Category Archives: Homeless

Homeless, Municipal

Maxine Wilson, Mayor of Coquitlam

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At first, he’s just another man sitting in the trash. His face is layered in dirt, his clothes are in even worse shape and judging by his choice of associates, he is a man who has truly hit rock bottom. Sitting on a log near Coquitlam River, he is sandwiched between a woman who seems to be constantly twitching and another man who is clearly drunk. And yet something separates this man from his company – his eyes seem slightly more vibrant and for a moment, it seems almost like he doesn’t belong here.

That’s because he doesn’t. (Indeed, does anyone?) This man has a home, an apartment somewhere – or so he says. He admits he used to call this forest home, but those days are behind him. He boasts that he is one of the lucky ones that escaped this life of despair, but has ties here still which brings him back to his former stomping grounds from time to time. But the real surprise comes when he is asked how he got his house. He smiles and then says proudly, “The Mayor got it for me.”

As this conversation is taking place in Port Coquitlam, one naturally assumes it is the Mayor of PoCo that is responsible for helping this man, but that assumption would be wrong. The man explains that it wasn’t Scott Young that helped him out, but the Mayor of a neighbouring city that helped out. “Maxine Wilson helped me,” he says, referring to the Mayor of Coquitlam. Then he adds, scathingly, “She actually cares about people.”

Does she now? I think to myself. It’s rare to hear someone who used to be homeless say something nice about politicians, so this indeed something unique. The man seems to suggest that Mayor Wilson is different than other mayors, as evidenced by what she did for him. But I have only this man’s word to go on – I’ve never spoken to the Mayor of Coquitlam. I have a feeling that is about to change.

***

The walls on her office seem to suggest a connection to people. On all sides of the giant desk that Mrs. Wilson sits behind whenever she is actually in her office, are pictures of her surrounded by giant clumps of humanity. In one picture, she is seen smiling with a group of Asians, in other she is seen grinning with her City Council. But perhaps the most telling portrait of Maxine Wilson is the one of her and her daughter as the watched the last election results come in. Her daughter is clasping her hand over her mouth and Maxine is looking on expectantly. It’s a picture a newspaper photographer captured and sent to Maxine who proudly posted it on her wall.

“How old do you think my daughter is?” she asks me as I study the picture closely. She’s a very young-looking girl, with a youthful face that could easily fit into any high school hallway. I venture a guess of sixteen. She laughs. Turns out the young woman is actually in her thirties. “Everyone gets that wrong,” she says.

She sits down in one of the seats that surrounds a small table in the other end of her office. I sit down next to her and begin explaining why I wanted to interview her, which means telling her about the man in the forest. When I had called her the day previous, I had left a message with her secretary that I wanted to discuss “homelessness” and that she could return my call whenever it was convenient. Less than an hour later, my phone rang and it was her.

Right away, she expressed her interest in the interview. “How does tomorrow sound?” she asked me. I was caught off guard, but maybe that’s because I am permanently scarred from my Mary Reeves ordeal. I said that it was fine. “How does 1:30 work for you?” I politely asked if I could bump that up to 2:00. “Sure, that’s fine. Whatever works best for you.”

I couldn’t conceal my surprise and quickly agreed to the interview. A phone call made to Scott Young last week was still not returned (but would be an hour later) and already I had an interview set up with the Mayor of Coquitlam for the next day. And remember, Mrs. Wilson and I had never met, and she had probably never even heard of SomethingCool News. Colour me impressed.
I mentioned Scott Young’s name at the start of the interview, explaining that I had spoken to him many times regarding the homeless problem in PoCo and expressed my view that until any sort of conviction appeared, he deserved the benefit of the doubt. She seemed to agree.

“People are products of their environment,” Wilson said calmly. “Scott’s had a difficult life. He’s a very easy Mayor to work with and remember, I am a woman saying that. He’s got some issues and he has to deal with them.”

