The following are just a few of the issues that hit the convention floor.

The RCMP and public private partnerships

There was a lot of coverage in the media about the breakdown in negotiations over a new RCMP contract between British Columbia and the federal government. A side bar issue that got no coverage dealt with the new RCMP Division Headquarters in Surrey.

Solicitor General Shirley Bond complained to a UBCM panel about the province’s inability to control rising RCMP costs. The example she gave was the RCMP’s new Division E headquarters that saw costs balloon from $300 million to $1 billion.

However, it turns out that the new headquarters is a federal public private partnerships and that so far the province’s privatization agency, Partnerships BC, has billed $2.5 million in consulting fees on the project. Remember when the government argued that P3s offered fixed costs and price stability?

The Municipal Auditor General

Mayors and councilors were not happy about the province’s decision to impose a Municipal Auditor General on them. Councilors argued from the convention floor that they were already forbidden by law to run a deficit and had many of their major projects subject to referendum.

However, the province backed down on most of the issues promising to pay for the new office (but not for the cost of audits) as well as swearing that new MAG would not have the power to second guess local policies, including tax policy.

The big issue that still remains is governance. The UBCM wants the same model the province enjoys in its relationship with its own AGM. That would mean an MAG would report to an accounting board made up of local government representatives. No dice Communities Minister Ida Chong told the convention. Apparently local governments will make up only a minority of the board. The business community has been promised its own chair at the table.

The business community (primarily the Canadian Federation of Independent Business) is on a full-court press to see business property taxes cut with the cost being shifted to homeowners. Of course business, unlike homeowners, can write off their property taxes against federal and provincial taxes.

Government downloading and rural areas

Every UBCM convention holds individual forums for different sized communities. My favorite is always the Electoral Area Directors’ forum made up of mainly people representing spread out rural areas. While diplomacy is the order of the day when big communities talk to the provincial government, with Area Directors you get a lot more down-to-earth candor.

Over the years Area directors have had a continuing complaint about downloading of costs. This year the complaint was over diking policy. As a Central Kootenay Director told the provincial officials at the forum, “One of the reasons you are downloading is that you lack resources. If you can’t handle it, we sure can’t.” The chair of the presentation on diking sent the provincial officials away with this message:

We don’t have the expertise, equipment or money. Flood mitigation needs more funding. Send the message back.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

Over the years residents, particularly in urban areas, have become used to a growing level of recycling. Blue boxes take away our newspapers, cans and plastics. For many of us there will soon be recycling of kitchen scraps.

It turns out there is some risk of things going the other direction. The Area Directors heard a presentation on Extended Producer Responsibility. Under this program producers and consumers or products will have responsibility for them. It sounds attractive but what will it actually mean?

A Director from the Sunshine Coast told the panel they were planning to extend their blue box program and asked for advice considering the EPR policy. An industry spokesman advised the Director that they couldn’t give practical advice but that it would be “prudent to wait.”  An industry spokesman reported that some governments were putting a pause on such projects. “Remain nimble” she advised.

It turns out we may all have to be more nimble if we have to start taking our newspapers to depots rather than having them picked up in blue boxes.

Wages for public employees

It appears Christy Clark’s government is determined to make public employees pay for the government’s ineptitude on the HST. In a panel on the economy Finance Minister Kevin Falcon told the audience:

With respect to the wage mandate for the whole public service at net zero for two years – that tough mandate is likely to continue.

Public sector wages have already fallen due to inflation and the two year wage freeze. The Finance Minister appears determined to push them down further. Meanwhile, at least for now, wages in the private sector are going up.

Ferries

At the forum on the economy an Island Trust Trustee told the panel of Ministers:

Ferry fares are killing our communities. We are losing jobs because of the ferry fares.  If government isn’t willing to put money into ferry infrastructure we are going to continue to lose jobs.

Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrum said they were cutting 400 sailings but that it would not likely affect fares. Finance Minister Falcon suggested fares really didn’t make much difference because when they cut fares temporarily during the recession, ridership didn’t go up. The Island Trustee disagreed.

