Fighting for Space

  “I had lots of questions about everything,” Richardson recounts. “So I had this routine. Every couple of weeks, I would take a Saturday and meditate all day. And then in the evening, I would take ’shrooms and go down to the beach and just pace up and down, trying to figure my life out.

  “I did that for about six months,” he continues. “It was a lot of [hallucinogenic] mushrooms. And Pivot was kind of the child of that process … The idea that I should start this organization called Pivot that would do strategic litigation on behalf of marginalized people.”

  Today, Pivot Legal Society has a nondescript office in the Downtown Eastside, tucked next to a trucking overpass that connects to the city’s port. Over the years, its small but dedicated team of lawyers has won major victories for sex workers, homeless people, and victims of police abuse.

  Pivot was founded at the old VANDU office on the corner of West Hastings and Cambie Street. “He came in and said, ‘Hello, my name’s John Richardson,’” Livingston recounts. Richardson told her a story about a walk he had recently taken through the Downtown Eastside, hoping to recover a stolen CD player. Faced with the neighbourhood’s poverty, Richardson felt he couldn’t turn away without trying to help.

  “This is a social-justice issue,” Livingston remembers Richardson saying. “This is just fucking nuts!”

  Dean Wilson was also there at VANDU that day. “It was a Friday afternoon,” he says. “It was, like, ten minutes to five and we were trying to wrap up for the day when he walked in. I looked at him, and I thought he was just another junkie.”

  Richardson explained that he was actually a lawyer, which made Livingston’s ears perk up. “He said he wanted to use strategic litigation to advance this movement, this civil rights movement,” she says. “And I said, ‘Good.’”

  Over the years, plenty of well-meaning people had offered to help VANDU in one way or another. After an initial pledge of support, it was rare Livingston ever saw them again. “But he never flaked out,” she says.

  Richardson had identified a need for legal services in the Downtown Eastside. Then he’d asked around for who might be interested in working with him on that. Livingston’s name was the one that kept coming up.

  She was “eternally radical,” is how Richardson describes his first impression of her.

  At the VANDU office, Richardson held monthly meetings with drug users. He brought food and they called them “pizza parties.” He also brought a number of other lawyers as rotating guest speakers. A process of reciprocal education took shape. Drug users and VANDU members living on the street or in the Downtown Eastside’s crummy hotels shared stories of persecution and police brutality—stories of such flagrant abuse of authority that at first Richardson and his lawyer friends had trouble believing them. In exchange, the lawyers answered VANDU’s questions and taught members about their basic civil rights.

  After a few months of pizza parties, Livingston recounts how the meetings grew more focused. She pulled out her big white chart paper and returned to the basic organizing tactics that had worked so well for her since her Back Alley days. “We asked, ‘What are the issues in this neighbourhood?’” Livingston remembers. “‘What’s going to make the biggest difference with very limited resources? What should we do?’ And what came out of it was this raw, unignorable problem: the cops.”

  Notes from these early Pivot meetings at VANDU actually show that four key issues were adopted as official areas of focus: drug addiction, sex work, homelessness, and police accountability. But it was problems with the cops that emerged as the most pressing.

  Richardson and the lawyers he brought to VANDU were utterly shocked by the stories they heard there. Someone would tell a story about an incident where they had sworn at a police officer and then were physically assaulted. Then other VANDU members would laugh, saying things like, “You cussed him, of course you’re going to get hit.” Richardson explains that literally not one of the drug users there was aware that a police officer was not allowed to respond to verbal abuse with a physical assault.

  The way Dean Wilson describes it, it was inevitable that police brutality was the issue to emerge from those VANDU meetings with Pivot. “It’s always the issue,” he explains. “It doesn’t matter where. We [addicts] don’t have drug problems, we have cop problems.”

  As flagrant as the abuse was, Richardson knew that doing anything about it would require a long and steep uphill battle. “In a credibility test, police always win,” he explains. “That was their strength and they used it, mercilessly … to see complaints against them dismissed. So we knew that if we were going to have success pushing back on that, we were going to have to come up with a pretty significant evidentiary basis.”

  In Vancouver, any claim of police abuse went to the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, a position within the same police department as the officers for which it heard grievances. How could Pivot ever get a commissioner to believe the word of a homeless drug addict over one of their own?

  Richardson found the answer in Champaran, India.

  In 1917, a then forty-eight-year-old Mohandas Gandhi organized a team of lawyers to collect testimonies from hundreds of farmers. The farmers were systematically abused by their British rulers and disadvantaged by colonial laws that forced them to grow indigo. The crop, used to make dyes, had become less profitable as cheaper artificial dyes were invented and overtook the market. But the British continued to force the Indian farmers to grow indigo, causing widespread hardship. Gandhi’s team of lawyers documented incontrovertible evidence of this economic injustice as well as accounts of general abuse and violence perpetrated by the British Raj. For years, the local colonial authority ignored the pleas of individual impoverished farmers. But the reports of hundreds presented together, formally documented by men with law degrees, became more difficult to dismiss.

  “Gandhi collected mountains of evidence,” Richardson says. “And so we did the same.”

