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This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers' efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns-Port Alice and Port Alberni-to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers' struggles to 'defend place'; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Due to ongoing inequities in the social determinants of health and systemic barriers, homelessness continues to be a significant concern that disproportionately impacts racialized communities. Despite constituting a small proportion of the population, Black individuals are over-represented among people experiencing homelessness in many Canadian cities. However, although Black homelessness in Canada is a pressing issue, it has received limited attention in the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reported prevalence of Black homelessness across Canada. Design/methodology/approach: By consulting enumerations from 61 designated communities that participated in the 2018 Nationally Coordinated Point-in-Time Count and two regional repositories – one for homeless counts supported by the government of British Columbia and another from the Rural Development Network – this paper reports on the scale and scope of Black homelessness across Canada. Findings: Significantly, these reports demonstrate that Black people are over-represented among those experiencing homelessness compared to local and national populations. These enumerations also demonstrate significant gaps in the reporting of Black homelessness and inadequate nuance in data collection methods, which limit the ability of respondents to describe their identity beyond "Black." Originality/value: This research provides an unprecedented examination of Black homelessness across Canada and concludes with recommendations to expand knowledge on this important and under-researched issue, provide suggestions for future iterations of homeless enumerations and facilitate the development of inclusive housing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater, as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use the scientific characteristics of groundwater to direct the necessary elements of regulatory design for this unique element. Developing interdisciplinary language that could be applied in any jurisdiction or region, the article describes seven groundwater characteristics as processes, functions, qualities, physical sustainability, scale, information and data, and physical state. Using these characteristics of groundwater embeds the scientific understanding of groundwater into regulatory design and enables the expression of new values such as Indigenous rights to water. Applying these scientific characteristics to a case study of new groundwater regulation in a subnational jurisdiction in the Global North—British Columbia (BC), Canada—highlights the failure of regulatory design even in a well-resourced jurisdiction where environmental regulation is the norm. Groundwater in BC is extremely heterogeneous in process and function, with low observation density and undefined sustainability goals where regulations are applied uniformly. Looking forward, three recommendations can be drawn using the scientific characteristics of groundwater to improve regulatory design in BC: defining sustainability goals and ecological thresholds; regionalizing and prioritizing; and long-term planning. This science-forward and interdisciplinary approach has implications for states with customary water entitlements and multiple legal orders. It also provides practitioners with an interdisciplinary language that can be useful for assessing current and future regulatory design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of childcare to national economies in general and women's economic participation in particular, spurring renewed interest in childcare policy in many countries that have implemented lockdowns. This paper adopts a circle of care framework to analyzes how COVID‐19 has affected paid childcare, unpaid childcare and other paid work, and the relationship between these sectors. Analysis is grounded in the lived experiences of parents and childcare educators, documented through 16 semi‐structured interviews during the initial lockdown (March–June 2020) in British Columbia, Canada. Experiences from educators suggest their safety was not prioritized, and that their contributions were undervalued and went unrecognized. Mothers, who provided the majority of unpaid care, not only lost income due to care demands, but struggled to access necessities, with some reporting increased personal insecurity. Those attempting to work from home also experienced feelings of guilt and distress as they tried to manage the triple burden. Similarities of experiences across the circle of care suggest the COVID‐19 childcare policy response in BC Canada downloaded care responsibilities on to women without corresponding recognition or support, causing women to absorb the costs of care work, with potential long‐term negative effects on women's careers and well‐being, as well as on the resilience of the circle of care. Pandemic recovery and preparedness policies that aim to promote gender equality must consider all sectors of the circle of care and the relationships between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A surgical readiness assessment is a major step in the medical journey of trans people seeking gender-affirming surgery. Much of the peer-reviewed literature surrounding surgical readiness assessments emphasizes the perspectives of academics and clinicians, leaving the voices of trans and gender diverse patients largely unheard. Aims: This paper foregrounds patient experiences with surgery readiness assessments to discuss the tensions, challenges and opportunities they generate. Methods: We conducted a thematic analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with trans people who accessed or were seeking to access gender-affirming surgery in British Columbia. Results: We developed three main themes to capture participants' narratives of their surgical assessment experiences. The first, assessments as gatekeeping, explores the stories of people who described their assessments as outdated and even discriminatory processes. The second, assessments as a barrier to care, discusses the informational missteps, bureaucratic regulations, economic issues, and geographic