Creative communities enraged by cuts to arts funding

WestEnder
September 17, 2009

Despite the provincial government’s reinstatement of some of the gambling-revenue funding it withdrew from arts and community groups at the beginning of the month, many of those affected remain outraged that full funding has not been restored.

On the heels of widespread outcry when groups learned of severe funding cuts in the week the B.C. budget was announced, the provincial government announced September 2 that it would restore about $25 million in grants to the arts and culture sector. Critics say that isn’t enough — and a consequence will be job losses across the province.

Clad in grey clothes to demonstrate what the world would look like without the arts, hundreds of members of B.C.’s arts and culture community gathered in Vancouver and Victoria on September 9 to protest the 85- to 92-per-cent funding cuts expected by 2012.

For Florence Barrett, a Simon Fraser University theatre student who attended the Vancouver rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, those cuts will be devastating to her hometown of Fernie, B.C., where she has worked as the assistant curator at the town’s museum. “The money we get from the gaming fund is our operational money... Without this money, we’re screwed,” she says.

“The community is coming forward and we raised a bunch of money this summer, but even with that, the city isn’t going to pay for it. We don’t have enough people to get tax money like that.”

Similar to other arts groups who only learned of the cuts by reading the news or checking their bank accounts, Barrett says the government didn’t give the Fernie Museum any notice. “The money disappeared, and then we got a notice from the B.C. Museum Association. Still no word from the government,” she says. “We’re in a rural community... How are you going to get your exposure to arts and culture? How are you going to imagine and dream beyond your borders? You’re not. You’re going to be stuck in the mountains.”

During the B.C. Legislature’s opening sessions earlier this month, NDP arts critic and Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert debated the cuts against housing and social development minister Rich Coleman. This week, Coleman told mainstream media that non-profit and charity organizations are not entitled to guaranteed gaming grant money, adding that grants are assessed every year on the basis of merit. In a legislative sitting September 1, Coleman responded to Herbert’s criticisms by saying that funds had been reapplied across the gaming-grant program to take care of people in need. “You have to look at the envelope of money and say, ‘What’s best? Where is the humanity in the decision in a grant program?’” Coleman said. “The decision we made, and the recommendation I made to government, was that we would protect services to children first, services to those most in need second; that we would actually fund some meals and some shelters in B.C. for people who are suffering from mental-health issues and addictions in the province of British Columbia.”

In an interview at the arts rally last week, Herbert told WE that Coleman was setting up false arguments. “Anybody who’s watched the legislature knows that the B.C. government has done next to nothing to support children in poverty,” he says. “They’ve set up this false argument to try to cause a fight between various sectors who are all being hit very hard, with the hope that we’ll fight among ourselves.”

Vancouver city councillor Ellen Woodsworth supported Herbert’s efforts by bringing forward a September 8 motion at city council calling on the provincial government to restore investments to the arts and culture sector. Councillor Raymond Louie amended the motion to include childcare, education, and library cuts. The motion passed, with all councillors but the NPA’s Suzanne Anton voting in favour of the motion.

“I think one of the things that these kinds of rallies are doing is pointing out that this isn’t a soft sector,” Woodsworth said from the sidelines of the Vancouver rally.

“There are huge spin-offs to putting money into the arts. It’s seen as a burden on the economy, but it’s actually an integral part of the economy.”

Eviction raises ire of DTES advocates

WestEnder
September 17, 2009

The owner of a Downtown Eastside hotel has denied any wrongdoing after tenants’ rights advocates accused him of evicting the entire building in order to take advantage of Olympics- and gentrification-related opportunities.

Daniel Jun told WE in a September 9 interview that he had come to an amicable agreement with the tenants of the Golden Crown Hotel, a 28-suite single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel at 116 West Hastings Street. He said tenants agreed to his plan to close the hotel for a few months in order to treat its bed bug, cockroach, and rat infestation, on the understanding that existing tenants would be allowed to move back after the renovations and continue paying the same rental rate. (Single rooms currently rent for $500 to $750 per month.) “We don’t push them,” he said in broken English. “They were happy, actually. Most of the guys agreed.”

