Fatalities on freeways vs. secondary roads

Posted on August 19, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

IRTAD (International Road Traffic and Accident Database)

The following IRTAD (International Road Traffic and Accident Database) data show the number killed per 1 000 000 000 vehicle kilometres for selected countries for the year 1997, according to road location

 

Country Label Year Location Injury Type Rate
Germany D 1997 A-level roads outside urban areas Killed 21.87
France F 1997 A-level roads outside urban areas Killed 21.11
France F 1997 Motorways Killed 5.71
Japan J 1997 Motorways Killed 5.03
United Kingdom UK 1997 Country roads Killed 10.93
United Kingdom UK 1997 Inside urban areas Killed 7.65
United Kingdom UK 1997 Motorways Killed 2.46
United Kingdom UK 1997 Outside urban areas Killed 8.39
United States of America USA 1997 A-level roads outside urban areas Killed 15.17
United States of America USA 1997 Country roads Killed 17.83
United States of America USA 1997 Inside urban areas Killed 7.32
United States of America USA 1997 Motorways Killed 5.48
United States of America USA 1997 Other roads outside urban areas Killed 20.67
United States of America USA 1997 Outside urban areas Killed 12.38
Posted in Toll roads | Leave a comment

What would happen if Canada didn’t protect its culture?

Posted on June 21, 1997 by Other News Sources

Catherine Keachie,Christopher Mau
The Next City
June 21, 1997

The Next City asked Catherine Keachie, president of the Canadian Magazine Publishers’ Association, and Christopher Maule, professor of economics and international affairs, to comment

Catherine Keachie

We’d be overrun with American “entertainment.” In fact, you may think that we already are. But for those who want to read Canadian magazines and books, who want to see Canadian movies and television, and who want to hear Canadian music — it’s out there. Without sensible policies that reflect the value we place on the expression of Canadian views and perspectives, though, that access to Canadian alternatives would disappear.

That giant sucking noise to the south? Ross Perot might recognize it — it’s the sound of Canadian jobs being sucked into the United States. Cheaply available American entertainment would wash over Canadian cultural industries like a flood-crested river, washing jobs downstream to the U.S. Writers and editors, directors and actors, musicians and producers — as well as the thousands of support staff and workers in related industries — would have no choice but to get out of the industry or follow the jobs south.

Get used to “huh” instead of “eh.” Those Canadian companies that manage to survive would do so by becoming repackagers of cheap American content. You could say that they’d become the cultural equivalent of a ventriloquist’s dummy: The mouth might move, but the words that came out wouldn’t be our own.

Ottawa? Isn’t that a suburb of Chicago? With Canadian voices effectively silenced, you could also say goodbye to an informed Canadian citizenry. Sure, the occasional reference to Canada might pop up on American television — the odd mention of Canadian football on the Simpsons, say, or jokes about Thunder Bay on David Letterman’s show — but intelligent analysis and exploration of Canadian themes, issues, and perspectives would be a distant memory without Canadian control over our cultural industries.

No culture, no country. Straightforward enough, I think. Because a country that loses its voice — especially a country that loses its voice by failing to defend its right to speak — ultimately loses its way.

Christopher Maule

Our cultural industries would be liberated. Content providers, instead of being shoehorned into a small linguistically divided domestic market, would have the incentive to capitalize on foreign markets. Their enhanced profitability would be a magnet for Canadian creativity and jobs. Moreover, creators in countries with small markets have more to gain by penetrating larger markets than do creators in large countries who penetrate smaller markets.

Our film and television producers already thrive abroad. Annual reports for 1995 show foreign revenues represent about half of the total take of Alliance, Atlantis, and Cinar, and three-quarters of Nelvana’s. Foreign markets are also important for MuchMusic, Trio, Newsworld, and Cineplex Odeon. Arguing for open access to foreign markets and for a restricted domestic market is a losing strategy that invites retaliation that harms both cultural and other industries.

Magazines would thrive too. Publishers like Harrowsmith Country Life, no longer forced to close their split-runs, would become more profitable and vibrant. Without protectionist postal rates, Canadians would read lower priced foreign magazines. The New Yorker, among others, has always published Canadian stories by renowned Canadians like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro.

What’s wrong with more Canadian role models? Look at Céline Dion, Alanis Morissette, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, Norman Jewison, Atom Egoyan, Garth Drabinsky, and Harlequin Books. They excelled internationally by being world class, not by being subsidized. With more open markets, our Canadian successes would do even better and be less compelled to leave Canada.

Government wouldn’t tell us what we could see. Studies show that content rules don’t help English language drama, and Canadians already prefer Canadian news, current affairs, and sports. If the government decided that certain markets, like children’s programming, were underserved, the CBC could best provide such material.

Posted in Culture | Leave a comment

Editorial – The ends of unemployment

Posted on June 21, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
June 21, 1997

 

Discussion

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, a popular song, “Brother can you spare a dime?” helped explain why there wasn’t enough work to go around: “Once I built a railroad, made it run / Once I built a tower, now it’s done” conveyed the notion that much of the work that society had to do was done. John Maynard Keynes, this century’s most influential economist, expressed a similar sentiment: “The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges,” he wrote, decrying the absence of investment in job creating projects. “[T]wo masses for the dead are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.” Jeremy Rifkin’s recent best-seller, The End of Work, warns of automation and the information society, and calls for a shortened work week to spread the remaining jobs around.

Governments also believe that society’s job-creating potential has run out of steam. Where once they considered full employment attainable, they now retreat to a concept called the Natural Rate of Unemployment. According to this concept, the natural rate of unemployment can be high due to the structure of labor markets. And given that structure, the natural rate is optimal for keeping inflation in check and the economy humming. An unemployment rate below the natural rate, in fact, becomes dangerous to the greater good. In Canada, many consider this natural rate to be eight and even nine per cent, making an unemployment rate of 10 per cent only one or two per cent too high.

Because governments now believe full employment to be neither attainable nor desirable, they see their job as preventing unemployment rates from dropping below the natural rate of unemployment. Yet the actual level of the natural rate is a mystery: Even Milton Friedman, the economist who developed the concept, believes that there is no way to determine it.

THERE SHOULD BE NO MYSTERY over why countries such as Canada find themselves with unconscionably high unemployment. Study after study show that the ranks of the unemployed are dominated by low-skilled workers. And in countries such as Canada, government policy — through the minimum wage and other mechanisms — outlaws low-paying jobs.

Regulations, particularly those affecting low-income occupations, share the blame in creating mass unemployment. A study of the United States found that approximately 10 per cent of all jobs, many in low-skilled areas such as taxi driving, hairdressing, street vending, and trash hauling, require a licence. Although the regulations aren’t designed to raise unemployment, government-organized taxi monopolies effectively shut out immigrants and students from a traditional entry into the job market; municipal ordinances prevent low-tech entrepreneurs from hawking their jewelry and T-shirts on sidewalks; and zoning rules stop single mothers who’d like to climb out of welfare from running hair salons out of their homes. While the well educated or highly motivated generally have little trouble meeting the regulations or finding their way around them, others feel overwhelmed or intimidated in the face of government bureaucracy and throw in the towel.

