Green Wizardries with Maxine Rogers

July 27, 2023

Green Wizardries, Lughnasadh by Maxine Rogers

The Americans are losing the war in Ukraine and with it the last shreds of their national dignity and international relevance. The BRICS countries are announcing a new gold-backed currency in August. This is a direct challenge to the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All these things are going to provide interesting challenges for the US and its allies, Canada among them.

Canada, under the Liberal/NDP federal government continues on its merry way of out of control government spending and assisted suicide for all. The country is rapidly burning down while becoming unaffordable to many of its inhabitants.

With all that in mind, I thought I would write something cheerful. Countries go up and go down and there is no point in getting overly emotional about things outside of our control. We are facing a time of great change but the world is always changing. The wheel of the year continues to turn and we are coming up to the splendid festival of Lughnasadh.

This is the ancient Celtic festival of the God Lugh who is a sun God. Some people consider Lugh to be the Celtic Apollo. The holiday falls on August first and consists of the usual round of prayers, reflection on the coming of autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere, the coming of the autumn years to people of my generation and the coming of the autumn years of Western Civilization. So, there is a lot to think about. Besides that, we get yet another occasion to feast with our friends and family and rejoice in the first harvest festival of this year.

The Irish used to enter into temporary marriages at this festival. If you didn’t like your new spouse at the end of a year and a day, you could just turn your back and walk away from them, ending the relationship. The reason for the marriages was that human fertility was considered a mirror of the fertility of the land. There may be something in this as humans are becoming less fertile, so are our lands.

Lughnasadh is quite a boisterous festival with athletic competitions such as foot races and horse racing. There is even a cycle race named after the festival. But Lughnasadh is chiefly famous for it’s dancing and feasting.

This is such an excellent time of the year to feast. We have heaps of fresh, lovely produce to choose from. The tomatoes will be ripe, figs should be ready, the first apples, sweet corn, greens fresh from the garden and of course the excellent freshly-harvested garlic. We make fresh cheese at this time too and it is so much better than store bought cheese.

A friend just taught me to make fresh pasta sauce with raw chopped tomatoes, finely chopped basil and thinly-sliced garlic. To this, you only need to add a little olive oil, salt and pepper and it goes, uncooked, over the hot pasta and is delicious.

Another dish you may want to try for this festival is gazpacho. Just blend some ripe tomatoes, celery, cucumbers and garlic in a blender. Add salt, olive oil,cumin, red-wine vinegar and chili to taste. Serve with some chopped red onions on top.

Cucumbers are doing well this season and every feast should start with a salad. My current favourites include Sichuan cucumber salad and basil cucumber salad. For the Sichuan salad, slice a bowl of cucumbers, add 1 teaspoon of salt, a dash of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of minced garlic, 2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of sesame oil, 1 teaspoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of chili flakes. Stir and serve. This salad is delightful as it is both hot and cold at the same time.

The other salad starts with a bowl of sliced cucumbers to which you add sliced basil, mint, garlic and yogourt. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Bread is the main course of the Lughnasadh feast as it is the beginning of the grain harvest that the feast is really celebrating. The first loaves made from the new grain used to be carried to church and blessed on the altar. So, bake some bread or cornbread and make that the focal point of the meal. You may even want to ask the Gods you worship to bless the bread, your family and the wider community.

A pleasant Druid custom involves cutting a slice of the first loaf and leaving it out for the birds to eat to share Nature’s bounty with Nature’s creatures.

Normally, we would be indulging in the blackberry harvest at this time but it has been so dry the blackberry vines are really struggling and what looked set to be a bumper harvest may be nothing of the kind. Never mind because the apple and fig harvests look to be pretty good.

Celebrating what we have here and eating locally will help prepare you and your family for the uncertain future many of us can feel coming.

