B.C.

With 500 people in metro Vancouver, B.C., hunkering down without a roof overhead nightly, an advocacy group wants to distribute red tents to the city's homeless to make shelter on the sidewalks -- at the height of the Olympic games festivities.

The Tyee reports:

Picture homeless people camped on downtown sidewalks. Big yawns inside bright red tents as the sun rises on another Olympics day. Early next month, Pivot Legal Society hopes to ask city council's permission to start handing out 500 collapsible shelters to Vancouver's most needy. Pivot's rights activists want to confront a city enthralled by Olympic jubilation with the reality of local poverty. And test the limits of constitutional law.

British Columbia Supreme Court rulings have upheld the right of the homeless to camp in public spaces when there is no other shelter. So Pivot is offering donors the right to "sponsor" a tent for $100 and shelter a homeless person. With world attention about to be focused on Vancouver during the Olympic games, the timing of the Red Tent campaign is no accident.

"We want the media to experience the most liveable city in the world and also see the contradiction -- that this is a city that has a chronic problem with poverty and homelessness," Pivot Executive Director John Richardson said. "We want them to ask, 'What is the Canadian government doing about this?'"

-- Rita Hibbard

B.C. Minister of Children and Families Mary Polak is cutting funding for an early intervention program for autistic children across seven B.C. communities, reports Lindsay Kines of the Times Colonist. The intensive program focused on 70 preschool children who received more one-on-one attention than their slightly older counterparts, a situation Polak said was unfair to the other 800 children under age six with autism in the province.
"We were not seeing any appreciable improvement in the outcomes for those kids," Polak says.

The preschool children each receive $70,000 per year in treatment funds, which Polak is slashing to $20,000 per child to put them on par with the other children. The plan also cuts 39 jobs from the Queen Alexandra Centre where the intensive program takes place.

Nicole Strong, whose son Isaac has autism, says he benefitted immensely from the intensive program. She disagreed with Polak's statement that the extra $50,000 in treatment per year didn't make a difference.

"For them to say that there would be no appreciable difference when you actually get 13 hours more of therapy [a week] is ridiculous," Strong says.

Strong also says children who go through the intensive program are much more able to deal with school and stressful situations than those who haven't.

British Columbia's poor salmon returns are beginning to hit more than the fishing industry. Grizzlies and black bears along the coast are starving to deathfrom lack of food, reports Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail. Officials attribute the strikingly low number of bears observed to low chum salmon runs the past few years, and suspect some bears may have died in their dens over the winter because they lacked the body fat necessary to survive. Conservation Director of Pacific Wild Ian McAllister states it plainly:

"River systems that in the past had 50,000 to 60,000 chum have now got 10 fish. The chum runs have been fished out. We've seen the biological extinction of a [salmon] species, and now we're seeing the impact on bears."

McAllister and others made a statement to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans requesting it cancel this fall's grizzly bear hunt and shut down all chum salmon fisheries. This comes after the Fraser River crisis, which InvestigateWest reported on further here.

"The collapse of the Fraser sockeye and now the north-coast chum salmon runs is leading to ecological collapse of our coast ecosystems," McAllister said.

– Emily Linroth

Nearly 10 million salmon should have swam up the Fraser River this summer, not the dismal 1.37 million that did, setting the record for lowest returns and effectively shutting down all but small harvest opportunities for First Nations who depend on the fish.

What's killing the salmon? The culprit could be changing ocean currents, food supply shifts, infections from sea lice at fish farms, or a combination of things. No one knows for sure, because the science isn't being funded to find out, reports The Canadian Press.

Not much is known about salmon once they get to the ocean, but scientists can design experiments to find out. Huge cuts to grants and programs over the years have prevented these studies from becoming a reality.

"You could pick just about any aspect of the management cycle and the scientific assessment, and you can say, 'Well, we used to do this but we don't any more,'" said Scott Hinch, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who specializes in salmon ecology.

The government is focusing on tracking salmon during the season, rather than investigating what happens when they're at sea.

During the collapse of the Fraser River salmon, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea was in Norway, attending the largest aquaculture conference in the world because she "supports aquaculture in Canada which is an important part of our economy," according to Rafe Mair in The Tyee.

A battle over resource management and clean water on south Vancouver Island came to a head when Halalt First Nation filed a petition with B.C.'s Supreme Court to review plans for a new water project before proceeding, reportsMark Hume of the Globe and Mail. Halalt opposes the North Cowichan District's plan to dig two wells and install a 1 million gallon reservoir to provide clean drinking water for residents in the Chemainus area because the wells would draw water from an aquifer below Halalt lands.

Halalt First Nation has objected to the plan since 2003, maintaining that the aquifer cannot support that many peoples' water needs without negatively impacting the connected Chemainus River and its fish stocks, reportsMark Kiemele in Klahowya. They are requesting creation of a watershed management plan, as well as involvement in monitoring programs for the area, before the project goes ahead.

Residents in the Chemainus area currently get their water from surface sources, which regularly suffer from high bacteria counts due to heavy rains, according to Hume. The District issues advisories several times a year for residents to boil their water. The District says drilling wells will draw up clean water, and it has agreed to halt their use if its three-year monitoring program shows negative impacts.

