Fighting for Space

  There were a couple of reports on the financial review in the alternative press that mentioned the New Fountain Shelter and the Rainier Hotel, but nothing in mainstream newspapers. Townsend says no journalist ever brought either of them up and neither did he. In 2014, the team went quietly, even as the newspaper coverage continued for weeks.

  Today, however, Evans is emphatic about why they were forced to resign. “I was told, pretty directly, that the government was just fed up with us fighting for things and embarrassing them and making them look bad,” she says. “I was told, to my face by a very senior bureaucrat [Ramsay, she later reveals], that it had nothing to do with the audit, and that it had everything to do with them being sick of us fighting. And that BC Housing and VCH were done; they were sick of the power that we had gained and the voice that we had and that they needed to shut us down.”

  Ramsay confirms that he and Evans spoke privately about the financial review. “That was a reflection of the good working relationship we had,” he says. But Ramsay denies ever telling Evans there was anything political about the financial review. He maintains that the PHS executives’ ousting had nothing to do with PHS staff protests against government cuts to programming at the New Fountain Shelter and the Rainier Hotel. “There was no political interference from my side,” he says. “As the audit lays out, the issues were around financial management and use of funds.”

  PHS had worked in partnerships with VCH and BC Housing staffers for two decades and had many friends within those organizations. Evans claims that Ramsay wasn’t the only one who told her the financial review was political. “That was told to me more than once in many different ways by many different people,” she says. “I was told by bureaucrats both within VCH and within BC Housing and not just once but many times.”

  Despite warnings from Ramsay and several other bureaucrats, Evans recalls she somehow never believed the government would actually go so far to take PHS away from them. “The truth is—maybe because I’m naïve and stupid—I never really believed in my heart that it would get followed through to the extent that it did,” she says. “I’m embarrassed to admit it because there were people who told me what was going to happen. But I actually believed in my heart that people were good, that we were doing the right thing, and that people understood that.”

  Tom Laviolette similarly says that right until the end, he thought a compromise was going to be reached. “I knew we really pissed off some of the senior bureaucrats,” he says. “I thought for sure Mark was going to have to sacrifice himself. But I was a bit surprised that they went much broader than that, that they took out Kerstin and Dan.”

  Laviolette says it finally became clear to him that they all were going to have to go when it was both BC Housing and VCH sitting together on the other side of the table from them. “As soon as VCH joined in, we knew we were totally screwed,” he says. “We knew the game was over when the two of them got together.”

  Kerstin Stuerzbecher was always the least political of the group. She doesn’t say much when asked about the financial review, but when asked about the Rainier protests, says this: “That was the nail in our coffin, that’s for sure.”

  Bibby takes the view that if it wasn’t the Rainier, it would have been something else shortly after. “The protests over the Rainier may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. “I think they were all just absolutely tired of us.”

  Heather Hay, the Vancouver Coastal Health director who worked with Townsend and Small to open Insite, offers a more complicated picture. She does not suggest the Portland’s activism had nothing to do with their ousting, but describes it as part of a larger transition. “Mark had a long history and was well known to have unrestrained behaviour if people disagreed with him,” she says. “VCH knew for many, many years about his behaviour, and there were many, many complaints.” Hay attributes less significance to the New Fountain and Rainier protests directly. She says the whole affair likely had more to do with a new executive team taking over Vancouver Coastal Health around the same time. Hay explains that those new bosses simply had less patience funding an organization (to the tune of millions of dollars) that was sending people with bullhorns and picket signs into their offices. “PHS read it wrong,” Hay says. “They couldn’t adapt to the new players.”

  Dr Patricia Daly, who in 2017 holds the positions of chief medical health officer and vice-president of public health at Vancouver Coastal Health, maintains she never once heard the Portland’s political activities discussed in relation to the financial review. She was a PHS ally inside the health authority but says that, after reading the KPMG review, she felt the management team led by Evans and Townsend had to go. “If you look at the audit, they had to leave to save the organization,” she says. “Remember the public: this was tax dollars.”

