Finally, a challenge to detention of ‘certifiable’ people in BC

Unlike other Canadian jurisdictions, those who are deemed to be mentally ill in British Columbia can be held indefinitely. B.C. does not have an automatic review of ongoing detention and unless individuals can take the case to the court, there is no recourse.

image: BC Mental Health Rights

That means that persons, who may or may not be mentally ill, can be held endlessly. Who is deemed “mentally ill” can be arbitrary. Those with cognitive impairments or genetic illnesses that impair their ability to communicate can be held in institutions under a doctor’s orders.

More than 25,000 people detained every year under BC’s Mental Health Act.

“BC is the only jurisdiction in Canada that still uses a ‘deemed consent’ model, which violates the Canadian Charter and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” says Michael Feder, a lawyer for the Council of Canadians With Disabilities (CCD).

Deemed consent means that people who are involuntarily detained under BC’s Mental Health Act are assumed to have given consent to detainment and treatment.  They are legally forced to receive all psychiatric treatment, including medications and electroconvulsive therapy -even when they are mentally capable of making their own treatment decisions.

The law also deprives detained individuals the right to a substitute decision maker, like a representative or family member, to give or refuse treatment on their behalf.

It’s difficult, but not impossible for wrongly detained people to gain freedom –but only if they take the case to court themselves.

Take the case of “A.H.,” a First Nations 39-year-old woman who was wrongfully detained for almost a year.

In a court case between A.H. and the Fraser Health Authority, the Supreme Court of B.C. learned that A.H. had been held against her will and that she was not even found to be mentally ill.

It wasn’t a simple case. A.H. suffers from cognitive impairments and mental health issues. She has a history of substance abuse, family violence and sexual abuse. She was also diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).

A.H.’s mother sexually exploited her by pressuring her to drink alcohol and take drugs to make her compliant to sexual abuse.

However, many of those held against their will don’t have the resources to take their case to court. In that event, they will languish indefinitely. Michael Feder says:

“Some courts, including the trial court in our case, have been rigid in their view that challenges must be brought by affected individuals, despite whatever barriers they may face and no matter how marginalized or disadvantaged they may be.”

In the past two psychiatric patients tried to challenge the law but given their fragile condition, withdrew.  People with cognitive impairments, or those who face cultural or racial bias, are not well equipped to handle the stress of legal cases. The B.C. government asked the court to dismiss the challenge because the two had withdrawn from the case. The B.C. Supreme Court agreed, saying that without the individuals involved the case lacked the kind of factual context that courts need to review constitutional issues. The B.C. Court of Appeal disagreed with the B.C. Supreme Court, stressing the importance of access to justice. B.C. then appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Supreme Court of Canada is allowing a constitutional challenge to go ahead against B.C.’s law that authorizes the confinement and forcible treatment of psychiatric patients in British Columbia.

It’s about time.

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Super, natural, takes on new meaning in the face of B.C.’s adversity

Super, Natural British Columbia has been our trademark for decades. B.C.’s natural beauty – our mountains, oceans, rivers- attract tourists from around the world. Our varied terrain spreads across a vast landscape from rainforests to prairies

image: 49 North Helicopters

How big is Beautiful British Columbia?  Big enough to hold one Japan and two New Zealands.

For over 35 years, Destination BC, a crown corporation, has branded B.C. as Super, Natural British Columbia® and inspired millions of people to visit B.C. On their website they say:

“Our brand essence is that we are wild at heart. And, our promise back to those that travel here is that BC’s powerful nature will transform and renew you, bringing out your better self. BC has a unique combination of refined civilization with raw wilderness, sophistication and exhilaration, and of urban areas immersed in natural environments.”

We’ve been marketed to world as place to be in awe of nature. Now our destructive wildfires, record heat waves, and torrential rains will require rebranding. Now we are the poster province of climate emergency.

That doesn’t mean we can’t still use the words super, natural, and awe for marketing but the meanings have to be expanded.

Super, from the root meaning in Latin, means “above, over, beyond.” Now nature is beyond benign. Mother Nature is angry at our abuse of the planet and she’s a force to be reckoned with.

Awe has been transformed into awful. From 1300 awful meant: “worthy of respect or fear, striking with awe; causing dread.” Now awful means “very bad or unpleasant.”

We have experienced the awe of heat waves, the terror of wildfires, the hardship of drought, and the despair of people evacuated from their homes.

However, marketing is about spinning the negative into something fascinating. Beyond the mayhem, there is a sense of exhilaration in the force of nature.

People are fascinated by the brute force of nature. During tropical storms, people are attracted to shorelines to marvel at the powerful waves.  Kite surfers harness the fury of the wind.

Even the seemingly placid side of nature can be ominous. Below the surface lurks an awesome power. Visitors can be drawn to a seething power that lurks below the surface.

