Protester Lies to Media About Being "Homeless"

Downtown Eastsiders rallied on February 29th outside the office of developer Robert Wilson who owns Archer Realty and Georgia Laine Developments. They accused Wilson of charging rents exceeding the amount people are provided for rent on welfare cheques, forcing them to dip into their food money to cover the rent. They demanded that Wilson return their food money.

Charging tenants more than the welfare shelter allowance is not an uncommon practice. Certainly, Wilson was not the only landlord profiting from this practice.




Wendy Pederson, the woman with the red hair and the "Stop Speculation" sign, was a paid organizer of the event. She works for the Carnegie Community Action Project which agitates for higher welfare rates and more social housing.

Pederson had been expecting to pay the bus fares of the swarm of people she took to the rally from Carnegie Centre via BC Transit. But the bus driver, eager to show his support for the cause, made a snap decision to give them a free ride.

Rally participants and media -- lots of people with cameras -- met at Emery Barnes Park and then marched across the street to the office of Archer Realty, the one with the yellow sign (which can be seen across the street behind Pederson.)

CCAP claimed on posters announcing that Robert Wilson was "Wanted" for "Crimes Against the Downtown Eastside". They claimed on the poster that Wilson "refuses to pay back food money" despite being a "hotel flipper" who had recently sold five hotels for a profit of $10 million. What Wilson did, of course, was completely legal. Most or all of the hotels he sold were to the BC government to create social housing for the poor and mentally ill.




Nobody answered the door at Wilson's office.

A pre-arranged line up of people gave mini speeches in front of an "End Poverty" banner on which the Olympic rings were depicted as hand cuffs. But first the crowd was reminded that we were standing on Squamish land, a reminder that appears to have become obligatory at such events. Speakers accused the government of not doing enough while speculators worsen the homelessness problem.

Participants also sang. In the above photo, Earl Peach a professional musician who is paid to work on music projects with Carnegie Center -- he once sent the welfare poor emails requesting $20 to be in his choir -- is seen playing guitar as a small group sings. The song encouraged people to "rise up" and fight "oppression."



A tenant of the Shaldon Hotel, one of the hotels which Wilson has recently sold to the BC government, wore a "Stop Stealing Our Food Money" sign and spoke to the crowd. According to her calculations, Wilson owes $54,000 to those who had been dipping into their food money for the past year to pay rent. He was charging $450 for rent while the shelter allotment on welfare is $375. Tenants were therefore taking money from the "support" portion of their welfare cheque which is $180 (for food and other basics) to pay the rent.

Holding the microphone for the former Shaldon tenant is anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson, author of "Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion". Swanson is an unpaid activist with the Carnegie Community Action Project and is considered by many Downtown Eastsiders to be a mentor to Wendy Pederson.


Another pre-arranged speaker, Ada, told the crowd and cameras that she had been evicted from 324 Carroll St., a building owned by Wilson and now being turned into condos. Ada emphasized that as of tonight, she had "no place to go" and was "homeless." She didn't mention that her homelessness would last just one night, as she had been accepted into the Ford Building run by Affordable Housing at Main & Hastings, and would be moving in tomorrow. In fact, before coming to the rally, she had moved her belongings over to the Ford where they were being stored until a suite became available the next day. Her cat was facing homelessness though, as the Ford building doesn't take pets.

About 50 people attended this afternoon's rally -- including numerous reporters and photographers, which of course are the ones who really count. " The rally was part of an ongoing effort by the Carnegie Action Project and the Citywide Housing Coalition -- Mel Lehan, head of the Coalition, attended the rally -- to pressure the BC government to keep it's promise to build social housing as an Olympics legacy.


Thanks to D.W. for passing on these photos to us.

Props Prepared for Poverty Olympics

The finishing touches were put on props yesterday for Vancouver's Poverty Olympics on Sunday. A garbage can was wrapped in newspaper articles about homelessness and displacement on the Downtown Eastside, some of which anti-poverty activists blame on the 2010 Olympics. Crawling over the garbage can were mice, rats, a bedbug, and sitting on top was a cockroach.

Vancouver Olympics Protesters say: “Free the Fish, Homes for People”

Wendy Pederson, a paid organizer of the protest, is the woman with red hair and a blue jacket in the center with the microphone. The woman sitting at the bottom left in the light blue coat is Sheila Baxter, author of "Under the Viaduct" and other books about poverty.

Ada, who 'volunteers' at Carnegie Center doing dishwashing and other tasks in exchange for food vouchers, holds a fish at the protest. (Ada, your fish is upside down.)

Roughly ten brightly colored cardboard fish were held by people standing on the steps on the Vancouver Art Gallery at lunch time today.

The weather was more suitable to fish than to people, wet with puddles. But the sun appeared shortly after about 60 people gathered in front of the Art Gallery. They listened to speakers protesting the failure of oganizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics to make good on their promise to build social housing.