Halalt Chief James Thomas worries the District wouldn't be able to stop the pumps once they were supplying thousands of homes in an area he says is already overdeveloped. The North Cowichan municipality has admitted it wants to pursue the well project mainly for financial concerns.

Environmentalists in British Columbia are reeling over cuts to the province's Environment Ministry, reports Mark Hume of the Globe and Mail. Although the government routinely discusses protecting the environment, it slashed spending by 15 percent from last year's budget, and that number is expected to decrease in the coming years. The province also repealed the Innovative Clean Energy levy, a program that uses sales tax on energy purchases and raises $25 million for clean energy annually.

B.C. was declared the greenest province in Canada on Earth Day this August, thanks to its carbon tax and programs like LiveSmart that encourage residents to make their homes more sustainable. But environmentalists worry this title could change if the government continues to provide tax incentives to industry while putting environmental programs on the back burner.

Much of the debate centers around the new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), which exempts fuel sources like gas and oil but not renewable energy, such as solar panels, reportsAndrew MacLeod in The Tyee.

Meanwhile, Vancouver is taking matters into its own hands by hiring Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, a 35-year-old "guru of green" from Chicago, in its efforts to make Vancouver the world's greenest city, reports Doug Ward of the Vancouver Sun.

It seems the incentives for environmental programs are there, but the money isn't. It will be interesting to see what Johnston does with Vancouver and how much funding he'll have to do it with.

– Emily Linroth

Metro Vancouver was planning on dumping more than 660,000 tons of trashannually in a Washington state landfill. But after the provincial government announced plans to outlaw international exporting of garbage, the region is looking for places closer to home to deposit its waste, according to Kelly Sinoski of the Vancouver Sun.

One solution proposed by Environment Minister Barry Penner is to expand the Cache Creek landfillnear Ashcroft instead of shutting it down next year as originally planned. The nearby Nlaka'pamux Nation Tribal Council heavily opposes the suggestion, saying the landfill already pollutes local rivers and affects salmon in particular. An independent study suggests the dump doesn't pose a hazard to humans or wildlife, but the council still would rather shut down the site.

Another possibility would be sending the trash to an incinerator at Gold River on Vancouver Island – a facility that hasn't been approved or built yet.

“It makes sense to deal with our environmental problems here in B.C., rather than exporting our problems to somewhere else,” Penner said. But is depending on potential expansion of an already full landfill to store garbage for the next three to 20 years the solution?

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Following a string of deaths of homeless people in Alaska and British Columbia, Lisa Demer of the Anchorage Daily News released a comprehensive report on why homeless people are dying: lifestyle. At least four of the 12 deaths this summer were related to chronic drinking, a habit that often forced people who did have homes back onto the street when landlords told them they couldn't bring drinking buddies around anymore.

Is this lifestyle a choice? Many people end up on the street because they can't get a job, or start drinking to deal with the death of loved ones or other stresses. Anyone could end up in this situation. For people on the street, the most important factor is finding the next drink, meal, or shelter - they're not worrying about long-term consequences of their actions, because they're not sure there will be a long-term for them. They're focusing on meeting basic survival needs.

Researchers in Victoria, B.C., found the number one issue of concern for homeless injection drug users was security - physical safety and shelter - not infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, reports Tom Sandborn of The Tyee. Once people have a safe place to stay that helps them battle their addiction rather than kicking them out, their stress levels and risky behaviors decrease. They are much more likely to use condoms and practice safer drug habits, or quit entirely.

Security also affects likelihood of death by outside factors, such as violent attacks.

Fires and beetle infestations are devastating northern forestsin a cycle that is both caused by and promoting climate change, reports Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press. As the climate warms, forests in Siberia, Europe, Alaska and northern Canada will grow weaker while pests grow stronger with milder winters. These boreal forests are key in absorbing carbon dioxide, but as they succumb to warming, they would become a source of greenhouse gases as they decay and burn.

Change is already happening in western North America, where a mountain pine beetle epidemic has killed 6.5 million acres of forest from Colorado to Washington and 35 million acres in British Columbia. The spruce bark beetle has already consumed 1 million acres in the Yukon during a 15-year epidemic. Scientists say these unprecedented epidemics are signs the climate is already changing, especially in the north.

Plant life in the north is also shifting, as warmer temperatures double the amount of shrubs and grasses on tundra, according to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press. Because the shrubby vegetation is darker, it would absorb more solar energy, possibly increasing the rate of global warming even more.

– Emily Linroth

As Vancouver, B.C., watches Fraser River stocks of sockeye fail, the count of steelhead passing the Bonneville Dam in Vancouver, Wash., is soaring. And while low Alaskan Yukon runs of king and chum salmon predict a devastating winter for subsistence fishermen, salmon are even making a comeback in the Seine, as InvestigateWest reported last week. What differences could account for these drastic population changes?

Multiple environmental factors could be affecting populations. Warmer weather can heat up rivers, especially those overdrawn by humans, and discourage the cold-water-loving fish from heading upstream. Shifting ocean currents or other predator influences could be altering food sources. Pollutants from stormwater can accumulate in the fish. Overfishing can deplete numbers. Sea lice from farmed salmon could be transferring to wild salmon, weakening them and increasing the likelihood of succumbing to disease or predators. Even superb returns from previous years could be problematic, as too many fish spawning and then decomposing could produce excess bacteria, possibly resulting in disease.