Land and Water

It's all connected.

Most of what I write about, the stuff that pays the bills at least, concerns housing in one form or another. This wasn't true before 2006 but that year my main project was a paper for the International Housing Coalition and the Canadian Real Estate Association on the subject of Aboriginal Housing in Canada. Since then, it seems as though property rights, housing and the whole idea of land and property ownership have taken over my working life.

That's OK with me, these are important issues. I can be moved to tears pretty easily by the thought of someone feeling safe in a home where they had not had that opportunity before. I suppose, in part, that is due to the fact that we moved around a fair bit when I was very small and once we did settle in Victoria my parents divorced and my home life became so chaotic and at times so dangerous that for months at a time I would just up and leave.

I stayed with friends, I house sat, I went back and forth between my parents and eventually I just moved out and lived on my own. The idea of home never really got through to me and I think, in many ways, it slowed me down a lot. I went to university late and I still seem to have a hard time accepting that I might have a place in this world. I'm just not accustomed to thinking of myself as someone who belongs.

In a way, that's a strength for a writer. I'm an observer and while I can certainly see how people would get very attached to a community or even a house, those things have never assumed a larger role in my life than they should. I value happiness, peace of mind, independence and the people in my life - and maybe in that sentence the order is even correct. (ask me on another day and I'm sure I'll have a different answer, human beings are like that.)

Anyway, I am entering the final stretch of my nomadic phase, that seems pretty clear to me. And it is fitting that as I do, the area that seems to be building in strength in my professional and personal life is the idea of belonging somewhere. Housing is at the heart of that.

Three years ago, I spent some time analyzing the Canadian government's First Nations housing policy for a national organization. The thrust of their strategy was really smart if you're interested in politics and thoroughly lacking in compassion if you're interested in humanity.

The First Nations Market Housing Fund was sold as a solution to facilitate home ownership for First Nations families and individuals. (it still is - here's a link ) The fund works like this: A Band ("Tribe" or "Community", depending on your verbiage which depends on where you are on the map, in Canada "Tribe" is considered racist - not so in the U.S.) Anyway, a Band applies to the fund when they decide to start selling houses to people instead of holding all the land and housing collectively. They apply to say they are proceeding with this plan and granting mortgages to people through one of the banks involved. It is the responsibility of the individual who is buying the house to pay the mortgage, just like anywhere else. The difference is, Native land cannot be used as collateral for a debt to any non-native person. So the banks could not, under the old system, foreclose on a mortgage if they had to. This meant it was impossible to get a mortgage to buy a house. Under the present system, the banks will grant a mortgage to qualified individuals because the $300 million fund is there to pay the bank back if someone defaults on their mortgage.

Smart banking. But how does it help poor people who need houses? Short answer? It doesn't. If someone defaults, it becomes the responsibility of the Band to pay that mortgage off. If the Band can't pay then the fund kicks in and pays the bank back. The Band in default must then withdraw from the program until they have paid the fund back. Get it?

The First Nations Market Housing Fund makes it possible for people who could already buy a house off-reserve to buy one on-reserve. Now lots of people might say that's a good thing, for my part, I'm kind of indifferent to it but it is not a means of providing housing to those in need. It does not ameliorate the crowding problem or the mould problem that comes from crowding in most social housing on-reserve. It does not give anyone who is not already on their way to financial independence the means to get there. (I suppose I should be happy about the establishment of this fund, I'm told it was established partly as a response to the paper we presented at the U.N. but somehow I can't shake the feeling that they just missed the point.)

Perhaps most importantly, the capital in the fund, all $300 million of it, will never be touched. Paying that capital back is a priority for everyone involved - and as long as it remains on the books it is a positive entry on the government's ledger that need never actually exist. It generates interest and some of that interest goes into housing education programs but most of it goes to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It has created some jobs, mostly for First Nations Individuals who were already pretty well employed but then again, that makes room for the unemployed to assume the jobs on the bottom of the ladder when everyone else moves up - so that's a benefit. But it has done nothing to improve life for the 80 per cent of people living on-reserve who have bad credit.

It has done nothing to fix the situation for the thousands of native women forced to leave their homes and move to urban centers every year; women who are essentially immigrants to their own country. It has done nothing to help solve the problem of adequate infrastructure on-reserve, it has not slowed down the boil-water advisories that are in place in hundreds of reserves, it has not helped to build one single road or school or medical center. It has given comfort to the comfortable and done very little else.