I remember visiting Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia and being attracted to the rocks polished smooth by the waves. Despite signs warning of the danger, visitors stand on the slippery rocks, watching the seemingly calm waves, only to be swept to their death.

Destination B.C. should market the fury of the atmospheric river. This spectacular band of moisture-laden air brings heat and precipitation from the tropics to our coast. Atmospheric rivers can carry 25 times more water than the Mississippi River.

Then there is the world renowned heat dome. Watch the temperatures soar as they did in Lytton. That Fraser Canyon village hit almost50 degrees and then went up in flames. It was the world’s highest temperature ever recorded north of 45°N and is a record high for all of Canada.

Come to B.C. and experience climate change in all its fury. Beyond nature, beyond a sense of awe, a climate emergency in progress.

Coronavirus tests Canada’s character

Canadians are seen as “nice” people, sensible, proud of Canada but not jingoistic, modest, not fanatically religious. The way we respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic will further define who we are.

Nice Canadian

The response to the pandemic in the U.S. has been politicized, similar to the response to climate change, with President Trump initially calling COVID-19 a hoax cooked up by his political opponents. Apparently some Republicans are following Trump’s initial lead and not socially isolating themselves by going to bars.

Canada can be an oasis of calm amid the global coronavirus freak-out. Political leaders can instil a sense of calm and confidence. One of those is Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer. She has become the face of Canada’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Canadians are rising to the challenge of a worsening novel coronavirus outbreak, going out of their way to be kind. Jason Dudas of Kamloops posted on Facebook:

“A co-worker told me about an elderly woman collapsing at a North Shore grocery store this weekend. If you are in a lower risk group and can help out elderly people you know with shopping you will be helping with keeping them safe at home, using extra sanitary precautions around them. If high risk groups don’t change their behaviour we will have a serious run on our health care system. But if we all work together then can make it through this situation.”

Kyle Ashley in Toronto posted a sign in the lobby of his downtown building offering to provide whatever assistance he could. “It’s like a war,” Ashley said, referring to the pandemic. “We will have bad actors, but good will come out.”

I have just returned from Mexico and will to self-isolate for two weeks. Neighbours have offered to buy groceries for me. It’s going to be tough to cut off contact with others, not going for coffee or to meetings at the society where I volunteer.  Social isolation is important, especially for travelers returning to Canada who have gone through busy airports. It’s voluntary but it’s the right thing to do; the only way to “flatten the curve” and slow down the spread which could potentially affect more than half of Canadians.

This isn’t panic, it’s just good citizenship under adverse social conditions.

Universal healthcare defines how we care for each other. Healthcare puts the common good above that of individual desire. Responsible Canadians will weigh what they individually want and what is in the public good. Canadian professor of philosophy Mark Gerald Kingwell says:

“Politics is a series of bargains between individual desire and collective good. What always remains is the goal of robust public trust. Community health is a shared good, just like education, transit infrastructure and building standards. It’s a concept that people against vaccines, flu-shot refuseniks, and turnstile jumpers everywhere just don’t seem to grasp (Goble and Mail, March 12, 2020).”

Herd mentality is not in the common good. Canadian’s response to COVID-19 will demonstrate our steely resolve in the face of adversity. We can hold our heads high with pride in the measures we take to stop the spread of this pandemic.

 

Blueberries without borders

Blueberries have arrived from Peru in my local store. Next they’ll be coming from Chile, then Mexico. As spring moves north, they will arrive from Florida.  Then in late spring they’ll be ripening in Georgia, after that California and Oregon. Washington will start shipping in early July.

image: Investment Agriculture Foundation of British Columbia

The northward march of the blueberries ends in British Columbia, where the largest crops in Canada are grown and the season is long says Corey Mintz:

“Because of the warm, sunny weather blueberries need to thrive; many regions have a growing season of only four to six weeks. But the climate of BC allows for a longer season: nearly three months, from early July to late September (Walrus magazine October, 2018).”

B.C. returns the blueberry favour by sending them south -all over North America. Blueberry production in BC has grown from 4.3 million kilograms in 1980 to 61 million kilograms in 2017.

The fact Canada exports any produce at all may come as a surprise. We can’t compete with American growers for many other crops says James Vercammen, professor of food and resource economics at the University of British Columbia. Economies of scale, higher labour and land costs, give U.S. producers an edge.

But as the sun lingers over Canada in the summer, we have an advantage that Americans lack. Vercammen says that British Columbia is “now growing raspberries and blueberries like crazy.”

Things didn’t look so good at the start of the 2018 growing season. Blueberries, like one-third of the foods we eat, depend on pollination by bees.

Bees prefer a balanced diet. In recent years, honey producers have expressed concerns over the nutritional value of a blueberry diet alone. “It’s a single fruit,” said Kerry Clark, president of the B.C. Honey Producers’ Association, “It’s like going to a buffet and the only thing there is salsa. It doesn’t give you a balanced diet.”