In our kind, compassionate, Canadian way, governments are saying that single mothers, our youth, our disabled, and others are better off on welfare than in low-income occupations. They’re saying that those who lack experience in our society should be denied low-paid entry-level positions that can qualify them for better jobs down the road. And in so doing, they exclude them from the job market, give them a welfare cheque and leave them to the company of their unemployed peers.

The economic costs of unemployment, serious though they are, are dwarfed by its social cost, a cost seen in legions of alienated youths; in once proud breadwinners now humiliated; in excuses for racism, as some groups are blamed for taking the jobs of others; in family breakups, depression, and other mental health costs; in loss of hope and purpose. Nothing should take priority over providing meaningful work to everyone desiring it; nothing is more destructive to the soul than feeling cast off, unable to contribute to society. Yet governments that impose a minimum wage undermine the social needs of the poor through this well-meaning attempt to protect the poor’s economic needs. And governments then undermine the poor’s economic needs by imposing hefty taxes on minimum wage earners, leaving them with a take-home pay almost $2 below the minimum wage.

ALTHOUGH GOVERNMENTS ACT OTHERWISE, the natural rate of unemployment is not a law of nature. It varies from country to country, even region to region, as well as varying over time. The natural rate has two components: the small amount of unemployment that arises when people are between jobs; and the large amount that results from regulations and other government policies that have created dysfunctional labor markets.

While the U.S. hardly exemplifies a well-functioning labor market, over the last two decades its labor market has become more open while ours has become more closed. While the U.S. decreased its minimum wage dramatically (relative to inflation), we increased ours. While the U.S. opened up its economy through deregulation — not just in major sectors such as communications but also in small sectors such as local taxi markets — Canadian governments clung to controls. While the U.S. has succeeded in the especially difficult task of opening up its economy to the low-skilled worker, Canadians have been denigrating low-skilled job opportunities by dismissing them as McJobs. The United Kingdom, with no minimum wage, has an unemployment rate two-thirds — and a youth unemployment rate half — that of the countries of continental Europe.

When governments these days vow to fight high unemployment, they usually mean the small levels of unemployment above the natural rate. Instead of tinkering with programs designed to fine tune our extraordinarily high unemployment rate down to the presumed natural rate of eight or nine per cent, governments should eliminate the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market.

Taking the following steps would quickly slash the unemployment rate and provide opportunities for a new generation of workers.

  • Abolish income taxes for low-income earners. With the federal and provincial government deficits about to be eliminated, many governments are considering tax cuts, particularly to those in high tax brackets to stimulate investment. But a greater social payoff would come from directing tax cuts to the poor, for whom income taxes can amount to thousands of dollars a year. Last year Canadians earning the minimum wage paid about $2,000. As John Maynard Keynes noted, workers know enough not to work when it doesn’t pay them to do so. Tax cuts to the poor are indispensable to transforming the welfare — and now workfare — culture that governments impose.
  • Exempt low-income earners from payroll taxes, which have escalated dramatically to the detriment of the poor. People don’t pay into the national pension and unemployment plans while they’re on welfare, and the self-employed low-income earner does not pay any unemployment insurance premiums, yet governments require the salaried poor to do so as a condition of employment — a requirement that forces up their wages without increasing their take-home pay and puts them beyond the hiring capabilities of many struggling businesses. Payroll taxes for low-income earners can amount to one-seventh of their take-home pay; if a minimum wage earner got to keep these tax monies — which have been raided by politicians over the years and no longer serve their intended purposes — he would have another $1,500 a year in his bank account.

    To kickstart the unemployed’s entry, and re-entry, into the workforce, the government should give all low-income earners the right to opt out of unemployment insurance and CPP. Without the burden of payroll deductions, those earning the minimum wage would receive an effective pay increase of 30 per cent, helping low-income families make ends meet, encouraging entrepreneurship among the poor, revolutionizing attitudes to the work ethic, and encouraging meaningful reform of the pension system. Last year, the take of governments from a minimum wage earner was often an astounding $3,500.

  • Once the various taxes on low-income earners are gone, abolish the minimum wage, or at least reduce it by the amount employees would now be saving in payroll deductions to ensure no person is worse off. About four per cent of the work force, most of them part-timers, earns the minimum wage, and of this four per cent, two-thirds are students. Of the balance, many are immigrants and other new entrants into the workforce who haven’t yet acquired the training and experience to command a higher wage. For the overwhelming proportion of permanent, full-time members of the workforce — approximately 99 per cent — minimum wage laws are irrelevant. Yet the very people who most need training and experience in permanent full-time jobs — those an employer would only hire at $1 or $2 an hour below the minimum wage — are shut out by virtue of it, preventing them from acquiring the skills and knowledge of an industry that would improve their prospects.

    THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is something vanishingly close to zero. In earlier times, when economies were based on the exploitation of finite resources, a plausible argument could be made that jobs based on those resources were finite. But in an age whose most valuable resource is information — a resource without limit — the notion of finite limits to work has become nonsensical.

    Jobs exist in limitless numbers, but as long as society places hurdles before the jobless — particularly legal bars to taking jobs — we’ll see books predicting the end of work. Remove the hurdles, and we’ll see book titles that read The End of Unemployment.

    Lawrence Solomon
    Editor

    Lawrence Solomon can be reached at: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

    Discussion

    ,

        Kingston, responds: July 7, 1997

    ,

      Director, Social Policy Research Unit, University of Regina, Regina, responds: July 30, 1997

    Todd E. Speck, Kingston, responds: July 7, 1997

    Thank you for the editorial on the end of unemployment.

    I am a 32-year old recent graduate of Queen’s in philosophy and political studies. I originally returned to school in response to unemployment and underemployment in a society that places tremendous emphasis upon a person’s credentials regardless of the applicability of these credentials to the vocation at hand (unfortunately for me, my current credentials are economically meaningless, but I do not regret the experience). Most of my contemporaries have suffered, along with me, from the increasingly rigid economic structure of this society, and I have been railing on for years about the topics that you discussed in your editorial.

    I would like to point out that the position which you take on the labor market would certainly have you branded as lacking compassion and also, most likely, as a “right-wing extremist” at institutions such as Queen’s (certainly in the philosophy and social science departments) as well as the mass media. Only recently, I had the displeasure of reading an article in the Citizen wherein the writer lamented the less-than-minimum-wage “exploitation” of women sewing at home for the Northern Reflections chain associated with Woolworths. Why comfortable middle-class girls and boys cannot understand that $4.50 earned (and retained) can be of tremendous benefit to both the individual and society, economically and socially, is a cultural mystery. We are, apparently, supposed to feel good about a “compassionate” society which forces the poor to clean up dog feces in public parks in order to receive bare subsistence funding (which workfare will amount to, no doubt), while we deny them the opportunity (among other denied opportunities) to flog apples, t-shirts, or trinkets on the street corner.

