalition of advocacy groups won two low-income housing eviction- and rent-increase cases for residents of one of the Downtown Eastside’s low-income hotels today.

Two residents of the Golden Crown Hotel received notice today from the Residential Tenancy Branch that their illegal eviction notices and rent increases linked to the Olympics were set aside.

“We are pleased to be part of a process that set aside these flawed eviction notices and rent increases,” says Shabnum Durrani of Pivot Legal Society who was counsel for the tenants. “However, this is a short term solution. The only real solution is for government to reinvest in social housing.

”The eviction notices given were for March 31, 2007, to the 28 units in the Golden Crown Hotel located across the street from the Woodward’s building. The eviction notices and rent increases are linked to the 2010 Olympics as owners of the hotel have indicated that they would like to use the hotel to provide housing to Olympic workers rather than the current residents.

In setting aside the illegal eviction notice, the dispute resolution officer in the case wrote, “the ‘Notice’ given by the landlord is not an ‘effective’ Notice because it is not in the approved form and it is fatal in its deficiency because it does not inform the tenants of their [rights]…I find the ‘Notice’ given by the landlord is void from the beginning.”

The Golden Crown hotel was one of the four hotels scheduled to close to low income individuals in the last four weeks. As a result of the work done by Pivot and several other advocacy groups including the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association and the Save Low Income Housing Coalition, three of the four hotels have remained open and operating for low income individuals.

Earlier today 46 single room occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms were saved when the new owners handed management of the Carl Rooms to a local non-profit organization. Community advocates, including David Eby from Pivot Legal Society, convinced a partnership of developers, 0773477 B.C. Limited, to turn over management of their recently-purchased SRO to Atira Property Management, a non-profit property management organization. Atira is a Vancouver-based company that operates three other low-income buildings in the Downtown Eastside. The owners’ agreement with Atira includes plans to renovate and improve the building, while it remains at rent levels accessible to those on basic social assistance.

Homelessness

2007-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

a speech by Bobbie Breckenridge

It’s the worst storm of the year, you’re scrambling to find shelter away from the cold. As you run down the street feeling the frost bite spread through out your body, you look up and see the house you used to own. You pause for just a second to see the happy family sitting around the fireplace warm and toasty so innocent and wonder What would their parents do if their little girl was homeless?? (pause) Good afternoon/morning Mr.T and fellow classmates today I will be talking about the very sad but realistic growing problem in today’s society “Homelessness”. Many people suffer from homelessness each day. You may see them on the streets of Toronto begging for money. What you might not know is that 5052 people are homeless in Toronto alone. Across Canada is an estimated 150,000 people who are homeless. Now think all those people have families and friends who love them. You might be wondering why these people don’t turn to their family and friends for help. Well there are many reasons that people don’t go to there relatives and stay homeless for long periods of time. One reason is that a majority of homeless people are mentally ill. Another reason is that a lot of the homeless are alcohol and substance abusers. The other reasons are: Unemployment, poverty and low paying jobs. The vast majority of the homeless are not living on the street. Many are sleeping in church basements, abandoned buildings and vehicles and in other places away from the public.
Here’s an eye opener 1 in 7 people who are in shelters are children just like us. They unlike us suffer from lack of education and physical abuse. Most of them will grow up to be nothing but there are an odd few that become very rich and have great lives. The pursuit of happiness is a great example of this. This amazing life changing film has a significant meaning and shows that if you work hard enough it will pay off. If you’re saying to yourself right now yeah this all may be true but why don’t they go get a job? Well if you think about it, when you go for a job interview the necessary things needed are: good hygiene (you don’t want to smell bad), proper clothes, a resume (which needs a computer), a phone (so they can call you back) and an address. Even if you do get the job you need five days worth of clean clothes, you need to be rested and be fed in order to concentrate on your work. Plus it will take a couple of months before you have enough money to rent affordable housing. By the end of all that you would probably be fired. Here are some facts on homelessness: Children under 18 make up 27% of the homeless, people from the age of 3 to 50 make up 51% of the homelessness, here’s a scary one 50% of the homeless are women and children running from domestic abuse. So next time you see someone on the street think about everything I’ve said. Think everyone has a different story another tale and all you have to do is take the time and try to think how can I help the on growing problem??? What can I do???

Rich - poor gap becomes a chasm

2007-01-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

Toronto Star, January 10, 2007 Carol Goar
Churning out cogent new studies on poverty wouldn't work, the research team decided. Canadians already knew how bad the problem was.

Making the case for fair wages, affordable housing, decent welfare rates and universal child care wouldn't turn the tide, they agreed. Dozens of advocacy groups were doing that with negligible success.

What was needed was a catalyst to turn awareness into action.

It was the summer of 2006. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives had just received a generous donation to wake people up to the alarming rise of inequality in Canada.
The three lead researchers – Armine Yalnizyan, Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessy – were brainstorming about how to get the message out, how to make it relevant to Canadians and how to get governments to move.

"We had to take it beyond poverty," Yalnizyan recalled. "We had to give everybody a stake in the issue.

"We had to show what's happening to us as a society. We had to get people talking about how disconnected the winners have become from the rest of us. This is the central economic and social issue of our day."

On Nov. 20, the centre launched its "Growing Gap" project. Its aim is to convert people's unease about the concentration of wealth into an active conviction that something is wrong when the economy is doing better than most of the population; when families are working longer and harder to stay in the same place; and when governments sanction this arrangement.

