Heather Conn Blogs

 

                                                                                                                       — Heather Conn photo

Oh, that lawless lettuce and suberversive zucchini. Those red apple rebels. Did you know that new regulations in British Columbia, Canada strike at the heart of local farming and produce markets? They are taking the small-scale producer out of the province’s food-production system, leaving room for agribusiness and government slaughterhouses to dominate the market. So much for supporting the 100-mile diet.

 

The B.C. government now requires vendors at farmers’ markets  to submit applications, recipes, and completed lab tests before they can sell their food at market. Essentially, this makes anyone who peddles produce from their garden, whether it’s organic or not, an outlaw.

 

The province’s Meat Inspection Regulations (MIR), effective since Sept. 30, 2007, stipulate that only meat slaughtered in provincially or federally licensed facilities can be sold for human consumption. In other words, all B.C. farmers who raise cattle, chicken or sheep destined for family dinner tables, and sell such livestock from their property, do so illegally. That’s outrageous.

 

Even though I don’t support the mass slaughter of animals for human food and don’t eat such meat, I still believe that farmers have a right to sell directly what they produce. I come from several generations of dairy and produce farmers in Ontario. My sister and her husband raised and sold beef cattle in Quebec for years until it no longer remained financially viable.

 

British Columbia’s regulations have resulted in long-standing, high-quality meat producers in the province losing their farm status and suffering dramatic losses in revenue. Suddenly, their related equipment is useless. One former sheep producer says:

 

“I had 110 ewes in Langley and maintained 58 ewes in Kelowna since 1999. I sold all my lambs locally and could have sold more if I  had them. 

“In the fall of 2005, I sold off all my sheep as there was no way I could operate under the draconian and ridiculous new meat regulations introduced by our Provincial government. There are no qualifying slaughter houses in our area and it is not economical to transport the lambs to the Fraser Valley.”

 

The B.C. regulations are supposed to protect consumer health, presumably following the hysteria over mad cow disease and subsequent efforts to prevent the sale of affected meat and cattle. Yet, small, organic framers who raise free-range animals without antibiotics — the more healthy choice for buyers — cannot sell their meat under these new laws.

 

Today’s eco-savvy consumers want to eat low-stress, humanely treated animals. They want to buy fresh, organic produce from outdoor markets in their neighbourhood. But B.C.’s regulations now ensure that more animals than ever will die in huge slaughterhouses, with animals mixed from different farms. There w ill now be more people handling this meat, risking greater chance of disease transfer. Any meat recalls will now involve tons of meat, rather than the mere pounds that might have resulted from a small-scale producer.

 

The implementation of the MIR regulations stands in total contradiction to the provincial government’s own policies of climate-change initiatives, green and sustainable communities, and reduced vehicle emissions. This new system demands the transportation of livestock and produce over greater distances and increases concerns over food security.

 

What happened to those “Buy local” campaigns? A B.C. medical health officer said in a 2005 annual report:

 

“Buying locally produced food also makes it easier for consumers to trace exactly where their food comes from and how it is produced, improving confidence in the safety of the food system.”

 

At the federal level, the Codex Alimentarius is an attempt at similar but vastly more far-reaching regulations, which would make local vitamins illegal, for instance. Currently, Codex covers most of the food consumed in Canada; we’re one of 176 countries, including the U.S., under its domain.

 

In theory, Codex food safety guidelines aim to protect consumers. In reality, they serve to boost the profits of, and further entrench and legitimize, corporate products made by the pharmaceutical, pesticide, biotechnology, and chemical industries. Find out more at www.codexalimentarius.net and www.saveournaturalhealthproducts.ca.

 

 

Many thanks to the Farm Food Freedom Fighters on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast for providing the core of this information. One member, an earnest senior, told me that their group had difficulty registering the URL for their website because the web provider thought they were terrorists.

 

How can you help?