What she didn’t agree with so much was PoCo’s policy of dealing with the homeless – i.e., tearing down their camps 85 times so far this year. “What PoCo is facing – and what we face – are residents who are afraid for their safety and are worried that they will be robbed so they phone the City and want something done,” she said. “But the only thing that will ever change it is to change the societal attitudes from being ones that are fear-based to realizing that we all have needs and we all need to support each other.”

Indeed, one resident of PoCo who watched the SCN mini-documentary The Displaced, wrote, “I live in this area and if your going to do a story about this then get all facts straight. The majority of these people are also drug addicts and we as residents are being affected greatly because they break into our homes, vehicles and steal and or vandalize our belongings. Drug deals are made in front of our children and homes. So tell the down side we as residents have to endure in the area; this is a huge problem and they create it!”

Those must the societal attitudes Mrs. Wilson is talking about. PoCo’s solution has been to destroy the camps only to watch them spring up on the other side of the trail. Maxine suggests a different solution: “The way I see we attack this is person by person and find the champions who will spread the word and mobilize so gradually people in the community help each other to be supportive.”

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this all sounds like another episode of Sesame Street. It’s just another Mayor spouting off a feel-good message about humanity coming together and facing all challenges and blah blah blah. It’s the stuff someone who has never experienced the problem says from their comfy office armchair. I thought that too, but then I remembered that guy in the forest.

“Sure, I know a few people I have helped,” Mrs. Wilson replied when I inquired about this man. “I give suggestions all the time as to who people should connect up with. You know I never intended to get involved with politics, but through my years I have come to know a lot of people form a lot of different agencies.” She chuckles. “My staff always jokes that I am a walking encyclopedia because I know who to connect to what.”

She decides to give me an example. “We just had a family traumatized because their son is a cocaine addict who is facing trial. The mother has two other kids and she wasn’t able to manage her own life or the rest of the family’s and she didn’t know what to do. I know Diane Sowden from the Children of the Streets Society. I gave her Diane’s number and told her to call her and to tell her that she needed help. And she did. The next time I saw her she was beaming and her son was there too. So they are going to help their son and get past all that.”

I ask her if she feels gratified and fulfilled having partaken in such a success story. She doesn’t smile or nod – she just shrugs. “That’s my job,” is all she says and patiently waits for me to ask my next question.

There’s a lot going on in Coquitlam – the problem of homelessness may not be as bad as PoCo’s but it could one day be. It’s for that reason, that Coquitlam is working on getting some churches together to help provide shelter for some of them over the winter months and has a long term plan to lease land from the City to help house women and children who are living on the streets. It’s a place she hopes those who want help will finally be able to get it.

“My idea is not to trap anyone in a cycle of dependency,” she elaborates. “We want to help every person that wants it. We are all co-dependent, symbiotic. We all need each other. Each person should be given the chance to be as resilient and independent as they can manage.”

I tell her about the disturbing information I came across when filming the mini-documentary – that there may be a pregnant woman living in the forest. She counters that she has heard there may as many as forty women living in the woods. About the pregnant woman, she asks, “Who can she learn to trust again and how can she learn to stay together with her family? It doesn’t do us any good to blame anyone – each of us must step up to the plate and take personal responsibility. These people are not numbers. Each has a different story and needs to be supported.”

Like the man in the forest? “That’s right,” she says, again refusing to congratulate herself. So I ask again how it makes her feel to know there is one man who feels he owes Mayor Maxine Wilson something. “It means that one person ahs been able to progress in life,” she responds passively. “But there are many more we need to support. I’m not great. I’m just another ordinary person. There are so many other people out there who are doing good things, much greater than what I am doing. I’m just an average person who as an accident of circumstances ended up being Mayor.”

She paints herself – like the pictures on her wall do – as a woman who is just part of something much larger. “We all need to pull it together,” she continues. “We all need to make sure that everyone is included in our society. Put simply, if you see there needs to be change, change it.” I notice for the first time she looks nothing like a Mayor is supposed to. And then she says, “That’s all of our jobs.”

