On May 31, 2023 and in what can only be described as a textbook example of ideological decision-based evidence-making, Trustees voted unanimously to cancel the school liaison officer (SLO) program in all School District 61 (SD61) schools (the only school district in BC to do so). The Vancouver School Board, which had previously eliminated school liaison officers in 2021, reinstated them in September 2023.
The SD61 decision built on a bizarre press release issued by the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner on November 22, 2022: Letter to school trustees on human rights concerns with the use of School Liaison Officers in B.C. schools. While obviously an overreach of the mandate of the unelected BC Human Rights Commissioner, she stated “I strongly recommend that all school districts end the use of SLOs until the impact of these programs can be established empirically. ” I was serving on the the Oak Bay Police Board at the time and was very familiar with Oak Bay’s community policing model and the important preventative role that school liaison officers play in such a model. I had hoped the Human Rights Commissioner letter was supported by extensive research on SLOs in BC Schools. Sadly, all that I could find was a single report commissioned by her office known as the Samuels-Wortley report.
I thoroughly reviewed the Samuels-Wortley report. It provides a literature review of studies pertaining to SLO programs in Canada and the United States. First, it’s important to note that the author states on page 3 of her report “an extensive review of the literature reveals no peer-reviewed studies that explore the impacts of Canadian SLO programs on marginalized students.” In fact, one of the five peer-reviewed Canadian studies the author found pertaining to Canadian SLOs suggested positive outcomes when introduced as a component of a community policing model (Broll and Howells, 2019).
The US-based research reviewed in the Samuels-Wrotley report focussed on the “school-to-prison” pipeline, violence, US-based SLO training protocol etc. and cannot be generalized to Canada. Even the Toronto Police internal evaluation reviewed in the Samuels-Wortley report is not generalizable to Greater Victoria as they were assessing a targetted SLO program introduced after the fatal shooting of a student at a Toronto high school, not as a key component of a community-policing framework.
The SD61 decision was also supported by a thoroughly debunked letter from the Greater Victoria Teacher’s Association who had apparently not surveyed their members before coming up with their supposedly (but clearly not) researched ideological position. On the other hand, the Victoria Principals’ and Vice Principals’ Association, whose members are in charge of individual school management wrote a strong letter of support for SLOsto the Board of Trustees that was apparently ignored.
What’s most odd about the GVTA letter is that in April 2018, when I was serving in the BC Legislature as the MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Victoria Police cut their SLO program after not being given the resources to maintain their frontline services. By December 2018, the Greater Victoria Teacher’s Association began a campaign to get police liaison officer’s back in Victoria Schools that continued into 2019 as school-based incidents started to rise. The GVTA’s dramatic policy lurch strikes me as a textbook example of what happens when one or two idealogues start ramming through their agenda while claiming to speak on behalf of the collective.
Rather than choosing to consult with those delivering or providing oversight into the SLO program, School Board Trustees seemed to be swayed by those purporting to have uncovered gotcha evidence from FOI information they received. The egregious misinformation brought forward in this regard provided the “evidence” to support the ideological narrative needed to justify a predetermined decision (so-called decision-based evidence-making) to eliminate SLOs from SD61 schools. For example, on X (formerly known as Twitter), one activist offered gotcha ‘proof’ that VicPD were targeting members of the BIPOC community. They pointed out that 19% of all “youth suspects” arrested by VicPD were indigenous whereas only 5% of the population was indigenous. What they failed to point out was that the data they were looking at was aggregate rather than individual data. To illustrate this, suppose there were 100 arrests & one BIPOC individual committed 19 of them. Suppose the other 81 were committed by 81 different other folk. Then the statistic is only 1.2% of people VicPD labeled as “youth suspects” were BIPOC. Perhaps the activists would have served our community better if they educated themselves on the data before making incorrect assertions.
In another example, a powerpoint presentation to a School District committee on SLOs seemed to have been particularly influential even though none of the purported “gotcha” statistics were checked with VicPD and most were misinterpreted. Sadly with gangs now having increased access to schools, vulnerable youth become easy victims for grooming into gang life. But that’s not the only consequence of the irresponsible School Board decision. Here’s an incomplete list of what the Board has identified as services the SLOs used to provide that now fall into the responsibility of already overburdened principals and vice-principals, along with the District’s lone Safe Schools Coordinator. This list also illustrates the challenges faced by schools and students since the removal of the SLOs.
• Longer wait times accessing crisis support for students.
• Loss of student support as staff are pulled to support the critical student. • Additional training cost for Non-Violent Crisis Intervention (CPI).
• Support for staff dealing with the crisis.
• Delays in receiving supports from police departments nonemergency calls.
• District Youth and Family Counsellor (YFC) and School-Based-Team (SBT) increased caseload.
