Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon spent the weekend tut-tutting Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s new plan to , arguing the move will make the notorious Downtown Eastside neighbourhood even less safe.
“If we're saying that we're going to not support the people that are already in the community until we wait for somebody else to do something, it's just going to cause more unrest in the community,” Kahlon .
The housing minister said he shared the mayor’s frustration that other communities in the region haven’t pulled their weight on supporting housing, “but by saying that we're not going to have supportive housing, it means more people will be homeless, more people will be sleeping in parks, and that actually is a bigger detriment to community safety than actually having housing available for them.”
It was a soft criticism from Kahlon, all things considered. He’s publicly chastised other mayors harder, for less. And that might have something to do with the NDP’s own political vulnerabilities when it comes to the lack of progress on improving conditions in the DTES.
It was only two years ago that incoming Premier David Eby promised to assume responsibility for, co-ordinate and begin to detangle the many complex issues that plague the DTES.
“I think it’s right to say that the province is going to have to take it over,” Eby said.
“At the end of the day, you know, we might have to pass special legislation to assist with the co-ordination work, we'll have to work with property owners, 小蓝视频 Housing will have to be involved. And so there's a number of moving parts, but the goal of the whole thing will be to have a plan and a direction that we can implement to change the trajectory, which is a very negative one right now.”
Just two days after being sworn in, Eby unveiled an action plan for addressing street disorder. It involved new co-ordinated teams to arrest and prosecute violent offenders, expanded mental health crisis response teams, directives to Crown prosecutors to pursue jail for repeat violent offenders, new Indigenous justice centres, a seamless addictions care system at St. Paul’s Hospital and a crackdown on organized crime.
The goal, said Eby, was visible change.
“I try to be realistic about what's achievable in the short term and in the immediate term,” he said.
“Resolving the encampment on the sidewalks, that feels like an achievable goal for us to work on — and not just achievable, it feels essential. We can't just cede a neighbourhood to chaos, both for the people who live in the tents and for the broader community.”
Most of the initiatives Eby promised have actually been implemented. He even got bail reform from Ottawa. But they did not produce the outcomes, nor solve the problems, they were intended to target.
You’d be hard-pressed, 26 months later, to say the sidewalk encampments, open drug use, crime or disorder issues are demonstrably better in the DTES than they were before the premier’s action plan began.
Sim had stood behind Eby when he launched the provincial plan. Last week, he stood on his own at the Save Our Streets forum to pledge his own new path.
“Despite the fact hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the neighbourhood, the current approach has failed,” said Sim. “It’s time for a new direction.”
All that provincial and federal money has only created a “poverty industrial complex” that has made things worse, said Sim. Hence the mayor’s move to halt any net new supportive housing construction, until other Metro Vancouver municipalities create more of their own supply to handle their own vulnerable people.
The two levels of government now appear set for a disagreement over the future of the DTES.
But don’t expect any public fireworks or fiery recriminations from the province, as there would be if this was happening in, say, Surrey. That’s because of the early marker Eby put on the issue, and the lack of progress since then.
“Part of the caution that I approached this with is recognizing that there are a lot of, I would say, broadly well-meaning politicians that have wanted to improve conditions in the Downtown Eastside for many decades, and they've struggled and it's not been a lasting solution,” Eby said two years ago.
“So for it to last longer than my time in office, or any other politician's time in office, or the police chief or whatever, it's going to have to be an integrated plan that we're working on together.”
Turns out, it didn’t last. It didn’t even get started. Which is why Vancouver’s mayor is going to have extraordinary leash from the province to do his own thing, and why criticism from the provincial NDP, if it comes, will be muted at best.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering 小蓝视频 politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on C小蓝视频 Radio.