To kick off the initiative, the think-tank sent out pollsters to find out how Canadians are doing after a decade of strong economic growth. After interviewing 2,021 randomly selected adults, the pollsters came back with sobering – but not surprising – news:

- Fifty-one per cent said their standard of living had either dropped or stayed the same.
- Forty-nine per cent said they were one or two missed paycheques away from being poor.
- Sixty-five per cent said the benefits of economic growth had gone to the richest Canadians.
- Seventy-six per cent said the gap between rich and poor had widened.

"What's clear in this poll is that Canadians are worried about their personal future and equally worried about the direction their country might be going," the think-tank said.
Next, it backed up these perceptions with facts. It released a series of statistical sketches of inequality.

The research team was hampered by a scarcity of up-to-date figures (the census, the best source of information on wealth and income, is now 6 years old), but sifted through earnings reports, employment numbers, housing data, consumer debt, economic trends and the 2001 census.

What emerged was a picture of widening disparity. The top 20 per cent of families held 75 per cent of the nation's wealth and were rapidly accumulating more. The bottom 20 per cent had no net wealth (their debts exceeded their assets) and were sinking deeper into poverty. The middle 60 per cent were struggling to hold their ground.

"Economic insecurity is now a fact of life for most workers, regardless of where they fit into the income spectrum," the think-tank pointed out.

Shortly before Christmas, the research team issued a year-end review suggesting – hopefully rather than confidently – that the growing gap would be the "sleeper issue" of 2007.

"This is a problem looking for political leadership. Will 2007 be the year our political leaders take it on?"

To usher in the New Year, Mackenzie did a bit of number crunching and came up with an attention-grabbing comparison.

He showed that by 9:46 a.m. on Jan. 2, the country's 100 highest paid chief corporate executives would make $38,010 – the same amount the average Canadian worker could expect to earn in the entire year.

In the coming months, the think-tank will explore what happens to a society when its privileged minority gets so far ahead of the rest of the population that there is no shared experience to draw on, no common set of goals and no basis for democratic dialogue.

The debate has already begun in Toronto, partly because of an alarming spike in gun violence in the summer of 2005 and partly because of the leadership of Frances Lankin, president of the United Way. She has been warning for three years that Toronto is developing enclaves of extreme poverty, social tension and urban decay.

The timing of the Growing Gap project could be auspicious. Neo-conservatism seems to be on the wane. Canadians are rethinking the trade-off between big tax cuts and threadbare social safety nets.

On the other hand, fate could play a cruel trick. Just as the initiative takes hold, it could be swamped by the environmental wave coming down the pike.
Yalnizyan and her colleagues are ready for either scenario.

They'll fight as long and hard as it takes to convince Canadians that a strong society is one in which everybody moves ahead together.

(More information is available at www.growinggap.ca).

How to tackle the economic paradox

2006-12-17T21:48:00.000-08:00

We have persistent poverty within a booming economy; here’s what B.C. can and should do --- Seth Klein --- Vancouver Sun (p A11), December 12, 2006

It’s the time of year when we find ourselves particularly conscious of poverty and homelessness, but especially this year.

British Columbians seem acutely aware of a paradox that marks our economy: We are simultaneously experiencing solid economic growth and decades-low unemployment on the one hand, and record homelessness, persistent poverty, and a stubborn sense of economic insecurity on the other.

We all tend to be more generous during the holiday season, but these problems cannot be fixed through charity alone they require public policy action.

So what can and should the provincial government do to improve the lot of low-income people, both those who rely on social assistance and those who struggle in the low-wage workforce? A lot.

1) Increase welfare rates. Premier Gordon Campbell’s October announcement that he will increase the shelter allowance for people receiving social assistance was welcome news. But this long overdue change shouldn’t wait until February’s budget. And overall rates must be increased, not just the shelter allowance.A single person without a recognized disability currently gets $510 a month for everything housing, food, clothing, transportation, heat and electricity, toiletries, etc. A single parent with one child receives $968, and a person with a disability gets $856. People without a disability receive less today, in real (inflation adjusted) dollars, than they did 12 years ago. After inflation, rates are 20–26 per cent lower (and 12 per cent lower for people with disabilities.

2) Depoliticize the process of setting welfare rates. Rates should be grounded in a transparent and objective rationale, and tied to a realistic estimate of the basic cost of living. The Dieticians of B.C. report that people cannot eat a nutritious diet on welfare. Calculations by both the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. and Human Resources and Social Development Canada show that welfare rates need to double if they are to meet minimum living costs.A good starting point would be to immediately increase welfare rates by 50 per cent, a measure that would cost about $500 million.

3) Let all welfare recipients keep some earned income. Currently, only those recipients with a recognized disability or barrier to employment are allowed to earn and keep some extra money. B.C. is the only province in Canada that penalizes other welfare recipients by one dollar for every dollar that they earn. Everyone should be able to earn and keep at least $500 per month tax-free.

4) Raise the minimum wage. As with welfare rates, the minimum wage should be depoliticized, and grounded in a clear rationale. An individual working full-time, yearround should not have an income below the poverty line. For this to be so, the minimum wage would need to be $10 per hour.

5) Index both welfare rates and the minimum wage to inflation, and adjust them annually. The Conservative government of Newfoundland recently indexed welfare to inflation, the first government in Canada to do so. B.C. should follow its lead.

6) Make welfare more accessible to those in need. The process of seeking social assistance has become so complicated to navigate, and the eligibility rules so restrictive, that many of those in need are systematically discouraged and denied, and some of these people end up on the streets. The entire application process should be the subject of an independent review, and redesigned so it is appropriate for the majority of people who seek assistance.

