John Fugelsang has a good point.  It really is closer to criminal harassment than anything else.

Derek’s story on Invisible People.

From Forbes

Local debt is the big untold story of the Euro crisis and, if that was not apparent before, it became glaringly so when Catalonia’s President this week told the world his autonomous Catalan Government would struggle to meet its bills at the end of this month.

Looked at from afar it might be difficult to interpret what this “local” problem means for Europe and those countries dependent on European consumer markets – but we’re always talking about a Euro problem when in fact it is a thousand local crises too. Put in American terms Catalonia’s problems are probably best likened to a successful area in the USA, like Austin, Texas, asking for a bailout.

The capital of Catalonia is, of course, Barcelona and Barcelona has a global reputation for excellence that stretches back to its management of the 1992 Olympic games.

A succession of charismatic mayors has turned Barcelona into a poster for regional economic success. Barcelona has done pretty much everything that the text book says a regional economy should do. It did “clusters” – it has a very strong cluster of companies in global logistics, it maintained regional manufacturing and grew a strong service infrastructure, it has a strong creative economy, the ESADE business school has a global reputation for management education, it has a very strong, competitive culture. And it has the world’s best football club, which gives the city global exposure week in, week out. Catalonia accounts for a quarter of Spain’s GDP. It is a success story.

But local indebtedness in Europe should come as no great surprise either. Germany and France bother have large local debt problems that are anything but transparent. In fact in the case of France much of the local debt was inherited from the central Government, which “delegated” the debt to localities where national funds were spent, effectively reducing the national debt headline figure.

Here is the big picture

In April last year the Economist also warned of all the mini-Greeces in Germany:

Germany’s 11,000-odd municipalities had a deficit of €7.7 billion last year, the second-highest ever…. in NRW( North Rhein Westphalia) local social spending rose by 274% between 1980 and 2006, whereas revenue went up only by 104%.

Local debt refinancing in Spain this year, though, is Euro 36 billion with Euro 13.5 billion of that falling to Catalonia. The reality is that, at this local level in Catalonia, the failure to refinance debt will lead to real wealth destruction and impair Spain’s prospects for years to come. When a success story like Catalonia hits the skids like this, you know the problem runs deep, very deep, but Catalonia also symbolizes something about Europe right now. It is not just a financial crisis but an existential one.

The same thing is happening in the United States.  I’d love to see the Canadian numbers.

I was out to Blue Mountain near North Battleford this week.  Part of the tour involved a bit of a commute over the second longest zip line in Canada. 

He runs his personal finances the same way he would run the country’s

New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair and his wife have repeatedly refinanced their home west of Montreal, gradually increasing the debt on the property over a series of 11 mortgages, land records show.

Mulcair’s office will not explain why the couple have loaded more and more financing onto the West Island home they’ve lived in since the early 1980s, saying only that it’s a “private matter.”

It is unclear why Mulcair would need to refinance the modest two-garage home in Beaconsfield so many times, bumping the value of the mortgage from $58,000 to $300,000.

Before he became leader, Mulcair enjoyed a successful and well-paid career as a government lawyer and, later, a cabinet minister in the Quebec National Assembly. His wife, Catherine Pinhas, is a psychologist practicing in Montreal. Both their children are now adults with jobs — one is a police officer, the other an engineer.

Mulcair was hit with a judgment from a defamation case in 2005 after he accused former Parti Québécois minister Yves Duhaime of influence peddling. He was ordered to pay Duhaime $95,000, plus legal costs.

He left provincial politics in 2007 and ran for the NDP in a byelection later that year. Even then, he stood to collect on a pension from his years as an MNA. When he was elected that fall, he began earning an MP’s salary that was then set at $150,800.

But in January 2009, he and Pinhas financed the home for the 11th time. They took out a $300,000 mortgage with the Royal Bank of Canada and then paid off the previous $249,000 mortgage from three years earlier.

Then again, he is scraping by on about $225,000 a year so who can blame him.

Of course the other problem with this story is that is a four car garage on his house.  Umm, so much for being lectured by Thomas Mulcair on the environment.  It’s a do as I say, not as I do kind of thing I guess.  Maybe he has to re-mortgage so often to put gas in his cars.

