Enough talk on homelessness - time to act
Dec. 7, 2007

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like five weeks of hanging around on the front lines of street issues to leave a person feeling sick at heart.
I hope I managed to convey that to readers in the Times-Colonist series I finished up last Sunday. I hope you’re alarmed, aghast and scared for the future. Because I surely am.
Going into the series, I figured my intense education running PEERS Victoria for three years had given me insight enough into the issues that lead people to the streets and the scope of the problem. I thought I knew all there was to know about the difficulties people face in trying to access mental health and addiction services.
I now realize I was a babe in the woods. Things are so much worse than I ever imagined. The people living on our streets have grown large enough to populate a small town, and they’re leading lawless, generally miserable lives in our streets and parks in conditions that border on feral.
These are people we once cared for. Not always well, mind you; I have a friend who won’t soon forget the straitjackets and dehumanizing aspects of the old-style psychiatric institutions, and another who lived through B.C.’s failed experiment in mandatory addiction treatment in the 1970s. But it was care nonetheless, something of which very little remains anymore.
There are many paths to homelessness, and we need to be taking action on all fronts if we’re to dry up the flow of lost souls to our streets.
But certainly the current crisis can be traced to the phasing out of our big mental hospitals starting in the late 1980s, with problems growing exponentially over the next 20 years as we cut even deeper into mental-health and addiction services; eliminated support programs and specialized housing for people with brain injuries and mild developmental disabilities; churned kids through the foster system until they lost their way; and stopped building subsidized housing.
On top of that, we made it much harder to qualify for a welfare cheque even while slashing job-support programs that helped people with challenges succeed at work. Add in the widespread availability of street drugs to ease the pain of the people who are out there, and it’s no surprise how we got to this point.
People wrote to me throughout the series asking what they could do to help. They cared, but didn’t know how to act on it. My first suggestion would be to get informed, then find an avenue for direct involvement - whether on behalf of the homeless, the business community, the police or the service providers. Make a personal commitment to do something. Give money, and time.
Then commit to writing a letter a week for the next year to the provincial government, and another to the federal government. Once a month, write a letter to your mayor, too, requesting a list of city council actions that month related to resolving street issues.
Teachers, get your students involved. Employers and union leaders, take it on as a project. A thousand people can generate 44,000 letters a month - in a year, more than half a million. We don’t just have to sit here and take it.
Provincially, alternate letters between the ministers of Health, Income Assistance, and Housing. Copy every letter to Premier Gordon Campbell and your local MLA. Federally, send letters to the ministers of Health Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, copying Prime Minister Stephen Harper and your local MP. (Websites for finding contact information are listed at the bottom of this column.)
Demand that they address the breakdown in services that has led to people living on our streets. Demand that 350 people be relocated into well-supported housing in our region by the end of 2008, and each year after that until the street problems are gone.
Keep letters short and respectful, but unwavering and relentless. Don’t let them distract you with stories of $40 million here and $10 million there, or of federal-provincial agreements that are “laying the groundwork for future negotiations.” Demand that the problems be fixed right here, right now, in your home town. Period.
My other request: Bear witness. Go to where the problems are and see them first-hand. That’s essential if we’re to understand the challenges that lie ahead, and the immensity of the tragedy.
Bearing witness is especially important if you still think addiction and untreated mental illness are about choice in any real sense of the word. But it’s equally important for the tender-hearted who think the business community just needs to lighten up a little. Believe me, businesses and downtown residents have good reason to be fed up.
And what will I do? I’ll keep telling the stories from the streets that I hope will start you writing letters to government. I’ll join like-minded people in the community and on the streets, and we’ll put our shoulders to the wheel to make things happen.
If not us, who? In the words of the revolutionary Thomas Paine: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Find your federal MP at canada.gc.ca/directories/direct_e.html. For MLAs: www.leg.bc.ca/mla/3-1-1.htm. Municipalities: www.civicnet.bc.ca/siteengine. BC cabinet ministers and the Premier: www.gov.bc.ca/ministries/

Noon on Dec. 2, in a driving rain:

I'm just coming out of a five-week stretch of looking at street issues in Victoria's downtown for the Times-Colonist, and am filled with thoughts of the people and the problems I encountered along the way. It's immensely discouraging - as bad as I thought the situation was, which was pretty damn bad, it's actually so much worse. I fear for the future if things don't start to change, and can't bear the thought of where it will all end up by the time my grandchildren grow into adults in another 15 years.

Somehow in our misguided attempt at charitable action, we've ended up providing people with just enough of the basics to maintain them in their misery. They have to work so hard to try to get out, and we make it as hard as possible by adding to the difficulty at every step of the way.