7) Increase the stock of affordable housing. The province’s recent move to expand rental subsidies is of some value, particularly for those living in communities with high vacancy rates. But truly addressing the housing crisis and escalating rents requires a significant boost in the quantity of lowincome housing. The province should aim to create 2,000 new units of social housing per year.

8) Enhance access to post-secondary education and training. Meaningful training and education is key to accessing stable, well-paying jobs. The province should rescind the rule that prevents people on welfare from being post-secondary students, and re-introduce tuition-free adult basic education and other upgrading programs at the post-secondary level.

9) Bring in a universal, publicly funded child care program. High quality child care brings important benefits to children in terms of brain development and school readiness, and is essential to women’s equal access to the paid labour market. Quebec has shown that, if the will exists, a province can act alone.

10) Enforce and enhance employment standards. People working in the low-wage workforce rely on provincial employment standards for their basic workplace rights: Minimum wages, statutory holidays, minimum and maximum shift times, overtime pay, etc.

But these standards aren’t being pro-actively enforced, and have been significantly weakened. Vulnerable workers need to know that their workplace rights will be honoured. And if the laws made unionization less challenging, such workers would likely see significant improvements in their income and security.

Combined, these measures would cost the provincial treasury just over $2 billion next year. That may sound like a lot, but consider that last year’s budget surplus was $3 billion, the current year’s surplus is on track to be a similar size, and next year’s surplus will be larger still.The money is there to make a dramatic difference, and the public wants to see action. The cost of inaction is high.

Seth Klein is the B.C. director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The unbearable kitschness of Christmas

2006-11-13T20:34:00.000-08:00

THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE of America was up in arms in 2002 about an exhibition in Napa, California, which included the "caganer", a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles.

Perhaps predictably, the Catholic League was offended by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable. What it didn't appreciate, however, is that the Christmas story is supposed to be offensive, and that the caganer is a reminder of the theological revolution that scandalized sophisticated opinion of the first few centuries of the Christian era: that God became human, that the sacred was no longer to be protected from the profane.

In his great masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech novelist Milan Kundera develops an innovative moral vocabulary around the notion of kitsch. Kitsch, he argues, isn't primarily about bad taste or the vulgarities of popular devotional images: kitsch is "the absolute denial of shit". Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It's the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

THE PROBLEM WITH KITSCH is not readily apparent because (by definition) the treatment of what is considered unwholesome takes place off stage. Think of those Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, healthy children skiing down the Bavarian Alps. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Of course there is. For this is a world that has been purified, where everything nasty or troubling has been eliminated. The logical conclusion of kitsch, argues Kundera, is the ghetto and the concentration camp – the means by which totalitarian regimes dispose of their shit, variously construed.

Opening the infamous exhibition of degenerate art in the summer of 1937, Hitler gave notice that "from now on in we will wage a war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture". Kitsch turns out to be motivation to cleanse the world of pollution. It is the aesthetics of ethnic cleansing.

Kundera himself thinks theology to be the ultimate source of kitsch. He recounts how as a child an aimless thought experiment led him from God having a mouth to God having intestines – the implications of which struck the young Kundera as sacrilegious. This instant and visceral reaction against the association of the divine with the messiness of the human helps us appreciate something of the hostility of many early thinkers to the idea of the incarnation. God and the messiness of the world must be kept at the maximum possible distance. But what then of God become human? What of the word become flesh?

Even many who felt the attraction of the Christian story believed this was going too far. Convoluted ways were sought to mitigate the offence. Christ was not really human or Christ was not really divine. Others created a firewall between the sacred and the profane within the person of Jesus himself. For the second century Gnostic, Valentinius, Jesus "ate and drank but did not defecate".

The Jesus of Valentinius is thus the kitsch Jesus. And it's this same kitsch Jesus of sentimental benevolence that features in countless Christmas cards and community carol services. The baby in the manger now presides over a celebration of feel-good bonhomie that makes the true meaning of Christmas almost impossible to articulate. Boozed-up partygoers and proud grandparents demand the unreality of "O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie". Elsewhere Kundera writes of kitsch as "the need to gaze into the mirror and be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection". And it's this gratifying reflection that many want to see when they gaze into the Christmas crib. Christmas has become unbearably self-satisfied.

THE CAGANER IS A REMINDER of another Jesus and another story. From the perspective of official Christian doctrine, the story of Christmas is a full-scale attack upon the notion of kitsch. Valentinius's theology is declared heretical precisely because it denies the full reality of the incarnation. For Valentinius, Jesus only seemed human. "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see", as the equally heretical carol puts it. Orthodoxy turns out to be vastly more radical, not because it provides a way of squaring the circle of a God-man, but because it refuses to separate the divine from material reality. God is born in a stable. The divine is re-imagined, not as existing in some pristine isolation, but among the shittiness of the world.

The temptation to disassociate the divine from material reality marks the beginnings of kitsch. For, once unhitched from the divine, the complexity of the world can be too easily by-passed and ignored. The orthodox formulation of the incarnation allows no way of avoiding politics, food, sex or money. Nor, as the Christian story of God goes on to make horribly clear, does it offer a way of avoiding suffering and death.

The problem isn't that Christmas has become too materialistic – but rather that it isn't materialistic enough. Kitsch Christmas is another way of uncoupling the divine from the material, thus spiritualizing God into incapacity. I am not being a killjoy attacking the kitsch version of Christmas. Three years ago, my wife gave birth to a baby boy. The labour ward was no place to be coy about the human body and all its functions. The talcum-powdered unreality of kitsch childbirth cannot compare with the exhaustion, pain and joy of the real thing.