This is depressing

Of those young women in D.C., more than 40 percent had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared to only 16 percent of their non-abused peers. We recommend providing increased and targeted trauma services to sexually abused young women, 85 percent of whom report they were asked to leave their prior residence, where they were usually staying with family or friends. With intervention services that address the emotional and psychological issues associated with untreated trauma, the young women can begin to heal, and avoid some of the dangers that a history of untreated abuse puts them at risk of.

I have spent the last two and a half years working on a book about kids like those who come to Covenant House every day. It’s called Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and the figures conjure up the faces my co-author Tina Kelley and I have come to love — of Benjamin, who spent his childhood in more than 30 places — foster homes, residential treatment centers, group homes, psych wards — after his mother went to jail for abusing him when he was a toddler. I think of Creionna, who became a mother at 17 and found our homeless shelter more welcoming than her father’s home. And Paulie, who got his high school equivalency diploma up here in Alaska, where I recently attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new shelter with many more beds. These young people, all of whom had abusive families, are thriving now, thanks in part to the unconditional love and respect they received at Covenant House shelters.

In the D.C. report, a couple trends jumped out at me, in part because they showed clear directions our programs need to take. For one, the recession has not been kind to young people. In the two wards of the District of Columbia that send us the most residents, Ward 7 and the one our shelter is located in, Ward 8, the percentage of 16-21-year-olds who were unemployed nearly doubled, to 72 percent from 38 percent. Yikes! (In our five-shelter study, almost 80 percent of our kids were unemployed, almost 60 percent hadn’t finished high school or gotten an equivalency diploma.)

Heartbreaking story of someone’s first week of being homeless.

May 18th 2007, I woke up at 7 am because I had barely a few hours of sleep, I had spent the previous night praying for God to perform a miracle and send some help, I believed the help was coming but couldn’t shake the little bit of fear in me.

At 8 am the door knocked and I opened the door, the bailiff was at the door, a large man in height and width and he told me he had court papers to seize the house. Two estate agents entered the house and the baliff began to change the locks on the front door.I was told me I had one hour to pack all I had. I did not even have time to take a shower. As I packed the estate agents went through the house, calculating how much profit they would make.

Was just watching the NFL Network Top 10 Draft Steals and Charlie Cassidy said that Bo Jackson was timed at 4.12 seconds in the 40.  6’1”.  230 pounds.  4.12 seconds. Bo Knows Speed.

From Fast Company

1. Hire the right people

Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. There is no shortage of impressive CVs out there, but you should try to find people who are interested in the same things you are. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward his or her own (very different) passion. Asking the right questions is key: What do you love about your chosen career? What inspires you? What courses in school did you dread? You want to get a sense of what the potential employee believes.

2. Communicate

Once you have the right people, you need to sit down regularly with them and discuss what is going well and what isn’t. It’s critical to take note of your victories, but it’s just as important to analyze your losses. A fertile culture is one that recognizes when things don’t work and adjusts to rectify the problem. As well, people need to feel safe and trusted, to understand that they can speak freely without fear of repercussion.

The art of communication tends to put the stress on talking, but listening is equally important. Great cultures grow around people who listen, not just to each other or to their clients and stakeholders. It’s also important to listen to what’s happening outside your walls. What is the market saying? What is the zeitgeist? What developments, trends, and calamities are going on?

3. Tend to the weeds

A culture of passion capital can be compromised by the wrong people. One of the most destructive corporate weeds is the whiner. Whiners aren’t necessarily public with their complaints. They don’t stand up in meetings and articulate everything they think is wrong with the company. Instead, they move through the organization, speaking privately, sowing doubt, strangling passion. Sometimes this is simply the nature of the beast: they whined at their last job and will whine at the next. Sometimes these people simply aren’t a good fit. Your passion isn’t theirs. Constructive criticism is healthy, but relentless complaining is toxic. Identify these people and replace them.

From the Ottawa Citizen

An internal RCMP investigation into a series of sex and drinking escapades in a staff sergeant’s office revealed a pattern of sexual harassment so disturbing that senior Ottawa Mounties say it will take “considerable effort to rebuild the damaged trust of our organization.”

