Changing the story from homeless to hopeful

For all there is to be negative about, serving the city's most fragile — and often difficult — population, Kath Hoffman, executive director of the Central Alberta Safe Harbour Society manages to stay pretty positive.

She credits her staff, people who work at the butt end of our city's effort to end homelessness.

“I can never say enough about our staff,” Hoffman said in an interview, praising “the remarkable skills they have to defuse situations.”

And for the winter, she gets one more staffer. After the $110,000 funding that had been covering the Winter Inn program was cut this year, the city found $13,000 for one more staffer to work November through March at an expanded operation at People's Place.

There's been a change in both provincial and municipal priorities regarding homelessness. Neither level of government sees much future in funding emergency shelters, winter after winter.

For her part, Hoffman agrees. Significant money is being poured into research and program planning to fight homelessness at its root — in addiction and mental health, family strife, trauma and brain function.

“There's a lot of good talk going on,” Hoffman said. And she's been part of it for years. She mentions that it would be a good idea for everyone to take a look at the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative web site, to see how resources are being put into keeping people at risk from ending up on the streets.

But in the meantime, it still gets pretty cold here at night in the winter.

Safe Harbour, Hoffman says, “is the agency between the dumpster and the referral. That's where we live.”

Against losing a program like Winter Inn, you'd think adding 12 beds at People's Place, and another six spots in the Mats program would be an inadequate response. Especially given that Red Deer has grown a lot since the last time either program had begun.

How could 18 emergency spots be enough to absorb all that growth?

Besides having great staff at Safe Harbour, Hoffman credits some of the very policy directions that led to the eventual loss of Winter Inn.

One solution has been the Housing First program.

Let's take it as given that people with addiction problems and mental health problems — and often both at the same time — are very difficult to get into housing. And even more difficult to maintain in housing.

That's a tough struggle, but there have been successes. Once safely housed in a place that a poor person can afford, and with supports provided to help them cope with some pretty serious problems, people do get off the streets.

Another way off the streets is People's Place. About 70 per cent of the people who come there are either employed or between jobs; they just need a safe, warm shelter for a month or so.

Hoffman says there's a whole lot of flow-through of people who need shelter, but who then find permanent housing, either on their own, or with the help of local agencies.

The room at People's Place has a fire regulation capacity of 46. With the bunk beds, the population is raised to 35.

Increased crowding at both People's Place and at Mats (where people must go if they are intoxicated) leads to fewer conflicts than you might think, Hoffman says.

Both places empty in the morning. Their clientele is walking the streets all day.

“They're bagged,” she said. “They just want to lay down and sleep.”

Plus, she says, she has good staff.

If someone walks out, they can't come back in. If they walk out drunk or on drugs, staff knows to advise police. Sometimes, a person drunk in public spends a night in a prison cell. Sometimes there are medical emergencies, and people end up in the emergency ward.

Those are two extremely costly consequences of not dealing with the fact that both mental illness and addiction are rooted in physical causes.

A person with cancer goes to a new cancer treatment centre. A person with a physical addiction or bipolar disorder gets a mat on the floor.

But access to medical treatment delayed by social stigma is being recognized, Hoffman will tell you. Even though Red Deer now has more people with these problems than ever before, her agency and others cope — for now.

“It's about changing the story,” Hoffman said. Medical science is catching up to the root causes of why people become homeless.

In the meantime, no one in Red Deer has recently frozen to death. Nor should it require that, to move the story forward.

For all that, Hoffman is optimistic.

Living longer, only to die of loneliness?

The Oxford Dictionary made “selfie” the word of the year this year, in recognition of, well, self-recognition. Thus, for a few days at least, Canada's news feeds were able to look away from the twin headlights of Rob Ford and Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy, and glimpse the current shiny thing: our obsession with ourselves.

What technology makes possible, people make cultural. In just one year, we are told, the word “selfie” — the act of using cell phones to take arms-length pictures of ourselves to share with a largely uncaring world — has increased in usage by 17,000 per cent.

Wouldn't you like copyright licencing power on something like that?