Consider methadone, for instance, particularly on this rainy and miserable day in December. Methadone is a prescription drug that is used as a replacement for heroin. You don't need to inject it, one dose lasts 24 hours, and the people who respond well to it are essentially able to just get on with a regular life.

But methadone is also a narcotic, and thousands of people who take the prescription drug are considered too unstable in their addiction to be given their methadone to take home. What that means is that every day, they have to go to the drug store - and only certain stores, because most pharmacies don't sell methadone - to take their daily dose in the presence of the pharmacist.

On a day like to day, anyone who's on methadone but not allowed "carries" had to head out into the driving rain for their morning "juice." Unless they are on disability and successful in scrounging up the $45 for an annual bus pass, they'll need to have bus fare of $5 in correct change in their pockets. They'll need to ride the bus for however long it takes to get there, then do it all over again to get home.

Every day. Every single day, as if forced to prove to all of us that they are worthy of recovery, that they want it badly enough. If anything goes wrong and they can't make it to the drug store, they will be very, very sick in short order.

Or they can call up a heroin dealer and have the drug delivered to their door in minutes.

What would you do?

Hi, readers. Here's a link to the five-part series I just finished up for the Times-Colonist. I don't know how long it will stay active on the TC Web site, but will post it on this site directly as soon as that happens. The series ran Nov. 4 to Dec. 2.

The Street

Across the water is the place for me
Oct. 26, 2007

As beautiful as the Capital Region is, it has taken me a long time to click into this place. I’m a Courtenay girl originally, and there’s not much that feels familiar in Greater Victoria if you hail from just about anywhere else on the Island.
But then my partner and I moved to Esquimalt in early 2006. And for whatever reason, things just kind of fell into place.
All of a sudden, I find myself taking an interest in goings-on in my community. Before I moved here, I wasn’t even sure what my “community” was.
I’ve recently caught myself reading with great interest about the proposed redevelopment of the local shopping mall, and pondering what kind of retail mix I’m secretly hoping for. I care about how things will turn out at Kinsmen Gorge Park after new facilities are added, and whether one of my favourite bird-watching fields along one side of the park will be affected.
Those are healthy signs. If I live here, I ought to care about what’s going on in my community. I should be paying attention, and feeling engaged.
I wish I could tell you that I’ve felt that level of engagement all along, on behalf of whatever neighbourhood I was living in at the time. But in all my years in the region, I just never felt the love until I moved to Esquimalt.
I’ve cast my lot in with several communities in the region since moving here in 1989. First came Sooke, then Highlands, albeit a mere electoral district in those days. I lived in the Hillside area for a while before finally settling in Saanich for 14 years, most of it spent in Gordon Head.
We lived in a perfectly nice neighbourhood there, and I don’t mean to suggest that there’s something wrong with Gordon Head. But I admit to feeling like a visitor all those years. It’s hard to pin down what makes a community feel like it’s the right fit for you; all I know is that I couldn’t find mine.
For the longest time, I thought it was just the way it had to be. After all, our region is a final, fabulous stop for people from around the world, all of whom come with their own definition of the “perfect” community.
For that reason alone, it’s always going to be a challenge to build community in our region. With a few exceptions, we tend to be a community of people from other communities. We have a common love for the scenery and climate of the southern Island, but that’s really not much to go on when it comes to community development.
One night maybe two or three years ago, I found myself on the way back home from somewhere and needing to run into the drug store at Colwood Corners. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time, but something must have been in the air that evening.
I walked in the door and suddenly it seemed like I was back among people I recognized - people like me, whatever the heck that means. I’d be hard-pressed to define it. But that night, I felt it.
That’s when it dawned on me that I might be living in the wrong part of the region. My “people” lived elsewhere - in the Western Communities, perhaps. Had it not been for the Colwood Crawl and the prospect of tedious daily commutes in creeping traffic, I might have packed up right then and there.
Fortunately, Esquimalt has turned out to be the happy mid-point. I’d been hearing the jokes since I moved to the region about how different things were “across the bridge” and am delighted to discover that indeed, they are.
Is it the proximity to the water? Could be. I suspect my fervour for kayaking has something to do with a daily routine that regularly leads me past eye-catching stretches of the Gorge and Portage. While I have no more of a water view now than I did in Gordon Head, the wonderful scent of the ocean definitely lingers more on this side of town.
Is it the interesting trails in every direction for cycling and walking? Yes, that’s significant. Recent expansion of the Lochside Trail has made a big difference for the Gordon Head area, but for cyclists in particular it’s still difficult to go for a ride without having to endure unpleasant stretches on roads like McKenzie and Shelbourne.
More than anything, I think what I respond to in Esquimalt is the people. It’s not that they’re nicer, or dramatically different from those in other parts of the region. But something about them just reminds me of where I came from.
The funny thing is, I have no urge to return to Courtenay, and barely recognize the old place anymore. But there must be some Courtenay state of being that I’ve been missing all these years, and for some reason the people on this side of the bridge just seem to bring it to mind more often.
Home. Nice to finally find a neighbourhood where that word feels like it fits.

