Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 6, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 TUESDAY AUGUST 6, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights Changing the approach to family violence N EARLY half of the women in this country have experienced intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. The number is even higher for Indigenous women — more than 60 per cent — and women living in rural areas are almost twice as likely to face domestic violence than those living in urban areas. While few officials are calling it such, many others recognize it as nothing short of an epidem- ic. These numbers are staggering. Talk to anyone who has ever experienced intimate partner violence and they will tell you it doesn’t impact just them, but the entire family. Children suffer in unimaginable ways, wearing scars well into their futures, many of whom repeat, or get stuck, in the cycle of violence that carries into the next generation. According to the Manitoba Advocate for Chil- dren and Youth, a child is exposed to a police-re- ported incident of intimate partner violence every two hours in our province. This kind of exposure is deeply traumatic, shattering their sense of safety and often leading to lifelong mental health challenges. If we want to get a better understanding of why people with unmet mental health needs are taxing our emergency response services, why our hospitals and health providers are overwhelmed and can’t keep up with the number of patients experiencing deep psychological wounds, why cy- cles of violence are repeated and why the number of people experiencing homelessness is growing, look no further than this report. Kids growing up in unstable and unhealthy home environments are all too often doomed to repeat the cycle. That’s why last week’s announcement of federal and provincial dollars toward ending gen- der-based violence was so significant. Federal Women and Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien was in Winnipeg announcing a second wave of funding, including resources for service providers such as Ka Ni Kanichihk, Clan Mothers and Blue Thunderbird Family Care. These dollars not only go to help survivors, but to support the entire family. It’s also important to note that many of the children in the CFS system are there because of intimate partner violence at home. During my time as families minister, I saw first-hand how often a mother would flee an unstable situation at home, only to land in equally dire circumstances where she and her kids were living in poverty, without stable housing and no guarantees of being able to put a meal on the table. Traditionally, these dire circumstances and instability would trigger CFS involvement. While well-intentioned in trying to protect the children, CFS involvement often leads to the further break- down of the family, resulting in worse outcomes for the mother and her children. This is the main rea- son why many women stay in abusive relationships. Reversing this trend will take a long time and a monumental shift in societal ways of dealing with family violence. Legislation and supports flowing from the families department has shifted in the last few years — starting under my former PC govern- ment and continuing with NDP Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine — to ensure poverty and domes- tic violence are not sole factors in child apprehen- sion and that more supports are available. Blue Thunderbird Family Care is a Winnipeg organization that received additional dollars last week and is committed to family reunification. It is a life-changing resource for many Indigenous families experiencing crisis. Executive director Dana Arabe said they are using these new dollars to expand its grandmothers council that will help break the cycle of family violence and offer guid- ance and support to those in need. Blue Thunderbird also offers respite for fami- lies and is fast becoming known as an agency to turn to without fear of triggering CFS involve- ment where no protection issues exist. Their mandate is to preserve and reunify families and believe the best option for any child is to grow up in a healthy family environment. Another interesting point from last week’s announcement by Ien and Fontaine was a com- mitment to enhancing services available to men and boys who are prone to violent behaviour. Ad- dressing the underlying trauma that often leads to violence and providing ways to de-escalate and release tension is key. We cannot get rid of inti- mate partner violence simply by helping women and children alone. When faced with an epidemic of intimate-part- ner violence in our province, these resources are never enough and will take time to yield results and stop generational cycles, but it’s a good step in the right direction. Everyone working to family violence prevention deserves our support, especially the ministers who advocated for these much-needed dollars. Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays. rohelle@rochellesquires.ca Who really runs health care in Manitoba? IT’S an obvious fallacy and yet, politicians, the media and unions continue to mislead — and in many cases manipulate — the public into a per- ception that has always been wildly untrue. For the past several decades, Manitobans have been led to believe that politicians are to blame for everything wrong with our health-care system. For example, we are updated with the latest health-care wait times data every month. If those times are higher than the previous month, the health minister is guaranteed to face tough questions from opposition MLAs and reporters, followed by scorching commentary from colum- nists and editorial writers. If there is a staffing shortage for a particular shift on a particular hospital ward, a health-care workers’ union will likely tweet about it and, again, the minister will be grilled under the bright lights. If an ambulance breaks down, an ER over- crowds at the height of flu season, or there is a nursing shortage on a long weekend, it’s almost always the health minister who bears the brunt of the complaints from the public, the opposition and health-care workers. All of those things happen with clock-like reg- ularity in Manitoba based on the misperception that the health minister has iron-grip control of every single aspect of our health-care system. The opposite is far closer to the truth. In Manitoba, our health ministers exercise very little control over a few aspects of the health-care system and zero control over most of it. They are largely big-picture figureheads who, because of the concept of ministerial responsibil- ity, are forced to take the heat and scorn for the mistakes of bureaucrats and health-care workers they, in many cases, have never met. Stating the obvious: the health minister has no control over how many nurses or health workers will be working the graveyard shift on a partic- ular night on a particular ward in a particular hospital. And yet, when something goes wrong during one of those shifts, it’s the minister who is often attacked by opposition politicians, the media and the relevant unions. Health ministers fight for as much money as they can get for the health-care system and then hand