    At the moment, I can add little to your editorial, other than to note that not all the poor are “unskilled,” whatever that term is meant to imply, although most are certainly without advantageous social networks. I only wish to congratulate you upon a fine magazine and wish you all success.

    Dave Broad, Director, Social Policy Research Unit, University of Regina, Regina, responds: July 30, 1997

    Lawrence Solomon invokes “our kind, compassionate Canadian way” and argues that “governments should be trying to all but eliminate unemployment by attacking the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market.” But he goes on to say that we should do things more the way they do in the United States — which has less government regulation, lower minimum wages and has, in recent years, thrown people off welfare and into prisons.

    Mr. Solomon also devotes much of his discussion to the pseudo-scientific notion of a “natural rate of unemployment.” But he does not mention that unemployment rates are poor measures of labor-market participation, not to mention work activity. We know, for one, that the low U.S. unemployment rate masks proportionately more low-wage, low-quality jobs than we find in Canada and Europe (outside Britain). We kind, compassionate Canadians, says Mr. Solomon, dismiss “low-skilled job opportunities” as “McJobs.” Unfortunately, much labor market research shows that this is the reality for too many workers, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that Mr. Solomon would like to unleash among the poor through low-wage opportunities is a mirage produced by the post 1970s new-conservative social policy climate.

    Mr. Solomon liberally quotes John Maynard Keynes, who believed that the way to “eliminate unemployment by attacking the causes behind our dysfunctional labor market” was to recognize that it was the capitalist character of that labor market that government needed to regulate, not liberate as neo-conservatives argue. Mr. Solomon also opens his piece with a quote from E.Y. (Yip) Harburg’s song, Brother Can You Spare a Dime?, but does not mention that Harburg was a socialist who would have advocated even more government intervention than Keynes. Now, I imagine both Harburg and Keynes would agree, for example, that we have a very inequitable tax structure, but I doubt either would approve of their writings being used as backdrop for Mr. Solomon’s promotion of neo-conservative ideas.

    Lawrence Solomon replies

    Mr. Broad begins and ends with mischievous paragraphs — I did not suggest throwing people off welfare and into prison, and the political leanings of the composer of Brother Can You Spare a Dime? will help no reader understand either of our arguments. But his middle paragraph does raise relevant questions.

    Is someone better off in a low-paying job or on welfare? Mr. Broad, if I understand his criticism of McJobs, chooses welfare. Are the poor capable of starting at the bottom and working their way up? Mr. Broad calls my confidence in the capabilities of the poor a mirage.

    When Mr. Broad expressed his views, I found them paternalistic but plausible: Comprehensive Canadian studies of the movements of the minimum wage worker do not exist, making his speculation as good as anyone’s. But the raw data to prove or disprove Mr. Broad’s thesis did exist in Statistics Canada’s vaults, and I commissioned it to resolve the issue. Its results show Mr. Broad’s paternalism to be unwarranted.

    Statistics Canada found that very few members of the workforce — about one per cent — stay trapped in minimum wage work for as long as a year. The vast majority of minimum wage workers are either students (60 per cent) or the young (71 per cent), who quickly advance up the pay scale as they gain skill and experience. Immigrants – despite stereotypes of textile sweatshops and domestic drudgery – leave minimum wage status even sooner than others.

    Statistics Canada data aside, I am at a loss to understand Mr. Broad’s defence of the status quo and dislike for the thrust of my proposal — that the poor be exempt from the hefty income and payroll taxes that they now pay, allowing the minimum wage to be lowered without lowering the poor’s take-home pay. Todd Speck, on the other hand, seems to know exactly where Mr. Broad is coming from, even as he despairs at the cultural mystery that leads him and his soul mates into holding incomprehensible beliefs.

Posted in Culture, Regulation | Leave a comment

Discussion Group, Statistics on skid row

Posted on June 21, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Bart Campbell
The Next City
June 21, 1997

Close encounters among the homeless in Vancouver

I VOLUNTEER AT THE DOOR IS OPEN, A SKID ROW DROP-IN CENTRE located beside Oppenheimer Park, the moral centre of the downtown eastside of Vancouver. I thought I would learn a lot about compassion as a soup kitchen volunteer, but instead I learned a lot about human misery and hopelessness.

The downtown eastside makes up most of the V6A forward sortation area, which has the lowest median income ($5,900) of all 7,000 of Canada’s postal prefixes. Inevitably, a little of the squalor bleeds into the surrounding neighborhoods, like mine.

Once, while heating a pot of coffee on the stove, I heard loud, terrified screams coming from the alley outside my kitchen window. I thought someone was being murdered until I stepped out onto the back porch and saw a garbage truck driver laughing at a mucky looking hobo clutching a precariously tilted orange dumpster, 9 or 10 feet above the ground. The hobo shimmied down the truck’s steep windshield and gave the driver a forearm salute before he turned and strode indignantly away. The driver winked at me and then reactivated the hydraulic arms, tipping hundreds of pounds of trash into the noisy jaws of the enormous compactor.

I forgot all about that strange incident until a little while ago, when I was going through some clippings files from the sociology desk at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library and came across two frighteningly familiar news stories.

“Transient escapes from trash trap” (the Province, August 20, 1989) described how a homeless man survived for three hours, compacted inside a garbage truck, as it obliviously made its rounds. A garbage dump worker accidentally rescued him mere seconds before he was about to be dumped into a pit along with a few tons of garbage. He survived with only a broken arm and hundreds of scrapes and bruises.

The next guy wasn’t so lucky. “Dead man found in garbage” (the Province, September 27, 1990) described how a machine operator at the Burnaby Incinerator found a body dangling from a garbage scoop. The investigating police officer speculated that the partially crushed, unidentified corpse had probably fallen asleep in a dumpster and was compacted to death. The only clue to the poor man’s identity were the initials SB tattooed to his forearm.

In 1996, Vancouver Police found 118 “sudden death” victims on downtown eastside streets, many of whom remain anonymous, since seemingly they had no relatives or friends to report them missing. But I suppose nameless corpses should not be surprising in a city that is supposed to contain between 1,000 and 3,000 homeless, depending upon which government survey or newspaper report you believe.

When I asked Brother Timothy MacDonald, the director of The Door Is Open, just how many homeless people he felt wandered Lower Mainland streets he replied, “Hard core homeless? Probably less than 350.”

When I asked why his guess fell so short of official estimates, he offered a story from his days in Toronto in the early ’90s, when he asked a reporter for the Star where he got his estimate of 10,000 Metro homeless for a story in a long Sunday supplement. The reporter referred him to a government agency’s report. When Brother Tim called the agency, it cited the Salvation Army, who then referred him to another charity, which claimed that the original source was Brother Tim’s own office. Someone along the way had made the number up, and it has been misquoted ever since — an urban myth.

