A man living in a tent eats as his dog stands nearby, in Vancouver, on Feb. 14.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Shelley Wood is a writer and journalist whose most recent novel is The Leap Year Gene.
I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, voting green or orange, or strategically red. I’m also fortunate: I make a good living and am happy to be taxed to help improve the lives around me. Most of my family and friends share my sociopolitical views, which is comfortable and reaffirming.
Lately, however, I’ve sensed a subtle shifting of the plates in my social-justice core, relating to a specific quadrant of lefty groupthink: the dual crisis of addiction and homelessness.
To be clear, I accept, absolutely, that addiction is a disease, stigmatized too long while pharmaceutical companies and organized crime reap the profits. Compassionately and ethically addressing opioid addiction and the enmeshed problems of mental illness, domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, colonialism, poverty and more – compounded by a toxic drug supply – deserve the same resources, research and moon-shot ambitions of cancer or COVID-19. On top of that, the lack of affordable housing, emergency shelters and addiction treatment in Canada’s cities is a shameful situation in need of lasting solutions at all levels of government.
What I’ve been wrestling with, privately, is whether I and my socially minded comrades are unintentionally part of the problem.
I trace the start of my quiet doubts to the days when people without housing began pitching their tents in municipal parks in cities across Canada. I and my friends expressed horror and outrage when bulldozers arrived to evict the tent cities. We all knew this was an assault on human dignity – these tents were the closest thing camp denizens had to homes and a community. How could they be destroyed by state powers when unhoused folks had nowhere else to go?
Yet a tiny voice in my head, one I wouldn’t dare to speak aloud, asked: but parks? Surely we can do better: find better locations, better shelter? Still, I reasoned, when I have so much, maybe this was a small price for a temporary, urgent solution?
Then I started noticing changes in my husband. He used to keep old winter jackets in his car to offer to people sleeping rough. He’d buy two hot drinks at Starbucks, giving one to the guy panhandling out front. He convinced his family-run business to cover Kelowna’s Gospel Mission’s hot meals program. In recent years, however, he’s spent most workday mornings cleaning excrement, trash, and drug paraphernalia from his shopfront before opening for business in downtown Kelowna. He’s had thousands of dollars of product stolen. He’s spent more repairing damaged property, much of it done by the same small group, their crimes deemed too small to warrant sentencing. His compassion has waned while his vitriol mounted.
I, too, am learning vitriol. Earlier this year, three men on bicycles with trailers (captured on neighbour’s cameras) broke into our home while we were out of town. Over the course of 24 hours, the footage suggests, they ransacked, showered, ate from our pantry, used the beds, left feces in our toilets and soiled clothes on the floor. They stole computers, phones, stereos, jewellery, family heirlooms, and tellingly: almost all our warm winter jackets and boots. They emptied our freezer and liquor cabinet, then stole our cars to transport their haul.
To the homeless encampment. At least, that’s where my work IT guy tracked my computer. Our cars, too, were found – by my brother-in-law, not the police – parked at the camp, as were the thieves’ bikes and trailers, easily identifiable from security footage.
The RCMP officer assigned to our case called it the worst “home invasion” he’d ever seen, yet no one followed up with neighbours’ videos and had to be cajoled into taking beer cans for fingerprinting. Ninety days after the break-in, he banged on our door at 9 p.m. to say he needed us to sign a paper to extend the request: Months had gone by yet the evidence hadn’t even been analyzed. Another officer warned us not to expect a conviction, even if RCMP identified subjects and pressed charges. We’ve heard this before. One man caught stealing from my husband’s downtown business had been charged with “petty” theft over 200 times.
Nor did the RCMP try to track down our stolen items in the encampment – to do so, they explained, would infringe on reasonable expectations of privacy in the camp. Indeed, many people I’ve told about our situation have stories of friends or family members who’ve gone to the encampment themselves to try to find and buy back their stolen goods. One officer told us the best chance of retrieving our stuff will be if one of the perpetrators dies of an overdose: A corpse would allow them to enter the tent to claim stolen items.
This is a profoundly broken situation. I am persuaded by the evidence in support of harm reduction that treats addiction as a medical problem, promoting human rights while seeking to curb the risks of infections, overdose, criminalization and stigma. For harm reduction to succeed, however, it needs buy-in not only from those with substance addiction, but also from community members paying taxes aimed at ameliorating the problem.
And we need to be open to reassessing what’s working and what’s not. One example making headlines is British Columbia’s well-intentioned but poorly thought-through “safe supply” program. While safe supply has no doubt helped many people with drug addiction to obtain prescribed, non-toxic medications for personal use, it’s had unintended consequences. According to a recent class action lawsuit and the RCMP, lethal doses of “safe” opiate prescriptions are making their way onto the streets with dire consequences for first-time users and vulnerable youth, increasing the risk of overdose and further taxing emergency services, social workers, and hospitals.
“That’s what you get for legalizing drugs,” sniffed a manager at my bank when we went to check our account security after the break-in.
In fact, decriminalization has seen more success in places like Portugal, largely because it was accompanied by heavy investment in addiction treatment services and assertive measures to engage people living with addictions who are found to be contributing to social problems. Portuguese decriminalization was also commitment to public safety. Critically, Portugal decriminalized drug possession but considered all drug crime illegal and punishable, enacting “dissuasion commissions” to tailor rehabilitation needs, stipulate penalties, and minimize community impact. By contrast, British Columbia’s incomplete approach – decriminalization and safe supply – hasn’t done enough to protect high-risk youth, fund effective and accessible treatment interventions, or prioritize public safety.
I’m wrestling with all of this. I need people who know more about this than I do to do better, even if it means trying new approaches and abandoning the ones that haven’t moved the needle.
But there’s the catch. For Canada to invest in the full tool kit required to combat addiction, it needs the backing of citizens who care about a healthy, equitable society.
I fear that’s what’s slipping.
The public price has become too high; hearts like mine are at risk of bleeding dry.
As more people end up as collateral damage to B.C.’s floundering approach to this complex problem, support inevitably wanes. Worse, the best state efforts to support those dealing with unaffordable housing, addiction, or both, may have unwittingly created a situation where hardened criminals can operate with impunity within the very services and supports that tax dollars sustain. As crimes go unchecked and compassion erodes, criminality is conflated with homelessness, lawlessness with addiction, creating an infectious muck of distrust and anger that helps no one, least of all the very people at highest need.
My husband and I are still tabulating our losses, both the financial and intangible. I lost digital photos of loved ones. I lost keepsakes, mostly worthless, that held priceless memories. As a woman, I lost my sense of safety and security in my own home – the very thing that might, in other circumstances, cement my empathy for those trying to survive on Canada’s streets. But the biggest loss? My compassion, now doing battle with a toxic blend of grief, disgust and rage.
This issue deserved to be an election issue last month, and it was, but the rhetoric – as always – was divisive. Neither of the prospective prime ministers offered creative, comprehensive, collaborative proposals that might risk rankling their base, any more than they could admit to decades of past missteps by successive governing parties.
Because that’s the kicker: Caring for people living without shelter, driven to desperate acts by their illness, is not the purview of left or right leaning people. Caring is bipartisan, or should be. But if people stop caring, particularly people putting their faith in strong social supports, donating to their local charities, and committed to a kind and compassionate Canada – then we are all the poorer for it.