Open government

I went to one of the 7:30 am “clinics” on Thursday morning on “open government.” I had hoped it might deal with the government’s poor record on access to information but instead it dealt with the governments new web sites.

It wasn’t a total loss though. The government’s data website that now contains more than 2,400 data sets looks pretty interesting. And the open information site that publishes the government’s FOI releases is certainly worth reading on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Too bad their policy of releasing the information only 72 hours after it goes to the FOI requestor will probably discourage media from using FOI.

Workshop on market housing

Thursday afternoon there was a workshop on market housing that was much more interesting than last year’s all day workshop. Last year was mainly taken up by how little the province could or would do. This year instead focused on how much was actually being done in communities like Vernon, Langford and Surrey.

 There were dozens of other policy issues addressed in the week long convention. Paul Willcocks has an interesting column on the debate about smart meters here. It is remarkable just how much information flows in a meeting like this.

This has been one of the more challenging research projects I’ve engaged in to date. It is the first attempt I have seen anywhere to bring together research in different fields – home energy efficiency, climate change and energy poverty – towards a coherent action plan. In particular, we look at BC Hydro’s pricing policies and model distributional impacts, and we take a closer look at energy efficiency retrofit programs. We then outline a series of next steps for BC that strive for win-win outcomes that reduce energy poverty and create green jobs (about 12,000 direct jobs per year) in the context of aggressive climate action.

I have an oped in today’s Vancouver Sun:

Power policy should protect low-income households

By Marc Lee

If BC is going to meet its climate action targets, the province needs to shift away from natural gas and rely instead on clean electricity. Coupled with aggressive conservation and energy efficiency investments, this transition could be the source of new green jobs, particularly in the residential housing sector.

The challenge is this: while upper-income households tend to consume (and waste) more energy, it is low-income households who spend a larger share of their incomes on energy, and are the most constrained in terms of changing their behaviour.

This means that across-the-board price increases can worsen energy poverty, a condition where a household spends a disproportionate share of their income on energy. Living in energy poverty poses a range of health risks, including respiratory, cardiovascular, and other health problems, as well as preventable winter deaths.

BC Hydro’s proposal earlier this year to dramatically increase electricity rates is a case in point. While a recent review of BC Hydro led to compromise that would slow rate increases for the next couple of years, higher prices are to some extent inevitable due to the higher costs of new electricity supplies, the installation of smart meters, and new capital projects.

More than three-quarters of energy in the home is used for temperature control and hot water. For low-income households – especially ones with electric baseboard heaters – the real issue is keeping the heat on.

Lower-income households already spend a greater share of their income on energy. The bottom 20% of households spent 5% of their total income on energy in 2009, and 3% of income just on electricity. Households in the top 20% spent only 1.5% of their total income on energy, and less than 1% on electricity.

But BC Hydro also shows us what a fairer path could look like. The shift to two-tier pricing in 2008 has moved modestly in this direction, with modest savings for low-income households and increases for higher-income households. The greediest 20% of electricity consumers use up 44% of the residential power, and they should indeed pay more.

If electricity price increases are needed, they should be concentrated on the second tier of rates. Increasing refundable tax credits for low- to middle-income households could also offset price increases. Assessing the impacts of pricing policies across income levels needs to be part of the BC Utilities Commission’s rate approval process.

The BC government can also help by delivering targeted energy efficiency programs for low-income households and multi-unit buildings, including rental units. Low-income households are typically renters. This means they are less likely to have capacity to invest in energy efficiency upgrades.

Currently, the vast majority of public subsidies for retofits (for example, BC’s LiveSmart program) goes to affluent homeowners in single-family dwellings. Existing programs have been criticized for two common problems: free rider effects (public subsidies going to households who would have made investments anyway) and rebound effects (where savings are offset by increased energy use).

In contrast, well-designed programs for energy efficiency for low-income households are “low-hanging fruit” that would dramatically reduce these effects, target some of the province’s least efficient housing stock, and make better use of public dollars.

A danger is that electricity price hikes will create a perverse incentive for people to switch to natural gas for their home heating. In the Lower Mainland, the delivered cost of natural gas is about half the cost of the lower tier electricity rate and 39% of the tier two rate.

