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.
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.
In July 2013, an explosion involving 74 oil-laden railcars destroyed the centre of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 residents. Transportation Safety Board of Canada photo.
There are at least four pipelines proposed for the Athabasca oil sands that look as if they will be stalled in various stages of planning for years to come. But oil continues to move out of Alberta via existing infrastructure and, increasingly, railways.
In 2014, 3,500 train cars carried approximately 279,000 tonnes of oil through British Columbia. That’s up from just six cars that carried 251 tonnes to B.C. destinations five years earlier, in 2009.
Andrew Weaver is B.C.’s lone Green Party MLA and the representative for Oak Bay–Gordon Head. “As the desperation to get this stuff to market grows larger, what we are seeing is the move, more and more, towards putting it in railcars,” he told the Straight. “This is remarkable. I knew it had gone up. But to see that it has gone up more than 1,000 times is remarkable.”
The final numbers for 2014 are slightly lower than projected figures the Straightreported on last January. According to Greg Stringham, vice-president of markets and oil sands for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, they mark a slowdown in the rate at which the volume of oil moved by rail has increased in recent years. That trend is likely to continue when numbers eventually come in for 2015, he added.
“Lower world oil prices have really made it more challenging for the economics of rail,” Stringham said in a telephone interview. “So while there was a trend up in our forecast for the last few years, we’ve seen that flatten, if not decrease, this year [2015].”
He noted that across the country, it is only about three percent of oil that’s transported via rail. Stringham also said that the increase in oil by rail that’s occurred over the last five years is not entirely the result of regulatory delays slowing pipeline proposals.
“Rail has been able to provide a niche and also a swing capacity, in the short term, that is quicker to action than the pipeline process,” he explained. “So we have now built into our forecast a small amount of rail on a permanent or ongoing basis.”
In the past, Weaver has attracted criticism for suggesting that if Alberta’s heavy crude is coming to B.C.’s coast, pipelines are a safer means of transport than rail. Today, he argued this shouldn’t be an either-or situation.
“We know that if we want to deal with global warming, 80 percent of global fossil-fuel reserves have to stay in the ground,” he said. “It is folly to continue down this path.”
This article originally appeared in print and online at Straight.com on July 29, 2015
B.C. Housing CEO Shayne Ramsey recent led a tour of various supportive-housing sites around the Downtown Eastside, several which fit into a Housing First strategy the province has adopted in partnership with the City of Vancouver. Travis Lupick photo.
SFU associate professor Julian Somers describes himself as a big fan of Housing First, a social policy wherein homeless people who struggle with a mental illness or addiction issue are given a room as the first step in getting their lives on track. But Somers told the Straight that a study he conducted suggests there’s one area where the benefits of Housing First may hit a wall.
“The model that we implemented based on Housing First doesn’t, on its own, have an impact on problematic substance use,” Somers said in a telephone interview. “I think one of the chief implications would be that we need to strengthen the quality, availability, and diversity of addiction treatment.”
Somers described his latest paper—which saw publication July 16 in the academic journal Addiction—as the first to quantifiably test this aspect of Housing First.
For two years, researchers followed 497 Vancouver residents who were both homeless and diagnosed with a mental illness. A control group of 200 was marked “treatment as usual” and not given a room, while 297 people were provided with independent housing plus support services such as mental-health care.
When researchers compared the two groups’ drug-use habits, it was found that Housing First “did not reduce daily substance use compared with treatment as usual”.
Somers emphasized that these findings do not detract from previous research concluding that Housing First’s benefits justify its costs. (A 2014 Mental Health Commission of Canadareport, for example, states that when the same group of people described above entered the Housing First program, the result was fewer visits to the emergency room, fewer interactions with the justice system, and “significant and meaningful improvements in community functioning and quality of life”.)
Somers added that this month’s findings related to drug use do not address cause and effect.
“Addiction treatment, period, is really hard to come by,” he explained. “The finding may really be related to the broader observation, that if you have an addiction in Vancouver and you are well-employed and wealthy, you may still have a problem getting adequate treatment.”
Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang defended Housing First while acknowledging there are limits to its benefits.
“We’ve always known this,” he said on Somers’s findings related to drug use. “His research has demonstrated that Housing First is a necessary but not always sufficient condition to help somebody get off the street.”
For that reason, Jang stressed, a number of supportive-housing sites the city has developed with the province not only provide people with a room, but also include support services such as rooms reserved for at-risk youth and mental-health care services.