“That’s why I hate it when people try and count the homeless,” Brother Tim complained to me, “you just can’t quantitate misery like that.”

MOST OF THE MEN AND WOMEN YOU SEE IN THE SOUP KITCHENS LIVE IN single occupancy hotel rooms and rooming houses. The number one reason for going to soup kitchens is simply “no money.” The second most common reason cited is “no cooking facilities,” which is very sad when you realize that in downtown eastside hotels, a hot plate or an electric frying pan alone rates as cooking facilities, and every window sill is a refrigerator.

In 1995, the downtown eastside had 6,037 single room occupancy units and about half as many illegal boarding house rooms. Over my years at the drop-in centre, I have visited many of these places, and all my tours show the same results.

You just don’t get much for $350 a month. Fat, cigarette butt-colored cockroaches scurry over every surface of every building. The light bulbs in most of the stairwells are burnt out or missing; the toilets in the communal bathrooms on each floor are usually plugged; the shower stalls, black with mildew, have no privacy curtains; and all the rooms are small (usually five by nine feet, the same dimensions as jail cells, unintentionally making many of the tenants feel at home). Several of the rooms were windowless, and so it must have seemed a little like living in a tomb, or a sewer.

The landlords seem to take as much rent as they can and put next to nothing back into their decaying buildings. In the last decade, every time the welfare rates increased, the rents rose to match the increase, but when welfare payments dropped by $50 in 1995, the rents stayed put.

The hotels and rooming houses are often 100 per cent financed, and many of the landlords use out-of-country addresses. I met one owner of two skid row hotels on the loading dock of a large downtown department store, where he worked as a shipper. He bragged that, officially, he was the building manager and his mother in the Philippines was the landlord. I guess such legal sleight of hand is necessary in a business where nearly all the hotels sell welfare rent receipts for $50. (One Hastings Street hotel managed 47 welfare rent cheques for its 32 rooms.)

Vancouver health and welfare authorities just don’t seem very interested in policing the slumlords, perhaps because they expect the hotels and rooming houses will soon be demolished, or redeveloped. The downtown eastside has lost over 4,000 units of low-cost housing in little more than a decade, mostly around its softening borders. Five or six city blocks of hotels and boarding houses along False Creek (the downtown eastside’s southwestern corner) were bulldozed for Expo 86 — and when the fair ended, a solid wall of tall, glassy, expensive condominiums was built in their place. Strathcona (the neighborhood’s southeastern rim) is rapidly being gentrified by yuppies, and highrise condominiums are under construction in Gastown (the northwestern corner).

The exuberant real estate agents in the Gastown condominium sales offices claim that the downtown eastside will be completely redeveloped within five years. When I asked one of them where all the people in the bread lines across the street will go, he glibly replied, “Surrey,” (Vancouver’s largest suburb). I guess the people moving into the luxurious, high-security buildings believe that, as long as their panoramic views face outward, they can ignore the problems of poverty knocking on their back doors until they migrate somewhere else.

MOST OF THOSE PROBLEMS STEM FROM HOTEL ROOMS and boarding houses that are not safe for their residents. Police respond to distress calls at certain Hastings Street hotels four or five times a day, and every door is pockmarked with boot prints and crowbar scars from generations of break-ins.

One old pensioner complained to me, “I got robbed four times last month. The last time, they tied me up and whipped me with an extension cord until I told them where I hid my wallet.” And I’ve heard many similar stories about poor people robbing other poor people. The downtown eastside — “Zone 3” to the Vancouver Police — suffers four times the robberies of all the other Lower Mainland zones combined. The neighborhood houses less than 3 per cent of the city’s population but provides more than 20 per cent of its murder victims and 44 per cent of the drug arrests. Zone 3’s criminal code offence rate is an unbelievable 540 per 1000 people, compared to a citywide average of 202.

And, frighteningly, such dismal crime statistics ignore the fact that crimes are much less likely to even be reported in the downtown eastside because victims fear retaliation. The old man who complained to me about being whipped reported none of his recent robberies.

Another trait of poverty is the fear of losing things. Sometimes people will fight, even to the death, to protect their meagre possessions.

One evening at the drop-in centre, I watched a wiry, middle-aged rice wino pick the pockets of his best friend after he’d passed out. I wasn’t the only one who witnessed the theft.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one tough looking ex-con hissed.

“That’s low, man,” several other people muttered.

“Fuck off, and mind your own business,” the thief spat back. “You’re just pissed because you didn’t get to him first.”

Which was probably true.

But then his buddy regained consciousness, saw the crumpled $5 bill in his friend’s hand, and immediately guessed what happened. He let out a rage-filled bellow and charged after his pal, who was already running away. Cornered in the kitchen, the thief turned and started swinging both arms like windmills.

“Come on,” he shouted, “come on, and try it.”

He appeared willing to challenge all comers, yet I could also see the terror in his eyes. He had a coyote mentality — fantastically courageous and cowardly at the same time. He’ll run, but when caught, he’ll fight. In a heartbeat both men were rolling around on the floor, biting, and scratching each other.

But 15 minutes later, after we broke up their fight and Brother Tim and I had bandaged their wounds in separate corners, they were best buddies again. They left with their arms around each other’s shoulders, on their way to buy another bottle of ginseng wine with the disputed $5.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Brother Tim as we watched them leave, “they wanted to rob and kill each other a few minutes ago.”

“They’re friends of convenience,” Brother Tim suggested, “and that’s important. All human beings need someone to talk to.”

SLOWLY I GLIMPSED A LITTLE OF WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT and noticed that plain loneliness explains why many homeless and very poor people are attracted to cold, urban ruins. When you’re lonely and broke, the bright lights and noisy excitement of a big city give your misery company; the many random acts of violence on skid row sidewalks become welcome distractions — live theatre and spectator sports. Prostitutes frequently fight publicly with johns and pimps, and the Hastings Street pubs host bloody brawls every day, all against a soundtrack of sirens from vehicles rushing to some new emergency down the block. (In 1996, the fire department responded to 3,146 downtown eastside fires, the police to 7,042 major crime incidents.)

And then there are all those big city conveniences. One guy actually told me, “When I came to Vancouver and saw all the fruit and vegetables in Chinatown, just sitting there on the sidewalk, I knew I’d never have to starve. I saw a lot of opportunities in the city, so I stayed.”

But that’s over in Chinatown, and he didn’t know yet about the merchant vigilantes who keep a collective eye out for punks like him. Downtown eastside streets are crowded and dirty, the food sold there more expensive than anywhere else in the city, and it is usually stale and of inferior quality. Kraft dinners, ketchup, wieners, potato chips, and candy bars seem to be all the corner stores stock for dinner. But since the neighborhood has no supermarkets, most people graze in convenience stores where the only thing sold cheap is the rice wine bootlegged from under the counter.