Jun, who has operated the Golden Crown for 10 years, says he has consistently lost money on the hotel. The pest infestation, he says, has made it necessary for him to shut down the hotel for a few months. “I tell them, just give me a break a couple months; I’ll let you come back,” he says. “We never kicked people out of here.”

Even so, Jun expressed interest in eventually renting rooms to what he calls the “office people,” whom he believes will start populating the area in larger numbers as the nearby Woodward’s development continues. “Now is time to ready for rent,” he says. “I don’t have money all the time. I just waiting for this.”

Jun and Golden Crown hotel management distributed a letter to tenants on August 24 detailing the severity of the pest infestation. “We will give you first priorities and same rate of rent for our tenants when we reopen doors,” the letter reads. Tenants also received a letter of agreement, which they were asked to sign. “I understand the situations of the Golden Crown Hotel and I accept your offer that moving out from my room of the Golden Crown Hotel by end of September,” it reads.

Given the low level of literacy among Downtown Eastside populations, Kim Kerr, executive director of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA), is concerned that the Golden Crown’s tenants may have been asked to sign a document they don’t fully understand. “With a 60-per-cent illiteracy rate in this neighbourhood, it’s easy pickings for these guys,” he says. “At the end of the day, the evictions are illegal, and [Jun is] trying to empty a hotel out right across from Woodward’s, in a neighbourhood that’s being gentrified.”

Kerr held a September 4 press conference to draw public attention to the issue, claiming it to be an Olympics-related eviction. Rental rates are particularly high in the Golden Crown, he says, because the rooms have private washrooms — a rare and desirable commodity in the Downtown Eastside. “A bathroom is what you’re paying all that money for, whether it works or not,” he says, adding that most of the showers in the hotel don’t work. “I don’t want you to have the impression that these are luxurious rooms, because they’re shit-holes.”

DERA has been communicating with Golden Crown tenants to ensure they are aware of their rights under the Residential Tenancy Act. Meanwhile, the City of Vancouver’s licensing inspectors toured the hotel last Wednesday (September 9). “There is nothing there that would cause them to have to vacate the building in order to do some remedial work,” says Barb Windor, the City of Vancouver’s deputy chief license inspector. “We [the City] don’t enforce the terms of the Residential Tenancy Act. All we can do is let the tenants know. And it’s my understanding, in talking with DERA, that they are representing any tenants that the owners may have tried to evict.”

Kerr says DERA will accompany Golden Crown tenants to an as-yet-undetermined arbitration hearing at the Residential Tenancy Office. For now, he says, the rents the tenants pay at the hotel are “unconscionable.” “I’m speaking with a woman here right now, who’s just moved into the hotel. She’s paying $685 for the smallest room in the building,” he says.

While Golden Crown’s owners did not specify that the intended renovations are related to the 2010 Games, Am Johal, chair of Olympics watchdog group Impact on Communities Coalition, says the situation is more complicated than whether it’s Olympics-related or not.

“Going into the Olympic bid process, [hotel] conversions were already a phenomenon, and certainly our fear was it was going to be exacerbated by the Olympic speculation that was going to happen,” he says. “So, that’s why, when we sat around the table around the Inner City Inclusive Commitment Statement, we asked for those protections to be in place,” he says. “It’s an irrelevant argument for me whether these are Olympics-related or not. The point is that we, in this Olympic timeframe, are trying to protect these units of housing because they’re so important to the low-income housing stock.”

PHOTO: Tenants of the Downtown Eastside’s Golden Crown Hotel may face eviction that critics say is Olympics-related. By Doug Shanks.

Street youth put their stories on film

WestEnder
September 10, 2009

Two years ago, Briony Metcalfe was living through what she describes as the “lowest of the low” period of her life. “I was on the street, I was using heroin every day, I was in a really crappy relationship,” she recalls.

