Today is the final day of the Gordie Awards where the Editorial Committee of Price Tags ranks the good, the bad, the fun and the just plain puzzling Transportation and Planning stories of 2016.
Today’s Gordie Awards goes for “Moments of Courage”-when work occurs that is not what is normally anticipated or expected, but meets an unfulfilled need.
There were two winners in this category:
Moments of Courage
Housing Crisis Forum
A forum was held in November 2016 that was an inclusive discussion of ” The Housing Crisis is Global! Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on the Foreign Investor Myth in B.C.” This forum provided a diverse discussion and was inclusive of the dispossession of First Nations peoples from their lands. While so much could have gone wrong at such a meeting, it didn’t . Here is the link to the meeting:: https://www.facebook.com/events/329547804095114/
Standouts about the meeting included translation in many languages, including simultaneous interpretation in Cantonese and Mandarin, the discussion of complex topics including race and housing with underexposed demographics, the meeting was held at a location that was not downtown, and lastly provided free child care.
Fentanyl Crisis
There is nothing more important than protecting and assisting the most vulnerable of our citizens, and ensuring that appropriate care is given. This award is given to the City of Vancouver for responding to urgent need. A City tax increase was approved by Council for increased first responders as the death toll rises in an awful epidemic of death.
This concludes the Awarding of the 2016 Gordies for Transportation and Planning Stories of 2016. What will 2017 bring for inclusion in next year’s awards?
Author
Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Just before the holidays a co-worker remarked rather angrily to our group, which was taking a rare coffee break, that she would rather see public funds go toward mothers and children in the DTES rather than “billions being put into helping addicts shoot up” (or words to that effect). That comment seemed off base so I typed several key words in Google and within 10 seconds had several pages of DTES public funding info and links, including annual financial reports and audits.
It turns out that tens of millions are put into programs in the DTES every year specifically designed for women / mothers and children. In my limited time to search deeper, I couldn’t find one for-profit organization. In fact, most fell short of funding goals and were significantly constrained in high-demand fields like supportive family housing, so they had to solicit funds on-line. More needs to be done, of course, but in this case my co-worker was completely wrong.
By comparison, Insite and it’s companion treatment centre Onsite ran a budget of under $5 million in 2015. In that one year Insite prevented well over 700 overdoses; perhaps the majority would have resulted in death in prior years before former mayors, coroners, a number of medical professionals, activists and certain compassionate provincial ministers took on the unbalanced and highly selective moral compass of the Harper Conservatives and started practicing harm reduction through the Insite vehicle while it was illegal. My guess is that over 10,000 overdose deaths have been prevented by this one facility, while treatment is just one floor up, albeit inadequate.
The federal Liberals today with urban mayors are now taking a healthcare approach to addiction and other Insite-like facilities will be appearing across the nation, hopefully with a stronger and widely-accessible treatment program. If 30 facilities were set up nation-wide, the cost would likely not exceed $150 million. That’s not even one fifth of my co-worker’s rhetorical flourish.
Her comment did not make any sense and it seemed prejudicial, especially considering it occurred in the middle of a fentanyl crises. The Metro lost 13 people on one day last month from this poison, nine of them in Vancouver alone. Addiction does not recognize social or economic boundaries.
I challenged my co-worker and forwarded her my incomplete list of the organizations that receive public funding for women and children, and also a link to the 2015 Insite annual report and invited her to make her own comparisons. Not completely surprising, she was unable to accept rebuttal though she was perfectly willing to issue a grossly uninformed and quite offensive opinion, and claimed entitlement to express it at any time. Well, opinions cannot be construed as facts, can they? She also angrily told me she deleted the list without reading it and that she will not be lectured. That comment was accompanied by the comical mannerisms of false insouciance.
Okay. Fine. Denial is a comfort to some. But it cannot be expected that I will not use this experience to elucidate the issue and the irrationality that grips some people about it. It is a good thing that dealing with addiction is now moving more into the healthcare field, and that federal support has finally arrived, despite some people’s opinions.