Poverty has become a much more personal issue for me since I have started hanging out at the drop-in centre. Instead of commuting numbly through the downtown eastside as I used to, now I know that Pete lives under that loading dock ramp, and Bill lives in that alley doorway. I consider a cardboard box in a weedy, vacant lot — or a shallow cave carved into the steep, berry bush-covered embankments of the Grandview Railway Cut — to be a legitimate address. And I have learned to differentiate a little between the various styles of homelessness. Only a small portion of the homeless shuffle around pushing shopping carts stuffed with all their possessions.

“Squatting” is breaking open a door or smashing a window and moving into some vacant building for a few days. Most experienced squatters start by constructing barricades of heavy junk — car doors, bed springs, bicycle frames, freight pallets — making their newfound space difficult to get into, and easy to get out of. The more junk they pile up, the less easily they can be evicted. If it is a “good” squat, and they can stay a week or more, they will steal garden hoses and run them from the water mains.

“Squatting stands for nothing, except for a temporary roof over my head,” one 17-year-old runaway told me. “Squatting is not a protest action like some people pretend. For most people, being a squatter isn’t something they chose to be.”

Many others live in vans and cars that barely run. They are forever limping from parking spot to parking spot, as the police harass them and move them along. And then there must be hundreds of couch surfers who are perpetually staying with friends and relatives: “Just for a couple of days,” or until “Welfare Wednesday,” or “the GST cheque comes in.”

For the truly down and out, there are several emergency shelters in the downtown eastside, but never quite enough cots to go around. During their busiest, coldest times of January and February, the downtown eastside shelters turned away 232 people in 1993, 338 in 1994, and 636 in 1995. And even if you are lucky enough to get a bed, the shelters are not restful places to sleep in, because the men who stand in line every evening outside The Look Out (40 beds), Triage (28 beds), The Crosswalk (25 sleeping bags on the concrete floor), Catholic Men’s Hostel (80 beds), or Dunsmuir House (10 emergency cots inside the Salvation Army cafeteria) are often exhausted, mentally ill wanderers, or sick, delirious, substance abusers.

In response to the increasing visibility of filthy homeless people on the streets, Vancouver city hall finances one important downtown eastside community service. At The 44 (44 East Cordova), people can get free delousing, showers, and clothes washing. The staff gives every visitor zip-lock bags containing shampoo and soap and disposable razors — and it rarely runs out of hot water or clean towels. The 44 even washes and folds your clothes while you’re bathing, and it’s open from 9 till 9 every day, so there is hardly any waiting in lines. Vancouver won’t house the homeless, but they’ll bend over backward to keep them clean and tidy looking.

WHILE TALKING TO HOMELESS PEOPLE, YOU SOON REALIZE THAT all those years of living completely in the present makes chronology difficult for them. They often can’t tell you if the event they are describing occurred last year, or five days ago. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence.

“And such here-and-now philosophies can be very frustrating,” Brother Tim complained to me once, as he told me a story about giving a wool blanket to someone who was sleeping on the steps of the drop-in centre.

“It’s hard enough to have nothing to give a homeless person but an old blanket,” he told me. “But I got kind of pissed off when I opened up in the morning and saw that the blanket had been discarded in a puddle in the curb lane.”

And then, the same guy came back that night and asked Brother Tim for another blanket.

“Why didn’t you keep the blanket I gave you last night?” Brother Tim complained, “or at least you could have left it by the door so I could have brought it in, and it wouldn’t have been ruined, and I’d have something to give you now.”

“But I didn’t know I’d need it,” the man explained.

“Do those guys in the sandwich line ever think about their future?” Brother Tim wondered aloud.

The best insight into the shattered souls of the homeless that I ever heard came from one sandwich line patron who told me, “If you take the time to think about it, you gotta realize that homeless people are not stupid, cause nobody stupid is gonna survive on the street. You gotta be smart and strong when you’re homeless.”

He has been living “outdoors” ever since he lost his “good” factory job when the auto parts plant he worked in for 12 years closed and moved south. His name is Paul, and he is that type of quiet little bum nobody pays much attention to, even on skid row. When he talks to you, he never looks in your eyes; he peaks around you. Paul is so lonely, he is almost invisible; missing out on so much of life, living at the fringes, away from the action, unable to get through the riddles of his life.

Like so many others, Paul has become a non-person, his life cancelled retroactively, like an annulled marriage. One day he “disappeared” from his life and was slowly forgotten by his former friends, co-workers, family.

“I chose to live this way,” he told me once, “and now there is no way home for me.”

And then he wept as he told me how he had left his wife and mother in Hamilton when the unemployment insurance ran out. He actually believed when he abandoned them that he’d find a good job in a B.C. bush camp or a mine, send for his wife, and send money to his mother. But all his leads turned out to be rumors; he just started drifting, and he stopped writing postcards.

“That was about six years ago,” he told me. “I wonder what happened to them?”

IN VANCOUVER, THE ONLY CONSISTENT PUBLIC REACTION TO POVERTY is just the same as in most Canadian cities — we ignore it — which almost guarantees that some people will take advantage of poor people.

One night as I was walking home from the drop-in centre, I saw a man loudly arguing with Lil, a bag lady I know. I thought he was mugging her until I recognized his white pick-up truck parked at the curb. It belongs to a salvage company that cruises up and down the city’s alleys in search of shopping carts, which it returns to supermarkets for a small bounty.

“You can’t have it,” Lil was screaming as he overturned all her belongings into the gutter, “it’s mine!”

“Shad-up!” he snarled. “It don’t belong to you. You stole it.”

“But it’s mine,” Lil feebly protested as she stubbornly grasped the wire cage as he tried to lift it onto the back of his truck. He swore and gave Lil a shove and she tumbled over like a sack of rags.

“Stop it!” I yelled from across the street, and rushed over to help Lil up.

“Mind your own business,” the man muttered.

But as he tried to toss the shopping cart onto his flatbed again, I pulled it back down. I couldn’t help myself.

“That belongs to her!” I hissed.

Only then did he seem to notice that I was a foot taller and at least 80 pounds heavier than him.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then get in your truck and leave,” I shouted.

“Look, I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Kick his ass,” Lil hooted, “kick his greedy little ass!”

“I don’t want to call the cops, but I will,” he muttered uneasily as he backed away.

“Go ahead,” I dared him.

And I guess he decided that the $10 Lil’s shopping cart would earn wasn’t enough to fight me for, and he angrily jumped into his truck and drove away.

“Does he do this to you often?” I asked Lil as I picked up her things, and she repacked them into her shopping cart.

“A couple times a week,” she complained, “whenever he finds me.”

“But can’t you report him to the police?” I asked her. “I mean, he assaulted you, I saw him do it, I’ll even be a witness.”

“What’s the difference,” Lil shrugged. “If it doesn’t kill you, I guess it makes you stronger,” and then she shuffled off with her rag- and cardboard-stuffed shopping cart.

