Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau has promised to modernize Canadian marijuana laws if he’s elected as prime minister this October. Travis Lupick photo.
Canadians sitting in prison or stuck with a criminal record for crimes related to marijuana have a reason to vote Liberal in this October’s federal election.
At an August 19 campaign stop in Vancouver, prime ministerial hopeful Justin Trudeau reiterated a campaign promise to legalize cannabis for recreational purposes. He then went one step further, adding that after a Liberal government is elected and has reversed laws that criminalize marijuana, it will begin discussing what should happen with people who have been charged for transgressions that the country no longer considers criminal.
“That’s something that we’ll be looking into as we move forward,” he said, answering a question from the Georgia Straight. “There has been many situations over history when laws come in that overturn previous convictions and there will be a process for that that we will set up in a responsible way.”
Trudeau initially took the question as an opportunity to criticize Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government’s tough-on-crime record on marijuana.
“One of the things that we’ve seen is that Mr. Harper’s approach on drugs is actually financing gun runners and street crimes,” he said. “Mr. Harper has failed in his drug policy. It is time that Canada regulated and controlled marijuana to protect our kids, to protect our communities, and to prevent the funds from flowing into the coffers of drug runners and street gangs. It is time that we did that. It is time that Canada adjusted to the reality that controlling and regulating marijuana is a way of both protecting our kids, protecting the public, and ensuring that we are not financing gangs to millions and millions of dollars. And that is what we are committed to and that’s what we’ll get cracking on when we form a government.”
The federal NDP led by Thomas Mulcair has said it supports decriminalizing marijuana and, if elected, will consult with the provinces on the possibility of further reforms.
The office of B.C. Justice Minister and Attorney General Suzanne Anton has repeatedly declined the Straight’s request for interviews on the subject of marijuana. Province of British Columbia photo.
Prominent marijuana activist Dana Larsen says documents released in response to a freedom-of-information request show the government of British Columbia is bending over backward to avoid taking positions on issues related to cannabis.
Authorized producers are growing and storing significantly more marijuana than they are selling, thanks in part to the proliferation of illegal dispensaries.
Canada’s legal medicinal-marijuana suppliers are struggling, and part of the reason why is Vancouver’s illegal cannabis storefronts.
“There is no question it has been a challenge,” Tilray CEO Greg Engel said in a telephone interview. “The proliferation of illegal dispensaries has had a significant impact.”
In June, the Nanaimo-based company, one of the largest legitimate suppliers of cannabis in the country, revealed it was eliminating 61 of 187 staff positions. More recently, Engel told the Straight Tilray has delayed previously announced plans to expand from 60,000 square feet to an operation more than five times that size. “For now, we have ample inventory from our first facility to serve the market on a consistent basis,” he said.
According to information supplied by Health Canada, Tilray isn’t alone in failing to meet expectations for sales that were sky high when the federal government introduced its new framework for medicinal cannabis on April 1, 2014.
Since that date, companies licensed under Ottawa’s Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) have collectively experienced growth from one quarter to the next, but slowly. What’s more, authorized companies are producing and storing significantly more marijuana than they are selling.
MMPR–authorized companies (of which there are now 25) together sold 408 kilograms of marijuana during the second quarter of 2014, 596 the quarter after that, then 789, and then 979 kilograms during the first three months of 2015.
Meanwhile, the amount of marijuana stockpiled in company inventories grew from 1,134 kilograms at the end of June 2014 to 4,810 kilograms as of March 31, 2015.
Health Canada declined an interview request and would not provide the Straight with a breakdown of MMPR sales by province. However, some information is provided in an April 2015 email written by Health Canada bureaucrat Eric Costen and released in response to a freedom of information request. It states that between October 2013 and February 2015, MMPR producers sent 5,272 shipments to addresses in B.C., accounting for seven percent of the national total.
Although B.C. bought only seven percent of Canada’s legal cannabis, the province is home to almost half of all patients authorized to possess medicinal marijuana (48.7 percent, or 18,383 people as of December 2013, the last month Health Canada made province-specific information available).