In the last few days it has been brought to my attention that this situation has not changed. I will be looking into it, this time for publication, and I expect this blog will be given over to those concerns for a while and to the concerns that are related to it.

Another little factoid that was recently brought to my attention is this: Canada is a net water importer from the United States.

I never thought about it but it is true that most of the fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by Canadians are grown in the U.S. As most people know, water shortages have become a real problem in the U.S. They are not, by contrast, a problem here. Not at all. We enjoy pretty cheap fruit and vegetables from California and Florida as a part of our daily diet. Because of the free trade agreement, we don't pay much in tariffs for them either and yet we are terribly concerned that someday Americans might want our water. We frame it as an environmental issue but it's not. We're eating the water they use to grow those crops and we're not giving much back in return.

I'm not exactly sure how just yet but all of this is coming together in my head right now the way the issues of housing and how it is a determinant of social success came together just before the U.N. World Urban Forum in Vancouver.

Even if you don't buy the one-world platitudes, we are one continent and I think we have our priorities completely out of whack in this corner of the continent.

The goal of governing a piece of land should be to prevent harm to the land, to the people and to provide a structure wherein everyone has a chance to prosper, preferably an equal chance. Right now the Canadian government seems to think somehow we are going to win something by ending up as the guys with the most money or control at the end of all this. It's small minded and anyway, it won't work.

I don't know how to address this except to write about where things are going right and wrong. In Canada right now there is an awful lot going wrong, we are going wrong on a meta-political level, not just one case at a time. In the U.S I do see some hope for real and positive change, of course there are all kinds of injustices there too and terrible messes all over the place but there seems to be more dialogue. People don't seem so complacent with the status quo. That appeals to me.

Then there is the fact of reconciling my own gain with all of this - I have always thought that we should not benefit from the suffering of others and because of that I have not made it a priority to further my own journalistic career but that's a weird way to think. If I'm not making money, I get quiet and my getting quiet has never done anything much positive in my own life or anyone else's.

Plenty of times I wish I could go back to writing book reviews and critiquing the arts but like everyone else, I would like to think I might make a small difference on this planet and this is where my role seems to be - housing, water, land, freedom, belonging.

Funny the places life takes you, isn't it?

A note on editing.

It's easy to assume nobody reads this but me. In fact, that's been my assumption since beginning this blog. Sure, a couple of my friends dip in from time to time but really? I figure in the great, sweeping ocean of the blogosphere, my few personal dribbles go completely unnoticed.

As a result, I've treated this space like a letter written to myself in the future. It's come to my attention that maybe that isn't the best way to go about this.

As a poet, I think my work gets stronger as I become more brutally honest. When you take the filter off in poetry and begin to touch the raw core of human experience your work becomes more real and more universal.

Life is always much messier than it appears to be on the surface. And this blog has been written almost entirely from under the surface, sometimes well under.

However - I am not only a poet and poetry is not the writing that produces my income stream or informs much of the work that propels the mechanism of my life along. I work in advocacy, as a journalist and, ironically for this space, as an advisor on how to manage a media presence.

Recently, it has come to my attention that the blog is actually getting read. (Thank you, google news alerts.) That has presented me with a dilemma. How do I keep the tone and ease-of-use of this blog while respecting the personal boundaries of the people in my life? It's a difficult question, one that Leonard Cohen has gone on record as saying can only be answered with "You don't." As a poet, that's true. As every other kind of writer and as a human being making difficult, life altering choices, probably not.

I've always said I'm a person first and journalist second, anything other than a person has to come second or life gets out of whack. In keeping with the spirit of this blog I want to tell you I am doing my best. If you are one of the people who has read the posts that divulge too much, well - that's done. I'm removing them now and I will make every effort, if you're one of the people in my life whom I love, to keep your interests and your feelings foremost in my mind.

When I forget, I hope you'll remind me just as I hope never to sacrifice compassion for honesty or vice versa.

Again with the advertising.

Today A friend posted a video on Facebook - here it is.

Now what do you think the purpose of that was? Do you think it has a purpose? Most of the people I've met think it does not. (If you watch the credits, it's obvious but the way it's structured, with commentary from the people who watched it tacked on the to the end of the thing itself, most people don't watch it all the way to the end.)