I don't believe that the explosion of selfies posted on boards around the world is evidence society is becoming yet more self-obsessed. I think we reached the psychological limits of that some time ago.

Rather, I think it might be evidence of something quite the opposite. Maybe the phenomenon is just billions of people putting their digital faces into the universe calling: is anyone out there?

I was cruising the news postings Sunday, in part using the hours before the football game could begin. (Let nothing healthy occur on Grey Cup Sunday.) On the recent postings that came up on my tablet was one story, then another elsewhere, unrelated, and again others — all mentioning the latest new health threat: loneliness.

In an age where we celebrate the advances that help us live longer, healthier, more active lives, it seems we're always finding new ways to kill ourselves early.

One story cited a study suggesting that being lonely has the same health effects on a person as being a heavy smoker. Most of the stories I saw were in the context of baby boomers — many of them divorced or widowed — leaving their work lives in droves to suddenly become alone.

Doomed to eventually wither in long-term care facilities, communities of people with nothing to connect them other than their own infirmities. I guess, posting pictures of themselves as they die.

Searching deeper, it's easy to find a multitude of studies and reports that treat the phenomenon of loneliness much more seriously. It seems a generation that perfected selfishness (because they could not invent it), faces its own undoing because it never bothered to connect that much to others.

Church and social club attendance are both in fast decline. Outside of a competitive and stressful professional life is . . . not much, for very many. People report close personal connections to ever fewer numbers of others, and do not realize the lack until late in life.

Work has become stressful enough in our fast-paced world. But for people who do not seek out and nurture personal ties with other people in an outside environment, retirement produces ample stresses of its own.

The reactions within our bodies to the drop in personal interactions with other people are the same, or worse, than the daily grind of employment.

Here's a shopping list of what happens to people who become lonely as they age: higher blood pressure, higher incidence of heart disease, more (and longer) hospital stays, higher use of prescription medications, reduced cognitive function, lower levels of physical fitness.

Of the 20-60 per cent of people aged 50 and up (the rate increased as people got older) who self-reported as being lonely to a study in Manitoba, a high proportion of them also reported having as many as four chronic diseases.

The report did not answer the chicken-and-egg question: did having diabetes, heart disease, Crohn's disease or other ailments set the stage for people becoming very lonely, or did their loneliness make them sick?

Correlation is not cause, but the correlation apparently shocked the people doing the study.

Other news reports were a lot more graphic: being lonely, not being able to connect, bond and interact with others, will kill you. In California, there's even a clinic where people can go to receive a good, long hug from a volunteer.

Workers at long-term care facilities have long reported residents as being starved for affection, even for the touch of another person.

We are social creatures, after all. That goes beyond the time when we clear out our desks and have one last slice of cake with the people at the office.

Boomers who took great care to plan their finances and set goals for retirement need also to look around and build a community of friends.

Just an observation I found, before heading out to a friend's home where we were invited to watch the mass bonding of Saskatchewan Roughrider fans in Regina.

Time to say yes to aquatic centre

If Red Deer really gets behind the project quickly, our city population will be around 125,000 or so by the time we open up a proper aquatic centre with a competition-ready pool, to host the 2019 Canada Winter Games.

If we decide we'd rather pay an extra $45 million to begin the pool on the long schedule — 10 years from next year — we'll be a city of 150,000 and probably the largest in Canada with this extreme shortage of athletic facilities.

Do they give gold medals for that?

In the meantime, all that horrible debt people complained about in the last municipal election campaign will continue to cost each city residence a whopping $4.26 a month to service.

Talk about things running away from us. If we continue to refuse to build and upgrade our public fitness infrastructure in pace with our growth, even one-per-cent inflation will be able to run away from us.

The proposal to put a new aquatic centre on the city's 10-year capital plan, forwarded by councillors Lynne Mulder and Paul Harris, has two parts.

As Harris described in a phone conversation, one part is to say yes to building the pool. The other part is to put together a group with broad representation to plan how it will work. That group would include city and county levels of government, plus the hospitality and tourism industry and sports stakeholders (think Red Deer College), just for starters.