But this would add to BC’s greenhouse gas inventory at a time when the province needs to reduce and eventually eliminate those emissions. This should be a key component of a next generation LiveSmart program for BC, and it should also be linked to green job creation and skills development.

We estimate a budget of $220 million per year in support of a decade-long retrofit of BC’s housing stock would lead to substantial reductions in GHG emissions and energy poverty in BC homes. Carbon tax revenues are an ideal source of public subsidies for such a program.

This investment would lead to 12,000 direct green jobs per year (and a total increase in employment of 20,000 jobs if we include indirect and induced job creation).

The challenge of the next generation is to enable a smooth transition to zero-emissions housing, while paying attention to impacts on low-income households and other vulnerable populations, as well as the housing stock where they live.

Rather than trying to sell more polluting fossil fuels to Asia, the BC government should be leading the charge on climate action. A coherent housing strategy could provide win-win opportunities for the province, and is the type of jobs program BC needs.

Almost everything that is vital to a healthy community, from life expectancy to levels of depression to crime rates, is affected by inequality. This is true in both rich and poor countries.  (The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett).

Social factors begin to affect us at conception, so that life in the womb and the perinatal period can affect well-being later on.  Even if exposed to stress in the womb, however:

A nurturing environment after birth can provide the child with enormous potential to change their course of development. This is known as “developmental plasticity,” which means that the brain can adapt and change as the child grows with a positive environment.

The important message here is in how we as a community support pregnant women. Stressful lives are most often linked with socioeconomic disadvantage. This research shows we should be targeting these women with support programs to ensure the stress does not negatively affect the unborn child.  (Repeated Stress in Pregnancy Linked to Children’s Behavior)

Poverty can even cause brain damage. Researchers discovered that U.S. children from “low socioeconomic environments” displayed a response in their pre-frontal cortex that was similar “to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke” (Poor Children’s Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows).

The damage may result from conditions such as poor nutrition, lack of time with over-worked and over-stressed parents, or fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation – all of which may affect the quality of care that a child receives.  This does NOT mean that all poor children are so afflicted, but the average poor child is more likely to suffer.

Every dollar invested in the young not only saves lives and prevents illness, but it will also save at least $7 dollars in future social costs. For instance, lead poisoning, ADHD, and autism resulting from toxic chemicals and pollution in the United States cost $77 billion annually. Globally, almost 350,000 women die each year in childbirth – most of whom could be saved for the cost of just six fighter jets. Even worse: over 22,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from hunger and preventable diseases – almost 9 million every year. This year’s U.S. military budget is around $800 billion, and the world spends twice that on war. The simplest change would be to redirect wasteful military spending to end the worst elements of global poverty.

In 2009, the combined net worth of the world’s 1,011 billionaires increased to $3.6 trillion, up $1.2 trillion in just one year. This NEW wealth alone could end global poverty.

Perhaps the most important point is that none of these social, economic, and environmental problems are necessary. All scarcities, as Murray Bookchin pointed out over 40 years ago, are artificial. We possess the knowledge and the wealth to eliminate the worst of these afflictions. Why aren’t we doing so?

Dr. Glenn, who is the Dean of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, began by saying that, “Economists, writers, and researchers are beginning to discover…what we have known for decades: that the events and environment surrounding pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, and early infancy set the template out of which we live our lives.”

“The time is right,” she added, for a shift in the paradigm.”

Recent coverage such as on prenatal health in “Time” magazine, and epigenetics in “Newsweek”, symbolize this profound change in consciousness.

Some of the specific insights that Dr. Glenn mentioned included:

*  “Early experiences determine brain architecture.”
*  “By the sixth prenatal month, most of the 100 billion neurons found in the adult brain are already there.”

She also highlighted the most important point of all: preventing trauma in the first place.  For instance, she noted that a father’s supportive involvement during pregnancy can reduce infant mortality.

Dr. Glenn also quoted Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, who points out that every dollar invested “in the very young” not only saves lives and prevents illness, but it will also save from $4-17 dollars in future social costs.

