All posts by James W. Breckenridge

Municipal

A Letter to Premier Gordon Campbell:

Leave a comment

Consider the words of that famous businessman Jacob Marley “Mankind was my business”. In choosing to pursue the premiership of British Columbia you made the health and welfare of these citizens “your business” and your “business” is failing badly due to your neglect, fear and unwillingness to provide needed leadership. These issues may not be pleasant, easy to address, popular or without great challenge.

True leadership is about making the tough choices. The story below from www.homelessinabbotsford.com calls for true leadership. It is time for you to Decide.

“Why is it so god-damned hard? Why is it so unfair?” I could hear the pain and fatigue in her voice as she asked the question, her eyes revealing her soul deep weariness of spirit.

She was not speaking of life but of detoxification from drugs. For the first time in the years I have known her, she desperately wants to get clean. If there were a detox bed available she would now be started on the path to a life free from drugs and off the streets.

But there are no beds, no room for someone seeking help. It will take up to three weeks of phoning every day, struggling to keep clean and free of drugs, trying not to use drugs to ease the pain of the wait. Homeless – but having to find a phone to call every day; Homeless – but having to try to keep from surrendering to hopelessness; Homeless – crying for help, those cries falling on deaf ears.

We know that the best chance for her those who find themselves seeking to reclaim their lives is to get a bed immediately. We have witnessed how many we lose of those who face the wait for a detox bed back to drugs and the street.

If a person is lucky in their timing there is a bed available to them immediately. The unlucky majority rolls snake-eyes and face detoxing on the street surrounded by the drugs that will relieve their pain. Many people get a little headache and they quickly take the drug aspirin for pain relief. Do you honestly think that YOU, facing the pain of detoxing alone and on the streets, would not seek the “pain relief drugs” you needed?

Maple Ridge, Chilliwack. Cordova and Vancouver – four detoxification centers for the entire lower mainland. There is a drug use epidemic on our streets and we have only these four inadequate facilities for those trying to find help. If this was not enough of a barrier bureaucracy steps forward to add another in the form of “health” regions. With two centers in the Coastal region and two in the Fraser region you cannot be on all four waiting lists in order to get the first bed but are restricted to your health region. Which raises the question of whether the reason we are not now opening another detox is that the two regions are to busy fighting over which region gets funding for such a facility to remember they are suppose to about Health?

I do know that a serious commitment to getting clean should not depend on, nor so often be defeated by, so literally a roll of the dice.

So the next time you see someone suffering the scourge of addiction instead of looking down your nose or assuming a “holier than thou” attitude it would be a more truthful reflection of reality if you apologized for the lack of detoxification, rehabilitation and the community based support programs we know will reclaim lives from addiction.

Addiction

Media lack of brainpower causes suffering and misinformation

Leave a comment

I saw Mark McCardell on Vancouver’s Global noon hour news on Wednesday February 21, 2007. All I can say about it is that this is precisely this type of media treatment of important issues that dooms Canada and its citizens to poor and misinformed decision making. At a time the country faces important decisions on a wide variety of complex issues, making the need for balanced, thoughtful and intelligent information a must, the media is serving up this kind of misleading, pointless nonsense.

Mr. McCardell demonstrates his total disconnection from reality and lack of familiarity with thought in his assertions that rounding up all the current drug dealers and jailing them would, in some manner impossible for anyone with more intelligence than a amoeba to fathom, ensure that illegal drugs are no longer available. At its roots the illegal drug industry is unfettered capitalism at its most avaricious, where the laws of supply and demand ensure a continuous supply of dealers and drugs. Any one who falls for Mr. McCardell’s glib assurances that the arrest of current suppliers would prevent their loved ones from the path of addiction, in reality would face an increased likelihood of the heartbreak of addiction so many now deal with. Given the immense potential for wasted lives and damage in Mr McCardell’s statement I would say his behaviour on this matter is criminal.

His solution for current addicts is to abandon them to their addiction in hopes they will solve the problem by dying off. Although, in further proof of his lack of an ability to reason, he fails to explain how this die off would occur once his magical plan for removing drug supplies from our streets denies them the drugs to kill themselves with. Perhaps Mr. McCardell favours some form of euthanasia for those who have not, for the convenience of Mr McCardell and those who wish to live in the type of society he advocates, killed themselves off before their drug supply miraculously disappeared.

Mr. McCardell is apparently to be numbered among those who wring their hands and decry a society where people step over those in need of help and walk away. As long as the person in need of help is suffering from something the Mr. McCardell deems worthy of help. I have no desire to live in the type of society that would grow out of adopting Mr. McCardell’s spiritually bankrupt ideology.

No. if you want to have a positive affect on these complex social problems, indeed a positive effect on Canada and Canadian society as a whole, you will not find it in the mindless demagogy of Mr. McCardell and his ilk. You will not find it in throwing drug dealers and addicts in jail; not in arbitrarily longer jail sentences; nor in ignoring the realities of addiction and the drug trade; assuredly you will not find it in wishing for the death of those suffering addiction for down that path lies corruption and darkness.

No, if we wish to find solutions we need to heed the wisdom of the great minds of the human race such as Albert Einstein. We must amend the criminal code, with draconically punishing sentence lengths, to make stupidity of the proportions and criminality demonstrated by Mr. McCardell as much against the law as it is against the public interest and intelligent thought. This would mean that at least minimal levels of intelligence will become a requirement for employment in the news media resulting in significant increases of useful information transfer to the public while cutting off the current deluge of misinformation. While an informed public does not guarantee wise decisions it at least affords a fighting chance for common sense and thoughtfulness to win out.

