Another Dull Day in the Life of a B.C. Emergency: First a Heat Dome, then Fires, now Flooding

 

     Hint: don't drain a lake, build on it, and then expect nothing to happen.

And now for something completely different: Vancouver Island's Old-Growth going & gone

 

What's in a name? The renaming of former Riverview Hospital Lands as səmiq̓wəʔelə

We see in the Tri-Cities with the renaming of Riverview as səmiq̓wəʔelə (pronounced Suh-MEE-kwuh-EL-uh) a misguided attempt to rectify history.  Yes, the seeds of European colonialism began over 600 years ago, with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, a momentous event (also perceived as tragic) which was soon followed by the new beginnings of slavery – in imitation of the ancients.  Today, North Americans are slowly coming to terms with the legacy of the past as First Nations’ Reconciliation is advanced, in part, by Canada’s Supreme Court and in light of Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict for the murder of George Floyd.  

Compassionate towards the sufferings of others, we can find at many levels a widespread and empathetic reassessment of history known as postcolonial theory, such that that almost everyone appears on the same page – and is learning the same thing.  But is it always good for everyone to read from the same book?  I am not denying that we should respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other minorities, but in the effort to find social justice are we not privileging one group here over another?  Are we not overlooking the mentally ill?

With regards to the revamped səmiq̓wəʔelə how can the NDP boast of (as the recent BC Housing survey states) a proposed “community of mental health excellence” when there is no indication of plans for an actual hospital?  Currently there are some “facilities” in operation on the former Riverview grounds, but nothing that approaches the needs of BC’s population. 

In typical NDP fashion, there is also boasting that səmiq̓wəʔelə will be “complete and inclusive”, words which sound utopian – and a term which means “nowhere”.  The therapy is apparently in the community, where there are proposed amenities for the general public, but no discussion of the kinds of Wrap Around Services required by the mentally ill – a concept that prevails in the United States, not in British Columbia.  

Years ago, the name Riverview was introduced to de-stigmatize the original name Essondale.  Now in an effort to de-stigmatize Riverview, we have the name səmiq̓wəʔelə. The trouble with the latest name, aside from the fact that it is difficult to pronounce (and the native orthography is beyond me) is that it is tone deaf with regards to the mentally ill.  A depressed person, or someone suffering from psychosis, hallucinations, or delusions simply will not know what to make of the new name, their whereabouts, or their place in it.  I believe that the new name is so counterproductive that it will only work against the distressed person’s frame of mind - and hinder the betterment of their condition.  As a possible compromise, I suggest that we foreground what səmiq̓wəʔelə actually means by simply calling it “Place of the Great Blue Heron”.

Everyone seems so interested in reconciliation - and is busy rewriting centuries of history from the point of view of the victim, but no one here has considered the mind of the mentally ill.  Perhaps it’s time to write – or rewrite - the past from their perspective.  With that in mind I give the name səmiq̓wəʔelə a failing grade.

Mental Health and Covid-19: Revisiting Riverview (or, on the varieties of epistemic experience)

So many people are talking about mental health needs these days it has become almost fashionable.  Those who abide by Covid-19 protocols may suffer from isolation and anxiety, if not depression, while anti-maskers might be considered by the rest of us as truly crazy, if not stupid.  But now more than ever we should revisit the idea of establishing a new mental hospital at the Riverview site. As someone who has worked with schizophrenics locally – I am convinced that closing Riverview was a mistake.

Deinstitutionalization was a global phenomenon gone too far, guided by ideology, cost-cutting, advances in medication, and in BC’s case it has led to a hospital vacated.  Those who advocated for Riverview’s closure included Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace and local resident.  Other principal actors were: former Premiers Dave Barrett, a Coquitlam MLA who had degrees in Social Work; Bill Vander Zalm, who introduced the preliminary plan to replace it in 1987; and, Gordon Campbell who continued with the logic of Glen Clark’s policy of decentralization despite the former having learned – in adulthood – of his father’s death by suicide.

Self-determination was considered key; after all, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were a time of “liberation”.  The Vancouver experience with the patient-led Mental Patients’ Association, a first in Canada, was spearheaded in 1971 by Lanny Beckman and the late Dave Beamish.  Their approach shaped the BC branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (an institution guided in policy these days by some in academe – yet another kind of institution) which argued in 2013, the year after Riverview closed, that: “Our Government has made the right decision.”  The Riverview model, it said, lacked “compassionate care.”

If we look closer at the historical record – for example the BC Legislature Hansard for Dec. 1, 1987 – we even find something of an alliance between the Socreds and the CMHA: both parties wanted the downsizing of Riverview to continue.  This is despite local NDP MLA John Cashore’s objections to the then Minister of Health Peter Dueck: “The minister knows full well that there have been comments from street workers, community workers and health workers about the number of ex-mental patients who have fallen between the cracks and ended up on the streets of Vancouver and other locations.”

