policy – Jewish Independent

NDP proud of their record

Selina Robinson (photo from Selina Robinson)

Premier John Horgan sent Selina Robinson a message: “A mensch is a good thing, right?”

Robinson, the NDP government’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, is seeking reelection in the riding of Coquitlam-Maillardville. She sees herself as the Jewish maven around the cabinet table.

“I said yes, who called you a mensch?” Robinson recalled. “He just wanted to double-check.”

As she and other New Democrats campaign toward the Oct. 24 provincial election, Robinson and fellow cabinet member George Heyman spoke with the Jewish Independent. (In this issue, we also speak with Jewish candidates and spokespeople for other parties.)

As minister of housing, Robinson takes pride in the development of a major initiative called Homes for B.C.: A 30-Point Plan for Housing Affordability in British Columbia. Her ministry engaged with housing groups, renters, developers, economists, local government officials, planners and other thinkers. Then they convened people in a “World Café,” an engagement exercise in which people from different perspectives sit at a table and must come to agreed-upon recommendations on a topic.

“It was from that that we picked the best ideas and so it really came from all sides of the housing sector rather than pitting them against each other,” she said, acknowledging that she had to convince some to buy into the process because bureaucracy is not always amenable to novel approaches.

She cited two particular areas that she wants to “kvell about.” BC Housing, the agency that develops, manages and administers a range of subsidized housing in the province, is building housing on First Nations land.

“The feds, I don’t think, are building a lot of Indigenous housing and they’re supposed to,” she said. “No other province has stepped up to do that.… You’re a British Columbian and you need housing … if it’s land on reserve, it’s land on reserve – we’ll build housing.”

By providing housing in First Nations communities, it also helps people remain at home, rather than moving to the city, where housing is even more expensive and possibly precarious, she said.

“I’m very proud of that,” Robinson said.

The other point of pride is, Robinson admitted, “a geeky piece of legislation.” When she stepped into the role as the government’s lead on housing availability and affordability, she recognized that there is no data on what kind of housing exists and what’s needed.

“Local governments are responsible for land-use planning and deciding what kind of housing goes where – this is going to be multifamily, this is going to be single-family – but, if you were to ask them, how much do you have, how much more multifamily do you need, they couldn’t tell you, because nobody was collecting the data.”

She brought forward legislation that mandated local governments to do a housing needs assessment every five years to identify whether more housing options are needed for different age groups and types of families.

She also cited the government’s development of social housing, through the allocation of $7 billion over 10 years to build 39,000 units. So far, 25,000 units are either open, in construction or going through the municipal development process.

“My biggest worry is that the Liberals [if they are elected] will cancel all of those that are still in the development stage because they did that in 2001 when they formed government,” she said. “We’re so far behind the eight ball because they did that. I’m not saying it would have fixed everything, but, if there were another 5,000 units of housing out there, it wouldn’t be as bad as it is because there would be another 5,000 units.”

Every Friday, Robinson lights Shabbat candles and then shares a reflection on social media about her week.

“Lighting the Shabbat candles just grounds me in my identity,” she said. “I make myself take 10 minutes on a Friday at sundown to stop and to clear my head and to remind myself why I do the work. It’s not for the pay. It’s not for any of that; it’s not worth it. It’s who I am, what are my values and what’s important to me? What did I hear this week that reminds me of why this work is important?”

Robinson admitted she’s being partisan in saying that she believes NDP values are Jewish values.

“From my perspective, taking care of the world – whether it’s the environment, the people and all that’s within it – is our collective responsibility,” she said, adding with a laugh: “I think all Jews are New Democrats who just don’t know it yet.”

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George Heyman, minister of environment and climate change strategy, is seeking reelection in the riding of Vancouver-Fairview. He is a son of Holocaust refugees, who escaped the Nazis with the help of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who illegally issued visas to about 6,000 Jews, many of whose descendants now live in Vancouver.

photo - George Heyman — George Heyman *(photo from George Heyman)*

In 2019, Heyman took a family trip to Poland, which broadened his awareness of his family’s history and where he met family members he never knew he had. The Independent will run that story in an upcoming issue.

Speaking of his record in government, Heyman expressed pride in bringing in CleanBC, which he calls “a very detailed, independently modeled set of measures to get us to our 2030 target and beyond.”