Heckman has written:

“Recent research demonstrates important differences in the family environments and investments of advantaged and disadvantaged children. Gaps in cognitive stimulation, affection, punishment, and other parental investments for children from families of different socioeconomic status open up early.” (Read the full article here.)

My presentation at the Congress overlapped with Dr. Glenn’s focus, beginning with the current state of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, and how the emerging consensus supports his long-held contention about just how fragile we are while in the womb.

I pointed out how Janov believes that too many children have been emotionally damaged from an early age, and that one element of healing is to re-connect with the buried memories.

The second part of my talk discussed how to PREVENT hurting children in the first place.  In short, research has shown that providing optimal conditions for pregnant women, such as low stress, adequate nutrition, and quality pre-natal care could prevent children from suffering from a host of intellectual, emotional, and physical illnesses.

In addition, around 500,000 women die each year in childbirth.  Adam Jones (UBC Okanagan) has pointed out that most of those mothers could be saved for the cost of – six fighter jets.

Canada, for instance, could set an example for the world by forgoing the unnecessary purchase of the F-35 fighter jets, save the lives of countless women, and still have money left over for vital domestic needs.

Providing optimal conditions for mothers and their children would cost only a tiny fraction of what the world spends on advertising, or the Olympics, or the military.

This Paradigm Shift can’t happen too soon.

But now comes news earlier this month that an all-party committee of the Alberta legislature recommends that that province adopt a poverty reduction plan, including increases to the minimum wage (which at $8.80 in Alberta is already higher than BC’s, where it has been frozen at $8 since 2001). According to a report in the Edmonton Journal, the Alberta Standing Committee on the Economy called on the provincial government to “implement a province-wide poverty reduction strategy similar to the 10-year plan to end homelessness.”

How long can BC hold out?

The Vancouver hearing kicked off this year’s budget consultation process, a month-long opportunity for British Columbians share their priorities and recommendations for next year’s provincial budget with a legislature committee made up of representatives of both the party that is in government and the Opposition.

The Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services will accept citizens’ input until October 15. You can sign up to present in person at a public hearing in your hometown, you can submit written recommendations or video/audio clips, or you can respond to a brief online survey with open-ended questions.

This year, it’s particularly important to make your voice heard, because there are actual money on the table that are not spoken for. Just last week, the Ministry of Finance revealed — surprise — $2.7 billion extra revenues over the next three years above and beyond last year’s budget forecast. In the same news release, the Ministry announced that about $600 million of the moneys would be applied to reducing the deficit, but the other $2.1 billion are yet to be allocated.

Personal income tax cuts have been floated as a possibility and given the current HST mess, the temptation to appease the anti-tax vibe in the electorate must be higher than ever. There are also calls in the media for the windfall revenues to be put towards further reducing budget deficits and paying off the provincial debt.

At the CCPA, we believe that the money should be used instead for strategic spending initiatives to reduce poverty and homelessness in the province. Here is why.

Debt-reduction is not a priority for our province at this point. Our debt levels remain affordable and the current environment of low interest rates presents an ideal time for the government to borrow in order to invest in improving the economic security and future productivity of British Columbians.

The rate of return on debt-reduction is the interest rate we pay on the debt (this is how much we save if we pay a portion of it today). The long-term interest rates the province pays on its debt are around 4 to 4.5%. Many public investments have higher rates of return that that, which makes them better candidates for government spending than paying off the debt.

Using the $2.1 billion windfall revenues to offer personal income tax cuts would frankly be irresponsible. It will squander the opportunity to boost the economy and address BC’s pressing social problems all at once. Tax cuts will not do anything for the poor or the homelessness who don’t owe much in taxes to begin with. Tax cuts will not build affordable housing, improve access to post-secondary education for low-income youth, or reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Strategic public investments, on the other hand, can do all these things.

The CCPA recommends that the revenue windfall is used to reduce poverty and homelessness in this province. Investing in poverty reduction has the potential to bring huge savings for the province over the long term in terms of lower criminal justice costs, lower healthcare costs, and higher school achievement and productivity. A report from the Ontario Association of Food Banks estimates that poverty cost the provincial treasury about 2% of GDP per year. If costs in BC are in the same ballpark, we’re talking about potential savings of $4 billion annually.