SKID ROWS ARE THE DRAIN TRAPS OF SOCIETY, A MUCKY PLACE where eccentric people congeal, the only stable home for all the stubborn men and women who have slipped all the way through the solitary, obsessive grooves of life. Their sustained poverty cuts to the bone, and Canadian skid row landscapes have become so demoralizing and dispiriting, so numbing and humiliating that the lives shaped there really do become different. I don’t think that many of the fire and brimstone missionaries to the poor understand that.

Christian charities become established in skid row neighborhoods like the downtown eastside because there is a large need for them, and because they sincerely want to help in some small, Christ-like fashion. Creating and maintaining soup kitchens is a compassionate response to the shock of seeing hungry, homeless people on the streets — people who have so visibly fallen through the broad cracks of our welfare system.

But making the poor attend even the most benign religious service before feeding them, insults them. Harsh words like “sin” and “fornicator” imply that the poor deserve their fate — and by focusing on poor people’s bad behavior, the charities ignore the poverty causing the behavior and blame the victims. After all, who among us wouldn’t fornicate more casually, drink too much, and do hard drugs after having lived for long periods in such desperate poverty, without hope, with little faith in human institutions?

I think we overrely upon puritanical and statistical silhouettes of the poor because they help make a long line of hungry men queuing outside a soup kitchen seem a little less threatening, a little less like an angry mob gaining momentum for violence. And because hopeless statistics allow us to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as we drive by bread lines and do nothing.

And consequently, the poor know us better than we know them, and become the beast hidden within our jungle of statistics and preconceptions.

THE WORST PART ABOUT LIVING IN POVERTY IS BEING IGNORED, even in your own neighborhood. They film a lot in the downtown eastside because directors like the gritty reality of the disintegrating landscape, but they never hire any of the locals as extras. Not because they are unreliable, but because the casting people think they look inauthentic.

Vancouver enforces special movie-making bylaws regarding eating in plain sight of passers-by when filming in the downtown eastside. The city feels it is too cruel to eat catered hot food in front of starving people, but it is all right for them to smell it cooking.

There’s lots of other examples of government stupidity about poverty. The Good Samaritan Bill was recently thrown out of the B.C. Legislative Assembly. It was meant to allow hotels, restaurants, and convention centres to donate their excess food to food banks, Meals on Wheels, and skid row soup kitchens. All the soup kitchens pledged to purchase industrial freezers and fridges, take public health courses, and suffer regular inspections to remove the risk of food poisoning and the fear of litigation by the restaurateurs.

But then a well-intentioned “poverty rights” lawyer derailed the bill when he insisted, “Just because people are poor, you can’t deny them the right to sue if they get sick from the food that is served them.” And so the restaurants continue to throw their excess food into padlocked dumpsters, while the rest of us volley the blame back and forth and argue about who is really responsible for feeding the hungry and giving shelter to the homeless.

I VOLUNTEER AT THE DOOR IS OPEN BECAUSE I KNOW all that separates me from the homeless men and women I serve is a couple of pay cheques. After all the sad, true stories I’ve heard at the drop-in centre, my psyche’s us-and-them walls are not as tall as those of my middle-class friends.

Sometimes when I watch an ancient bag lady feasting on a sandwich of stale bread and gamey luncheon meat, I feel a little envious of her grateful here-and-now dependence upon providence. I am slowly learning the Christian values of giving and of open-hearted, non-judgmental acceptance, and also learning to appreciate the human talent for adaptation. I am learning to see the homeless as individuals who have been inventive in their struggles for survival.

I don’t know why that three years ago I spontaneously pulled my mountain bike up to the curb at the front of a long line of hungry men and asked a chubby man with a broom if he needed any help. Perhaps I signed on because I wanted to feel needed, or I wanted to make my own life more meaningful, or for some other equally selfish reason.

But I slowly learned just to sit still and let the world of the poor flow around me to get a sense of its moods and rhythms, and to ask questions, just as in any other world.

Soup kitchens are popular not because of their free food, but because they are one of the only places left for the poor urban nomad to find social acceptance — sort of like warm public living rooms where they are never treated as specimens of some disease entity. In soup kitchens, no one stares at people who may be pacing, laughing out of context, or talking to themselves. Everyone at a soup kitchen table is included in the general conversation — no matter how shy, drunk, insane, or obnoxious — perhaps because to have a problem in common is as close to love as some poor and homeless people are likely to get.

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Discussion Group, Honk if you like city

Posted on June 21, 1997 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Bob Reguly
The Next City
June 21, 1997

“IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME” is the common lament of communities that adopted a few Canada geese in the 1960s to bring picturesque wildlife to their urban jungles.

The geese took on the task with such lust that their numbers have soared to the hundreds of thousands in southern Ontario, where the problem is most acute. Regina started with just one pair, Hiawatha and Queenie, and now has 30,000 nibbling to death all the greensward, including the flower beds at the Legislature. Vancouver imported a dozen from an Ontario wildlife refuge, and now 15,000 ravage the Fraser valley.

The motivation was noble. After all, the Branta canadensis maxima is a national symbol. What more stirring than the plaintive honk of a vee of geese winging north to signal the arrival of spring and, later, southward to remind us that winter is nigh?

“In retrospect, nobody foresaw the population explosion,” says Rick McKelvey, associate manager of the Pacific Wildlife Centre in Vancouver. In cities, geese numbers explode after 20 years, increasing at 30 per cent a year and becoming nuisances: Once settled, the birds won’t go away. For a while, the municipalities bestowed their surplus geese on unsuspecting towns, but now nobody, nowhere, wants them. The search is on for other solutions.

The timid bureaucrats of Canadian cities are watching with quiet approval the brave experiment in the twin Minnesota cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul: population 25,000 Canada geese. There, too, a few pairs in the early 1960s grew to 500 in 1968, and, had many not been exported to unsuspecting states, they would number 100,000 today. Last year, to general approval, the twin cities slaughtered some of their geese and donated the meat to food banks. The state Department of Natural Resources, surprised at the lack of public outcry, plans to corral and process another 1,800 geese this fall to trim the twin cities’ goose number further.

Minnesota found that the food banks’ demand vastly outstrips supply; on a 1-to-10 scale, consumers rated the product, averaging seven pounds dressed, a tasty seven with a 100 per cent approval rating for bringing more of them to the table. Goose consumption gets a clean bill of health. Geese don’t get stuffed with hormones or other chemicals, and analyses find no detectable residues of PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, or mercury. But the slaughterhouse program does cost — bird for bird, nearly double that of turkey — because it is illegal, both in the United States and Canada, to sell migratory game birds. So taxpayers must bear the cost of capturing the birds during their summer moulting period, clipping their wings to prevent airborne escape, fattening them in grassy enclosures, and slaughtering them in the fall.

Birth of a problem

THE CITY OF REGINA WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO FALL PREY TO the goose. A local naturalist beguiled city fathers into settling a pair in the 2,300-acre Waterfall Park in 1962. “People thought it would be nice for people to see the wildlife,” says park spokesperson Irene Pisula. Local farmers donated grain to feed their offspring during the winter. Now about 3,000 of the beggars overwinter, with some 30,000 lollygagging in the summers, and signs are posted to discourage people from feeding them.