But perhaps the most important corruption of Christmas kitsch is how it shapes our understanding of peace. This is the season where the word "peace" is ubiquitous. Written out in fancy calligraphy everywhere, "peace and good will to all" is the subscript of the season. It's the peace of the sleeping child, peace as in "peace and quiet", peace as a certain sort of mood. But this is not what they need in Bethlehem today. They need peace as in people not killing each other.

This sort of peace requires a stubborn engagement with the brute facts of oppression and violence – which is the very reality that the kitsch peace of Christmas wants to take us on holiday away from. How ironic: we don't want the shittiness of the world pushed at us during this season of peace. This, then, is the debilitating consequence of kitsch. Kitsch peace is the unspoken desire that war takes place out of sight and mind – it's the absolute denial of shit. Political leaders who are preparing for yet more fighting will be happy to oblige. Christmas has become a cultural danger to us all, not just a danger to orthodox Christianity.

Rev. Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. This article was first published on Ship of Fools in 2002.

Capital pound-foolishness

2006-11-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

We need to get some of those lock devices they put in drunk’s cars for council chambers. What else but enough booze to be having visions of pink elephants could explain voting for that White Elephant of a shrine to councils ego. And just about as useful since we could build several smaller ice surfaces so kids can get ice time for that kind of coin.

Must be some kind of politicians math. We are going to spend fifty-five million dollars plus multi-millions more in cost overruns and increases, chasing after some imaginary economic benefits in the range of multi-millions. Might as well invest all those millions then drive through the streets throwing the income to the residents to spend. Better, leave the taxes in the taxpayers pockets and they can add all those millions into the local economy any way they choose.

We cannot build a place for seniors but can waste money on a building for fossils and other old things? Instead of a fancy art gallery and museum use the money for MSA and Clearbrook libraries. Buildings all types of people use and that provides meeting space for all kinds of groups in the city. Build a swanky art palace and it catches fire and Ooopps! Guess we should have bought fire halls and engines.

The only part of the plan that makes sense is to expand ARC If council has taxpayer bucks burning a hole in their pockets then build a pool suitable for swimming competitions as part of the improvements. The rest of this foolish scheme should be filed in the big round file under Garbage.

Ken Hundt

Just how dumb ...

2006-09-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

What, Abbotsford couldn’t build a much smaller, cheaper arena with someone to help pay the bills for an established hockey team like the Chilliwack Chiefs. Instead we chased them out of town when they wanted to come here. Now council wants to build a building we don’t need that has nobody to use it except for some vague promises of maybe getting some kind of team. Like we are suppose to take a politicians promise seriously. You use to have more sense George. They promise to stick your name on it or something? 55 MILLION BUCKS!!!! For that we could build and buy all the other things we need.

I’ve lived in Abbotsford for years and I never heard of any world class art or world class museum bits and pieces. So why blow 10 million more bucks on a world class place for regular stuff? Why can’t those who claim to support that kind of thing put their own money where their mouth is and do fund raising themselves to pay for it like they do in big cities such as Vancouver? The Whalers raised money for improvements to Centennial Pool and the city has not kept faith with them. If the chic don’t think it important enough to raise money for then just stick some rooms on the ARC extension. Maybe then the ordinary people who pay the bills will see it.

I want a guarantee that council and anyone who votes yes will be paying all taxes needed over 158.00 a year. We all know about estimates and skyrocketing real cost. Why should I be forced to pay for councils boondoggles?

Chris O’Neill

Down and out in our backyards

2006-05-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

By Christina Toth - Staff reporter

By allowing a dozen or so people to camp temporarily on an undeveloped city park - Compassion Camp - Abbotsford Mayor George Ferguson has officially acknowledged his homeless constituents. By meeting with Fraser Valley Regional District mayors to seek workable solutions last week, and by having city staff meet with housing and homeless advocates, Ferguson and the other mayors are saying they have a responsibility to help the poorest of their residents. He is saying this is a community problem, not solely for provincial and federal governments.

What can we do to help the 430 or more people who are homeless? For starters we can turn up our compassion and turn down our fear - by several degrees. The "homeless" are not baby-eaters and monsters lurking in our backyards. We are talking about real people with heart and brains whose burdens have overwhelmed them. Their pain and shame is only deepened when you and I look down our noses at them and call them losers who have chosen this "lifestyle."
Some may resort to petty crime, but let's not forget there are criminals in every strata of society.

Now, let's meet Diane. Four years ago she was a stay-at-home mom to three children and regularly volunteered at her kids' school. Today, at 50, she sleeps in doorways when she's used her 10-day-per-month limit at the Salvation Army emergency shelter. She says when her marriage fell apart, she hung out with her neighbours, who introduced her to crack cocaine. She began an eight-month "trip to hell," and when it was over, her ex-husband had the kids and she lost all she had. Diane has been clean for more than two years but she can't find her way home from the streets. "It's very easy to fall, but it's so hard to get back up," she said. She hasn't seen her children for a year. Her heart is breaking, but it's not something she can talk about with her current friends. "Most of us are parents or grandparents, but we don't talk about our kids. It's a silent rule - it's too heart-breaking." Diane didn't want her real name and photo used. "I don't want my kids ashamed of their mom. Moms aren't supposed to do things like this." Huddled under a blanket the day I met her, worried about where she'd be sleeping that night, Diane never in her wildest dreams never thought she'd be homeless. "We used to be just like them," she said, pointing up to the nearby houses.

