Homeless needle exchange hits road for better or worse
May 9, 2008
We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Friday, May 02, 2008
We shine at solving non-problems
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
May 2, 2008
Our water bottles are safe once more, thanks to a federal response so speedy and decisive that you could almost believe a new day was dawning in Canada.
In less than a year, bisphenol A went from a chemical that few Canadians had heard of to one of the most talked about and roundly condemned toxins in the country. Were it not for my ongoing frustration at our penchant to rally around obscure concerns, I’d take last month’s BPA ban as a heartening sign that our federal government can still rally to a cause if it needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the world will be a better place without bisphenol A. It’s OK with me that we’ve banned the stuff. But in terms of tackling the issues that really ail us in this country and around the world, a ban on BPA gets us exactly nowhere.
North American scientists have actually known about the more unsettling aspects of the man-made chemical for more than 70 years. The media didn’t have much to say on the topic until about a decade ago, however, and only really got an appetite for it in the past year. Of the 115 stories on BPA that have collectively run in B.C. newspapers over the years, 100 of them have been in the last year.
If you haven’t heard - although I can’t imagine that - BPA is a chemical used in the manufacturing of hard plastic and epoxies. Researchers first identified it as an “estrogen mimic” way back in the 1930s. Men working in plastics factories can develop breasts from breathing in BPA fumes day after day.
BPA exposure is thought to put people at greater risk of hormone-related diseases like breast and prostate cancer. It’s also been linked to smaller penis size in infants.
Not good. But as a priority for public health, this loud fussing about BPA exposure is really just noisy distraction from the things that are actually killing us in this country.
The government wants us to believe it’s making the planet a little safer for all of us by banning toxins like BPA. But if that’s the case, how is it that truly disastrous toxins such as tobacco and alcohol remain readily available? Could it have something to do with the $14 billion a year in tax revenue generated through the sale of cigarettes and booze?
Smoking accounts for more than a fifth of all deaths in Canada. Alcohol-related harms cost us $14.6 billion annually. Consumption of either toxin over a lifetime is associated with all kinds of cancers, organ damage, heart and lung problems, and chronic health issues. Together, tobacco and alcohol use account for most of the burden of disease, death and disability in Canada.
BPA is used in the manufacture of plastic baby bottles, something which no doubt helped make it an “It” issue. But if it’s children and youth we’re worried about, why don’t we do something to protect the nearly 400 babies born each year in Canada with the lifelong brain damage caused by a mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy - and the untold thousands who go undiagnosed? How come suicide is a leading cause of death for Canadians ages 15 to 24, and we don’t even talk about it?
Facts and figures around BPA-related harms are far less certain. Studies of the chemical’s toxic properties have generally involved rats, which were either injected with BPA or had BPA implants placed in their brains. That doesn’t much resemble the way humans ingest the chemical, so it’s difficult to draw parallels.
Nor do rats and humans respond the same way to toxins. Even the rats aren’t responding uniformly to BPA exposure; some don’t react to the chemical at all, and researchers are calling for more study to sort that out. In the meantime, we just don’t know the effects of low-dose BPA exposure on people’s health.
Again, that’s not to say that we should keep the stuff around. If we don’t need it, why use it? But at the risk of sounding cynical, what I conclude from Canada’s rush to ban BPA is that the plastics industry must not have much of a lobby, and that the media hullabaloo leading up to the ban certainly did a fine job of distracting us from all the other things Ottawa isn’t doing.
But please, drink deeply from your new BPA-free water bottle, and take what comfort you can from the knowledge that an uncertain and possibly non-existent threat to your health has been avoided. As for the real killers, they’re still out there.
Pick a project to move us off the "stuckness"
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
April 25, 2008
We’ve got the motivation. We’ve got the ideas. We’ve certainly got the money, and all the knowledge we need to fix the problems taking root on B.C. streets.
So why don’t we? That’s the million-dollar question - or the $852-million question to be more precise, which is roughly what it costs British Columbians every year to ride herd on the 15,500 people living on our streets. With the Olympics a mere two years away at this point, I would have expected urgency tinged with panic to have reached the highest levels by now, and yet it never seems to.
Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness.” He should know, given the challenges he has faced trying to set up a therapeutic community on the old Woodwynn farm in Central Saanich (http://www.createhomefulness.com/home).
“There’s a grand stuckness in Victoria,” says LeBlanc, who I first got to know several years ago through his highly successful Youth Employment Program. “We need to pick a project like Woodwynn - or any project, really - to get through it. Let’s pick one we feel passionate about and get past this.”
LeBlanc says he has been overwhelmed with support for his project, modelled after Italy’s famous San Patrignano therapeutic community. He recalled one two-minute trip through an office building that turned into a 45-minute meander due to so many people stopping him along the way to tell him how much they supported what he was doing.