Monoculture crops that cover vast areas aren’t very nutritious for bees. Weakened bees are more susceptible to disease and the wet spring this year meant that growers were applying more fungicides –also not good for bees.

That meant that owners were reluctant to send their colonies to blueberry fields. “It’s become less and less attractive, to the point where the beekeepers have decided not to bring thousands of colonies into the blueberries this year,” said Clark.

While blueberry production has increased, the number of bee hives has not kept up. One beekeeper predicted a loss because he couldn’t supply enough hives:

“There’s definitely going to be a shortage of bees in blueberries this year. It will be worse this year. The plants will be there, but the bees won’t be there to pollinate them, so they won’t get the berries.”

But all the worry turned out to be for nothing. As the damp spring turned into a sunny summer, blueberries thrived and by the end of the year there was a glut of the crop. The lower prices were good news for berry lovers but disastrous for farmers.

John Gibeau of the Honeybee Centre in Surrey was philosophical: “If it’s nice weather we do well. If it’s poor weather we do poorly. That’s farming.

New Zealand’s experience with electoral reform

I sat down with Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, to talk about her country’s experience with electoral reform. She was in Kamloops on June 21 at a reception held at a local pub where about 70 people had gathered.

   image: Wikipedia

“You have five minutes for the interview,” the organizer of the event told us. We made our way to a quiet table.

Two referenda were held in New Zealand, she told me. The first in 1992 was non-binding. It asked whether voters wanted to retain the present first-past-the-post (FPTP) system or if they wanted a change. And if they wanted a change, which of four systems of proportional representation did they prefer?

The results were overwhelming with 85 per cent in favour of a change. Of the four systems, Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), was a clear favourite.

A second referendum was held a year later. This time the referendum was binding and the results closer with 54 per cent choosing MMP over FPTP.

I wondered how proportional representation had changed the culture of political parties. MMP leads to minority governments, Ms. Clark told me, which means that parties need to get along, not only after election but before. “Be sure to make friends”, she said, “you never know when you’ll need them later.”

After 20 minutes, I had asked all my prepared questions and we just chatted. “I thought the interview was only going to be five minutes,” the organizer scolded when he found us. Ms. Clark returned to the group where photos were taken and she gave a speech.

Afterward, I thought about the similarly of our upcoming mail-in referendum this fall to the one in New Zealand.

Two questions make sense to me: Do you want a change? If so, want kind do you want?  However, a B.C. lobby group called Fair Referendum disagrees. In a robocall call, they said that there should be just one question. I had to chuckle. The Fair Referendum proposal illustrates what’s wrong with our voting system. They want a single question with four choices, three of which are a type proportional representation and one being the existing FPTP. Those in favour of change will have their vote split three ways and those who don’t want change will have one choice. The ballot is rigged so that even if, say 60 per cent want change, 40 per cent will make sure it doesn’t happen. It seems obvious that’s what Fair Referendum hopes for.

The referendum, to be held from October 22 to November 30 by mail-in ballot, is shaping up along party lines. The Greens and NDP favour proportional representation and the BC Liberals oppose it.

Kamloops-South Thompson MLA Todd Stone says the referendum would be biased in favour of the NDP and that’s probably true –but only because the BC Liberals choose not to cooperate with other parties.

The Greens and NDP have made an extraordinary effort to be nice to each other because, as Ms. Clark suggests, it’s the only way that future governments under proportional representation will work. It’s a shift in party culture that the BC Liberals have yet to realize.

 

Germany pays customers to use electricity

German power companies paid customers to use electricity on one hundred occasions in 2017. Companies paid customers a lot relative to what they normally receive -1,720 times more per kilowatt hour.

   photo: CleanTechnica

The reason why power companies were so eager to pay customers had to do with the wind. Wind turbines were generating too much power on the grid and they had to dump it quickly. Surplus electricity is a dangerous problem that has to be corrected quickly.

While wind turbines can be switched off quickly, fossil fuel and nuclear sources can’t. Power grid managers have to agile to compensate for gusty winds.

The problem with surplus electricity is that voltage quickly rises and that can damage equipment. Power grid engineering is complex but one thing is simple: power in equals power out. Managing the grid requires a balance in the production and consumption of electricity. The sum of all the power used by your TVs and toasters, and all that of your neighbour’s, equals the power produced by generators. If the power produced is more than what’s used, something has to give.  What gives is a precipitous rise in voltage.

Christmas Day, 2017, was pleasantly warm in Germany and the wind was strong. As well, demand was abnormally low being a holiday when factories and offices are shut down. Suddenly, the wind blew and power companies had to shed a lot of power from the grid. So the plea went out from power companies to start wasting electricity. Turn on your electric heaters and all the lights in your house. Open the doors. We’ll pay a lot is you do.

