Looking forward to 2025 — and back at 2024
What's next for The Bind. Plus, some of the top stories from the last year in The Bind and elsewhere
Hello 2025.
I’m not big on new years resolutions. I think personal growth shouldn’t be tied to one particular time of year, but should be a constant project. By putting so much weight on the new year, I worry that we set ourselves up for greater disappointment if we fail.
One problem with the Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous model of recovery is the binary it places on substance use. One is either “clean” or they are using, and a “relapse” becomes a personal failure, an Event.
The issue with building up pressure on one event into a capital-E Event is that it compounds shame — shame being one of those emotions that one attempts to mop up with substances.
It also individualizes substance use, atomizes all patterns of behaviour into a collection of distinct particles that act in a vacuum, separate from one another — never mind the countless external social or economic factors that can pull one into substance use.
Personal growth is a process — not an Event
I think this applies similarly to new years resolutions. By placing so much weight on the Event of a new year, and the Event of failure to live up to our own expectations, we set ourselves up for more shame, and ultimately less motivation to achieve our goals.
Never mind that everything is exhausting, that it’s ever-harder to make time for exercise, for reading, for that pottery class you want to take, and ever-easier to justify splurging on some kind of treat or another because you just need something for you when you’re struggling to make rent.
That being said, the symbolism of a new year with a new slate is hard to escape — and I have some resolutions, myself.
My suggestion for us all is to approach personal growth not with a single goal in mind, but with an intention, and with an acknowledgment that goals aren’t a singular Event, but one event in a sea of events, each interacting with events preceding, coinciding, and succeeding (not: I aim to go to the gym three times a week; rather: I aim to go to the gym often when things are going smoothly, and to try to make time for the gym when I’m feeling stressed). I also want to find balance between quantity and quality (not: I want to read 20 books; rather: I want to read work that is both challenging and nourishing).
The Bind in 2025
With that in mind, one of my resolutions for myself is to be more active with The Bind as long as it’s still around. I don’t want to set a schedule of publication because I don’t want to publish purely for the sake of publishing.
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and the folder they automatically go into is so overwhelmed with unread emails that I just don’t go in there. Two particular newsletters are major culprits — Zeteo and Wonkette, each of which has a billion different newsletters, both of which I’ve recently unsubscribed from as a result.
I don’t want to insert myself into your inbox if I don’t feel it is warranted.
But I also don’t want to over-correct, to question my judgment that I have a good story that is worth sending out by email. I want to maintain a high quality of work, but I also want to make room for publishing pieces that fill smaller knowledge gaps.
Up to now, a lot of my work in The Bind has been paid for by the Changing the Conversation project through Douglas College, which came to a close with the new year. I’m extremely grateful to Elliot Rossiter, the professor at the head of that project, for giving me the resources and autonomy to do work I want to do.
With the end of that project, The Bind will be much more on my own time, meaning it will be subject more to the ebbs and flows of my energy and capacity. While I do have a handful of paying subscribers (to whom I’m also extremely grateful), the annual income from that is about two-thirds of one month’s rent.
To be clear, this is not a request for paid subscriptions. I hope to have other ways for you to support my work in the future.
However, as with just about any freelance journalist in the year 2025, I also subsidize my journalism work with communications work because this industry loathes its workers.
I also am looking for regular freelance and/or part-time work in communications, as well as in non-daily journalism (editing, research, fact-checking, etc.), to fill the income gap that will be arising with the absence of Changing the Conversation, so I’d gratefully accept any leads at dustin@godfrey.work.
I have one last big project from Changing the Conversation that I spent most of December and a lot of time in the preceding months working on, along with plugging away at it throughout the last year, and I’m really excited to publish that — it’s a project I’ve enjoyed working on, and something I’ve tried to be creative with.
It’s still going to be some time for it to come out, but I’m hoping to publish within the month. When I do, prepare for five parts, plus at least three bonus posts (the latter of which I’ll put at least initially behind some kind of paywall).
The year that was
With all of that said, I do want to recognize some of the work I’ve done over the last year, both here in The Bind and elsewhere.
The most popular
Brad West fed CHEK viewers an unmitigated stream of misinformation
One was nearly exactly a year ago, in response to an appearance on CHEK by Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West.
My open application for the position of senior editor of National Post's opinion section
The next was my (unsuccessful!) open application for senior editor of the National Post’s opinion section. For some reason they didn’t reach out?
Labour intensive pieces
The Housing Accelerator Fund may be accelerating housing. But not necessarily how the federal government says it is
In September, I published an analysis of cities’ applications for the Housing Accelerator Fund — that analysis involved looking at initiatives put forward by the cities as “HAF-incented” housing and scouring those cities’ websites to see how many of those initiatives were actually new to the federal project.
In search of Canada's 'hidden crime tax'
Earlier in the year, I saw some talk of Canada’s “hidden crime tax,” so I asked the group pushing this narrative for the report they relied on for their figure ($824 per household per year) and found it to be largely napkin math that used shaky data, dubious assumptions and an overly generous application of the term “crime tax.”
Challenging narratives
BIG SCOOP: A press release
Earlier in the year, a couple of RCMP detachments issued press releases claiming safe supply was flooding the street supply of drugs. An analysis of media coverage of those press releases to be lacking in nearly any critical perspectives, despite some serious questions raised by them.
Alberta's significant decline in toxic drug deaths already showing cracks
As Alberta published data on drug toxicity deaths in that province, media were entirely credulous about claims the “Alberta model” was working, despite having been through this claim before.
One more…
The housing crisis is increasing wait times for publicly funded voluntary treatment
In October, I published the result of an FOI request that found operators of publicly funded substance use treatment beds were struggling to discharge patients because of the housing crisis.
Beyond The Bind
‘Exclusion Zone’ Blocked Journalists Covering Vancouver Tent City Teardown (The Maple)
As the Vancouver Park Board was tearing down the CRAB Park encampment, I spoke to journalists who say park rangers denied them access — something they deemed to be an exclusion zone. Exclusion zones are illegal, but police keep using them to block journalists’ access to observe their actions.
BC Lawsuit Highlights Harms of Opioid Prescribing Crackdown (Filter)
I looked at a lawsuit from a pain patient who says the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC invaded his privacy by unilaterally deciding he needed to be tapered off his medications, against the will of his doctors and without ever assessing him.
Can Court Cases Turn the Tide for Canadian Harm Reduction? (Filter)
As a right-wing attack on the rights of drug users has ramped up, a number of lawsuits have been challenging carceral approaches to drug policy, from the above-mentioned deprescribing lawsuit to legal challenges around compassion clubs and recriminalization.
“Greed is just killing everybody”: Why Vancouver’s independent grocers are struggling while big grocers profit (Vancity Lookout)
I spoke with local grocers in Vancouver who said they’re facing existential economic struggles amid inflation and an affordability crisis — all the while, the grocery sector saw skyrocketing profits.