There are a whole lot of community areas that stand to gain from Red Deer having first-class (as opposed to what we have now) athletics infrastructure. The more stakeholders — not just athletes and people interested in a fit lifestyle — the more opportunities to share sponsorship.

Red Deer's bid to host the Winter Games puts some urgency into the conversation. If we say yes to a plan to have the pool ready by 2019, not only will it cost about $45 million less to build than under the long plan, but Red Deer will have access to additional provincial and federal funding and sponsorship tied to the Games.

That's one of the reasons Canada promotes national Summer and Winter Games in the first place.

We all like to see Canada's best athletes in action, but they need top-level opportunities to train and compete. By moving hosting opportunities around the nation for events like the Winter Games, Canada spreads the chance to place legacy projects around the nation, to allow athletes everywhere to train and to grow.

If we get excited for the Olympics every other year, one reason we can do so is because of the legacies of provincial- and national-level summer and winter events all around the country. We don't reserve the Olympic dreams to the largest cities far away, they grow in places like Red Deer.

But only if we choose to allow it. If we say no, the legacy projects — and the funding and sponsorships for them — will go to places with more faith in the future.

So far, there really only exists a plan outline and some artist's renditions of what the aquatic centre we describe might look like.

It will go in Rotary Recreation Park, in the space just south of the existing Recreation Centre. The two buildings will be connected.

In fact, all the sports, recreation and cultural centres in the immediate area will be connected.

From the Public Market, the Arena and Kinex, with the Pidherney Curling Centre, past the indoor and outdoor tennis courts, past the aquatic centre, the museum, Golden Circle, speedskating oval and splash park — all these will be on a promenade that connects to Alexander Way.

The city's cultural master plan says that new major projects need to connect with our parks system, and areas where people already naturally gather. Like the splash park, like the Public Market, like the Red Deer and District Museum and Heritage Square. And soon, from Barrett Park, all the way to the river valley.

Quite the legacy.

We already have a committee gathering sponsorships for the Winter Games. Adding an aquatic centre in conjunction to that opens up wider corporate and private sponsorship opportunities. Plus, there would be federal and provincial funding sources available, in addition to what we would get otherwise.

That's before we even begin to look at municipal debt, with a tax bill for all our existing debt that costs us less than the price of a lottery ticket per month.

Red Deerians deserve to live in a city with recreational, training and cultural infrastructure at least on par with Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Canmore and others. In fact, I suggest we can even do better.

Time to say yes.

Here's a job, take it or leave it

If the federal government is footing the bill for a jobs training program, shouldn't they be able to dictate the terms of the program?

Well, that depends if the goal is to claim credit for the money spent and to control the program, as opposed to actually doing some wider good.

Now, if you propose to pay less, and split the cost three ways, can you still dictate terms?

If you're federal employment minister Jason Kenney, I suppose you can. All the more so, if one the partners paying for this is business. When business and federal conservative ideology align, that's pretty much an unstoppable force.

So the provinces complained last week that — once again — the dictatorial federal government tramples provincial rights and unilaterally imposes major changes to funding agreements. Yeah, that and five bucks will get you a latte.

Complaining about federal dictators didn't help two years ago when the feds just up and announced that funding for health care would be capped, leaving the provinces to figure out for themselves what happens next.

The difference between the health announcement and the jobs deal is that while health care costs are rising with little progress to show for it, the current Labour Market Agreement is actually working well.

For unemployed people, that is. Not so much for the feds, and for specific industries that can't find people with the specific skills they need to make their industries grow.

The current LMA will expire in March. The new deal was broadly announced in the budget last spring.

But there was never a meeting between the federal government and the provinces to get into details, or to explain how this will work (or not, as the case may be). Until just recently.

There was a recent meeting between the premiers and Kenney, which was described as “frosty.” The provinces told Kenney he was destroying an existing formula that works very well, while Kenney just stuck to Tory speaking points.

CBC News reports that with the existing LMA, the vast majority of participants are still employed in their provinces two years later.

In B.C., where 94,000 workers have gone through the federally-funded LMA, two-thirds are working. That province is already looking for 100,000 more skilled workers to build their liquified natural gas pipelines and seaport.