The protesters wanted the world to know that governments renegging on their promise to make social housing an Olympics legacy were considering coughing up $90 million to expand the aquarium in Stanley Park. In a handout at the protest, organizers summed up their case:
“While more than 2000 people are sleeping on our streets, the Vancouver Aquarium expansion is about to provide luxury homes to captive fish for $90 million. The fish aren’t happy about it and neither are Vancouver residents. “

With the exception of several reporters and tv cameras, the crowd was made up largely of familiar faces from the Vancouver left. Wendy Pederson, a key organizer of the event is becoming a big fish in their little pond. "Our governments are rolling in dough," Pederson, a full-time paid organizer for the Carnegie Action Project on the Downtown Eastside, told the crowd as she held a microphone on the steps. "All of the money they spend on these tourist projects and then on top of that, last year the province had a 4.1 billion dollar surplus. That’s money on top of all of their spending.”

Dag Walker, a blogger at the Vancouver site, Covenant Zone, has a different take on the surplus. "If the government has a 4.1 billion dollar surplus, they should be cutting taxes."

The Carnegie Action Project and the other groups which organized the protest, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users [VANDU], Citywide Housing Coalition, and Students for a Democratic Society, had one key demand: that the British Columbia government get to work right away and build 3,200 units of social housing.

The handout highlighting key points revealed a sense of entitlement characteristic of such protests: “Do I need to grow gills to get a home?”, Clyde Wright, Vice President, Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction and Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users member, was quoted as saying.

Some taxpayers take issue with this sense of entitlement. An argument heard on talk radio, for example, is that many working people can’t afford to live in downtown Vancouver so why should we build government housing downtown for welfare recipients and drug addicts.

Walker dismisses these left-wing protesters as "Sunday School teachers who think they know best and always need more money from the congregation for missionary work." Statements like the following from Pederson make him wince: "[The hand-made fish] represent our deep concern and love for those who are most harmed by those government policies. And it's shameful that they look after business interests and not after the interests of those who are most vulnerable."

A little girl – protesters say she was Pederson’s four yr. old daughter – stood with her head and arms poking out of holes cut into a big plastic red and gold fish, as her mother and others spoke. But like some taxpayers, she got tired of it real fast. She left with a pouty face.

Countdown clock to Olympic homelessness unveiled

Wendy Pederson is no slouch as an organizer. The thirty-something mother of two, with flaming red hair, has previously organized everything on the Downtown Eastside from the Whitecaps Stadium to a Block Party outside her Downtown Eastside apartment for the entire neighbourhood. From a family of gill netters – Pederson Hill in Surrey is named after her family – Pederson is now organizing on behalf of Vancouver’s homeless.

Pederson and a group of about 50 demonstrators shadowed Premier Gordon Campbell on the lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery this afternoon as he unveiled a giant clock to countdown to the Olympics just three years away. Pederson and her crew unveiled their own hand-made clock on the lawn, a clock for the “Countdown to Olympic Homelessness”.

The clock identifies the year 2010 as “Doomsday”, a time when homelessness will have tripled since 2006.

Pederson was recently hired as an organizer against homelessness by the Carnegie Community Action Project at Main & Hastings. Indeed many of the people who showed up at today’s demonstration are familiar faces from the Carnegie Community Centre.

Today, Pederson not only took a political approach to the issue of homelessness but a spiritual one. Developers are driven by “a factor of greed”, she explained, and promised repeatedly that developers and politicians would experience “true happiness and love” if they housed the homeless.

But Pederson wasn't without concrete steps for achieving this true happiness and love. "We need legislation from the city to protect the existing housing" from being converted to condos which are unaffordable to low income people, she says. She also wants a committment from the federal and provincial governments to fund more low income housing. And she wants welfare rates jacked up.

Of course not everyone agrees with such taxpayer-funded meddling in the free market. The opposition was summed up by a recent caller to the Bill Good radio show who challenged anti-homlessness advocates: he pointed out that most working people can’t afford to live in Downtown Vancouver, so it didn’t make sense to him for government to provide apartments in that core for people on welfare.

But the left-leaning Carnegie Community Action Project and their supporters are, Pederson believes, “on the logical high ground”. What's more, Pederson is not without a plan. She figures if she can get 20 people to each organize 20 more people to work for action on homelessness, she’ll be rolling.

[This posting may be updated as Mayor Sullivan has been asked to respond to claims made by Wendy Pederson.]

More members kicked out of Carnegie Centre

The Republic newspaper has picked up on some of the themes raised by the Downtown Eastside Enquirer about unfair barring practices at Carnegie Centre and whether Carnegie staff genuinely promote "community" on the Downtown Eastside. The author of the article, Tavis Dodds, specifically mentions the Downtown Eastside Enquirer and it's exposure of the barring of homelesss man Bill Simpson.

Peter Haskell and Ricky, two other men who have been barred from Carnegie Centre, are quoted in the article. Haskell's case is particularly interesting as he provides evidence that after being barred for free speech, he became the target of political psychiatry by a Carnegie staff person. The Downtown Eastside Enquirer has in the past pointed to emerging signs that Carnegie staff were participating in the epidemic of political psychiatry on the Downtown Eastside.

See The Republic article: Celebrating 104 years at Main & Hastings