Read more.

Read more at Focus magazine.

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It was one of those articles that makes me think, “Wow, I’ve been so stupid.”

I love reading those.

We’ve all heard alarms about health care gobbling 40% of BC’s provincial budget. Our Liberal government asserts that, at current growth rates, health care will be mainlining 100% of BC’s budget by 2040. You can’t help but start screaming with the expanding mob, “More cuts! De-fund Viagra! Privatize! Unplug the elderly!”

But The Tyee‘s Will McMartin analyzed thirty years of BC health budgets and completely dispelled such claims. It’s worth the read (I checked the numbers); however, McMartin’s central point was simple: Don’t forget the BC Liberals have repeatedly cut taxes and the budgets of most other ministries. ­The end result in a quick analogy: While the government spent $2 on health care and $8 on other ministries decades ago, today government spends a bit over $2 on health, but barely more than $3 on all other ministries. That’s the primary way health care has gone from taking 20% of the budget to taking 40%.

McMartin contrasts this by calculating health care spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), a more common standard for comparing public expenditures across governments and decades. GDP represents the overall economic activity and tax base from which a government can draw for funding public services. Government data show BC’s health spending has fluctuated steadily around 5-7% of GDP since the mid-80s (See here, especially page 106, table A 3.5, and the GDP numbers here). Essentially, relative to our overall economic strength, health spending now is in line with where it’s always been. So, while we can still improve our health care system, clearly, we needn’t be acting as if we’re having a financial near-death experience.

This eye-opener made me wonder, ‘How is it I’ve read innumerable hysterical articles about BC’s health care budget, and have never heard this simple counterpoint?’ (According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, as a percentage of GDP, BC is actually at the lower end of spending nationally. See here and here for details.) Intrigued, I revisited how local media have handled the issue the past two years.

Most coverage was typified by Rob Shaw’s Victoria Times-Colonist news story: “Health care continues to devour money and accounts for 42 per cent of the entire $40-billion budget,” wrote Shaw. He quoted Premier Gordon Campbell: “[I]t’s really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.”

No other point of view on health spending was quoted. While Shaw seemed guilty of simply lazy journalism, others seemed more manipulative—or manipulated.

T-C staffer Jack Knox wondered how much we’ll “shovel into the gaping maw” of health care’s “ever-growing, insatiable appetite”. Interestingly, he related health spending to GDP, but only in one specific context: “Health spending has been outstripping the economy for decades…” Knox wrote.

I soon spotted this imprecise but alarmist refrain reappearing ad nauseum like a Republican talking point on Fox TV. No articles cited BC’s low health spending relative to GDP; however, many roared menacingly about the high growth rate of BC’s health spending relative to GDP.

“[B]etween 2001 and 2005, public health expenditures have grown faster on average than total revenue…” wrote public administration professor emeritus Jim Cutt in an opinion article about the approaching “financial brick wall”.

T-C news columnist Les Leyne parroted the same idea being spun by BC’s previous Liberal health minister: “Abbott said health spending grows twice as fast as the GDP and has done so for 20 years…”

It does sound terrifying. And it’s terrifically misleading. That’s because the growth rate for health spending is relative to a much smaller dollar amount than the growth rate for GDP.

Why is that significant? Well, if I spend $5,000 on consumer goods this year, that’ll be 400% more than five years ago. In that same time, BC’s GDP increased by a measly 17%. So now ministers and journalists are crying, “Rob Wipond’s increases in frivolous spending have been outstripping the increases in productivity of BC’s entire industrial base thirty times over! Stop Rob Wipond before he consumes the whole province!”

Sound absurd? You bet. Rob Wipond’s consumption still represents just 0.0000025% of provincial GDP.

To abandon ludicrous comparisons, then, and examine the numbers: BC GDP was $79.35 billion in 1990 and $197.93 billion in 2008, an increase of 150%. Meanwhile, BC health spending was $4.4 billion in 1990 and $14 billion in 2008, an increase of 218%. And that slight (hardly “twice as fast”) difference in growth seems significant, until we calculate that it merely means health spending was 5.5% of GDP in 1990 and 7% in 2008—within its normal fluctuation range. Much of that recent rise isn’t due to health spending increases, anyway, but GDP drop-offs after Wall Street meltdowns.

Spinning the tale the other way, though, the BC Liberals make it sound like they’ve been dramatically increasing health care funding. And in the atmosphere of crisis, they can justify privatization—something they’ve shown a propensity towards with hospital and nursing home operations, facility ownership etc.

What’s staggering to me personally is how I fell for such bafflegab for several years. I console myself that, when I actually write about a topic or take a political stand, I do some research first. But now I’m disturbed about what other illusions I have yet to dispel.

Though I guess that makes us humble, and not quick to parrot what anyone tells us. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

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Originally published in Focus, August 2010.

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You’ve heard of “green-washing”, where companies make their products sound more ecologically friendly than they are. Well, I keep seeing something more insidious: green-tinted glasses.

Green-washing is propaganda; it’s easy to spot and dispel. Like ads BP runs about its commitment to environmental responsibility, while the largest, most unprepared-for oil spill in North American history spreads from their Gulf of Mexico well.