For each of the last 15 years, Regina has rounded up 300 to 500 of the geese and trucked them 500 miles north to the remote Cumberland area. But still their numbers keep growing, in spite of a program of addling — shaking eggs vigorously to kill the fetus, then putting the eggs back in the nest to stop geese from laying more. “We’ve discussed having them processed by Hutterite colonies, who raise a lot of geese, but some people think eating Canada geese is too radical a solution,” says Pisula.

In Vancouver, the original Canada geese, airlifted from Kortright Waterfowl Park near Toronto for planting in three local park refuges, now number about 15,000 — half of them in the Greater Vancouver urban environment. “The Fraser valley has reached its carrying capacity for the birds,” says goose expert McKelvey. Some suggest relocating the birds up the valley where they can be shot by fall hunters. (Minnesota had encouraged the hunting of Canada geese by increasing the daily bag limit to five from the previous two.) The geese, however, are smart. As soon as the shooting starts, they hightail it back to the safety of the cities. Fraser valley communities have talked about slaughtering and eating the geese, but the expense and fear of animal rights groups have iced the idea for now.

Meanwhile, some people have taken it on their own to reduce the 1,500 Canada geese hanging around Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s downtown Stanley Park. “Recent immigrants are helping themselves to the protein,” McKelvey says of midnight raiders who have been sighted carrying off lumpy garbage bags whose contents honk in protest. Area municipalities now addle eggs, an ironic development. When officials first introduced the birds, they encouraged fecundity by removing new-laid eggs, tricking the parent birds into laying up to 30 eggs a year. Removed eggs were hatched in incubators.

The Vancouver goose population is still increasing, partly because Vancouver no longer exports up to 1,500 birds a year to the interior cities of Penticton, Kelowna, Vernon, and Kamloops. “There’s virtually no place in British Columbia you can put them where they don’t already have a problem with Canada geese,” McKelvey says.

Winnipeg, Regina, and Victoria are similarly astonished at the burgeoning of their introduced geese. The problem is just beginning in the Thousand Islands and in Quebec towns along the lower St. Lawrence river. One transatlantic goose export — to Buckingham Palace — met deep ingratitude. The Queen, it turned out, was not amused. Her groundskeepers reacted with alacrity to the befouling horde and simply wrung their necks, leaving a few alive as visible symbols of Commonwealth solidarity. Surprisingly, in a nation of protective societies for practically anything that flies, swims, or crawls, there was no outcry.

BACK IN 1968, BIOLOGISTS AT ONTARIO’S MINISTRY OF NATURAL RESOURCES also figured that the urbanized shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario needed some wildlife reminder of bygone days and also ignored the consequences of bringing the giant Canada goose — which had been hunted to virtual extinction by the 1920s — back from the brink.

The ministry plucked a few survivors from Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo, collected others from private aviculture hobbyists and “re-introduced” the geese — two dozen in all — to the Toronto region waterfront. Trouble was, the new domicile had never been the historic habitat of the big, plump bird with the nasty disposition. But the geese liked what they saw: plenty of park and golf club grass to feed on, few predators, and an abundance of nesting sites. As wild game birds, they were untouchable under the law. They decided to stay.

What with four to six eggs per couple — Canada geese are monogamous — those pioneering few grew to 100,000 in a decade, to 200,000 by 1987, and to 300,000 today along the shoreline from Sarnia to Oshawa. Depending on the local habitat, they now double in three to five years. Although most retreat in winter, taking a lazy, short flight just south of the Great Lakes, tens of thousands hang in year-round, are fed cereals and bread dispensed by kindly retirees and stale goods dumped by bakeries.

Canada geese have poor digestive systems, requiring them to eat almost constantly. They expel their undigested remains with metronomic regularity, about once every seven minutes while feeding, convincing many that the geese have worn out their welcome. “The main beef is that parks are ruined by their defecations, with parents complaining that kids can’t use the parks — aggressive geese protecting their nests take off after small kids — and farmers say that the geese raid their crops,” says Rick Pratt, Ontario region manager of habitat enforcement for the Canadian Wildlife Service, the government agency in overall charge of Canada geese under the Canada-U.S. Migratory Birds Convention Act. Geese convert lush public greensward to mud flats as they eat the grass down to the roots. A recent report for the Toronto-area Waterfront Regeneration Trust calls the bird “a significant wildlife nuisance” that pollutes shoreline waters with fecal coliforms, that is mainly responsible for the pollution of popular Grenadier Pond in Toronto’s west-end High Park, and that wreaks havoc on farm crops around Toronto. It blames Canada geese for 24 deaths and $200 million in aircraft damage in North America last year.

At one time, the agency annually rounded up the geese on the Toronto Islands, shipping them by chartered aircraft and truck to municipalities in Michigan, Minnesota, and New York state that had naively put in requests. The export program has ended — the last shipment, 750 birds, last year went to New Brunswick as hunting stock. But even it said, no more, thanks. With the collect-and-ship program ended, visitors to Toronto’s most popular outdoor recreation area can expect to emulate Fred Astaire in traversing the islands’ parklands.

THE GEESE REFUTE THE ADAGE THAT THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a free lunch. They know that a steady handout enables one to stay put. As wildlife technician Gordon MacPherson of the Metropolitan Toronto Region Conservation Authority puts it: “Canada geese are opportunistic. Why fly to James Bay where it’s cold, there are predators and the food’s not as good when you can hang out in the Toronto area? The winters are shorter, there’re no predators, and the people feed you.”

In contrast to the goose surplus down south, Indian settlements in the far north worry about a decline in their indigenous goose flocks, a different subspecies that migrates to the James Bay lowlands. These migrants use perilous flyways through predator-filled boreal forests that skirt Southern Ontario far to the east and west, whereas the Toronto geese fly in armadas north to James Bay in late May and early June through lowlands that offer long sight lines. The plentiful Toronto geese then take food from the mouths of the local, smaller species of Canada geese.

Crowding themselves out of Lake Ontario waterfront land, the Toronto welfare geese, when flying north to inland conservation areas, have become a traffic hazard at some of the highway interchanges. The geese are also a hazard off the road — when nesting, they chase dogs and attack people who sometimes fall and break a leg when running away. To curb the aggressive hordes, the conservation authority is taking some habitat-modifying steps. Since geese fear tall grass that may hide a fox or a coyote, the authority is planting shrubs and letting the grass grow high along the water’s edge to limit their grazing area.

Greater Toronto Area communities already spend $350,000 a year on goose management. In Mississauga, a trained sheep dog harasses the birds away from picnic spots, whereas other municipalities oil their olive-colored eggs: The geese try to hatch the suffocated offspring until it is too late to lay another clutch. But to start a population decline, at least 72 per cent of the eggs have to be destroyed. Performing vasectomies on geese is effective — the males don’t cheat on their mate — but too costly at $130 a bird.