He also said the government “completely revamped the province’s Environmental Assessment Act, incorporating the principles of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Collaborating with the First Nations Leadership Council, the government adapted the legislation to bring in affected local communities at the beginning of a project, before a proponent spends millions of dollars then has to go back to the drawing board due to local concerns.

“We’ve been investing in clean technology, we’ve approved transit plans that were stalled for years that the mayors of Metro Vancouver thought were critically important,” Heyman added. “We’re going to see the Broadway [SkyTrain] line commence to relieve the tremendous congestion on the Broadway corridor, both on buses and on the roads. And we’ll be working on ultimately being able to work with UBC and the city and the federal government to extend that to UBC.”

The government, he said, updated the Residential Tenancy Act to address tenants who were being threatened with eviction for suspect renovations and that saw people getting notices of rent increases as high as 40% because of loopholes in the act.

“We closed those loopholes, we held rent increases to the cost of living unless there is a legitimate demonstrated need to do renovation and repair and it’s fair to receive some compensation rent to pay for that,” he said.

Like Robinson, Heyman cited the construction of affordable housing, as well as supportive housing, to get homeless people off the street and provide them with services they need. He said the government has created 20,000 childcare spaces in the province “with significant fee reductions for families as we work our way toward a $10-a-day program.” Increased staffing in schools, mandated by a Supreme Court decision during the previous regime, is also an accomplishment, he said, as well as adding more investments in new schools for seismic upgrades, fire safety and heating and ventilation systems.

On the opioid crisis, Heyman acknowledged a surge in deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. “While there is much more to do, we managed to flatten the level of deaths up until COVID hit,” he said.

Also parallel to the pandemic was a realization of “the terrible state of many of our long-term-care homes.”

“We saw that deteriorate under the previous government,” he said. “With COVID, we saw the results of that. We saw people dying because workers were having to go to two or three different care homes, increasing the risk of infection, simply to cobble together a living. We took measures to allow our healthcare workers to work in one institution without suffering the loss of pay and we’re also investing in more beds and more equipment for long-term-care homes.”

New Democrats have been governing in a minority situation with the support of the Green party since 2017. Horgan called the snap election on Sept. 21, facing criticism for breaking fixed election date legislation and going to the polls during a state of emergency.

Segal helms Liberal message

Rachael Segal is media spokesperson for the BC Liberals. (photo from BC Liberals)

Facing a campaign unlike any other, with shaking hands and kissing babies prohibited by social distancing protocols, all parties needed to reimagine how they would reach voters. Rachael Segal, media spokesperson for the BC Liberals, had to figure out how to get her party’s message to British Columbians.

“We can’t have a media bus, so, as the person responsible for media relations, how I connect with media now is very different than how I would do it in a normal campaign,” she said. “I’d be on the bus, I’d be with the leader.”

Instead, the leader is often driving himself to the modest-sized events that typify the 2020 campaign. Instead of facing a phalanx of TV cameras and radio mics, party leader

Andrew Wilkinson speaks to a pooled camera, with his message then shared among the media consortium. It’s an experience all parties are dealing with. But the leaders, as well as candidates in 87 ridings across the province, still have to communicate their positions.

“Obviously, Andrew still needs to get out there and get his message out there,” said Segal. “We’re making announcements daily, just like we would on a campaign normally, they’re just different.”

Wilkinson, a medical doctor as well as a lawyer, is particularly sensitive to the health risks and safety of his team, Segal said.

Segal, who grew up in Kerrisdale, is the official campaign spokesperson for the party during the election and is second-in-command at party headquarters when in non-campaign mode. As senior director of the party, her role is a loosely defined collection of responsibilities that she describes as “basically whatever hole is there, I try and fix it.”

One of her primary responsibilities is stakeholder relations, which means meeting with particular community groups and connecting them with the leader and other members of the legislature.

“Andrew and I have done Shabbat dinners, we’ve done Rosh Hashanah meals, we’ve done tons of Jewish community events,” Segal said by way of example. She also hosts the party’s podcast and started a young professional women’s group “to try to engage the 30-to-50-year-old women demographic, which is the largest swing demographic in British Columbia.”