According to Cam Battley, communications chair for the Canadian Medical Cannabis Industry Association, that disparity suggests British Columbians holding doctor’s notes for cannabis are finding their medicine outside of Ottawa’s mail-order system. With more than 90 marijuana dispensaries illegally selling cannabis over the counter in Vancouver, he added, it is an easy guess where that might be.
Battley, however, said those challenges are largely confined to Western Canada. “We notice the impact of B.C. dispensaries in B.C.,” he emphasized. “There is a certain culture and a certain comfort level with dispensaries, and we are not seeing that across Canada.”
There are however signs MMPR producers outside of B.C. are similarly struggling to meet expectations. For publicly traded companies, share prices have stumbled. Bedrocan Cannabis Corp., for example, saw its stock hit a high of $1.17 in September 2014 before dropping to a price of 80 cents today. In October 2014, Mettrum Health Corp. debuted on the TSX at $2 a share but, since then, has fallen steadily to a value of $1.50. And in November 2014, the price of a share of Tweed Inc. spiked at $2.88 and now its stock is currently worth about $1.85 per share.
Engel noted dispensaries aren’t the only force affecting indicators like staffing levels. He said Canada’s cannabis industry is still in its infancy, and as companies scale up operations, they learn more cost-effective production methods. Engel maintained that the layoffs announced in June were as much a result of good news as of bad.
“That was a combination of the market having not grown as we had anticipated but also some efficiencies in our facilities,” he said.
Engel cautioned, though, that he sees new challenges on the horizon—for example, a creeping acceptance of recreational marijuana.
“Go back six months ago: many of the dispensaries were looking to have some type of semilegitimate medical association,” he said. “We continue to hear that that is no longer the case, that many of the dispensaries are now simply acting as recreational distribution points.”
Battley remains optimistic. He reported that MMPR producers are collectively seeing their patient base grow at a rate of 10 percent per month, adding: “We’re quite bullish on the future.”
This article was originally published in print and online at Straight.com on August 12, 2015.
Naloxone kits that are used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose area vailable at 88 health-care sites around B.C. Toward the Heart photo.
Provincial health officials are discussing a variety of interventions that could be deployed in response to a recent surge in overdoses linked to the synthetic opioid fentanyl. However, several of those ideas remain blocked by legal or bureaucratic challenges.
During an August 11 conference call, Jane Buxton, harm-reduction lead for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, said one suggestion is to open drug “checking” sites where people could bring illicit narcotics to be analyzed without fear of police persecution.
“The possibility of testing street drugs, that is something that would be of value,” Buxton said. “Currently, there is no way to do that in the legal framework that we have and there is no test available.” (A test for fentanyl does exist but it requires specialized equipment and a trained technician.)
On August 5, the Straightreported that the Vancouver Police Department would not oppose such drug-testing.
Joining Buxton on the call was deputy provincial health officer Bonnie Henry. She said she would like naloxone, a drug used to counter opioid overdoses, made available without a prescription in B.C. That decision has to be made by Health Canada, she noted, and though it is being discussed, it is unlikely to come soon.
Although ambulances in B.C. are equipped with naloxone kits, police and RCMP officers still respond to calls without them, Henry added. In a subsequent telephone interview, she explained that there is concern about officers carrying needles and the risks those can pose. In the United States, some police departments equip their officers with an intranasal form of naloxone, but that has not been approved in Canada.
Buxton said she would also like to see an expansion of harm-reduction services in B.C. But again, she noted, there are barriers such as opposition from the federal Conservative government.
Buxton maintained the province is advancing these ideas, especially in the case of naloxone. But she conceded that it is “frustrating”.
According to an August 11 warning issued by the B.C. Coroners’ Service, so far in 2015 it has detected fentanyl in 66 overdose deaths. That’s up from 13 in 2012 and on track to surpass the 90 seen in 2013.
This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on August 12, 2015.
The supervised injection room at Providence Crosstown Clinic, where patients are given prescribed heroin as a means of managing their addictions. Travis Lupick photo.
Perhaps to no one’s surprise, it turns out that supplying heroin to people without breaking the law is not an easy or a simple thing to do.
Since November 2014, a program run out of a clinic in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has done just that—that is, giving chronic addicts free prescription heroin, otherwise known as diacetylmorphine. But there was recently a hitch in the supply chain, which effectively put the harm-reduction initiative called heroin maintenance on hold.