For as Albert noted: “The two most abundant elements in the Universe are hydrogen and human stupidity, and of the two I am not sure about hydrogen.” With the challenges facing our society, our country and our world today, we can no longer afford the luxury of human stupidity of the magnitude demonstrated by Mr. McCardell and those who foist him upon us.

Municipal

Abbotsford’s New Homeless Strategy

Leave a comment

Abbotsford’s New Homeless Strategy: zip, nada, zilch

It has been close to a year since Compassion Park with several city councillors recently quoted in the newspapers ballyhooing the strides made on the homeless front since the closing of Compassion Park.

Looking at Compassion Park in the spring of 2007 what changes in city behaviour do we find? Well, the notices posted to vacate the park now bear the date March 15, 2007 and …… that’s it. It is truly amazing what progress can be made on homelessness and other growing/pressing social issues with leadership, imagination and intelligent behaviour. Unfortunately for the citizens of our City, Abbotsford City Hall is lacking all three.

A year to plan and prepare and we are unprepared and apparently lacking in any plan but pointlessly chasing of the homeless from spot to spot around the city. What Progress!

It may be of interest to readers that the park is pretty much the last choice on the local realty listings for camping spots. For those who have not visited this area it is basically a steep wooded hillside with little level ground for comfortable tenting. But with all the best camping spots around the city taken and the demand for camps rising with the homeless population, you’ve got to take what is available. Especially since so many of the doorways, overhangs and stairwells are already homesteaded by other homeless.

And so it appears we face another spring and summer of senseless chasing of the homeless from point to point around the city until they arrive back at the starting point to begin yet another fruitless merry-go-round chase, and another, and another, and another. More homeless, more wasted time, more waste of taxpayer dollars to achieve – NOTHING. Apparently Abbotsford City Hall’s action plan for dealing with homelessness and other social ills lies in creating a plan in their own image – a perpetual motion money wasting machine.

Maybe it is just me, but personally I would have decided to try at least one different, preferably several different approaches to these problems. What do you think? Would not you also want to have been prepared with new and different approaches, instead of the same old wasteful behaviours?

Homeless

"Olympic" evictions declared illegal

Leave a comment

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.

Homeless, Municipal, Provincial

Recycling schools to meet community Needs.

Leave a comment

I read in a local newspaper that the provincial government actually has a program that will give a grant to study whether cooperation between a school (Yale) and local recreation (ARC) would prove beneficial to local recreation programming. Then the program will pay for capital improvements to need to advance the cooperation.

Does this concept seem as inane to others as it does to me? How could access to Yale school fail to be of benefit to recreation programming? Gymnasiums, change rooms, classrooms etc, open up a wide array of possibilities for programming. The fact is that in the town/small city I grew up in schools were used for a wide range of community activities after school hours thus saving the taxpayers the expense of building facilities when school buildings, with a little creative thought, could serve the community for many purposes. Save the taxpayers putting up two buildings where one could be made to serve double duty. Georgetown, Saskatoon, Toronto, Edmonton; in all these cities I participated in programs making use of school gymnasiums and classrooms at substantial savings to taxpayers wallets.

Unfortunately Abbotsford has the Parks & Recreation Empire and the School Board Empire and we all know that empires are about building up your empire and power by increasing the buildings and workers you control then protecting your empire against any invaders.

Now I do like the concept of the provincial government funding of capital changes that would enhance usage of school buildings for community purposes. I like the idea of funds available to draw up the plans for what changes would permit maximum usage of existing school buildings for community use. I do think that we need to look beyond merely Recreation to include seniors, clubs etc.

I suppose what disturbs me about this matter is the implication that our school buildings are not part of the community outside of providing schooling. Recent articles on the proposed school closures reinforced this apparent division between community and school district. The implication in the words of the school district is that the schools are the property of the school district, not the community. If the school district can use them fine, but if they are of no use to the school district they will be sold to benefit the school district. As if it was not the community that paid for the facilities and that the community does not have a right to use closed facilities if there is a need, especially a pressing need.

We do have a pressing need for one of the empty school buildings, preferably Abbotsford Elementary, because of a total lack of leadership at Abbotsford City Hall, which has chosen to procrastinate rather than take action on homelessness and its associated social issues. Dragging their feet on this matter has allowed these problems to worsen to the point they are on the verge of exploding out of control.
They frittered away time that should have been spent planning and preparing to address the overwhelming need for shelter in this city to the point we are on the point of finding ourselves in a position of having to act NOW to provide some form of shelter and services for the homeless, or of living with them spread throughout the neighbourhoods of the city.

Abbotsford Elementary and other school buildings exist, better yet are designed to withstand the depredations of children. Abbotsford Elementary located where it is offers the best location for providing the homeless with shelter while maintaining their access to the services they need and has the potential for the least disruption on the neighbourhood adjacent to the school. Hopefully we can engage the community spirit shown on the question of closing Philip Sheffield to work with the neighbourhood to minimize disruptions, deal with problems and maximize our ability to begin to address these social problems.

It is going to take community, from local neighbourhoods to the entire city to put in place the programs and facilities needed to start reducing homelessness rather than letting it grow. Granted using Abbotsford Elementary is not ideal, but ideally we would have had leadership on these issues and be in a much better position to deal with the burgeoning crisis of homelessness. Until we can get some leadership and intelligence into Abbotsford City Hall we are just going to have to make do with leadership from the citizens and make use of facilities such as Abbotsford Elementary.