Homeless solution rests with all of us
Oct. 19, 2007

Up until I read that damn Frances Piven and her research into social change, I was certain that a bright new day was just around the corner in terms of people living sick, homeless and desperate on our streets.
The darkest days are just before the storm, I’d tell myself. People wouldn’t take it for much longer.
The better part of a decade has passed since I first had that thought, prompted by a walk through Vancouver’s tragic Downtown Eastside. But the street situations in Vancouver and Victoria have worsened significantly since then, and I’m still waiting for that storm.
Fortunately, a friend pointed me toward Piven’s 1979 book Poor People’s Movements earlier this year, and I saw in its pages the error in my thinking.
Piven and co-author Richard Coward looked at U.S. movements that had sprung up over the last century around issues such as welfare rights, unemployment insurance, and civil rights for American blacks. In each case, change only happened when several highly specific factors came into play all at the same time - few of which are evident when it comes to homelessness.
Violent protest and economic disruption were essential aspects in the movements Piven and Coward studied. Equally important was somebody in power who was championing the cause. Tiny, dedicated groups of committed people at all levels also had to be in place, and prepared to work very hard for many, many years.
Even with all that in place, change only happened when the mainstream felt directly affected. People had to see that change would serve their own interests. (The mass unemployment of the Depression, for instance, did wonders in convincing the broader population that unemployment insurance was a good idea.)
In addition, those at the heart of the movement had to be relentless in their commitment, not to mention articulate and compelling. View the modern-day disaster of homelessness through Piven’s lens, and it’s obvious why change continues to elude us.
First, consider the homeless themselves.
People on the streets tend to be quite sick - physically and mentally. Few are in any position to protest, let alone wait out the series of court injunctions should they dare try.
They come from a street culture that might as well be Mars in terms of how much it resembles our mainstream culture. They can’t often present themselves in appealing enough fashion to elicit any public sympathy, and many inadvertently inspire fear.
Then there are the challenges of economic disruption as a motivator, particularly in this region.
Downtown Victoria and city taxpayers certainly feel the pain. The city has spent $1.4 million to date in 2007 cleaning up the detritus of 1,200 people living on or near the streets. Police have identified 324 particularly intense people in the downtown who have collectively racked up more than 23,000 encounters with the law in just over three years, at a total cost of $9.2 million. The needle exchange, currently under threat of eviction due to the social ills unfolding on its door step, has seen its caseload triple to 1,600 in the last decade.
But if you don’t live, work or shop in the downtown, it’s almost like there’s no problem. In a region with 13 municipalities and numerous shopping districts, you can choose not to look - at least until the problems grow large enough to spill into your own neighbourhood.
So how will we battle this beast at the heart of our community? I guess it’s up to the small band of believers that Piven identified as playing a key role in leading change. If you’ve made it this far into my column, it could be you’re one of them.
Maybe you’re sick of washing urine and dirty needles from your storefront. Maybe you want homes, health care and support for everyone out there. Maybe you live in the middle of it all and just want a decent night’s sleep and a feeling of safety. No matter. Everyone who wants meaningful solutions to the real issues on our streets is ultimately on the same side.
The Mayor’s Task Force on breaking the cycle of mental illness, addiction and homelessness reports today. And as you’ll see, there are solutions.
The task force has spent the last five months crafting a strategy that draws on best practises from around the world. Speaking as someone who was part of the process, it’s a good report. There’s much to learn from the experiences of cities that are hard at work trying to tackle their own crisis of homelessness.
But without action, the report is just words on paper. There’s no big bag of money out there waiting to be spent, and no immediately obvious champion for the cause who will take it from here. In other words, don’t count on change unless you’re prepared to be part of it.
Homelessness is growing at a rate of 30 per cent a year. Close to 2,000 people will be living on our streets by the end of next year. Another 600 will join them the following year, and almost 800 more in 2010.
Want to do something about that? Then gird your loins and let’s get at it. Nobody but us is going to make it happen.