Now, at 30, Metcalfe has gotten clean, found housing, and is in a new relationship. Her life is more stable than it has been in years. And a large part of her transformation was captured on film as part of a National Film Board (NFB) project on harm reduction, in partnership with the Vancouver-based YouthCo AIDS Society. The film series, called Playing it Safe, follows the lives of Metcalfe and four other street-involved youth over the course of almost two years, documenting their life histories and their day-to-day existence. For Metcalfe, participating in the films was a significant undertaking — for the first time, she was speaking publicly about experiences that she is only starting to come to grips with herself. She is hopeful that the project will send a message to other young people dealing with similar issues. “If I can help one person, it means everything,” she says.

The film’s participants and the young people who produced it were brought together by YouthCo, the first youth-driven organization of its kind in Canada. Operating out of an office located downtown at Hornby and Helmcken Streets, YouthCo offers outreach, education, and drop-in support services to youth who are using drugs, are homeless, and/or are HIV and Hepatitis C-positive. “We’re hoping [the film] can go far, education-wise,” says Hywel Tuscano, YouthCo’s 26-year-old volunteer coordinator. “We’re starting to submit them to festivals and conferences... It did really well at the Alberta Harm Reduction Conference.”

Each pairing of filmmakers and participants produced four to six five-minute films over the course of the past year and a half. Starting this month, the films will be posted to an NFB website, Playing-it-Safe.nfb.ca, every two weeks. After they’ve run online for a time, the episodes will be compiled onto a DVD for educational and outreach purposes.

“YouthCo tends to work against a lot of stigma, and with a lot of youth who are on the edges... We work with HIV- and Hep C-positive youth, queer youth, and drug users. Openly identifying as one or all of these things can compound and really make someone invisible,” says Tuscano. “What I saw a lot of [the youth] struggling with [during the course of the project] was really being seen, and being like, ‘Okay, well, this is who I am, and I know I’m not the only one, and I’m putting this on the internet and we’re going to see what I can do for people.’”

For 25-year-old Lulu Gurney, taking part in the film fulfilled a longstanding desire to share her experiences with other youth. “I thought it would be something that would make it easier for people to cope,” she says. “For myself, I was a drug user, so there were moments when I just felt like I was crazy. So, just being able to share some sort of experience felt like a huge accomplishment for me.”

Gurney worked hard to get clean and into school, where she is now taking upgrade courses to eventually enter a pharmacy technician program.

Twenty-seven-year-old Dan Schwass’s films focus on his experiences at InSite, the controversial safe-injection site in the Downtown Eastside. “I thought it would be a good idea to show people what it’s like in there, and what it looks like and what they offer — more than just words on a piece of paper,” he says.

But Schwass and his peers know that what’s shown in the films can be controversial. Even though they’ve received only positive feedback so far, Tuscano is preparing them for some less-than-kind reactions. “Mention drugs or queerness or being positive, or say that someone’s homeless — all the assumptions just float in, right?... There are going to be people who hate our movies, but that’s because they’re going to have prejudice, because you guys are who you are,” he tells the group. “But you’re also going to get the people who are in the middle: youth who are unsure, and people who are going to be needing to see themselves. And those are the victories.”

PHOTO: YouthCo filmmaker Aaron Chan (left), on-screen participants Lulu Gurney, Dan Schwass and Briony Metcalfe, and YouthCo volunteer coordinator Hywel Tuscano, collaborated with other filmmakers and street youth on the Playing it Safe film series. By Doug Shanks.

Group voices opposition to library funding cuts

WestEnder
September 10, 2009

Given the continued and widespread effects of the recession, funding cuts to the province’s public libraries came as no surprise to library staff when the provincial budget dropped on September 1. Vancouver Public Library (VPL) officials were notified of the pending cuts before the budget was officially announced (the B.C. Ministry of Education scaled back library funding from $15.7 million last year to $13.1 million for 2009-2010). “Everybody, it seems, is experiencing some form of cut, so we don’t feel singled out,” VPL communications manager Jean Kavanagh told WE.