“It’s more and more common that the folks in our housing are the most ill,” he said. “They have a mental health and addiction problem. Concurrent disorders. And those guys can be expensive and difficult to treat. But they can be treated.”
This article was originally published at Straight.com on July 25, 2015.
RainCity Housing’s Aaron Munro and Amelia Ridgway describe the Marguerite Ford Apartments as a “success story” but also say it is “still a work in progress”. Travis Lupick photo.
From the seventh-floor patio of the Marguerite Ford Apartments building at West 2nd Avenue and Cook Street, the Downtown Eastside looks very far away.
Indeed, it is for the many residents who came from shelters or who were sleeping on the streets before they found a room at this supportive-housing facility on the edge of Olympic Village.
“We’ve had amazing successes,” said Aaron Munro, a project lead with RainCity Housing, the building’s non-profit operator. “People who have reconnected with their families, people who have been able to go back to work, or people just having a place that is safe.”
“I’ve worked with some of the folks in this building for over 10 years, and to see them having their own kitchen, their own bathroom, and cooking for themselves,” he continued, trailing off. “We haven’t been successful at being able to keep everybody here, but the majority of folks have been able to settle into the building and are doing really well.”
Standing on that rooftop patio alongside Munro was Amelia Ridgway, an associate director with RainCity Housing. The two described a situation at the Marguerite as a huge improvement over the picture that emerged through 2014 media reports that began with a story in the Courier. That article by Mike Howell revealed police had received 729 calls to the Marguerite during its first 16 months of operation.
Since then, things have improved but challenges remain, and not just at the Marguerite. This building is one of 14 the city and province have opened to tenants as part of a partnership on housing that began in 2007. An ongoing series by the Straight reveals a number continue to experience growing pains that persist more than a year or longer after tenants begin moving in.
As previously reported, Vancouver Police Department statistics for the first 11 of these buildings to come online 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.
Statistics for the Marguerite fit this pattern. Police calls spiked at nearly 50 per month during the middle of the site’s first year. That was during the second half of 2013. According to statistics for the first six months of 2015, the number of police visits to the Marguerite has since declined, but still remains high compared to buildings that rent at market rates. Police visits to the Marguerite now average 31.5 per month.
Ridgway noted a high percentage of the Marguerite’s 147 units are occupied by medium and high-needs individuals. (When the building opened, 50 percent of tenants were previously homeless or living in a shelter and another 30 percent came from Vancouver’s generally shoddy single-room-occupancy hotels. Since then, RainCity has moved more lower-needs tenants into the building with the goal of creating more of a balance.) She said that means there will sometimes be challenges.
“I think everyone’s take on this is it is still a work in progress,” Ridgway added.
The city’s willingness to move a more challenging population into the Marguerite is related to a social policy known as Housing First, wherein homeless people who struggle with a mental illness or addiction issue are given a room as the first step to getting their lives on track.
SFU associate professor Julian Somers is at the front of a group of Vancouver researchers who have spent years studying Housing First. He told the Straight the pattern that appears in the VPD’s statistics is similar to data he’s analyzed in the past.
“We basically did a literature review and found that there was no evidence of increases in crime rates or declines in property values following the introduction of buildings like that,” Somers said in a telephone interview.
He added the benefits of Housing First extend beyond individual buildings and the people formerly homeless who live in them. “In terms of the city-wide numbers, clearly, introducing Housing First leads to an overall reduction in the amount of crime being committed and the number of convictions that are associated with that,” Somers said.
Don Gardner sits on community advisory committees for two supportive-housing sites located in Mount Pleasant. The first is at Kingsway and 12th Avenue and the second is at Broadway and Fraser Street.
He told the Straight his experiences with those buildings match the pattern present in the VPD statistics obtained by the Straight. (Though much more so for first than the second, which has also not been open for as long.)
“All of the sudden, we started noticing a lot more homeless on the street and a lot more characters hanging around,” Gardner recalled. “Break-ins were going up. And that kind of peaked and stayed up for a period of time after the opening.”
Gardner added that while calls to police have since declined, the question remains of why that is the case. He noted residential towers neighbouring these two supportive-housing sites have increased security. Gardner said that might have more of an impact on crime than anything to do with changes at the city’s buildings.
“We’ve all basically hardened our building,” he explained. “When they see you’ve got new cameras everywhere and new deadbolts, they are going to move down the street to the next target.”