Homeless, Provincial

“D’oh”

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For Gordon Campbell quoting Homer Simpson would have been a verbally succinct method of conveying his real message on Homelessness.

Instead, in the way of politicians, he wasted peoples time by making them wade through a sea of words to arrive at the same place: Campbell and the Liberals have none of the fresh ideas or approaches needed to begin to reduce the homeless and addicted on our streets. With homelessness growing so quickly and into such a major issue Campbell and the Liberals had to do something, no matter how “Homer Simpsonish” (i.e. REAL DUMB) the actions were.

In desperation the Liberals have fallen back on the old political strategy of wastefully throwing taxpayers $$$ at the problem to make it appear they are addressing the issue. After all, if they are spending millions of hard earned taxpayer $$$ it must be going to accomplish something positive, right?

Wrong. Wasting money to open shelter beds 24 hours does not create a single new space for the homeless, although I concede it will pump more dollars into the pockets of those in the homeless industry/economy.

Unless of course an unannounced part of the plan is to use the beds in shifts in order to double (12 hour shift) or triple (8 hour shift) the effective number of beds available? Or perhaps the unannounced plan is to chain them to the beds, keeping them out of the public eye in order to create the illusion the problem is disappearing and thus solved?

I used the wording “something positive” in speaking of what opening 24 hours will accomplish because I know the opening 24 hour policy will give rise to negative effects. In speaking with those who run operations open 24 hours a day in our area they have stated that the one big change they would make is not to be open 24 hours – for a host of reasons.

Experience with the longer hours (basically 24) that come during an extreme weather response demonstrated that with 24 hour operations came/comes a host of headaches. These problems could be endured for the length of an extreme weather alert, but can be expected to compound at shelters that run 24 hours a day. The discussions I have witnessed among those experienced with shelter operations have always given rise to lots of problems and no real benefits – at least to the homeless.

What will this government, obviously bankrupt of any new and effective ideas, turn to next as a “solution” – internment camps in the interior?

We do need both more shelter beds and drop-in facilities for the homeless. Most of all we need to change how we deliver aid services to the homeless in order to help them recover themselves and their lives.

But such a course will require creativity, accepting reality as it is, risk, patience and change. In judging the likelihood of this based on Gordon Campbell’s recent statements I can only conclude:

D’oh.

Federal, Homeless, Municipal, Provincial

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. Grouch Marx

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A friend took me to Mission the other afternoon to visit the Union Gospel Drop-in Centre and speak to the people there as I had never been to the Drop-in. We found the leaders of the Union Gospel Mission’s mission in Mission out walking the streets and serving ice tea on a hot day as a way to reach out and stay in touch with their clients and those in need on the city streets.

While speaking to them about the homeless situations in both Mission and Abbotsford the subject of opening a Drop-in Centre in Abbotsford arose and I issued an invitation and urged them to pursue a place in Abbotsford since Abbotsford is sorely in need of an afternoon/evening drop-in/supper meal centre.

We also spoke of the benefits of adopting the wellness recovery action plan that Fraser (mental) Health puts on in communities in the FVRD and how a wellness plan would have significant benefits for those seeking recovery from addiction or those simply seeking to get their lives back on track form whatever had disrupted their lives.

Afterwards I sat down to have a coffee with some of the clients and chanced upon a copy of the new September/October issue of The Inner City Pulse, the Union Gospel Mission’s newsletter for the lower mainland. On page seven of this issue I found three stories about some rather interesting children.

A five year old who donated her birthday presents to benefit many other children who were in need. An eight year old, who seeing people living on the streets of Vancouver’s downtown eastside, collected blankets for these homeless people. An eleven year old who founded K.A.R.E. (Kids Actions Really Energize) to encourage people and local businesses to donate clothing and non-perishable food items for those in need.

I was contemplating these children as we crossed the Mission Bridge on our way back to Abbotsford, a community sadly in need of the lesson about generosity of the spirit which these children embody.