all that cash to their department’s senior bureaucrats. It is those civil servants who really decide the areas of the health-care system where that money will be spent and how it will be spent. In my five-plus years working in the premier’s office, I attended dozens of meetings regarding important health-care issues facing Manitobans. What I saw and heard bore no resemblance to the spin Manitobans often see from the opposition, the media and health-care unions. I observed first-hand that health ministers don’t freelance their decisions. Every decision they make is based upon the advice of experienced bureaucrats, as well as senior doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals. The problem the minister frequently faces, however, is that there is often no consensus among those advisers as to what the true nature of the problem is, let alone the solution. In many cases, different doctors will have completely different perceptions of an issue and passionately different opinions as to what the correct response should be. Discussions on complex health issues often involve a clash of egos among highly paid senior health-care experts, with the minister observing the debate from the sidelines. The challenge for the minister is deciding which of those experts’ advice should be followed and which should be ignored. The minister seldom possesses the specialized knowledge required to competently decide which expert is right, so the decision is almost always made based upon the advice of senior civil ser - vants in the department and hoping it proves to be the right choice. If things don’t work out as hoped, as often hap- pens, the minister and government are blamed for a decision they likely played little to no role in making and had even less of a role in implement- ing. That’s the unrealistic, unfair level of account- ability and criticism that health ministers are sub- jected to in our province. They pay the price for the mistakes of others in their department and/or other health agencies. Viewed from that perspective, it’s fair to ask how we can reasonably expect our health-care system to improve if the advisers, decision-mak- ers and implementers really running the system aren’t being held accountable. Deveryn Ross is a political commentator living in Brandon. deverynrossletters@gmail.com X: @deverynross The printed word “THERE is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest con- sideration.” — Andrew Carnegie. I live surrounded by books. Thousands populate my home. I invite more in every week. They have been and remain the “tools of my trade.” But they are much more than that. Books, or actually their authors, have taught, provoked, surprised and sometimes even comforted me. This has been going on for years. I cherish them all. Most rest only a few metres from where I write. With a consid- erable degree of accuracy, I can tell you where any particular volume stands on my bookshelves — I even get annoyed when one is not returned to its “rightful place.” When I go looking, they need to be where I expect them. Order is reassuring. These books are rather like close friends. Some have been around for decades — their frayed covers and dog-eared pages are evidence of that. But, whenever I return to any of them, I’m reminded that the year in which they were published doesn’t matter. Books don’t age, at least not like we do. The gateway to my bibliotheca is a bedside table. I like to read before I meet Morpheus. Several books are always on call. Having a selection sates my desire for diversity. Just now I’m reading The Show- man, Simon Shuster’s timely biography of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky; Colonialism, by Nigel Biggar; The Unicorn, Virginia Moore’s exploration of the her- metic teachings influencing the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats; a troubling discourse disputing free will, presented in Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined and an English translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s War, a bracing fragment-of-a-novel. And I just finished Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I got a hint about why this 1942 opus would be worth my time from Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, published just this year. Perhaps you have noticed that I do not mention e-books. I have never owned one and, hopefully, never will. Whatever their supposed utility, I recoil instinctively from such phantasms — non-corporeal things can’t be held, and are not like friends you have jostled, jousted and smiled with. And, to access a ghost book, you must connect to one of those gadgets almost everyone seems irreversibly addicted to, forgetting how these devices hoover up the details of your lives and not to your benefit. I prefer a li- brary that informs me, not others about me. There is an exception. Whenever a guest explores my library, I am exposed, for they soon detect what interests me. This is ac- ceptable because, in turn, I see who browses the collection (many don’t) and what at- tracts them. It’s a good tactic for separating savants from servants. You might wonder how I came to have such an affection for the printed word. That’s a question answered easily. When I was in grade school, my mother escorted me, every Saturday, to the Kings- ton Public Library. Unlike Winnipeg’s first public library, ours wasn’t one of the 125 Andrew Carnegie’s wealth established across Canada, out of the 2,500 his corpora- tion financed around the world. But it was nevertheless a splendid place. And, every weekend, I was allowed to borrow as many books from this sanctuary as the library’s lending rules permitted. There was never any censor or censure. Only one condition was imposed — all of the books I picked on any given Saturday had to be read by the following one. The only disappointment I ever experi- enced with my library’s service was when I asked the Reference Desk for Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” I had just watched Errol Flynn in a 1936 film of the same name. Swept up by its heroic portrayal of British cavalrymen during the Battle of Balaclava, I confess I wanted to be like them. Alas, the librarians could not find the poem. It wasn’t until 2010 that I stood on the actual battlefield and read this poem aloud. I’ll do so again when Crimea is liberated from the Russians. Mother persisted in taking me to this publicly funded space, dedicated to foster- ing knowledge, until I was a thoroughly smitten book-lover, old enough to go on my own. I pray some mothers are still guiding their children to public libraries, letting books inoculate their young against the Janus-faced devices they will otherwise become enslaved to. Libraries are cradles of democracy — iPhones aren’t. Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada, does not own an iPhone and never wants to. LUBOMYR LUCIUK ROCHELLE SQUIRES MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES ‘As a province and as a country and as a territory, we must work together to end gender-based violence and create a safer future for girls, women and gender-diverse citizens,’ Manitoba Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine said at a news conference. DEVERYN ROSS ;