But green-coloured glasses are a personal choice. And once you’ve put them on, you don’t see anything’s true colours anymore.

I got thinking about this when I received emails from a government employee and a university administrator with similar signatures: “Think about the environment before printing this email.”

It reminded me of several companies who’ve been bothering me to switch to electronic billing because it’s “green”.

And I thought, ‘Seriously?’

Yes, pulp and paper mills are notorious polluters. But cleaner processing techniques are available, trees are a renewable resource, and paper is mostly biodegradable. It wouldn’t take a lot to create an environmentally sustainable, all-natural paper industry.

Sure, snailmail depends on transport systems, but email depends on a vast electronic infrastructure of non-biodegradable and highly toxic hardware, cables, satellites and more, devouring energy. Since when did all that become “green”?

You could argue that, when we have computers already for other uses, then using them instead of printing is a net eco-saving over a couple decades. And that might be true, if most of us weren’t also throwing away and upgrading computer systems on average every two years along with our expanding plethora of peripheral iPods, iPads, DVDs, flashdrives, webcams and cell phones.

Heck, according to some researchers, a typical Google search requires more energy than boiling a water kettle, and the carbon footprint alone of digital communications technologies has surpassed that of the global aviation industry. So how did this conviction computers are greener become so widespread? I don’t recall seeing any advertising or propaganda campaigns. It’s some bizarre sort of grass-roots, self-delusional movement.

The same thing hit me when I was at my credit union searching for “ethical funds”.

We looked at a clean energy mutual fund and, in the top 15 firms this fund was invested in, one-third were Chinese.

“Does this fund consider human rights issues?” I asked.

“If human rights are your concern,” the financial rep responded, “we’ll have to try a different one.”

So we looked at an ethical fund with a human rights focus. Most of its investments were in North American companies, including Canada’s big banks.

“I realize they treat their Canadian employees relatively well,” I commented. “But these banks and their investment arms are funnelling dollars to companies and regimes around the world with abysmal human rights records.”

“You’d be hard pressed to find any ethical funds that don’t invest in our banks,” the rep said.

Evidently, most ethical funds just create another degree of separation between us and the exploitation and devastation. Like hiring people to hire people to do our dirty work. Like placing a thin green veil over our eyes to buffer our self-respect from harsh reality.

The rep pulled up another human rights-focused fund. Beside our banks, I spotted Canada’s Barrick Gold.

“How could they possibly justify investing in Barrick Gold?” I asked, providing additional commentary that will go unrepeated here, since Barrick is infamous for its threats against writers and publishers. (e.g. An expose on Canada’s multinational mining companies from Vancouver’s Talonbooks has been indefinitely delayed.)

“I imagine some people would argue that, through becoming shareholders, perhaps they can positively influence Barrick’s decisions,” said the rep.

‘Yes,’ I thought. ‘I’ll influence Barrick to stop its horrendous exploitations, or else I’ll pocket a tidy profit from those exploitations—either way, a win-win for me!’

After an hour, I just left my meager assets in a savings account where, the rep promised, the worst thing that would happen was that it would be loaned to someone locally. (Please, dear borrowers, be good with my money).

Walking home, I was shaking my head, thrusting my arms about the air, and protesting nearly aloud to the people I passed. It seemed so absurd, and so aggravating.

I understood that, if you want to save some money, you have to put it somewhere. And if you want to work in freelance writing, government, or education these days, you really can’t do it without computers and email.

But why lie to ourselves? Can’t we simply acknowledge we aren’t living green-ly or righteously, and really begin to grapple with the depth and complexity of the problems facing our society? Why are we instead inventing bogus ethical funds and uncritically advocating email over paper? Why does anyone think hybrid cars, bottles with 20% less plastic, and recycling cell phones in China are serious “steps in the right direction”?

Do we like wearing green-coloured glasses because they make anything we do appear green to us, and consequently little serious change in our behaviours is required? If so, what’s the attraction of that, really; what do we hope to achieve?

I arrive home from my journey through my angst about planetary catastrophe, and have a dinner of mostly organic, local food with a friend I adore. Then we snuggle, and she affectionately assures me that, even if she does sometimes treat me with terrible disrespect, that’s not reflective of how she truly feels, or who she truly is.

“Yes,” I murmur, smiling as I doze off, “I know.”

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Originally published in Focus, July 2010.

Bob the Fake Comedian riffs on the differences between the real most common search words and the top searches Google, Yahoo and Lycos give out to the media.

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There have long been gaps between the vision most of us have for a socially responsible, environmentally “green” Victoria, and the high-priced, unbridled growth towards which the dominant economic forces in this region steer us. This gap was identified in city staff’s own analysis of Victoria’s Official Community Plan (OCP), and grows wider daily through disagreements over everything from new condominium high-rises to mega-yacht marinas.

In sustainable governing parlance, such gaps can ideally be bridged by making all development decisions with equal consideration for economic, social and environmental impacts, or “triple bottom line” accounting. Unfortunately, in its current OCP consultation process covering issues like urban design, energy and emissions, local food sustainability, and economic development, the City inscrutably failed to request that its economic discussion paper provide any triple bottom line analyses (see “Visioning Our Future or Our Pipe Dream?” in May’s Focus). Yet, obviously, economic decisions frequently drive bulldozers right through the most beautiful of our food sustainability and urban design dreams.

So Focus and Transition Victoria recently brought together an expert panel to brainstorm how the municipal government could help transform Victoria’s economy and economic decisions to be more in line with the social and environmental values which our citizens have overwhelmingly given voice to over the years.

The task, of course, is not easy, and that’s one reason the gap has long gone without being bridged. We cannot, without extreme measures, pull our city out of the global capitalist economy, even if we collectively wanted to. So a gargantuan machinery of international finance, federal interest rates, and provincial tax policy comes bearing down upon us every day with its own values and priorities, capable of crushing the plans of even the flushest of governments with the greenest of aspirations. One collapse in the Wall Street derivatives market, and governments from Africa to the E.U. stagger and struggle to even survive.

So what can a small municipality with relatively meager resources actually do? What tools, if any, do our elected local representatives have to help sustain the city most of us say we want, with well-paid jobs, pollution reductions, environmentally-friendly infrastructures, affordable housing, protected greenspace, character neighbourhoods, and healthy, locally-grown food?

The panel participants:

Sasha Angus is the Economic Development Officer for the Greater Victoria Development Agency.

Bruce Carter is the CEO of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce.

Nicole Chaland is the Program Director for SFU’s Certificate for Community Economic Development, and advisor to the BC Co-operative Association.

Deborah Curran is a municipal law specialist, co-founded Smart Growth BC, and currently sits on Victoria’s Official Community Plan Citizen Advisory Committee.

Rod Dobell is an economist who works with UVic’s Centre for Co-operative and Community-based Economy.

Donna Morton is an economist and director of the Centre for Integral Economics.

I facilitated, and I’d deliberately chosen the panelists for their diverse backgrounds. There are many agendas from political left to right for changing local economies out there, but few gain traction because they only inspire small sectors of the population. I’d hoped we’d find some ideas which might appeal to Victorians from divergent political perspectives.

My first surprise was that everyone seemed to share a basic respect for “sustainability”, economic “resilience”, and “green” values. No one was shouting that the only thing that mattered was profit. This, itself, seemed extremely important. It was utterly unlike many cities where, say, the Chamber of Commerce and environmentalists are almost always completely at odds. As the dialogue became more detailed, of course, it became clear that the real differences between the panelists were rooted in differing degrees of dedication to specific, underlying principles of environmental sustainability. But at least we had a starting point.

We also agreed fairly quickly on several tools for economic change which a municipality could influence and were worth exploring: business development, political co-ordination, and taxation strategies.

Help Knowledge-based Businesses

When it came to business development, there was fair consensus in the group that Victoria should try to increase and strengthen its high-wage, knowledge-based sector. “Knowledge-based” was defined as a type of business activity that’s “human knowledge intensive” rather than land, capital or materials intensive. So education, software development and research were things we could do well in Victoria; agriculture or automobile construction, not so much.

One of the major appeals of this sector was its flexibility and resilience, even in times of economic or ecological crises—one of the hallmarks of sustainability. Carter pointed out that it was easy for people with expert knowledge to transfer from one job or part of the sector to another when need be, doing research, then teaching, then doing policy development, then consulting etc.

And for most in the group, their interest was knowledge-based businesses that were specifically involved in renewable energy, clean technologies or sustainable development. “If you look at the trends all around the globe, as other sectors went crazy rollercoaster riding through economic turbulence, renewable energy, for example, as a sector, really stayed strong and solid,” said Morton.

Angus summarized the vision forming: “I’d like to see us be a top-ten global centre for clean technology in resource development, and top five for environmental slash sustainable consulting. It’s not only the right thing to do; it’s fantastic business. The industry globally is twice as big as the aerospace and automobile sectors combined. And even given these economic times, it’s been growing at twenty percent plus.”

But without millions to invest in economic stimulus packages, what could our municipal government do? The discussion soon turned to one of the primary methods municipal governments have to encourage or discourage certain types of business activities: managing the use of spaces and buildings through zoning bylaws, fees, and other tools.

(Note: Many comments have been edited for length.)

Curran: We need to continue to have a fairly nuanced understanding of the kind of space needed by these industries. Ninety percent of the businesses in Greater Victoria employ about five people or less. Mosaic [on Fort Street] is a great example of re-purposing of a commercial building into residential-based mixed use; you can still [legally] have an office space in those units. The second thing is that, the way a knowledge-based economy works, we need to continue to improve on the number of organic, messy interactions that occur each day at street level and in our buildings, where you have people from different firms interacting, creating synergies. [How does the City help] create those kinds of interactions and cross-pollination? I think one way is free [public] Wi-Fi. The second is allowing way more on-street vendors. The number of conversations I’ve had at the wieny dog outside Capital Iron outstretch any civic engagement I’ve done in the last five years.