Segal came to the role in April 2019. She already had a long resumé in education, politics and media.

She attended Vancouver Talmud Torah elementary and Magee high school and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria, where she was the first president of the Jewish student organization when Hillel House opened there. She served as national president of the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students before graduating from UVic in 2005. She then went to the University of Leicester, in the United Kingdom, for a law degree, followed by a master of laws from Osgoode Hall, in Toronto.

She worked on Parliament Hill for Conservative MPs David Sweet and Scott Reid, as well as Senator Linda Frum, and was a senior policy advisor overseeing corrections and the parole board for then-minister of public safety Steven Blaney.

While studying in Toronto, Segal worked full time as an on-air legal and policy correspondent for Sun News, until that network shut down. She worked in criminal law and then civil litigation for a time but found it not her speed and returned to media, joining Toronto’s Bell Media radio station News Talk 1010. She returned to Vancouver in 2018 and covered as maternity leave replacement for the B.C. regional director of the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee. She joined the BC Liberal party staff three days after that position ended.

“This election is really about who British Columbians can trust to lead them through economic recovery,” said Segal. “When we think about the ballot question, that’s really what British Columbians are voting on. Who do they trust to lead them through the next stage of this pandemic from an economic perspective? We have an incredible team who are all very experienced. We have former ministers, we have doctors, we have lawyers, we have just a really diverse and interesting team of very smart people.”

Given significant turnover – seven cabinet ministers have opted not to seek reelection – Segal questioned who would be on the frontbenches of a reelected NDP government.

“The question is, what does an NDP cabinet look like in the next government and do they have the bench strength to be the best party to lead this province economically?” she said.

Segal takes seriously her position as one of the few Jewish individuals on the campaign team.

“It’s a real privilege to be able to represent the community within this political sphere and it’s something I take very not lightly,” she said.

Of her job on the campaign and her slightly less hectic role the rest of the time, she added: “My job is pretty different, wild, fun. Every day is a new adventure. It’s pretty great. And we have such an incredible team, so they make it all even better.”

Managing our potable water

Seth Siegel’s latest book is Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink. (photo from Seth Siegel)

With approximately seven percent of the world’s renewable water resources within Canada’s borders, it would seem that we should have little to worry about when it comes to agriculture and potable needs. But our drinking water is at risk, said Seth Siegel, author of Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink.

Siegel has spent the last half-decade studying the quality of drinking water. While his book focuses specifically on U.S. water sources, he said water quality is also a concern for Canadians and he worries that neither country is really prepared to address the threat of contaminants from our technological age: plastics, undetected chemicals and aging, inadequate infrastructure.

All of the issues that Siegel examines in his book regarding U.S. drinking water have been raised in recent years in Canada-based research. In many ways, Siegel’s exposé on the environmental impacts of toxic substances, chemicals and medication in the United States is a mirror into our own environmental dilemmas, as Canada is home to many of the same industries and technological challenges. It’s also home to its own significant problems with water purification in rural indigenous communities.

Lead in drinking water

The Flint, Mich., lead water crisis of 2014 may have faded from newspaper headlines, but researchers are still warning about the levels of lead in American and Canadian drinking water. While we are exposed to lead daily in minuscule amounts from the environment, both countries’ federal governments publish guidelines to stringently limit exposure – because lead is a neurotoxin. In Canada, old (pre-1970s or so) water pipes or solder were made with lead, while more recently made pipes do not contain the substance.

In March 2019, Health Canada tightened the guidelines for lead in potable water from a maximum of .01 micrograms (mcg) per litre to .0005 mcg/litre. The decision coincided with a yearlong investigation by Canadian journalists to determine how prevalent lead was in tap water. Some 300 homes in 11 cities were tested and, as expected, newer homes connected with updated water systems had acceptable readings but neighbourhoods with lead service lines or antiquated interior pipes had excessive lead in tap water. One older home in Whistler produced readings more than 12 times the maximum limit, and some 20 communities in Montreal were found to still have lead service lines.

What often makes things worse, Siegel told the Independent, is that updating service lines and interior water lines aren’t inexpensive undertakings and homeowners, who may not have the expertise to weigh the urgency of those changes, often have to bear the cost of upgrades.