Letter to the Editor – Graeme Isbister

July 27, 2023

Last weekend’s Readers and Writers Festival was a rich feast. Featured keynote speakers as well as local authors brought us sober, lucid reflections on the complexities of issues such as climate change, racism, and refugee displacement as well as the joys and challenges of the writing life and simply being human.

The ongoing theme for this attendee was hope – that education and engagement are the pathways forward and that here and now our choices matter.

Many, many thanks to all the organizers, committee members, volunteers and billeteers who made it all happen.

Graeme Isbister

Why Won’t Putin Go To South Africa? – Gwynne Dyer

July 27, 2023

23 July 2023

Why Won’t Putin Go To South Africa?

By Gwynne Dyer

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he won’t be going to South Africa for next month’s summit of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), although all the other leaders will be there. In fact another couple of dozen national leaders who want to join the club will also be there. Why is Putin staying away?

One reason might be that it’s too dangerous, because a lot of Ukrainians want him dead. South Africa would doubtless let him bring his own security team, but he’s been quite cautious recently, visiting only dictator-run post-Soviet states (and a China trip coming up in October).

Another reason could be that Putin is afraid to leave Moscow at the moment. What looked like a coup attempt by Wagner Group mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin fizzled out late last month, but Putin is looking vulnerable and his absence in South Africa might tempt somebody else to have a go.

Or maybe he has just belatedly realised that the South African courts are independent. I’d vote for that one.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin last March for alleged war crimes committed during the invasion of Ukraine. Putin may initially have assumed that the party that has ruled South Africa for the past three decades, the African National Congress, would protect him from arrest, but it’s not that simple.

The ANC depended on Soviet financial and military help back in the days of the anti-apartheid struggle, when most Western countries withheld their help, so there’s strong pro-Russian sentiment among the older comrades.

Moscow still subsidises the ANC today (in various clandestine ways), so Putin could reasonably expect Prime Minister Cyril Ramaphosa to protect him from arrest. However, South Africa is also a member of the 123-country ICC and legally obliged to execute its arrest warrants. Ramaphosa tried to stymie the courts, but by May it wasn’t looking good.

South Africa’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, went to the Gauteng High Court asking it to order the government to arrest Putin if he came to South Africa, and last Friday the court did just that. Forewarned of that decision, Ramaphosa announced on Wednesday that he and Putin had agreed that the Russian leader would attend only by video.

Ramaphosa’s explanation for the change of plan was the usual bumbling mess, claiming that arresting Putin would amount to a declaration of war on Russia, but the real winner in this was the rule of law, both in South Africa and in the wider world.

Having Putin available only on video will do no harm to the deliberations of the BRICS, an organisation that is set to grow its membership dramatically and could come to play a useful role in the world. It does South Africa no harm either: Putin may sulk a bit, but his flailing regime needs all the friends it can get.

And the rule of law in the world expands a little bit: for the first time, Russia’s ruler is is having to worry about being held responsible for his crimes.

You think I’m being naive? That there’s no chance Vladimir Putin will ever face an international court? Consider the fate of Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia and the prime mover of the genocidal Balkan wars of the 1990s.

In 2001, he lost an internal power struggle and was deposed as president, whereupon the winner, Prime Minister Zoran Dindić, handed him over to an international criminal tribunal in The Hague. He died behind bars in 2006 while the trial was still continuing.

That happened because the new Serbian regime desperately needed money and couldn’t borrow it unless it handed Milošević over. At that time, such a thing could not have happened to Vladimir Putin (who was already president of Russia), because great powers are, in practice, above the laws that apply to other countries.

Russia has fallen below that status now. Apart from nuclear weapons, it has none of the attributes of a great power, and it’s easy to imagine somebody who overthrows Putin handing him over to the ICC in return for international recognition and financial aid.

‘But that’s not fair’, I hear somebody cry. ‘Why aren’t George W. Bush and Tony Blair in prison as war criminals for their illegal (and exceedingly stupid) invasion of Iraq in 2003?’

They certainly should be, but they were the leaders of countries that are still great powers (though only by courtesy, in Britain’s case), so they were for all practical purposes exempt from international law. So are China, India, and the member countries of the European Union.

But not Russia any more, so Putin really needs to avoid countries that belong to the ICC and have domestic courts that enforce the rule of law.

Dead Skin Funerals

July 27, 2023

The Good War and Generation Dread

July 27, 2023

The Good War and Generation Dread

The Readers and Writers Festival, last Saturday night’s main stage event was inspiring. Britt Wray and Seth Klein were both addressing the dreadful and dire personal, social and political issues related to climate change.

One mistake Seth Klein makes is to ignore the effects of cutting forests on climate disruption. Oil and gas resource extraction is always cited as the leading cause of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Often experts ignore how cutting old growth forests contributes to the causes of climate change. Also, the solution of protecting old forests for carbon sequestration is rarely mentioned.

Here are the facts that I have recorded in my notebook. In June 24, 2021, The Tyee reported that the logging of Old-Growth forests in BC emitted 23% more GHG emissions compared to BC’s energy sector’s 64.6 million tonnes. BC’s cutting of Old Growth emitted 305.3 megatonnes of GHG. BC does not include GHG emissions from logging nor from forest fires in their estimates of how much we are contributing to climate change. They keep forests apart from the environment so that they can pretend that logging is carbon neutral.

We humans need to live each and every moment respectful of the natural world’s brilliant intelligence. Nature knows how to sustain life without our help. We are destroying this planet and ourselves because we have set ourselves apart from nature. Dismantling oppressive global extractive systems begins with seeing our arrogant fearful egos. Submitting our lives to the laws of nature cannot wait until our bodies are finally buried in the ground. One place to start is to fall in love with forests and their plants and wild animals. “Sustaining long term relationships with long-lived plants is a rejection of The End, an affirmation that there will be-must be-tomorrow.” Jerrad Farmer from “A Modern History of Ancient Trees”

Above and beyond lobbying politicians to cut off the huge subsidies to the energy sector, as Klein urges, we need to digest the following important fact. According to Jim Pojar, BC biologist “an undisturbed OG forest will keep on sucking up and storing carbon dioxide for several centuries or even millenia.” An OG forest stores 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare. No need for expensive technological solutions to climate change. An OG forest is a superorganism that organizes biogeochemical processes essential to life on this planet, for example “Flying Rivers” are the process of pumping their moisture thousands of miles inland. Drought is caused by loss of forest canopy because not only do trees exhale oxygen, they also absorb light, cool air temperatures and create the essential water cycles. Tragically, monocropped plantation forests cannot withstand fire; global wildfires are increasing and the hole in the ozone layer is expanding.

So, if and when you lobby our MLA Josie Osborne, (Josie osborne.MLA.gov.bc.ca) please remind her of the above and that at the rate of current cutting, we have less than 7 years before all OG forests will be rendered extinct. Not to mention all the forest soils and plants that also absorb CO2.

As Jane Goodall puts it: “Every ancient tree felled, every species that becomes extinct, represents another threat to the future of this planet.”

Jump Start Our Hearts

July 27, 2023

March 22nd, 2007

Jump Start Our Hearts

So finally the workday had drawn to an end. Time to pack up and go. There was a popsicle with my name all over it. Or was there? It seems that the safety light on the back of the crummy, blinking all day, had drained the battery. We were stranded! C.O. Person had to radio back to the jail for someone to fetch us. This had us sitting about for an extra half hour in wait. S.C.O. Wight was on his way and almost conveniently as far as Person was concerned. Wight could then lay eyes on the enormity of our day’s collective effort. We all sat about in the back of the crummy revelling in ourselves for a manly day. Camaraderie through hard work and laughter. Fred leading the way with his keen wit and infectious laugh. Finally Wight showed up. As Person was jumping the crummy, Wight pokes his head into the back and proceeds to tell us that we’re going to have to pull some of the alders further back from the road as he deemed them to be a hazard. He also went further to say that he wanted us to load up the back of his truck with all the rounds we’d stacked roadside. At this point, Fred pipes up, “thanks for the work guys…good job!” laughing as he does. This only provoked all of us to laugh the giddy laugh.

Person started bending Wight’s ear about how productive our day had been as a perfect lead in to complaining about our woefully inadequate lunches. It just so happened that we got burgers today, which is what we really desire, but only due to Paul from the kitchen sneaking them into our cooler under the shitty sandwiches of which we are to a man unmoved by. Person said to Wight that with the solid work we do a better lunch is not only needed, but deserved. At this point, Wight asks if there are any sandwiches left, as his voluminous gut was seemingly growling. A perfect opportunity to have him taste such lacking fare. When he motioned to Fred to pass him a sandwich, he pulled out two and said, “have a second one, on me!” Giggling his signature laugh. Again, we all joined in. It was apparent that we were feeling beyond reproach given our efforts of the day on top of being delayed from our routine by the failure of jailhouse equipment. Wight took the sandwich, bologna and processed cheese on white, and after a precursory inspection proceeded to peel away the bread and dispassionately pitch it out the door of the crummy. This only served to confirm opinions of our pitiful lunches drawing further laughter from within the crummy.

Finally boosted the focus shifted to getting the hell out of there, but there was still the matter of filling Wight’s truck with the wood and cutting away the protruding alders from our neatly stacked roadside piles. This much we did, but not without Fred’s joking. At $3.50/day, we were officially done work 45 minutes earlier and because of a dead battery, were now having to do more work. Within earshot of Wight Fred said, “I’d like to put in for a raise!” Official-like in delivery, if not for his infectious smile and contagious laughter. Not two minutes later, as we’re continuing to do the S.C.O.’s bidding, Fred says to Peters, loud enough for Wight to hear as he was approaching, “it sure would be nice if we got a raise!” Again, riotous laughter. I don’t think Wight knew how to take it. Why was everyone so invigorated and in such affable spirits? I conclude because we all got our hearts pumping blood through a solid effort of work. Nothing more, nothing less. The only downside to the afternoon was that we didn’t stop for a popsicle on our way back to jail, due to running late. C.O. Person lied to us!!

Jenin Jenin

July 20, 2023

Jenin Jenin by Sally Campbell

I remember our hosts making and bringing us lunch on the rooftop garden of The Freedom Theatre (TFT) in Jenin Refugee Camp after they gave us a tour of their black box type theatre. We were there with Eyewitness Palestine. (It was 2014, just when Hamas & Fatah reached a Unity Agreement, just before that summer’s brutal siege of Gaza, killing the fragile unity in its wake.) There were several Europeans in temporary residency at TFT, teaching lighting, sound, film. Plays of TFT are original writing, based on stories told by Palestinians, or adaptations of established plays. Friends of TFT, based in New York & London, also mentor and support financially. Our Palestinian hosts, who run the Theatre, were born and raised in the Camp or elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territories. They proudly recounted the history of TFT, inspired by the work in Jenin Refugee Camp of a Jewish-Israeli woman named Arna. As a young woman, she was part of an Israeli militia, the Palmach, participating in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouin from the Negev. She later married a Palestinian from Nazareth and they had 3 children. She wanted to create a space for children to heal from the violence and to learn their own history, not a history written by the new State of Israel. Arna won the Alternate Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and her son Juliano Mer Khanis, then the most famous and most controversial actor in Israel, encouraged her to use her prize money to build a small theatre. She did that, then died in 1995; Juliano re-established it as TFT in 2006. By this time, Jenin Refugee Camp had been devastated by the Israeli military during the 2^nd Intifada.

Jenin has long been a place of resistance to Israeli control over Palestinian lives and dispossession of their land. Jenin Refugee Camp is about 1 square km., housing 15,000, mostly people (& their descendants) driven out of Haifa by Zionist militias in 1948. Haifa at that time had a Palestinian population of about 70,000. Only 4,000 remained after the Nakba. Their homes, businesses and lands were taken over by Jewish immigrants to the new State of Israel, and the Palestinians – neither consulted nor compensated – have never been allowed to return, even to visit.

The utter failure of the Oslo Accords in the 90’s, with loss of even more land to Israelis, plus the non-realization of the promised Palestinian State, created pre-conditions for the 2^nd Intifada (“shaking off”). With no military, and ownership of weapons by Palestinians illegal under Israeli law, some of the most desperate Palestinians resisted with their lives, as suicide bombers. Many of these came from Jenin, and consequently Jenin Refugee Camp became a prime target of the Israeli military. The Camp’s virtual destruction in 2002 was seen as collective punishment by many. The 2^nd Intifada was harsh and ineffective, with 5,000 Palestinians killed and 1,400 Israelis.

More resistance was created by the violence and destruction, and so the cycle goes. Out of the ashes rose once again The Freedom Theatre. It has served as a place for numerous youth and young adults of Jenin, living unfree in the cramped squalor of the Camp, to work through their trauma, to find purpose, to learn skills and be mentored. It is like a beacon of hope in a pretty bleak environment. When parts of the Camp were rebuilt after 2002, our hosts from TFT told us that Israelis made sure the roads were wide enough for Israeli bulldozers and tanks.

And now in June & July, 2023, Jenin has been not only invaded again by land, but bombed by Israeli drones & Apache helicopters, causing a level of destruction not seen since 2002, which locals remember as the “Battle of Jenin”. The latest incursion began in the middle of the night with over 1,000 Israeli military entering the Camp in tanks, holding people at gunpoint while forcing 3,000 people to leave their homes, moving on the rampage from one occupied house to the next. 12 were killed, over 100 injured. Power, water and sewage networks were damaged; roads were completely destroyed, perhaps to prevent ambulances from getting through*. Bombs were dropped indiscriminately from the air, damaging or destroying almost 80% of the buildings. (Jewish Currents, Unpacking Israel’s Legal Fictions, 14 July, 2023.) Every boy the Israeli military found over 15 years of age was arrested. (Mondoweiss Podcast “Unpacking Jenin”, 11 July, 2023.) Journalists were once again targeted by snipers, ostensibly to prevent their reporting.** Then after 2 days of mayhem, the military upped and left the Camp. Go figure.

*The Israeli military has a long history of preventing help for the injured enemy, in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. See Thomas Suarez’ Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea (2023), describing Jewish militias’ guerilla attacks against the British in the lead-up to 1948: “As was their habit, the militants mined the approach road to blow up anyone coming to the victims’ aid”. (p.139)

** This practice has been documented & condemned by the International Federation of Journalists.

(Next week: Part 2)

Green Wizardries with Maxine Rogers

July 20, 2023

Green Wizardries, Chickens in the Country by Maxine Rogers

We keep a flock of Buff Orpington laying hens. This is a heritage breed from England, from the town of Orpington in Kent. The birds are large and heavily feathered with golden feathers. I saw a Buff Orpington rooster at a Fall Fair when I was a small child. The rooster was a little taller than I was, or so I remember it. He was a beautiful deep-gold colour and from that day on, the Buff Orpington was the only breed for me.

The Buff Orpington is a new breed of chicken, dating back only to the 1880’s. The first Orpington chickens were the Black Orpingtons. The breeder, a Mr. William Cook, wanted a good laying hen and a heavy meat bird. He succeeded in his goal and his new breed of chickens rapidly became a favourite in the UK and the US.

Not content with the Black Orpington, Mr. Cook went on to create the Buff. To get the golden colour he wanted, Mr. Cook drew on some golden Cochin chickens and some other breeds to get the excellent colour and the very thick feathering. There are other colours of Orpingtons, including the lavender and the splash, but the Buff has remained far and away the most popular variety.