The waterfront trust report recommends oiling eggs, plus modifying open spaces as deterrents, plus harassment of feeding geese (fireworks, non-toxic chemical repellents on grass), plus hefty fines on people who feed the geese, plus “harvesting” the geese for human consumption. Though the cost of donating geese to food banks is expensive — $25 to $30 a bird — it could pay in the long run, if a British report is at all applicable here: it pegs the damage Canada geese do to London parks at a hefty $85 per bird per year.

Across the country, the emerging goose consensus says, “eat the geese,” either through the slaughter-and-donate solution or by relaxing hunting restrictions. The Canadian Wildlife Service favors chasing the birds from the inner cities to the boonies, where they can be hunted, and increasing the bag limits.

As the Minnesota summary report of its slaughter program states: “Processing of geese for human consumption has proven to be an accepted and effective technique for nuisance goose control.” In less bureaucratic language: Bon appétit!

City folk are getting gulled, too

WHILE CANADA GEESE ARE A MAJOR HASSLE IN SOME PARTS of the country, the ring-billed gull is a bigger — and growing — problem from the prairies to the Maritimes. It, too, was once close to extinction because settlers ate their eggs and sought their plumage for bedding. To avoid its disappearance, the Canadian government protected it in 1916, and the gull increased in number at a desultory pace until the 1960s. Then, thanks to man’s greed, this yellow-footed gull with the black band around its bill became a pest everywhere.

The population explosion followed a seemingly unrelated chain of events. First, commercial overfishing and chemical pollution almost wiped out the Great Lakes’ trout and pickerel (the blue pickerel in Lake Erie became extinct), leading to a great increase in alewives and smelt, their prey. The gulls then fed on the alewives and smelt, producing offspring galore. But the feast would not last for long. Governments soon introduced hatchery salmon to please sport fishermen. These big Pacific fish, engorged to 40-pound trophies, muscled out the gulls, forcing them to look far afield for sustenance. They found it in the dinner leftovers tossed into landfill sites and fast-food dumpsters. Many gulls left the country for the city.

Omnivorous and opportunistic, gulls begat more chicks than the garbage dumps could support. So they began raiding farms, eating cherries off the trees and tomatoes ripening on the vine — their favorite farm foods — plus corn, peas, beans, and even onions. They learned to roost in trees, a first for the species. The Canadian Wildlife Service notes: “The diverse diet is the result of the ring-billed gull’s agility and adaptability: It can plunge dive for fish, hawk for insects in the air, follow the plow looking for earthworms and grubs, scrounge french fries at fast-food outlets, hunt for voles in the fields, and forage at garbage dumps amid dump trucks and bulldozers.” The ring bills are supremely adaptable, unlike their kin species, the herring gulls, whose numbers are declining because they stick to eating fish.

The ring bills also ate small songbirds, wiped out the piping plover at Long Point on Lake Erie by raiding their nests, and elbowed aside the long-settled colonies of common and Caspian terns. The ravishing hordes then spread northward past Sudbury and New Liskeard, to northwest Lake Nipigon at the beginning of the 1990s, then even farther west to Lake of the Woods, and downstream to Quebec and the gulf.

ONE CANADIAN WILDLIFE SERVICE REPORT STATES the gulls’ hazards to human health include histoplasmosis, caused by a fungus inhaled from the spores in fecal deposits, botulism, which is transmitted by contact with gull feces, and salmonellosis, caused by a bacteria spread by gulls feeding at garbage dumps and sewage disposal sites. Gulls can also cause swimmer’s itch. The gulls are natural carriers of schistosome trematodes, a parasite expelled in their excretions. After the parasite burrows into a human, it encysts and dies, leaving tiny, itchy red sores.

On occasion, offices in Oshawa and Nanticoke have closed for the day — fumes from gulls’ defecations, sucked into air intakes, caused workers to gag.

“In Ontario,” says the CWS report, “the gulls pose a threat to flight safety; cause ruinous damage to crops; are a potential health hazard to people, cattle and fowl; and are an unacceptable nuisance in many parks, marinas, beaches, playgrounds, and other public areas.”

In the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence river region down to New Brunswick, the gulls have exploded from an estimated 27,000 in 1960 to nearly 1.5 million today. In Toronto, the ring-billed gull soared from 20 nesting pairs in 1973 to 60,000 pairs today at Tommy Thompson Park. Aware that the problem can only get worse, federal, provincial, and municipal authorities have been meeting to discuss bird control solutions for the Greater Toronto Area, home to the nation’s most acute goose-gull problem. Like the goose, the ring bills are a protected species, and it is illegal to harm them.

AIRPORTS HIRE FALCONERS TO SCARE AWAY THE GULLS; factories mount sentinel plastic owls and erect near-invisible fishing monofilament grids to discourage alighting; farmers use banger, screamer, and whistler pyrotechnics to harass the birds, or just blow them away.

At Metropolitan Toronto’s huge Britannia dump, officials tried a tactic to deter the gulls, with some initial success. Officials captured and caged several gulls to frighten away others with their cries of distress. But the imprisoned gulls, discovering they liked the regular meals dished out by the dump staff, soon settled into contented silence. For a while, the custodians tried to replace the caged gulls with batches of fresh ones; then they gave up in a flurry.

At Toronto city hall, authorities tried fishing lines to deter the winged beggars from speckling its broad esplanade with their droppings and from hassling lunch-hour brown baggers. But the gulls soon learned to land outside and stroll in. Ontario Place, Toronto’s sprawling waterfront summer playground, has installed a monofilament grid, like a giant gill net, to dissuade the raucous, ever-hungry gulls.

At Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit, until recently home to the world’s second-biggest ring-billed gull colony after Big Sur, California, officials tried stuffed real owls, but they weren’t as effective as a pair of coyotes who have taken up residence there with obvious relish. Then conservation authority staff used falcons and pyrotechnics to herd the birds into ever-smaller areas. It succeeded for a while: the count dropped to below 50,000 pairs after hitting a high of 80,000 in the mid-1980s, but with government cutbacks, the number soared last year to about 60,000. In any event, harassing the gulls only succeeds in shunting them elsewhere. Some Leslie spit gulls muscled in on the docile mallards at the Toronto horticultural showplace, Edwards Gardens, to the distress of the society ladies who frequent the place.

Last year, the Canadian Wildlife Service, which administers the gull protection program on behalf of the federal minister of environment, granted 69 permits to kill gulls in southern Ontario, most to tomato growers, with 10 permits aimed at gulls nesting on office building or factory roofs where they’re safe from their natural predators — foxes, raccoons, coyotes, great horned owls, skunks which eat their eggs, and garter snakes that swallow newly-hatched young.

The wildlife service advocates gunning the gulls down, “Many wildlife organizations would probably agree to a [gun] control program if it were properly justified, biologically sound, reasonably humane, and efficiently run,” its report states. More realistically, it notes that “It would be impossible to run a gun control program without criticism from some animal rights movements.”

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