Kevin Ellis, who sometimes stays at the camp, is wrapped up in a green sleeping bag, trying to get comfortable on two plastic chairs. The sleeping bag heaves with his breathing. Turns out he has COPD, or emphysema. He used to work at the Mission Raceway until the COPD sapped his strength. He can't walk far. "Sometimes I fall asleep at the side of the road," he said. "I get tired, I can't help it. Then someone will call the cops on me." Kevin has been homeless since Aug. 22, when he and 30 others were evicted from the Fraser Valley Inn. He stays at the Army's shelter sometimes, but because he coughs so much, he says he's also been asked to leave. The cough makes it difficult to share a place with someone. Kevin, 46, has spent two weeks on and off at the hospital recently. "I need an oxygen tank, but I can't have one out here," he said, labouring for breath. Is there enough warmth in his tent? "No, but I've got no choice, eh?"

James is a bright, articulate soul, a trained accountant and he lives in his car. Like Diane, he tumbled from middle-class comfort, in his case due to the depression that descended into his life and dissolved everything he had. Being homeless has given him a cruel insight to how our agencies and you and I treat the down and out. He shares his views and experience on his remarkable blog, www.homelessinabbotsford.com. To maintain some kind of balance, he volunteers at a local pool with special-needs kids on the weekends.

A few weeks ago Lawrence E. Smith hopped on a bus in Prince George and landed in Abbotsford without a penny. Lawrence, 59, had a head injury and was very much lost in the world. When he didn't receive care at the local hospital, Compassion Camp resident Kerry Pakarinen took in "Yogi," as he was nicknamed, fed him and sheltered him until he found some help from local churches. "Yogi" was put back on a bus to Prince George, where we presume his mental health workers have found secure housing for him.

Kerry, 44, was working and had an apartment until he broke his ankle while working as a construction labourer in winter. He has grown children in university. He didn't want to talk about them, but did say rather proudly they are strong-willed and intelligent. Kerry has some problems: aches and pains, epilepsy and maybe the depression that dogs people who are homeless. But he has faith that God is helping out. "That's why all of this is happening," he said in reference to the community action plan for the homeless. Kerry took a risk exposing the camp. I asked him why he doesn't just look after himself. "That wouldn't be me. I enjoy giving a hand, I like to see people's eyes light up when you help them."

New homeless stories:

2006-04-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

New stories are on www.somethingcool.ca Monday Aprill 24, 2006 - Issue 161

Need to Increase Welfare Rates

2006-04-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

HI everyone out in povnet land. Here’s some info on the “Shoe-In” that we held at Carnegie Centre to try to get some coverage for the need to increase welfare rates and end the barriers that keep people in need from getting welfare. We did get some media (Georgia Straight, Metro, 24 hrs, Global TV, Fairchild, CKNW) but nothing in the Sun, Province, CBC, Globe and Mail, etc. so I’m trying to make this our own media coverage. The actual event was a lot of fun and involved a lot of Downtown Eastside residents. - Jean Swanson

Carole Taylor “Shoe-In” a big success

When Finance Minister Carol Taylor introduced the provincial budget last month, she wore new $600 Gucci shoes. Six hundred dollars is $90 more than a single person gets in a month on welfare. There was no increase to welfare rates in the budget even though there’s a $2 billion surplus. Like many other people, Jaya Babu and Diane Wood were appalled by Carole Taylor’s arrogance and blindness—flaunting $600 shoes while thousand of British Columbians live in deep poverty. They began to talk about shoes, and how they might be used as an expression of resistance to injustice. Then others at Carnegie joined in the conversation and began to create an event. They had the confidence to do this. They had the faith—faith as creating what we do not see. And the Carole Taylor “Shoe-In” was born. There would be a large, golden shoe representing Carole Taylor’s $600 shoes (thank you, Miriam), and there would be $600 worth of food to give to hungry people (thank you, BCGEU, BCTF, BC Fed, CUPE 391, Michael and Diane Goldberg, CCPA staff and Andrea Ottem).

The event took place on March 28th at 11 am in the Carnegie theatre, and the Carnegie was buzzing. Lots of media showed up, and the “Shoe-In” was ready for them. The event was designed as a teach-in to teach Carole Taylor some facts about poverty in BC. She didn't show up, but Libby Davies, our Member of Parliament, and Jenny Kwan, our Member of the Legislative Assembly, were there. Professor Bob Sarti presided over the teach-in, and he did an excellent job. Mary Ann Cantillon (thanks, Mary Ann and Sharon for the costume) was Mary Ann Antoinette and she repeated that famous phrase, “Let them eat cake.” Then delicious cake (thanks Katrina) was served to people in the theatre.

Jean Swanson gave a talk on why welfare rates should go up. Then Prof. Bob asked us to answer the question, “How do people on welfare get by in a 5-week month?” Downtown Eastside residents in the audience responded with many answers and Diane Wood wrote them down. The answers will be sent to Carole Taylor. Some of the answers to the questions were: use food banks; use free food outlets; beg in the streets, go binning; sleep a lot; prostitution; end up in hospital, and many more.

Seth Klein of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) spun the Wheel of Misfortune. This wheel had the many barriers to welfare on it, and it showed how difficult it was to get welfare in BC. Then Seth talked about a new CCPA report that showed that the drop in the number of people getting welfare in BC is due to the new welfare rules, and is not because more people on welfare found work. Seth said welfare rates should be raised by 50 percent, and the money to do this was there because the government had a two billion dollar surplus.

Then Prof. Bob asked the audience what it would do with the government’s $2 B surplus. There were many answers to this question, and Diane wrote them down. They will be sent to Carole Taylor. Some of the answers were: increase welfare rates; build social housing; a dental program for people on welfare; more treatment centres and harm reduction programs for drug users; opening up Riverview so mentally ill people aren't on the streets, and many more.