The investigation, which has not been made public until now, reviewed seven reports about the misconduct of Staff Sgt. Don Ray, the officer in charge of the polygraph unit at Alberta’s RCMP headquarters in Edmonton.

Internal Affairs investigators discovered Sgt. Ray was hosting after-hours parties in his office and kept a bar fridge stocked with Budweiser and Appleton Jamaica Rum. Sgt. Ray would encourage female subordinates to drink and make sexual advances when alone with them, the investigation found.

In April 2009, close to the end of one work day, Sgt. Ray invited his staff to a private office party at which he invited them to sit down and have a drink.

One of his female subordinates consumed four beers over two hours, and once the others left, Sgt. Ray unzipped his pants, exposed himself and told her to touch his penis, according to RCMP files. She refused.

“S/Sgt. Ray then wanted to have sexual intercourse with Ms. A, which she refused. S/Sgt. Ray insisted but Ms. A. maintained her refusal. They then both left the building without further sexual contact,” a senior disciplinary officer wrote in his findings in February.

The investigation said Sgt. Ray exhibited a “serial” pattern of “disgraceful” conduct.

Sgt. Ray’s behaviour is the latest in a series of complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination levelled against the RCMP across the country.

A high-profile RCMP veteran, Cpl. Catherine Galliford, ignited the controversy last fall by speaking publicly about her internal allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by former male colleagues.

The sad thing is that it gets worse and it’s only one of many negative stories coming out lately of RCMP misconduct.

A disturbing report from the New York Times

The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.

Women say the tribal police often discourage them from reporting sexual assaults, and Indian Health Service hospitals complain they lack cameras to document injuries.

Police and prosecutors, overwhelmed by the crime that buffets most reservations, acknowledge that they are often able to offer only tepid responses to what tribal leaders say has become a crisis.

Reasons for the high rate of sexual assaults among American Indians are poorly understood, but explanations include a breakdown in the family structure, a lack of discussion about sexual violence and alcohol abuse.

Rape, according to Indian women, has been distressingly common for generations, and they say tribal officials and the federal and state authorities have done little to help halt it, leading to its being significantly underreported.

In the Navajo Nation, which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, 329 rape cases were reported in 2007 among a population of about 180,000. Five years later, there have been only 17 arrests. Women’s advocates on the reservation say only about 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported.

The young woman who was raped in Emmonak, now 22, asked that her name not be used because she fears retaliation from her attacker, whom she still sees in the village. She said she knew of five other women he had raped, though she is the only one who reported the crime.

Nationwide, an arrest is made in just 13 percent of the sexual assaults reported by American Indian women, according to the Justice Department, compared with 35 percent for black women and 32 percent for whites.

In South Dakota, Indians make up 10 percent of the population, but account for 40 percent of the victims of sexual assault. Alaska Natives are 15 percent of that state’s population, but constitute 61 percent of its victims of sexual assault.

I was finally linked to by National Newswatch.

A couple of months ago I got a note from our MLA, Cam Broten who knew that Mark did a fair amount of volunteering with me at The Salvation Army and now at The Lighthouse whenever I have a task that needs to be done.  Cam nominated Mark to win a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal.  A week or so ago this arrived in the mail inviting Mark to the Saskatchewan Legislative buildings to meet Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall in a ceremony and tea.  Tomorrow morning we will be driving down to Regina so that Mark and Wendy can be a part of the ceremony.  Yes I said, Wendy as Mark only gets one guest and I am not it.  Wendy would prefer that I go as she is nervous about it but I saw the Duke and (then) Duchess of York in 1989 in Saskatoon and I thought she would enjoy it.

Sadly I couldn’t even get into the Legislature as the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are apparently a really big deal so I have a couple of hours to kill in Regina by myself while Mark and Wendy are living it up.

Fantastic piece by Gizmodo

Flickr’s mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google’s buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol’s purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.

As a result, Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago. It’s an Internet backwater. It’s not socially appealing.

Recently, Flickr rolled out a "Justified" view, a way to scan your friends’ recent photos where they are all placed together like puzzle pieces. It’s similar to the way Pinterest lays out images. It’s a dramatic, gorgeous way to look at photos—that mostly highlights how rarely many people update now.

As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.