  It’s clear that Evans and Townsend regard the media’s coverage of the entire affair as brutally unfair. Then again, they acknowledge that in 2014, they never came out to give their side of the story. Evans adds she was pleased with one aspect of newspapers’ reports. “Not in one article, not one document anywhere, ever, in the whole shit show of what went down, was there any suggestion that we were not actually doing what we said we were doing,” she says. “No one ever came out and said we weren’t doing a good job. No one.”

  Ramsay agrees with her. “The work that the Portland had done for some of the most marginalized folks in the Downtown Eastside was absolutely second to none,” he says. “I quite admired them.”

  Daly, who was not directly involved in the removal of PHS’s team of founders, remembers thinking she wasn’t sure what the government would do without the organization. “Portland provided housing for some of the most challenging people in the community, hundreds that no one else would take,” she says. “There are a lot of service providers down there but nobody else with their skills and expertise. So we would have been in real, real trouble if they had gone under. The deal that was worked out, whereby they left but the organization continued, that was probably the best outcome that could have happened there.”

  The team that Evans and Townsend had built over the years remained in place. Tanya Fader, Coco Culbertson, Andy Bond, and Darwin Fisher are all still with PHS today. But an interim board of directors appointed by BC Housing and VCH was stacked with their employees, ensuring the organization’s activist days were over.

  The province hadn’t just taken PHS from the group that founded it; it had also labelled them corrupt, and forbade them from speaking against that narrative. Evans remembers feeling like she couldn’t even discuss it with her closest friends in Vancouver.

  “We knew that they were going to say things to get rid of us, with the motivation to make us look as dishonourable as possible,” she says. “I tried to not care about that but was devastated.”

  The night after the newspapers reported on the details of BC Housing’s financial review, Evans sat on her kitchen floor drinking a bottle of wine and crying. She called old friends in England, waking them in the middle of the night, trying and failing to explain what was happening.

  “I did drink too much one night and was very upset,” she recalls. “It was four in the morning, and I remember thinking, ‘I can’t talk to anyone here. I can’t tell anyone what is happening.’ It was really hard.”

  Today Evans and Townsend live with their children in New York City. They work for two nonprofit organizations there, the Washington Heights Corner Project and New York Harm Reduction Educators. They’re struggling within America’s more conservative approach to drug addiction, running basic harm-reduction programs like the ones they started in the old Portland Hotel more than twenty years earlier.

  They left Vancouver in 2016. The two were finally married in March of that year, in a small ceremony in a church just across the water from the Downtown Eastside, in North Vancouver. Evans laughs about how long it took them to get around to it. “We just never had time,” she says. Two days after their wedding, Towns
end flew to New York. Evans followed with the kids in July.

  Their departure from the Portland Hotel Society in 2014 was the first ending of several Downtown Eastside stories that concluded that year.

  In April, Bud Osborn was admitted to St. Paul’s Hospital for pneumonia and a heart condition. He passed away on May 6, 2014. Osborn was sixty-six.

  Ten days later, the East Hastings 100 block was closed to traffic for his memorial. It was a sunny afternoon and hundreds of people filled the street outside Insite, the sanctuary he had helped create for intravenous drug users. A small stage was erected and there above the crowd Ann Livingston recounted the power of Osborn’s writing and his poetry’s ability to help people feel better about themselves.