The cuts, however, have spurred an opposition campaign organized by Think City, a non-partisan Vancouver advocacy group that strives to improves public engagement on municipal issues. The campaign, which chiefly takes the form of an online petition at StopLibraryCutsNow.ca, has garnered the support of Canadian authors Yann Martel (Life of Pi), Susan Juby (Alice, I Think), Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo), and others. “Cutting the libraries means there will be fewer resources, fewer books, fewer hours of operation. People who are unemployed or underemployed won’t have a place to go to educate themselves, re-train, or have a place to gather to deal with the fact that they are unemployed,” says Think City chair Neil Monckton.

Moreover, Monckton says, the cuts will put more pressure on cities to pick up the slack; the increased burden on the City of Vancouver to fill budgetary gaps left by provincial shortfalls raises larger questions as to how changing the autonomy of municipalities can improve local governance. “We really need to look at municipal finance reform in the province... What is it that cities should be given in order to chart their own course?” Monckton says.

Think City members would also like to see more public engagement around budget decisions in B.C., similar to capital budget processes in Montreal, in which citizens participate. “As people are brought in and they can see the consequences of decisions, they’re going to be able to help inform those outcomes — and, yes, you’re still going to get compromised, you’re still going to not get everything you want, but you’re going to have a better understanding, as a citizen, of why these decisions were made, and what things were sacrificed to get to them,” Monckton says. “Right now, we don’t know.”

In a recent survey conducted by Think City, more than 91 per cent of 1,754 respondents said they want expanded or maintained funding for libraries. But Monckton isn’t optimistic that the City alone is up to the task. “We have Olympic costs and we have the other impacts that we’re going to have to suck up as a result of the recession, so asking the City to replace up to a half-million dollars of the library’s funding is going to be very difficult,” he says.

As a VPL employee, Kavanagh says the Think City campaign is heartening. “When people start campaigns like this, it shows that they value our services,” she says. “A lot of library programs are based on literacy, services for people who don’t have English as a first language.... They’re things that really help people in their day-to-day lives.”

Todd Wong has worked as a library clerk at various VPL branches for more than 30 years. As a union employee of CUPE 391, he participated in the 2007 library workers’ strike, where he says issues similar to the 2009 funding cuts were raised. “When the government heard those initial outcries, they said, okay, the cuts are not going to be so drastic. It was a matter of the library users speaking up,” he recalls.

At press time, it was still unclear how the cuts would be meted out among individual branches across B.C., but Wong is most concerned about their potential impact on library databases, particularly historical records. “Library workers are gatekeepers to information,” he says. “In the recession, during times when people start reducing services, it takes away the access of the citizenry to gain information.”

PHOTO: Neil Monckton, chair of Vancouver advocacy group Think City, says the public needs to become more directly involved in the municipal issues that directly effect them, such as cuts to library funding. By Doug Shanks.

MLA Spencer Herbert juggles provincial, municipal issues

WestEnder
September 3, 2009

It’s only a few months into his first official term as MLA for Vancouver-West End, but Spencer Herbert has been busy, despite the summer lull that often characterizes political life.

At 28, Herbert is the youngest MLA in the B.C. legislature, and while he laughs at the fact the he continues to be mistaken for a legislative assistant, his commitment to his constituency has made him one of the most well-liked politicians in the city. After a busy opening week in the B.C. legislature, Herbert sat down with WE during his one day in Vancouver, last Friday morning (August 28), to talk about what he’s learned, and what’s next.

As the NDP opposition critic for tourism, culture, and the arts, Herbert has been a vocal opponent of the provincial government’s recent funding cuts to gaming grants (grants from provincial gambling revenues) that finance province-wide cultural organizations. Organizations such as Scotiabank Dance Centre and the Vancouver Fringe Festival learned on the day of this interview that their gaming grants would be cut for the year, even though the provincial government promised before the election that arts organizations would receive about $20 million from the grants.