This is anecdotal, sure, but I follow many of these same people on other networks (Path, Facebook, Instagram) where they tend to be very active. I see photos of the same people, with their same children and their same dogs—all looking a year or two older than on Flickr.

This justified view also serves to highlight just how many of my friends’ photos are formatted in perfect squares—the tell-tale sign of an Instagram snap that’s been exported. Many of my contacts’ entire photostreams are made up of Instagram photos. In other words they are mere duplicate streams—with fewer comments and activity—of content that exists in primary form elsewhere. The only reason they are active on Flickr at all is because they automatically export there.

There are other signals as well. On Stellar.io, a favorites aggregator that tracks what people are linking on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, the latter’s links fail to show up even daily in my stream. And of course, there is that damning Quantcast traffic chart.

I still love and use Flickr a lot but like a lot of people, enjoy using Instagram a fair bit as well.  My iPhone shots go to Instagram first (where they are sent to Flickr, Twitter, and occasionally Foursquare) but anything shot with a camera goes right to Flickr.  Sadly that isn’t as easy as it should.  The Flickr Uploadr is slow and often times out and I have had a horrible time setting up a Flickr acct for The Lighthouse.  After having problems with the login, Yahoo!/Flickr have totally ignored my help requests and despite it being a Pro acct, no one will answer my emails.   I keep hoping that Flickr will survive but more and more it feels like Dopplr 2.0.

From Dr. Gabor Mate,

There is a disproportionately high ratio of native Canadians among my Downtown Eastside patients, as well as in Canada’s drug-using population and prisons. And they suffer disproportionately. Last week, a study showed that the HIV rate among Vancouver’s aboriginal drug users is twice that of non-natives. The report came just a day after the tragic incident in which two toddlers froze to death on a Saskatchewan reserve. Their father, in an inebriated stupor, had carried them into a snowstorm.

The devastation wreaked by addiction among our first nations peoples is a national scandal — or it would be, were it to strike virtually any other segment of our population. Our country is strangely indifferent to its depredations among this marginalized group. We seem content to accept the high death toll that afflicts our native citizens, the low life expectancy, the high incarceration rate and the grinding poverty that both gives rise to substance abuse and results from it. We seem to comfort ourselves with the belief that the endemic drug addiction and alcoholism are unfortunate realities for which we, as a society, bear no responsibility. From both scientific and historical perspectives, such a view is distorted and self-serving.

Addicts are made, not born, and the most common precursors are early childhood privation, neglect and abuse. For several generations, Canada’s native children have been far more likely to suffer grinding penury, abuse and childhood substance addictions than non-natives. But contrary to what is sometimes asserted, such facts say nothing about the “innate” nature of Canada’s native peoples, either cultural or genetic. Abuse of young children among tribal peoples living in their natural habitats is virtually non-existent, and so it was with North American natives before European colonization. On the contrary — in many ways, their parenting practices were more enlightened than those current in our civilization.

And tobacco and other potentially addictive substances were available prior to the European settlement of this continent — even alcohol, in what is now Mexico and the American Southwest. Yet there is no mention by anthropologists or historians of anything that could be reasonably called addiction. As Bruce Alexander, professor emeritus of psychology at Simon Fraser University, points out, “where alcohol was readily available, it was used moderately, often ceremonially rather than addictively.”

The precursor to addiction is dislocation, according to Dr. Alexander. Dislocation is the loss of psychological, social and economic integration into family and culture — a sense of exclusion, isolation and powerlessness. “Only chronically and severely dislocated people are vulnerable to addiction,” he has written. Thus, today’s dismal statistics arise from the relationship between aboriginal people and the dominant culture.

With the mass migration of Europeans to North America and the economic transformation of the continent came also the loss of freedom of mobility for native peoples, the inexorable and still ongoing despoliation and destruction of their habitats and traditional livelihoods, the invalidation of their spiritual ways and persistent discrimination. Within living memory, native children were seized from their homes, alienated from their families and incarcerated in “civilizing” institutions where their lot was one of cultural suppression, emotional and physical maltreatment and, all too frequently, sexual abuse.