At the same time, Gardner repeated that things have improved since the two sites opened.
“Now that there is a core of people in the building, they have taken some ownership of that building and they feel it is there home,” he said. “So if new people come in and there is a problem, they are as much an advocate for the community because it is their community as well.”
Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang acknowledged residents’ concerns. “There is a lot of fear,” he told the Straight. “And so we actually invite them and we ask them to call us if they see anything.” Jang suggested that could help explain why a supportive-housing site attracts so many calls to police during its first year in operation.
Back at the Marguerite, Ridgway stressed she’s optimistic the number of calls to police will continue to decline.
“For some members of the community, moving in just took a little bit of time to get settled and to begin to feel safe again,” she said. “We can all identify with moving being stressful. And I think that having that year to really settle into their spaces has made a really big difference.”
John Pate, a resident of a new supportive-housing site in the Downtown Eastside, says such building’s higher-needs tenants are easy to get along with if people don’t sweat the small stuff. Travis Lupick photo.
One summer evening in 2013, Ronna Chisholm looked out an office window at a construction site across the intersection of Alexander Street and Princess Avenue.
Thinking aloud to a colleague working late, Chisholm asked if he knew anything about their soon-to-be neighbours.
“He said, ‘It’s going to be a shelter,’ ” she recounted. “And he just went, ‘It’s going to be awful. There is going to be police here constantly.’ ”
Chisholm, cofounder and president of a design firm called Dossier Creative, said that sentiment reminded her of lessons she learned from Milton Wong, the well-known financier and philanthropist whom she described as a mentor during her time at UBC.
“It was a conversation that sparked my thinking and connected the dots with previous conversations with Milt, and then the idea of…how we might help change the conversation,” she said.
When tenants began moving into 111 Princess in November 2014, a group of Dossier Creative interns was there waiting with gift bags that included items like coffee mugs donated by J J Bean (another neighbour). Seven months later, Chisholm said, she still visits the building’s third-floor lounge for a weekly game of snooker.
But she conceded that her colleague’s predictions about the building weren’t wrong. “After Christmas, you did see lots of police cars,” Chisholm said. “And I know there was a bit of chatter in January. ‘Oh, did you see there were three police cars? Did you see there was police cars there again?’.”
According to Vancouver Police Department statistics provided to the Straight, officers made 61 trips to 111 Princess last month.
The building, one of 14 the city is developing as social housing in partnership with the province, was designed for Vancouver’s so-called hard-to-house, so some disruptive behaviour was expected. But that number of visits in a single month makes 111 Princess the most problematic of the 12 sites that are up and running.
Even so, Chisholm called it a success. She suggested that people in other neighbourhoods might feel the same about supportive-housing developments if they only got to know the people living in those buildings.
Ted Bruce is interim executive director of the Portland Hotel Society, the nonprofit that operates 111 Princess, which staff have dubbed the Alexander Street Community. He stressed that those police visits are seldom in response to one person harming another.
“This is a population with very high needs,” Bruce said in a phone interview. “There is even a special unit in there of 39 beds where some of the most difficult hard-to-house folks have moved into. So it’s challenging for us to have that site compared to other sites.”
Specific to the recent spike in calls to the Princess, Bruce revealed there are also extenuating circumstances at play. Digging into the VPD stats obtained by the Straight, he found a significant portion of the calls were related to just one person. “One of the highest needs individuals we serve,” Bruce added. “My staff feel the calls will drop back.”
John Pate is an Alexander Street Community resident with lower needs than most people in the building. How does he feel about living there when police are showing up sometimes more than twice a day?
In an interview in his 10th-floor room, Pate said it doesn’t bother him. “There are worse things happening on the planet than people doing drugs in an elevator,” he explained. “Most of these people have experienced a traumatic event in their life.”
When Pate recounted moving in last December, he described it as “the best Christmas present I’ve ever received”.
He had come from the Cosmopolitan, Pate recounted, a run-down hotel on the zero block of West Hastings. “No window, no sink, and meth heads all around me,” he continued. “Junkies, thieves, entrepreneurs, businessmen,” he said, trailing off.
At the Alexander Street Community, Pate said he sees himself as part of a social mix that brings “balance” to the building, adding that that’s a role he’s happy to play.
