BC Liberal Leadership - Community Gaming Grants

Non profits throughout British Columbia rely on the province's Community Gaming Grants program for their funding. For many, it's their sole source of desperately needed dollars.

The important work that these non profits do toward addressing social needs in their communities cannot be overstated. They deliver far more for the tax dollars they receive than do the majority of government agencies.*

Three BC Liberal leadership candidates have proposed changes to the Community Grants program. Christy Clark would boost the current money allotted ($120 million) by 12.5 percent, or $15 million. Kevin Falcon has just announced increasing the program to $159 million, a 32.5 percent jump.

The third proposal, made by leadership hopeful Ed Mayne, would see the "politically-motivated" Community Grants program junked entirely. In its place, he proposes that two percent of the HST go directly to municipalities.

By a long way, I prefer Mayne's proposal. It gives communities the autonomy and freedom to address their own needs, build on their own strengths and devise their own solutions. It also eliminates the perpetual problem of non-profits having to fit their funding needs, and hence their community needs, to the demands and economic needs of a far-off funder. By 'far-off', I mean in all of these senses: geographical distance, ideological distance and hierarchical distance.

*One such non-profit is the internally-recognized Providence Farm, right here in the Cowichan Valley. Go take a look; it's truly a community wonder.

Recommend this post

Oh, the Compassion!

The wording in the BC Government media release says it all. The new Act, just announced, is intended "to protect homeless in extreme weather." How fortunate that the Act has been put in place in time for the Olympics!

The Province has introduced the Assistance to Shelter Act to keep homeless British Columbians safe from extreme weather by giving police the authority to take people at risk of harm to emergency shelters, announced Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman.

"When an extreme weather alert has been issued, we want people at risk off the streets and into safe accommodation," said Coleman....

Once at the shelter, [homeless] have the right to decide whether or not they want to stay at the shelter....

"The RCMP fully endorses efforts to assist homeless and less fortunate people on our streets," said Gary Bass, RCMP Deputy Commissioner, Pacific Region. "We recognize that for the most part, these individuals do not commit crimes, but consider it a key pillar of our Crime Reduction Strategy... We view this as a positive step forward in terms of assisting not only the homeless but those making efforts to avoid a criminal lifestyle."

For the most part, street people are VICTIMS of crime, not the perpetrators, you idiots!

Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham said, “The terrible dilemma for police officers is when the weather is so extreme and vulnerable people are found who are at very substantial risk. When a mental illness or addiction takes over rational decision making, the only hope is for the police to have supportive legislation allowing them to take people to safety."

Who are YOU, your officers, or anyone else for that matter, to decide what is "rational decision making"? How do YOU know that the decision to stay away from shelters might not be based on excellent reasons? And who are YOU to say whether someone is 'mentally ill' rather than simply one who doesn't conform to YOUR standards?

Compassion and concern for the wellbeing of street people isn't driving this Act. It's concern for the unsightly appearance of BC's homelessness problem during the Olympics. As for the Act, now all the government has to do is get Environment Canada onside - or at least its BC equivalent - so that 'extreme weather alerts' occur regularly during the optimum period.

ETA: See also Part 2 of this post.

Recommend this post

"Call it a sickness if you must"

In an article today Jody Paterson writes:

Think of the creative gifts that mental illness has given us over the centuries.

Would Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf have set pen to paper in such compelling fashion if not for their mental illnesses? Would Van Gogh have painted with such passion and insight? Or Beethoven written with the same power?

Call it a sickness if you must, but the truth is that the world is a much better place for having people with mental illness in it.

I do not call it a sickness. Nor do I accept the term 'mental illness'.

So many people with 'mental illness', as diagnosed so conveniently by the mental health industry, identify themselves as nothing more than differently-abled or as ab-norm-al, where 'norm' has an ever-narrow and never-specified definition, by virtue of all that it is not.

How easy it is for governments to collude with the mental health industry and to write people off by virtue of their newly acquired labels. How convenient it is for the mental health industry to then disgorge their hordes to 'treat' the people it has so labelled with the latest fashionable 'disorder'.