concerns that made assessments difficult to access. The third, assessments as useful, includes positive stories about assessments that often involved feeling supported by an assessor and feeling prepared for the next steps. Discussion: These narratives demonstrate how much variation exists among people's experiences of readiness assessments for gender-affirming surgery. No matter how their actual assessment turned out, many participants approached their appointments with a great deal of anxiety and trepidation. We attributed this stress was to challenges ranging from lengthy wait times, arbitrary medical gatekeeping, a lack of access to knowledgeable and supportive providers, unclear or changing administrative processes, and insufficient communication. To address these challenges, it is crucial for the medical system to create more accessible pathways with centralized, up-to-date information for people trying to access assessments. Patients are best served by multi-disciplinary gender-affirming teams that provide individualized care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing sexual harassment law in British Columbia, this paper argues that in highly sexualised work environments, in which practices including sexual 'jokes' or innuendo may be common, law embodies and (re)creates the gendered subtext of the workplace. When a complaint of sexual harassment from a sexualised workplace is raised in a legal forum, a complainant has an obligation to clearly object to the sexual remarks, 'jokes,' banter, etc.-which may be the 'norm'-to show the conduct in question was unwelcome. At the same time, however, a workplace may be structured, in part by law, in a way that restricts employee resistance to uncomfortable sexual experiences. This is the case, I argue, for women working in full-service restaurants when it comes to sexual interactions with customers. This paper explores how restaurant work, in the Canadian context with a focus on the province of British Columbia, is organised in a manner that makes women vulnerable to enduring sexually harassing practices as a routine part of their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread rule of sex work is that payment occurs before service provision. Drawing on a subset of data collected as part of an ethnographic study conducted in metro Vancouver, Canada, this paper explores the temporal and gendered connections between payment and financial violence in a semi-criminalised indoor sex industry. A detailed examination of the timing of payment with 51 independent indoor sex workers reveals the gendered nature of the violence and its direct connection to anti-violence strategies indoor sex workers employ. We found that women (including transgender women) (n= 26) and men (n= 25) use payment schedules to minimise potential violence, but in divergent ways. Sex workers adhere to, negotiate and reject the golden rule of payment in advance based on different experiences of gendered violence. Through a gendered relational analysis, we show the contextual relationship between men and women as they negotiate payment schedules in their sex work interactions. These findings offer insight into the significance that the timing of payment has in sex workers’ anti-violence practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Canadian Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in favour of the Health Employees Union (HEU) versus the British Columbia government. Based on international labour law, this ruling recognised collective bargaining as part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While recent research in human and labour geography on labour law and the state have emphasised its contingent, topological and site-based nature I argue: (i) that this case reflects how Canadian unions became deeply embedded in post-war hegemonic splicings of law and space and the state's role in the reproduction of the wage-labour relation and (ii) while the HEU's struggles and the use of international law contest such splicings, these are still sharply inflected by existing nation-state legal systems that remain both relatively resilient and ambivalent about labour rights. The HEU case thus reveals that scaling up by law may not protect worker interests if labour is otherwise weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Integrated surveillance of pathogens along the food chain and the multidisciplinary investigation of food hazards are considered international best practices. Integrated surveillance of Salmonella was initiated in British Columbia (BC), Canada in 2006. The objectives of this paper were 1) to describe the BC integrated surveillance experience, 2) to present findings from the integrated surveillance of Salmonella, and 3) to identify the components that enabled the program. Data about BC animal, food and human Salmonella isolates from 2006 to 2010 (n =5003) were centrally collated and analysed. Among chickens, chicken meat and humans, the most common serotypes identified were S. Enteritidis, S. Typhimurium and S. Heidelberg. An increase in S. Enteritidis in all three sectors in 2007–9 led to a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral investigation. An evaluation of the integrated surveillance program helped identify four critical program elements: dedicated people, cross-sectoral sharing and integration of data, multi-disciplinary analysis and interpretation of findings, and collaborative multi-sectoral response. Ongoing challenges include lack of resources and infrastructure to sustain the program. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Aim The spatial extent of western Canada’s current epidemic of mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins (Coleoptera: Curculionidae, Scolytinae), is increasing. The roles of the various dispersal processes acting as drivers of range expansion are poorly understood for most species. The aim of this paper is to characterize the movement patterns of the mountain pine beetle in areas where range expansion is occurring, in order to describe the fine-scale spatial dynamics of processes associated with mountain pine beetle range expansion. Location Three regions of Canada’s Rocky Mountains: Kicking Horse Pass, Yellowhead Pass and Pine Pass. Methods Data on locations of mountain pine beetle-attacked trees of predominantly lodgepole pine ( Pinus contorta var. latifolia) were obtained from annual fixed-wing aircraft surveys of forest health and helicopter-based GPS surveys of mountain pine beetle-damaged areas in British Columbia and Alberta. The annual (1999–2005) spatial extents of outbreak ranges were delineated from these data. Spatial analysis was conducted using the spatial–temporal analysis of moving polygons (STAMP), a recently developed pattern-based approach. Results We found that distant dispersal patterns (spot infestations) were most often associated with marginal increases in the areal size of mountain pine beetle range polygons. When the mountain pine beetle range size increased rapidly relative to the years examined, local dispersal patterns (adjacent infestation) were more common. In Pine Pass, long-range dispersal (> 2 km) markedly extended the north-east border of the mountain pine beetle range. In Yellowhead Pass and Kicking Horse Pass, the extension of the range occurred incrementally via ground-based spread. Main conclusions Dispersal of mountain pine beetle varies with geography as well as with host and beetle population dynamics. Although colonization is mediated by habitat connectivity, during periods of low overall habitat expansion, dispersal to new distant locations is common, whereas during periods of rapid invasion, locally connected spread is the dominant mode of dispersal. The propensity for long-range transport to establish new beetle populations, and thus to be considered a driver of range expansion, is likely to be determined by regional weather patterns, and influenced by local topography. We conclude that STAMP appears to be a useful approach for examining changes in biogeograpical ranges, with the potential to reveal both fine- and large-scale patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001 a coalition of actors including farm, consumer, health, environmental and industry organizations announced its opposition to Monsanto's attempts to commercialize GM wheat in Canada. Although this coalition consisted mostly of rural and agricultural groups, the three arguments that came to dominate the discourse advanced by the coalition seem, at first glance, to characterize a politics of consumption. These three arguments revolve around market acceptance, environmental risk, and the lack of democratic and transparent process in biotech regulation and policy. This paper argues that producer interests were not displaced by, but rather articulated alongside and through consumer-driven discourses. In fact, farmers used claims about the supremacy of the consumer and impending environmental change to advance their vulnerable political and economic positions as producers of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of casual work in British Columbia is an important issue given that the increase in casual work has been greater in this province than in other provinces in Canada and given that the labour market has been substantially deregulated since 2001. In this paper, we analyse how individuals’ casual employment status affects their economic security based on a specially designed survey undertaken by the authors. We follow the ILO’s classification of the dimensions of economic security but, based on our findings, add a further dimension—Time security—As being of particular importance to casual workers. On the basis of these results, we analyse the policy interventions that might be necessary to increase the economic security of casual workers, policies which we suggest can best be conceptualized as providing a “security quilt”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Services offered by voluntary organisations are an integral but often overlooked component of health and social care. Of late, there has been a renewed interest in voluntary welfare provision as a viable alternative to state and market. Recent developments in welfare provision in Canada appear to have brought greater social care roles for the voluntary sector at the same time as new and arguably more restrictive funding and accountability mechanisms are being imposed by different arms of the state. To explore these issues more closely, the present paper examines the impressions and experiences of voluntary and formal sector providers of services for senior citizens and people with disabilities in a remote urban centre (population less than 100 000) in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. Two important operational pressures provide the context of the analysis: (1) reform of provincial government funding and regulation of voluntary services; and (2) the restructuring of welfare provision, especially in the areas of health care and social services. The authors found evidence of an escalating incursion of the state into local voluntary sector affairs that needs to be understood in the context of long-standing institutional links between government and ‘professional’ voluntary welfare provision in British Columbia. The results point to three important directions in contemporary local voluntary provision: (1) an emerging ethos of accountability, efficiency and competition in voluntary provision; (2) increasing pressure to centralise volunteer services; and consequently, (3) the potential erosion of flexibility and personalisation that are seen to characterise the voluntary sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The water resources of Canada are today, and have always been, of major importance to the welfare of Canadians. Throughout most of Canada's history, these resources have been viewed within a supply–management framework and, frequently, exploited through the construction of ‘megaprojects’, often with little or no concern for issues such as environmental harm and social and community disruption. As in many parts of the world, those most affected by such large-scale water resource developments have been aboriginals (in Canada, ‘First Nations’ peoples). Although the issues of environmental, social and economic damage to First Nations as a result of water megaprojects have been investigated, little has been written about the impact of such projects – especially dam construction – on the loss of sense of place of deracinated peoples. This paper investigates one example of such loss of sense of place, that of the Cheslatta T’En forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the 1950s so as to allow for the construction of a private hydroelectric dam by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]