Morton: In the building the Zeidler family has reconstituted in Toronto [Urbanspace Property Group's Robertson Building], there are warehouses that have been fundamentally overhauled to do exactly that. There are artists and knowledge workers and web designers and… It’s become a hub. They’ve built a phenomenal internal economy. In addition to all the innovation that happened, they sell things to each other; there’s this massive kind of stimulus that happens even within the building, and then it ripples out throughout the city.

Carter: I’ve also had some tremendous interactions in Hollywood Park where kids play baseball. When you look at a small community like we have, we need to recognize that those areas are just as important as street vendors downtown.

Chaland: The [municipal OCP] policy, then, would be applying a triple bottom line lens to public spaces, and to maximize the social, economic and ecological benefits that accrue out of every building, office space, neighbourhood association, park, every road, and even parking spot.

Angus: So in a very black-and-white scenario, if we were to come up with 25,000 square feet in the City of Victoria, which is nearly impossible, would [the City encourage] a call centre in there, or a clean tech knowledge centre where they’re employing people at $80,000 a year, versus less than the living wage?

Morton: And there’s an overstock of city parking lots that I’d argue you could have any day of the week, if they were taxed appropriately, to do exactly what you’re talking about. Because they’re paying nothing in taxation. They’re paying fifteen grand for those massive parking lots here. But the kind of thing you’re talking about would probably generate half a million to a million dollars in taxation revenue. And we can incentivize knowledge workers to come to Victoria through taxation, if we structure the business fees and licences differently than we do currently. Parking lots are asinine. With our housing issues, it’s ludicrous. Your incubator [for clean tech entrepreneurs] is there, the housing you want for workers is there, and affordable housing for everybody living on the street in Victoria is right there. At the drop of a pen. It’s easy.

The conversation then swung entirely towards affordable housing; interestingly, everyone regarded it as a crucial component of the business development strategy.

“If we don’t take care of the affordability of housing, new businesses will not want to move here,” Curran stated emphatically. She suggested some possible options. One could be collecting a levy from properties or new businesses that would then be directed towards creating affordable housing. Another could be allowing developers to build more units and surpass zoning limits, in return for their including new affordable units. “Whichever way we decide to do it in Victoria, we need to simply do it.”

Carter also recognized the seriousness of the issue, but suggested it was more important, and less penalizing to developers or taxpayers, to build our economy to increase the average wage in Victoria, so people could afford housing at market rates.

Chaland countered that, “The private market isn’t providing housing at a cost that citizens can afford, so that’s where government has a leadership role.” She then provided intriguing examples of city governments requiring developers to create a specified percentage of affordable units in all new buildings. Even though the developers “fought and screamed” when the rules were brought in, said Chaland, afterwards, developers were thrilled to see how the clear rules saved them time, effort and money by dramatically reducing the amount of public and government consultation they had to go through.

The group couldn’t quickly reach consensus on how best to execute the affordable housing component of the business strategy. And Morton’s emphasis to me that, “I would like you to record that density is good,” reflected everyone’s acute awareness that there’s still widespread public resistance throughout Victoria to building even a few extra stories upwards, affordable or not, and no matter who’s paying for it.

But I wondered, would we be more open to increased density, if we knew it was part of a comprehensive city-wide sustainable economic development strategy? That led to the heart of the political problem: the lack of a comprehensive sustainable economic development strategy.

Let’s Build a Strategy

The group generally felt one of the simplest and easiest ways to begin improving sustainable economic development here would be for the municipality to invest more energy and resources into a centralized approach. Though the City of Victoria does proclaim it’s “committed to a triple bottom line approach to decision making”, and has created a “Department of Sustainability”, no one felt the commitment was sufficiently vigorous, particularly in relation to economic decisions.

The first problem, Angus explained, is that the City isn’t investing much in any economic strategizing of any kind.

“We spend right now about twenty-eight cents per resident in the CRD on economic development. An average jurisdiction should spend probably around five dollars.” Amongst other problems, Angus added, this dearth of funding has left us without regularly updated, research-based knowledge about our local economy’s strengths and weaknesses to guide government decision-making or help attract new businesses, sustainable or otherwise. “If the [City] could facilitate that on an ongoing basis, I think that would be tremendous.”

Angus also suggested that every new city bylaw or regulatory initiative should involve a triple bottom line analysis. “There’s an old saying, what gets measured, gets managed.”

Chaland added that the Province of Manitoba had enacted legislation to enforce the viewing of all community economic development decisions through exactly this kind of “lens”. “Every staff person at every level, whatever program, has to articulate, ‘This is the social impact, this is the economic impact, and this is the environmental impact.’”

Obviously, though, there are reasons for the limited follow-through from the City of Victoria. How much does it cost in time, effort and money to do these kinds of analyses constantly, or make the changes to decisions that might result? Meanwhile, many people and businesses lacking social or environmental values put pressure on government virtually daily.

So then our group decided to address the problem of developing Victoria’s economy in more sustainable ways from a different direction: We asked, how could our municipal government support citizens and businesses in incorporating sustainability values into their own daily, economically-related decisions?