News of the cuts came on the heels of the provincial government’s August 24 announcement proclaiming the reinstatement of previously frozen gaming grants to social organizations that help low-income or disabled citizens, while leaving the funding of arts groups with an uncertain future. Herbert says the government’s method of prioritizing funding from gaming grants to social organizations over cultural organizations is a false-economy argument. “What they’re doing is, they’re trying to pit artists against children living in poverty, and trying to claim that they care about children living in poverty when B.C. has had the highest rate of child poverty for six years in a row,” he says. “We know from the government’s own studies that investing in the arts actually pays back in higher tax revenue.

“Meanwhile, the [arts] groups have spent their money on the assurance of government that they would get it [back through grants]. So, you’ve got the Children’s Festival, who have spent their dollars, put on their festival, and now the government’s saying, ‘We’re not actually going to give you the money. You fulfilled your end of the bargain, we’re taking the money.’ I’m not a guy who likes to use inflammatory language that much, but essentially what the government’s doing here is they’re stealing from charity. The charity has fulfilled its commitment, but the government is now stealing the money that’s supposed to contractually go to them so that they can pay off their budget lie, which is devastating.”

In the wake of the news of the funding cuts to arts groups, the B.C. Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts announced Monday (August 31) that communities across B.C. have received more than $2.86 million in 2010 Olympic Torch Relay Community Grants. “This grants program will enable communities to proudly showcase the very best of their heritage and culture to the world in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games,” said Kevin Krueger, Minister of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, in a press statement.

But when Herbert asked Krueger about the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST)’s potential impact on tourism and restaurants in the legislature last Thursday, Herbert says the tourism minister refused to respond. “He refused to rise and talk about it, to defend the HST. Instead, they got the Minister of Finance up to talk about other things not even related to the question I was asking,” he recalls.

Herbert and the NDP have been leading an aggressive campaign against the HST, which Herbert is concerned will negatively affect renters. “We could be seeing upwards of an eight per cent [annual] rent increase next year because of the HST,” he says.

As a representative of a constituency in which 80 per cent of households rent, Herbert has worked with many West End renters to advocate for their rights under the Residential Tenancy Act, and to call for changes in tenancy legislation. While he has been supportive of the City of Vancouver’s efforts to lobby the provincial government to step up tenancy protection in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics, Herbert says the City has received very little provincial support on tenant-rights issues. “I think the Province treats the City like a child, just like it treats the people of B.C. It’s kind of like a ‘father knows best’ relationship,” he says.

But it is Herbert’s chief objective to remain accessible and accountable to his constituents. “The West End is my top priority,” he says. “I think people are feeling pretty desperate right now, and wondering why they should trust any politician... So, if I can act to ensure that they do feel represented, and that they do have the opportunity to influence change, that’ll be a great thing.”

PHOTO: Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert at Barclay Manor. By Doug Shanks.

Downtown hotel to become site of housing project

WestEnder
September 3, 2009

Bosman’s Motor Hotel will soon become the Vancouver site of a national research project on homelessness and mental illness. The hotel, located downtown at Howe and Helmcken Streets, will begin housing homeless people with mental illness in May 2010, as part of a three-year national trial led by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, a non-profit that received $110 million from the federal government last February to find ways to help the growing number of homeless people who struggle with mental illness. Vancouver is one of five Canadian cities participating in the trial, alongside Moncton, Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg.

The trial will test what’s called the Housing First approach to homelessness against “care as usual” approaches: A total of 2,225 homeless people with mental illness from across Canada will participate in the trial, 1,325 of whom will be given a place to live; remaining participants will receive the “usual” health and social services afforded to people living on the streets or in shelters. The aim is to collect data that will inform new policies and service development for homeless people across the country.

“The rationale [of Housing First] is that you can’t get better unless you have a safe place to live,” says Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang, a psychiatrist and member of the Mental Health Commission.