Central Saanich council dealt the project a significant blow in February by nixing institutional or residential use of the property before LeBlanc had even presented to council. But LeBlanc would rather sort that challenge out than go find another piece of land - a lengthy and potentially futile process at the best of times in our region, and a major contributor to stuckness.
“If not here, where? If not now, when?” asks LeBlanc. “If you pick a new property, nine to 12 months from now we’ll be finished with due diligence and be back in the exactly same place as we are right now - and a year later.”
LeBlanc and I got chatting about Woodwynn a couple weeks ago over coffee with Ray Howard, who’d brought us together to talk about his own dream to do something with the five decommissioned BC ferries that are coming out of service in September. Howard wants to use them as floating treatment centres for people with addictions, and even has a low-profile spot picked out in Saanich Inlet where the ships can anchor.
Howard says everyone’s first reaction is to scoff, then declare that it can’t be done - but really, why couldn’t it? It’s an interesting idea.
As is LeBlanc’s project. As is a bottle depot similar to Vancouver’s United We Can, designed to work with, train and hire the “binners” out there who earn a living redeeming the bottles and cans we can’t be bothered to return. (There’s even a depot licence available in Victoria right now.)
All sorts of innovative projects are out there waiting to be tried. They’re going to require us to take a chance on doing things differently, and to stifle that automatic “No!” that rises to our lips so easily in this region. In my opinion, no idea should be considered too wacky to dismiss out of hand, because nothing could possibly be wackier than leaving things as they are.
But all the ideas in the world won’t get us far if we stay stuck. Let’s do something big, bold and dramatic for a change, and prove to ourselves - and the world that will soon be on our doorsteps - that it’s possible.
Speaking of saying no, the Capital Regional District was none too happy about my column last week about separating out returnable bottles and cans so that binners can benefit from some of the $18 million in deposits that go unredeemed in B.C. every year.
The CRD contract with Metro Waste - the company that buys the recyclables collected through the blue-box program - is based on three to four per cent of the “container stream” being redeemable containers, says a CRD spokeswoman. In other words, the CRD got a cheaper deal by telling Metro they could count on people like you and me to put at least some of our redeemable bottles into our blue boxes, which Metro then takes in for a refund.
With all due respect to the CRD, I’ll do as I choose with the deposits on my redeemables, and eagerly await word of other ways to put our forfeited deposits to work on social fronts. In Vancouver, a pilot project to collect workplace bottles and cans is generating funds for the United Way.
B.C.’s redeemable containers are managed by non-profit Encorp Pacific, and our unredeemed deposits are its major revenue stream. But Encorp has the means to make up that revenue elsewhere, says spokesman Malcolm Harvey, and would be happy to see deposits being rerouted to help binners.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Redirect bottles and cans to binners
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
April 18, 2008
We tend to look for big solutions to big problems. We all want that “magic bullet” that’s going to fix everything in one single, brilliant stroke.
But of course, there isn’t one. Whatever the issue at hand - global famine, rising obesity rates, a relentless rise in poverty in our communities - the truth is that every big problem is in fact just a dense thicket of small ones, all needing to be solved one by one.
So no magic bullet, then. No sexy instant cures. No one-fell-swoop solutions. Just the hard work of tackling a host of small problems one at a time.
Ignore that important fact, and nothing gets resolved. Here in B.C., alarm grows on all fronts that more than 15,000 British Columbians are now living on our streets yet the years pass and nothing seems to change.
Woodwyn Farm proponent Richard LeBlanc calls it “stuckness” (more on that next week). I suspect it’s about waiting for that magic bullet, when in fact the actual magic is in seeing that the key to dealing with any Big Problem is to address the myriad small problems at its core.
What can one person do to make a difference? I’m asked that all the time. As a member of the co-ordinating committee of the Greater Victoria Commission to End Homelessness, I can tell you that what’s being talked about there is the need for a Web site where people in our region can connect with like minds and innovative projects, and learn more about what has proven effective in other cities.
The Web site Our Way Home is a good start (http://www.ourwayhome.ca), but is not yet the interactive hub for ideas that people are looking for. So for today let’s consider just one simple and small thing that we could all start doing immediately: Change our recycling habits.
If you’re like me, you buy a lot of beverage containers without getting around to returning them for a refund of your deposit. Recycling them in your blue box diverts the containers from the waste stream, but that deposit you paid never does get returned. Deposits on beverage containers picked up in our blue-box program go unredeemed.
