Priority will be getting a 'better handle' on crime, Rix says
"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."
Bruce Constantineau
Vancouver Sun
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Vancouver Board of Trade's new chairman says Vancouver businesses have to become more philanthropic and he'll push that concept aggressively over the next year.
"You can count on that," Donald Rix, 77, said in an interview Thursday after he became board chairman at the organization's 121st annual meeting.
The chairman of LifeLabs Diagnostics Inc. and Cantest Ltd., who's also a well-known philanthropist, told the meeting a recent U.S. survey found just 39 per cent of business leaders believe corporate citizenship is part of their business planning.
"To be successful over the long term, companies have to be involved and invested in their community," Rix told the meeting at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. "Not just chequebook involvement, but personal involvement.
"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."
Well, yes, great, but in the last line of this report are the causes of the disproportionate rates of oral cancer in the DTES - no dental service being one. Yes, a free clinic will pull a tooth if you are in pain, but not give you a free cleaning. So where is the money and other resources for that? The DTES malaise is stuck at the band-aid stage, throw dollars at the results of a problem, and prevention of the problem itself seems to be beyond anyone's vision. See housing, addictions, mental health, poverty, nutrition (on welfare...huh), well being, isolation, and the same tired unimaginative approach continues.
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
VANCOUVER - The BC Cancer Agency is launching a free mobile screening program in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where one out of 150 residents is thought to suffer from oral cancer, compared with a provincial rate of one in 10,000.
"We're taking a proactive approach and screening for oral cancer in populations of people more likely to get this cancer," said Health Minister George Abbott.
"The chances of survival are greatly increased if the cancer is detected early."
Dr. Catherine Poh, an outreach program leader with the agency's oral cancer prevention program, said a more intensive, closer-to-home approach for care is necessary to ensure people seek screening and treatment.
"One in 10,000 British Columbians is diagnosed with oral cancer annually, but the incidence rate is alarmingly higher for residents of the Downtown Eastside, where one in 150 suffers from oral cancer," Poh said.
"There is an urgent need to reach out to this community with strategies that will help prevent and identify disease at early stages when it is easier to treat."
"Our goal is to make access to screening easy," said Dr. Miriam Rosin, director of the program.
The increased risk for oral cancer among the downtown residents is thought to be due to heavy tobacco and alcohol use, compromised immune function, poor nutrition and poor oral hygiene, and limited access to dental care.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Shelter plan is unfair to hard-pressed area
Beverley Bowes
Times Colonist
Friday, June 20, 2008
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.
Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.
The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.
This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside.
.
Exactly.....
Saturday » June 14 » 2008
Why do cellphone users condemn us to share their tiresome chatter?
John Martin
Special to The Province
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
One evening back in the dreadful '70s, four or five of us decided to venture from the bland cul-de-sacs of Richmond and check out the mean streets of skid row.
It was yet to be known as the Downtown Eastside, and was more pitiful than dangerous at the time.
True, there was a fair bit of heroin. But for the most part, Main and Hastings was a refuge for low-income pensioners who spent the bulk of their waking hours in the many beer parlours that lined the streets.
The first thing we noticed upon entering one of these watering holes was the staggering decibel level.
But there was no music -- and upon closer examination, almost everyone was sitting by themselves, babbling incoherently to no one in particular.
I was reminded of this image last week while riding the West Coast Express from Mission to the Waterfront Station.
It had been years since I rode the train and things were remarkably different this time.
Every second person was chattering on their cellphone the entire trip.
It didn't matter what car or level I moved to, I didn't detect a single, normal conversation between two passengers seated side by side.
Instead, people were literally screaming into their phones and had zero apprehension about how public their conversations were.
Somewhere along the line -- and cellphones are not the sole reason -- we have collectively opted to forfeit any semblance of personal space.
Recall in the days of phone booths how we'd always glare at the next person waiting to make a call if they stood too close?
Everyone closed the door and typically cupped the receiver to minimize the possibility of strangers eavesdropping.
Similarly, when we would use the row of pay phones in malls or hotel lobbies, we'd move as far away from the next person as the cord would allow, to maintain some privacy.
And those in line fully understood the etiquette of the day to stand several feet away, much as we tend to do with ATM machines in modern times.
But now there is absolutely no concern over who hears our conversations, no matter how personal.
Given that most people talk two or three times louder than they need to on a cell, it would seem we actually want the world to listen in on our business.
This isn't simply about being rude and annoying.
It's also about people having delusions of self-importance and insisting on sharing their life stories.
Unfortunately though, most people aren't nearly as interesting as they apparently think they are.
And given all the blather I had to endure on the train last week, I'd say many aren't even as interesting as, well, the old rummies in that beer parlour on Hastings Street 30-odd years ago.
Contact John Martin, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley, at John.Martin@ucfv.ca
© The Vancouver Province 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Globe editorial
The rights of drug addicts
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
May 29, 2008 at 6:09 AM EDT
Insisting that a Vancouver clinic be allowed to provide potentially life-saving supervision for heroin and cocaine addicts to inject their drugs, as a British Columbia judge did this week, is the right thing to do. It's right as a policy choice, but it's also right as a use of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect addicts from the arbitrary reach of the criminal law.
Well exactly - who really cares about Mr Ego Density?
Saturday » June 14 » 2008
You say Campbell's premier, I say he's mega-mayor
Municipal roles near zero as provincial leader races from project to project
Miro Cernetig
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, May 31, 2008
You may have noticed we're in civic election season again, time to pick a bunch of new mayors for Metro Vancouver. But, honestly, do we even have to bother?
After all, we already have something better than 21 mayors, all looking after their various fiefdoms. We have the mega-mayor, otherwise known as Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia.
Think about it. The premier bestrides our various cities like a colossus. Is there anything he doesn't have his hand in?
Just consider the city of Vancouver. The biggest ideas transforming the city aren't coming from Mayor Sam Sullivan or his opponents. They come straight from the premier's office.
Want a new $400-million Vancouver Art Gallery? Then get the premier to kick in $50 million and it'll get off the ground.
Sullivan wasn't even in the loop on that one.
Will that art gallery be on the edge of False Creek, instead of in an old bus station, as many favoured? The premier liked the waterfront location and so did his representatives at B.C. Pavilion Corp., so a waterfront gallery it shall be.
