En garde, Magnat.

1994 was a naive time.

There were groups of us sitting around the tables believing we were there to make a difference in our lives. In this belief many of us saw government employees as being partners, ergo democracy in direct action: and, again, Vancouver leads the country with an innovative Canadianism!

We were diligent in our meetings, keeping the decisions on course with how we saw the medical system would best meet the needs of everyone. We studied our communities, met as citizens of the city and province, learned the communication skills the bureaucracy had been learning, wrote and shared our reports, and gave our hearts to what we knew would have the best outcomes. It was to be the final, not beginning stages of the Vancouver Health Board.

Quickly it came from the government the service boundaries had to be divided differently. They knew the money flow, so we posed no argument and continued to make plans as to how we include the new neighbourhoods into our plan for the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board. In quick succession the names and boundaries kept changing and every neighbourhood across the Lower Mainland (22 municipalities surrounding the Fraser River delta) no longer had input to any plan's implementation.

Fast forward through the Drunken-Campbell-BC, where addictions developed into big business for the province. In fact, along with cannabis, the continent's pharmaceutical industry found another group of subjects to test and sell their new found mood-altering concoction, methadone. The Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and Whalley in Surrey are the Lower Mainland's focus to find test subjects, and methadone-only pharmacies have popped up like daisies. One Surrey pharmacist plied flyers for his delivery service ($80. per prescription) to his strongest client base's residential complex. (photo to come)

Many of the generational homeless are raised or migrate to these two areas: It is much easier for the urban poor to make a camp in park-filled Surrey, or have a floor mat in Vancouver than any where else in Canada. Besides, the Lotus lands are always found in the port cities, or those that longshoremen reside in, because that's where the pirates, aka gangsters, have historically plied their trade.

1912 Vancouver businessmen successfully lobbied the provincial government to have the merchant-class ships unload in their port.  Originally the plan was Prince Rupert, because it was a 55-hour shorter route from Singapore, but the Vancouverites were better sleeping partners. A century later Jim Pattison has changed this - and he's been a BC pirate since his infamous 1970's pornographic smuggling - back to Prince Rupert, and that lovely, little coastal community is about to be the hub of ugly; The pirates are sure to moor and leave a wake of destruction up and down the eastern Pacific coast and along the hunting grounds of the Yellowhead Highway, aka Highway 16, right into Edmonton. Pattison has the two western provinces tied into a juggernaut of pig farm proportions, and the psychopaths are salivating.

The State of Addiction

There is a nasty cocktail brewing in Vancouver under the auspices of Mental Health care. The most recent document outlining the new care model is pure plagiarism from the 1990's studies commissioned for the BC Ministry of Health and the City of Vancouver. (How do I know? I was involved in the community and co-wrote some of those studies and had the others in my possession as reference to our recommendations of health care in the neighbourhood.)

The difference is the new document "Improving Health Services for Individuals with Severe Addiction and Mental Illness" (November 15, 2013, Ministry of Health Report to the Honourable Terry Lake) is full of language to describe the estimated 130,000 people as if they are totally incapable of anything, and all their rights are stripped. The revolving door of incarceration-to-the-street is assured.

These people are being video-monitored while they stay in the shelters, because they have no home, and teams of so-called professionals will bound them off to the hospital to be forced to take "treatment" of anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, methadone and electric shock therapy.  Their diet in and out of hospital is predominately refined starches, little in the way of fresh vegetables and fruit, and heavy fat proteins.

These authors have actually used the homeless population numbers and assigned them to their definition of severe addictions and mental health to validate their intended treatment program. Instead of solving homelessness, they're keeping it alive so they have their subjects to torture.

In 1984...

... I had been in Ontario for two years, and got to watch Pierre Eliot Trudeau's last week as Prime Minister, live. Mr Flamboyant had reached the pinnacle of his working life and gracefully bowed out while there was still fire in his belly to pursue something else.


The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was law and my lifestyle choice of independent woman was sacrosanct. The naivety of being a young adult idealist. It took 30 years to figure out none, or the vast majority, of us (humans, et al) were given the tools to behave like adults by the previous generations. We inherited the shame-based behaviours that won't allow an awareness of Self, and it has been a long, blinding history. The baby-boomers declared a change was desired and science responded by naming the behaviours of the previous generations.

The majority of the younger baby-boomers, and those born 15 years after, have the 'escapism' imprint. The desire to deny anything is wrong and jump into some form of escapism. Most turned to drugs and alcohol. Few, like me, turned to creativity and meditation, but we all lived in a wax of confusion.

It has been my time in Surrey that cleared my head of the dynamic of the toxic-shamed culture. I always thought of all the religious organizations the Catholics were the masters of shaming children - just look at the Middle Ages! - but, Sikhism, in my book, takes the lead by a notch. Absolutely diabolical the way their mothers belittle their sons and disown their daughters.

In the 30 years I have studied what makes humans tick, I conclude the only way to make the Charter of Rights and Freedoms work is to force people, immigrants especially, into mental health programing. From Grade 8 onward psychology needs to be an integral part of the curriculum. There are enough educated Social Workers in BC to start this school year... But, herein lies the crucible:

The majority of people controlling the education system are choosing to remain in the shame-base dynamic, and too afraid of their own shadows to go beyond "THOU SHALL NOT BE AWARE" (by Alice Miller).

99 Ave at 120A St

Living the Homeless Life, Part 1

For those who don't know...

On November 15, 2013 the police pulled me out of the apartment I was living in to protect my life from the numb-nut criminals in the complex.(Had I been informed that the landlord is associated with gangsters I would not have moved into the place in the first place.  Because I know me and me always calls the police upon witnessing a crime, and living in a den of thieves is not conducive to my well being.)

Since then I have been in the homeless state of sharing a transition house run by the Salvation Army.  I have no say on who my roommates will be, and army life is not something I have ever needed. For more than 50 years I have learned self-discipline by engaging in the arts. Artists are masters, and masters create something from nothing. Simple as that. Do these Army folk understand this? No.

The majority of the people who work and live within the Salvation Army are people who need to be told what to do and how to do it. A case in point:

This morning I had a discussion with one of my roommates about the effects of drugs and alcohol on the human mind. She has not used crack cocaine for the last eight months after 15 years of using. She was saying the addiction is a disease, and I said it is a lifestyle choice. I backed my statement up with the fact that drugs and alcohol suppress the mind's inhibitors, allowing for the user to express whatever emotion they feel or think about in the moment; and, that it takes a great deal of practice to control one's emotions. She ended the conversation with stating she needed to get ready to go to church. 

She needs the structure of basic rules because she has spent a great deal of her adult life in the state of being out of control. For her, the daily church attendance is an absolute need, because it is the comfort zone where she does not have to take responsibility for controlling herself. Someone else is in control, she's obedient to her faith instead of a substance.

What I know...

In more than 50 years of engaging in one art form or another I have discovered self control. Each art form is a skill, and those skills require practice to achieve proficiency, and the practice demands self control.