Change Taxation to Encourage Green Choices, Green Businesses

Morton kickstarted us with an impassioned speech about the immense influence of municipal taxes, licences and fees on city development.

“The key driver is taxes. It’s the big lever,” said Morton. “There’s a huge chasm between this greatest power any government has, and this space where citizens are completely disempowered. [People are] either rabidly interested or completely disinterested. The people who understand the power of taxation are rabidly interested. The rest of the citizenry is just left in the cold, because they don’t really understand how [taxes] work. So economic literacy matters. Empowering citizens to understand the DNA of economics, including taxation and subsidization, is foundationally important.” She pointed again, by way of example, to how heavily Victoria subsidizes parking lots, of all things, by desperately under-taxing them—something most people are oblivious to.

Soon, we were exploring taxation strategies that could help educate people about municipal finances, encourage, prod, push or harness public and business spending in the green economy, and get sustainability to “pay its own way”. And both the group’s areas of agreement, and disagreement, provided some interesting possibilities.

Curran: There are a variety of mechanisms through which we can “daylight” the city’s budget and increase our economic literacy in a colourful and fun way, that are web interactive. So for example, if I pulled up my utility bill, on the website I’d know exactly where my fifty dollars in garbage taxes went. X dollars went to salaries, that kind of thing. The second idea is to nuance in a more specific way how we pay fees for things like collection of garbage. If you’re going to fill up your garbage can, then you pay fifty dollars every two months; if you don’t fill up your garbage can, then you pay somewhat less, and you have the option of putting that [saved money] into recycling your soft plastics. You can do that for water as well: We all get a base minimum at a cheap rate, and then if you’re going to water your lawn it goes up from there.

Morton: We built a bunch of software tools for the City of Winnipeg that allowed people to go in and say I live here, I drive this, this is my commute, this is the size of my house, this is how much energy I use. And by making a few decisions differently, they could alter their tax bill. And people were into it. It was a really sexy thing that people wanted to play with.

Wipond: Would we consider raising taxes to achieve specific goals of sustainability?

Carter: The level of taxation is important. Our mill rate is among the higher of the provinces. Our mill rate right now for residential in Victoria is about 13 and for Vancouver it’s about 10. I personally think it actually needs to be reduced overall. I am in favour of tax shifting and consumption taxes, I think they’re great. The challenge that I see [with raising taxes to achieve specific goals] is that over a period of time it actually becomes part of the fixed infrastructure process. The municipality becomes dependent upon it. All the parking revenue was supposed to go to improve parking in Victoria when it was originally created a long time ago. It’s an essential part of the city’s budget now.

Morton: For some of us, it’s about a nuanced, more sophisticated use of tax policy. Not bluntly looking at all taxes as bad. Even have voluntary taxes, for things like compost toilets. The old barrier was, ‘The municipality cannot afford to monitor [the safety of your compost toilet].’ So instead, you voluntarily pay for that monitoring. There’s this massive amount of green technology out there that we’re really not implementing because municipalities can’t get their head around how to administer it. There are engineers that are terrified.

Curran: I think if you were to delve down into Dockside Green [in Victoria] you would see a huge amount of that regulatory innovation going on. But it’s on a larger scale that hasn’t necessarily been replicated at the household level.

Morton: Big things are allowed to innovate because they can be administered differently. [For household compost toilets], the municipal costs are $1,200 a year to monitor you, and to do ground, water and floral testing. So you’d pay $3,600 and, after three years, if everything’s good, you’d get a permit.

Dobell: With all the folks in a neighbourhood association, we could bring it down to twenty bucks a person.

Carter: I see that as an administrative nightmare in a public system where overhead kills us.

Morton: But this is a cost-recovery system. This lets all the wacky dreamers pay for it themselves. Why don’t you like this? This comes from the “don’t raise taxes” [line of thinking].

Carter: My point is, the system, the public administration, gathers overhead. So next thing you know, there’s a supervisor who actually isn’t inspecting compost toilets, they’re supervising the people that are [and costs go up]. And I look at the guy who operated the thirty-seat restaurant that was actually a six-seat takeaway, and it took the City about four years to finally shut him down—in a place where it was really unsafe, and it was the wrong structure. Now we’re going to say a guy’s going to have to take out a toilet? Four years later and how many lawyers…

Chaland: I’m sorry, but what you’ve just said is the law of mediocrity. I mean, all of these bylaws and building codes have been created to protect us, right? To keep us safe. They haven’t been built on what is the very best thing we could accomplish. And there needs to be room for both. I don’t know how you can argue with true cost accounting.

Carter: Do I think that the building code should be updated to allow composting toilets? Absolutely. But that’s not what we’re talking about.

Chaland: This is a way to get us there.

Carter: I’m not in favour of breaking the building code just because somebody wants to pay. I think the liabilities are too great, the costs are too great, you can’t get cost recovery.

Dobell: Couldn’t you do it along the lines of what we’ve done with septic fields? It used to be you had to have those inspected by the health authority, and now the whole business has been turned over to private contractors who’ve become certified.