It is an irony that we have mentally ill people on the streets at least in part because of ex-patient advocacy.  Those displaced onto our alleyways were deemed to be better served by “housing options” in “community-based settings” – a further indication of utopianism, given present-day property costs and availability.  In my opinion, this abysmal and long-standing failure to deal with the here and now of those in despair reflects poorly on all people of British Columbia.

I do not see the squalor of some Vancouver streets and our tent cities as less stigmatizing than Riverview, which is depicted in popular culture – to this day – as an “asylum”.  Without specialized treatment acute needs can go unmet – it is that simple.  I am not advocating for a Riverview reincarnated but for a new reimagining.  Now is the time to abandon rhetoric and search for solutions: clearly Covid-19 teaches us that mental ill-health can be everywhere and affect everyone.

 

Coquitlam’s Confucius Institute in light of Covid-19

 

School Trustees in SD43 missed their annual trip to China this past spring, and likely they will remain home again next year – one minor consequence of the virus originating from and mishandled in Wuhan.  And as the entire globe grapples with Covid-19, President Xi has galvanized Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ambitions – over Hong Kong, the Himalayas, Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, Mongolia, the South China Sea, and, of course, democratically-elected Taiwan, the so-called “renegade” province.  What sort of government is this in China, where one man rules over its only party without limits?  Are not the new Emperor’s boundless aspirations rather self-evident?

Aside from the many overt geopolitical ventures, Xi persists in “hostage diplomacy”, the latest victim being Chinese-born Australian news anchor, Cheng Lei.  Hostage diplomacy is essentially an ugly Communist habit picked up from Stalin, who held a number of hostages in his time, including Chiang Kai-Shek’s only son, which gave the Soviet-supported CCP leverage as the they and the Nationalists (and Japanese) fought over control of China in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  According to Jung Chang and John Halliday’s book, Mao: The Untold Story, Mao’s famous “long march” was saved precisely because of Stalin’s hostage diplomacy.[1] It was also used during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Today Xi is copying from Mao.

Meanwhile, in sleepy Coquitlam BC, our “public” school board maintains a Confucius Institute, not at all far removed from the autocratic reach of the CCP itself, in the hopes that it will lure “business” in the name of overseas students thus adding to its coffers, since depleted because of Covid-19.  I am sure Chinese students will always want to come to Canada, not only for the fresh air, but also for a bit of breathing space, as Xi clamps down on even freedom of thought, where nothing within its grasp is deemed independent of the CCP.  But closing the Confucius Institute requires principle.  No school district should have one – or rely on the income from overseas students.  It’s a stand SD43 seems unwilling to take, owing to its sorry addiction to the cash nexus, induced by BC government chronic underfunding of education. History will not take too kindly to this Canadian yearning for the yuan.

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[1] Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao: The Untold Story (Toronto: Random House, 2005), pp. 130-137.

“21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act.” A Review in light of Wet’suwet’sen voices.

As national bestsellers go, Bob Joseph’s book, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, provides valuable context to the history of our First Nations Peoples, particularly given the current Coastal Gaslink pipeline debate – or crisis, rather - that began in northern British Columbia, and which has since spread to other parts of the country with a number of strategic rail and road blockades.  Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs oppose the project, as they lay claim to considerable swaths of unceded land through which the proposed pipeline will run, while most elected Band Councils – which are products of the Indian Act – support it.

   

21 Things, which should be read by all concerned Canadians, methodically details how the Indian Act (1876), created when Sir John A. McDonald was Prime Minister, made Indigenous Peoples (in variation of an oft-repeated phrase) “wards of the state.”[1] Moreover, the subsequent legacy of the Residential school system robbed generations of youth of their family elders, ancestral values and cultural identity, confronted as they were by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so-called denominational educators - and by high rates of death, especially from TB.

    

Echoing the conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the words of Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief of the Supreme Court of Canada, Joseph – like many today – refers to this sordid episode in Canadian history as “cultural genocide”, a term I prefer not to use.  The important memoir, The Education of Augie Merasty, for example, which gives a child’s eye view of the Residential school system, does not compare to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, or Elie Wiesel’s terror-fraught Night, and here I am in accord with Merasty’s own co-writer and editor, David Carpenter, who concedes “Augie might differ with me on this”.[2]  The sheer industrial scale and deliberate mass destruction of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazi’s who were either gassed, incinerated - and sometimes shot, when considered cost-effective - or turned into soap products, suggests that a “genocidal” approximation of these two different historical experiences – Jewish and Indigenous –  is not quite tenable.