The accumulated deposits on all those unreturned cans and bottles in B.C. added up to almost $18 million in 2006. In fact, unredeemed deposits are the single biggest source of revenue for Encorp Pacific, the non-profit started by government in the mid-1990s to manage B.C.’s bottle returns. Something as minor as bagging your refundable cans and bottles separately from the rest of your recycling would put that money into the hands of what are probably thousands of street-level recyclers in B.C.
I’m sure Encorp would be unhappy to lose the revenue stream, but that’s hardly the point. You and I paid for those bottle deposits fair and square when we bought our beverages, and I certainly feel no qualms about exercising choice around who gets the refund that I’m choosing to forfeit.
In Vancouver, the highly successful business United We Can proves what can happen just by shifting our thinking on this one small front. Drive past the Downtown Eastside social enterprise on any given day and you’ll find a lineup of homeless people pushing shopping carts stacked high with empty containers into the UWC bottle depot. The program puts a few bucks into their pockets on a steady basis, and diverts a significant volume of cans and bottles that would otherwise be headed for the trash.
The 13-year-old business has grown to the point that it now employs 24 full-time workers, most of whom came from the streets. In 2006, it launched a new project that paired “binners” - people on the street who dig through garbage bins - with restaurants and other businesses that generated large volumes of returnable bottles. The binners were trained, matched with a business, and provided with one of 50 specially built collection carts known as UBUs (Urban Binning Units).
Will any of it solve homelessness? No, but it all counts. We’re not going to buy our way out of more than 25 years of flawed public policy just by handing over our bottles and cans to people on the street, but it’s one small step in the right direction. And with $18 million in unredeemed deposits up for grabs province-wide, it’s not even such a small step.
One word of caution before you begin: In our region, it’s illegal for anyone but you or the Capital Regional District to go through the contents of your blue box. To get around that, I sort my refundable containers into a separate bag and hope that will suffice in protecting the enterprising recyclers in my neighbourhood from being charged with theft.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Problems are fixed when people have a place to live
April 11, 2008
They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son.
He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was.
He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above).
The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but Ishmael figures it was actually about 80. The campers lived on the Toronto lakefront for three years on vacant property owned by Home Depot before being evicted in 2002.
Ishmael had moved in after finding himself out of rent money and in between jobs, and stayed for a year and a half. For him, it was the perfect situation, and in his opinion far more cost-effective than the “current idiocy” of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of homelessness without ever solving the problems.
“When I was in Toronto, it cost $80 a night to keep me at the Salvation Army for two and a half years. That’s 1,000 nights - $80,000 in all - yet I was still as homeless on the day I left as when I arrived,” he says. “Here in Victoria, they’ve got a van that goes around at night handing out soup and sandwiches. But it costs [taxpayers] $12 a head for that soup and sandwich. I could buy the same thing at Quizno’s for half the price.”
These days, Ishmael spends virtually all of his daytime hours at the UVic library. He’s found a place to sleep in the Western Communities, but needs to keep a low profile so the property owner doesn’t spot him. So every day he hops a bus to the university and spends long hours browsing the library stacks.
“I don’t smoke, don’t do dope, don’t drink. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow, so I’m doing this. And I am a bookworm, so it suits me,” says Ishmael, whose favourite writer is Thomas Jefferson. “I’ve got quite a book collection that I drag around with me, including some rare and hard-to-find volumes.”
He’s not sure why he lives like he does, but recognized years ago that he could no longer count on holding down a job long enough to pay his rent.
It wasn’t always that way. After immigrating to Canada from Germany in 1983, he landed a job quickly and was able to buy himself a house within a couple of years.
“But in 1990, I just kind of died,” he says. “They tell me I’m somebody who fell between the cracks. There’s a reason for every one of us to be on the street. A lot of us are really 12-year-old children in adult bodies.”
Ishmael jokes that he was a drifter throughout the 1990s, “then a new century started and I became a vagrant.” But he works when he can, and is currently making do on savings from the $7,000 he earned last year doing odd jobs. He refuses to go on welfare; socialism is “the philosophy of the parasite,” he tells me emphatically.
He’s 51 now, and no longer sure that his 2005 move to B.C. was a good idea. He’d ridden his bicycle from Toronto to Vancouver - a 44-day sojourn - after seeing televised images of the city and finding himself drawn to it.
But things haven’t worked out as planned. He built another tiny house in the woods of Metchosin, but that’s lost to him now. He swapped farm labour for a small wage and a place to live on the Peninsula for a time, but then he and the owner got into an argument and that was that. He’s thinking he might end up back in Toronto if he can find the bus fare, and get a room again at the Salvation Army.
I ask him what he’d suggest for readers wanting to know what part they can play in ending homelessness. Hire people, he says. (Call Cool Aid’s Community Casual Labour Pool at 388-9296 for more information.)
And if you’ve got a little bit of land where a wanderer might settle for a while, he’s all ears.
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