The overall pattern continues to be dispossession, denial of historical rights and patronizing control. Canadian society, with our self-appointed “mission” to improve the health, education and well-being of Afghans, has not even come close to securing those same essentials for our first nations citizens. The living situations, health conditions and social deprivation of many aboriginal Canadians are abysmal even by Third World standards. Under such circumstances, among tormented, dislocated and, most fundamentally, disempowered people, pain and suffering are transmitted from one traumatized generation to the next.

The weekend that was: On Friday night I dropped by the Rook and Raven to celebrate Sean Shaw’s birthday.  On Saturday morning we took Oliver up to the cabin for a night of rest and relaxation.  It was so relaxing that other than filling the bird feeder, I got nothing else I want done accomplished which was okay.  I did manage to get in a long nap, an extended game of fetch in the lake with Maggi, and a good night’s sleep.

I also realized that the last time I spent some time at the cabin, I came home and quit my job the next day.   A lot has happened since I was last up there.  One thing that did catch my eye was this hanging on the wall.  Wendy had seen it and bought it before our last trip up there.  Odd how life works sometimes.

Where I am at the moment: I am work.

On my to-do list this week:  I have some bad medical news that is going to be confirmed.  Nothing life threatening but maddening and frustrating.  I am also finishing up a marketing/communications plan.

Procrastinating about:  That doctor’s appointment.

Book I’m in the midst of: The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance

Music that seemed to catch my attention this past week:  Been listening to the new Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas.

How I’m feeling about this week: It’s going to be a good week.

This comes from the Saskatoon Police Service.

Six Toronto men are now facing charges relating to a dial-a-dope operation in Saskatoon.

The arrests were made following an investigation by the Saskatoon Integrated Drug Unit which began in March 2012.  The investigation focused on a crew of Toronto men who were running a dial-a-dope operation within the City.  On Wednesday, May 2, 2012, six males (ranging from 25 – 31 years old) were arrested and two search warrants were executed.  SIDU officers searched a residence in the 1200 block of Avenue D North and a hotel room in the 2100 block of Avenue B North resulting in the seizure of 7 ounces of cocaine and crack cocaine along with $20,000 in cash and numerous bank cards.  A total of 19 charges have been laid so far relating to Trafficking Cocaine, Possession for the Purpose of Trafficking Cocaine and Possession of Proceeds of Crime.  

In addition to these charges a 25 year old man was also charged with Escape from Lawful custody when, after he was arrested, pushed and ran from officers.  He ran into oncoming 5:00 p.m. traffic at the intersection of Avenue C and Circle Drive but was apprehended again immediately by officers.  Numerous unrelated warrants from other Canadian cities were also executed on these men.             

All six men are scheduled to appear in Provincial Court today at 2:00 p.m.  The court information number is 44304529.  This investigation is ongoing.

An electronic photo depicting the seizure is attached for the media.

The Saskatoon Integrated Drug Unit is comprised of members of the Saskatoon Police Service and "F" Division of the RCMP.

I thought it was classy of the policy not to name the hotel and not describe the house as “that house that everyone in Mayfair knows they are dealing drugs out of”.   Still it was a good job of the Saskatoon Police Service.  It is something that we have been complaining about for a long time in the neighbourhood and that block is notorious for illegal activity.

If you are like me, you don’t use your CD player very much or if at all anymore and you have a couple of them laying around.  If that is true, The Lighthouse needs them for their Complex Needs Wing.  The residents that are moving into the Complex Needs Wing have their room and board paid by the Ministry of Social Services but have very little money after that.  By the fact that they are in the Complex Needs Wing means that they can’t even start to think about employment yet.  We have televisions and cable for them but many of our residents love music and we would love for them to be able to experience that or listen to John Gormley, Sheila Coles, or another morning show in the morning.

If you are inclined to drop off a CD player/stereo, feel free to weed out your CD collection and bring us down some “classics” that you don’t want anymore.  Our residents will love them and we won’t tell anyone what you brought down.  I love Bon Jovi so I can’t judge anyone.

You would be surprised how much stuff like this can mean to people.