  “He reassured them,” Livingston said, “that their terrible anguish, humiliation, their shame, their horrid families, their drug addiction, their sexual abuse, the fact that they had traded sex for drugs—things that people don’t want anyone to know—he would say, ‘These are the exact things that you can say in poetry. And it creates beauty. It creates resistance, it creates pride, and it creates healing.’”77

  Evans shared a simple memory of Osborn, of an afternoon when they sat outside a PHS coffee shop located a few doors down from Insite. She recounted how much it meant to Osborn that the Downtown Eastside simply exists, that it remains a place where anyone can feel welcome, without fear of stigma or judgment. “Bud and I sat and reflected on the fact that in spite of everything that had happened, we could still sit here on the corner of Columbia and Hastings,” Evans told the crowd. “That this community still exists. That we’ve overcome, over and over again. That the Downtown Eastside had fought off challenges, fought off extinction, and survived and thrived, against the interests of those who fail to see the love, the magic, and the beauty in this community. Bud was so proud of this simple victory. This space that was occupied, against all odds.”

  Libby Davies, who had taught Osborn politics and become one of his closest friends, also spoke that afternoon. “Bud was a critical part of the struggle for the rights and dignity of drug users,” she said. “He worked tirelessly for the opening of Insite. When times were dark and people felt hopeless, he gave us hope. When people felt that they had no voice, his poetry raised many voices and gave people courage. When people yearned for belonging and community, he led by example and united people in a common cause for human dignity and respect.”

  In December 2014, Davies announced that she was retiring from politics after representing the Downtown Eastside at the federal level for seventeen years. “I’ve worked very hard on issues like housing and homelessness, making sure that the rights of drug users are upheld and we don’t criminalize people,” she told the Georgia Straight newspaper that month. “It’s been an extraordinary honour to serve in this community. East Vancouver is a very special place.”

  Davies said that her very first meeting with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users was one of the fondest memories of her career. “There were about 100 VANDU members sitting on the floor,” she recounted. “We talked about a safe-injection site, and they said it would never happen. I said, ‘It will. It will happen because you are involved. Your voice is finally being heard, and that’s what makes a difference.’”

  Davies reflected on how far Vancouver had come on harm reduction, calling it an example for all of North America to follow. Then she paused, and added: “I’ve learned this in life: When rights are won, you can never rest. This is an ongoing struggle.”78

  78Travis Lupick, “Outgoing Vancouver East MP Libby Davies Cautions Social Justice Victories Cannot Be Taken for Granted,” Georgia Straight, December 12, 2014.

  72Frances Bula, “Audit Findings Could Derail Downtown Eastside Non-Profit Housing Provider,” Globe and Mail, March 4, 2014.

  73Frances Bula, Andrea Woo, “Vancouver Non-Profit Housing Group’s Programs Will Be Protected, Minister Says,” Globe and Mail, March 19, 2014.

  74Rob Shaw, Tiffany Crawford, “Portland Hotel Society Audit Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars in Questionable Expenses,” Vancouver Sun, March 21,2014.

  75Pete McMartin, “The Portland Hotel Society ‘Does Not Always Play Well with Others,’” Vancouver Sun, March 19, 2014.

  76Doug Ward, “‘We Were Seen as Quite Scary’: PHS’s Townsend,” Tyee, April 2, 2014.

  77Travis Lupick, “Bud Osborn Memorial Sees Insite Founder Remembered for Fighting the Good Fight,” Georgia Straight, May 16, 2014.

  Chapter 33

  Fentanyl Arrives

  It was the last Wednesday of August,” Janet Charlie begins. She was working at a concession stand in the Downtown Eastside when her son Tyler came by. “He was walking through the market,” recounts the grandmother of four. “He’d seen me working. But he knew I had an issue with his girlfriend, so he would never talk to me when she was around. He just looked at me and he walked out,” she continues. “That was the last time I saw him alive.”

  Tyler spent the next few hours hanging out with friends on the corner of Main and East Hastings, just one block from where his mother continued her shift. “Selling cigarettes and whatever, and they drink there,” she says.

  Shortly after noon, a girl sprinted into the market and ran right up to Charlie. “They said, ‘Your son went down,’” Charlie says calmly. “‘It doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it.’ And I said, ‘You know what? Don’t say that, because you’re not God.’”