• Alternatives are not available for a majority of activities.
• Additional program, training, and equipment costs.
• Information around community safety is not being shared in a timely manner.
• Reduction in pro-active and collaborative work around internet/social/media/cyber bullying.
• No longer an opportunity to build a positive relationship on a regular basis.
• Increase in vandalism and graffiti on school grounds.
• Students no longer have an opportunity to learn through a police focused lens. • There is no longer an opportunity to build positive relationships between police and students on a regular basis.
The following programs or presentations are missing from this list that the District provided:
• Gangs in (BC)
• Personal Safety
• Female Personal Safety
• Halloween Safety
• Healthy/unhealthy Relationships
• Human Trafficking
• LGBTQ Presentations
• PARTY program
• Property & Vehicle Crime
• Shoplifting
• Stranger Danger
• Street Drugs
• WITS program
• Mentor individual students
While at present, the Board of Education is certainly within its right to ban SLOs from their schools, community safety falls within provincial and local government jurisdiction. My hope is that the province will step in to rectify what has happened in SD61 through the introduction of legislation or regulation to ensure that such ill informed decisions cannot occur in the future without either provincial approval or consultation with the affected police boards (charged with oversight of policing). Nobody’s interests are served when our collective safety is undermined by poorly thought through decisions that are grounded in nothing more than ideology and virtue signalling.
I wish to offer my sincere thanks to all police officers in our region for their continued service to our community. I can only imagine how decisions like this, based on nonsensical rhetoric and misleading information, affect your morale. Yet the same activists undermining our region’s policing would almost certainly be the first ones to call for your help when a problem arises. Finally, I can’t imagine how police officers feel as they go to pick their children up at school while dressed in uniform knowing that new school district policy requires schools to log when officers are on school property.
This past weekend I received an email from a young adult from the US struggling with climate anxiety. Their email, and our follow-up conversation over Zoom, are what inspired me to write this piece.
As I wrote last year, one of the biggest surprises I found upon my return to the University of Victoria 1n 2021 after spending 7 1/2 years in the BC Legislature was the overall increase in underlying climate anxiety being experienced by students in my classes. I’ve been teaching at the university level since the mid 1980s. For most of this time, the students considered global warming to be an esoteric and highly uncertain distant future threat to others, somewhere else in the world – but not any more.
While I was not surprised that another young adult reached out to discuss their struggles with climate anxiety, their email was particularly thoughtful. It contained quotes that they had seen in the media or heard in conversations with their friends, and a link to a recent ITV Good Morning Britain interview with Canadian William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk from the Star Trek series.
Mr. Shattner is 92. He is passionate about climate change. Yet I struggle to understand what he was hoping to accomplish in the interview. It was over the top, outrageous and, in my opinion, utterly irresponsible. For example, when asked by the ITV reporter “So you don’t think it is an overreaction to say we’re digging our own graves“. Shatner responded incredulously “No, no, no it’s not dramatic enough. We’re burrowing into our own graves” . “Really?“, the interviewer responded at which point Shatner lays into him: “I’m so unhappy that you don’t understand how imperative the situation is. We’re dying man, the seas are going to rise… to me I’m stupefied that you as being a reporter aren’t filled with that passion“.
Later in the interview Shatner berates the reporter “you failed to grasp the dire situation. We’re talking about 20, 30 years. We’re talking about .. are you married?“. “No” the interviewer replied. “Are you going to get married? asked Shatner, “possibly” was the response. Shatner pushed further: “Do you want children?”, to which the reporter replied “possibly, yes“. Getting the answer he was obviously hoping for, Shatner insisted “You want children. Your children are going to have difficulty LIVING. Do you understand that?”
But here’s the kicker, when the reporter asked Shatner “what sort of changes have you made in your life, because you are so passionate about the climate issue, what are you doing differently now that you perhaps weren’t doing 5, 10 years ago.” All Shatner could come up with in response was this: “I haven’t eaten meat in 6 months. I was at a hamburger thing I got the other plant made vegan thing“. Really?
I am very disappointed in Mr. Shatner. He has a platform, a public profile and the potential to influence people of all ages. Yet he chooses to use this platform in a completely unhinged way to imply the world only has 20 to 30 years left because of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental influences.
Now I recognize some will just dismiss my concerns by saying he’s just an old guy with odd views that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, such views from his position of influence do a lot of damage and undermine the efforts of so many who recognize the seriousness of climate change yet reject his outlandish prognostications. His words would land like a 16 ton weight on younger generations. How dare he espouse his unhinged views about the end of the world when all he has done is not eaten meat for six months. The hypocrisy and demonstrable lack of leadership is shameful.
Ritchie, a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (in which I include William Shatner) often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
Mr. Shatner is not alone in channelling his own climate anxiety in ways that drive people to despondency and apathy (we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can go about it – the red box). But unlike most, he speaks from a very large podium.