Of the 24 cities, Vancouver has the highest percent of population with low income; the highest percent of working poor families; and the largest and fastest growing income gap between rich and poor. Welfare income was also very low in Vancouver, and Vancouver had the second highest number of households which paid more than 30% of their income for rent and/or lived in inadequate housing. Vancouver was also worst for “community affordability.” That means that the combination of low income plus high cost of living makes the poorest fifth of Vancouver residents worse off than those in other cities.

This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: the ratio of median housing prices to the median household income in each municipality (housing market). This price-to-income ratio measures how many years the median family (the one in the middle of the income distribution, where half of all families earn more and half earn less) would need to work to earn as much as the median house costs. Typically, a housing market is considered affordable if 3 (or fewer) years of household income is sufficient to purchase a home in the area.

In Vancouver, however, the median housing price – $540,900 – is equivalent to 9 years and 4 months of the median household income of $58,200 (both are measured in the third quarter of 2009). Wow, just wow.

The rest of BC’s urban areas aren’t doing much better: 4 of the 5 least affordable housing markets in Canada were in BC. In order of lowest affordability, these are Vancouver, Victoria, Abbotsford and Kelowna. The next least affordable housing in Canada is in Toronto.

If you’re curious, the 5 affordable urban housing markets in Canada are Thunder Bay, Windsor, Moncton, Saguenay and Saint John, NB.

What can we do about the rising unaffordability of housing in BC?

First off, we need our policy-makers to recognize that housing affordability is a serious problem and begin to monitor it regularly so they can measure their progress in addressing it (targets and timelines, anyone?). Here’s where I agree with the assessment of the folks at the FIPP that in Canada

housing affordability has received little or no political attention, even in the bubble markets where booms escalated housing prices to unprecedented heights.

It’s time for this to change.

What kind of policy reforms should we be looking at? The folks at the Frontier Institute for Public Policy recommend a market approach of relaxing zoning regulations and getting rid of agricultural land reserves, which they argue will reduce the price of land and thus the price of housing. Increase supply to lower prices – a standard textbook economics solution, but in this case it’s not going to work.

No matter how far you take it, eventually there are hard limits to low-density sprawl. We’ve got only so much land to fill with single family homes before we run out. Paving over agricultural land may postpone the problem for a few more years, but it’s not a long term solution. Moreover, as we prepare to face climate change and peak oil, encouraging urban sprawl may well do more harm than good. And if our world is about to get a lot smaller, paving over agricultural land would soon prove to be short-sighted.

It seems to me that we’ve left the invisible hand work its magic in the housing market long enough by now to know what it is good and bad at. It does an excellent job of providing luxurious condos with ocean views to the highest bidder (and we don’t lack millionaires in BC), but it fails miserably at providing affordable housing to the hundreds of working families. And I’m not just talking about the poor or near poor here – whose situation is dire – but about families with two earners with decent middle class jobs who are finding it more and more difficult to afford a home in the city. It’s time for governments at all levels to intervene in the market and ensure that a share of the new homes build are priced so that they are affordable for middle income families.

And since affordability is not just about housing prices, but about household incomes as well, I’d like to see some action on the income front. A couple of decades of making our labour market more “flexible” have resulted in stagnating earnings at the middle, and falling real (inflation-adjusted) earnings for families in the lower end of the income ladder. We need to address the rising income inequality and increase the economic security of the poor and modest income households. This can be done both through strengthening labour law and through re-distribution via the tax system.

Using the pine beetle wood from our forests for rebuilding Haiti seems like an idea worth considering. What it would take would be enormous amounts of government money to make this happen, but if the Premiere truly wants to “re-establish and revitalize our forest industry” it makes sense.

Come to think of it, I can’t remember hearing anything at all about the BC government’s contribution to the Haiti relief effort. BC municipalities have signaled their intention to give support, and Harper is all over the news with his efforts. It would seem that Campbell needs some encouragement in this direction. I’m sure the forestry sector would be on side, and perhaps even the federal government could be.