David Lefebvre, a spokesperson for its operator, Providence Health Care, told the Straight that “due to a permit issue”, doctors at Crosstown Clinic had to transition patients to another drug called hydromorphone, a synthetic derivative of morphine. He noted that for some addicts, the change has been a struggle.
“This is the first time in North America that any clinic has provided diacetylmorphine to people who have chronic heroin addictions and that is a process that is extremely complex,” he said in a telephone interview.
Lefebvre explained that Crosstown was forced to begin transitioning patients roughly two weeks ago and hopes to have a majority of those people back on diacetylmorphine when a shipment of the drug arrives from a supplier in Europe “sometime in mid-September”.
“The reality is, the movement of diacetylmorphine is governed internationally, so it is so much more complex than people realize,” he explained. “It is not just a national issue with Health Canada, it is not just a national issue with the Office of Controlled Substances. It is also an international issue.”
Lefebvre said where exactly in the supply chain this problem occurred is in transit at a point across the Atlantic Ocean.
“The permit system in Europe takes six to eight weeks for drugs to be exported to Canada,” he said. “That results in delays that affect our ability to provide diacetylmorphine to our patients. Due to this time lag, Crosstown has had to transition some patients onto hydromorphone.”
Lefebvre cautioned that even after Providence receives its next shipment of diacetylmorphine in mid-September, the same problem could occur again.
“We are expecting continued issues with regard to supply due to this importation time lag,” he conceded.
Lefebvre acknowledged that for many long-term addicts, the transition off of heroin, even to another opiate such as hydromorphone, is not a painless experience. “We appreciate that this is challenging for them,” he said.
In past interviews, Lefebvre stressed that heroin-assisted treatment is only recommended as an appropriate intervention for individuals who have repeatedly failed with traditional therapies such as methadone.
In accordance with a B.C. Supreme Court injunction granted in May 2014, to be eligible to receive prescription heroin, a patient must have participated in the Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness (SALOME), an academic program that began at Crosstown Clinic in 2011. The average SALOME participant has failed with traditional treatment for opioid dependence an average of 11 times.
The number of eligible past SALOME participants is 202. Of that group, Lefebvre said doctors have written diacetylmorphine prescriptions for 120 patients. He declined to specify how many of that group were affected by disruptions in the supply chain.
Health Canada has steadfastly opposed Vancouver’s prescription heroin program. The province’s Health Minister, Terry Lake, has stood behind regional authorities and supported it.
This article originally appeared online at Straight.com on August 5, 2015.
Police warn that pills sold on the street as OxyContin can contain dangerous amounts of a synthetic opiate that’s 50 to 100 times more toxic than morphine.
It is not safe to use street drugs in Metro Vancouver this summer. That’s the message from police following another rash of overdoses related to the synthetic opiate fentanyl.
And part of the reason for that is prohibition-style drug laws that keep illicit substances beyond the reach of regulations that could save lives, health authorities told the Georgia Straight.
In a telephone interview, Const. Brian Montague emphasized that a problem once confined to heroin addicts now concerns recreational drug users of every sort.
“These are teenagers, husbands, wives, and family people with jobs,” the Vancouver Police Department spokesperson said.
Montague explained that authorities are finding fentanyl, a drug anywhere from 50 to 100 times more toxic than morphine, mixed with and sold as cocaine, methamphetamine, and ecstasy, and in fake pharmaceuticals such as pills labelled as OxyContin.
Montague’s warning follows the August 3 death of Jack Bodie, a 17-year-old boy who was found unconscious in an East Vancouver park after he took fentanyl sold in the form of a green pill. Bodie died later in hospital, while a 16-year-old friend narrowly avoided the same fate. Before that, on July 31, a 31-year-old North Vancouver man died of another overdose in which fentanyl is suspected. And on July 20, a North Vancouver couple in their early 30s died in their home after taking fentanyl. They left behind a two-year-old son.
In discussing these deaths, some of the province’s top health officials told the Straight they are open to unconventional methods to manage drug-use risks. Going further, they placed deaths linked to fentanyl in the context of prohibition, saying that existing drug laws are at least partly responsible for avoidable fatalities.