  Together, they ran up Hastings to the corner of Main, where Charlie found her son on the sidewalk outside the Carnegie Community Centre. Paramedics were bent over him, pumping oxygen into his lungs. She spent the next week with Tyler, who lay unconscious at Vancouver General Hospital.

  “We thought he was going to be okay, because they had a little bit of wave in his brain,” Charlie continues. “But the next day, there was nothing. So on the seventh day, we had to take him off the machines that were keeping him alive.

  “He would be twenty-seven, if he was still here. He left behind an ex-wife and two kids.”

  In 1998, the peak of British Columbia’s overdose crisis of the 1990s, there were 400 illicit-drug fatalities across the province. Nearly half of them were in just one city: Vancouver.

  Four hundred was a number so high that it prompted activists to mobilize and, eventually, transformed how BC’s government responds to the problem of addiction. Harm reduction was named a part of Vancouver’s “four pillars” approach, Insite opened its doors, and researchers began looking at more radical ideas like providing clean drugs to addicts on a prescription basis. In the decade that followed, from the years 2001 to 2010, fatal overdoses in BC fell to an annual average of 212. Harm reduction worked.

  But in 2011, something changed. That year, the number of fatal overdoses jumped by nearly a third, from 211 to 294. It dipped slightly the following year, to 269, but then rose again in 2013, to 333 overdose deaths. The climb continued, to 369, then 519, and then, in 2016, to 978. In 2017, BC is on track to surpass 1,500 overdose deaths, three-and-a-half times the very worst year of BC’s crisis of the 1990s and nearly six times the annual average during the preceding decade.

  Fentanyl had arrived.

  The synthetic opioid is more than ten times stronger than heroin and at least fifty times more potent than morphine. Canada has sanctioned its use as a prescription pain killer since the 1970s. Now chemists mostly based in China and Mexico are manufacturing the drug illicitly and mixing it into North American’s heroin supply. Fentanyl costs a fraction of what heroin does to produce. Just as important to dealers, its potency means it can be shipped in very small amounts, making it easy to smuggle over borders. It only has one drawback: it’s so potent that it can be very difficult to accurately measure and mix into other substances for sale on the street. Police agencies often compare a shipment of heroin spiked with fentanyl to a batch of chocolate chip cookies: the baker never knows how many chips are in each treat.

  In April 2016, BC’s prov
incial government declared a public-health emergency, but no level of government took significant action to stop the tide of overdose deaths. There were half-measures. The federal health ministry dropped a prescription requirement for naloxone. In BC, the provincial government then essentially made the overdose antidote widely available at no cost in at-risk neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside. Those initiatives undoubtedly saved many lives. But a response to fentanyl based on harm reduction, while important, is entirely reactive; it’s only reaching people after they’ve already ingested drugs that are potentially deadly.

  Beginning in 2011, the arrival of fentanyl and then carfentanil sent overdose deaths across British Columbia soaring.

  Photo: Travis Lupick

  For the Downtown Eastside, a community that had lived through this sort of crisis once before, Tyler’s death was one too many. In 2016, already five years into this new epidemic and still with little help from authorities forthcoming, the neighbourhood mobilized to take care of itself.

  The alley behind the street market where Janet Charlie works is always busy with drug users. There are dealers positioned at each end and the space between them is crowded with street-entrenched addicts. There, late one evening in 2016, Ann Livingston walked the length of it, remembering how she’d seen all of this before.

  Back in the 1990s, when the Downtown Eastside was breaking under the AIDS epidemic and the arrival of intravenous cocaine, Livingston cofounded the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and, in 1995, opened the city’s first unsanctioned injection site, on Powell Street. As bad as things were back then, when the Downtown Eastside became synonymous with poverty and addiction, Livingston maintains that there is no doubt that the situation is worse today. She says that through the fall of 2016, she racked her brain for new ideas about how activists could help address the fentanyl crisis, and reveals that a state of depression began to weigh her down.