The Buff Orpington is an excellent bird for cold weather but they require shade in the summer to thrive. As soon as the sun hits our hen yard, all the Buffs depart for the shady interior of their house.

The Buff Orpingtons have a reputation as being good mothers but this is, sadly, not the case anymore. This breed, and so many other breeds of chicken, have been reared in incubators for so long that breeders have not selected for good mothering ability and some of these birds have almost none left.

Last year, we were very pleased to have one of our Buff hens sit on a clutch of eggs and rear them all with mothering skills more often seen in Bantam breeds. This summer, we set her to breeding again and again, she chose to sit on the eggs. She was very focused and every time we checked n her, she was screwed down tight on that nest. We kept listening at the door for the first peeps which would tell us the chicks had hatched.

A couple of days ago, I heard some peeping and went in to find the area around the nest to be littered with six unconscious chicks. I ran and quickly set up the incubator and got a basket to gather the chicks in. We went in and picked them all up. Some seemed dead but the rule with hypothermia is you are not cold and dead until you are warm and dead. Once in the incubator, they all revived.

We went back and lifted the hen up and collected the remaining chicks and the eggs, some of which were pipping, that is, the chicks inside were breaking their shells to hatch. Our hen may have lost her mind at the end but she did such a good job of incubating the eggs that we got eighteen chicks from twenty-two eggs which is a very good rate of hatch and would have been even better if she had not managed to smother one chick as it was hatching. Only one of the eggs was infertile which tells us our rooster, Admiral, is a good breeder. The chicks spent something like 28 hours in the incubator and then went into a brooding box with a heat lamp and are all doing very well.

I mention this because the other way to get chicks is to order them from Rochester Hatchery in Alberta and have them flown over. This is stressful on the chicks and some always die in transit. Rochester is good about this and puts in a few extra chicks to make up for the expected travel losses.

I would rather breed my own birds here as there is no danger of importing disease and the savings in fuel are astronomical. Flying our chickens in from Alberta is kind of pants on the head madness. I get to choose what my hens are eating to get them ready for breeding and this makes a difference in the strength and resilience shown by the chicks.

Having roosters on our islands is essential for food security. There was some lunatic idea from the Trust, some time ago, that roosters would be banned from Denman and Hornby. They seem to have mistaken our rural islands for the suburbs of some large city. Luckily, the backlash from that proposal was fierce and they gave it up.

I feed my birds a mash every day of soaked alfalfa pellets, kitchen scraps, a bit of milk, any animal fat I have extra, and their usual ration of layer pellets all soaked in hot water to make it more palatable. We also soak their hen scratch in water to ferment for three days before serving it. This makes the scratch much easier to digest and it has more nutritional value from the process of fermentation. They also get heaps of lettuces and other greens from my garden, dandelion greens being a perennial favourite.

The chicks are thriving on a diet of unmedicated chick starter, home-made cottage cheese and finely-chopped greens. The future is uncertain. Having some hens in your back yard may be the best investment you will ever make.

Letter to the Editor – Keith Porteous

July 20, 2023

In a recent Letter to the Editor, I referred to advice from Stephen Malthouse that I had thankfully ignored. When we later spoke on the phone, he asked me what I was referring to. Nearly nine years ago, there was a Pertussis outbreak on Denman Island that went undiagnosed for a long period. My 4 month old daughter was hospitalized with Pertussis, but fortunately she had already received her first Pertussis shot from a public health nurse, saving her from brain damage or worse. Contrary to his claim, Malthouse did have one early appointment with my newly born daughter, weighing her, and advising me against vaccinations. Now, in last week’s Letter, Malthouse violates the privacy of our phone call and is not honest about its content.