“We are in a situation where these drugs are prohibited,” said B.C.’s top doctor, Perry Kendall. “It is not helping. People are still taking them.”
In a separate interview, Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, a medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), suggested overdose deaths could be avoided if illicit drug sales could be raised from the shadows.
“This is definitely a problem that a legal, regulated drug market could solve,” he said. “A legal, regulated drug market doesn’t solve every problem associated with substance use, but it does solve this particular problem where there is a drug contaminating the drug supply. We don’t see that in the area of prescription medicines because that is a regulated market.”
The same argument was made by Jane Buxton, harm-reduction lead for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC).
“Because it’s an unregulated market, people don’t know what the substance is in the drug they are taking,” she said. “If we had a regulated market, we would know what was in the drugs.”
None of the interviewees favoured full legalization of hard drugs, but rather a nuanced version of decriminalization that would involve heavy regulation. Buxton named Portugal as a working example, while Kendall pointed to New Zealand.
A July 12 BCCDC bulletin stated that a provincewide study found 29 percent of participants tested positive for fentanyl, and of those drug users, 73 percent said they did not consume fentanyl knowingly. It noted that the portion of B.C. overdose deaths tied to fentanyl jumped from five percent in 2012 to 25 percent in 2014.
On specific measures, Montague said the VPD is also open to less traditional policies that could help prevent deaths linked to fentanyl. For example, he said, police would not oppose drug-testing sites like those deployed at some music festivals.
“We’re not naive,” Montague explained. “The police can stand here forever until we’re blue in the face and tell people not to use drugs, but we know people will use drugs.…So if people are going to use drugs, we would much rather have them use them safely than die as a result of an overdose.”
He stressed, however, that he has concerns about the limitations that drug testing can involve.
Lysyshyn noted that the Downtown Eastside has struggled with an influx of fentanyl for several years. He recalled one particularly challenging weekend, in October 2014, when Vancouver’s supervised-injection facility, Insite, recorded dozens of overdoses that were later linked to fentanyl. Lysyshyn emphasized that not one of those incidents ended in a death.
“People who live in the Downtown Eastside, even though that is the neighbourhood where you see the most overdoses, we are not seeing the most deaths there,” he said.
Lysyshyn pointed to data from Insite and B.C.’s take-home naloxone (a drug used to counter opioid overdoses) program that proves such harm-reduction initiatives save lives. With those initiatives deemed a success in the Downtown Eastside, Lysyshyn suggested there’s no reason variations wouldn’t work in other communities around the Lower Mainland.
This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on August 5, 2015.
In February 2014, BCCLA executive director Josh Paterson (far right) appeared alongside Will Horder, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, and Ben West, to protest what they allege is illegal government spying on pipeline foes. Travis Lupick photo.
A group of B.C. environmentalists is about to have its day in court in a high-profile case against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Beginning in Vancouver on August 12, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), an oversight body, will begin hearing a February 2014 complaint that alleges CSIS illegally spied on activists and First Nations people.
In a telephone interview, B.C. Civil Liberties Association executive director Josh Paterson said rules for the hearing are so secret and restrictive that even he—one of the lawyers involved in the case—doesn’t know if he’ll be allowed to remain in the room for the full length of proceedings.
“Nobody can attend other than witnesses who are testifying,” Paterson told the Straight. “I’m not sure there has ever been one [hearing] like it in Vancouver. We think it is a pretty big deal.”
The BCCLA’s complaint pertains to documents released in November 2013 in response to an access to information request. It describes those files as evidence CSIS cooperated with the National Energy Board (NEB) to monitor activists who opposed the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, a project that is subject to the NEB’s review.
The complaint alleges that in doing so, CSIS officers violated several sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Those include provisions stipulating freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association, as well as freedom from unreasonable search. (The complaint also targets the RCMP, though that aspect of the legal action is being handled separately.)
In addition, the complaint against CSIS claims that the spy agency violated sections of the 1985 Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act that forbade the collection of information on “lawful advocacy, protest or dissent”.
Paterson said the case is about bringing to light the actions of a secretive security agency that may be breaking the law.