Morton: This framework would be designed to piggyback on that.

Carter: The difference here is proven technologies versus experimental.

Morton: There are [Canadian Standards Association] CSA-approved compost toilets.

Carter: In which case I’m good with that.

I liked the ideas for stimulating the green economy by allowing people to save on taxes through going greener, and to voluntarily pay taxes for new, greener services. Yet I couldn’t help laughing at Carter’s biting observations about bureaucracies, which seemed all too recognizable.

The group managed to come to a provisional consensus that at least trying voluntary taxes and website-based “participatory budgeting” would be worthwhile. The evident conflict area, though, seemed important, too. It made me suspect that the degree of trust or distrust people already have in government would likely determine the degree to which the general public would support any innovative tax proposals. (Even I, for example, was secretly having anxious visions of everyone soon being charged complicated, variable fees for every single public service they might want…)

Some larger-scale proposals for guiding personal, professional and business economic decisions in sustainable directions were also floated. Morton pointed out that the City could boost renewable energy use and encourage the local green design and energy sectors simultaneously by, for example, requiring large buildings to supply some of their own energy through solar, geothermal, wind or other renewable sources.

“There are countless incentivization and anti-incentivization programs for renewable energy, but we do very little at the local level, and we could do a lot more,” said Morton. “The City of Victoria tomorrow could say we’re going to site-generate twenty percent of all of the energy used by buildings in this city. Tomorrow. They could just do that.”

Curran suggested the municipality find a way to raise and contribute money towards a regional fund to help our agricultural economy and food sustainability. “We should be purchasing farmland and turning it over to 99-year leases, because there’s no new farmer who can afford to purchase farmland,” she said. “Or use [a levy] for an agricultural development fund which would become a kind of ag-industry hub for the region.”

But Where is the City Actually Going?

Evidently, there’s no dearth of feasible ideas for developing more sustainable economic decision making in Victoria, even without seceding from Canada and transforming the island into a giant commune (which might be my own preference).

And even though we couldn’t hammer out consensus on every issue in merely three hours, it seemed encouraging that this diverse group still forged a lot of common ground in support of specific, triple bottom line policies for taxation, business development, government decision making, and even preparations for global financial or ecological disaster.

From this perspective, though, unfortunately, our municipal government is failing. The City’s capital and strategic business planners have long operated outside concern for social and environmental values—as they’ve admitted. The elected leadership has shown disinterest in soliciting for Victoria’s OCP the kind of visionary and detailed economic feedback our forum only began to explore. And if the City and business community are positioning the Greater Victoria Development Agency to be our lead economic development organization, as they seem to be doing, then we have to ask, when will the GVDA bring some people with broader economic, social and environmental expertise onto its board, instead of just people with business expertise?

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Originally published in Focus, June 2010. To provide input into Victoria’s OCP, go to www.shapeyourfuturevictoria.ca before June 6. The City hosts an OCP forum on June 25 and 26 at Crystal Garden.

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As the public participation component of Victoria’s Official Community Plan process officially launched, the air felt heavy with irony. It was only March, but fans were already fighting mugginess in the glass-roofed Crystal Garden, serving as a constant reminder of the preceding century of haphazard government “planning” that built a downtown saltwater swimming pool which became ­a tropical botanical zoo and then an ill-fated geographic museum and finally a less-than-ideal conference centre dependent on the public purse.

Nevertheless, as I participated in the municipality’s “Shape Your Future Victoria” event, the energies of an increasingly concerned and engaged population were stirring inspiration.

Over at the “Local Food Systems” forum, Derek Masselink led conversations about his consulting firm’s thought-provoking 134-page report. (See all the available discussion papers here.) Participants explored establishing more farmers’ markets and local food processing infrastructures, supporting regional agricultural protection, composting organic wastes, and replacing ornamentals along public boulevards with fruit and nut trees. By the end, we were even considering models for reining in private property rights to create free community gardening spaces. The increasingly animated group made statements like, “First, I want to cheer for the comments of the previous speaker…” before offering their own ideas on preparing for climate change-­driven food shortages.

All of that rolled seamlessly into the “Climate Change and Energy Challenge” forum, where Alex Boston provided block-by-block data on automobile types, transportation habits, and emissions. Stunning statistics showed vehicle emissions going up six-fold in our suburban areas and building emissions nearly doubling compared to inner city homes, and spurred discussions of public transportation, walkable communities, centres for used goods exchanges, and mandating high performance buildings with onsite renewable energy systems.

Similar ideas and unity of purpose revolving around quality of life and the characters of neighbourhoods emerged at the “Urban Design” forum, and all together, it started to feel like some sort of long-overdue civic revolution was truly in the offing.

But something extremely different happened at “Trends and Prospects for the Local Economy”.

Jay Wollenberg of Vancouver’s Coriolis Consulting laid out a completely different kind of story: Victoria’s economic growth was slowing compared to regional competitors, and so we had to give renewed focus to bringing in more jobs, more offices, more businesses, more residences in higher densities, more industries, more stores, more tourism and more harbour development.