Pertussis is not a dangerous disease to everyone, but can be very dangerous to newborns. In his most recent letter, Malthouse admits that the Pertussis vaccine can reduce the symptoms. These are the very symptoms that threaten a newborn’s life. Malthouse’s claim is that my issue with him is that he promotes anti-vaxx views. I was very clear with him on our phone call that this was not the case. And when he claims that I believe his views led to the Pertussis outbreak, he is being dishonest. I told him that he has every right to his view on childhood vaccines, just as I have the right to my own. I have always believed, and still believe in the principle of vaccine choice, where every person has the right to make decisions regarding themselves and their children.

I told Malthouse that I believed that the most critical public health issue currently in our community, is that we have become more acrimonious in our differences. Some best friends and neighbours no longer speak to one another. Neighbours viciously smear one another, and some have lost their jobs over the COVID19 issue. In attempting to bridge these unhealthy divides, I encouraged him to publicly share what he had told me of his own mistakes when the public health emergency was first declared. It would show a conciliatory tone that might help us reconcile divisions with a demonstration of humility. Three times he asked for suggestions of what he might say, and each time he simply refused to acknowledge what I had given him in specific suggestions, even when I repeated his own admissions to him.

In my view, some of Stephen Malthouse’s actions during the pandemic were irresponsible, and exacerbated the divisions in our community on what should have been personal and private health matters, just as I believe that the 20 local Doctors who promised herd immunity as a result of COVID19 inoculations have been irresponsible, having never admitted their mistakes. This demonstrates critical flaws in all of our local caregivers, and their capacity for reason. Malthouse doesn’t listen well, and his hubris impedes him from the compassion required to be an effective public health advocate. He is, however, a very capable Spin Doctor.

Sucking the Oxygen Out of Affordable Housing Solutions – Keith Porteous

July 20, 2023

Sucking the Oxygen Out of Affordable Housing Solutions

The threads of text about the Local Trust Committee’s Housing Advisory Planning Committee appearing on the Denman Island Bulletin Board, reveals that which is not well understood, and conspicuously, not even contemplated. Much of it is finger pointing at local governance and its rules by some of the same people involved with the APC, while never considering that residents can get together in an ad hoc effort to discuss housing and human health services without involving the same institutions they believe are impeding needed improvements. Instead, the loudest voices wade back into another slow and bureaucratic process, even Chairing its appointed housing advisory committee, then publicly complaining that the process and its enablers are flawed. Perhaps we have identified the problem in addressing needed changes.

We have been through all this before without producing the result of increased access to affordable housing, even when the Local Trust Committee has amended some bylaws. It may be faint praise, but to the Islands Trust’s credit, they have suspended bylaw enforcement of some non-conforming housing. What is not understood by many, is that Islands Trust has no legal jurisdiction as a housing authority, where they are limited to zoning and land use only. They have no power to enforce rent controls, or initiate any development of housing, affordable and not. The major impediments to affordable housing development are Provincial laws relating to water and septic and setbacks from riparian areas, and of course the funding needed to build it. Whatever changes the APC may recommend, it will have no effect on these Provincial laws.

So what is all this self-righteous grandstanding about? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Hopefully, Denman Green will be built, and some people will be housed affordably, following what will amount to a 10 year effort. And then we’ll still be faced with many of the same access to affordable housing problems, with nearly no rental vacancies, residents with low incomes, and some human health issues that contribute to an individual’s capacity to find comfort in a safe and affordable home. We don’t need (god), The United Nations, or the Islands Trust to tell us what needs to be done. And all the self-congratulatory and performative backslapping is completely unnecessary, as are more surveys.

We will have to accept that simply changing local bylaws is not necessarily THE solution, or at least not the only solution, or even the presumptive best solution! Many people with housing issues need different kinds of help, and we should be addressing the deficit in local support for health and human services. Looking at these issues from a different perspective starts with supporting people’s needs based on their personal circumstances. We already have some zoning for small secondary dwellings, without the intended outcomes. Entering into yet another cumbersome, bureaucratic, one size fits all process that will take months and years, and has an extremely low probability of creating fundamental change, is a fool’s errand.