“By then I had learned it was preventable, it was unnecessary,” Osborn told Nettie Wild. “I had learned about harm reduction, I had learned about the reduction of overdose deaths in Europe and elsewhere. Something—it was physical—rose through my nervous system like a charge of some kind and just went right up into my brain and exploded,” he continued. “That’s enough, that’s it—that is just too much of death.” Osborn was totally overwhelmed, not with grief but with anger.
At that moment, Evans was sitting in her office on the ground floor of the Portland, chatting with Townsend and Kerstin Stuerzbecher. “Bud came in and was fuming,” Evans recounts. “He was like, ‘I’m just done. I’m done. This is too much. We’ve got to do something and I don’t know what, but we have to do something.’”
He wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Stuerzbecher, who by now was considered a co-founder of the Portland alongside Evans and Townsend, recalls how bad things had gotten. “I was reviving people two or three times a day,” she says. “We needed to symbolize that, somehow.”
Evans remembers that in those years, the vibe of the Downtown Eastside could get so intense that some mornings she would vomit on her walks to work. “I used to get incredibly stressed,” she says. “I was really anxious about what I was going to come across each day. There were funerals every day for people dying in the neighbourhood. I was literally walking to work passing blue bodies in the stairwell every day.”
On top of it all, they felt alone, as if nobody outside the Downtown Eastside was even aware of how many people were dying. “There was a general, wide-spread abandonment of thousands of people, and nobody gave a fuck and everybody turned a blind eye,” Evans says. “We were sitting there in the middle of it, thinking, ‘What the fuck is going on? Why doesn’t anybody care? Why isn’t anyone talking about it? Why isn’t there a giant public outcry?’”
In Evans’s tiny office, the four of them got to work brainstorming. “That’s when we decided to create this giant banner in red and stretch it across the intersection of Main and Hastings and call the neighbourhood the ‘Killing Fields,’” Evans says. “And then we thought we’d get a thousand crosses and build one for each person who had died in the last five years from drugs.”
Townsend recalls that they planned the protest to be a deliberate attempt to grab the specific attention of the city’s journalists. “So many people were dying, but the media hadn’t taken it up,” he says. “We needed visuals.” How would the crosses look on camera? Was there a vantage point from which a news crew could capture the entire scene? Who would speak at the protest? What could they say that could serve as a succinct and punchy soundbite? All of these questions were given careful consideration.
The year before, the federal government had published a report on HIV/AIDS in Canada, and Townsend had gone crazy for it. But nobody else had paid the document any attention. He made a phone call to Ottawa and ordered 500 copies of the report. They would shut down the intersection of Main and East Hastings and there set them all on fire. “We wanted to block the traffic and burn these reports to say, ‘There are all these reports that gather dust on government shelves while nothing happens,’” Townsend explains.
Next they needed quotes for print media. Townsend placed a call to Dr Steffanie Strathdee, then a young researcher with the University of British Columbia. He asked her how they could describe the extent of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the Downtown Eastside. Everyone knew it was bad, but how could they describe it in a way that would grab headlines? “Was the Downtown Eastside’s rate of infection the highest in the world?” Townsend asked Strathdee. No, it wasn’t, she informed him. “Could we say that the rate of HIV/AIDS infections in the Downtown Eastside was the highest in the Western World?” Strathdee checked and confirmed that was accurate.
Evans, Townsend, and Stuerzbecher continued to spitball ideas. Meanwhile, Osborn went to find volunteers willing to assemble 1,000 crosses. He found them in the Political Response Group, a loose organization of Christians he was close with who lived in a row of colourfully painted houses located on Jackson Street, on the eastern edge of the Downtown Eastside.
“There was a gang of us,” recalls Dave Diewert, a close friend of Osborn’s. The two of them went to another friend who owned a carpentry shop and asked if they could borrow the back room for an evening or two. “We nailed the crosses at the wood shop through the night leading up to it,” Diewert says. “And then, early in the morning, we had a bunch of people ready for the march.”
At the Four Sister’s Co-op, Livingston had also gone most of the night without sleep. She woke up hours before dawn to make sandwiches for the dozens of drug users that she and Osborn had organized to take part in the demonstration. “I did all the fucking work, but Bud got all the credit,” Livingston says with a laugh. “That was the usual relationship that we had.”
She describes him as the ideas man. Osborn seldom put in the hours and days and weeks of leg work that it takes to bring a protest together, but he often would serve as the spark that got everybody moving. Nobody interviewed today is sure who came up with the plan to plant crosses to symbolize the dead, but everyone agrees it sounds like a Bud Osborn idea.
On July 15, 1997, about 200 people gathered in the middle of the intersection of Main and East Hastings Street. A fire burned in a barrel in which Townsend threw the government reports he had ordered from Ottawa. Drug users dragged a chain across the street and fastened it to poles on either side to block all six lanes of traffic. From the chain they hung a banner. “The Killing Fields,” it read. “Federal action now.”