  His plan was to take sworn affidavits. But that was easier said than done. Champaran farmers had fixed addresses where lawyers knew they could find them. Many Downtown Eastside residents who suffered the worst of police abuses were homeless. Others who did have rooms in one of the hotels lived highly erratic lives, constantly on the hustle for drug money, in and out of jail, hospitals, and rehab.

  Richardson’s first attempt to collect affidavits was a failure. “At the beginning, we would say, ‘We’re going to do a draft and then we’ll meet again in a few days and we’ll have the draft ready for you,’” he remembers. Nobody ever showed up for their second meeting. So Richardson decided he would go to them.

  On the corner of Main and East Hastings, just outside the Carnegie Community Centre, Richard set up a table one day in 2002. Right there in the middle of the sidewalk, out in the open and at the centre of an open drug market, he pulled up a chair, took out a laptop, and attached a portable printer that ran on batteries.

  “People would sit down and I’d ask what they were here for,” Richardson continues. “I would ask if they had ever been abused by police. Lots of people would tell me their stories. And then I would ask if I could take their affidavit.”

  It was slow going. People had to get used to a lawyer wearing a suit at the corner of Main and Hastings. At first, nobody wanted to be seen sitting down with him. But once the community figured out that he was on their side, they came around.

  “The corner of Main and Hastings was a pretty reliable place where you knew people would come back, but you still had to get them in one sitting,” Richardson says. “So we had the portable printer, we would type it up as they were talking, print it out, read it out to them, do any corrections, print it again, and then they would sign it right there.”

  One by one, Richardson filled a binder with fifty sworn affidavits written by drug users and homeless people who detailed how they had been abused by the Vancouver Police Department. Thirty-six of those accounts describe what Richardson categorized as unreasonable use
of force. “She had the needle in her arm and was just pushing the heroin in when two young police officers came up from behind a garbage bin,” one reads. “Without pausing, they pepper-sprayed X in the face. As they pepper-sprayed her, they said ‘No fixing in the alleys.’ They took the rig and broke it on ground. Then they turned and left.”

  A further twelve affidavits describe what Richardson argued amounts to torture. “They handcuffed my hands and my ankles. They forced me onto my knees and made me face the wall,” reads one of those cases. “The woman held my neck, and pushed my face into the wall. She held me very tight. The man held my hands, and lifted them up behind me. I couldn’t move. I tried to turn around to see them, but the woman pushed my face further into the wall so I couldn’t. They started punching me in the kidneys. I don’t remember clearly everything they did. They left me in the cell with my handcuffs and ankle cuffs on. I was very weak, and I passed out.”

  Richardson then compiled excerpts from the affidavits in a report and matched each incident with specific provisions of the Criminal Code of Canada that he argued officers had violated. “We filed them with the office of the police complaint commissioner,” he says. “And then this becomes a very long story that stretches over a period of the next five years.”

  After the initial complaint, the Vancouver police chief of the day, Jamie Graham, got involved. In response, Richardson argued that the chief was interfering with the investigation and filed a complaint about that with Canada’s federal police, the RCMP.

  In August 2007, the embattled police chief resigned. One year after that—and six years after Richardson collected his stack of affidavits at the corner of Main and East Hastings—the series of investigations he’d sparked with Pivot finally concluded. A report that went to the city’s mayor states that Graham was found guilty of discreditable conduct.

  Pivot became VANDU’s secret weapon.

  When police confiscated the table that VANDU was using to run a needle exchange at the corner of Main and Hastings, Richardson sent the VPD a letter threatening to file charges for theft. When police officers barged into VANDU’s injection site at 327 Carrall Street and refused to leave, he filed a complaint claiming trespassing.

  “There is a drug-user group, and then there is a drug-user group with a lawyer,” Livingston repeats.

  Livingston remembers how she constantly asked Richardson, “Can we please sue somebody?”

  In the summer of 2006, she finally convinced him to do so—and to aim higher than the chief of police. “We wanted to say that these massive numbers of overdose deaths and this huge outbreak of HIV is illegal,” Livingston says, “and that they could not allow this to go on. We were challenging the attorney general of Canada and the minister of health.” Their target was to eliminate the prohibition of illicit drugs.

  It was an ambitious idea, Richardson concedes today. He explains how it grew out of conversations with one of the guest speakers that Pivot brought to VANDU, John Conroy.

  For years, Richardson had taken an obsessive interest in a provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms called Section 7, which states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

  Lawyers had used Section 7 arguments in drug cases before, notably in 1997 to successfully see laws in Canada changed to allow for the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Richardson thought it could be taken further. In 2002, he said so in a letter he wrote to Vancouver city council, arguing that by denying proper health services for drug addicts, the city was violating their Section 7 right to security of the person. “In this manner, Section 7 could stand as an independent cause of action against the failure of government actors to establish safe injection facilities,” it read. Nothing ever came of it.

