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.