In the midst of it all, there was no mention of how such growth could potentially accommodate greater food sustainability, emissions reductions, or character neighbourhoods. There was no analysis of how such growth might affect quality of life, population health, or the local environment. Basically, everything Wollenberg was saying ran at ­cross purposes to everything being explored in the other forums.

As his presentation gave way to group discussion and this gap was pointed out, the conflict heightened. Wollenberg himself became testily dismissive, and an intense division emerged between participants subscribing to a model of endless economic growth, and those questioning it.

Of course, there’s ample literature on ways of re-designing cities to reduce costs rather than increase financial bases. The net economic effect is the same, but the impacts on our environment and quality of life can be dramatically different when we’re focusing on reducing resource use and energy costs, increasing local food production, or maintaining greenspace and gathering rainwater to ease pressures on stormdrain and water systems.

So I asked Wollenberg if he’d made any suggestions in his report with regards to such a “reduced cost model” for Victoria, wherein ideas for economic expansion might be tempered by some of the other issues under discussion for the OCP like food sustainability and emissions reductions. He replied, “No. We weren’t asked to look at that.”

This ­encapsulates a common, giant problem with OCPs.

Under BC’s Local Government Act, OCPs are done about once a decade, and cover planning for everything from building and farming to sewers, roads and schools. The legislative goals sound surprisingly progressive: avoid urban sprawl, minimize car use, reduce pollution, develop alternative energy sources, protect greenspace, and encourage economic development “that supports the unique character of communities”. (Here’s the City’s own overview of the legislation.)

In practice, OCPs are guidelines not rules, though; so our elected representatives can ignore, bend or re-write them, and the latest economic pressures often win the day. Usually in response to re-zoning or development permit requests, Victoria has amended its current OCP on average about every two months since 1995. Tellingly, that OCP already included many laudable commitments to affordable housing, food sustainability, harbour water quality improvement and more which fell by the wayside. City staff’s own 2009 review of Victoria’s OCP notes that there’s a “lack of clear, structured implementation directions” and no procedures for monitoring compliance. Another problem, the report states, is that there’s “no link” between the OCP’s grand urban, social and environmental visions and the city’s “capital and strategic business planning”.

Obviously, then, it was sadly predictable that a reality gap could appear between Wollenberg’s economic paper and every other report. Why did it still occur?

Senior planners Cameron Scott and Deb Day insist in a conference call the city wants an “integrated” economic-environmental-social vision, and point me to Victoria’s OCP “Project Charter” which explicitly seeks strategies unifying “Ecological Integrity”, “Social Wellbeing” and “Economic Vitality”. Yet Scott forwards the city’s final Request for Proposals for the economic analysis, and there’s no mention of ecological integrity or social wellbeing.

Equally troubling, the city is offering questionnaires to help citizens run “Community Circle” discussion groups and submit ideas by June 6—but by late April, that key economic report was still not even publicly available for consideration. (See shapeyourfuturevictoria.ca for info.) Meanwhile, the two-page topic preambles (as opposed to the comprehensive consultants’ reports) that most people will read are devoid of specific visions or cost-benefit analyses, so unless participants already have expertise, their suggestions will likely be feebly underdeveloped.

Are we simply being drawn into a legally-mandated charade of public participation, at the end of which our city’s status quo will prevail?

Victoria Councillor Pamela Madoff insists council does want a strong OCP with clear “implementation mechanisms” which integrate economic drivers with broader environmental and quality of life issues.

“We’ve been trying much harder to link the budget to the goals so that [the OCP] doesn’t just become a document that sits on the shelf and gathers dust,” she says.

And she is concerned about the apparent conflicts between different community visions. “When I hear about [urban] growth, growth, growth, I have to admit one of my first questions is, ‘Okay, how do we feed those people?’”

So how is the municipality going to ensure it hears some serious, practical suggestions for integrating our economic, environmental and social visions?

“To engineer a Community Circle that would bring those disparate views together, that would be really, really interesting to see,” suggests Madoff.

But then shouldn’t council consider keeping the public feedback period open for longer after the release of the economic report, and make efforts to help guarantee exactly such circles do occur with some less conservative economic experts on hand?

“You’re the first person who’s told me about this,” responds Madoff. “If there are more people out there that have identified this as a real issue, I’d love to hear from them. And I’ll bring it to the attention of council.” (Contact information for Pamela Madoff here. Read the follow-up article here.)

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Originally published in Focus, May 2010.

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In early February, the Victoria Times Colonist published a series of investigative articles by Louise Dickson, Lindsay Kines and Rob Shaw which upset and impressed me. But in the end, I wondered if even they really understood the significance of their discoveries.

The reporters went incognito to ten courthouses across Vancouver Island and the lower mainland. They asked to see basic information like court transcripts, records of charges and unsealed warrants—documents anyone should be able to easily obtain in any democratic society where courts are open and all are equal before the law.

What they found was Kafka-esque. Almost without exception, the clerks, supervisors and Justice of the Peace employees of the BC Ministry of Attorney General’s Court Services Branch frequently made arbitrary decisions controlling access, cited non-existent regulations, and engaged in blatant contraventions of the law.