The children could also teach our self-styled leaders something about tackling seemingly overwhelming problems in society. They did not talk the situation to death; nor seek to study it to death; nor spend their energies saying all the right things but doing nothing. They did not pursue grandiose plans; nor seek a comprehensive solution where none exists; nor lose sight of the reality that at some point of dealing with a problem action is required.

These children took action to meet a need they saw.

The observer affect tells us that the act of observing will make changes on the situation/problem being observed. The uncertainty principle tells us that when we try to quantify the qualities of ending homelessness, these quantities can only be determined with some characteristic ‘uncertainties’ that cannot become arbitrarily small simultaneously.

You study a problem, you change the problem. The uncertainty principle defies attempts to measure or quantify the problem with exactness. Any action taken to put a plan in motion will change the nature of the problem and render the original plan moot.

Homelessness involves people and uncertainty: we are dealing with a chaotic system with its implications of little agreement about what should be done and even less agreement on how whatever should be done can be done.

Without starting you will never finish. We need to pick a point, any point, as the start point. With a place to begin we simply begin at the beginning and continue to the end.

The biggest hurdle to ending homeless and addressing other social ills is an apparent inability to start. A concept so simple a child can understand it and in understanding it set examples such as those above in how you end homeless – you start.

Addiction

Mr. Ron Taylor’s solution to drugs is terrorism?

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The following is a reply to an editorial in the Abbotsford Post, Tuesday September 18, 2007. I have posted a copy of the editorial below the reply

So, Mr. Ron Taylor’s solution to drugs is terrorism?

The reason that threats from “woolly faces” work is that they are terrorists and everyone knows they have and will kill for no other reason than they think you should die. So while Mr. Taylor is praising these terrorists for their ability to frighten drug dealers, he should remember that this ability came at the price of the sectarian violence he appears to cavalierly dismiss.

I am sorry but years of terrorist attacks on innocent bystanders; the deaths of thousands of men women and children; bombings; people shot because of their religious beliefs; people shot for saying or writing something someone disagreed with; are not, to me, an acceptable price to pay, even if Mr. Taylor seems comfortable with this because it makes threats made by the terrorists to drug dealers believable.

One week Mr. Taylor is praising our brave troops for fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and then he turns around and advocates turning terrorists in Canada as a solution to the drug problem. This would seem a little disingenuous and somewhat lacking in ethical consistency.

In keeping with the flow of ill considered babble, he laments the failure of the current system of criminal rehabilitation. Now when I see the failure of rehabilitation, whether criminal or addiction, I suggest looking around and trying practices that have been successful in other jurisdictions in achieving recovery or rehabilitation. Mr. Taylor suggests we forget about rehabilitation and concentrate on whipping our criminals into top physical shape, which would … make them better and more dangerous criminals.

So in the world Mr. Taylor fondly envisions, not only will we have the gang violence and shootings currently plaguing the lower mainland, we have the terrorists he wants to loose on our streets and the physically honed criminals he wants our prisons to churn out – all of these groups better armed than the police.

It is no wonder he supports the Canadian Armed Forces being in Afghanistan – we are going to need battle-hardened experienced guerrilla/terrorist fighting troops to retake our streets.

Mr. Taylor: solutions are not really solutions when they turn serious social problems into a societal disaster. Except to politicians who in their search for simple, easy solutions will thoughtlessly advocate anything that sounds good, no matter how negative the consequences would be.

It is this insistence on simplistic solutions to complex problems that have no easy, quick or perfect solutions that has us floundering with crime, the drug trade, rehabilitation and recovery. We just might want to try applying rational, realistic thought and planning which has demonstrated an ability to solve complex problems.

I do have a final question for Mr. Taylor: just what dictionary were you using that defined justice in terms of being dispensed by terrorists?