For over 40 years, Statistics Canada has produced a statistic called Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs), and for almost as many years, that statistic has been improperly cited as a measure of poverty in Canada. This, despite the fact that Statistics Canada has continually emphasized that it is inappropriate to equate LICOs with poverty lines.

This type of statement has bugged me for years. How can a statistical agency develop a measure of poverty, call it “low income”, and then have the audacity to point the finger at anyone who dares call it a poverty line. The logical retort is to ask them why they do not then develop a “real” poverty line. Statscan’s position is something like, you cannot talk about the numbers of people who are poor because we refuse to measure them.

But the piece gets better. The author reviews a simplified methodology of how the LICOs are calculated and how that can be influenced by how well-off people are at different points in time. That is, overall, people today spend a lot less of their income on the basics, and the LICOs are just an arbitrary cut-off relative to that amount. This is an important point, although other attempts to measure poverty don’t really change the percentages that much.

The punchline goes like this:

Based on LICOs, British Columbia had the highest incidence of low income in the country in 2007, but these LICOs are based on national expenditure figures. … To see how this can be problematic, one need look no further than the difference in the price of housing by province. British Columbia has by far the highest housing prices, on average, in the country. In 2008, the average house price in BC was almost 50% higher than the Canadian average. The problem is exacerbated even further when urban areas are compared. … While the difference in rents are not quite as dramatic, they are still significantly higher in Vancouver compared to most other cities with greater than 500,000 population across the country. Given that the cost of shelter comprises by far the largest portion of spending on food, shelter and clothing, this renders LICOs a dubious means of regional comparison, let alone as a measure of poverty.

I’m not sure I agree with that last clause, since the costs of food and clothing are not much different across the country. If housing is what matters, my takeaway from that discussion is that BC’s poverty problem must be even worse because of our high costs of housing. The author may really just be making a methodological point that provincial numbers should be based on provincial not national data.

This precipitates a general question about “what is poverty?” that inevitably leads to absolute measures based on minimum consumption of necessities. The author makes a pitch for the Market-Basket Measure (developed outside of Statscan by the federal department of Human Resources Development) although this one too holds up the finding that BC has the highest poverty rate in the country.

The MBM is indeed a useful measure, but it would be a loss not to consider relative position in society as an aspect of poverty. In fact, the grandfather of economics, Adam Smith, clearly argues for a relative definition of poverty: “By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without.”

Adam Smith, it should be noted, was not a right-wing ideologue. He would not have worn the Fraser Institute’s “Adam Smith tie”, which is sort of a burkha for free market fundamentalists. The Fraser, it should be noted, is in the shadows of this discussion, having promoted a “thin gruel” absolute measure of poverty for many years. The development of the MBM was a response to them, and after all of that effort, poverty based on the MBM is not much different than based on the much-maligned LICO.

It’s hard for me to see friends struggle financially, so I’ve tried to encourage Emily to get a better job. Though she doesn’t have a degree, Emily is bright and a hard worker — she should be able to do better.

But Emily doesn’t want to get a better paying job. There is no point, she tells me, because she’s close to the cut off point of many of the government subsidies she relies on and if she made even $1,000 more per year, she’d lose so much in government benefits that her net income would end up lower.

She’s calculated that she needs to earn thousands of dollars more per year to compensate for the value of the lost benefits and she figures that she can’t get such a job without finishing her degree. Which she can’t afford because her low income doesn’t allow her to save up for school. But she can’t get a higher-paying job to help finance her education because if her income went up she’d lose her childcare subsidy, her housing subsidy and will have to start making payments on her student loans.

It seems like the system is stacked against her.

And she’s not the only one. Many low-income people find themselves in a similar position as the majority of government benefits are targeted to the lowest income categories and phased out quickly as soon as the family’s income gets above the bare minimum. A recently released CCPA brief addresses the problem of benefit “stacking” and presents some possible solutions. You can read more about it here.

It’s a classic case of unintended consequences: policy-makers start with the laudable goal of helping the most needy first and they try to avoid spending scarce resources on those who are able to pay for themselves, but in targeting benefits narrowly to the lowest income families they make it very difficult for people like Emily to break out of the low-wage cycle of economic insecurity. For those who need to obtain further post-secondary education or training to be able to move up, the system becomes a catch-22 when BC’s high tuition fees are taken into account.