Adrienne Montani from First Call gave a strong talk on the needs of poor children and poor families in BC. She said there is more child poverty in BC than in any other province. She said that the gap between rich and poor is increasing, and that those poverty facts are known to government. Yet the government turns away from the crisis of poverty. “Why does it do that?” Adrienne asked. Why do the rich turn their backs on the poor? Then there was a parade of shoes—not Gucci shoes—and a class photo on the front steps of Carnegie. After that, the $600 worth of food was distributed to people who were hungry after a five week welfare month.

The “Shoe-In” was a great success. There was a lot of energy in the Carnegie Theatre. Congratulations to the many people who worked hard to make this event inspiring, informative and lots of fun. Hopefully, some of that energy will spill over to the Raise the Rates Campaign. In her speech Jean Swanson quoted Nelson Mandela, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” --Sandy Cameron

Here’s a copy of the talk I gave at the Shoe-In, in case there’s anything in it that might be useful to anyone fighting for higher rates: Shoe-in talk March 28, 2006 I remember what this neighbourhood was like 25 years ago. It was poor. It had drug users and people with illness and disabilities. But hardly anyone was homeless. Most people had enough to eat. No one slept in the pews at First United. The stores weren’t boarded up.

Why was it different then? In those days welfare and minimum wages had more purchasing power. People could afford to rent a room, buy a sandwich at a cheap restaurant, have a cup of coffee with a friend, and get a bus pass or a phone. Now the welfare rate for a single person is $510 a month. How many voters who aren't poor actually realize that welfare rates are so abysmally low? How many know that the $510 is divided into 2 parts. $325 is for shelter. How many people who aren't poor know that the $325 has been frozen for 14 years or that the average rent for a crummy hotel room is $380? How many people who aren't poor know that the support portion of welfare is $185? How many know that it was $205 a month in 1981, 25 years ago?

How many middle class or rich people or members of the legislature would have the budgeting skills to even survive on $510 a month, let alone stay healthy and look for work? Think of what you could buy if you got $852 a month for welfare. That’s what welfare you’d get today if welfare had the same purchasing power that it had 25 years ago.

Why are people in this neighbourhood so sick, so hungry, so depressed? Because provincial government policies have created a deep, deep poverty in the midst of incredible wealth.

That’s why Carole Taylor’s shoes made us angry—shoes that cost $90 more than a single person on welfare has to live on for a month. She had a $2 billion budget surplus. She could have ended the deep, deep poverty and the hardship it creates. She could have helped open the stores in our community and in low income neighbourhoods across the province. But she didn't. The government didn't. Instead she bought the Guccis—the shoes that say, “if you’re poor you don't count”--the shoes that say being rich in the midst of deep, deep poverty is normal. But, as Nelson Mandela said, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” That’s what we expect the governments we elect to do. We’re getting allies and we’re not going to stop til those welfare rates get raised.

And here’s a poem written by M. Kelly at Carnegie: $600 could have bought…

*A wheelchair for my dear wife so I could push her when she’s in too much pain to walk (a retiree)
*milk for my kids for a year (mother of four)
*Almost 300 bus tickets for my job search rides (young immigrants)
*Tune-up for old beater that gets us to work each day (Mr+Mrs working poor)
*Laser surgery for cataracts in both eyes (senior)
*Steel-toed boots and a hard hat so I could get a construction job (young man)
*150 jars of jam to go with my peanut butter sandwiches (school girl)
*I could get my prescriptions filled (senior citizen)
*600 presents from the Dollar Store so I’d always have gifts for my family (a “training” wage earner)
*Bannock to feed all the hungry tummies, and blankets for the winter (an elder)
*Decent clothes for my children to wear to school so no one laughs at them (single mom)
*Dinner for 200 people at Union Gospel Mission at Easter (homeless person)
*Brushes and paint (a starving artist)
*600 boxes of Kraft Dinner (a young mom)
*Comfortable shoes for the next 10 years for our poor, tired feet (taxpaying public)

Instead our $600 became some ugly shoes abandoned in a rich woman’s closet.
--M. Kelly Jean Swanson

Editor, The News; Tuesday April 4, 2006

2006-04-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

Note: I was going to just post excerpts but felt Mr. Gibson deserved the courtesy of his entire letter, so I have highlighted the parts I want to emphasis.

Abbotsford’s residents are living in a city that is trying to be something it’s not.This is not a small town that’s experiencing growing pains. It’s a city. Period. And as a city it needs to have progressive thinkers in charge that can handle city problems and growth.There is no reason why issues time and time again get put on the back burner to be dealt with in the future. The future is now here in Abbotsford, and I believe this city is long overdue for some of the amenities that come with a population base the size of which is here now, and growing rapidly.

We should have an arena the size of which can handle a WHL team, not a BCHL team. Why should Chilliwack be supporting a larger market team in a much smaller market? Other uses for the arena would attract people and money here, not the other way around. A casino? Why not have one here instead of seeing our dollars head elsewhere? The dangers that come with gambling do not simply disappear if an Abby resident gambles in another city. It’s past time for this city to build some sort of entertainment district, clustered close together south of the No.1 highway. This would keep policing costs down, keep young people in town and realistically accessible to taxis as transportation.

This city is a ghost town at night, and it should be a hub to draw people from the smaller cities that surround us. Residents of Chilliwack, Mission and Aldergrove should be feeding our economy, not the other way around. And our 1 o’clock closing times are a joke that gets laughed at by visitors to our city. The people who really want this are long in bed at this hour. Keep our streets safe? Does anyone see the streets as safer since these changes were implemented?