The Vancouver arm of the project will be co-managed by the PHS Community Services Society, a local representative from the Mental Health Commission, and the Streetohome Foundation. When the Mental Health Commission project ends in 2013, there will be the possibility of expanding the Bosman’s project for up to five years, depending on future funding. After that, Jang says Bosman’s residents will, hopefully, move on to supportive housing.

Bosman’s will undergo a public-consultation process in changing its designation from a hotel to a rooming house, with a Development Permit Board hearing scheduled for October 5. The first open house to discuss the situation with neighbouring residents and businesses was held on August 25. So far, there seems to be less community resistance to the Bosman’s project than there was with the emergency homeless shelters set up on the north end of the Granville Bridge by the Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT) last winter. Street activity outside the Howe Street HEAT shelter resulted in a number of complaints from people living in nearby condominiums and apartments, and the shelter was closed on August 5 as a result.

Rob Whitlock, the City of Vancouver’s senior housing planner, says he doesn’t expect similar community resistance to the Bosman’s site, although he admits there were security-related concerns expressed by some residential neighbours at the open house. But Bosman’s will be much better suited than a shelter to providing housing, he says. “The nature of a motor hotel building is much different than the sort of warehouses they were using for the shelters,” he says. “I think, on a broad basis, people support the need to provide housing, as it’s critical to resolving the needs of people who are out on the street and don’t have the resources. I think everyone understands and appreciates that.”

All 100 rooms at Bosman’s, each with a private bathroom, will be fitted for residential use for the trial. There will be a common dining room for meal services, as well as a secure outdoor amenity area for residents. Mental-health and addiction treatment will be administered on site by care teams comprised of nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and addiction and mental-health support workers. Care will be rounded out by security workers and two on-site staff. “What we are comparing against, too, are typical models in which the homeless person is in housing but has to go out to get treatment,” says Jang. “In the Housing First model, it’s like a house call.”

Mark Townsend, executive director of the Portland Hotel Society, says he’s excited that the trial will include cities across Canada. “It’s a problem that’s affecting every single city. You can either just keep your head in the sand or you can do something about it,” he says. “The aim [of the project] is to make people who are suffering on our streets more stable, and, on top of that, to move them forward, to help them rebuild their life.”

PHOTO: City councillor Kerry Jang, who is also a psychiatrist, stands outside downtown’s Bosman’s Motor Hotel. As part of a national trial, the hotel will soon be converted to housing for homeless people dealing with mental illness. By Doug Shanks.

Falling back into the dating world

August 27, 2009
WestEnder

As the seemingly endless August sunshine gives way to crisp mornings and rainy nights, the beginning of autumn can feel like a new year of sorts. It’s as much a time to make a fresh start of the return to work and school as it is to rediscover the nest-like comforts of wool cardigans, flannel sheets, and, most importantly, the loving warmth of another human body that several Tetra-Paks of butternut squash soup simply can’t replicate.

And the best part is, other people feel it too — hence, the spike in new clientele that Vancouver’s dating and matchmaking services receive during the autumn months. Maybe it’s something about the poetic romanticism of the season’s weather, or a collective fear of the crippling loneliness that often compounds the darkness of winter, but singles in Vancouver seem to put more effort into finding a mate when the leaves start to turn.

“Once it starts getting a little bit colder, people stay indoors a lot more — and, of course, are on their computers — and would like to find someone to snuggle up and watch a movie with,” says Kate Bilenki, spokesperson for local dating website PlentyOfFish.com. The site, founded by Vancouver’s Markus Frind in 2003, is now the largest dating website not just in the city, but in the country. “We notice an increase in the fall, and a very large jump come Christmas time. I think that’s when most people are looking for a mate.”

While Plenty of Fish generates a high volume of traffic because it offers free membership, local paid dating services such as Executive Search Dating (ESD) also see an increase in business in the fall. “Labour Day weekend comes, and all of a sudden you realize that fall’s here, and, more importantly, winter’s just around the corner,” says ESD president Paddi Rice, who started the company five years ago. “I think there’s a natural feeling where people start thinking, ‘Enough of this fun in the sun; it’s time to hunker down.’ The winter is about to get here, and it would be nice to spend quality time with one person.”