  Conroy had earned a reputation in drug-policy circles by winning a number of marijuana cases and had a similar interest in Section 7 and ideas about how it could be applied to larger issues. In 2006, he and Richardson got to work drafting a legal challenge that made such a case for intravenous drug users in the Downtown Eastside. On August 30, 2006, they filed a legal challenge in the Supreme Court of BC.

  “Because the sanction for possession and other conduct includes imprisonment, the constant threat of the imposition of the law and imprisonment produces in the IDU [intravenous drug user] a high level of psychologically induced stress, thereby resulting in threats to the liberty and the security of the person of the IDU that are constitutionally cognizable,” it reads.

  “The state action in imposing this prohibition has the grossly disproportionate effect of impairing the IDUs’ health, thereby affecting the life, liberty, and the security of their persons, otherwise than in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice, contrary to s. 7 of the Charter.”

  Conroy concedes it was a long shot. “Obviously we were asking the court to do a pretty major thing by striking down the possession laws,” he says. “But I did think the evidence was there.”

  Chapter 27

  Protests across Canada

  Stephen Harper was elected prime minister of Canada on January 23, 2006.

  Dean Wilson remembers that the Conservative party taking power was like a shadow falling over the entire movement they had built to legitimize harm reduction. “We knew,” Wilson says, “little by little, he would try to dismantle everything. It became this heavy weight on all of us.”

  For the preceding three years, Insite had operated on an exemption from federal drug laws that the Liberal government had granted. Now the Liberals were out of power.

  On the campaign trail in December 2005, Harper made clear that, for him, drug policy and the government’s response to addiction would be based on ideology. “Our values are under attack,” he said in Vancouver’s neighbouring city of Burnaby, explicitly stating that a supervised-injection facility was not something his government would support.

  “We as a government will not use taxpayers’ money to fund drug use,” Harper said. “That is not the strategy we will pursue.”58

  When Insite’s initial three-year exemption was scheduled to expire in September 2006, it looked like that would be it for the Downtown Eastside’s injection site. So PHS launched a pre-emptive attack.

  In August 2006, Toronto was set to host the annual International AIDS Conference, a big event that brings together health-care professionals, politicians, and stakeholders from around the world. Mark Townsend devised a plan to use the convention as a stage. The night before the conference, Townsend, Wilson, Tanya Fader, and a couple other PHS staffers flew to Toronto. The entire event had become a magnet for protests. The prime minister had declined to attend. In his place, he sent Canada’s health minister, Tony Clement. It was a major rebuff of the HIV/AIDS community as well as LGBTQ people, so many of whom were affected by the disease. The conference’s co-chair even called attention to the controversy during his speech opening the event.

  “We are dismayed that the prime minister of Canada, Mr Stephen Harper, is not here this evening,” said Dr Mark Wainberg, director of the prestigious McGill University AIDS Centre. “Your absence sends the message that you do not consider HIV/AIDS as a critical priority, and clearly all of us here disagree with you.”

  There was a long list of groups planning street protests for every day of the conference. Townsend realized that if they wanted to attract attention to Insite, they were going to have do something big. But they didn’t have the people for that. Toronto is a four-and-a-half hour flight from Vancouver and so he only managed to get a half-dozen PHS staffers across the country to the conference. They were going to have to get creative. Townsend’s plan? Bring downtown Toronto to a standstill. All of it.

  “We were trying to reach out to the minister of health, Tony Clement, and to the prime minister, and project that we had more power and more influence than we really did,” he says.

  The night before the confer
ence, Portland staffer Andy Bond was out to dinner with Liz Evans, Kerstin Stuerzbecher, Dan Small, and the maintenance team. Evans’s phone rang and Townsend was on the other end from Toronto. “Do Andy and Phong [Lam] want to come out here? Because we’re in trouble,” Townsend said. Evans relayed the message to the rest of the table and immediately, Bond and Lam rushed out to pack for the trip.

  “We left the restaurant, went home, booked flights, and then went to the airport and flew overnight,” Bond recounts. “We got there and we checked into a hotel at about six in the morning. We slept for two hours, and then we went to the convention centre.” There they found Townsend sitting on a park bench where he brought them up to speed.

  Meanwhile, Fader, Wilson, and the others were inside the conference centre handing out fliers and recruiting volunteers. Their leaflets were political but somewhat mysterious. They wanted to attract people to the demonstration they were planning but couldn’t explain what it was because then the authorities would very likely mobilize police to prevent it from happening.

  The fliers said things like: “Stephen Harper wants to go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was denying AIDS,” and “Do you want to be part of a creative display to save Insite?”

  “They were sort of vague but they said, ‘Show up at this time,’” Bond says. “It was kind of alluring. But if no one showed up, it wasn’t going to work.”

  The goal was to raise 336 large banners across intersections around Toronto’s downtown core. That was the number of overdoses that Insite staff had reversed since it opened three years earlier. Townsend and Bond had calculated the math for how much ground they could cover and how many people they would need to do it.

  They would deploy four banners in each of the intersections they targeted. It took two people to hold each banner, so they needed at least eight volunteers per intersection, plus another eight people to walk up and down traffic in four directions from each intersection, handing out information about Insite and the Conservative government’s intention to shut it down.