Benefit stacking is a real problem in BC and it needs to be considered carefully in the design of all new low-income tax credits and other benefits. I haven’t run the numbers, but my guess is that the new low-income credits the government just introduced in the last budget (the HST credit and the new premium assistance) are only compounding the problem.

The report estimates there are 400,000 British Columbians with some kind of addiction problem. The annual financial impact is $6 billion.

The BCMA says the burden falls mainly on addicts and their families, but it also falls on law enforcement, emergency wards and workplaces. The doctors call for changes in the way we look at addiction and they call “on the premier and the Minister of Health to formally recognize addiction as a chronic disease and increase resources for addiction treatment…”

Among the many issues addressed, the BCMA recommends the creation of “240 new flexible medically supported detoxification spaces across BC by 2012.” It quotes Health Authorities on the weakness of the current system. The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority makes the following comment:

While the intake system for detoxification facilities has been significantly streamlined in recent years, immediate access to withdrawal management services is still an unmet need among highly marginalized individuals, many of whom are homeless and have no safe place in which to wait for access to services. The result of missing or insufficient services is people not receiving treatment, inappropriately accessing emergency care, or staying for extended periods in more costly acute care.

The BCMA reports, “The number of people in BC with a severe gambling problem has increased since 2002 from 0.4% of the population to 0.9% in 2007.” Another 128,000 people have a moderate gambling problem.

On housing, the report says, “The current lack of appropriate housing programs for the range of addiction and mental health problems in BC undermines the effectiveness of and the ability to provide medical care and treatment.”

Responding to the report in the Sun, the Health Minister said while he agreed with the direction taken by the BCMA in these tough economic times the province is hoping to maximize the benefits of its health care dollars.

The Time is Now: A Poverty Reduction Plan for BC Slideshow

0. THE TIME IS NOW – Introduction from CCPA on Vimeo.

This is a narrated presentation about how BC could end street homelessness and reduce poverty by one third — within the mandate of the next provincial government (first chapter is shown above — view the full slideshow here). It includes interviews with people working on health, immigration and family well-being issues, and with Erna Calingasan, a parent struggling to make ends meet by working two jobs. Here is the interview with Erna:

THE TIME IS NOW – Erna Calingasan from CCPA on Vimeo.

Poverty Amid Plenty: A Slideshow About Welfare in BC

1. POVERTY AMID PLENTY – Introduction from CCPA on Vimeo.

Welfare is the program of last resort for people who find themselves without work, or who are unable to work because of a disability. It is supposed to protect people from homelessness, hunger and other hardships. BC was in the midst of an economic boom when this slideshow was created, but as we enter a recession in 2009, welfare is more vital than ever (first chapter shown above — watch the rest here). The slideshow addresses some myths about welfare and poverty — that welfare is easy to get; that life on welfare is an easy ride; that poverty is inevitable; and that solutions to poverty are too expensive.

The slideshow includes interviews and images of people who are living on welfare benefits, as well as advocates who work with welfare recipients and/or anti-poverty groups (these interviews can be watched separately). Here’s four of them:

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – Judy Graves from CCPA on Vimeo.

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – Richard Watson from CCPA on Vimeo.

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – Matthew Matthew from CCPA on Vimeo.

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – Susan Henry from CCPA on Vimeo.

Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil, has a population of 2.5 million people, slightly larger than the Lower Mainland. The city grappled with abject poverty and hunger in the early 1990s, when a new mayor decided to tackle these problems head-on by “creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system” and establishing channels for citizens to problem-solve together in their own communities. The results were impressive.

There is much we can learn from Belo’s example. One of the key lessons is that often, all that is required to resolve pressing social problems is a change in our approach:

… it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

Participatory democracy is a powerful tool that is vastly underused in Canada. We should be doing more to ensure that our most precious resource, the ingenuity of our people, is directed towards solving the pressing problems of our times.

Belo Horizonte eliminated hunger. Vancouver should use a similar approach to eliminate homelessness.