So what do we call the Indigenous experience in Canada since the Indian Act?  An “historical wrong” is a generic term Justin Trudeau sometimes uses.  A system of “apartheid” is perhaps a more valuable and historically generalizable designation employed by Tommy Douglas when he was Premier of Saskatchewan.[3] A form of apartheid persists even today, and we can make comparisons between the Indigenous and the Palestinians, as each are in their own ways “a landless people", or deterritorialized, to use the term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since popularized by legions of admirers of the two postmodern French thinkers who wrote a number of seminal works together – one as a philosopher and the other as psychiatrist.[4]

When looking at the greater nineteenth century context, “historical error” - or, in more modern parlance: “fake history” - is a term which apparently has its rightful place according to another French thinker Ernest Renan in his classic essay of 1882, “What is a nation?”[5]  He explains that “historical enquiry brings back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origins of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally …”[6] Renan insists that “the act of forgetting … is an essential factor in the creation of a nation” and he adds that “progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality.”[7]

 

In other words, Renan might be construed as someone who – at first blush - considers Indigenous studies at our schools and universities a threat to Canadian nationhood, but his notion of such is that it presupposes “all individuals have many things in common.”[8]  He is not a racialized thinker: in fact, he considers Europe to be a thorough mix of apparent “races”, and he argues that “the primordial right of races is narrow and full of danger for true progress”.[9]  Renan also goes on to anticipate a “European confederation” in the future.[10]  But, even more significantly, Renan promotes the right of national self-determination as first proclaimed by the French Revolution with an eye to revisiting Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.  “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle …. A nation is therefore a vast solidarity.”[11] More famously, as he puts it, a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”[12]

Even though the right to vote in the nineteenth century was restricted (only white men and those who held property or who payed taxes were eligible), the electoral principle - ostensibly a European construct, one could argue - was introduced into the Indian Act, thus disrupting existing traditional matriarchies. Not only were Indigenous lands in a number of provinces reduced to postage stamp-size reserves, the Indian Act specified that “First Nations must have an election every two years.”[13] This electoral principle (and Canadian Confederation) occurred – not by chance, I would argue - along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867 which enfranchised large numbers of the working classes in both England and Wales. Tragically, however, the right to vote beyond the reserve was not extended to all Indigenous Peoples until it was introduced by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1960, though Indigenous veterans of WWI were granted the vote in 1924.[14]

This electoral principle is still at the nub of the Wet’suwet’sen debate.  Band Chiefs, who have “status” according to the Indian Act, are elected to a limited term and support the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project.  Hereditary Chiefs, according to Bob Joseph, “have power passed down from one generation to the next along blood lines or other cultural protocols” (though in the case of the Wet’suwet’sen which of the two is not very clear), and they oppose the project because it runs through their traditional territory.[15] Josephs goes on to say – and this should be subject to further analysis - that the Hereditary Chiefs are “similar to European royalty”.[16]  Similar to European royalty when – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  Queen Victoria, as is well-known, chose the location of Canada’s capital, Ottawa; she also chose the name of New Westminster as the original capital of British Columbia, so she participated in the colonial process on one level at least.  She also enjoyed good relations with Benjamin Disraeli, so her influence was likely by means of protocol and supine deference. Overall, the British Empire represented colonial rule in the name of its monarch, which dates back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, also - and this is no coincidence - the mainspring for the Crusades which followed.

Today’s European royalty, however, are mere titular figures – constitutional symbols that have no real authority outside of ceremony.  The examples of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle suggest that pomp and circumstance are no shield from the invasive scrutiny of royals by the British popular press.  In other words, the Wet’suwet’sen Hereditary Chiefs who lay claim to an occupation of land that numbers in the thousands of years appear to exercise a kind of power that exceeds that of European royalty today, such that they can spark a national crisis – rather unlike Queen Elizabeth II whose role is to stay above the fray of politics (but who is also by no means marginalized).

European democracy advanced hand in hand with science – in particular positivism, with its focus on the observable, as found for example in Renan – in the nineteenth and later in the twentieth centuries. Central to this was the expanded electoral vote, which worked against hereditary influences in society mitigating the role of the Crown.  Today’s Supreme Court of Canada, with support from the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, indicates that there must be “nation to nation” dialogue with the First Nations. This brings us back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which indeed first articulated such a relationship between the Indigenous and “settlers”, a lapse in the longer tradition of British imperialism - later revived by the Industrial Revolution - following a costly Seven Years’ War.[17] In other words, Canadians are being held to account to an agreement when a monarchy, using its “soft power,” was apparently more inclined to recognize other hereditary chiefs, that is, when the English Crown still had a measure of influence.

  

Most of us in the modern world – with the exception of the Saudi royal family and perhaps Donald Trump's White House - have moved on from the idea of hereditary power.  Is the idea of an unlimited tenure with actual authority, or the hereditary chiefdom of the Wet’suwet’sen, consistent with Canadian democracy as we know it today? Or am I imposing my own Western values?  Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, himself, a kind of Liberal Party hereditary chief, eldest son to Pierre Trudeau?  These are questions we must ask ourselves as we – Canadians and First Nations – work towards Reconciliation, and with that in mind 21 Things is a good first step.