In addition to acting as a dating service for professionals, ESD also functions as a dating headhunter. “It basically means that every potential match for you in the city is someone we could set you up with,” says Rice.

Sheree Morgan takes it upon herself to get to know potential matches for her clients personally, priding herself as Vancouver’s only “true” matchmaker who works with clients one-on-one. As the founder of Match-Works.com, Morgan says the economic downturn and the end of summer has resulted in a surge in new clients, some of whom she was in the midst of meeting when WE caught up with her last week. Morgan’s personalized matchmaking service, she says, is geared toward people looking for a committed, monogamous relationship. “It’s a lot easier to go through [the economic downturn] with somebody,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to stay home and nest with someone. How nice to sit around a fireplace — but it’s not very nice to sit around a fireplace by yourself.”

So, for the lonely hearts in the city sheepishly turning to Vancouver’s dating industry for help this fall, you’re in good company. And if people like Morgan, Rice, and the folks at Plenty of Fish have anything to do with it, you and your new mate with be nauseating your friends with pet-name-filled exchanges (“No, you’re schmoopy!”) before too long.

Local non-profits made nervous by funding freeze

WestEnder
August 27, 2009

The controversial freeze of funding for “gaming grants” — grants for arts and community organizations raised from provincial gambling revenues — was widely disputed earlier this month. But the reason for the freeze was as mysterious as the sudden, subsequent un-freezing of funds on August 19, which was followed by an August 24 press release from the provincial government stating that the Ministry of Housing and Social Development had “lifted the funding freeze for community gaming grants, having completed a review of the program.” The release states that programs supporting low-income, disabled, at-risk adults and underprivileged children will be given priority funding, as well as a “limited” number of arts and cultural activities.

The freeze and subsequent reinstatement of the grants is frustrating and confusing for Kerry Porth, agency director of the PACE (Prostitution, Alternatives, Counselling, and Education) Society, a Downtown Eastside advocacy organization for sex-trade workers. “I don’t even think they [the provincial government] know what they’re doing at this point,” an exasperated Porth told WE after it was announced that the freeze had been reversed.

Porth, who has recently returned to PACE from stress leave, is no stranger to the difficulty of relying on gaming grants for partial funding. PACE’s support services are funded through gaming grants, and the agency received word last fall from the British Columbia Association for Charitable Gaming that the PACE grant would be extended, in the form of a lump sum, until the end of March 2010. But Porth is unsure of PACE’s future after that.

“It’s very scary times for everybody,” Porth says. “We have been forced, in the last few years, to volunteer an extraordinary number of hours just to ensure that the agency stays open, and we’re once again in that position. It’s a very difficult situation. The middle of a global economic crisis... disproportionately affects vulnerable and marginalized people, so they need our help more than ever. Now’s not the time to be cutting funding for services.”

Porth says she only found out about the freeze of gaming grants through an e-mail from the BC Association for Charitable Gaming, whose representatives at the time seemed just as uninformed about the reasons behind the cuts. “The only indication they had about a gaming freeze was from a newspaper article,” she recalls. “Their efforts to contact the government have pretty much gone unanswered.”

The back-and-forth of funding drying up and coming back for organizations such as PACE has been disturbing, says Porth, particularly with the recent closure and re-opening of the MAP (Mobile Access Project) Van, the city’s only overnight mobile outreach program for sex-trade workers. The van was the only service of its kind to provide sex-trade workers with first-aid supplies, condoms, shelter, and counselling. Lack of funding forced the van to be pulled from the streets June 12, but municipal, provincial, and federal stakeholders announced August 12 that they had gathered enough resources to reinstate the van service starting in September. “We’re extremely pleased that the funding has been re-instated. It shouldn’t have been cut in the first place. It’s caused an enormous gap in services,” says Porth.

