Attention: Disability advocates worldwide -- Ontario disability benefits (ODSP) class action needs your advice!

 

Medical marijuana is now legal in Canada.  Find out how to get it, how to grow it and how the international community feels about it here.

 

Toxic Mold -- more about toxic mold and leaky condos at www.bccondos.ca.

Put your Google "adsense like" ad here. Contact us here for details.

 

 

Lack of home support may be killing the disabled.  Read what happened to one Victoria wheelchair athlete when services were cut here. See also Transition magazine's excellent July/August 2004 issue, available by subscription,  featuring first-person accounts of the effects of cutbacks and the B.C. Coalition for People With Disabilities' initiative for national home care legislation the provinces won't be able to cut.  Click on BCCPD's homepage  for more information COMING SOON.  In the meantime, click here to tell our new federal Health Minister Ujjal Donsanjh what you think of the proposal.

 

What’s to become of the information contained in B.C.’s controversial 23-page disability benefits application forms?  The Ministry of Human Resources can’t seem to make up its collective mind.  Check out the conflicting messages at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=44.

 

Is your benefits appeal procedure fair?  Is it even legal?  Read the constitutional challenge to B.C.’s legislation posed by one of our visitors and the ministry’s response, which actually agreed with our visitor at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=17.

 

Urgent!  Abilities Foundation is undergoing a major financial crisis.  Read the open letter from president Ray Cohen to find out how you can help.

 

  

	Web www.bcdisabilities.com

Our Mission:

Welcome to www.bcdisabilities.com. We're a new worldwide disability consumer/advocacy website from Vancouver, British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. Visit myBeautifulBC.com for more information about the daily goings on in this world-class city.

Our mission is to provide protocols for a variety of disabling conditions, including a description of the illness and the medical treatments and social supports necessary to manage the disability and maintain a reasonable quality of life. At the end of the day, we hope to have amassed a body of evidence so compelling that governments throughout the world will be moved to properly plan and provide for all disabled citizens.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within. I'm
coming now I'm coming to reward them. First we
take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

Opening lyrics from First We Take Manhattan from Leonard Cohen’s 1988 release, I’m Your Man. See the album cover, watch a video and listen to the track by clicking on Discography at http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/, the Leonard Cohen Files, our favorite Leonard Cohen website. It’s so good even Leonard is a contributor. For recent entries, click on Blackening Pages. For lyrics to Nancy White’s hilarious tribute, Leonard Cohen’s Never Gonna Bring My Groceries In, visit her website at http://www.nancy-white.com and look under Discography at Momnipotent: Songs for Weary Parents, recorded in 1990. Scroll down and click on This is Nancy’s Page.

We open our homepage with a cut from our favorite Canadian poet for two reasons: first, because at 69, Leonard Cohen still provides the most eloquent answer we’ve heard so far to the immortal question, What do women want? Second, because we rejoice in his mysterious recovery several years ago from the crippling jaws of what fellow sufferer Sir Winston Churchill called the black dog.

My depression, so bleak and anguished, was just crucial, and I couldn’t shake it; it wouldn’t go away,” he says, looking back at that time from his suite in the Vogue. “I didn’t know what it was. I was ashamed of it, because it would be there even when things were good, and I would be saying to myself, “Really what have you got to complain about?” But for people who suffer from acute clinical depression, it is quite irrelevant what the circumstances of your life are…
 
Excerpt from A Happy Man by Mireille Silcott in Saturday Night, Nov. 15, 2001, p. 22-28. Click on Saturday Night online at http://www.saturdaynight.ca/html/coverarchive.php.

Here’s to the mystery. Here’s to recovery.

We’re also delighted with the trim new text, The Obesity Myth, Why America’s Obsession With Weight is Hazardous To Your Health, by the equally trim Paul Campos published by Gotham Books in May, 2004.  Read our favorite interview with the Colorado law professor by Dr. Pattie Thomas at http://www.bigfatblog.com/columnists/archives/001240.php, Big Fat Blog, The Fat Acceptance Weblog.  Here’s a sample of the book from its conclusion at p. 248:

…The prosecutors in the case against fat aren’t completely wrong:  They’ve just indicated the wrong parties.  Americans are too sedentary.  We do eat too much junk that isn’t good for us, because it’s quick and cheap and easier than the alternative of spending the time and money to prepare food that is both good for us and satisfies our cravings.  A rational public health policy would focus on those issues, not on weight, which isn’t the problem, any more than diets and diet drugs would be the solution, even if they actually made people thin (thin people with bad habits are no healthier than fat people with the same bad habits).

Forum Index:

• We endeavor at www.bcdisabilities.com to provide a basis for comparative analysis of disability benefits and legislation throughout the world beginning here in B.C. For more information about legislative schemes, governing bodies and advocacy groups, go to Disability Law FAQs and Worldwide Disabilities.
   
• We hope our Disability Shop will become a forum where consumers meet directly with industry leaders to discuss the latest assistive devices and technologies, what we like and dislike, what works, what doesn't and what's still needed. For a look at our favorite accessible bath, click on http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=28&sid=002766dc8a0194a984830f066260b84a.
   
• On a lighter note, our forum called Disability Heroes celebrates the many accomplishments of women and men who are also disabled or who have performed a miracle or two on their behalf. Not surprisingly, this has been the fastest growing forum, but visitors are warmly invited to add anyone we’ve missed. Read about the internationally renowned Graeae Theatre Company and its latest production called Peeling at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=12&sid=002766dc8a0194a984830f066260b84a.
   
• Our Disability News forum has international conference listings, items of general interest and links to what we consider to be the very best sources of current online information on disability.
   
• At Disability Link Reviews, we trawl the wide reaches of cyberspace for websites that have distinguished themselves in one or more ways as a cut above the disability dot crowd.
   
• When we start taking ourselves too seriously, we’ll post some new entries at Disability Jokes, where we hope visitors, too, will write in and share some levity. For anyone who doesn’t think disability is anything to laugh at, go to our Disabled Heroes forum at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=3&sid=055998fd060129155ae128ed2dd8723b for listings by our favorite funny man on wheels, Sir John Mortimer.
   

How to use this site:

1. Home Care at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=62&highlight=care;
2. Disability Protocols Sticky at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=44&highlight=care; and
3. Canadian Disability News Sources at http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?t=46&highlight=care.

A cautionary last word:

The one thing we won't publish is policy. Tortured analysis in an endless stream of go-nowhere position papers advances nothing, in our view. Don’t send it. We won’t read it.