“We allege that CSIS acted illegally in spying on community groups,” he said. “That in doing that, CSIS violated their constitutional rights. This hearing is about getting to the bottom of that.”
SIRC and CSIS did not respond to requests for interviews by deadline.
This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on August 5, 2015.
Protesters are led to a police van after being detained by RCMP officers during a demonstration against the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline protest on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia on November 20, 2014. Ben Nelms / Reuters photo.
This article was originally published online at Al Jazeera America on August 5, 2015.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — On July 16, James McIntyre, 48, was shot and killed by police outside a public meeting about a proposed hydroelectric dam in Dawson Creek, a small town in northeastern British Columbia. The dam, called Site C, is controversial among environmentalists and First Nations people, and the night McIntyre was shot, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were responding to reports that a protester was disrupting the meeting.
Little is known about the circumstances surrounding his death, but in a video taken immediately after the shooting, his blood can be seen pooling on the sidewalk and dripping into the street. Eventually, two officers approach his slumped body and place restraints on it while a third policeman keeps his gun drawn.
A day after the shooting, it emerged that McIntyre was not the person who interrupted the meeting, though he was reportedly wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding a knife. Five days after McIntyre’s death, Minister of Public SafetySteven Blaney responded to questions about the incident at a press conference in a Vancouver suburb.
“I’ve said clearly in the past, there are many ways, in this country that enjoys freedom, to express our democratic views,” he said. “I invite those who want to express their views to use democratic ways. Those who don’t expose themselves to face the full force of the law.”
According to Sean Devlin, an activist who has spent the last two years working on a documentary about Canadian government surveillance, both the shooting and Blaney’s remarks are consistent with a larger government crackdown on environmental activists. “They are using violence to intimidate those who oppose [projects like the Site C Dam],” Devlin said, adding that what the country’s conservative government tolerates as legitimate dissent is shrinking.
Nowhere is this tension felt more acutely than in British Columbia, where the province’s premier, Christy Clark, has staked her legacy on transforming the region into a global hub for liquefied natural gas. In addition to megaprojects like the Site C dam, two pipelines are under discussion that would carry massive amounts of heavy crude from the Athabasca oil sands in central Alberta to the coast of British Columbia. The scramble for natural resources has turned Canada’s westernmost province into a battleground for conservationists, and First Nations people have led the way in fighting these efforts.
The environmental movement in British Columbia is diverse and gaining public support. It enjoys the backing of Vancouver’s mayor, for example, and rallies attract thousands, including families. Occasionally, there are confrontations with police. In November 2014 dozens of people were arrested when they refused to leave a protest camp erected to prevent survey work related to a proposed pipeline expansion. But that incident eventually ended peacefully, without violence or accusations of police brutality.
Meanwhile, evidence has slowly revealed that several Canadian security agencies are monitoring the activities of pipeline opponents, demonstration organizers and First Nations people involved in related activities. Documents released in response to freedom of information requests present a picture of state surveillance that activists say is stifling dissent. In the wake of McIntyre’s death, these tensions have only heightened.
Widespread surveillance
One afternoon in March 2015, Tim Takaro, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and a self-described activist, was out for lunch with his teenage daughter when her cellphone rang. On the other end was an RCMP officer who wanted to know her father’s whereabouts.
After she handed the phone to him, the officer said he was calling about photographs Takaro took of a property owned by Kinder Morgan, an oil pipeline company. Takaro acknowledged that one week earlier, he had had a brief interaction with a security guard working for Kinder Morgan. But the incident was nothing serious, Takaro recounted. He was simply asked to stop taking pictures. Takaro thought it was all a misunderstanding until the officer continued to press him. “Then he said, ‘We also saw your car at a protest in November,’” Takaro continued. “And then, ‘But don’t worry, there are no criminal charges.’”
“It was definitely intimidation,” Takaro concluded.
Over the last several years, stories like Takaro’s have corroborated documents released through freedom of information requests that outline the extent to which law enforcement agencies are monitoring environmental activists. These files are notable for the language they use to describe protesters and the level of detail they include on the activities of organizations and the lives of their members.
An RCMP internal document dated December 2012 compares the First Nations movement Idle No More to “bacteria,” warning, “it has grown a life all of its own all across the nation.”