Lessons from Belfast:

One benefit of traveling as I am at the moment is the opportunity to see how other communities deal with the same problems we face. So, it was irresistible to explore why areas of Belfast that were the centres of violence during the sectarian conflict now have virtually no drug dealing, no break-and- enters and almost no instances of paedophilia, all severe problems for us.

A good place to start the search was Taughmonagh Social Club in a staunchly Protestant area of Belfast, once a known gathering place for the Protestant militias during the troubles. Not an easy place to get people to talk even when introduced by a member. But a good place to start because a once prevalent problem of drug dealing has totally disappeared.

The community became concerned because one individual was selling drugs to youngsters. He was twice warned (nobody would admit by whom). He had excuses – he’d just lost his job, and he had marital problems. But the community just didn’t care – enough was enough. Men with “woolly faces” (the local slang for balaclava-covered faces), apprehended him, questioned him in their own inimitable fashion and found heroin and crack in his possession.

He was hauled to a public area, his shirt stripped off, hot tar was poured on him and then the feather contents of two pillows was added. A notice was pinned around his neck saying “I am a drug selling scumbag.” The police were unable to find the offenders (local feeling is they didn’t try very hard), while the individual left the country and now lives in Scotland. Drug dealing in the area stopped overnight. In another case in a nearby Catholic area, a paedophile was beaten and then locked in a van with four pit bulls for over an hour. He is considered unlikely to reoffend.

These are not isolated instances. Known break-and-enter offenders, drug dealers and those committing crimes of violence are routinely beaten. In these areas crime is almost non-existent, although there is some tolerance, for instance sale of marijuana is considered benign. Are there lessons for us?

Obviously, vigilante justice can’t be supported (although I must admit an attraction to introducing paedophiles to pit bulls). However, brutal though these actions are, they do disprove a common mantra that “more severe sentencing won’t solve the problem.” It just depends on the severity of the punishment.

A few extra months in prison won’t solve the problem, but how about a different kind of punishment that makes the whole experience very unpleasant? The equivalent of army basic training for a few months, Spartan living conditions, out of bed at 5 a.m., run ragged until exhausted each day, no TV, no so-called “treatment programs” with virtually zero success rate. Such sentences would offend the more sensitive of our citizens and would cause some unemployment among psychologists and sociologists but the evidence from those jurisdictions that have implemented such schemes is that they work.

Perhaps when rehabilitation fails and when our justice system seems to favour offenders over victims, it is time to scare the hell out of the bad guys.

Ron Taylor is a former Mission councillor who remains active in community affairs. Abbotsford Post

Consider, Homeless

A Reply – to a comment.

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This is a reply to a discussion I had with someone commenting on one of my articles.

The complete denial of reality contained in your words “no freaking way am I gonna give a handout or support a handout for these slackers” serves to highlight why we continue be plagued by the problems of homelessness and addiction, not to mention so many other issues.

You are already spending tens of thousands of dollars on the homeless and those suffering the scourge of addiction- in the area of $50,000 per person on the streets. Once you begin to arrest and incarcerate people the cost per person doubles, then triples. If you doubt that I refer you to the government of BC website where you can find all the relevant costing data.

Perhaps your anger is such that you are completely happy to continue spending $$$ hundreds of thousands, $$$ millions per person and continuing this behaviour year in and year out. I would refer you to AA where in their hard earned wisdom they know that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insane. If you and others of like mind feel that the homeless should be left on the street, you are the ones who should be paying the $$$millions of extra dollars that following that course of action costs.

Even when my mental illness was at its most debilitating point I personally still retained enough common sense and connection to reality to know it is far more intelligent a reaction to acknowledge reality, not what one wishes to see, and deal with it by designing a system that supports and in most cases rehabilitates the homeless and the addict.

For many the unpalatable truth/reality of the matter is that it is far cheaper to put those who are incapable of working in some form of housing than it is to have them wandering the streets. That’s real life – DEAL WITH IT.