Too much wind power is not unforeseen. Germany spent $250 billion to develop wind turbines and they now produce 20 per cent of the country’s power. The remainder of Germany’s power comes from fossil fuels and nuclear.

Germany has obviously solved one part of the greenhouse gas problem by investing heavily in renewable sources but the other side remains unresolved –how to store surplus energy. Battery technology doesn’t have the capacity to store huge amounts of power. If it did, surplus wind power could have been stored.

Batteries will work on a smaller, household scale. Elon Musk sells his Tesla Powerwall battery for $7,000 and it holds enough power to run your house for about 3 days. Imagine being paid to store electricity and then to use it to supply your energy needs for days? In Germany, you’d be doing yourself and the power company a favour.

If you live in B.C., not so much. British Columbia has the enviable position of generating power by hydroelectricity; 95 per cent of it with the remainder by natural gas plants.

B.C. can’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially by switching to wind and solar. Small scale installations in houses can reduce the cost of electricity for homeowners. Because dams hold stored power, storage of surplus electricity is not a problem.

Germany has reduced the burning of fossil fuels with wind and solar. Now, if they could only find some way to store the surplus electricity.

In BC Hydro’s case, ideology means higher electricity costs

When I opened my BC Hydro bill and read the leaflet inside, I thought some transformation must have taken place.  The leaflet said that Accenture was now a B.C. business.  The last I heard, Accenture was based in Bermuda.

Accenture has been blacklisted by California’s state treasurer for questionable business practices such as relocating to offshore tax havens.  The Ontario Auditor General slammed Accenture in 2001 for a deal to take over a government program that resulted in massive cost over-runs.  Apparently image problem is nothing that can’t be fixed by opening a B.C. office of Accenture.

The flyer said that “Accenture Business Services of BC is committed to building a world-class operation in British Columbia that will contribute to the province’s economic growth and provide employees with expanded career opportunities.”

Accenture, through BC Hydro, is trying to counter the growing opposition to the privatization of the publicly-owned utility.  People are angry that Premier Campbell has handed one-third of BC Hydro operations over to Accenture.  It’s a sweet deal — a ten year contract worth $1.45 billion.

Accenture will save BC Hydro money, Stephen Bruyneel told me. He’s the manger of Corporate Communication for BC Hydro.  He said that Accenture is contractually obliged to save $250 million over ten years.

“Exactly how would Accenture save that money?” I asked.  Well, it turns that we will never know.  Private businesses are not obliged to divulge such things.  But in general, “savings will result from economies of scale,” says Bruyneel, “by having a larger customer base.”

Accenture Business Services of British Columbia has big plans and BC Hydro is just the start. The plan is to bring other North American power companies into the B.C. office.  BC Hydro will share in those profits, Bruyneel said.

“How much profit will Accenture get from the BC Hydro contract?” Sorry, that’s a secret.

Jerri New has a problem with all this secrecy.  She’s the head of the Office & Professional Employees International Union.  Her members were not given much choice — move to Accenture or retire.

“If this is such a good deal,” Jerri New told me, “why is the government afraid to show us the details?”  The whole transfer of a public crown corporation has also been done in secret.  “It’s normal business practice when one company takes over another that hearings are held.  The shareholders of BC Hydro — the people of B.C. — were not consulted,” she said.

Jerri New also disputes BC Hydro’s claim that they could now “focus on its core business of generating, transmitting and distributing electricity.”  Some of that core work is now done by Accenture, such as monitoring water levels in dams.  “The whole computer system is integrated with BC Hydro,” said New, “it’s a matter of public safety.”

The former BC Hydro workers feel betrayed.  They are still providing Information Technology, computer networking, customer service, and building supplies but their employer is now Accenture.

She suspects that profits for Accenture will come by increasing BC Hydro rates.  Accenture is not in business as a public service – – last year they had net revenues of $11.6 billion world-wide.  Also, Accenture will save money from fewer staff.  Of the 1,600 staff that worked for BC Hydro, only about 1,450 moved to Accenture.  That alone results in over one-third of the claimed savings.

BC Hydro employees (some from Kamloops) moved to Accenture call centers in Vernon, Nanaimo, Prince George, and Vancouver.  Most call centers are not unionized, so you can be sure that when the current collective agreement expires, they will be asked to take a pay cut.  And if they don’t, call center operations can be moved to where workers will accept lower wages.

The real question is why Premier Campbell would dismantle a profitable company that provided high customer service and the lowest electricity rates in North America?

The answer is ideology.  In the premier’s mind, crown corporations and public utilities are sources of untapped profits.  Regardless of how efficient they are or how well they are operated, they are public services that must be dismantled for the corporate good.

If money and jobs flow out of the province, and if we pay higher electricity rates, Campbell considers it  a small price to pay for sake his ideology.