“There is a high probability that we could see flash mobs, round dances and blockades become much less compliant to laws,” it continues. “The escalation of violence is ever near.”
Two years later, a separate RCMP intelligence assessment warns, “violent anti-petroleum extremists will continue to engage in criminal activity to promote anti-petroleum ideology.” The 44-page document, made public by Greenpeace in February, calls attention to British Columbia, saying, “there is a coalition of like-minded violent extremists who are planning criminal actions to prevent the construction of the pipeline.” Yet with rare exceptions, there are almost no reports of existing environmental groups engaging in illegal actions. When asked for examples, RCMP representatives usually cite a series of attacks that occurred in the 1990s. (These were the actions of one man, Wiebo Ludwig, who in 2000 was convicted of sabotaging oil and gas infrastructure in northern Alberta.)
In March, declassified documents revealed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s equivalent of the CIA, was involved in helping local law-enforcement agencies track protesters, particularly in British Columbia. That memo also described the role of the Government Operations Centre, another federal agency, in compiling a “risk forecast” report for the 2014 “spring summer protest and demonstration season.” A previously released Government Operations Centre document includes details of more than 800 demonstrations throughout Canada since 2009.
The names of well-known Canadian environmental groups appear in these documents. Among them are Greenpeace, Tides Canada, the Sierra Club, the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Wilderness Committee and Idle No More.
Creating paranoia
In November 2014, David Lavallee, a Vancouver-based filmmaker, used a small unmanned aerial vehicle to record footage of an oil tanker marine terminal that serves as the endpoint for a Kinder Morgan oil pipeline. Lavallee is producing a documentary about unconventional energy sources such as the oil sands, and the facility he videotaped receives significant amounts of diluted bitumen from Alberta.
Two days later, he received a voice mail from a local RCMP detachment. That was followed by a visit from two local police officers and a visit from officers with the RCMP’s anti-terrorism unit.
In a subsequent telephone call, an officer warned him, “What you are doing could be seen as a precursor to terrorist behavior,” Lavallee said.
“I’m not a terrorist,” he told them. “I’m a kindergarten teacher.”
Lavallee wasn’t surprised when he learned about the Dawson Creek shooting, saying that it was only a matter of time before a violent confrontation occurs between protesters and police. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he said.
Clayton Thomas-Muller, a former organizer with Idle No More, now works as an campaigner on indigenous issues for the climate change group 350.org. Documents made public by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in October 2014 reveal that the RCMP has monitored his activities since at least 2010.
“A known member of the Indigenous Environmental Network will be heading to northern B.C. tomorrow,” reads a reference to Thomas-Muller that appears in an RCMP occurrence report dated July 7, 2010. “We would like to anticipate and monitor any protests in order to keep you informed if these protests happen in your detachment areas.”
On the phone from his home in Winnipeg, Thomas-Muller said he suspected that the government was monitoring him. He recounted how RCMP officers often acted as if they were familiar with him when they saw him at public demonstrations, making clear they knew his name and face.
“These things are designed to create paranoia. They are designed to create mistrust. They are designed to affect your confidence in your cause,” he said.
The Canadian Ministry of Public Safety and the RCMP refused repeated requests for interviews. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service did not respond to emails or voice mail messages. An emailed statement supplied by RCMP spokeswoman Annie Delisle claims the force respects the public’s right to peaceful demonstration. “Security operations balance individual rights and freedoms with the need to maintain public safety, peace and good order,” it reads.
Stewart Phillip is the president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and a prominent figure in the province’s environmental movement. He described the federal government’s monitoring of environmentalists as part of its focus on the development of the Alberta oil sands and pipelines.
He called attention to the controversial anti-terrorism legislation Bill C-51, which was passed into law on June 18. He warned that several aspects of Bill C-51 could be used against environmentalists. For example, the bill broadens the definition of an “activity that undermines the security of Canada” to include anything that targets the country’s “economic or financial stability” or “critical infrastructure” — including energy projects such as pipelines.
Activists such as Takaro worry that this legislation could be used to expand what he sees as overreaching federal oversight. “The thing that is most concerning to me is that with Bill C-51, my taking a picture could actually be construed as a criminal act, because it could be construed as interfering with critical infrastructure,” he said.