Next time Mr. Shatner wants to decry the state of the world from his personal, rather than scientific, perspective, perhaps he could tell us more about what he is doing about climate change from his position of privilege. Leadership involves demonstrating through your own actions what you are expecting in others. Failing that, Mr. Shatner’s is just taking a page out of Granpa Simpson’s playbook.
My colleagues Karin Kvale, GNS Science, New Zealand, Natalia Gurgaczand I published a piece in The Conversation last week. It is reproduced below as Facebook appears to be blocking the reposting of Canadian news articles.
The window for cutting emissions to keep warming at internationally agreed levels is closing rapidly and it seems logical to conclude that any “extra” fossil carbon from plastic contamination will be a problem for the climate.
Our research examines this question using an Earth system model. We found carbon leaching out of existing plastic pollution has a negligible impact. The bigger concern is the production of new plastics, which already accounts for 4.5% of total global emissions and is expected to rise.
Organic carbon leaching from plastic pollution
In nature, plants make organic carbon (carbon-hydrogen compounds) from inorganic carbon (carbon compounds not bonded with hydrogen) through photosynthesis. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are organic carbon compounds. This organic carbon leaches into the environment from plastics as they degrade.
Concerns have been raised that this could disrupt global carbon cycling by acting as an alternative carbon source for bacteria, which consume organic carbon.
A key assumption in these concerns is that organic carbon fluxes and reservoirs are a major influence on global carbon cycling (and atmospheric carbon dioxide) over human timescales.
It is true that dissolved organic carbon is a major carbon reservoir. In the ocean, it is about the same amount as the carbon dioxide (CO₂) held in the pre-industrial atmosphere. But there are key differences between atmospheric CO₂ and ocean organic carbon storage. One is the climate impact.
Atmospheric CO₂ warms the climate directly, whereas dissolved organic carbon stored in the ocean is mostly inert. This dissolved organic carbon reservoir built up over many thousands of years.
When phytoplankton make organic carbon (or when plastics leach organic carbon), most of it is rapidly used within hours to days by bacteria and converted into dissolved inorganic carbon. The tiny fraction of organic carbon left behind after bacterial processing is the inert portion that slowly builds up into a natural reservoir.
Once we recognise that plastics carbon is better considered as a source of dissolved inorganic carbon, we can appreciate its minor potential for influence. The inorganic carbon reservoir of the ocean is 63 times bigger than its organic carbon store.
Plastics carbon has little impact on atmospheric CO₂
We used an Earth system model to simulate what would happen if we added dissolved inorganic carbon to the surface ocean for 100 years. We applied it at a rate equivalent to the amount of carbon projected to leach into the ocean by the year 2040 (29 million metric tonnes per year).
This scenario likely overestimates the amount of plastics pollution. Current pollution rates are well below this level and an international treaty to limit plastic pollution is under negotiation.
We repeated the model simulation of adding plastics carbon both with strong climate warming (to see if plastics carbon might produce unexpected climate feedbacks that increase warming) and without (to see if it could alter the climate by itself). In both cases, plastics carbon only increased atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by 1 parts per million (ppm) over a century.
This is a very small increase, considering that current burning of fossil fuels is raising atmospheric CO₂ by more than 2ppm each year.
Direct emissions from burning plastic
We also examined the impact of plastics incineration. We used a scenario in which all plastic projected to be produced in the year 2050 (1.1 billion metric tonnes) would be burned and directly converted into atmospheric CO₂ for 100 years.
In this scenario, we found atmospheric CO₂ increased a little over 21ppm by the year 2100. This increase is equivalent to the impact of fewer than nine years of current fossil fuel emissions.
Relative to the current continued widespread burning of fossil fuels for energy, carbon emitted from plastic waste will not have significant direct impacts on atmospheric CO₂ levels, no matter what form it takes in the environment.
However, plastics production, as opposed to leaching or incineration, currently represents about 4.5% of total global emissions. As fossil fuel consumption is reduced in other sectors, emissions from plastics production are expected to increase in proportional footprint and absolute amount.
A legally binding plastics pollution treaty, currently under development as part of the UN’s environment programme, is an excellent opportunity to recognise the growing contribution of plastics production to climate change and to seek regulatory measures to address these emissions.
Limiting the use of incineration is another climate-friendly measure that would make a small but positive contribution to the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Of course, environmental plastics pollution has many negative impacts beyond climate effects. Our work does not diminish the importance of cleaning up plastic pollution and implementing stringent measures to prevent it. But the justification for doing so is not primarily grounded in an effort to cut emissions.
In May 2016, all 90,000 residents of Fort McMurray, Alta., were evacuated shortly before wildfires engulfed 2,400 homes and businesses with a total cost of more than $4 billion.
Let’s not forget the June 2021 heat dome resulting in temperature records being broken across British Columbia three days in a row. The heat wave culminated in Lytton, a village in the southern part of the province, recording 49.6 C on June 29, the hottest temperature ever observed anywhere in Canada and breaking the previous record by five degrees. The next day, wildfires engulfed Lytton, destroying more than 90 per cent of the town.
“The area burned by forest fires in Canada has increased over the past four decades, at the same time as summer season temperatures have warmed. Here we use output from a coupled climate model to demonstrate that human emissions of greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol have made a detectable contribution to this warming. We further show that human-induced climate change has had a detectable influence on the area burned by forest fire in Canada over recent decades.”
It appears little has been done to prepare rural Canada for what’s in store as governments deal with immediate, rather than transformational approaches to wildfire management.
This, despite the existence of the national FireSmart program designed to assist homeowners, neighbourhoods and communities decrease their vulnerability to wildfires and increase their resilience to their negative impacts.
Pressure is certainly mounting on decision-makers to become more proactive in both mitigating and preparing for the impacts of climate change.
An Aug. 14 pivotal ruling from the Montana First Judicial District Court sided with a group of youth who claimed that the State of Montana violated their right to a healthy environment.
A similar case brought by seven youth against the Ontario government after the province reduced its greenhouse gas reduction targets has also been heralded as groundbreaking.
As the number of such court cases grow, governments and corporations will need to do more to both protect their citizens from the impacts of climate change, and to aggressively decarbonize energy systems.
While attention is currently turned to the evacuation of Yellowknife, it’s sobering to remind ourselves that they are not alone. The village of Lytton, burnt to the ground just two years ago, has been put on evacuation alert as wildfires approach.
Kelowna has just declared a state of emergency as the McDougall Creek fire starts consuming homes in the region. And this, coming on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the Okanagan Mountain Park fire, when more than 27,000 people had to be evacuated and 239 Kelowna homes were lost.
Canadians will take solace as summer turns into winter and the immediacy of our 2023 wildfire situation wanes. Unfortunately, it will be Australia’s turn next to experience the burning wrath of nature in response to human-caused global warming and the 2023 El Niño.
Rather than waiting to respond reactively to the next fire season, proactive preparation is the appropriate way forward. For as the old adage states: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Today I published an article in The Conversation concerning the headlines last week proclaiming the Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. Facebook has decided to block reposting of news stories originating from Canada on their site, so I decided to reproduce the article here. Please go to the link above for the published online version.
“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” announced the New York Post. “A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted CNN in the U.S. and repeated CTV News here in Canada.
This latest alarmist rhetoric provides a textbook example of how not to communicate climate science. These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, let alone influence public policy to support climate solutions.
This is also not the first time such headlines have emerged. Back in 1998, the Atlantic Monthly published an article raising the alarm that global “warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.”
In 2002, editorials in the New York Times and Discover magazine offered the prediction of a forthcoming collapse of deep water formation in the North Atlantic, which would lead to the next ice age.
Building on the unfounded assertions in these earlier stories, BBC Horizon televised a 2003 documentary entitled The Big Chill, and in 2004 Fortune magazine published “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” piling on where previous articles left off.
Seeing the opportunity for an exciting disaster movie, Hollywood stepped up to created The Day After Tomorrow in which every known law of thermodynamics was ever so creatively violated.
The latest series of alarmist headlines may not have fixated on an impending ice age, but they still suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous claim at best and a completely irresponsible pronouncement at worst.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the likelihood of a cessation of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic for decades. In fact, I was on the writing team of the 2007 4th Assessment Report where we concluded that:
“It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the course of the 21st century. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century.”
The 6th assessment report went further to conclude that:
“There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.”
Understanding climate optimism
Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, recently penned an article for Vox where she proposed an elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.
Ritchie’s framework lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (such as many within the Extinction Rebellion movement), often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
A responsibility to communicate, responsibly
Unfortunately, extremely low probability, and often poorly understood tipping point scenarios, often end up being misinterpreted as likely and imminent climate events.
In many cases, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, particularly around the differences between hypothesis posing and hypothesis testing, are lost on the lay reader when a study goes viral across social media. This is only amplified in situations where scientists make statements where creative licence is taken with speculative possibilities. Possibilities that reader-starved journalists are only too happy to play up in clickbait headlines.
Through independent research and the writing of IPCC reports, the climate science community operates from a position of privilege in the public discourse of climate change science, its impacts and solutions.
Climate scientists have agency in the advancement of climate solutions, and with that agency comes a responsibility to avoid sensationalism. By not tempering their speech, they risk further ratcheting up the rhetoric with nothing to offer in terms of overall solutions or risk reduction.