Wonderful talk by Nancy Duarte

When I started at The Lighthouse, I was caught on what was the best way to communicate with the staff.  I didn’t want to use memos and while email works, I wanted something that would keep a narrative of where we started from.  I set up an intranet with Google Sites and while it was impressive, I didn’t think it would get checked enough and was a bit of a pain to post stuff too.  I finally settled on setting up a password protected staff blog using Blogger.  It took about 2 minutes to set up and invite the staff to.  Another 60 seconds and I had invited Chris and DeeAnn to post to it as well.

The response to reading it was good but there were some technical difficulties.  Once those were settled it will be even more productive.  The main technical obstacle is staff forgetting their passwords at home and then wanting to read it at work.  That was solved by setting up a generic account that can be accessed by anyone at work to read it.

We are only six posts into it and I am not sure what the end result will be but the hope is that it will be a resource that will bring staff up to speed quicker and give them a better feel for the ethos, feel, and personality of The Lighthouse quicker than ever before.

With it being so easy to set up and publish to, I am surprised that more employers aren’t using internal blogs more.  I have loved the idea ever since I heard of the idea of Blogger in Google shortly after Google acquired Google.

From MacWorld:

"Google Inc., which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.

Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003, and since then Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog, said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

"Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up to," Goldman said. "It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."

Google executives have talked in the past about the company’s internal Blogger implementation, called Blogger in Google (BIG), and a Google employee even posted a screenshot of a BIG page last year".

It’s not a new idea but it has the potential for The Lighthouse to have a big return on almost no investment.

The man behind Mitt Romney’s campaign, Eric Fehrnstrom

Fehrnstrom calls himself a "utility player," and in the press he’s typically identified as a "Romney spokesman" or a "Romney strategist." But that doesn’t begin to do justice to his place in the high command. Fehrnstrom has been with Romney for a decade, longer than any other political adviser on his 2012 campaign. "Anytime I’ve got questions or I’ve got a doubt, I know I can go to Eric and I’m getting feedback from someone who’s inside Mitt’s brain," Romney’s senior adviser Kevin Madden told me. Or as Peter Flaherty, another senior Romney adviser, puts it: "Eric has a deeper shelf of institutional knowledge of Mitt Romney than anyone I know whose last name is not Romney."

Fehrnstrom’s first job for Romney was running the press shop during his successful 2002 run for Massachusetts governor. But his role quickly expanded, and  as Romney’s national profile grew, so did his trusted aide’s. (So much so that when Scott Brown was looking for someone to help him win Ted Kennedy’s old Massachusetts Senate seat in 2010, he hired Fehrnstrom, who remains Brown’s top strategist.) Over the course of his decade with Romney, Madden says, Fehrnstrom has become "a Tom Hagen figure. He’s consigliere to the governor."

But with two slight differences. Whereas Hagen was always trying to cool off the hotheaded Sonny Corleone and keep the peace, Fehrnstrom, 50, is both the wise man and the hothead. He wears the uniform of the modern political consultant—iPad tucked in the crook of his arm, open-collared shirt, rectangular-framed glasses—but his fleshy face and thick New England accent betray a rougher core. And far from reining in Romney, he performs the opposite service for his client: Fehrnstrom toughens him up. "Eric gives Mitt a capability that Mitt doesn’t have," says Ben Coes, Romney’s campaign manager in 2002. "It’s a streetwise savvy; it’s an on-the-ground Boston-smarts mentality; it’s a back-alley-politics, survival-of-the-fittest point of view. Mitt is not a knife fighter. Eric is a knife fighter." The best political operatives are the ones who provide their clients with a tangible quality the candidate himself lacks. If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.

Interesting profile.  I don’t know if he is any tougher than other presidential advisor, Karl Rove seems to have set the bar very high (or very low depending on how you vote) but if anything, it will give you an idea of what kind of general election it will be this fall.

It’s been about a year since I took some extended time away from work.  There has been the occasional weekend away but a combination of Wendy’s depression last year pushing all of us to almost the breaking point (as an aside, it pains me to read of Heather and Jon’s marriage issues as their marriage was an inspiration in knowing the depression would not beat us as a family) and a lot of stress at where I was working.  The only time I got away and some time to myself was when I had heart problems last summer and that wasn’t exactly relaxing.  Since I started at The Lighthouse, most days are 10 – 12 hours and when I am at home, I am working.  I have always prided myself on being there for the boys but there was a six day stretch where I didn’t see either boy and then I followed that up with another five day stretch.   While work has been less stressful with some new excellent staff coming onboard, the hours are still long and this line of work has a lot of conflict.  There is conflict with some residents although that is heartbreaking, it isn’t stressful.