“If they are really after you,” Takaro continued, “you’re not paranoid, right?”
This article was originally published online at Al Jazeera America on August 5, 2015.
Kettle Society manager Damian Murphy says the trick to seeing a supportive-housing site run smoothly is all about finding the right mix of tenants. Travis Lupick photo.
When residents hear a homeless shelter or supportive-housing facility is preparing to open in their neighbourhood, the reaction is often outrage.
Charles Gauthier, president and CEO of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA), told the Straight that’s what happened in the fall of 2014 when the city moved 227 people previously homeless into two siteslocated at 900 Pacific Street and 1335 Howe Street.
“I went to the meetings where there were quite heated debates and discussions,” he recounted in a telephone interview. Gauthier noted that initial response is so common there is a well-known acronym for it: NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard”. But he argued that attitude isn’t justified by reality.
“We have the data that illustrates that when you do provide housing options, when you do provide food, and when you do address mental-health needs, that there is a correlation with a drop in street-disorder issues,” he explained. “We’ve been doing this for 10-plus years, saying there is a need for it [housing]. And there is a need for it in our district and we’re not going to be NIMBYs about it.”
The Straight has spent four weeks looking at 14 supportive-housing sites the City of Vancouver has developed in a partnership with the province. Vancouver Police Department (VPD) statistics combined with visits to five of these buildings, plus interviews with government officials, building operators, tenants, and neighbours, reveal a picture of social housing far less dramatic than many assume.
As previously reported, VPD figures for these buildings reveal a pattern. The number of calls to police goes up as tenants move in, usually peaking five to seven months after an opening. Then, after that initial rocky period, calls decline as the building ends its first year of operation and enters its second.
The DVBIA has statistics going back years that make for a similar argument in support of social housing.
In December 2008, the city opened a number of Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT) shelters in the area covered by the 90 square blocks that comprise the DVBIA. In October of that year, the DVBIA recorded 140 incidents of drug dealing or open drug use. After the shelters opened, that number fell to 30 per month, where it stayed with minor fluctuations as long as the shelters were open. When they eventually closed, in May 2009, this number climbed back up, to 196 incidents per month. When the HEAT shelters re-opened, in December 2009, it fell again, down to below 20. And so on.
The same pattern is present in another indicator, incidents of “aggressive panhandling” recorded by the DVBIA, though not as uniformly.
In August 2008, there were 291 reported incidents of people begging. That’s around where the monthly number stayed for a time after the HEAT shelters opened. But several months later, in March 2009, it began to “freefall”, in Gauthier’s words, to below 100 incidents per month. From there, it jumped back up to 150 after the shelters closed, and then fell again, to around 100 per month when they reopened the following winter.
“We’ve seen a drop in street disorder issues with the advent and introduction of more low-barrier shelters and with a continuum of housing options,” Gauthier concluded.
The DVBIA isn’t the only organization that’s collected data on supportive housing and learned a thing or two along the way.
The city describes the last eight years it has spent bringing these 14 buildings online as a learning process. It admits mistakes were made and emphasizes lessons have been applied to buildings that have opened more recently.
A tower operated by the Kettle Society at Burrard Street and Helmcken Street, for example, started moving tenants in in May 2014. In a common area on the seventh floor,Damian Murphy, a housing department manager for Kettle, told the Straight the most important lessons applied there are all about balance.
He acknowledged buildings that opened earlier, such as the Marguerite Ford Apartments at West 2nd Avenue and Cook Street, were criticized for moving too many high-needs tenants in too quickly. With the Kettle on Burrard, Murphy continued, special care was taken to create a better social mix.
The crux of this strategy is called the vulnerability assessment tool (VAT), which was developed in Seattle in the mid-2000s.
“It basically assesses people’s strengths and weaknesses and their level of vulnerability across a number of behavioral domains,” Murphy explained. Vancouver social workers who received VAT training in Seattle assess prospective tenants on social behaviors, mental-health issues, substance-use, general communication, plus organization and other life skills. That lets social workers assign each applicant a score. Then those numbers are used to see a given supportive-housing site filled with individuals who received a range of high and low scores on their VAT assessments. (Alternatively, supportive-housing sites with more support programs may receive more higher-needs tenants.)
