Drug prevention programs ineffective, report says

WestEnder
December 3, 2009

While educational anti-drug programs such as the 26-year-old D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) continue to thrive internationally, the principal investigators of the Vancouver-based Urban Health Research Initiative (UHRI) joined a long line of critics in denouncing D.A.R.E.’s effectiveness at a local press conference last week (Nov. 24), where UHRI investigators Dr. Evan Wood and Dr. Thomas Kerr unveiled their 10-year prospective report on illicit drug use in Vancouver. The report aims to directly inform the City of Vancouver’s Four Pillars drug strategy, the provincial government’s response to hard drug use, and the federal government’s new National Anti-Drug Strategy, which controversially removed harm reduction from the plan in 2007.

Dr. Wood and Dr. Kerr’s report seeks to provide comprehensive information on hard drug use in Vancouver that they hope will help to determine how well B.C. is responding to the city’s drug problem, particularly in the inner city. Despite a large body of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of harm-reduction programs such as Insite, the supervised-injection facility in the Downtown Eastside, the report suggests that policy-makers continue to be stuck in a debate mode that doesn’t help the drug users they purport to address.

“The [Harper] government chose to remove harm reduction from the National Drug Strategy, despite the fact that the World Health Organization and United Nations actually endorse these interventions. We also have seen a government that’s continued to provide increased funding to programs that have been thoroughly evaluated to no longer work,” Dr. Kerr told a large audience at the Downtown Eastside’s Carnegie Community Centre. “The most obvious example is the D.A.R.E. program. There are many published studies which show that the D.A.R.E. program is ineffective, and that this is a government that’s continued to throw more resources on a program that doesn’t work, and yet it has placed a moratorium on the establishment of supervised-injection sites... despite a massive body of literature and endorsements from the scientific community showing this is an effective intervention.”

D.A.R.E. seeks to prevent drug use by having school-aged students pledge not to use drugs or join gangs. The program has been widely criticized since its inception in 1983, but very little progress has been made in the way of new methods to address drug use, in Vancouver or elsewhere, says Dr. Kerr.

“I could produce any number of reports to make the point that harm reduction is scientifically proven, and we need to really move past that debate,” adds Dr. Wood. “But, of course, there are lobby groups who have taken interest in Vancouver’s drug policies, and certainly the [U.S. organization] Drug Free America Foundation has been very active in terms of publishing a report funded by RCMP to basically attack this science.”

Using information obtained through Freedom of Information Requests, Dr. Wood and Dr. Kerr state in their report that senior bureaucrats in the George W. Bush White House played a key role in helping draft Stephen Harper’s drug strategy, widely criticized for taking an American ‘war on drugs’ approach. “From a scientific perspective, that is a massive flushing of taxpayers’ dollars down the toilet,” Dr. Wood says.

Harm reduction is key to the approach taken by the staff at Vancouver’s Youth Community Outreach AIDS Society (YouthCO), Canada’s first youth-driven organization providing peer education and support for HIV and Hepatitis C-positive youth. “It has caused more stress and anxiety for [us] knowing that the federal government has taken harm reduction out of its drug strategy, which is a core value of our organization, so it does definitely raise some fear,” YouthCO executive director Stephanie Grant told WE. “We know the federal government is not moving in the right direction regarding this topic.

“Our approach, when it comes to potentially decreasing drug use among youth, is to focus on getting to the core of the issues that lead youth to become problematic substance users.”

Self-esteem and the residual effects of residential schools, Grant says, underscore many of YouthCO’s educational workshops. Despite those efforts, the effectiveness of organizations like YouthCO will be limited as long as drug policy remains in its current incarnation.

“The status quo is unacceptable,” says Dr. Kerr, whose report also makes a case for a supervised-inhalation facility to accommodate the rising number of crack-cocaine smokers in the city. “This is not really earth-shattering news. Other countries have gotten this right: they’ve implemented treatment on demand, they have innovation in terms of developing new treatments, they’ve created harm-reduction programs, low-threshold employment opportunities for drug users, found a way for policing to partner with public health in a way that’s supportive. And they’ve seen the demand for drugs decline, public order problems decline, and all the problems with health-related harm decline.”

The UHRI report on Vancouver’s drug situation is available for download at http://uhri.cfenet.ubc.ca.

PHOTO: Stephanie Grant, executive director of YouthCO AIDS Society. By Doug Shanks.

Should homeless be "forced" into shelters?

WestEnder
December 3, 2009

A new shelter for homeless women at 625 Powell Street opened its doors Monday (Nov. 30), offering 24-hour emergency accommodation, 26 beds, and on-site support for homeless women in the Downtown Eastside. It opened on the heels of the provincial government passing a third reading of the controversial Assistance to Shelter Act last week, which now needs to pass Royal Assent to become law.

If passed, the Act will give police authority to use “reasonable force” to transport homeless people to emergency shelters during extreme weather — that is, weather deemed severe enough to present substantial threat to the life or health of the homeless. Extreme-weather alerts are typically called by provincial housing authorities when temperatures drop near zero, with snow, sleet or rain that makes it difficult for someone living outside to stay dry. In the event of such alerts, emergency homeless shelters are opened in community centres, churches, and schools to provide extra beds and shelter space for people to seek refuge.

B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman stated in an Oct. 29 media release that the Assistance to Shelter Act aims to prevent tragedies such as the death of a homeless woman known as Tracey, who died in the early morning hours of December 19, 2008, when temperatures had dropped to -10. Tracey, who had been visited by police earlier in the evening, was trying to keep warm with a candle in a makeshift shelter at Davie and Hornby when her belongings caught fire, eventually engulfing her in flames.

While the Act has been publicly endorsed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Vancouver Police Department has yet to come forward with an official response. Const. Lindsey Houghton told WE that the VPD is reserving its policy response until the Act passes Royal Assent. “What I can say is that we share the government’s concern for safety and well-being of the homeless,” he says. “We have always taken extraordinary steps during harsh and inclement weather to ensure that homeless have safe and secure shelter, and this winter will be absolutely no different.”

While the VPD awaits the Act’s fate, housing campaigner Laura Track and her colleagues at the Pivot Legal Society have been planning a legal challenge against the Act since talk of it started earlier this fall. “I think the Minister knows there are clear constitutional problems with the law, which is why I think he’ll delay its proclamation as long as possible, and thus delay the inevitable court challenge,” Track says. “I think that the police are worried... Police officers are well-versed in the law of reasonable detention and arrest, and what this bill asks them to do is to arbitrarily detain someone who has committed no crime, and to transport them who knows where against their will.”

Track says she would rather see the provincial government take steps to fund outreach workers instead of police officers to connect homeless people to shelters. “Empowering the police to use force to bring someone inside is going to hurt rather than help, and it’s going to undermine the safety of people who are homeless,” she says.

When emergency shelters were opened last winter under Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT), Judy Graves, whose tenant assistance work with the City of Vancouver involves directly connecting homeless individuals to resources, recalls the HEAT shelters were full to capacity immediately upon opening. “People in the street were desperate to come in; they didn’t need police force,” she says. “And even when all of those shelters were full, we still had people in the street.”

Reverend Ric Matthews of the Downtown Eastside’s First United Church, the site of one of the first shelters opened last year under HEAT, echoes Graves’s concerns surrounding the logistics of the Act. “It doesn’t solve the problem of the people who it’s seeking to be helping,” he says. “The problem, obviously, is that there aren’t mental-health beds... It assumes that you’ll solve the problem by dropping these folk off at a shelter.”

Matthews is also concerned about what the Act says with regard to use of force by police. “There are no limits to what the definition is of how much power will be used to coerce the person to a shelter,” he says. “In theory, the legislation allows for people to be Tasered into submission.”

Grant Gayman, the Vancouver Extreme Weather Response Coordinator for emergency shelters in the city, wants to consider the objectives of the Assistance to Shelter Act as genuine efforts to protect the health and safety of homeless populations. “If you just want to look at the Shelter Act, sure, you could say, ‘Oh well, we all know this is because of the Olympics and they’re going to clean the house like A Clockwork Orange,’ or something like that. But if you look at the big picture of what’s happened over the last few years with the shelter situation in British Columbia — Vancouver, in particular — then you see an awful lot of positive changes,” he says, pointing to the recent conversion of several temporary shelters into year-round, 24-hour operations.

Even so, Gayman notes that shelter staff are not in a position to prevent people from leaving in the middle of the night, and he also wonders whether police will be able to take personal belongings, such as shopping carts and bedding, with the people they pick up to take to shelters. “I should stress here that the extreme-weather shelters are supplemental to what I’ll call the regular shelters,” he says. “[Extreme-weather shelters] rely heavily upon the efforts of volunteers — not exclusively, but certainly volunteers play a huge role in the coordination and administration of these shelters, and certainly none of them are in a position to keep people should they not want to be there.”

PHOTO: Grant Gayman, the Vancouver Extreme Weather Response Coordinator for emergency shelters in Vancouver. By Doug Shanks.

Arts groups decry funding cuts

WestEnder
November 26, 2009

Arts groups will gather at the B.C. legislature buildings in Victoria today (Nov. 26), staging the latest in a long line of rallies protesting provincial-government funding cuts to the arts, which critics fear will exceed 90 per cent by 2011.

Despite recent recommendations by the province’s own Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services that arts funding be restored to 2008-2009 levels in the 2010-2011 provincial budget, critics are skeptical that the recommendations will actually be put into practice. Recommendations to restore the B.C. Arts Council budget, as well as the arts and cultural community component of Community Gaming Grants, were presented in a Nov. 13 report. The report concerns public consultation sessions on the 2010 provincial budget, which took place across B.C. this fall. Arts advocates, the report says, were “well represented at [the] public hearings, in the written submissions received, as well as the torrent of form letters submitted electronically.”

Keith Higgins, a Vancouver-based writer, visual artist, and community organizer, says the finance committee’s recommendations don’t go far enough to ensure long-term security for the arts. “Only campaigning to restore 2008-2009’s level of [arts funding] support is short-sighted,” he says. “What we need is for the provincial government to develop multi-year commitments that respond to the actual cultural needs of the province’s communities, the realities of B.C.’s profile internationally in all disciplines, and that respond to the economic realities that artists and their organizations are facing.”

Higgins says the politicians in charge of arts funding — Tourism and Culture Minister Kevin Krueger, and Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman — have not been respectful to the public in their discussion of arts cuts. “The fact that the government has been so clumsy — and, at times, duplicitous and condescending — in its responses, hasn’t helped them at all,” he says. “At times, Mr. Krueger has argued that there aren’t really any cuts. When pushed to admit that there really are cuts, he says something general about ‘tough times.’ When he is challenged about the wisdom of 85 to 92 per cent cuts, he gets angry and stalks away.”

Neither Krueger nor Coleman responded to WE’s requests for interviews, and a representative from the Ministry of Finance office asked not to be quoted in this article.

“It is extremely telling that they did this right after an election,” says Higgins. “We are, unfortunately, stuck in a binge-and-purge cycle in this province. In the run-up to an election, the government gives out little gifts, and talks about how they masterfully solved the terrible problems of a few years back. After the election, they say, ‘Sorry, things are worse than we thought they were; everyone has to suffer now.’”

NDP culture critic and Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert says the finance committee’s recommendation to restore arts funding is a positive first step, but he’s unsure whether the government will put it into action. “There have been many finance committee reports in years past where the committee recommends increasing arts funding, but then the government does nothing,” he says. “The real test will be March 2nd, with budget day.”

In the meantime, arts advocates such as Amir Ali Alibai, executive director of the Vancouver-based Alliance for Arts and Culture, are working to encourage non-members of arts communities to write to local MLAs about restoring funding. “This is a critical time; this is when big decisions will be made,” he says. “Empowering civil society is how we start to hope to deal with some of our social issues and challenges, and the very things with which [Rich Coleman’s] ministry is charged to be overseeing in our province.”

Previous to the August 2009 announcement of cuts to Community Gaming Grants, the Alliance for Arts and Culture had been receiving provincial funding to maintain an information resource centre. “We lost a significant amount of that funding; we probably are no longer going to be able to maintain an information centre for the public,” says Alibai. “If, obviously, it’s not valued by the province, then we can’t continue to do it.”

PHOTO: Amir Ali Alibai, executive director of the Alliance for Arts & Culture. By Doug Shanks.

Little hope for Little Mountain?

WestEnder
November, 26, 2009

After four hours of debate, six presentations by housing advocates, and questions raised concerning contractual arrangements between provincial housing agency BC Housing and developer Holburn Properties, Vancouver City Council voted unanimously November 19 to endorse an updated plan for Little Mountain, a 55-year-old public housing complex at Main and 37th. That means the official redevelopment process for the complex will begin this month, starting with what City staff refer to as “initial community introductions” in a report that went before council. The first of three scheduled open houses about the future of the complex will start in December, with a final policy framework set to return to council by September 2010.

Little Mountain’s future has been rife with controversy since the federal government transferred interest in the site to the province in 2007. In May 2009, BC Housing obtained a permit from the City to start demolishing vacant buildings on the site that had been deemed uninhabitable due to asbestos, obsolete infrastructure, and other problems that were hotly contested by residents and housing advocates. A number of residents were evicted and relocated in summer 2008. For the few households that now remain at Little Mountain, the future seems bleak.

For longtime resident Ingrid Steenhuisen, who was raised at Little Mountain and whose mother has lived in the same unit since 1957, health issues exacerbated by the demolition have bound her and her mother to the complex, despite the now derelict conditions. The recent installation of a fence near the home of Steenhuisen’s mother, who already has mobility difficulties, forced her to walk almost three times the distance she normally would, along a sharp slope, to come and go from the complex, which caused a strangulated hernia requiring emergency surgery. Steenhuisen’s mother has now been in the hospital for almost a month.

“Some people will say, ‘Oh, well, if you just move, then you don’t have the stress anymore,’” an exasperated Steenhuisen told WE outside council chambers. “But it’s difficult to be able to make a decision when you are already pressured with health issues… So, we chose to just try and get our health stable first.”

In her presentation to city council, Steenhuisen emphasized her concerns about the proposed community consultation process and the future of the site. “The community is already feeling that [three open houses are] the extent of what’s being offered... It certainly does not meet the guidelines for community consultation,” she said. “Little Mountain’s housing situation relates to how all other public housing will be, or can expect to be, treated in the future.”

David Chudnovsky, MLA for Vancouver-Kensington, echoed Steenhuisen’s concerns in his presentation to council. “I call it a tragedy, because community has been destroyed. It’s the oldest, and one of the most successful, social housing communities in B.C... It could have been done another way.”

Chudnovsky told council he would have liked to see a commitment to building social housing added explicitly to the report, which was written by City staff members Ben Johnson and Matt Shillito. “The commitment that was made to the tenants is that the social housing would be built first,” he said. “If the social housing is going to be built first, then somewhere it should say, ‘The social housing will be built first.’”

As for the murkiness surrounding financial deals between Holburn Properties and BC Housing, Johnson and Shillito wrote, “It is noted that while BC Housing and Holburn may have a financial agreement between them, the City is not party to the details of that agreement.”

Mayor Gregor Robertson acknowledged the ambiguity in his closing remarks to council. “We are in a very difficult situation, without knowing exactly what the contractual arrangements are between the province and the developer,” he said. “That said, we do need to clearly state our goal here of achieving and exceeding, hopefully, the social housing component.”

While Vision Vancouver councillors Heather Deal, Raymond Louie, Kerry Jang, and Tim Stevenson were absent from the meeting, COPE councillors Ellen Woodsworth and David Cadman voiced concerns that echoed those of the housing advocates who spoke at council. “We’re seeing a spiraling-out of problems coming from the lack of commitment to social good,” Woodsworth said.

“The federal government needs to get back into social housing,” said Cadman near the end of the debate. “It’ll be a cold day in hell when that happens.”

PHOTO: Longtime Little Mountain resident Ingrid Steenhuisen at the now-demolished public housing site. By Doug Shanks.

West End residents to weigh in on proposed apartment tower

WestEnder
November 19, 2009

If all goes as planned in the rezoning application process, a 22-storey rental apartment building will occupy the site of the former St. John’s United Church at 1401 Comox Street (at Broughton).

The church’s congregation has dwindled in recent years, and the BC Conference of the United Church of Canada placed the 17,200-square-foot property on the market this year. Westbank Projects and Peterson Investment Group, the same developers behind the Shangri-La and Woodward’s projects, paid $4.25 million for the property in September, and Henriquez Partners architects has been hired to design the building. The complex is to include 193 rental units, 13 of which will be three-bedroom townhouses.

“It’s a 100-per-cent rental building, 100 per cent dedicated for the life of the building, and will not be stratified,” says architect Gregory Henriquez. “This is something that falls into the mayor’s STIR [Short Term Incentives for Rental housing] program, which will probably be one of the very first all-rental buildings to be built in the West End in over 25 years.”

Since word of the rezoning application was mailed to surrounding residents earlier this month, Henriquez says he’s received a surprising amount of positive response to the proposal, which will be presented to the public at an open house Tuesday (November 24), in the Nelson Room of the Coast Plaza Hotel (1763 Comox), from 4-7 p.m. “Affordability is the number-one issue in terms of housing in Vancouver, and rental housing isn’t being built because the economics don’t work. This is a unique opportunity to build up our rental stock,” he says.

Henriquez told WE that studio units in the new development will rent for under $1,000 a month, with other units renting between $2 and $2.15 per square foot. Outdoor amenities will include a community garden and a children’s play area.

While some residents have voiced concerns about the appropriateness of a 22-storey tower at the site, Henriquez says a great deal of consideration has gone into the building’s streetscape; it would feature a series of brick elements and a four-storey brick facade to help facilitate the transition in building size. “There’s been a real effort made to help with the transition in scale from the buildings, but then acknowledge that it’s one of dozens of towers in the neighbourhood,” he says. “There’s towers all around it.”

For West End Residents Association (WERA) president Brent Granby, the site proposal means more than just a rezoning application — it’s a process, he says, that should fully engage residents who might be affected by it. “It’s critically important that people give as much input to the City as possible, so that they can have some kind of influence on what the... development is going to look like,” he says. “I think that’s what’s giving people a lot of concern on these projects, is that there isn’t a consensus on what the actual built form is going to look like if we go forward.”

As part of efforts to open up discussion about the redevelopment, Granby and members of WERA have started sharing information on a blog, 1401Comox.ca. In advance of the November 24 open house, WERA will hold a community forum on rezoning applications Saturday (November 21) in the Crystal Ballroom of the Empire Landmark Hotel (1400 Robson), from 1-3 p.m. The forum will discuss the rezoning of 1401 Comox, as well as a public hearing on the rezoning of 1215 Bidwell Street, currently occupied by the nightclub Maxine’s Hideaway.

“Affordability is critical for this city right now,” says Granby. “It really concerns me, particularly with the STIR program, that there seems to be a notion that if you just increase supply, that somehow that’s going to create affordability.”

Public forum to focus on homelessness, Olympics

WestEnder
November 19, 2009

Housing, homelessness, and the 2010 Olympics will be the focus of a public forum on Monday (November 23) at SFU Harbour Centre’s Fletcher Challenge Theatre. The forum is part of the Right to the City lecture series organized by the Impact on Communities Coalition, an Olympic watchdog group.

The forum features speakers with a wide range of expertise on Vancouver housing and homelessness, including Martha Lewis of the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre; Wendy Pedersen of the Downtown Eastside’s Carnegie Community Action Project; and Reverend Ric Matthews of First United Church, the site of one of the first homeless shelters to open last winter under Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT).

While preparations for the 2010 Games have drawn criticism from housing and civil-liberties advocates, attributing all of the city’s housing issues to the Olympics is too simple, says Nathan Edelson, a former senior planner for the City of Vancouver and a speaker at the Right to the City forum.

“We often look at [the Olympics] and say, for instance, ‘Why did we spend a billion dollars on a convention centre when we could have housed everyone?’ But the choice usually doesn’t come down that way,” Edelson says. “The nature of the Olympics is such that some money probably never would have been a city priority. For instance, a billion dollars in security wouldn’t have been spent that way. So, would that money have been available for other things? Possibly, but it requires a different political context.

“The real issue, to me, is that we don’t have a national housing program, we haven’t had a provincial housing program, and we don’t have consistent infrastructure programs by the senior governments,” he says.

As for the controversial extreme-weather-shelter legislation that B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman introduced last month, which gives police authority to take people to emergency shelters, Christine Smith-Parnell is concerned about the possible impact the legislation could have on the aboriginal homeless population. Smith-Parnell will speak at the Right to the City forum representing her role as executive director of the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Society. “If they’re going to legislate that, they should be legislating more beds, so that if we have a certain amount of homeless people, we should have a certain amount of shelter space available to them.”

Smith-Parnell is concerned that, under the new legislation, people will be put in jail if there is insufficient space in shelters. “Our [aboriginal] population has always been over-represented, whether it’s in the criminal justice system or the homeless [population]... Because we are the most visible, our people are going to be the first that are being scooped up.”

For his part, Edelson would like the provincial and municipal governments to focus more on shelter issues. “I think we need a year-round shelter program that gives people at least a roof over their heads — not a mat on the floor, but in a bed, in a place where they can relax,” he says. “It’s going to take a number of years to build the housing that’s needed, but I don’t think we should condemn hundreds of people to live outside while we do the construction... It’s just so devastating for people when they don’t have a place that they can have some stake in, that they can’t be asked to move along from, and that they have the ability to be there when they need to get rest or get out of the weather.”

PHOTO: Christine Ackermann (Renters at Risk), Am Johal (Impact on Communities Coalition), Wendy Pedersen (Carnegie Community Action Project). By Doug Shanks.

City contemplates future of bridge lanes

WestEnder
November 5, 2009

The apparent success of the ongoing Burrard Bridge lane re-allocation trial is something urban planner Gordon Price would like to think foretells a new “post-motordom” era, in which urban roadways evolve to accommodate not only cars but a variety of transportation methods. “As we move into the post-motordom era, the car will be accommodated as one of the five modes of transportation that we use — in addition to feet, bikes, taxis, [and] transit — but it won’t be the dominant one,” Price, the director of SFU’s City Program, told WE. “I think what’s going to happen — and you can see it already in most places in Europe — is the streets will become places of common use for different users.”

Price was a supporter of the first Burrard Bridge lane re-allocation trial, in 1996, when he was nearing the end of his six-term stretch as an NPA city councillor. That trial, which lasted six days, was unsuccessful, Price says, because not enough effort was made to inform the public about it beforehand. “It just came as a real shock to people,” he recalls.

This year, however, a rigorous promotional campaign by City staff helped citizens prepare for the change, which, beginning on July 13, saw a southbound vehicle lane re-allocated for bikes, the northbound sidewalk become a bikes-only lane, and the west sidewalk rededicated for the exclusive use of pedestrians.

“It is important to note, historically, that there was never an option to keep the status quo,” Price says, adding that the legal necessity of making the Burrard Bridge safer for cyclists has already resulted in a court case. “Have things changed [between now and 1996]? Yeah, clearly they have, in two respects: more people are cycling, [and] more people realize the need for more sustainable transportation, so I think there’s more desire to make something like this work.”

Assistant city engineer Jerry Dobrovolny presented a Fall 2009 status report on the lane trial at Vancouver City Council’s Transportation and Traffic meeting Tuesday (Nov. 3), outlining the progress of the trial as well as disclosing the results of a September 2009 Mustel Group public-opinion survey on the subject.

The survey, which consisted of 300 random telephone interviews with Vancouver residents in the months leading up to and following the launch of the trial, indicates largely positive support, with 45 per cent responding in favour of retaining the re-allocated lanes after the Olympics, and 21 per cent opposed. Support for the trial, including from drivers of single-occupancy vehicles, outweighs opposition three to one in what the survey refers to as “target neighbourhoods,” or downtown and west-side neighbourhoods near the Burrard Bridge. Cyclists, in particular, responded positively to the trial, with 90 per cent favouring retention of the re-allocation after the Olympics. Seventy-one per cent of pedestrians surveyed favoured keeping the re-allocation.

Opinions expressed in the Mustel survey echoed Dobrovolny’s recommendation on behalf of City staff that the bike lanes stay in place. Staff will return with a post-Olympics proposal for permanent plans for the bridge. (The previously mooted idea of widening the sidewalks is reportedly no longer a consideration.)

The City status report mentions lingering concerns about pedestrians being restricted to the west sidewalk only, as well as increased travel times for vehicle trips on Pacific and Thurlow streets.

Members of the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition (VACC) spoke at council Tuesday to call for a permanent two-lane re-allocation, as well as improved bike lanes approaching the bridge on either side. “We are concerned about the pedestrians having to use only the west side, and it would be so great if the pedestrians could re-claim their east sidewalk,” VACC president Arno Schortinghuis told WE before the meeting. “The other point is that the east sidewalk is a bit narrow for cycling... I think for a permanent solution, we would love the northbound lane re-allocated for cycling as well.”

Schortinghuis, who cycled across the bridge during the 1996 re-allocation trial, is glad to see more than 10 years of VACC advocacy work coming to fruition with the current lane trial. “It was such a thrill, even back then, to go over the bridge in a re-allocated traffic lane,” he says, “and it’s really great to be able to do that again.”

PHOTO: Following a well-received trial period, Vancouver City Council will now decide whether to make the re-allocated bike and pedestrian lanes on the Burrard Bridge permanent. By Doug Shanks.

New media centre hopes to empower troubled community

WestEnder
November 5, 2009

The controversial Woodward’s site, located near Hastings Street between Cambie and Abbott, has existed in a state of flux for years. Standing between the Downtown Eastside and Gastown — both rapidly changing neighbourhoods — the future of the block that once housed the historic Woodward’s department store has, for many, been symbolic of the future of the city itself. Like most major changes to Vancouver’s landscape, it has seen its share of growing pains, from the housing squats in 2002 to the day in September 2006 when the original building was demolished.

Now, with the 2010 Winter Games serving as the unofficial (and fast-approaching) deadline for construction in the city, and with big-box grocery and drug stores set to open at the Woodward’s site in a matter of weeks, years of planning are finally reaching tangible results.

Meanwhile, across the street, Irwin Oostindie’s work for the past five years is also coming to a head in the form of W2 Community Media Arts, an ambitious and multi-faceted art, media, and community centre that’s already played host to a wide range of events such as the Heart of the City Festival, the Fresh Media conference, and a Downtown Eastside photography exhibit. A sleep-deprived Oostindie met with WE last week, in the midst of hectic negotiations and final planning, to talk about W2’s progress to date.

“Woodward’s will only work if W2 works,” says Oostindie, who is the centre’s executive director. “And while there’s cynicism in some quarters of the Downtown Eastside towards Woodward’s — that it’s a retail giant and market housing — in reality, W2 is taking on the responsibility of making sure that Woodward’s isn’t alienating to Downtown Eastside residents. It’s a responsibility we carry very heavily.

“It’s also the policy framework W2 is working on to advance and to ensure that, 20 years from now, we have existing populations that are still intermingled in the Woodward’s complex, and that we don’t suffer the fate of Plaza of Nations or the Roundhouse Plaza, which became controlled by either market forces or strata councils.”

Prior to his role with W2, Oostindie worked as the communications director for the Roundhouse Community Centre, with the City of Vancouver as a senior community planner for the Downtown Eastside, and, most recently, as the executive director of Gallery Gachet. His experience with the Roundhouse in its formative years, he says, helped shape his thinking about how to develop W2, particularly within the context of the Roundhouse’s successes and failures.

“It’s about bringing many voices together, and the Roundhouse is a community piece of civic infrastructure, so W2 is very much the same way,” he says. “It’s a piece of communication infrastructure that empowers residents to access creative technology, and those residents may be Downtown Eastside residents, those residents may be citywide. It’s very much like a wired community centre.”

W2 will also take to the streets in the form of the two-year-old Fearless City mobile project, which aims to provide video and online technology with which Downtown Eastside residents can communicate to audiences in their neighbourhood, across the city, and around the world. During the Olympics, W2 will serve as a digital media space, giving Downtown Eastside residents the opportunity to share their experiences of the Games — good or bad — with a global audience. “Fearless City is the mechanism where residents can be engaged in telling their own stories around their own personal experiences. And for some, that will be critical, and for some, that will be celebratory,” Oostindie says.

For now, W2’s online membership and presence in the city’s independent arts scene is continuing to grow, with 628 members on the official website (CreativeTechnology.org) and 550 members on the W2 Facebook group.

For Oostindie, it’s a project he hopes will contribute positively to the city’s cultural and intellectual fabric. “I’m born and raised in Vancouver, so, for me, a place where we can re-imagine the future and deal with redress and cross-cultural dialogue issues — if W2 can contribute toward healing Vancouver’s past and imagining a socially inclusive future, then our work’s been done,” he says. “We can only walk the talk. If people are critical of W2 by lumping us into their opinion that Woodward’s is gentrifying, then we’re either not doing a good enough job or they’re not hearing our story.”

PHOTOS: Perel Gallery by Doug Shanks, Irwin Oostindie by Gavin Schaefer.

BOOKS: Leaving the city in stitches

WestEnder
October 29, 2009

The very first piece of knit graffiti has been traced back to Houston, Texas, in 2005, when Magda Sayeg and her friend affixed a blue and pink acrylic cozy to a door handle. The piece, now referred to among descendents of the art form as the “alpha piece,” was revolutionary: it signified the beginning of Knitta, the first knit-graffiti group, and the start of similar groups around the world dedicated to craft-based activism — or “craftivism” —through yarn bombing, the act of leaving tags in public spaces. In Vancouver, a prominent example of yarn bombing can be found at the entrance to the Davie Village Community Garden, where a crocheted pink rose joins a series of striped cozies wrapping the length of a wooden gate facing Davie Street.

But aside from the twee delights of seeing a distinctly suburban craft invading the urban landscape, what does it all mean? That question is part of the mystery and fun of yarn bombing, says Leanne Prain, who co-authored a book about the phenomenon with Mandy Moore. Yarn Bombing: the Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti was released through Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press last month, and has already garnered considerable critical attention, including a nod from The New Yorker magazine’s book blog.

True to the spontaneous spirit of knit graffiti itself, Prain and Moore’s collaboration on the book was, at first, a bit of a surprise to them both. Prain was finishing the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University, and Moore was working as the senior technical editor of Knitty, a Toronto-based knitting magazine, when Arsenal Pulp unexpectedly responded to a book proposal that Prain sent the publisher as part of her master’s thesis project. At the time, the two had only met briefly through the now-defunct Knitting and Beer “stitch and bitch” group.

“I had been working in the knitting industry for a number of years and had been thinking I’d like to write a book, and I get this e-mail out of the blue,” Moore recalls. “Leanne’s like, ‘I don’t know if you remember me. Let’s write a book together!’ And I’m like, ‘I do remember you. Yes, let’s! It’s perfect!’”

Starting in February 2008, the two embarked on an eight-month book-making journey, in which Prain’s partner took pictures, Moore edited patterns, and she and Prain interviewed fellow yarn-bombers from around the world via Skype. Moore kept her job as an editor with Knitty, and Prain continued to work full-time as a graphic designer, so they wrote the bulk of the book on evenings and weekends at Mount Pleasant’s Rhizome Café, a meeting place between the two neighbourhoods where they live (Prain resides in the West End, Moore in East Vancouver).

By the time WE caught up with the two of them at Rhizome on a rainy evening earlier this month, Prain and Moore had been receiving feedback on the book for several weeks, particularly from the extensive online crafting communities that have been largely responsible for the growth of knit graffiti. “The online knitting community is massive,” says Moore. “For a lot of people, that is their community for this thing that they’re really passionate about. You’re probably not going to know a lot of other people in your real life that do it, so this is where you hook up with other people and get your support, your inspiration, and feel part of something.”

“Even when we wrote the [book] proposal, we didn’t have an idea of how many people we would actually encounter,” adds Prain. “We started a blog at around the same time as we started writing the chapters, and people would contact us. We still have that community — people are coming back and talking and commenting, sending me articles that they find. It’s really interesting, to grow and grow.”

Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain will hold a special Yarn Bombing “stitch and bitch” Thursday, Nov. 5 at Book Warehouse (1051 Davie), 7 pm. More information about the book and their work can be found on their blog, YarnBombing.com

New report imagines a greener Vancouver

WestEnder
October 29, 2009

The City of Vancouver released its Greenest City Action Team’s 10-year plan last week in a report titled Vancouver 2020: A Bright Green Future. The report, which includes a summary of long-term sustainability targets for the city, is the product of collaborative efforts among the 18-member Greenest City Action Team, which is comprised of city councillors, representatives of local environmental groups, and green-business leaders.

Part of the report, titled “Green Mobility,” discusses the goal of creating a Vancouver in which, by 2020, more than half of trips within the city are carried out on foot, bicycle or public transit . “Great green cities are walkable cities,” reads the report. “Walking is the most environmentally sustainable form of transportation, creating no emissions, no noise, and requiring the least amount of infrastructure… Vancouver could do much more to facilitate walking and cycling, although the allocation of additional space on Burrard Bridge is a step in the right direction.”

As part of efforts to enhance Vancouver’s walkability, the report includes recommendations to connect all primary and secondary schools to existing green spaces, and to increase access to green spaces by ensuring that every Vancouver resident lives within a five-minute walk of a park, beach, greenway, or natural space.

Pedestrian City, a pedestrian advocacy initiative founded by Natalie Ethier, as well as the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN), have started to explore these and other goals through “green mapping sessions,” the first of which was held last Thursday (Oct. 22) in Mount Pleasant. The mapping sessions aim to create visual representations of the city’s existing green spaces, thereby helping to maximize future use, and hopefully illustrating the need for the creation of more green space. For Ethier, who moved to Vancouver from Toronto this spring, it’s an extension of her previous work with Pedestrian City, which she started as part of her master’s degree in Environmental Science at York University. Her work was influenced in large part by Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs and cultural theorist Guy Debord, who coined the term “psychogeography.”

“Psychogeography is the study of the effects of the geographical environment —consciously or subconsciously — on the emotions and behaviours of individuals,” Ethier explains. “One of the ways to explore that is through... inventive strategies that take pedestrians off their predictable paths and bring them into this new awareness of the urban landscape.”

One of Ethier’s goals with the VPSN’s mapping projects is to give participants an opportunity to reflect on their neighbourhoods and their sense of place. “As one of the participants noted, it was about connecting the dots between the places and interactions you experience in a neighbourhood — the things that you notice but never put together in the same mental space,” she says.

Connecting with one’s sense of place in public spaces, Ethier says, is crucial for building awareness of the importance of pedestrian spaces and their role in urban life. “Canadian cities, in particular, have changed really quickly and developed around the car, and didn’t give much thought to other modes of transportation,” she says. “I think most people just don’t think that pedestrianism needs to be advocated for, because, for the most part, there are sidewalks everywhere, so you don’t need to go and build sidewalks like you do with bikes.”

Even though she’s fairly new to Vancouver, Ethier says she sees strong interest in sustainable-transportation issues among the city’s residents, and she hopes to expand her work with Pedestrian City to community centres in the future, so she can reach out to more diverse populations. “So far, I’ve found everybody who participates is around my age: mid-twenties to mid-thirties,” she says. “I think it would be really interesting to reach out to children and seniors, to get different perspectives... I think it’s really important to foster a sense of environmental awareness and education within the community.”

Future calls for public participation in the mapping sessions will be posted on the Pedestrian City website, PedestrianCity.ca, along with other pedestrian-advocacy resources.

“You notice a lot more when you’re passing through a space on foot rather than zipping by on a bike,” Ethier says. “There’s just more opportunities to come across new spaces or found objects, or to wander off a path; you really get a sense of what a neighbourhood is like. Jane Jacobs herself said, to get to know your neighbourhood, you have to get out and walk. I think it’s really important that we encourage people to do that.”

PHOTO by Doug Shanks.

Critics slam Olympic bylaws

WestEnder
October 29, 2009

Last week, while Premier Gordon Campbell showed off a pair of Olympic mittens on U.S. television as part of promoting the 2010 Games during a visit to New York City, MLAs in Victoria were debating Olympic-related civil liberties issues. The debate focused on a second reading of Bill 13, an omnibus bill containing a controversial act critics say restricts Charter rights to free speech during Games time.

The Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act, which gives the municipalities of Vancouver, Richmond, and Whistler temporary enforcement power to remove unwanted signs and graffiti during the Games, was introduced earlier this month, and garnered criticism from civil liberties groups and Olympic critics.

The Act gives Olympic security officers the right to enter private residences with 24 hours’ notice to remove or cover up signs that the City of Vancouver classifies as “ambush marketing and graffiti.” Under current provisions of the Vancouver Charter, it would take the City 30 days or more to remove such signage, but the new Act would allow the City to stop the unauthorized distribution of flyers and display of commercial signs immediately. While the City distributed a media release on October 20 stating that “there is a misperception that free speech during the Olympics is at risk” and that the City is “not focused on anti-Olympic signs,” Olympic critics Chris Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe will continue with their lawsuit against the City of Vancouver for infringing on Charter rights to free speech, which they launched with the BC Civil Liberties Association earlier this month.

“We’re not going to back down,” Shaw told WE. “I am going to take a very hard-line view that I’m not going to negotiate Charter rights with any government entity. It’s non-negotiable. They can withdraw it or they can face us in court.”

Shaw hopes the lawsuit will force the City to back down or withdraw what he says are “egregious” Charter of Rights infringements. “I think the implications of having a bylaw — or Bill 13 — that essentially strips away, in principle, civil rights, is a very, very damaging piece of legislation to have on the books,” he says, “and I can’t imagine that that sort of legislation would not be abused in the future by other cities, maybe even by Vancouver.”

Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert was one of the five opposition MLAs who raised concerns about the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act in the legislature on October 20. “The thing about Bill 13 is it’s kind of a miscellaneous grab-bag... But then you dig through the bill and you find the provisions related to the sign bylaw,” he told WE after the session. “You’d think something like that would come to more substantive debate through the introduction of its own individual bill, but I can understand the government does not want to highlight this and does not want this to become an issue. They’d prefer people didn’t know it was happening.”

Herbert says the bill should have been addressed earlier. “I think the international community would have supported that, as they were sold on a vision of a sustainable and socially just Games,” he says, “but when they come to B.C. and Canada, I don’t think that’s what they’re going to get.”

COVER: Rude awakening

WestEnder
October 22, 2009

Once my eyes stop resembling dried fruits, I’ll know I’ve won. Until then, the nightly battle my mind wages against my body (or is it the other way around?) continues to torment me. I can’t sleep, and it’s the worst.

The infuriating number of times I wake up in the night, combined with the number of mornings when I feel as though I’ve had no sleep at all, stonewalls me from achieving my lifelong aspiration to approximate the relaxing woodland-cottage life of the heavy-lidded, pajama-clad bear featured on boxes of Sleepytime Tea, which I drink before bed in the hope that its promise of sleep-inducing camomile and lemongrass will one day have an effect on me — but to no avail. Instead, I lie awake most nights, waking frequently from dreamless almost-sleep, the following day fuelled by a variety of caffeinated beverages which probably hinder that night’s sleep. As any sleep-deprived person will tell you, it’s a vicious cycle.

My morning coffee, followed by a steady stream of tea as black as my heart, keeps me somewhat alert through the workday, but once it’s time for bed, I can only fall into a light snooze that barely sustains me until 2:00 a.m. Then begins the pattern of waking up almost every hour until the alarm goes off. Sometimes my frustrated interior dialogue gets the better of me, and I’ll swear at myself out loud for not sleeping, which wakes up my partner, a sound snoozer and well-rested contributor to society. If only I possessed the Zen-like inner peace of that damn Sleepytime bear.

Despite the gentle solitude I feel while looking out my window at the desolate 4 a.m. streets of the West End, statistics suggest I’m not alone. According to information released in 2002 by Statistics Canada, one in seven Canadians (about 3.5 million people) over the age of 15 has a hard time falling or staying asleep. About 18 per cent of that group averages less than five hours of sleep per night (seven to nine hours is considered optimal for adults).

Comforted by the widespread company I seem to be keeping, I went to the doctor to talk about my dilemma. She ruled out anemia and thyroid problems, and instead suggested I might be overworked (this is probably true), especially since I tend to sleep relatively well on weekends. She suggested warm milk before bed, vitamin B, and acupuncture or massage therapy. I’ve yet to allow myself to be stuck with needles, but the B supplement I started taking a few weeks ago has helped my energy levels a little, and the new apartment I moved into last weekend boasts a quieter bedroom than the one where I used to live. These factors, combined with the age-old “going to the doctor makes things seem better” remedy, have left me hopeful.

But, according to Dr. Jonathan Fleming, a psychiatrist who works at the UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health sleep-disorder clinics, a number of popular misconceptions — such as the idea that people who experience regular daytime sleepiness are lazy, that you should catch up on sleep by lying in on the weekend, and that most people adapt to shift work — prevent people from seeing a doctor about their problem.

“The most common sleep disorder is insomnia associated with stress,” says Dr. Fleming. “If the stress resolves, the sleep commonly reverts to normal.”

This could explain my Sunday nights of no sleep, and my relatively restful Saturday nights. The next most common sleep disorder, Dr. Fleming says, is sleep disruption associated with an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder.

Previous to seriously exploring the psychopharmacology of sleep by opening a sleep clinic at Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Hospital in 1983, Dr. Fleming says he received relatively little training on sleep disorders. “I, like many of my vintage, had received a total of one hour’s instruction on sleep, but this was largely on sleep EEG [electroencephalography] and the investigation of seizures,” he recalls. “At this same time, investigators at the University of Pittsburgh were reporting that depressed patients had specific sleep findings... which looked as though it may be a marker for clinical depression. This finding, and my ignorance about sleep, prompted me to get further training in this new area.”

At that time, Dr. Fleming says, quality of sleep was not considered to be very important, and sleep apnea — disturbed breathing during sleep — was thought to be fairly rare. Today, sleep disorders are still under-reported and untreated relative to other health issues — something that Dr. Sunny Dong sees frequently among his patients at the Burnaby-based West Coast Sleep and Breathing Centre.

As a trained respirologist, Dr. Dong treats patients suffering from sleep apnea, but he says about 90 per cent of people with the condition are unaware of its occurrence. “Quite often, they’re told that they snore,” he says of some new patients who are later diagnosed with the disorder. “Some people will say they have difficulty getting to sleep, other people complain that they’re waking frequently at night, or they feel that they’re sleeping soundly but they don’t feel rested in the morning. So during the day they may feel tired or feel sleepy or have difficulty thinking clearly.”

Daily lack of sleep — experienced as a result of sleep apnea or otherwise — results in an accumulated sleep debt, says Dr. Dong. “Over time, fatigue and sleepiness would tend to increase, as well as problems with mental function,” he says. “If, at the same time, you’re having disturbances in your breathing, and the episodes are long enough that there’s a significant drop in your oxygen level, then you can also develop diabetes or hypertension or liver disorders, such as elevated cholesterol.”

While the toll that lack of sleep takes on the body is considerable — changes in concentration, energy, mood, and physical resilience are some of the most common drawbacks — public awareness and medical progress on understanding and treating sleep disorders is increasing. The National Sleep Foundation is a U.S.-based non-profit agency dedicated to alerting the public, health-care providers, and policy-makers on the importance of adequate sleep. Dr. Dong recommends SleepFoundation.org as a helpful resource centre for anyone interested in learning more about disordered sleep.

Nevertheless, public awareness about the health impacts of inadequate sleep lags behind other health issues, Dr. Dong says. “”There’s a growing awareness, but there will probably be another two, three decades before sleep is something that people think of as being a possible cause of their problems in the same way that they would think of hypertension or diabetes. It took a long time for people to be aware of hypertension as a chronic medical condition; that effort started decades ago. Even now, quite a few people with hypertension aren’t getting assessed or the appropriate treatment. It would be the same kind of timeline I’d expect for sleep as well.”

While I wait patiently for the day when widespread awareness of sleep disorders results in the construction of outlandish contraptions like cozy workplace napping rooms where Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” plays on a loop (No! —Ed.), I’ll keep exploring new frontiers in sleep hygiene and tea-drinking. One of these days, I’ll sleep through the night and not wake until morning. And when that day comes, life will be awesome.

The fight for territorial rights

WestEnder
October 22, 2009

When Thomas Berger was appointed by Vancouver City Council in 2004 to conduct a review of the city’s electoral system, the former B.C. Supreme Court judge noted in his report that the existing at-large system we use to elect our municipal government “is not a truly democratic agreement.” He discussed problems of representational inequality that continue to figure prominently in Vancouver civic elections. “Disparities in income and education, family status... and so on have led to disparities in voter turnout,” Berger wrote. “As a result, our city councillors have largely been chosen by (and to a large extent from among) west side residents.”

Berger recommended that the City reform its electoral process by adopting a ward system, in which voters elect a candidate from their ward — or voting neighbourhood — to represent them in city council. The recommendation was taken to a plebiscite on October 16, 2004, and of the approximately 66,000 citizens who voted, 54 per cent voted in favour of keeping the at-large system.

Now, with the 2011 municipal election on the horizon, and with the creation of a provincial task force on electoral reform (which Premier Gordon Campbell introduced at the Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention earlier this month), renewed debate on Vancouver’s electoral system suggests the results of the 2004 plebiscite left more than a few stones unturned.

In an effort to encourage citizens to weigh in on current debates surrounding electoral reform, COPE held its first of 14 “travelling neighbourhood office” sessions on Commercial Drive last weekend (October 17) to ask the question, “What does local democracy look like to you?” The left-of-centre municipal party will set up the travelling office every three weeks for the next 14 months as a means of reaching out to every neighbourhood Berger suggested be divided as a ward in his 2004 report.

Information gathered by COPE will be used to help form party policy going into the 2011 election, says the party’s executive director, Rachel Marcuse. But the electoral system isn’t the only thing that holds citizens back from becoming fully engaged in democratic processes, she adds. “It’s the distrust of politicians, it’s the distrust of the big money that’s used to run elections in Vancouver... It’s a feeling of,‘Why waste your time on electoral politics when you can be doing more community organizing?’ I think there are a lot of things that contribute to low voter turnout, particularly with young people.”

Neil Monckton, chair of municipal-issues advocacy group ThinkCity, says the at-large voting system discriminates against minorities and, for that reason, is ruled unconstitutional in parts of the United States. “We’re the only city left in Canada in the top eight [metropolitan cities] that elects people in this really old, outdated way from the 1930s. Calgary, Edmonton — everybody does wards. No other city but Vancouver is like this,” he says. “Voter turnout continues to go down... We’re not at all engaged around elections, and we have to ask ourselves why.”

Monckton discounts the results of the 2004 plebiscite because he doesn’t think it was fair. “Putting a plebiscite in front of people using the same system that sustains the at-large system is a bit of a conundrum,” he says. “I don’t think it was something that reflects the majority view of people of the city. In fact, every public polling that I’ve seen on this in the past 10 years has said the majority favours getting rid of the at-large system.”

For NPA councillor Suzanne Anton, the debate on wards ended with the plebiscite. “There was a lot of energy spent on that a few years ago... and the voters of Vancouver clearly chose to stay with the at-large system. These things consume a lot of time and energy in city staff and resources and so on,” she says. “I favour the at-large system.”

The piece of electoral reform that must be addressed, Anton says, is campaign financing. “We are the lawless wild west in election financing; there are very few rules,” she says, adding that Vision Vancouver’s U.S. campaign donors in the 2008 municipal election would have been more controversial if the money had gone to a different party. “Imagine if the NPA did that. You would have people setting their hair on fire. It seemed to be okay when Vision did it, but it is shocking.”

Premier Campbell’s electoral reform task force will report back by the end of May 2010.

PHOTO: A new B.C. government task force is revisiting a previously proposed electoral system in which representatives would be elected by neighbourhood. By Jackie Wong.

Reaching out to senior renters

WestEnder
October 15, 2009

Since the landmark mass eviction of tenants from the West End’s Bay Towers apartment building three years ago, the advocacy work of local organizations such as Renters at Risk and the West End Residents Association has resulted in stronger public awareness of the precarious housing situation facing renters, who make up 80 per cent of households in the West End. But awareness of the issue hasn’t stopped mass evictions and volatile landlord-tenant relationships from continuing in the neighbourhood.

The stress of finding and keeping affordable rental housing takes a particular toll on seniors, says Sharon Isaak, who co-founded Renters at Risk after taking her Bay Towers eviction notice (issued by the now notorious Hollyburn Properties) to B.C. Supreme Court, where she and other tenants fought for — and won — the right to continue living in their apartments during renovations Hollyburn claimed would necessitate eviction.

“One of the seniors that got thrown out of my building... had been living in the building for years. She was the first one to go,” Isaak recalls. “Watching her move out and move into her daughter’s place in Kamloops was heartbreaking.”

Since her Bay Towers experience in 2006, Isaak has counselled and educated numerous tenants on their rights under B.C.’s tenancy legislation. Seniors, she says, continue to be among the most vulnerable tenants she meets. Fixed incomes and limited resources can put a cap on their ability to advocate for themselves, which often results in their being displaced and moved around, especially when they face an eviction notice that other tenants choose to fight. “The first people to leave are the seniors, because of the stress of the situation,” Isaak says. “They quite often have no other option but to move in with family in another city, another province, and they have to leave everything behind.”

As part of efforts to raise awareness of tenant rights and to address the many affordable-housing concerns facing West End residents, Isaak has started holding weekly outreach sessions at Gordon Neighbourhood House under the title of Senior Housing Outreach Coordinator. The position is the product of a $25,000 United Way Seed grant that partners Gordon Neighbourhood House, the West End Residents Association, Women in Search of Housing Society (WISHS), and the West End Seniors Network. Isaak will be available to assist renters with their tenancy concerns on Thursdays from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

When WE interviewed Isaak on her first day of outreach work last week (October 8), she already had two appointments. “There has been a real increase in evictions over the last three years because of the tight [rental] market, and because other companies are recognizing the opportunity to make significant profits by evicting tenants to do renovations [and then] increase the rent,” she says. “We need to have a review of the [Residential Tenancy] Act on certain issues to stop and solve these problems.”

John Lucas, executive director of the Gordon Neighbourhood House, says he has seen many seniors come through the neighbourhood house in search of advice on disconcerting rumours they hear about the rental buildings in which they live. “A number of seniors are in the position of not knowing exactly what’s going to happen to them,” he says. “A lot of seniors become stressed because they hear rumours about their apartments, [such as that] they’re going to be sold and it’s going to be renovated.”

Moderate- and low-income renters over the age of 40 are a vulnerable population that Leslie Stern, of the Women In Search of Housing Society, has been working with for years. “If we don’t help people at 45 and above to start earning more money and saving money and doing personal planning, they’re going to go into their senior years with even less,” she says. “Landlords don’t want these people anymore, because they don’t have the ability to pay the high rents that they think the market can take. That’s where I think we’re at a crisis in housing.”

In addition to Isaak’s weekly work at Gordon Neighbourhood House, the project, called the West End Seniors Affordable Housing initiative, will host public forums this winter and next spring on tenant rights and affordable-housing concerns. The first forum, called “The Right to Rent: Aging in Place,” happens November 22 at 2 p.m. For more information, contact Sharon Isaak at isaaksharon@gmail.com.

PHOTO: Sharon Isaak, co-founders of tenants’ rights group Renters at Risk, says many seniors would sooner move out of their home than deal with the stress of fighting unfair eviction. By Doug Shanks.

Education feature: It's never too late to change

WestEnder
October 15, 2009

Like many people enduring the seemingly endless drudgery of life in a cubicle farm, Sharon McFayden was biding her time in a job (in her case, as a project administrator for an internet-banking software company) and looking elsewhere for more fulfilling work. She started volunteering at a homeless shelter in the Downtown Eastside, and found that despite the late nights, she had more energy at work the day after her volunteer shifts than she did the rest of the week. “I realized that the thing that was missing in the job I was doing is that there was no heart,” she recalls. “It was just computers.”

McFayden was eventually laid off from her job along with 46 of her coworkers — a situation that coincided fortuitously with a full-time staff opening at the shelter where she volunteered. She stayed in the job for almost four years before entering the Social Service Worker program at Langara College to formalize her skills. “It turned out to be one of the best things I ever did for myself,” she says. “I never went to college or university when I finished high school. I’m in my late forties now, so to go back to school was a little daunting... but I totally enjoyed it, which I never did when I was in high school.”

McFadyen graduated from the one-year certificate program in June 2008, and is now working as the Shelter Programs Manager for Salvation Army Harbour Light in Vancouver. She’s also taking classes toward a degree in social work. Her new career, she says, couldn’t be more different than the administrative jobs that used to fill her days. “The people that are living on the street, people who are homeless, at risk of homelessness, people living in poverty— all they need is somebody to care, and there are far too many people who don’t,” she says. “The reason I keep doing [this job] is because it’s needed... and I really, really enjoy the company of the people that I work with. They’re intelligent, they’re funny, they’re no different than the rest of us, except that they’re having to deal with other issues.”

With the fourth annual Homeless Action Week wrapping up in Metro Vancouver on October 17, the region’s ongoing struggles with homelessness and affordable housing have been the focus of extensive public attention and discussion. But, of course, effectively addressing and solving such broad issues requires more than an annual week of events. For many, the missing link lies in career-driven educational training that can facilitate the shift to a new job.

“It’s never too late to pursue academic study. It’s not always easy — [it requires] balance between study, work, and family responsibilities — but being a mature student is sometimes an advantage, as it brings a lot of focus, life experience, and perspective to one’s interest and work,” says Faith Eiboff, a single parent who graduated last week with the first-ever honours degree from Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences. Eiboff also received the Top Honours Student Award for her outstanding studies addressing housing, homelessness, and mental illness.

Eiboff is now pursuing a master’s degree in public health at SFU, and she plans to continue with research focusing on homelessness and housing. “My hope is to inform the future direction of housing policy and development, help prevent the occurrence of homelessness, and contribute to the development of effective strategies to better serve the housing needs of the more vulnerable and marginalized populations of society,” she says.

As someone who faced her own housing crisis a few years ago, Eiboff has first-hand knowledge of the circumstances that can push someone into homelessness, even though she didn’t end up on the street herself. “I grew up in Vancouver, and have witnessed the growth of homelessness here, particularly in the Downtown Eastside,” she says. “I hope that my academic research and other involvements will make a contribution, even in some small way, to improve the living conditions and quality of life for people living in Vancouver.”

The School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC is another hub for activity related to housing policy and city planning. Spring 2009 grad Latosia Campbell, who is now working for the regional municipality of Fort Buffalo in Fort McMurray, Alberta, will return to Vancouver tomorrow (October 16) to speak at a UBC symposium on challenges to sustainable and affordable housing. Campbell’s research focused on Vancouver’s rental-housing market –something she first became interested in when faced with the struggle of finding affordable housing as an international student in Vancouver. “I first stayed on campus, and campus housing was okay, but I really wanted to live in the city and have that interaction with city life,” she says. “I was unable to do so because rents were very high in the city, especially downtown.”

Campbell’s research suggests more collaboration is needed between different levels of government in their approaches to affordable housing, and so does Eiboff’s. “More affordable housing and... service coordination is necessary to achieve a greater impact,” Eiboff says. “This suggests the need for a comprehensive provincial-level homelessness strategy to better support initiatives that are working. I think this also warrants mention of the need for a national housing strategy. Canada is one of the few countries in the world without a national housing strategy.”

If students like Eiboff, Campbell, and McFadyen continue to contribute to the large body of work and discussion around citywide and provincial housing issues, a national housing strategy — and more — could be in the cards for Canada’s housing future.

B.C. publishers left reeling by funding cuts

WestEnder
October 15, 2009

One week before the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival kicks off its 21st annual edition, three B.C. literary organizations have learned that the provincial-government funding they’ve relied on for years has been dropped.

The Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (ABPBC), the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers (BCAMP), and BC BookWorld newspaper were notified of the funding cut, effective immediately, on October 6, via phone calls from the office of the B.C. government’s arts and culture branch.

“That was the first we knew of it, that phone call on the 6th,” ABPBC executive director Margaret Reynolds told WE. “There was no discussion ahead of time... We would normally be applying for our operating funding now.”

The $45,000 in funding the ABPBC has now lost from its operating budget comprises 20 per cent of its annual budget. But since Reynolds’s operations are already tight (she shares an office with only one other ABPBC staff member), the cut, she says, will significantly affect new projects, such as a digital library of B.C. books the ABPBC is about to launch for libraries across the province.

“We’re particularly concerned that there [likely will be] no budget for the BC Arts Council for next year, and we’re concerned that we’ve been cut 100 per cent; we’re concerned that other arts groups are going to fall into the same situation,” says Reynolds. “I feel badly for the writers festival, because that’s a celebratory event and does so much for our community, and to have this come on the eve of it is not good news — it’s rather embarrassing.

“I hope the government is watching and seeing how we’re viewed internationally. We’ve got writers from all countries here. And what are they going to think of a society that doesn’t support its writers and publishers?”

Aside from membership dues, funding for the BCAMP relied on its $20,000 in annual provincial-government funding. Executive director Rhona MacInnes says the already trim operations of the organization, which supports the province’s magazine industry, will now need to shrink even more — but she’s not sure how. “We’re a two-person office... We feel like we’re doing the work of five between the two of us,” she says.

Like Reynolds, MacInnes was notified of the cuts by a phone call from the office of Andrea Henning, executive director of the B.C. government’s arts and culture branch. While she was anticipating some funding cuts to her organization, she wasn’t expecting all her funding to be slashed. “I understand there’s a recession. None of us are saying, ‘Absolutely no cuts.’ We’re saying, let’s be fair about this. Let’s not decimate an entire sector,” she says. “Seventy-eight thousand people make their living and contribute to the economy through this sector. That’s 78,000 taxpayers. We’re not just artists. We are part of this economy.”

BC BookWorld’s $31,000 in funding was cut less than a month before publisher Alan Twigg was scheduled to renew the publication’s 21-year funding partnership. The newspaper, which is distributed quarterly to more than 900 outlets in B.C., was named by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing as “the most important cog in the infrastructure” in a report commissioned by the provincial government.

BC BookWorld, the ABPBC, BCAMP and its supporters have formed an ad-hoc organization called the Coalition for the Defence of Writing and Publishing in B.C. to draw public attention to the cuts.

Vancouver-West End MLA and NDP culture critic Spencer Herbert has projected that there will be 90-per-cent funding cuts for arts and culture in the 2010-11 provincial budget, which has been discussed by the provincial budget committee this month in public consultation sessions across the province. BC Liberal finance minister Colin Hansen will present the budget March 2, 2010.

PHOTO: Margaret Reynolds (left), executive director of Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, and Rhona MacInnes, executive director of the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, were given no advance warning by the provincial government that their annual funding was being cut. By Doug Shanks.

Building a bridge to a greener future

WestEnder
October 8, 2009

For all its Pacific vistas and North Shore mountain beauty, Vancouver, in its relative youth, is just beginning to define itself as a green city. Mayor Gregor Robertson’s speech at the Vancouver Board of Trade Meeting on September 30 introduced a new “Green Capital” economic branding strategy to the city’s business community, which focuses on growth in Vancouver’s green-technology industry.

Earlier in the week, a group of local environmental advocates unveiled their plans for Bridge to a Cool Planet, a day-long festival on October 24 to commemorate the International Day of Climate Action, and to draw attention to Canada’s role in December’s international Copenhagen Climate Conference.

“We need the same kind of movement now that we had back in the day of the peace marches,” says Kevin Washbrook, Bridge to a Cool Planet organizer and director of the group Voters Taking Action on Climate Change. “This hasn’t happened yet for climate change and global warming in Canada. The government we have in Ottawa right now... they don’t feel compelled to act, and right now there isn’t the pressure on them to do so.”

While Washbrook is supportive of the City’s recent efforts to draw attention to our potential as a green city with its Greenest City Action Team and the Green Capital branding strategy, he says citizen support will be crucial for the City to move forward on its sustainability goals. “For the City to make those kinds of fundamental changes, they’re going to need public pressure from below,” he says. “They don’t operate in a space right now to say ‘We are going to make huge changes in how you live and work’ until they know that the public’s there.”

That’s the goal of Bridge to a Cool Planet: to garner widespread public support on action for fighting climate change. The day’s festivities will close Cambie Bridge to car traffic, with activities taking place on the bridge, along Pacific Boulevard, and on the Science World grounds. “This is an opportunity to remake society in a way that’s fair for everybody,” says Washbrook. That involves making connections between social issues, citizenship, and sustainability, he adds.

Ben West, spokesperson for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, one of the organizations involved with Bridge to a Cool Planet, says Vancouver is at a critical juncture in its approach to climate change. “We could be looking at a bridge to a cool planet, or we could be looking at a gateway to global warming,” he says. “This could be a place where we’re enabling the rest of the world to use more and more of our tar sands oil and do more and more coal exploration...or [we] could be a model for sustainability for the rest of the world.”

Part of the rationale for situating Bridge to a Cool Planet around the Cambie Bridge, West says, is to unite citizens in a place that geographically connects the east and west sides of the city, and ideologically joins citizens from diverse backgrounds. “It’s trying to look at not just ways of addressing climate change, but looking at addressing equity issues, social-justice issues,” he says. In regards to the City of Vancouver’s recent green branding efforts, West says it’s a start, but it’s not enough. “Vancouver can do a certain amount, but it really takes the province and the country and an international movement to make change.”

More information on Bridge to a Cool Planet can be found at BridgeCoolPlanet.ca.

PHOTO: Organizers of Bridge to a Cool Planet, which will take place October 24 on and around the Cambie Bridge, promoted the day-long event last week by, among other things, dressing up in a polar bear costume. By Doug Shanks.

Mental Illness Awareness Week focuses on city's Chinese community

WestEnder
October 8, 2009

While at least one in five people in B.C. develop a mental illness in their lifetime, mental-health issues continue to fly under the radar among the Lower Mainland’s large Chinese-Canadian population. The Canadian Mental Health Association aims to address that in this year’s annual Mental Illness Awareness Week, which runs to October 10. Vancouver-based workshops this week will focus exclusively on Chinese and Mandarin speakers, with the aim of educating audiences on mental illness among seniors and youth, mood disorders, and stress and anxiety.

Dr. Hiram Mok, a clinical associate UBC psychiatry professor who published a 2003 report in BC Medical Journal about mental-health-service access among Chinese Canadians, says shame plays a large role in preventing access to mental-health information and services among Chinese communities. “There are a lot of problems in Chinese cultures about shame in having a mental illness... If you have a family member who has a mental illness, it will be shameful, and they will lose face,” he says. “Therefore, coming forward for treatment is a problem.”

Compared to other groups, Dr. Mok says there is a stronger tendency among Asian populations to express emotional difficulties in physical terms; for example, someone struggling with mental illness might first tell their doctor that they’re in physical pain, he says. “There’s not enough words in [Chinese dialects] to describe the different types of emotions that we have, compared to the Caucasian population,” says Dr. Mok. “So, a lot of people will convert emotional distress and present to their family doctor in physical terms.”

Andrew Lee, a registered clinical counsellor based in Richmond, deals with the transitional struggles of new immigrants, and sees an increasing number of Chinese immigrants dealing with adjustment-related mental-health difficulties. “We see a lot of depression and anxiety,” he says. “Traditionally, Chinese [populations] are not very aware of how to take care of their mental-health concerns... We still see quite a few Chinese families [who] minimize the impacts of their mental-health concerns, or they just totally reject the idea because they feel so ashamed.”

While Dr. Mok points out that stigma surrounding mental-health issues continues to be prominent regardless of race, he says cross-cultural psychiatry plays an important role in delivering sensitive care to diverse populations. Oral therapy among new immigrants in Chinese communities can be a point of difficulty in depression treatment, for example. “They don’t understand why they’re talking about problems to a stranger, which will bring more shame to their family,” he says. “In cross-cultural psychiatry, we rely a lot on community agencies. We also rely a lot on family and the family doctor in terms of giving us the whole story or what the background is.”

The Chinese-language workshops, as part of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mental Illness Awareness Week, take place Saturday, October 10, at Raven Song Community Health Centre (2450 Ontario), from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mandarin workshops will take place in the morning, with Cantonese workshops following in the afternoon. Interested participants can phone 604-872-4902, ext. 235. More information on dealing with mental illness can be found at HereToHelp.bc.ca.

Housing activists protest government convention

WestEnder
October 8, 2009

The annual convention of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) took place at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre last week, drawing thousands of municipal-government representatives from across the province. The last day of the conference (October 2) featured an address by Premier Gordon Campbell, which was protested by Vancouver housing advocates in a demonstration in front of the Pan Pacific Hotel.

The protest, organized by the Downtown Eastside’s Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), was aimed at drawing attention to what activists called a dearth of affordable housing in B.C.

“The city councillors and the premier have got to get their priorities straight. They can’t spend... on the Trade and Convention Centre without considering housing,” CCAP organizer Wendy Pedersen told WE before the protest. “This is the sixth year in B.C. where B.C.’s had the highest number of people in poverty in Canada.”

The demonstration followed a September 30 UBCM resolution to call on the provincial and federal governments to develop a national affordable-housing strategy. UBCM has passed similar housing resolutions in the past, but COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth, who helped bring forward the resolution, says it’s especially important to bring municipalities together on the issue now.

“I think that people are very aware of the kind of cost overruns that are tied into Olympic spending, and that there’s still millions of dollars that are being poured into... things like Olympic security,” Woodsworth says. “And right now, if you look at the rental situation in Vancouver, even the simplest single-room-occupancy units available are over $400 for 10-by-10-foot rooms, and yet the shelter portion of income assistance is only $375. And I’m talking about people who’ve got serious mental illness and addiction problems, and there’s no detox beds available.”

Laura Stannard of the Citywide Housing Coalition, a Vancouver-based housing advocacy group, helped Vancouver city councillors flag the issue at UBCM. “To be silent on an issue like that is tantamount to telling the provincial and federal government that we think you’re doing enough,” she says, “and we don’t.”

The same day that the affordable-housing resolution was passed at UBCM, Vancouver East MP Libby Davies’s bill for a national housing strategy, Bill C-304, passed second reading in Parliament, and will now progress to the committee stage. Bill C-304 is an act to ensure secure, adequate, accessible, and affordable housing for Canadians.

PHOTO: Wendy Pedersen, organizer with the Carnegie Community Action Project, spoke last week at a demonstration outside the Pan Pacific Hotel, where the Union of British Columbia Municipalities was holding its annual convention. By Doug Shanks.