You need big thinkers in a big city, and more tax dollars earned at night would help fund the issues that really are hurting Abbotsford – addiction and homelessness. City in the country? It’s starting to look like East Hastings in the country.

Rodney Gibson Abbotsford BecomingHastings in the country

By JOE MILLICANAbbotsford NewsApr 01 2006

2006-04-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Homeless want a patch of land.

A 42-year-old man sifts through his dirty belongings and attempts to drag the leaves and undergrowth over the shelter he created to fend off the winter nights. He was covered and out of sight for a few days and enjoyed some peace and quiet. However, a group of kids has now attacked his temporary home and left it exposed to Abbotsford's police and city bylaw officers. He expects a visit from them any time now, and knows they will likely confiscate his remaining possessions -something he said has happened six times previously - and ask him to move along. However, Kerry Pakarinen is adamant he is going nowhere. And the reason? He says there is nowhere for him to go.

Pakarinen has been living in Abbotsford for the past six months having moved here from Vancouver. He had a home and a job locally, but said an ankle injury and his epilepsy contributed to his downfall and he has been living on Abbotsford's streets for six weeks. Pakarinen currently calls a patch of woodland on Sumas Way. Ironically, Pakarinen is a trained home renovator, and he put those skills to good use by digging a shelter into the side of a hill and reinforcing it with makeshift beams that he found in the woodland. He just wants to be left alone to find a job and get himself on track, but at the moment has more pressing issues. "When I came from East Van I thought I had come to God's country. I have come to the Bible belt but all I have found is the devil," he said.

Despite spending time in a number of communities across Canada, Pakarinen is adamant that Abbotsford is one of the worst for its "treatment of individuals. "People turn a blind eye and look the other way. If they saw they would be shamed by what's going on. "Pakarinen believes he is well-qualified to make such a statement, having been at the forefront of homeless issues in other communities. Acting as a media spokesman at the time, Pakarinen was one of the men behind the high-profile squat in the old Woodward's building in Vancouver in 2002. The protest followed a decision by the B.C. Liberals not to build social housing in the structure, despite a commitment by the previous NDP administration to do so. The City of Vancouver eventually evicted the squatters through the courts and in 2003 bought the Woodwards building from B.C. housing for $5 million. In the summer, it will be made into houses, shops, green space and a post-secondary base for contemporary arts.

Having relocated to Abbotsford, Pakarinen is turning his attention to B.C.'s fifth-largest city.In February, the City of Abbotsford was criticized for elements of its homeless policy. At that time, city officials were accused of "stealing" the personal belongings of some of Abbotsford's street people. In response to that, city spokesman Jay Teichroeb said bylaw officials gave homeless people 48-hours prior warning to shift from a particular area before city crews moved in to "clean it up. "Rather than "pushing around our poor folk," Pakarinen said the city should designate a piece of property for homeless people to pitch their tents. "This has got to be better than chasing people all over the place." he said.

Pakarinen said he does not do drugs, although he does smoke a small amount of marijuana to control his epilepsy. Basically, having been living paycheck to paycheck, he said he simply hit a run of bad luck. "A lot of people out there are hurting and they need the help of their society," he said. "I will be working again. I just need a hand. "I am a pacifist. If you have a fear of me then come and I will make you a cup of coffee. It would be good to hear people's ideas and concerns. Please don't be fearful of me because I am homeless - I am just hurting.

"Abbotsford Mayor George Ferguson said on Thursday that he recognizes homelessness in Abbotsford is a problem. Ferguson was recently approached by local resident Richard Bell, who is pushing to find a patch of land for Abbotsford's homeless to pitch their tents. Bell set a March 31 deadline for that bid, but despite failing within that time frame, he got Ferguson's attention. According to Ferguson, there are provincial and federal issues that need to be addressed when it comes to homelessness, such as attempting to include Abbotsford in the share of money that is currently allocated to the Greater Vancouver Regional District. However, he said the city can also play its part. "We need to find a solution to this homeless situation and figure out how we can deal with," Ferguson said." I will be asking at the next council meeting that we set up a homeless committee to deal with the local problem. The weather is now going to improve, but hopefully we will get something resolved so we do not have this same problem next year. "Bell said he plans to appear before council within the next couple of weeks. "I made it clear that there is going to be a solution to this," he said. "People need to have a place where they can live legally. How that can be achieved is what we have to work on."

Letter to editor, Abby News March 16, 2006

2006-03-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Not a Christian city

Mar 16 2006

Editor, The News;

I have to say I am not looking forward to the casino debate. I am anticipating a multitude of letters arguing that we are a Christian community, and therefore cannot allow such a thing. I am not even going to give my opinion on the proposed casino; instead I would like to address another issue.
As a Christian who is very familiar with the Bible and the words of Jesus, I would have to argue that we are not a “Christian community.” In fact we are far from it. Just because there is a church on every other street corner, and a large population in our community attends church, that does not make us a Christian community. If you think we are such, consider the following arguments. In a Christian community the food bank would not have to beg for donations, and would never be running short of supplies. In a Christian community a youth shelter with ample beds would have been established many years ago. The one we have now took blood, sweat, tears and years, and only has space for two.

We would have a better homeless shelter. As it is, a homeless person can find shelter only two nights per month in Abbotsford. Tell me how the homeless are supposed to know which will be the two coldest nights in a month? We would also have drug rehabilitation for teens, and more for adults. There would be breakfasts and lunches provided at every school, every day for the children who come to school hungry. If you think we don’t have that problem in Abbotsford, spend a few days in a downtown school, and see how many children come without a lunch. There would be social housing provided by churches. I could go on and on.