In Saskatchewan, under the existing plan, fully 60 per cent of participants are aboriginal, who already live close to where that province's new jobs will be located.

The provinces assert that aboriginals, youth, older workers needing to change careers due to layoffs, people on social assistance or who have been unemployed for a long time — these are the people who stand to lose most, if Kenney's changes are imposed as proposed.

Tough beans, says Kenney. We already spend billions on aboriginals, the disabled, people on welfare, etc. If the provinces want an additional employment readiness program for them, they can fund it themselves.

The new Canada Jobs Grant (better named and branded for the federal government) cuts $200 million from the existing $500 million LMA. It will require two matching funding shares from each of participating businesses and the provinces, for a total of $15,000 per participant.

So, for a maximum $5,000 investment, the feds can claim $15,000 worth of success — if the provinces choose to participate. If not, tough, says Kenney.

“If they don't want to participate at all, then I've been clear that we will end up delivering a job grant directly in those provinces that do participate,” he said in an interview.

Reading from the usual script that vilifies all dissent, he says the existing programs merely turn most of their participants into habitual welfare recipients anyway.

The Canada Jobs Grant virtually guarantees you a job, says the government. That is, if you want a job requiring hard physical labour, some risk of serious injury or death if things go wrong, working 12-hour shifts round the clock in a cold, remote part of the country. But for serious, serious cash.

And once the pipelines and ports are built, you can apply for another grant to pursue that career you always wanted in anthropology, right?

Just as with the health funding announcement, the provinces will probably just have to take it. In Ottawa's eyes, consultation and negotiation are highly overrated.

And anyone who doesn't fit the federal cookie-cutter is just a parasite, anyway.

Flaherty's surplus somewhat less than advertised

Of course Jim Flaherty's mid-year budget report is as much a political document as it is a financial one. When the news is generally good, when has it ever been otherwise?

That doesn't mean you should discount what Canada's finance minister said when he made his update in front of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. But neither does it mean the federal budget is actually on track for a budget surplus in time for the 2015 federal election.

An election, by the way, for which Flaherty announced his intention to run.

After all, as the opposition NDP were quick to remind us, last year's updates were inaccurate to the outcome, by a full one-third.

Rather, let's take it as read that finance minister Flaherty and prime minister Stephen Harper actually believe they can deliver a real cash surplus in 2015, which they will use to buy votes in that year's federal election.

So instead of carping on the methods — which the NDP and Liberals have done — I'd rather carp about the plan.

Let's just quickly dispense with the methods by which Flaherty promises that this year's $17.9-billion deficit will become a $3.7-billion surplus in just two years. With an economy growing at best by an average 2.5 per cent over the next 36 months, you don't get there without cooking the books.

The Liberal Party knows this quite well. A whole whack of that number will come from overcharging on EI premiums. In fact, employment insurance (which is actually more of a tax-and-spend program than insurance plan) provided the billions Liberal Paul Martin needed for his miracle surplus budgets, back in the Chretien days.

But even with a gold mine like EI, you don't create a $22-billion turnaround in two years. A freeze on federal hiring (eliminating more than 20,000 well-paid jobs) and selling a few government-owned assets — like shares in General Motors and a couple of coal mining properties — won't get you there, either.

Flaherty must really be counting on major job growth over the next two years to provide income tax and GST revenues to make up the balance. Well, maybe he'll be right. Maybe we'll build a couple big pipelines or something.

But I'd rather think about what Canadians would rather think about, such as: what's he going to do with the money?

Family income-splitting seems to be Priority One for the Tories right now.

The question is frequently asked: why should a family (with children under 18) where one spouse earns $65,000 and the other $35,000 pay more income taxes than a family where both earn $50,000?

That's the sort of thing income-splitting is proposed to cure. It's estimated engaging this plan would put $2.7 billion more after-tax dollars into the hands of Canadian families a year. Kids are expensive, you know, and the money would surely help.

Personally, I don't believe a word of it. Unless the government caps the plan severely, income-splitting looks more designed to buy the votes of families where one member earns $100,000 a year, so the other can stay home and look after the kids.