This was Liz Evans’s first time participating in a public demonstration. She recalls actually feeling guilty about it. “All these cars were stopped, and I just kept feeling sorry for them all not being able to get to work,” she says. “They would roll down their windows, and I would shove pamphlets into their car, saying, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but did you know people are dying?’”
From Main and Hastings, the demonstration marched three blocks east to Oppenheimer Park, where Diewert and his friends with the Political Response Group had worked since before sunrise, banging their 1,000 crosses into the ground.
Oppenheimer Park is a square block of green space in the Downtown Eastside that for decades has served as a living room for people who don’t have a home. There’s a baseball diamond at one end and, in 1997, a shuffle board and area for chess at the other. It’s a cherished community space shared by children and adults.
With 1,000 crosses spaced evenly to cover the entire block, Townsend recounts how the crowd thinned and fanned out as it moved into the park. “People started to write names on the crosses, which is something we hadn’t really thought of,” he says. “It was emotional and very upsetting.”
As the crosses were assigned names of the dead, Osborn recited a poem he had written for that day. It reads in part:
These thousand crosses silently announce a social curse
On the lives of the poorest of the poor in the Downtown Eastside
They announce an assault on the community
These thousand crosses announce a deprivation of possibility
For those of us who mourn here
The mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers
The uncles, aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers
The sons and daughters the friends and acquaintances
Of those members of our community
Of a thousand dreams of a thousand hopes
Of a thousand yearnings for real community
Lost to us but memorialized today
Brought finally into a unity here in this community park
This park which is the geographical heart of the Downtown Eastside
These thousand crosses are a protest
Against the abandonment of powerless and voiceless human beings
These thousand crosses speak to us resoundingly
Collectively to warn us that to abandon the wretched
The miserable the scorned the scapegoated
Makes a legitimate place for abandonment in our society
And this abandonment will go right up the social ladder
But to truly care for lives at the bottom
Will make a place for care
And this caring will ensure that no one be abandoned
These thousand crosses represent the overdose deaths of drug addicts
Who are not the only drug addicts in our society
But only the most visible the most naked because the poorest
But these thousand crosses reveal a culture
Pretending to be about life and health and hope
But permeated with death and disease and despair
These thousand crosses bear witness not to a culture of care and freedom
But of carelessness and addiction.25
In July 1997, Downtown Eastside poet and activist Bud Osborn helped organize the city’s first major protest calling for action on overdose deaths.
Photo: Duncan Murdoch
They were all on the news that night and in the papers the following morning. “It was a day of tears and sombre symbols in a Vancouver neighbourhood,” narrated an anchor over a CTV News broadcast. “All orchestrated to bring attention to the growing number of people in the area who are dying from heroin and AIDs. The city’s east end has gained international notoriety for the deadly resurgence of drugs, and residents say it’s time something is done.”
A number of Vancouver papers quoted a report that BC’s chief coroner of the day, Vince Cain, had published in 1995. “Governments were made well aware of the crisis more than two years ago,” reads one of those articles. “And what has happened on this front since Mr Cain issued his report at the beginning of 1995? Virtually nothing.”
“Testimony of the Crosses,” read a headline above a story about the demonstration in the Montreal Gazette, all the way on the other side of the country.
Reflecting on that day more than a decade later, Evans described it in a letter to friends as a “turning point, a point when people began to ask questions about what was going on … and a turning point at which people began to see that those images of people with needles in their arms were people who were suffering, alongside families who were suffering, alongside an entire community that was suffering.”
With the Killing Fields protest, as the day became known, Osborn and Livingston and the Portland’s management team finally grabbed the public’s attention. Among those who took note was Libby Davies. Just one month earlier, she’d been elected to her first term as a member of parliament.
Davies knew the Downtown Eastside well. More than twenty years earlier, in 1973, she was out for a beer with her boyfriend, Bruce Eriksen, at an East Hastings bar called the Patricia Hotel, which is still there today. Davies was a twenty-year-old student at the University of British Columbia at the time and Eriksen, twenty-five years her senior, was an artist and activist. When the waitress at the Patricia came to take the couple’s drink order, she asked for Davies’ ID, and the three of them began to chat. The waitress introduced herself as Jean Swanson. Eriksen, a recovering alcoholic, responded by admonishing her for the Patricia’s reputation for over-serving customers. Swanson liked them both right away and asked Eriksen what she could do to get involved in the sort of activism he was then already well-known for.
Within a year, the three of them had transformed a small nonprofit group Eriksen was working for, called the People’s Aid Project, into a political force in the neighbourhood. That was the beginning of the Downtown Eastside Resident’s Association, or DERA, the housing nonprofit that in 1991 had given Liz Evans the keys to the Portland Hotel. (Forty-three years later, in 2016, Jean Swanson received the Order of Canada—a civilian honour comparable to the United States’ Presidential Medal of Freedom—for the work on housing and homelessness that she began with Eriksen and Davies at that chance encounter at the Patricia Hotel.)