NDP social-development critic and Vancouver-Hastings MLA Shane Simpson chalks up the provincial government’s handling of grant freezing to panic in anticipation of the September 1 release of the provincial budget. “We saw the HST, we’ve seen this panic to freeze funds. I think you have a government right now that is in panic mode and is desperately looking for every dollar it can find,” he says. “It’s totally lost any sense of good governance and process to desperately claw every dollar back it can, and these organizations and groups got caught in that.”

Both Simpson and BC Association of Charitable Gaming president Susan Mardsen made note of the June 1999 Memorandum of Agreement with the provincial government, which committed one-third of net community casino revenues, indexed to inflation, to charities and non-governmental organizations. “Communication through the media is not good-faith policy negotiation, and does not honour the agreement,” Mardsen said in an August 19 press release, referring to the fact that many organizations learned of funding freezes only through hearing about them in the news. “It’s totally irresponsible of the government to make these commitments and then not even have the courtesy or the grace to talk to these organizations and tell them what’s going on. They had to find out on their own, when their bank account didn’t have any money in it,” says Simpson.

A representative from the BC Ministry of Housing and Social Development did not return WE’s request for comment by press time, but an August 24 press release from the Ministry noted: “As in previous years, demand for community gaming grants significantly exceeds the available funding. The Province is fully supporting some of the highest-priority organizations.”

PHOTO: Kerry Porth, agency director of the PACE (Prostitution, Alternatives, Counselling, and Education) Society, says the provincial government’s recent back-and-forth on funding assistance has put many community organizations on edge. By Doug Shanks.

Environmentalists call for reponsible solution to growing waste problem

WestEnder
August 27, 2009

To burn or not to burn: that is the question. While regional waste officials are considering waste-to-energy technologies (a term critics say is a thinly-veiled descriptor for incinerators) to deal with garbage in Metro Vancouver, opposition from environmental groups is mounting in anticipation of a new draft of the Metro Vancouver waste-management plan, which is to come forward this fall.

Currently, Metro Vancouver residents recycle 52 per cent of their waste, and the goal is to increase that to 70 per cent by 2015. Marvin Hunt, chair of the Metro Vancouver waste-management committee, says we’ll continue to be faced with such large amounts of waste by that time that new waste-management technologies could be necessary, hence his enthusiasm for exploring waste-to-energy technologies. “We will still have a million tonnes of waste to deal with,” he says. “Yes, we’re doing the Zero Waste Challenge... but I think it’s going to take a long time for us to get there.”

Hunt says the main goal of this fall’s waste-management plan is to present possibilities for waste-to-energy facilities in Metro Vancouver, with concrete plans to follow next year. Some real-life waste-to-energy examples Hunt has seen include a new downtown facility in Paris, France, as well as recent approval to build a “mass-burn” facility just outside of Toronto. A possible benefit of such technologies includes using fuel from the facilities to replace coal, thereby reducing pollution and reusing energy, Hunt says.

Environmental groups like Zero Waste Vancouver and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee are vocal opponents of waste-to-energy facilities. They are calling for a moratorium on incinerators in B.C., and last week brought Paul Connett, executive director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project, to Vancouver in an effort to educate the public on the growing waste-to-energy debate.

Helen Spiegelman, chair of Zero Waste Vancouver, has kept a watchful eye on Metro Vancouver’s waste-management policymakers for years. She’s worried that by the time Metro’s new waste-management plans get to the stage of public consultation, there will be no room for meaningful discussion. “In May 2006, they already had incineration as one of the fundamental stars in the firmament,” she says. “They haven’t been asking any of the fundamental questions about how we want to manage our waste.”

Spiegelman will be working with the City of Vancouver and other organizations this fall to build awareness of and alternatives to waste-to-energy facilities. “The blue [recycling] box looked to cut waste in half, and it succeeded,” she says. “The second half is going to be harder, but it will be more creative and more transformational.”