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[1] Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam, BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018), p. 60.

[2] David Carpenter in Joseph Auguste Merasty (with David Carpenter), The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir, ed. David Carpenter (Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2015), p. xxxiv.

[3] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 45.

[4] François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives, tr.Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 258.

[5] Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? And Other Political Writings, ed. and tr. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 251.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. The full sentence reads “Now, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”

[9] Ibid., p. 254.

[10] Ibid., p. 262.

[11] Ibid., p. 251.

[12] See Ibid., pp. 261, 262  Giglioli translates these key words mundanely as “an everyday plebiscite.” Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, points out that Hobsbawm in his Nations and Nationalism since 1780 offers a superior translation: “a nation is a daily plebisicite.”  In the original French: « L’existence d’une nation est (pardonnez-moi cette métaphore) une plébiscite de tous les jours. » See Renan, Oeuvre Complètes de Ernest Renan, I, ed. Henrietta Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [nd]), pp. 904,903.  See Stefan Collini , “The Enlightened Vote,” London Review of Books Vol 41, No. 24 (19 December 2019), p. 10. Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 7. 

[13] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 109.

[14] Ibid., pp. 81, 82.

[15] Ibid., p. 109.

[16] Ibid.

[17] For some text and discussion of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 see Joseph, 21 Things, pp. 82, 83.

On the national interest

President Trump’s tirades against Justin Trudeau and by implication the Canadian people raises the issue again of our “national interest” something our prime minister had already been trying to bring forward before he was left with no other option but to nationalize the Trans Mountain Pipeline.  Alberta oil is sold at a discount to the U.S.A., and our neighbours to the south will always have the upper hand over our oil sands development as long as it remains land-locked and as long as we are unable to get our resources to tidewater.  In other words, it’s in the national interest to diversify and open up new markets across the Pacific. Of course, it’s vital that we do so safely, and with an eye on the environment.

But Trump’s tariff threats actually demonstrate the vulnerability of Canadian sovereignty.  I am afraid that the BC Green MLA’s, federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, and BC NDP Leader Andrew Horgan – all of whom represent idyllic Vancouver Island ridings - suffer a twofold separation from the concerns of the rest of Canada.  They are out of touch with core national interests because the Strait of Georgia removes them from the continent.  And they, along with the rest of BC, including the Lower Mainland which suffers from a terrible case of NIMBY, are cut off from the rest of Canada because of the Rocky Mountains.

 

Given the degree of separation, and looking “back East” (as opposed to south of the border) British Columbia is more like Quebec, which former prime minister Stephen Harper recognized as a distinct society, or better yet, like Newfoundland, which is surrounded by water.  But because of this both the BC NDP and the BC Greens are a bit tone deaf on the “national interest” when it might be wiser to be more afraid of Washington than Ottawa.

Kinder Morgan and the Trans Mountain Pipeline: the "bitumen battle"

History shows that British Columbia's provincial politics is dominated by ideological polarization and a tendency to extremes, with no middle ground ceded in what amounts to a zero sum game where there is a ‘winner take all’ attitude.   This was most clear in Gordon Campbell’s landslide victory in 2001 when the (neo) Liberals won all but 2 seats in the Victoria legislature, reducing the (left wing) New Democratic Party to unofficial opposition status. More recently, it took a Supreme Court of Canada decision to force Liberal Leader Christy Clark to relent in her obsessions and allow B.C. teachers a say in class size and composition, a move that took some 13 years or so to come to conclusion.

Today’s NDP, likewise, is plagued by its own drive for ideological and environmental promises of purity: no to Site C dam, yes to Site C dam; no to liquified natural gas, yes to LNG; no to tolls, maybe yes to smaller tolls. But the line across the sand over which John Horgan will not cross ‘as long as he is Premier’ is the twinning of an existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, in operation since 1953 – and its possible implications for the health of the B.C. coastline should a bitumen spill occur, given an increase of one tanker a day in traffic.  Needless to say, the three Green Party members (who are propping up the razor-thin NDP minority government) are also dead set against this.

Normally minority governments can be creative ventures and a boon for democracy, which is about making compromises in a complicated world, but Premier Horgan’s posturing appears to pander to a form of environmental populism which resonates widely in a province as blessed as British Columbia.  I see no NDP effort to compromise with Andrew Wilkinson’s Liberals on the other side of the legislature regarding this issue, nor any efforts to work with their NDP cousins in Alberta under Rachel Notley, nor with the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau.  Can they all be wrong?  Can the BC NDP be all right?  Should a so-called “constitutional crisis” tilt on a three-member Green alliance with the NDP in British Columbia?  I tend to disagree, but, maybe in another light, this opinion piece could be considered about fifty percent correct.