“We were one of the first buildings to use that tool and it really helped a lot in our tenant selection,” Murphy said.
In a telephone interview, Vancouver city manager Penny Ballem spoke candidly about past shortcomings. For example, she said the implementation of the VAT was long overdue.
“It is remarkable to me that we didn’t have this before,” she said. “I think B.C. Housing finally realized that we need some tools to actually assess tenants as they come in, so you have a chance to understand the balance of needs that you have with a tenant group coming into a new facility.”
As the last of the 14 sites come online through 2015, Ballem conceded complaints from neighbours will likely still come in, but at lower levels than years past.
“There are still police calls but they have gone down a lot. And again, these are people with multiple challenges and not every call to the police means there is a criminal act going on,” she said. “But everything has gone down. I don’t think we’re hearing much in the way of complaints from residents at all.”
Looking to the future, Ballem said the city’s next priority related to low-income housing will be working with the province to clean up the Downtown Eastside’s older single-room occupancy hotels. She added there’s also more work to be done on street homelessness.
It has been very useful for western society to classify addiction as a disease, according to Marc Lewis, a Toronto neuroscientist. That has let drug users understand their cravings as something that can be dealt with within existing health-care systems. It has also allowed doctors to treat addiction with pharmaceutical tools like methadone and permitted policymakers to spend money on drug-rehabilitation programs the same way governments fund research for conditions such as diabetes.
On the line from the Netherlands, where he teaches developmental psychology at Radboud University, Lewis conceded that the conception of addiction he proposes in his new book, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, risks upending all of that.
“The criticism that I’ve gotten says that if you stop calling it a disease, if you take away our health-care system—the institutional network that we have for dealing with addicts—that addicts won’t get treated,” he told the Georgia Straight. “That is a valid concern, but I think it is shortsighted.”
Lewis will present a long-term alternative when he travels to Vancouver on August 4 for an event, organized by the Portland Hotel Society, that is timed to coincide with the Canadian publication of his book.
In The Biology of Desire, he argues that addiction is not a disease but a learned habit, a normal process of the brain’s development, albeit a destructive one.
“The repetition of particular experiences modifies synaptic networks,” he writes. “This creates a feedback cycle between experience and brain change, each one shaping the other. New patterns of synaptic connections perpetuate themselves like the ruts carved by rainwater in the garden. The take-home message? Brain changes naturally settle into brain habits—which lock into mental habits.”
In easily digestible anecdotes, Lewis presents the lives of characters like Natalie, a university student who slowly transitioned from prescription opioids to heroin. Alternating real-life stories and descriptions of neurological changes happening at a molecular level, Lewis delivers step-by-step explanations of the ways that physical actions involving drugs impact the brain to create feedback loops. Over time and through repeated behaviour, those effects change how the brain functions.
For example, dopamine uptake to the striatum—the part of the forebrain that receives input from the cerebral cortex—evolves to prioritize short-term rewards over long-term planning. At the same time, synaptic pruning results in a loss of communication between different brain systems that regulate self-control.
These changes are not the result of a disease or dominant genetic predisposition, Lewis maintained, but are the predictable results of behaviour patterns and environmental impacts.
“When people talk about an addiction gene or a cluster of genes for addiction, it is just not right; it is just not scientifically valid,” he argued. “What I wanted to do is to launch an alternative based on the science, and on the neuroscience in particular, as well as the stories of addicts.”
Lewis, whose 2012 book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, lays bare his own past struggles with drugs, said that as long as we continue to incorrectly describe addiction as a disease, we prevent society from developing an understanding that allows us to more effectively help people get better.
His work makes a strong case for a paradigm shift, but The Biology of Desire presents no silver bullets.
“Whether you see addiction as a disease or as a learning phenomenon, it isn’t clear exactly how you fix it,” Lewis said. But, Lewis added, the first step must be acknowledging that addiction as a concept is something more complicated than a disease.
Marc Lewis will speak at 7 p.m. on Tuesday (August 4) at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward’s.
The article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on July 29, 2015