On the face of it, that's not such a bad idea. It's just not good public policy. In this scenario, income-splitting will mostly end up allowing rich families to simply buy a bigger house.

About 28 per cent of Canada's children live in single-parent families. Very few of these single wage-earners make $100,000 a year. Quite the opposite — they earn far less than the median family income, and they get no break from income splitting.

If we're going to spend $2.7 making life better for families with children, why not build a national child-care plan? Sorry, not on the priority list.

Doubling the levels of allowable savings into a Tax Free Savings Plan is a good incentive for people who already know how to save, but again, the benefits will not go to the highly-indebted middle class.

The cost of this is only $600 million a year, so it's a pretty minor interference in the economy. But it's a heck of an election plank, so this is a no-brainer.

Nowhere is there anything for unemployed and underemployed young workers. Flaherty is counting on that 2.5-per-cent growth curve to solve that for him. Nor is there even a nod to growing income inequality. The 90 per cent must not vote.

In sum, Flaherty's announcement adds up to much less than advertised.

The revenue growth curve looks pretty unlikely, and the spending cuts aren't enough to make a $22-billion difference in two years.

Worse, the feel-good pre-election goodies don't do all that much for most of us.

Any good news is appreciated, but did you expect something really astounding?

Nope, just something astounding enough to get the government re-elected.

In Philippines, assess first, then help

It was a long weekend Monday, so Canadians had time to pause, and honour our military services and remember their sacrifices in battle. But the day also allowed us time to try to comprehend the magnitude of superstorm Yolanda, which devastated the Philippines over the weekend.

And, as always happens in these events, to examine Canada's response to an international crisis.

There has been a lot of pressure, both internally and externally, for Canada to do more, faster, to aid the millions of people suddenly placed in horrific conditions in the wake of the storm.

Yolanda, known as Haiyan in the rest of Asia, was the strongest storm ever recorded to make landfall. Winds reaching 275 km/hr pushed a storm surge or seawater more than four metres high far inland, while torrential rains simply washed entire forests and the land holding them down toward the sea.

Almost 10 million people are directly affected.

In some places, there is no longer a town or city, much less the expectation of road access, communications or even electricity. It is reported that, days after the fierce winds and rains struck, bodies are hanging from trees, or floating in brackish water.

There is no way yet to even begin counting the dead, though a figure of 10,000 killed has been the most often-quoted so far. But that could be just from one major city, Tacloban, a provincial capital which was described by military spokesmen as now resembling a garbage dump, with people crawling through it.

Guiuan, a city of 40,000 is reported to be essentially destroyed. Cebu and Baco are reported as 80 per cent under water.

Since the Philippines is not a contiguous country, but a string of 7,000 islands holding about 97 million people, it is extremely difficult just to assess damage, much less mount a military-style aid campaign.

So let's not be too hard on our federal government for not rushing to be first on the scene. When you're talking about thousands of islands, where is the scene, anyway?

First off, Canada has pledged $5 million in direct aid to the Philippine government. In addition, the government had promised to match the donations Canadians make, dollar for dollar, to registered charities working on disaster relief there.

As of Monday (situations can change quickly in events like this) Canada is also ramping up its first response team, the Interdepartmental Strategic Support Team. They are the first on the ground, ahead of Canada's better-known DART, or Disaster Assistance Response Team.

Even though news crews can instantly bring us video of people pleading for food, water and shelter immediately (who wouldn't, in such a situation?) the Canadian response is more likely to do lasting good.

In a lot of places, there is no functional society remaining. Looters have stripped the stores, and local military attempting to bring a first wave of aid to some regions are worried about attacks by mobs. The country is under martial law, but that only applies when the martial is present.

Richard Gordon, the head of the Philippine Red Cross, said the situation in the country is “absolute bedlam.”

So in order to not make the relief program more complicated than it already is, a first wave of cash for local authorities to be able to get themselves back up and running is a good step.

Sending in an professional assessment team, while DART gets packed up and ready, will help ensure that Canadian aid arrives in a place where it can be made quickly effective. There's no point in landing a fleet of heavy aircraft on one island and then asking “what do we do now?”

