FLETCHER: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a $1 million-a-day failure nobody wants to fix

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.Retired senator and former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell has just had his term as BC government advisor on the infamous Downtown Eastside extended for a second six months.Campbell’s comments in a round of media interviews do not build confidence that things are likely to improve. He thought it would take a couple of months to get up to speed on the problem, but his whole first term was consumed with finding out how big the poverty industry has become.Campbell was a police officer 40 years ago, when Vancouver was North America’s heroin hub and the Downtown Eastside drug and alcohol ghetto became known around the world. Now, after decades of doing the same thing and expecting different results, it remains, and most cities across Canada have established their own version as the drug trade has grown.He described the “hundreds” of meetings with service providers that started as soon as he was appointed by Premier David Eby and gave out his phone number. His next move is to attempt to find out how much duplication there is.“It’s hard to tell what’s not working,” Campbell told a CBC interviewer. “There’s overlapping going on, five or six organizations or in some cases 15 organizations that are addressing a specific issue.”“One of the things I’m concerned with is the ability to say to somebody, when you get a contract, what does it say? And what are the expectations? And what are the metrics, say at the end of the year?”.The groups are not only not supervised or coordinated with one another, but they aren’t connected to the three levels of government that directly provide public safety, health, and social services. Campbell doesn’t know exactly how much is being spent, but it’s not difficult to find estimates.A 2022 report for the City of Vancouver added up police, government, and charity spending for about $1 million a day for the Downtown Eastside. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the end of volunteer help in these agencies. Everyone’s paid now.Campbell goes on and on like this, and it boils down to what most long-time observers already know. The spending is out of control, nothing is measured for effectiveness, there’s a reflexive “housing first” mentality that has succeeded only in attracting and maintaining more drug users, there was a disastrous experiment in decriminalizing hard drugs that was tried and failed in Oregon as well as BC, and the latest Chinese-Mexican drug concoctions are causing brain damage as well as despair.One conclusion Campbell has already reached is that the government shouldn’t buy any more rundown old hotels to give people a private place to do their drugging and drinking. That model was pioneered in Vancouver by former BC housing minister Rich Coleman, who teamed up with the Portland Hotel Society to run “single-room occupancy” hellholes that reduced the ghastly street scene in time for the 2010 Olympics.Four years later, four society executives were let go with severance after an audit revealed they were running up lavish dining and travel expenses. Their tireless pursuit of poverty solutions required trips to Vienna, Paris, Bristol, Istanbul, New York City, Los Angeles, Banff, and Ottawa. NDP MLA Jenny Kwan, now MP for East Van, paid back $35,000 in travel expenses for a family trip to Disneyland, her then-husband being one of the executives who expensed the trip..Old motels have since been bought up in many BC communities, where the same problems persist. Eby’s government recently changed its residential tenancy law to allow “supportive housing” operators to evict drug dealers who move in with a tenant and bring their weapons with them.As Campbell embarks on the next six months of his assignment, he has one calming message for the many, many service providers.“The big worry is that I’m there to chop, and I’m not there to chop,” Campbell said. “I have no intention of taking any money out of the Downtown Eastside.”Campbell was paid $92,000 for his first six months, with another $10,000 for expenses. He’s doing a second shift at the same rate.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a $1 million-a-day failure nobody wants to fix

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