As the Straightreported on July 8, VPD statistics for a selection of Vancouver’s more problematic social-housing sites reveal a pattern in which a building requires less attention after an initial one-year period. The Alexander Street Community is in the middle of that period, when emergency calls usually peak. So the numbers indicate that things are likely to improve at 111 Princess soon.
In the meantime, Chisholm reported that Dossier Creative’s employees and other tenants of the space they share are getting along well with their new neighbours across the street.
“I think, normally, our perceptions are: police equals crime and police equals fear, and there must be something horrific going on,” she explained. “Then we started going over there and breaking through the barrier.”
In September 2013, Vancouver police chief Jim Chu and Mayor Gregor Robertson issued recommendations to address what they say is a growing crisis of severe, untreated mental illness. Yolande Cole photo.
During the first half of 2015, the Vancouver Police Department saw a slight decline in the number of apprehensions its officers made under the B.C. Mental Health Act.
B.C. Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay stands outside a new social-housing development at 111 Princess Avenue, where police have had to respond to calls more than 60 times per month since the facility opened in December 2014. Travis Lupick photo.
A new supportive-housing facility at Princess Avenue and Powell Street is generating a lot of calls to police. In June, Vancouver Police Department officers made 61 visits, an all-time high since the building at 111 Princess Avenue opened six months earlier.
It’s one of 14 sites the city is developing as social housing in partnership with the province following an agreement that was approved in 2007. The projects are characterized by things like below-market rents, units set aside for at-risk youth, and, in the case of the Princess, limited health-care services.
As the 139 rooms began to fill with tenants in December 2014, the number of police calls rose steadily, starting with 32 the first month it was open and increasing to the high of 61 recorded in June.
“When you start going to a building 20 or 30 times a month, that is a lot,” conceded Const. Brian Montague, a spokesperson for the force. “But there is some fear there that is not necessarily justified.”
According to VPD data supplied at the Straight’s request, things are likely to improve at the troubled Princess.
So far, 11 of the city’s 14 sites are up and running. Review VPD statistics for the first year each of those buildings was open and a pattern emerges.
Eight of the 11 recorded a steady increase in the number of calls to police for the first five to seven months of operation. But after that time, the number of calls began to decline. By the end of each building’s first year, VPD visits were substantially fewer than the number around the midyear peak. (There were a small number of deviations for those eight addresses. For buildings that did not fit this pattern, the number of calls was significantly lower to begin with.)
At Pacific Coast Apartments (337 West Pender Street), for example, there were 11 calls during its first month, 17 at the midyear point, and six during month 12. For the Sorella (525 Abbott Street), those numbers were eight, 22, and 10. And for the Marguerite Ford Apartments (215 West 2nd Avenue), they were four, 49, and 34.
What’s more, the pattern’s decline generally continues beyond the one-year period analyzed by the Straight.
“If you look at the more recent data, say, for the last couple of months, again there is a downward trend,” Montague said. “The Marguerite Ford is a good example: calls for service in the last year compared to the first year are about half.”
Montague emphasized a number of caveats. For instance, the data only pertain to calls to each specific address and so would not include an incident that involved a tenant but occurred down the street. But he described the pattern as an indication that social-housing projects are not as damaging to a neighbourhood as residents of some communities worry. (In Yaletown, for example, people have started petitions in failed attempts to keep supportive-housing developments out.)
Montague also noted that any large residential tower is going to attract a certain number of calls. “We do attend regular buildings,” he said. “Not every day, but we do go multiple times in one month, depending on the size of the building.”
On a walk around the Downtown Eastside, B.C. Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay stressed that buildings with a high volume of police calls are housing people who need support for issues such as mental illness.
“That’s largely related to the client groups that have been housed in those developments,” he said. “The 14 city sites and those kinds of projects really try to tackle the issue when you’re faced with it at the end of the line.”
Both Montague and Ramsay noted the nature of the calls in question. The majority were for events like a suicide attempt or a drug overdose, or to check a person’s well-being.
“This isn’t people harming other people,” Ramsay said.
Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang told the Straight he’s observed similar patterns, where calls to the city spike when a site opens and then decline to a point where a building is considered a “success story”.
Jang described the VPD’s data as evidence in favour of “housing first”, a social policy proposing that support for a homeless person is most effective when it begins with a room that doesn’t have behavioural conditions attached, such as zero tolerance for drug use.
“It [the VPD data] is a very broad indicator, but it suggests that as people are getting inside, people are settling down,” he said. “That is what we are seeing. People start to accept help.”