Meanwhile, Canada's substantial Filipino population — make that all Canadians — do not need to wait.

Probably the easiest and most effective way for the rest of us to “do something” is to simply go to www.redcross.ca/typhoon. You can donate to the relief effort, knowing that every dollar you give is turned into two dollars by the federal Philippine Crisis matching Fund.

And that the Red Cross will efficiently turn your donations into real aid.

Canada's experience helping in the humanitarian efforts following Haiti's massive earthquake in 2010 informs us that this new effort will carry some extra tactical complications.

So, good marks to the federal government for what it has done so far. The world is watching to see how the situation develops, and we will try to do this right.

The rest is up to us.

Successful food banks, unsuccessful cities

The concept of food banks was first developed to be a stop-gap measure against hunger, especially for families with children. Local charities would collect boxed cereal and milk, bread, peanut butter, canned beans and pasta to help families facing hunger, just for a short term.

That isn't how things have evolved, is it?

Today, across the country, food banks are now too large a part of a broader strategy for coping with poverty. Depending on how you look at things, either the coping strategy is failing, or food banks have become a great success.

In Red Deer, after more than doubling during the past recession, demand at our food bank has settled back and has remained more or less steady at something like 50 per cent higher than it was before the recession hit.

Last year, 16,500 people made use of the food bank in Red Deer, some of them multiple times. Since our food bank also serves people from communities in our immediate region, we can surmise that roughly 10 per cent (or perhaps less) of our local population required help to keep from going hungry at one time or another in the past year.

That's way too high.

Nationally, while the Canadian economy continues to make small gains, the number of people going to a food bank in March 2013 was more than 833,000, a drop from just over 872,000 in March of 2012.

I know this is poor math, but let's use this to make what comparisons we can. Extrapolated over a year, that national monthly figure works out to roughly a million people — or just under three per cent of the Canadian population.

While admitting these are rough figures, the comparison is still rather jarring.

Years ago, while Stockwell Day was Red Deer's MLA, he used an economics model to explain food bank growth. You could view it as a success story, I suppose.

He said demand for a free product would grow infinitely, as long as the supply lasted. The Red Deer Food Bank was simply being successful in growing with this demand, but ultimately would fail, since supply could not possibly grow infinitely.

If my math is poor, Day's understanding of economics and poverty was even worse. People do not go to the food bank because the food is free, they go because they cannot afford to buy food. And people need food to live.

Whatever, in the decades that have followed, the group of Canadians with direct contact with a food bank has grown. Two years ago, the national office of the Salvation Army hired Angus Reid to determine what portion of Canada had direct experience with homelessness and hunger at some point in their lives.

The answer: about one in four. That's really high.

About seven per cent of respondents in the survey said they had been homeless at some point in their lives, and had either slept on the street, or made use of a shelter. About 25 per cent said they made use of a food bank, either now or at some time in their lives.

That's with a three-per-cent national usage rate.

My math is either unbelievably poor, or at our local rate of food bank use, we will surpass the national figure very soon, if we haven't already. One in four? That is not success.

What do we do with this information?

I believe the success of food banks has to include an admission of failure in other areas. We cannot accept the poor economics of supply and demand where food is concerned, but we also cannot grow the food bank indefinitely.

One food bank in Nashville has a kitchen where people devise recipes from whatever donations come in. They cook meals in an industrial pressure cooker and flash freezes them (these meals store for a year or more), and distribute free nutritious heat-and-eat meals.

I don't think we want to go there.

Poverty, housing, minimum wage, living wage, illiteracy, social supports, none of these are the the purview of cities. But cities are where all the services in these areas are delivered. It's where these issues live.

Therefore, cities do need to be at the table where they are discussed. Cities should not just get behind the non-profits who advocate on issues around poverty, homelessness and hunger, but lead the efforts to make decision-makers at higher levels of government pay better attention.

Changes in quality of life affect how cities grow, and determine whether cities prosper or whither.

If we can't convince our local civic leaders to take the lead in this, we are left with needing to continuously restock our food banks. That's not success — for food banks or for cities.