If you were one of those people, you should know this is an ad for Trident's latest product, a layered fruit gum that comes in flavors like pineapple/granny smith apple. If you thought that was a fun, spontaneous moment in a supermarket, you were supposed to think that but you were wrong. (Just like you were supposed to think Ikea Heights was a spontaneous theatre project.)

I'm not saying the ad is bad or wrong or even that the approach is wrong, I'm just saying, we need to be aware of the difference between advertising and "spontaneous creativity."

I suppose it could be argued that all art has an agenda but not all art is designed to provoke a smile and hopefully a purchase once you reach the checkout. That is the realm of commercial art, propaganda and public persuasion.

More importantly, art isn't so ashamed of its agenda that it tries to conceal it. Neither is it so determined to play on your sense of happy coincidence and personal enchantment.

So, should we start making art that persuades while pretending to merely amuse? Or should we maybe be aware of who writes the score, directs the video, pays the singer and ultimately cashes the check?

and just in case you wondered if I'm being a paranoid spoilsport....

this is an excerpt from the FAQ section of Improv Everywhere's website:

"I work for a brand / marketing firm / advertising agency, can we hire you?

Maybe. We do not stage official Improv Everywhere missions that advertise a brand. However, we have in the past worked with companies as creative consultants helping to develop campaigns and as video producers creating content for a brand. We have also staged pranks at internal meetings and conventions for corporate clients. We do this work independent of Improv Everywhere, and will not use this site or its resources to promote it.

We also take on sponsorship from time to time. If a company wants to hire us to simply do a mission we already want to do (with their brand having nothing to do with the content,) we would consider sponsorship. We think this video is a good example of a brand sponsoring a project.

Why would you ever work with a brand? Isn’t that against the spirit of IE?

Taking on occasional corporate gigs helps us continue to do what we do. Doing a small amount of corporate work (while keeping it separate from Improv Everywhere,) allows us to pay our New York City rents and fund future Improv Everywhere events. In terms of taking on a sponsor, we see it as no different than a television show being supported by commercials. So long as our content is not influenced by the sponsor, we think it is a smart way to fund our work."

And here is the original video to which they are referring. Remember this? People posted it all over the place, turns out it was for Stride Gum - just like the new one is for Trident Layers.

http://urbanprankster.com/2008/06/where-the-hell-is-matt/

This is the meat of their pitch btw. It bears remembering that the idea of posting a "frequently asked questions" section on your website is useful because it frees you from quoting a source. Anyone could be asking this question. If you're the owner of the website you could even be asking it to yourself, and because it's a "frequently asked question" you don't have to quote a source, there is no source - you're paraphrasing something that has come up any number of times. (good way to get your point across without sounding pushy or even assertive - it wasn't IE that asked this question after all, it's just out there in the ether - the question of How do we make money on this? You have to admit, it's a pretty important question since we all need money to live.

The thing is this, advertising is always going to take new forms and because we tend to think of advertising as a bad thing those forms are likely to be more disguised as the public becomes more adept at recognizing the old ones. Because once we see an ad for what it is, we tend to disregard it.

I'm interested in why we are so intent on preserving the illusion of spontaneous, creative expression even at the expense of awareness of how we are being persuaded to act.

I'm also interested in the response that will make most people who read this post - is anyone does, pissed off that I even mentioned it. Why does knowing this is a profit-based activity change your view of it?

Facebook itself is an advertising medium - and I'm not talking about those irritating little squares that line the top of your screen when you're playing a game or the side of your page when you're engaged in other things. I'm talking about the people you choose to friend and what you decide goes up on your page and why.

Facebook is a consensual, community advertising forum. In a way, it's a variation on Second Life. Where Second Life creates consensual geography, FB creates preferential demographics or aspirational demographics. We choose the organizations and individuals that appeal to our sense of who we are on FB and through that choice we end up cobbling together an advertising demographic that relies on interest and self-identification rather than the usual physical factors of age, income bracket, gender, geography, profession and education.

It's also an advertising demographic that provides an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to say. And if you can disguise your content to appear to be a quirky, amusing video posted by a friend - well, why wouldn't you pick up that packet of gum that just happens to be squished together fruit flavors (pineapple apple) at the checkout counter? After all, it reminds you of your FB friend and their cute little video, you haven't tried it before and it only costs a couple of bucks, in a way, it's a reminder of a good, shared joke. And that makes it worth its weight in gum.