Cancer took Eriksen’s life in March 1997, four months before the Killing Fields protest. He and Davies were never married but were common-law partners until the day he passed away. She recalls being utterly devastated by the loss but marching ahead as best she could. On July 15, Davies met protestors at the intersection of Main Street and East Hastings, hoping to learn more about the rising number of overdose deaths that were occurring in the constituency she was recently elected to represent in the nation’s capital.
“I remember walking into Oppenheimer Park and the emotional impact of seeing 1,000 crosses neatly lined up in rows,” she recounts. “The park was empty because everybody was behind us in the march. And the visual impact was something I will never, ever forget. It was moving and it was also very empowering, in a strange way. This sense of the community being together … There was a silence, a deep sense of grieving, but also togetherness. People were united for a common purpose.”
Davies and Osborn had been friends for years and had grown very close throughout 1996. Eriksen was mostly bedridden that year, and Osborn visited often. The two of them talked for hours, Davies says, with Osborn asking questions about Eriksen’s work as an activist.
“He was so eager to learn what organizing was about and how it happened,” she remembers. “Then when I ran [for office] in ’97, Bud came canvassing with me. He just laughed his socks off. He had never done anything like that in his life, and he didn’t like politicians. But we actually went door to door … him with his little clipboard, putting marks for supporters and people who were undecided. He just thought it was hilarious that he was out doing political canvassing.”
At Oppenheimer Park, Davies looked across the field of crosses to where Osborn was reciting the poem he had written for that day. “It propelled me to Ottawa,” she says. “I knew what I had to do. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to do it. I didn’t know how Ottawa worked. I just knew I had to make this a critical issue. My constituents were dying, and these were preventable deaths.”
She took Osborn’s words to the House of Commons. The first statement she made there was from the poem he had recited in Oppenheimer Park:
These thousand crosses of the contemporary martyrs—
Bear witness not only to their drug overdose deaths
But to the uncounted deaths in the Downtown Eastside
Deaths of drug addicts from suicide and AIDS
And so we are all abandoned if one is abandoned
So we are all uncared-for if one is not cared for.26
The seat that John Turvey had secured for Osborn on the health board was an accomplishment that might sound minor but was, in fact, unprecedented. “We used to meet in this greasy spoon,” Osborn said. “And there he asked me if I wanted a seat on the health board, the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board. I didn’t even know what a health board was. I said, ‘Is that a good thing?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
For the first time, the seat gave someone who was open about an addiction to drugs a say in how a government spent its money on addiction services. But Osborn didn’t know how to use the position to turn the needs of the Downtown Eastside into policies that would address them. Davies continued the lessons in activism that her partner had started with Osborn the year before he passed away.
“When he was on the board, it just about drove him mad,” she remembers. “It was a new environment for him, and he was pulled here and there within the bureaucracy. And so I began to give him a lot of advice.” Throughout 1997, Davies met with Osborn on just about every trip she made from Ottawa back to Vancouver. Together they strategized on how to use Osborn’s seat to bring action to the Downtown Eastside. “My job with him was to give him patience,” Davies continues. “How to work it on the inside, how to figure out who your allies are, how to figure out who your obstacles are, and how to work the system. He was very frustrated, so my job was to help him keep the faith.”
At one meeting, Osborn read a preamble to a motion he brought forward by describing his words as “a composite cry of a
nguish expressed to me by both service providers and drug users in the Downtown Eastside, the people I represent on this board.” He called what was happening a “genocide” and one for which he blamed the very people to whom he was speaking.
“To ascribe the eruption of this tragic phenomena to the behaviour of addicts, to injection drug users crowding into the Downtown Eastside in unsanitary conditions and injecting cocaine in large numbers is a subtle form of blaming the victim for their conditions, when the production of this epidemic can be found in the near criminal neglect and abandonment of our poorest and most afflicted citizens by all three levels of government,” Osborn said. The crowd he faced was often skeptical of Osborn’s arguments, to put it mildly.
Livingston, who attended many of those health board meetings as a citizen, recalls how they could end with Osborn standing up, sometimes knocking over his chair in the process, and literally screaming at the other board members. Other times, he would completely lose his temper and storm out. She recounts a particularly memorable one of those incidents.
“Bud was in a board meeting and somebody was looking at the graphs of AIDS deaths,” she begins.
For years, HIV/AIDS raged through the Downtown Eastside unchecked. In 1989, there were eighty-six deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS in the City of Vancouver. By 1994, that number had jumped to 203. By 1996, HIV/AIDs deaths were on the decline, but the disease still claimed 146 of the city’s citizens that year.27
What’s more, authorities were now closely tracking the rate of infection in Vancouver and knew more deaths were coming. “Vancouver has the highest reported HIV incidence rate amongst injection drug users in North America,” reads a 1997 government report.28 The majority of those people were Osborn’s neighbours in the Downtown Eastside.
Livingston recounts that one member of the board looked at the statistics charted on the wall, turned to the rest of the group, and said, “If we don’t do anything, they are going to come down, because we’ll hit a saturation point.” The suggestion was that eventually, so many drug users would die that there simply wouldn’t be enough left to keep the statistics as high as they were at the time.
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