No Place Like Home

Even allowing for the gloss of the TV coverage, one of the most memorable aspects of the 2010 Winter Olympics is the degree to which family tales found their way into the narrative of the Canadian team and its record-breaking performance.

There was Joannie Rochette’s mesmerizing tribute to her dead mother, and Alexandre Bilodeau’s inspiring relationship with his brother, Fredrick, stricken by cerebral palsy. We saw other siblings competing side by side—the Hamelins in speed skating and the legally blind cross-country skier Brian McKeever being guided by his formidably athletic brother Robin. With Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the ice dancing gold medalists, their parents worked diligently together for years, providing the financial and logistical support their kids needed to make it to the podium.

The media feasted off these heartwarming accounts, but that exposure does not make them less real. After all, high-performance athletes function within a grid of expectation and encouragement that is by its nature familial: what are coaches if not turbocharged parental surrogates?

The tableau of Vancouver also offered a starkly different variation on the theme of family life, and it can be found in a world that is antithetical in every way to the robust athleticism of the games. The city’s Downtown Eastside—a cluster of blocks not far from touristy Gastown and BC Place that has long been known as Canada’s poorest postal code— is a blighted community of damaged souls, many of whom found themselves homeless and addicted after fleeing violent, broken homes. Lacking their own supportive families, the members of this hard-luck community created new support structures for themselves, despite the addiction, street crime and grinding poverty that consume the area around Hastings and Main.

But it would be a mistake to conclude the athletes and addicts in Vancouver are sadly ironic juxtapositions of one another. In all large cities, wealth and poverty are uneasy fellow travellers. But the story of the Vancouver Games, in a curious way, is also the story of how the Downtown Eastside over the past 15 years fought to carve out a legitimate space for itself in the politics and psyche of an outwardly wealthy metropolis renowned for its physical beauty and quality of life.

Completed a year before the games, A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the Fight for Its Future is a compellingly written account of how what was once the commercial heart of Vancouver became a neighbourhood that displayed the worst features of American inner-city poverty.

Its authors are certainly well positioned to tell this tale: Senator Larry Campbell, the Mountie turned coroner turned mayor, spent much of the 1990s witnessing the human devastation piling up around Hastings and Main. It was a galvanizing experience that transformed him from a workaday cop with conventional attitudes toward drugs into a crusader who has pleaded with Canadians to reconsider their attitudes toward addiction. Neil Boyd, a Simon Fraser University criminologist, has spent much of his career studying drug laws, and conducted impact assessments of the prescription heroin clinic and supervised injection facility that were established in the area in recent years. And Lori Culbert, a Vancouver Sun reporter, has spent years covering the Downtown Eastside’s struggles, as well as the trial of serial killer Robert Pickton, who preyed on the area’s sex workers.

In spite of its three-author format, A Thousand Dreams is an impressively seamless mixture of narrative journalism, academic analysis and political memoir. Although Culbert is billed last, her skills as a reporter and storyteller are immediately apparent, and her co-authors are dutifully referred to in the third person. But the text is dominated by Campbell’s candid and brave assessment of the events of the past 25 years—a period of history bookended by a pair of major events—Expo ’86 and the 2010 Winter Olympic Games—that played an enormous role in the decline, fall and gritty resurgence of a hard-luck community Campbell often described as his favourite part of Vancouver.

Vancouver is a port town, and so heroin from Asia flowed readily into the city, although, as the authors point out, the drug was not always an illicit substance. Opium dens flourished in Vancouver’s Chinatown, as well as at the docks on the Burrard Inlet. A prohibition movement, led by Chinese businessmen, sprang up in the city around the beginning of the last century, leading eventually to the enactment of Canada’s first drug law in 1908.

Long before it acquired its own name, the Downtown Eastside was home to a high concentration of poor, single men. During the Depression, they were unemployed. In later years, they were retired mill and mine workers who made their homes in the area’s many scrubby hotels and rooming houses, buildings that came to be known as SROs, for “single room occupancy.” These places had communal bathrooms, and the rooms often had no kitchen facilities. Downstairs, the bar functioned as the living room and communal area for these guys, but its role turned out to be corrosive:

While the area had once teemed with stores and theatres, Vancouver’s centre of gravity started migrating west. During the 1970s, retailers began to flee as the area’s burgeoning drug scene attracted teenage runaways and sex workers (many of them aboriginal). During the run-up to Expo ’86, the once-plentiful supply of seedy SROs started to erode as opportunistic property developers refurbished them for tourists.

With the squeeze on housing came mass evictions, mounting homelessness, waves of newly deinstitutionalized individuals with mental illness, the scourge of crack cocaine and finally a hurricane-scale health crisis—epidemic levels of hepatitis C and HIV/AIDs due to needle sharing, as well as a fearsome spike in drug overdose deaths involving a lethal cocktail of booze, legal and illegal drugs, and poverty. As public officials like Campbell and a cast of determined community activists sounded alarm bells, the mounting death toll became increasingly difficult to ignore. “[The government] told us they were bringing us a world-class city,” a community worker tells the authors, “but what they brought us was world-class drugs.”

The powers that be did their utmost to relegate the area’s problems to the urban periphery. The authors cite a ground-breaking 1994 taskforce report by B.C. chief coroner Vince Cain, a former Mountie who was one of the first to assess the plight of addicts through a social and medical lens, rather than write them off as moral degenerates best dealt with through the criminal justice system. Many beat cops working the area had come to a similar conclusion. Cain’s recommendations failed to find an audience. In fact, the city only began to pay attention when sleeping addicts started to turn up on the plazas of downtown office towers and the steps of Vancouver’s gleaming new coliseum-cum-library designed by Moshe Safdie.

As the crisis mounted through the 1990s—with hundreds of OD deaths annually and mounting evidence that a serial killer was preying on the Downtown Eastside’s sex workers—this down-at-the-heels community began to cobble together its own fixes. Some addicts and former addicts managed to establish advocacy organizations and even store-front needle exchange programs. Meanwhile, families and friends of the missing women pressed police to take these disappearances seriously.

A determined street nurse named Liz Evans, in turn, pushed hard for better housing conditions and eventually co-founded the Portland Hotel Society, one of the first SROs to be transformed into a not-for-profit equipped with facilities and services for its tenants. Like Cain, Campbell and others, Evans and her co-workers regarded the area’s residents as real people, not statistics:

The years of advocacy began to pay off. By the end of the decade, the Vancouver/Richmond health board declared a public health emergency, while Donald MacPherson, the city’s indefatigable drug policy coordinator, hustled to educate municipal and provincial officials, as well as ordinary citizens, about the so-called “Four Pillars” approach that Swiss and German authorities had deployed to address similar crises in needle parks in Zurich and Frankfurt.

The Four Pillars policy consisted of an equally balanced combination of prevention (i.e., education to discourage children from getting into drugs), treatment (detox programs), enforcement (going after the traffickers instead of clogging the courts with petty possession charges) and harm reduction (needle exchanges and clean, supervised injection sites that would provide medical support to addicts while helping to reduce the street-level mayhem associated with open drug scenes). The most important facet of the philosophy is that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing, and should be treated medically, not punitively.

After a roiling public debate over the plan, Mayor Philip Owen embraced the Four Pillars strategy in 2000, a sea change. Here was, in Campbell’s words, “a very staid, conservative, blue-blazer guy who woke up and got it.”

What happened next, of course, ranks as one of Canada’s most riveting, bizarre municipal melodramas. On the eve of the 2002 mayoral race, Owen’s long-time right-of-centre party, the Non-Partisan Association, stabbed him in the back for his bold drug stance, refusing to back his re-election bid. Deeply hurt, Owen opted not to run as an independent, paving the way for Campbell’s decision to sign on as the parachute candidate for the left-leaning Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE). Campbell’s surprise victory—spurred on by his good-old-boy persona and celebrity status as the real-life inspiration for the coroner in Da Vinci’s Inquest—reflected a dramatic moment of urban self-awareness for Vancouver, as this largely middle class city actively chose to confront the Downtown Eastside’s troubles with realism and humanity rather than with self-righteousness and bulldozers.

When Insite, the safe injection site for heroin addicts, finally opened in 2003, it marked a sharp change in the way Canadian cities deal with open drug scenes. The first such facility in North America (and an instant target of the Bush administration’s drug war generals), Insite operated under a complicated tri-level agreement that provided the facility with a limited exemption from federal narcotics laws, as well as funding and other supports from both the city and B.C. health authorities. Part of the deal was that Boyd and other researchers would closely scrutinize Insite to see if this controversial service was, in fact, reducing harm, as advertised. (To date, Insite has facilitated more than 200,000 injections, and not one person has died of an overdose in the facility, although its presence appears to have done little to curb drug-related crime— assaults, theft, etc.—in the area.)

The new mayor also found the half-finished Olympic file on his desk when he took office. Defying the wishes of the organizing committee, Campbell asked Vancouverites to vote in a referendum on whether they wanted the games, a high-risk gambit that paid off and helped the city win.

With federal and provincial cash poised to flow into the city, Campbell wheeled and dealed with his political counterparts and members of council to make sure the games would not lead to the clean sweep efforts in the Downtown Eastside that had marked Expo. Gordon Campbell’s B.C. Liberals, while implicated in a spike in homelessness due to welfare cuts, have mostly supported the Four Pillars strategy, even after Larry Campbell’s departure from the mayor’s office in 2005, and more funds for affordable and supportive housing have flowed into the area.

The same cannot be said for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have fought Insite from the moment they took office in 2006. The Tories’ determination to dismantle Insite belies their rhetoric about decentralization and provincial rights; after all, the facility had the explicit support of the province and local voters. The Harper government’s position remains rooted in attitudes that people like Larry Campbell and Philip Owen have long moved beyond: that harm reduction programs condone drug use. (Ottawa’s attempts to obtain legal judgements against Insite have been rejected twice by the B.C. Supreme Court, but this fight is not over yet.)

The fears are not outrageous, it must be said. Well beyond the boundaries of the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver has chronic problems with property crime that can be traced back to desperate addicts looking to finance habits that cost hundreds of dollars a day. If I were raising a teenager in Greater Vancouver, I am certain the presence of the Downtown Eastside’s drug scene would provide a steady source of anxiety.

But the debate in Vancouver has confronted these concerns head on, even if the Tories have not. As the authors note, drug users who become addicted to heroin or crack rapidly lose the ability to choose, and therefore it is important for society to regard these individuals not as outlaws but as human beings in need to medical attention. Some, they note, will simply not be cured. So what to do?

A Thousand Dreams concludes with a recommended program of action that offers an important counterpoint to the Tories’ tough-on-crime/just-say-no approach. Housing remains key, especially supportive housing for addicts or mentally ill individuals who have found themselves trapped in a cycle of homelessness or chronic shelter use.

They also stress that provincial health authorities must continue to expand detox treatment services and facilities for the mentally ill, who account for almost half of all police calls in the Downtown Eastside. As Campbell says, “We’re still a long way from where we should be on demand treatment. If drug addiction was any other disease, like cancer, we would be all over this like a rash.” They also say there must be greater recognition of the needs of the area’s aboriginal people, who are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the homeless and the addicted.

But as the authors make clear, the necessary funding is not in place, and opportunities to make significant investments have been lost. When the Tories shaved a percentage point off the GST, they opted to forego $6 billion in revenue, half of which would have made a huge dent in addressing affordable housing shortages, not just in the Downtown Eastside but in poor communities across Canada.

What’s more, they quote activists who say that the Olympic funding spigot will close now that the circus has left town. As one mental health advocate worries, “It’s the 2010 hangover I worry about.” Others, such as NDP member of Parliament Libby Davies, were sounding the alarm a year ago that governments were falling behind on the promised housing legacy. Larry Campbell, ever the booster, says he believes the games will be “a net benefit to the Downtown Eastside.” And it is clearly true that they did not inflict Expo-style havoc. But time will tell whether his optimism is well founded or naive.

For general readers, however, the real take-away from this book is that it provides a close-up look at how the Downtown Eastside, for all its seemingly intractable problems, manages to function like a genuine community, filled with people who have devoted themselves with extraordinary energy to a place they call home, warts and all.

Something to think about the next time you hear a local politician talking about the urgent need to clean up a blighted area.