The stressful part is working within the system that really is dysfunctional.  There are multiple agencies and as a colleague said to me this week, they only care about their stovepipe.  The bigger the bureaucracy, the more extensive the rules and the more rules there are, the harder it is for people in the margins to get help from them and the harder it is that it is to help them.

Here is story about Richard I know and is a resident of The Lighthouse.  When Mark Horvath was in Saskatoon last summer, Richard was in The Lighthouse’s shelter while Mark shot this video.

Richard’s a cool guy (who has now a long term room) but when you think about this story, Social Services in Humboldt sent him by bus to Saskatoon without supports, prior arrangements, or even to check out of the shelters could house him (before you defend Social Services, I verified those facts last year) and you get a bit of an idea what we deal with.  Outside of Richard’s health problems, there are no other significant contributing factors to his homelessness and yet he was sent to live on the streets in a strange city.  There is even more government dysfunction to the story than he says here.  I don’t have his permission to say it but it’s so insane, you wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Then there is Rhoda’s story which was also interviewed by Mark Horvath while he was in Saskatoon last summer.

She mentioned the tent that she was discharged earlier to.  Here is it.

It’s in a clearing where some of people Saskatoon’s homeless live.  I know that we like to think we don’t have homeless encampments but we have two large ones and a smaller one in the city that people live in, take care of each other in, and sadly get really sick in.  When I originally found out about these spots, my reaction was that this is where people go to do drugs in or just won’t conform.  No, most of it that they just don’t have anywhere else to live.  In the winter they find places indoors… abandoned buildings, sheds, or garages.  Some couch surf.  Most of the people are “off-the-grid” or in other words, they aren’t on Social Services and are stuck living outside, even if they have HIV.  It’s crazy. 

Again, just take a second to think about this for a second, our hospitals are legally not allowed to discharge to the street but a doctor decided that it was okay to send her back to this tent, even though she had HIV and was just hospitalized for something serious. I wish this was a rogue doctor but it isn’t. I am not saying that all doctors are like this but some sadly are. A couple of years ago I was invited to speak to some hospital social workers and during the meeting some started to cry and started to talk about what they are expected to do. As a couple of them said, “it’s abusive working conditions” because of the expectation of them to clear out hospital beds.  I know social admissions (admission to a hospital for a reason other than being sick) are on the upswing but discharging anyone to this is just wrong.   One agency in an attempt to help it’s clients even allowed people to sleep in a metal shed in the back of their location because they had no where else.  I don’t know the “R” value of metal sheds but I am assuming it’s pretty close to being colder than outside in the winter and hotter in the summer.

Some people don’t have even this and I was reminded of a former client who committed suicide this winter after an enduring an extended period of absolute homelessness.  She had mental health issues and I am sure that is the real reason but she was on the streets and in the cold for a long, long time.  In the meetings that I am too often a part of, I keep hearing, “someone is going to die”.  Well it happens, it is just that “homelessness” isn’t recognized as a cause of death.  Alcohol, drug use, or mental health issues are blamed and we can keep looking the other way.  The worst part of it was that this was a death that I may have been able to prevent if I had decided to take a more involved role in but like a lot of people, it wasn’t my job either.

What’s the solution to the encampments and people being discharged to the streets (other than firing some doctors and social workers)? The big picture is that the province needs to make someone responsible for homelessness and housing and right now no one is.  Quite a few departments have initiatives to ensure it doesn’t happen which means that with many people in charge, no one is in charge and that is why someone with HIV is living in a tent in an encampment in Saskatoon. 

I can’t fix that but I can create a space that has an extremely low thresh hold for entry which will at least connect people up to supports and stop them from having to live in places like this (there are always going to be some that want to live like this and I can’t do anything about that).  It would be a place of last resort for those that are banned elsewhere.  It would concentrate on keeping people alive more than providing comfort with the idea (a gamble perhaps) that once people were comfortable enough with staff and others that they would be willing to take some positive steps in securing housing.