We have no excuse for state of things in our community. Our churches are overflowing with people, and many have multimillion dollar budgets. Many have new, elaborate buildings and state-of-the -art multimedia equipment.There is no shortage of money in our churches. Why do so many leave it to the Salvation Army to take care of Abbotsford’s neediest people?In a truly Christian community, every church would be doing what the Salvation Army does. Every church should have it’s doors opened to the needy and be known for it’s social programs.

When Jesus talked about who he would welcome into heaven in Matthew 25, as he separated the sheep (those who would enter heaven) from the goats (those who would not) he didn’t commend the sheep for fighting for social and moral justice, he didn’t praise them for building beautiful churches with wonderful programs, instead, he praised them for feeding the hungry, clothing the needy, sheltering strangers, and taking care of the sick and imprisoned. Jesus said that whatever you do to the least of these, that is what you are doing to him.

If we want to be known as a Christian community, all of us need to join the ranks of those who are doing what Jesus actually told us to do. Let’s start meeting the needs of those in Abbotsford who have the least. While the needs of the least of these in our community are so wholly unmet, how dare we even begin to take a moral stand. It will only be regarded as gross hypocrisy.

S.R. Klassen
Abbotsford

Pews are full but the coffers are empty as First United struggles after 120 years

2006-03-16T16:47:00.000-08:00

by Pete McMartin

At 11AM on a rainy Wednesday morning, a small dark-haired woman enters the sanctuary of the First United Church and, in front of the alter, begins to change her clothes.

She is carrying a towel. She looks like she has just had a shower. She slips out of the sweatpants she is wearing and puts on a new pair, and then she slips off her sweatshirt. She has a thin bare-shouldered chemise on underneath. she is thin herself. There is a small tattoo beneath her right shoulder. Her hair looks wet and she begins to comb it slowly, which, given the location, is an oddly affecting display of vanity. She takes the towel, and a quilt she has, and carefully rolls both of them up. Then she puts the wet towel in a plastic bag and places the places the towel and quilt in one of two cardboard boxes she has with her. She unearths a roll of masking tape and tapes up the box. the tearing sound of the tape echoes through the sanctuary. Then she applies underarm deodorant.

While she does this, a man sleeping near her on the alter platform wakes up and watches her. He looks to be in his 30's and appears to be fairly well-dressed, and he wakes up groggy. He has kicked his shoes off to sleep. He doesn't move, but stays lying where he is, and with no particular look on his face regards the woman with mild curiosity. Then he closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

All around her there are men sleeping and women, too. They are sleeping on every one of the church’s pews and on the hard linoleum floor of the sanctuary and on the steps of the alter. The sanctuary is filled with a stifling, overpowering smell of body odour and stinking feet. One man is in a pew eating a cheeseburger and another is rolling a cigarette from the butt ends he has collected. Some people are sleeping in the pews sitting up, and some are sprawled in a nest of clothing and blankets. Some have backpacks and some have boxes and plastic bags and some have nothing at all. One man is sleeping at the foot of the church organ. A man and woman are sleeping together just off to the side, he, bare-chested and on his back, she lying on her side and curled up under the crook of his arm. She has pulled her quilt tight up against her chin as if to keep the world out.

Meanwhile, the world outside hums along. The housing market has gone mad and so has the economy, and the government bribes unions with a billion tax dollars to sign fat contracts.

First United, on the other hand is enjoying a boom of a different kind. For years, the mission a block east of the corner of East Hastings and Main has opened its sanctuary to street people so that they might sleep there and be safe during the day. They are allowed in at 8:30 a.m. and asked to leave at 4 p.m. – the longest the church can afford to keep the sanctuary open.

“For years” said Rev. Ruth Wright, the church’s executive director, “if we had 15 people sleeping in the pews we thought that we were really busy. But now, 80 or 90 people sleeping in the sanctuary is not uncommon at all and more and more of them are not the kind of people we would see before. Now we’re seeing the unemployed looking for work; a lot of forestry people, for example, whose jobs don’t exist anymore and have lost their jobs to mechanization; people who have low-level paying jobs who can’t afford rent in a city like Vancouver and are sleeping here while they try to get on their two feet; people who come to Vancouver thinking there’s lots of work but can’t get their tickets. And we’re seeing more women.”

But, Wright was asked, why aren’t these people landing jobs in this hot economy? Why aren’t the sanctuary’s numbers shrinking instead of growing?
“For some people(in the public), there’s that mentality of, ‘Why can’t these people pull themselves up by the bootstraps?’ But a lot of these people don’t have boots to pull up. Some don’t have the qualifications. And, of course, mental illness is a huge problem down here.”

The growing numbers have put a strain on First United. Last year, the church recorded a $260,000 deficit, and is predicting a similar deficit for 2006. This is a dire situation for a church that has been at that location for 120 years. Its regular congregation – most of whom travel from outside the area to worship there – has shrunk to 30 people. Its traditional sources of revenue – bequeathals and donations from people who admire the churches activism – are not what they use to be. The situation has got to the point where the church, to raise donations, is hoping to recruit 100 people to run on its behalf in this years Vancouver International Half Marathon. (To register for the run or to make a donation to First United, go to www.firstunited.ca or call 604-681-8365.)

It is money First United is going to need. On Wednesday morning, there are 85 people sleeping in its sanctuary. Business is booming.