Microplastics and more

Lead isn’t the only health risk homeowners face. Microplastic contamination, which has been traced, in part, to the use of plastic bottles, is a growing concern in Canada, home to a robust bottled water industry. Researchers at McGill University, the University of Toronto and several institutions in the United States are currently undertaking studies to determine the prevalence and effect of microplastics in the environment, including on local marine life.

While the World Health Organization states there isn’t enough evidence to confirm that ingesting microplastics is harmful to humans, Siegel and other researchers disagree. As he details in his book, there is now compelling research to suggest microplastics can actually “disrupt the human body’s hormone-related activity,” especially in children.

Becoming advocates

Still, Siegel cautions that his book isn’t an appeal to simply throw out the technology we use. “None of this is a call to ban plastic,” he said, noting that, “just more than 100 years since its first commercial use, plastic is the dominant material of our times. If one wanted to do so, it would be nearly impossible to go even a day without contact with it in some form.”

The answer, he said, is advocacy: educating ourselves and taking proactive approaches that steer both companies we invest in and the experts that oversee their products’ safety, so that materials are exhaustively tested and verified as safe for dependent, long-term use.

“Because your health and the health of your family rely upon your drinking water being of good quality, it’s important for you to get this right,” said Siegel, who said he hopes the data he has provided will help inspire a “citizen’s movement” to change the way drinking water is tested, approved and protected in the United States and elsewhere.

Troubled Water is Siegel’s second book on drinking water management. His New York Times bestseller, Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water Starved World, published in 2015, delved deeply into Israel’s national water management system and the mechanisms that have made the country a sought-after resource on drought management in an era of climate change.

A graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a successful entrepreneur and expert in patent law, Siegel said the book’s concept has been licensed in his name, but he is not charging royalties for its use. He said he wants to encourage other countries to use it as a template to inspire environmental change in their communities.

“[Every] country in the world is dealing with the same contaminants,” said Siegel. “They may have a different regulatory regime. Obviously, not everybody has the U.S. [Environmental Protection Agency] … but, whatever the local problems are, they are more similar than different.”

Both of Siegel’s books, as well as other resources, are available through his website, sethmsiegel.com.

Jan Lee’s articles and blog posts have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism, Times of Israel, as well as a number of business, environmental and travel publications. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.

On access to palliative care

The way a society treats its most vulnerable speaks volumes about its principles. There are few more vulnerable than those reaching the end of life. The physical, emotional, interpersonal and spiritual challenges confronted at life’s end are immense. Just as we expect our healthcare system to be there for us throughout our lives, so too must it support each of us – and our families – as we enter life’s final chapter.

Palliative care is a policy issue that has the potential to touch every family across the country. According to the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, only 15% to 30% of patients approaching the end of life have access to palliative care. With Canada’s population continuing to age, existing shortfalls in the system will only grow in the coming years.

While the federal government has taken the vital step of announcing additional federal funds for home care and palliative care, more can be done to ensure that no patient seeking palliative care is denied. This is why the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) has taken a lead role in mobilizing an interfaith coalition to urge Ottawa to take action on this issue.

Working with Catholic, Evangelical and Muslim allies, CIJA’s efforts achieved a key milestone in late 2017, when Parliament passed Bill C-277. This bill, which received strong support from MPs across party lines, called for the establishment of a national palliative care strategy. Our next step is to ensure that the national strategy that flows from Bill C-277 strengthens end-of-life care for all Canadians.

For this reason, in partnership with others, CIJA is organizing an expert working group to provide us with advice regarding Canada’s national palliative care strategy. An essential portion of these suggestions will be based on the patient and family experience, which is why I invite every reader to consider whether they have personal insights they can share with us.

Can you attest to the importance of high-quality palliative care, perhaps having had a loved one who received excellent end-of-life care? Or, do you have a family member who, despite seeking it, was unable to access appropriate hospice or palliative care? We want to hear your stories – and government policymakers need to hear how these policies affect real lives. Email [email protected] to share your experiences with palliative care.

It is an extraordinary act of chesed to care for a person in their final days of life. Our healthcare system, in which Canadians rightly take pride as evidence of our nation’s innate sense of kindness, must do better to ensure that those who need palliative care are never denied this essential service.

Steve McDonald is director, policy and strategic communications, at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA).