The Dengue Virus Has Been Found in Arizona

Dengue has been found in native mosquitos and at least one human, suggesting that it could be spreading locally in the state for the first known time.

By Ed Cara
Published Thursday Nov 17,2022


Aedes aegypti mosquitos, the primary vector of dengue, seen at a lab of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the Sao Paulo University, on January 8, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Photo: Nelson Ameida/AFP (Getty Images)

A dangerous viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes has seemingly landed in Arizona. Earlier this week, health officials reported that a Maricopa County resident recently contracted dengue, while routine surveillance has found traces of the dengue virus in at least one nearby mosquito population. These discoveries suggest that the infection could be spreading locally in the state for the first time, though the investigation is still ongoing.

Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) officials announced the human case of dengue on Monday, though no other details about the patient were provided. They also reported that the Maricopa County Environmental Services Department had detected the virus last month in samples taken from a mosquito trap in a neighborhood of the county. Though there have been cases of dengue reported in Arizona before, they’ve been found in people who likely caught it while recently traveling to countries where the disease is endemic. But given the surveillance data, officials say, it’s possible that this is the first locally transmitted case of dengue to be reported in the county and the state as a whole.

“While previous dengue cases in Maricopa County have been related to travel to countries where dengue commonly occurs, it is important to understand if others could have been exposed or if this is an isolated incident,” said Nick Staab, medical epidemiologist, in a statement released by the MCDPH. “This is in addition to our routine investigations of anyone suspected to have dengue or other mosquito-borne diseases.”

Dengue is spread by bites from infected mosquitoes. Most infected people will experience no illness, but about one in every four will develop flu-like symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in every 20 people will develop severe dengue, which can lead to life-threatening complications like internal bleeding and shock. There are four major serotypes of the virus, and surviving infection from one type does not provide immunity to the others. In fact, it actually raises the risk of severe dengue should you ever catch another type of the virus.

Though dengue is most common in the hottest and most humid areas of the world, it’s become remarkably widespread in recent decades, with the virus now believed to be endemic in over 100 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Many experts fear that climate change will allow dengue and similar viruses to become a local problem in previously unaffected parts of the world, like much of Europe and the United States. Notably, two of the best known vectors of dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, can now be found throughout much of the Southern and Eastern U.S. during their peak seasons, though it’s still not clear whether these populations could sustain the widespread local transmission of dengue and other viruses yet.

For the time being, Maricopa officials are planning to go door to door in the area, armed with mosquito prevention kits and tests that should be able to detect whether any residents have been infected with dengue in the past several months.

Drugs, Death and Denial on the Job
One in three BC construction workers reported problematic substance use. As deaths rise, a response is taking shape.

Zak Vescera

15 Nov 2022

TheTyee.ca
Zak Vescera is The Tyee’s labour reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

LONG READ

Trevor Botkin, who stopped using drugs in 2019, says the culture in trades work increases the risks. ‘Look at the rate that men are dying.’ Photo for The Tyee by Lillie Louise Major.

Vince Tournour’s obituary said it best: he loved and he was loved.

Before he broke his back after a hard fall at work, before the pills, before he died alone on a winter night in a motel room in Bracebridge, Ontario, Rob Tournour says his brother was a good man who gave big hugs, had a bigger smile and loved carving, canoeing and carpentry.

But then a cocktail of drugs turned him into a number, one of thousands killed in a toxic drug epidemic claiming Canada’s working men.

“When I think about my brother lying dead in that fucking, shitty little motel, and I’m looking at his picture right now beside my desk, every day I wish he was still here,” Rob Tournour said.

“He tried. But in our system, he was a statistic.”

Vince was one of hundreds of men in the trades who died as a result of a toxic, unpredictable drug supply — a public health crisis that has shaken an industry defined by camaraderie and brotherhood.

Good data is scarce. But available information paints a troubling picture of substance use in the trades. A recent survey of construction workers in B.C. found one in three self-reported problematic substance use.

For many, that substance may be alcohol or cannabis. But many workers are also using stimulants, opioids, benzodiazepines or a combination of them all — a dangerous and increasingly deadly trend. The BC Coroners Service says roughly one in five of the 6,000 British Columbians who died of a toxic drug poisoning from July 2017 to August 2021 worked in the skilled trades and transportation sectors.

Rob Tournour might have been one of them. He started drinking when he was 16 and turned to cocaine shortly after. He quit 12 years ago, after a sleepless night that ended in a bleary-eyed sobriety meeting.

He said his story, and that of his brother, are tragically common accounts in construction and the skilled trades. Unions and workers say tough working conditions, high rates of injury and zero-tolerance policies create ripe conditions for use and abuse. Tradespeople — more than 90 per cent of whom are men — have long avoided talking about it, for fear of judgment or loss of work.

“Everybody is a tough guy. And they’re scared to not be a tough guy. They’re scared to be the one with the problem,” said Trevor Botkin, a carpenter who stopped using drugs in 2019. “Using the drugs is fine. But being addicted, that’s dirty.”

Employers and tradespeople alike have bristled at discussing the topic, worried it paints their profession in a negative light.

Today, that attitude is changing. Businesses and unions have made joint pitches to British Columbia’s NDP government, asking for more money to prevent deaths in the trades. Workers like Botkin and Tournour have personally fought to change the culture at work sites.

But the few specialized resources for construction workers at risk of dying are overwhelmed.

“Nothing is going to happen fast enough. Look at the rate that men are dying,” Botkin said. “I just don’t have that answer.”

Born into the trades

Anthony Monti was born to be a tradesman. At 12, his father was taking him to construction sites. When he was 15, he got his first job in Kelowna. And by 18, he was working in the oilfields near Fort McMurray. He loved the work, the people and the satisfaction of a good concrete finish.

“There’s just something about it,” Monti said. “It’s hard work, as well. But there’s an artistic part of it.”

In eight months of work in Alberta, he could clear six figures.

“I was making a lot of money, so I thought I was doing OK,” Monti said. “That was the main thing. If you’re making money, you’re doing good. But I wasn’t inside. Not mentally.”

Since he was a teenager, Monti had been dealing with a worsening substance use issue.

When Monti arrived in Alberta, he fell deeper into a pattern of use. Shift hours were long and hard. Offsite, workers would use drugs to numb pain from the job or pass the time. In Kelowna, he mostly drank and used cocaine. By the time he left Fort McMurray, he was using heroin.

“In my heart, I didn’t like it. But to survive in that atmosphere, you had to change,” Monti said.

It was an open secret: everyone knew what was happening, Monti said. But any sign that someone was struggling with substance use was met with judgment, Monti says — even if many others were going through the same thing.

“It shows weakness,” he said. “Before I got into recovery, I could have friends die, and my mentality in my head was, ‘He wasn’t doing it right.’”

Monti’s story echoes that of many workers in the trades, who say the culture of the industry and a stigma against substance use kept them from seeking help and plunged them deeper into addiction.

Substance use in the trades is not a new issue. In 1980, construction industry employers and unions joined forces to create the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan, a dedicated resource for members who used drugs and wanted to stop. The program is funded jointly by employers and unions, a recognition the issue goes beyond differences at the bargaining table.

What has changed over the years, however, is the toxicity of the illicit drug supply.

‘Before I got into recovery, I could have friends die,’ says Anthony Monti. ‘My mentality in my head was, “He wasn’t doing it right.”’ Photo for The Tyee by Lillie Louise Major.

In 2016, Monti completed a 60-day rehabilitation program, right as fentanyl was coming into B.C.’s illegal drug supply. He remembers losing seven friends in the six months that followed.

“It rattled me,” Monti said. “It could have been me. It would have been me.”

That loss — and risk — is felt deeply in the skilled trades. Last year, the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan conducted a survey in partnership with WorkSafeBC. One in three of the 270 workers who responded to the online poll reported having problematic substance use. Half of total respondents said they had a mental health problem and more than 70 per cent screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I don’t think we would have the issue we have in construction today if it weren’t for what I call the perfect storm,” said rehabilitation plan executive director Vicky Waldron. “It’s not something anyone has thought out or maliciously created. I think a lot of variables have all collided.”

Waldron says the loss is felt at every level of the industry. But for many years, it was verboten.

“There are still many parts of the industry [that] will tell you there is not an issue going on. ‘There is nothing to see here.’ The truth is, it’s becoming more and more difficult to deny as more and more data comes in.”

‘Suck it Up’

Kale Moth pulled prosperity from the ground. Moth began his career as an oil rigger in Lloydminster, a border town with one foot in Alberta and the other in Saskatchewan. He didn’t have much growing up. His job on the rigs let him afford a truck, a home and more than one decision he would grow to regret.

A short while into his job, Moth tried cocaine for the first time. Within three months, he was selling it. Drugs, he said, were part of a lifestyle. But they were also one of the only ways to numb the pain of “backbreaking” shifts at the rigs that started early in the morning and went well into the night.

Kale Moth says the work was dangerous, demanding, draining and drugs were part of the equation for many workers. Photo for The Tyee by Zak Vescera.

“The work is beyond physically demanding. It’s mentally draining. It’s not easy to push yourself through that without some sort of stimulant,” Moth said.

Moth was far from the only person on the rigs using drugs, he said. But the topic wasn’t discussed. Asking someone for help, Moth said, would be met with more scorn than compassion.

“You’re not getting connection. You’re not getting fulfilled in any way. So you turn to something that makes you feel good for a short amount of time,” Moth said.

Moth said part and parcel of the crisis in the trades is a crisis of masculinity and of societal norms that push men from seeking help.

Across Canada, three out of four people who die from the toxic drug supply are men. In B.C., nine out of ten of the roughly 250,000 workers in the construction industry are male. Tradesmen describe their profession as a tight-knit brotherhood, a career where anyone could earn a good living by working hard. The trades, as careers, are often open to men regardless of the postal code they grew up in, their personal histories or their high school transcripts.

The flipside, according to Botkin, is a culture that celebrates suffering and looks down on vulnerability.

“The culture around job sites is, ‘Work hard and good things will come to you’,” Botkin said. “We celebrate our suffering on job sites. We’re proud of how hard the job is and that not everybody can do it. And with that, we’re very scared to be vulnerable, to be the weak link in the chain.”

Lorna Thomas’s son Alex, a welder, died by a drug-related suicide at the age of 24.

“I say he died by stigma,” Thomas said. “He was not able to speak to people, not able to speak to his boss openly about what was going on.”

Thomas, a filmmaker, documented the troubling toll overdose deaths have taken in the skilled trades in a short film called Building Hope: Substance Use in the Trades, which starred Tournour, Moth and Botkin.

“People are going to do everything they can to avoid being in trouble. And the workplace policies don’t always work in favour of someone who wants to disclose,” Thomas said.

For Moth, the breaking point came when his older cousin died of a fatal overdose in a B.C. rehabilitation centre. He is now sober and living in Saskatoon, where he is training to be a welder. In his spare time, he is an advocate for men’s health — and particularly for workers in the trades using substances.

“It’s so embedded into the trades,” Moth said. “It’s so accepted.”

Breaking backs

BC Building Trades executive director Brynn Bourke says B.C.’s construction industry is inherently precarious, dangerous work.

“The structure of how the industry works is so unforgiving for anyone,” Bourke later said. “If you don’t report to work, you don’t get paid. There are very few industries that operate with such hard guardrails around being sick or being unable to come to work like the construction industry does.”

Less than 15 per cent of B.C. construction workers are in a union. Many don’t have benefits or a formal relationship with an employer. The rate of serious injury is nearly three times higher than the average worker, according to data from WorkSafeBC. The vast majority of employers are small companies employing fewer than 20 people, meaning staffing and deadlines are often tight.

“You’ve got an industry that is very short-staffed, an industry that doesn’t have enough supply for the demand that exists. You have an industry that is predominantly made of small, independent contractors that are competing with very tight margins against each other to deliver on jobs,” Waldron said. “When you couple all of these variables together… you have the perfect storm.”

The BC Building Trades, whose 14 affiliate unions represent about 40,000 tradespeople, has long advocated for a holistic approach to reducing the harms of substance use that includes on-site worker safety, better working conditions and more resources such as the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan, which it helps fund. “Every one of my business managers knows someone who has died from poisoned drugs,” Bourke said.

One of the long-standing issues is chronic pain and injury on the job. Doug Parton, the business agent for Ironworkers Local 97, believes prescription of opioids after being hurt on the job is one of the drivers of use.

A 2020 Globe and Mail investigation found doctors used by workers compensation boards, which are designed to protect workers, were sometimes prescribing opioids after an injury, pushing them back to work and then cutting their benefits, pushing them towards the illicit supply.

B.C. Labour Minister Harry Bains said WorkSafeBC, the organization mandated to keep workers safe, had adopted what he called a “harm reduction strategy” around opioid prescriptions for workers focused on preventing chronic opioid use and finding alternative therapies for workers with chronic pain or addiction.

The decision of what to prescribe is up to a doctor, Bains said, but he believes the program is bearing fruit. He said the number of workers considered chronic opioid users without a viable treatment alternative had decreased from about 9,000 in 2017 to just over 6,200 in 2021.

Bourke says non-opiate pain prescriptions are part of the solution. But she and other advocates say broader, institutional change is needed.

In 2020, Fraser Health and the rehabilitation plan released a report around return-to-work procedures for construction workers who use or used drugs. One of the findings was that many employers and unions did not have concrete policies to accommodate those workers or suitable work options if they could not do their prior job. In addition, the report said, many workers preferred after-work treatment options because they feared losing income. It also found that return-to-work processes often hinged on the question of whether a worker was impaired, rather than overall well-being, and that there was generally poor awareness around what treatment programs were available and how to access them.

The Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan exists specifically to help construction workers access those resources. In 2021, Waldron said they received 6,500 calls — a more than 60 per cent jump from the year prior. When she began work at the program in 2016, she said they treated an average of 60 people a year. Now they consistently see more than 200.

Not all people who use drugs want to enter residential treatment. But for those who do, Waldron said waits are a challenge. “Getting a bed is incredibly difficult, and I know I’ll take some heat for that, but it’s true. There are not enough beds. There are not enough resources. And the wait times can be considerable.”

The Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan used to run its own residential treatment facility, Waldron said, but it was closed years ago due to issues with the building. She says the organization is now trying to secure government support for a new, dedicated facility with 25 to 40 beds specifically for B.C. construction workers. (Bains said he was aware of the proposal but that no funding commitment had been made.)

Unions and employers say they’re also embracing the B.C. government’s broader focus on harm reduction — ways of making substance use safer rather than insisting on abstinence.

Dave Baspaly, the president of the Council of Construction Associations, said that has included asking government to provide naloxone kits at all construction sites. Such kits can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose if provided quickly.

“You’ve got a patchwork quilt and everybody trying to do right by it, but I think that what ends up happening is that it drives it underground,” Baspaly said.

“This is one of those issues that is felt top to bottom, labour to employer,” Baspaly said. “That, and asbestos.”

But unlike asbestos, Bourke says employers and unions don’t have a clear understanding of how to integrate harm reduction approaches for substance use into the industry.

“We don’t have the blueprint. We have a system that is built on trying to manage use of substances, and it only has blunt instruments for that,” she said.

Tough enough to talk about it

There’s one place where people agree progress is being made: awareness. Waldron said the rehabilitation plan survey of B.C. construction workers found most wouldn’t feel comfortable disclosing a substance use issue to their peers. But paradoxically, it also found the vast majority would support a colleague if they disclosed.

“We have unions and employers that are spending hours of their time just talking about mental health and substance use, talking about using the correct language without stigmatizing, encouraging people to come forward,” Waldron said.

In 2017, the Vancouver Island Construction Association began the Tailgate Toolkit, a guide to how construction workers can access resources to use drugs more safely. The association began giving talks on Vancouver Island, and now offer them across the province, with backing from the B.C. government.

The association’s CEO, Rory Kulmala, says many greeted those talks with skepticism at first. Now people are taking the issue more seriously.


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“I have to say when I started down this road five years ago, I had industry people saying, ‘Don’t say anything, because people will say we have a problem,’” Kulmala said. “Well, the coroners’ report says we have a problem.”

Many of the men interviewed for this story have made personal and professional commitments to helping their peers struggling with substance use.

Rob Tournour, a bricklayer by trade, says his substance use began with alcohol, adding that it was normal for a crew to go out drinking after a hard day of work.

“On the outside, it might look like you’re having a pretty damn good time,” Tournour said. “But for me, as it progressed through my 30s and my early 40s, the more I drank, the more I was thinking of getting ahold of coke, and then it turned into crack as well.”

That ended 12 years ago, when Tournour got home from another late, hard night and decided to go to his first sobriety meeting. He estimated he went to as many as 200 meetings in the 90 days after that.

Moth, who now lives in Saskatoon, has delivered public talks about his time in the trades encouraging other men to come forward.

Botkin, who works full time at a Victoria non-profit, has also shared his story.

Monti resolved years ago, he said, to pay it forward to other workers in the industry going through what he went through.

And Tournour says he is doing it for his brother.

“It’s become a little more OK for men to open up and discuss the traumas they may have faced,” said Tournour. “Our society has groomed us to be strong, to be protectors, to be the providers. And God, in this world now that we’re living in, that’s not such an easy thing to do.”

BC 

Site C’s Slippery Slope
Newly obtained FOI documents raise questions about oversight of the troubled megaproject.

Ben Parfitt 

16 Nov 2022

TheTyee.ca
Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. office.

LONG READ

It took only a few hours to win BC government approval for major changes to the Site C dam design. Photo by Don Hoffman.

It was the bureaucratic equivalent of waiting for Timbits and a double-double at the Tim Hortons drive-thru.

In the space of just hours on a single day in June 2020, the provincial government office in charge of dam safety rubber-stamped a request to embark on a costly fix at the Site C construction project.

The fix was needed because the notoriously unstable layers of sedimentary shale on the Peace River’s south bank had shifted following construction activities. And the shifting of that “soft rock” had destabilized major components of the dam, including a massive sloped wall consisting of millions of tonnes of concrete.

Yet the the provincial water comptroller’s office never publicly disclosed what had gone wrong at the $16-billion-and-counting megaproject.

Details on the swift approval by the only government office with the power to halt Site C’s construction because of safety concerns are contained in more than 8,000 pages of documents the provincial government released in response to a freedom of information request by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The documents show that on June 26, 2020, the provincial water comptroller’s office received an 18-page report from Tim Little, Site C’s “independent engineer.” It proposed a major, costly change to the dam’s design.

Little’s job was to feed information on Site C from BC Hydro, the publicly owned hydro utility spearheading the project, to the provincial government office in charge of dam safety.

It was that office’s job to review Little’s submissions, weigh the consequences and decide whether to issue BC Hydro with permits that would let it advance to each new phase of construction, or to order course corrections.

Little’s report was a bombshell. The connections between layers of soft sedimentary shale beneath the dam had weakened, causing tiny, but troublesome, ground movements.

Worse, this had happened after millions of tonnes of roller-compacted concrete — a type of concrete which can be laid down quite quickly — had already been placed to make a huge, sloped wall known as a buttress, the foundation for some of Site C’s most critical infrastructure, including its powerhouse, turbines and spillway.

“Detailed mapping of excavations and monitoring with geotechnical instruments during construction to date have identified that certain bedding planes have lower strengths and are more critical to stability than previously considered in the design,” Little reported to Richard Penner, a professional engineer who, in turn, reported to water comptroller Ted White.

That has “led to design revisions” for the dam’s foundations, Little reported.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of Little’s warning.

The buttress — which formed one arm of the dam — was sitting on top of what geologists call “soft” or “near” rock. There was a risk the shale layers were weaker than thought and could shift, causing ground movement.

Yet in a matter of hours, the regulator gave BC Hydro everything it asked for, with nary a hint from the water comptroller’s office that a delay was in order.

All of this was a sad but foreseeable outcome, says U.S. energy economist Robert McCullough, who has studied Site C in detail, has decades of experience analyzing hydroelectric projects across Canada and who was once an executive at Portland General Electric, a privately owned hydro facility in Portland, Oregon.

Site C is simultaneously a BC Hydro project and a B.C. government project, because as a Crown corporation BC Hydro’s sole shareholder is the province. Effectively, that means the government is regulating itself at Site C.


“This is an ongoing concern for me — the lack of separation between the reviewer and the entity being reviewed,” McCullough says. The lines get even blurrier, he suggests, when a key player in the regulatory process has deep ties to both BC Hydro and the Site C project itself.

In this case, Tim Little was a senior engineer at BC Hydro where he worked on various aspects of the Site C project. He then became a consultant to BC Hydro before being nominated by BC Hydro to be Site C’s independent engineer. The B.C. government then accepted the Crown corporation’s nominee, appointing Little to be the critical liaison between BC Hydro and the water comptroller’s office.

What made Little’s report even more disturbing was that Site C’s design called for the potentially unstable buttress to be joined by an as-yet-to-be-built earthen wall.

The shale below the critical corner where the buttress and earthen wall would meet to form a highly unusual L-shape dam was also weaker than previously thought. It, too, needed “enhancement.”

If ever there was a time to push the pause button, this was it. Yet, in a matter of hours on the very same day that he received Little’s report, Penner granted BC Hydro everything it asked for.

“My decision is to authorize BC Hydro to proceed with Stability Enhancements for RCC Buttress and Earthfill Dam Right [south] Bank as described in the submission,” Penner wrote, adding elsewhere that without the changes, the whole thing might come crashing down.

“With the decrease in interpreted shear strength of the underlying bedding planes, the structure is subject to failure,” Penner wrote.

Anchoring three million tonnes of concrete?

The most immediate of the approved changes or enhancements outlined by Little and approved by Penner called for BC Hydro to sink 162 steel bars or rods in front of the buttress, where just shy of three million tonnes of concrete was in place.

The reinforcing bars were intended to anchor all of that mass, preventing it from moving.

“The selected approach is to install foundation anchors extending across bedding planes BP29A and BP30 in the bedrock below the base of the RCC [roller-compacted concrete] buttress. There will be three rows of 54 anchors, each consisting of 75 mm, 20 m long non-tensioned steel bar,” Little said in his report of June 26.

Little did not elaborate further on what would be required to do this. But clearly much work lay ahead.

A total of 162 angled holes would have to be drilled through layers of shale and weak bedding planes, and each hole would need to be almost as long as a five-storey apartment building is high.

What made Little’s report even more notable, however, was his use of the future tense. “The selected approach is to install.... There will be three rows.”

This suggested that the proposed fixes were some way off.

But clearly that was not the case. We know this because in a subsequent report written by Little on July 20, a photograph shows a pile of the anchor bars that would be used to shore up the vulnerable buttress at Site C. The photograph is dated June 23, 2020.

In other words, three days before Little submitted his bombshell report, BC Hydro had already invested in the material that would be used for the critical foundation enhancements — a signal that the publicly owned utility felt that no regulatory roadblock would be placed in its way or that it would proceed with the enhancements with or without the approval. The cutline accompanying the photograph reads: “Core buttress anchors (975 mm diameter threadbares) being prepared for installation.”

Also revealed in Little’s July 20 report is that “by the end of June” 133 of those 162 holes were already drilled, with 30 of the steel bars already inserted.

Little’s July report also revealed something else: For “several months” he’d been meeting with BC Hydro officials and Site C’s technical advisory board to discuss problems at the construction site.

A project risk

Less than two weeks after Little’s disclosures, provincial Energy Minister Bruce Ralston held a press conference on July 31, a Friday heading into the long weekend.

Ralston announced that the government had appointed former deputy minister of finance Peter Milburn to investigate Site C’s problems and spiralling costs.

Ralston did not address what the water comptroller’s office knew about problems at Site C, when it learned of those problems, or what it had done about them.

The press conference coincided with BC Hydro’s voluntary filing of a quarterly report on Site C with the BC Utilities Commission. (Under normal circumstances, the commission would have been the arm’s length overseer of the project, but it was removed from that role by the BC Liberal government in 2010, a decision that the current government opted not to reverse.)

In a cover letter accompanying the filling with the commission, BC Hydro CEO Chris O’Riley first blamed the project’s skyrocketing costs and delays on COVID-19.

But he later wrote “a project risk has materialized on the south bank. Towards the end of December 2019, investigations and analysis of geological mapping and monitoring activities completed during construction identified that some foundation enhancements would be required to increase the stability below the powerhouse, spillway and future dam core areas... the foundation costs are anticipated to be more substantial than initially expected in January.”

Neither Ralston nor O’Riley was asked then about when BC Hydro had officially alerted the water comptroller’s office to those problems. But BC Hydro’s filing with the utilities commission indicates that senior executives knew of serious “project risk” issues long before Little filed his June 2020 report — a fact well-documented in an investigation by the Narwhal.

BC Hydro’s most recent report to the utilities commission was in June. It notes that in addition to the 162 steel rods used to stabilize the buttress in 2020, even more reinforcements are now needed. The report flags that another 48 “large diameter concrete-filled vertical steel piles” now must be placed near the dam’s powerhouse.

The latest “enhancements” will allegedly be completed by next spring at undisclosed additional cost to Site C’s already bloated $16-billion price tag.

The independent engineer

When BC Hydro nominated Little to be Site C’s independent engineer, the water comptroller’s office quickly deemed him to be an “appropriate and satisfactory” choice.

Little was not, however, independent, at least not by commonly accepted definitions of the word. He had worked for years as a BC Hydro engineer before forming a consulting company, with BC Hydro as its main client.

According to BC Hydro financial statements, T.E. Little Consulting Inc. received more than $2 million in the past 10 years, with the bulk of that money covering Little’s services as Site C’s independent engineer.

By accepting Little’s nomination, the water comptroller’s office was knowingly basing its decisions on the advice of someone who had deep ties to BC Hydro and was personally and professionally invested in the Site C project.

Which comes as no surprise to McCullough.

“It would be very unusual that a decision-maker would appoint an advisor who is likely to oppose his project,” McCullough says, when what you really need is someone who is there to provide a firm check and balance.

Decades of warnings

Ever since the massive W.A.C. Bennett and smaller Peace Canyon dams commenced operations in 1968 and 1980 respectively, BC Hydro had planned to build other dams on the Peace River.

But getting the third dam — Site C — built was another matter.

In 1991, Little, then a BC Hydro employee, was one of two authors of a peer-reviewed paper in the Canadian Geotechnical Journal that discussed the “rebound potential” of “soft rocks” or “near rocks” at Site C.

That rock was shale; the dominant geological feature at Site C. Such “soft rock” can move in a process called “rebounding” after large excavations occur.

Little and co-author Alfred Hannah, then an engineer with Klohn Crippen, a company later involved in Site C’s design, noted this phenomenon.

“Nonelastic or time-dependent rebound, otherwise known as heave or swelling, is a well-known phenomenon associated with certain soils and rocks, predominantly clay based, that are sensitive to moisture. In the case of soft rocks, or ‘near rocks,’ clay shales and shales are most likely to exhibit swelling characteristics. The swelling of shales can be initiated in response to unloading by erosion or excavation, and (or) by exposure to water.”

In plain language what Little and Hannah said was that shale, which is not really a rock at all, is a temperamental material. Dig around it, expose it to water, and watch out. As political commentator and satirist John Oliver would say, that is a “wow” statement if ever there was one. Because if you’re building a dam you’ll do a lot of digging and you’ll encounter a lot of water — for the lifetime of the project.

Little, Hannah and many others knew decades ago that the presence of so much shale at Site C posed daunting engineering challenges, particularly on the south riverbank.

It was those uncertainties that eventually led Site C’s architects to toss out the original and more conventional dam design, which cut across the Peace River Valley in a more or less straight line.

What was once straight became a dramatic L-shaped structure featuring a massive concrete wall or buttress that paralleled the south riverbank from west to east and an earthen dam that cut across the river valley from north to south to join the concrete edifice at a sharp right angle.

As first reported in The Tyee, the reason for the new dam design was explained in a paper written by six professional engineers who either worked for BC Hydro or for two major engineering firms — SNC Lavalin and Klohn Crippen — and presented to delegates attending a Canadian Dam Association conference in Halifax in 2016.

The new L-shape dam was intended to liberate the structure from all the layers of shale “rock” and the weak bedding planes separating it.

BC Hydro engineer Andrew Watson, one of the authors of the paper, later explained the change to a reporter with the Alaska Highway News.

“The new design will minimize the depth of the excavation required under the generating station, which will reduce concerns about foundation stability.”

We now know this wasn’t the case. The massive wall of concrete constructed parallel to the problematic riverbank quickly became embroiled in its own stability problems.

Milestone or millstone?

Notable problems that have delayed scheduled construction activities and inflated Site C’s costs include a 400-metre-long tension crack on the excavated north riverbank that necessitated the removal of hundreds of thousands of additional tonnes of earth, problems completing the drilling of diversion tunnels, which led to delays in diverting the Peace River around the construction site, and dangerous buildups of dust and falling slabs of concrete in a drainage tunnel.

But one thing that BC Hydro’s contractors did get done well ahead of schedule was to pour all of the concrete to make the buttress that subsequently was identified as at risk of failing.

On Nov. 1, 2019, BC Hydro boasted in a press release that another 585,516 cubic metres of roller-compacted concrete had been placed that year. The “major milestone” was achieved “seven months ahead of schedule,” bringing the total volume of concrete poured at the site to more than 1.2 million cubic metres, which BC Hydro noted was six times more concrete than that used to build the world’s tallest building in Dubai.

What BC Hydro did not say in that press release is that such concrete has its drawbacks.

Unlike conventional concrete, which is wetter and poured into forms that hold it in place until it hardens, roller-compacted concrete is a drier mix that is placed with asphalt pavers and then compacted by vibrating rollers.

Its great advantage is that it can be laid down quickly, without joints, forms or steel reinforcing, all of which increase costs. It is also strong and durable. If done right.

But on CivilJungle, a website that discusses products used in engineered projects, there are warnings about its downsides. “Water seepage” can be a major problem, necessitating the drilling of drainage infrastructure before the concrete is laid. The other thing to avoid is placing roller-compacted concrete on “foundation rock” that is of “poor quality,” which any geologist will tell you abounds at Site C.

BC Hydro also didn’t say, as it boasted about its great concrete pour, that some of that concrete was placed well before its own construction plans called for.

We know this, thanks to other documents filed with the water comptroller’s office by Little.

On June 2, 2017, Little reported to the water comptroller’s office that a drainage tunnel on the south bank was far behind schedule, thanks to the buildup of dangerous levels of silica dust in the tunnel and portions of the tunnel’s concrete liner crashing to the floor.

The original construction plans called for the tunnel to be drilled “in advance” of the buttress because, as Site C’s engineers knew, water and exposed shale were a bad mix that decades earlier contributed to the 1957 collapse of a suspension bridge spanning the Peace River not far downstream from Site C.

But because of the delays in drilling the tunnel, BC Hydro was in a bind. Its construction schedule called for concrete to be poured, but the tunnel was nowhere near done.

“As Independent Engineer for the Site C project, I have received a submission from BC Hydro requesting permission to commence construction of the powerhouse buttress, tailrace wall and downstream spillway stilling basin. Those components are the RCC structures scheduled to be constructed in 2017,” Little wrote in his report submitted to Bruce O’Neill, then deputy water comptroller.

Little then recommended that the concrete be poured as per BC Hydro’s request and that, in the absence of the drainage tunnel, temporary wells be used to assist in capturing and diverting potentially dangerous and destabilizing water flows.

As would be the case a few years later with Little’s bombshell report on instability issues at the buttress, it took the water comptroller’s office just hours on the same day to issue the requested approval.

With a stroke of a bureaucratic pen, BC Hydro received permission to flip things on their head.

The concrete would be poured first. The pesky drainage tunnel finished later.

Asked to comment on the same-day-approvals, Harry Swain, the long-standing federal public servant, former deputy minister of Industry Canada and chair of the joint review panel of the then proposed Site C dam, said he was troubled on two counts.

First, the regulator’s decision to allow Little to be Site C’s independent engineer “does not pass the most elementary test of independence,” Swain said.


Site C’s Radical, Risky Makeover

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But he said it’s what the regulator then did with the reports Little provided that raises even more concerns.

“The instantaneous approvals of major construction changes by the water comptroller’s office is inexplicable,” Swain said. “At best, it is possible that extensive consultations between that office and BC Hydro preceded the formal approval of documents. Even then, careful scrutiny of the final texts of these lengthy and technical documents would be expected. At worst, senior government officials may have applied unrecorded pressure on the sole regulator to hasten approvals.”

An inquiry? Don’t count on it

For 44 years, Ken Farquharson was a civil engineer, working on major projects including BC Hydro’s Mica and Keenleyside dams. In an interview he gave in December 2020, eight months before he died, the engineer and committed environmentalist said projects of Site C’s magnitude demanded more rigorous oversight from one provincial office with authority to ensure safe dam construction.

“I do not believe recommendations of this magnitude coming from a proponent should be turned around on a dime by a government engineer,” Farquharson said. “This is not effective consideration.”


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Marc Eliesen, a former president and CEO of BC Hydro, adds that as more information comes to light about the “disastrous boondoggle” at Site C, the decision by the Liberal government to exempt the project from independent oversight by the BC Utilities Commission, and the NDP government’s decision to maintain course, looks worse with each passing day.

“The complete lack of provincial regulatory oversight, the escalating construction cost, and the ongoing geotechnical risks to public safety — all cry out for an independent commission of inquiry into the building of Site C,” Eliesen says.

But it is almost certain that any inquiry will have to wait until Site C is done.

Ralston rejected the idea of an independent inquiry when asked about it during his July 2020 press conference.

By then it was clear that the government was in thrall to the sunk cost fallacy — the idea that too much money had been spent at Site C to walk away, even though walking away may have been the best thing to do given the expenses and risks that lay ahead.

Yes, You Can Oppose Trafficking and Support Sex Workers’ Rights

Decriminalization offers access to legal protections and allows sex workers to access justice if they face violence or exploitation.

Angela Wu 

16 Nov 2022

TheTyee.ca
Angela Wu is a project manager at SWAN Vancouver, an organization that supports and advocates for the rights and safety of immigrant and migrant women engaged in sex work.

SWAN staff and supporters at the 2022 Red Umbrella March, which marks the National Day of Action in support of sex workers. Photo submitted.

Every day, there seems to be more news about human trafficking in Canada. But does this mean that there is more trafficking happening now than there was before? Does it mean that people are finally paying attention to a crime that has been happening all along?

The play ‘Courage Now’ shines a light on a Japanese diplomat who tirelessly aided refugees during the Second World War.

You might be surprised to learn that the answer to both of these questions is “no.”

The reality is that the current discourse around human trafficking is full of imprecise language and inflated numbers. “Human trafficking” is often used to describe everything from intimate partner violence to child sexual exploitation to labour exploitation, casting a wider net that makes it seem like it’s more common than it really is.

SWAN Vancouver is the only organization in Western Canada that supports immigrant and migrant sex workers and has consistent access to the massage and body rub establishments where trafficking is supposedly happening. This access is available to us because we provide low-barrier support and do not require anything in return from the people we serve. We have spent 20 years building a reputation as an organization that centres sex workers’ agency and prioritizes their health, safety and self-determination above all else.

We are uniquely positioned to support both immigrant and migrant sex workers, as well as victims of trafficking. And yet we very rarely come across any of the latter.

Instead, what we see is a troubling conflation of trafficking and sex work.

Trafficking and sex work are not the same. Yet, they are constantly conflated by anti-trafficking advocates, policymakers and the media, which leads to misinformation that causes harm to both sex workers and trafficking victims. A recent example of this happened last year in Winnipeg, where conversations about municipal licensing of escort and body rub parlours were dominated by anti-trafficking advocates who equated selling sex with selling child abuse.

Despite the fact that sex work is widely considered the world’s “oldest profession,” it’s still a topic most Canadians are uncomfortable with. Many people view sex work through a morality based lens, which makes it hard for them to accept that it could be a form of employment someone might choose to do. It’s often easier to believe that everyone in the sex industry is there against their will.

Mainstream media continues to platform anti-trafficking advocates who are anti-sex work, perpetuating the stigma around sex work and promoting the flawed idea that criminalization will eradicate the sex industry. Some prominent anti-sex work, anti-trafficking advocates have been quoted in the media saying things like, “I want the government to indicate that there’s no difference between trafficking, prostitution and pornography. They’re all one and the same,” and “Bawdy houses, body rub parlours, escort services is just a front for human trafficking.”

Often voices invited to speak on violence against sex workers are explicitly campaigning for the abolition of sex work.

But this is not an issue that requires a “both sides” approach — people who are anti-sex work should not be given space to comment on violence against sex workers.

The conflation of trafficking and sex work in Canada has made its way into the highest realm of policy: our federal sex work laws. The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act was adopted in 2014 after our previous prostitution laws were struck down as unconstitutional. In most ways, however, the act replicates similar violations to sex workers’ health, safety and rights.

In both the initial and 2022 parliamentary review hearings to discuss the act, the discussion always migrated back to human trafficking. Somehow firsthand accounts from sex workers themselves were weighed equally with testimonies from anti-sex work, anti-trafficking advocates. The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act is a law about sex work, not trafficking — but human trafficking dominated the conversation.

Because the discourse around trafficking and sex work has become extremely polarized, it might appear nearly impossible to be anti-human trafficking and support sex workers’ rights simultaneously.

But at SWAN, that is what we do every day. For us, addressing trafficking and upholding the rights of sex workers are not mutually exclusive goals.

Immigrant and migrant sex workers experience multi-layered stigma and criminalization that makes it incredibly risky for them to access mainstream services.

On top of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations prohibit temporary residents (anyone without permanent residency or citizenship) from working in the sex industry, placing migrant sex workers at risk of arrest, detention and deportation. This creates an environment in which the women we serve fear law enforcement even more than predators. As a result, predators are emboldened to target them without fear of consequences, and women are left with little recourse when they are assaulted, robbed or raped.

Sex workers’ rights advocates do have one thing in common with anti-trafficking advocates who are also anti-sex work: we all want to ensure the safety and well-being of people who are being exploited.

And if that’s the goal, then we need to acknowledge that criminalizing sex work to fight trafficking is not working. Instead, criminalization causes serious harm to sex workers. This is acknowledged in the recent parliamentary review report on PCEPA.


Sex Worker Advocates Launch New Challenge to Prostitution Laws

READ MORE

With complex issues, it’s tempting to look at things as if they are black and white — but with issues like trafficking and sex work, almost everything is grey. If we try to oversimplify these complex issues, we often wind up getting the wrong answers, even if we mean well.

We need to embrace the complexity and nuance, and be open to solutions that might contradict our personal feelings about sex work.

Solutions like decriminalizing sex work.

Decriminalization would allow access to legal and labour protections and open up opportunities for sex workers to access justice when they are faced with violence and exploitation before situations evolve into trafficking. For the women SWAN serves, decriminalization also includes repealing the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations that put them at risk of arrest and deportation.

After two decades supporting immigrant and migrant sex workers, and victims of trafficking, decriminalization is the solution SWAN supports as the best way to ensure the safety and well-being of the women we serve.

Edmonton advocates urge province to track deaths in homeless community

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Neither the provincial government nor the city track

mortality rates of Edmontonians experiencing

 homelessness

Andrea Huncar · CBC News · Posted: Nov 17, 2022 

Shopping carts, some filled with personal belongings, outside a tent pitched on a sidewalk in Edmonton's Chinatown district. (Wallis Snowdon/CBC)

Edmonton advocates are calling on the provincial government to track deaths in the homeless community to better direct dollars and resources.

One of the latest deaths occurred on Nov. 3, when a 64-year-old Indigenous man was found dead after his tent caught fire in the downtown core.

News circulated fast among the hundreds of Edmontonians living outside, but it's unclear how many deaths have occurred among people experiencing homelessness since temperatures dropped earlier this month because no government agency tracks those numbers. 

Neither the provincial government nor the city keep official count of mortality rates of Edmontonians experiencing homelessness.

"I think the people that have the jurisdiction to act on this would probably prefer that those numbers aren't known," said Jim Gurnett, a community activist with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECHH), who has long called for an official count.

"If we don't know how bad it is, it's easier to not take any action to address it."

• Edmonton's emergency shelter plan still a work in progress as winter looms

Since 2005, the coalition has identified and counted the number of homeless people who have died in Edmonton. The deceased are honoured at a memorial every June.

ECHH finds them by asking those working directly with people living outside. The names are then cross-checked to remove duplicates. 

Jim Gurnett has tracked deaths of people living homeless in Edmonton since 2005. (Jim Gurnett)

Gurnett recalls the tears in his team members' eyes in 2005 after 32 people were identified. In 2021, that number rose to 222. Some people freeze to death, said Gurnett, while others die of drug poisoning, fire or violence.

"But the main reason, I believe, is just chronically having everything about how to stay healthy destroyed and crushed around you. And there's a point where no human being can exist with that for longer," Gurnett said.

'Are they next?'

The impacts of such a death in the community are hard to verbalize, said Lina Meadows, a manager at Boyle Street Community Services.

In the Nov. 3 incident, Meadows said neighbouring tents also caught fire, leaving fellow community members to start over.

'We know that it's only going to get colder," said Meadows. "We know that the reality is more of our community will likely die in a tent fire. It's not a one-off. The community is worried — are they next?"

While the man who died earlier this month was well known, often when a death is reported "detective work" is involved, Meadows said. It can involve talking to other community members and agency workers, calling hospitals and police.

"Sometimes it will take days or in other unfortunate cases weeks to be able to actually get that confirmation that somebody died."

Meadows urged government authorities to redefine kinship in such cases because "the reality for a lot of our community members is that the agency is their family."

'Privilege of saying goodbye'

Bissell Centre has implemented a mail system for community members with no permanent address who may receive a note left by a loved one, asking them to call. 

In some cases, Bissell workers are able to identify people who have died through photos shared by police. Sometimes they don't learn someone has died for years, if ever.

"Especially with things like privacy laws, unless they're in a system somewhere and that system finds out that they've passed away, there's really only so much we can do," said Bissell Centre spokesperson Scarlet Bjornson.

"So lots of times, unless a community member has seen one of their friends pass away or watch them drive away in a van, they're just gone. Their friends don't get that privilege of saying goodbye. You don't get any closure."

Scarlet Bjornson said grieving is a privilege in a community where members often disappear. (Trevor Wilson/CBC)

Alberta Justice press secretary Ethan Lecavalier-Kidney said death investigations by the chief medical examiner take on average nine months to complete. Reports are published online, including whether a person has no residence.

"Any death of a homeless person, regardless of cause, is a tragedy. Our thoughts are with those who may be struggling to find a home or shelter during the cold winter months," Lecavalier-Kidney wrote in an email. 

Alberta Health did not respond to an email asking whether the government would consider tracking the deaths of people experiencing homelessness. 

Bjornson said she was relieved to recently catch up with her uncle who has lived on the streets for decades and inspired her career path.

"It's a miracle and it's wonderful, but then it's just like, how do we get them to make it through the next six months?"

Neil Young says he will no longer tour 'unless the venues are clean'

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The Canadian icon explains why his environmental views

may spell the end of touring for him

CBC Music · CBC Music · Posted: Nov 17, 2022 

Musician Neil Young performs onstage at the 4th Annual Light Up The Blues at the Pantages Theatre on May 21, 2016 in Hollywood, Calif. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Neil Young has not performed live since September 2019, and it now seems that might have been his fans' last chance to catch the Canadian icon in concert.

Last year, Young told Rolling Stone that he was holding off on touring behind his latest Crazy Horse album at the time, Barn, because of ongoing COVID-19 concerns, telling the magazine, "I don't want to put people in danger. I don't want people to see me out there and think I think everything is okay. I don't think everything is okay." 

• A musician's musician: Neil Young's catalogue of influence

And while the pandemic is still causing concern and complications among touring musicians, Young has added a more definitive reason why he may never hit the road again. 

In a new interview with Q's Tom Power, promoting another new Crazy Horse album, World Record, Young explains that his environmental views, especially when it comes to eating sustainably, are something he refuses to compromise on, and which can be difficult to uphold when touring from city to city.

"When I look at the compromise that I would have to make to do that, the things that I don't believe in, that I'd have to endorse, it doesn't turn me on," Young tells Power. "I can deal with the power for the venue, I can make it clean. I can make the P.A. clean, the lights clean, the electricity in the building clean. I can clean up all my vehicles. I've got the right fuel. I can do all of that. But the food — all those places are fed by factory farms."

Young is referring to the industrial method of raising farmed animals, which has been criticized by environmental advocates as an intensive form of agriculture that prioritizes maximizing profits over the treatment of its livestock in addition to generating as much greenhouse gas emissions as "all cars, trucks and automobiles combined," as Greenpeace states.

Young has been speaking out against factory farming for years, and in 1985 he helped establish the annual Farm Aid concerts, which raise money for family farmers in the U.S. One of Young's last performances was at the 2019 edition of Farm Aid. 

"I can't support it," Young continues, noting that most venues' foods are sourced from caterers who use factory-farmed foods. He notes that it can be difficult coming into venues, demanding "good food that has to be clean food, sustainably grown, and presented in a sustainable way." 

Ultimately, Young states: "Fuel is half of it, and food is the other half." 

When Power asks Young if that means he's no longer touring, Young replies, "Unless the venues are clean, and that they work that way, I won't be there."

"I've seen too much," he continues, "I can't do it. I believe in what I believe, and it's grounded in science. I know what's going on in the planet, what caused it, what we're continuing to do, and I cannot support buildings, organizations and companies that will not change that. If they change it, then I can consider going."

Listen to the full interview below. 

34:40Neil Young on his new album and 50 years of Harvest.

Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young returns to Q to talk about his latest album with Crazy Horse "World Record." He delves into his love and grief over the world around him, plus the 50th anniversary of his legendary album Harvest.