• Write your local MLA.
• Write to Premier Gordon Campbell: premier@gov.bc.ca or Room 156, Parliament Buildings, Victoria, V8V 1X4
• Write to provincial Health Minister Hon. George Abbott: hlth.health@gov.bc.ca
• Write to federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, minister_ministre@hc-sc.gc.ca 
• Buy from local farmers at neighbourhood markets.

To find out how people in the U.S. are fighting back against similar regulations, please visit www.healthfreedomusa.org

 l

A police officer tasers a homeless man who refuses to leave his temporary, tarp-covered dwelling on a city sidewalk, resulting in the man’s death. A crack dealer in a wretched downtown eastside hotel offers to pimp out his female friend so that she can pay him back for the drug money she borrowed. A clerk at a government housing office can find no record of a homeless woman’s application for rental accommodations, even though she’s made repeat submissions for the past seven months.

 

These dismal events, taken from real-life experiences of people who live on the streets, appear as provocative, grim scenarios in the Headlines Theatre play After Homelessness. Two weeks of performances at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver, BC and the Holy Trinity Cathedral in New Westminster have produced a compelling production, guaranteed to rip away the don’t-get-involved complacency of any middle-class viewer.

 

The play features six main characters, performed by actors who have all known homelessness in their own lives. These range from Nico (Justine Goulet), a young, dreadlocked rebel with a punk attitude and a desire to remain drug-free, and Shawna (Sandra Pronteau), a crack-addicted thief, to Bob (Kevin Conway), a near-broke man on lithium who finds solace in alcohol after eviction from his condo.

 

In another play, these characters could well appear as crusty stereotypes, eliciting pity or even dismissal from a contemptuous audience. But Headlines Theatre bills itself as “Theatre Making Policy”; as artistic director David Diamond tells us from onstage, it’s not enough just to write and perform a play about homelessness.

 

As a society, we need to come up with positive outcomes  for those who battle daily with homelessness and any accompanying combination of addiction or mental illness. How can social solutions reflect compassion, respect, and dignity when city authorities too often treat the homeless like a blight that deserves no cure?

 

The play After Homelessness invites audience-members to think beyond knee-jerk responses and bureaucratic models that degrade people and their situations. Instead, it offers viewers the chance to respond immediately, from their guts. How?

 

By yelling “Stop!” any time during the production when they can relate to a particular incident or attitude performed onstage. The audience-member who calls out goes onstage temporarily and replaces an actor, taking on the same role through improv interactions with the other characters. The results? Sometimes different outcomes and kinder choices, but always ones in keeping with the character’s original profile. In other words, no magic solutions.

 

At times, Diamond stopped the action, asking the actors to share their innermost secret thought in a scene, one that they would never normally share. In one case, the female audience-member whose character was angry and frustrated over her lack of success with the housing registry, replied: “I feel like blowing the place up.” Her remark shocked me, yet it reflected her true sentiments in that situation.

 

Diamond told our Wednesday-night audience at the Holy Trinity Cathedral that mainstream media were not reviewing this play because of its audience-motivated interaction, performances and discussion. Supposedly, this format did not render it a “real” play, worthy of coverage. What crap.

 

(Ironically, in the next morning’s Vancouver Sun, an editorial had the headline: “Policy breakthrough: House the homeless first, then help them with their problems.” It acknowledged the “classic Catch 22 — you can’t get help to solve your problems until you have a place to stay, and you can’t get a place to stay until you’ve already solved your problems.”) Gee, I wonder: Did the writer see the play? 

 

I applaud the performance format of After Homelessness, especially in a region where millions are spent on creating Winter Olympics venues, with comparatively little money targeted for adequate shelter and housing for the urban homeless.

 

A study by the International Olympic Committee concludes that the construction of new affordable and social housing has not kept up with the number of homeless people. A 2008 Metro Vancouver count recorded at least 2,660 homeless people, a whopping 373-per-cent increase since 2002.