“what bothers me even more is people with ABLE BODIES AND SOUND MINDS ( even half with it ) are homeless”. All I can say is I do not know what addicts you hang with but the clients I deal with at the shelter are far from “ABLE BODIES AND SOUND MINDS”.

Addiction is a stone cold bitch and until you help them deal with their addiction they are not in any way, shape or form of able bodies and sound minds. Which brings to mind your words “who got themselves into their predicament because of their addiction”. The implication being that they chose to be addicts. No one, no matter how insane, chooses addiction. It is frighteningly easy to start out onto that slippery slope and slide down into addiction. And it is not a fate I would wish on my worst enemy.

“SOUND MINDS” A harsh truth, an indictment of our society, is the appalling number of homeless who are not of sound mind. There are several clients here tonight at the shelter who are incapable of looking after themselves. Who are condemned to the streets by those who see only what they want to see when they look at the homeless. There is no place, no agency of our “civilized” society that is charge with ensure those who cannot help themselves get the help they need. It is no wonder life is so hard when people are so harsh as to abandon the helpless to homelessness on the streets. Perhaps you would care to suggest that we reach into our barbaric past to once again take the elderly, the handicapped and mentally ill into the wilds and abandon to their death at the hands of the elements?

“what bothers me even more is people”; I will tell you what bothers me is people and a system so focused on denying the few, and as a percentage of the total we are speaking of a few, a tiny percentage who are not truly in need. They are so busy focusing on ensuring they deny help to those they deem unworthy, that they deny and inflict harm on those truly in need.

What bothers me is people who want to believe that the world is flat they refuse to see that in fact is (more or less) round; people who allow their anger (get a program) to drive them to unreasonable decisions and positions. That is to say they refuse to see just how much more it costs to deal with the homeless on the streets and in the legal system than it would cost to house them. Reclaiming those lives we can. And living with the economic realities of our society – it is far cheaper to enable lazy bums to be lazy bums than it is to pay through the nose just so we can be in denial about the reality of the world around us.

Case in point: Seattle recently opened a housing project aimed at housing the city’s worst drunks. Worse was defined as those who were costing the most to have on the streets (mostly medical, it is the USA, and police costs). We are speaking of a per person cost of $100,000 to as much as $1,000,000. It is now basically costing Seattle $19,000 per person per year. As I wrote to the radio host who was upset that the city was putting them up and allowing them to drink, if he and his listeners feel that strongly then they should approach the city and provide the money to cover the costs over the $19,000 the city currently spends. Why should the rational people of any city, province or country be required to pay for the irrational actions demanded by those who are angry or refuse to acknowledge what is, as opposed to what they want it to be.

What bothers me is the suffering and waste that refusing to act inflicts.

Let me close before this turns into a novel with a comment about your words “I work hard to provide for my family”. Are you aware that the number one reason for homelessness in Canada is now poverty? I have witnessed the growing number of clients at the shelter who are employed but lacking the cash to cover an unexpected expense found themselves on the streets. The current commercial with the can opener “ to pay her rent, she cannot afford to eat, to eat she cannot afford to….around the circle and back to … she cannot afford her rent, to pay her rent. The Post recently had an article about the Abbotsford Food Bank and how its clients have increased over only a few years from 980 per month to over 4,000 per month. I know and have spoken to the person in charge of the food bank. What frightens us both is how many of these people and families depend on the food bank for their food and who would face the choice between homelessness or starvation were it not for the Food Bank. The ugly truth is that as the cost of housing rises, not only in Abbotsford and the lower mainland but across the country, more and more of the working (40+ hours a week) poor are being forced into homelessness.

More worrisome is the growing number of people and families who will be forced onto the streets by any economic misfortune: lost job, unexpected bills (ie car repair) even to much sick time.

It is past time that we as a society get our heads out of…… and begin to deal with the real world, as it exists, around us in a mature, thoughtful, rational and creative way.

If not for reasons of personal honour, human decency and spirituality; then for the crass reason of enlightened self interest – it is simply to costly not to deal with these issues realistically.