One employee claimed a requested file couldn’t be shown because it was under a ban which she wasn’t sure she was even allowed to name.

Another employee started asking probing questions about why the requester wanted to see a file, and then added, “If you are not forthcoming with me, I may not be as forthcoming with you.”

Access to a court file was refused, and later given, without explanation.

Access to a court file was given and then suddenly retracted because the employee said she felt certain the Crown would soon apply to seal it, anyway.

In some courthouses, the requester had to fill out intimidating reams of unnecessary personal information, or show precise knowledge of case details like charge status or addresses of police searches—things most people would only learn after accessing the court file.

When it was explained that the Vancouver courthouse was making decisions about access differently from New Westminster, a Vancouver employee even blithely justified this disregard for the law: “They have their way of doing things and we have our way of doing things.”

When the TC contacted the BC Ministry of Attorney General, their senior spokesperson explained there were no overarching policy guidelines. “The reality is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ policy for access to court records,” he enlightened the TC in an email.

This has far-reaching implications. Media accessed court records to discover our minister in charge of traffic safety had a suspended driver’s licence, and our assistant deputy health minister was under investigation for embezzlement. Landlords, tenants, investors, businesses, victims of crime, environmental, development, health and poverty groups and many others often need access to court records for everything from exposing polluters to understanding how trade agreements affect municipal decision-making. Our government is suggesting AG bureaucrats have the right to arbitrarily and without rationales restrict all this?

When legal experts expressed horror and the TC presented policies governing public access to court records from other provinces, the AG’s office promptly changed its story: The government is “working on” policy guidelines but, in the meantime, the ministry told the TC, provincial judges are responsible for court records.

A perplexed spokesperson for our provincial judiciary responded that records handling is actually the legal and practical responsibility of the AG, and presented policy guidelines issued by the AG to BC’s courthouse employees in 1994 and 2001.

Abruptly, the AG’s office conceded that they do have court records access policies and are indeed accountable for courthouse employees.

When then asked about controversial new fees for searching online court records, the AG’s office again foisted blame on the provincial judiciary for asking government to impose the fees. Chief judges of the BC Supreme Court and Provincial Court promptly stated the government was, again, lying.

By then I was thinking, ‘By jove: This! This is is what a community newspaper should be doing!’ It was shaping up to be the kind of journalism that both disturbs you profoundly and makes you want to stand up and cheer—and could even bring down a government.

But then something pathetic happened.

The provocative series was topped off with a facile, sycophantic article, credited to all three journalists, featuring Attorney General Mike de Jong.

“B.C.’s attorney general has promised sweeping changes to improve public access to the province’s court system in the wake of a Times Colonist ­investigation,” the article began, aptly encapsulating how the main purpose seemed to be to make both the Minister and the TC look good.

The Minister was allowed to wax on in politico-speak about the grandiosities he “hopes” to perform in future, and all of it thanks to the TC‘s fine work. His imminent plans were hardly “sweeping” (in fact, they basically amounted to finishing that policy guide the ministry had said it was working on, once they’d been forced to acknowledge they had a policy), while not a single other source was included and no critical perspective was provided.

By then I was thinking, ‘This. This is the epitome of everything that is wrong with mainstream journalism today.’

Evidently, the TC journalists hadn’t grasped the true significance of their own discoveries—or were reluctant to follow them to their logical conclusions.

After all, their articles had already made it clear that none of this was news to the government.

Lawyers, unions, watchdogs and others have been complaining of worsening problems in our courthouses for years. Even the AG’s communications director eventually acknowledged awareness: “I know it came up and they were talking about giving people better training…” De Jong himself eventually admitted he’d seen this improper “culture of protectiveness” within the AG’s Court Services Branch “developing over the years” (emphasis added, and note that de Jong, a lawyer, has been a minister in the BC Liberal government since 2001).

So what had the TC’‘s articles really exposed, then?

First: The Attorney General’s office, the highest-level rule of law in our province, essentially argued, in writing, that it was reasonable that the very foundations of our legal system—the right to know the charges against you, the right to witness how laws are applied and legal decisions are made, the right to monitor how our daily lives and world are being policed by the state—have been operating on a capricious, ad hoc basis.

Second: The Attorney General’s office has until now apparently been largely ignorant of the laws pertaining to courthouse work and our provincial court records system.

Third: The Attorney General’s office had the staggering audacity (and sheer stupidity) to simply make up legal references and legislative authorities and twice inform the media that the province’s judges were responsible for activities central to the operations of our legal system, which the ministry itself was actually responsible for.

These are facts that can’t be simply wiped out by the Attorney General promising a new policy guide. These are facts that show this government—this government’s legislative branch—has little fundamental respect for the rule of law. These are facts that boggle the imagination, when we consider that, if our legal system is operating so far outside the law, then how much more cowboyish and authoritarian must decision-making be right now in areas of our government and civil service where people are not being explicitly trained to work in the law?

These are facts that should bring down this government.

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Originally published in Focus, April 2010.