Society needs people who differ from the norm. Society needs nonconformists. But what does society do instead? It pathologizes rather than embraces them and so society goes without the benefits of their sometime genius.

Recommend this post

"Conformists may kill civilizations"

Well, duh! It shouldn't take a whole lot to realize that. Still, this article raises interesting points.

Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University ... and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning - imitating and emulating what the majority are doing - may also cause the demise of societies....

Behaviour that is genetically determined can adapt to environmental change by the slow process of natural selection, but only when that change is also slow. Rapid change puts a premium on the capacity of individuals to learn through exploration and experience, and to adapt their behaviour accordingly.

Figuring things out for yourself can be time-consuming, however, and a waste of time when others around you have already acquired the relevant knowledge....

"[1] Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, and [2] the models for social learning should be individuals who have demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental trends," says Whitehead. [my emphasis]

Translation of the second point: If you must follow someone else's example or be instructed by them, then make your role model a present-day environmentalist. That is, adapt your behaviour and learning to our changing environment. If enough of us do that, then we MIGHT yet save our civilization.

Alternatively, carry on as you are; the planet will do just fine without us.

Regarding the second point, post-secondary institutions must look seriously at what the hell they've been doing. "Higher learning" has become an industry and post secondary institutions little more than diploma mills whose aims are to provide a labour force to big business.

Moreover, far too many graduate students have discovered that conformity is THE ONLY WAY they'll be permitted to climb the academic ladder. Innovation and originality are taboo, given that these challenge the academics already in power. Modern post secondary institutions effectively discourage, weed out and reject non-conformists. It wasn't always this way and is anathema to the way education should be.

Recommend this post

Meanings - Belonging, Home, Community

I filled out a survey yesterday on community meaning. For each question, respondents were to give the first answer which came to mind. Along with questions about the respondents' understanding of various concepts, including belonging, home and community, was this question, the last one:

When do you most feel a sense of community?

Here was my response:

It has been a very long time. I'm 57 yrs old now and the last time I felt a sense of community was at the age of 14. Then, I was in an environment in which to be and express who I am was permissible; it was the first time in my life I'd experienced that. Unfortunately, it lasted for only 11 months, after which I had to leave that community. When I think of belonging, I think of home, and that's the place I associate with the latter.

I went for a walk after completing that survey and began reflecting on my answers. I soon realized that underlying my sense of the meaning of belonging, home and community was a single, uncomplicated idea: acceptance.

It was nothing so robust or overt as welcoming. Just acceptance, manifested in an environment in which everyone adopts a live-and-let-live attitude and respect for difference.

In that place, I was FREE TO BE ME, without pigeonholing or labelling.

Actually, the latter isn't quite right. ALL of the residents at that place were labelled, which meant that we ended up undistinguished from one another. That is, being labelled made us all equal - at least in each other's eyes, which was all that mattered to us.

You see, that place was Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which doesn't exist anymore. In the 60's, that location on Lakeshore Blvd. in Toronto was a 'mental institution' or 'looney bin'. I'd more describe it as a warehouse for undesirables and strays, people who society was happy to throw away.

Now, given the horror of that place, how could I possibly recall it to mind whenever triggered to think of home or belonging or community?

It's because the patients were expected to have an emotional life and licensed to exhibit eccentric behaviour. We were permitted to be normal, as judged by our own standards.

The relief to be who we were was enormous, and the sense of freedom intoxicating. Never before or since have I felt anything like that degree of acceptance and with it, the freedom to stretch my faculties, explore who I was and who I could potentially be. It was mind expanding in the best sense of that term.

As bad as most of these institutions were, including LPH, they got some things right. For LPH, it was its failure to psychiatrically treat certain of its residents - to leave us alone. Its failure to treat summed up, in a word, acceptance of us just the way we were.

Curious about LPH? For a start, check out this site.

Recommend this post