The problem?  No one wants this kind of service around them and no one wants to fund it because many of the people who would use the service scare people (they scare me occasionally), are very violent or just vile and angry.  One guy we tried to work with this winter went on and on about his desire to have sex and violently rape female staff and residents.  It’s obviously a mental health disorder but he wasn’t being treated and yet his IQ was so low he wasn’t able to get help for himself.  While at one hand he was a risk, he was also a victim and he doesn’t deserve to freeze to death.

In other cities that have free shelter, it sadly gives an incentive for social workers to not give people emergency services and so you actually make the problem worse for others.  In case you think that professional social workers wouldn’t do it, I heard lots of stories of clients coming to a shelter with instructions from their worker to lie to staff in order to get a lower subsidized rate.  The reason I knew is that they would confess to me because their conscience wouldn’t allow them to do it and they didn’t want to get caught.   I can’t imagine what would happen if there was a place that was free.  Well actually I can and it would be an excuse for more people not to do their jobs.

As for why it won’t get funded… the cost benefits are large but they would happen in a different department than what would fund it.  No community really wants to get behind it because of the fear of what can happen and because people die in small enough numbers that we really don’t have to care about it.  

You can get more details here.

and it only took him a couple of days

Richard Florida looks at density and ecology in bigger cities

The size and density of cities confers considerable economic advantages. Denser cities are seed-beds of innovation and productivity improvement, as Jane Jacobs long ago argued. Pioneering studies of "urban metabolism" by Geoffrey West and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute find that as metro areas get larger their metabolic rate essentially speeds up, making them more productive and inventive

The environment benefits from density and size as well. Larger, denser cities are cleaner and more energy efficient than smaller cities, suburbs, and even small towns. Ecologists have found that by concentrating their populations in smaller areas, cities and metros decrease human encroachment on natural habitats.  Denser settlement patterns yield energy savings; apartment buildings, for example, are more efficient to heat and cool than detached suburban houses. Urban households emit less carbon dioxide than their suburban and rural counterparts. In his book Green Metropolis, David Owen lauds the dense, concentrated built environment of Manhattan – where most people live in apartments and use mass transit — as the greenest place in America. When it comes to greenness, size matters; as urban regions grow their populations, the rate of growth in their emissions actually declines.

It’s the Tampa Bay, Phoenix and 255 other cities that will determine the health of the United States economy

Collectively, large cities — which we define as metropolitan areas with a population of 150,000 plus — in the United States are the center of gravity of the economy, generating almost 85 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 20 percent of global GDP today. While New York and Los Angeles, the two American megacities with populations of more than ten million, have continued to tower above all others among the 259 large U.S. metropolitan areas, it’s the 257 "middleweight" cities — with populations of between 150,000 and 10 million — that generate more than 70 percent of U.S. GDP today. The top 28 middleweights alone account for more than 35 percent of the nation’s GDP.

It is America’s large cities, and particularly the broad swath of middleweights, that will be the key to the U.S. recovery and a key contributor to global growth in the next 15 years. Large cities in the United States will contribute more to global growth than the large cities of all other developed countries combined. We expect the collective GDP of these large U.S. cities to rise by almost $5.7 trillion — generating more than 10 percent of global GDP growth — by 2025. While New York and Los Angeles together are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 2.1 percent between 2010 and 2025, the top 30 middleweights (measured by GDP) are expected to outpace them with a growth rate of 2.6 percent.

What’s the formula for success?

Even when narrowing our focus to the strongest performing cities, again there is no single path to success — no unique blueprint that all urban leaders should pursue. The cities that outperform their peers simply find ways to make the most of the economic opportunities they face, get lucky, or both. Some cities have been able to reinvent themselves; many others make the most of their endowments or their location.

Even in these important middleweight cities, growing is going to be tough

The coming years are not going to be easy. As households and the government pay down debts built up before and during the recession, growth could be dampened for many years. Cities that have experienced real estate booms and busts will find recovery particularly hard going. In Orlando and Phoenix more than half of mortgage holders are in negative equity. In Las Vegas, it’s two out of three. And there are still pockets of stubbornly high unemployment — two-thirds of all the jobs lost during the downturn were in states that accounted for only 45 percent of the U.S. population.