Rush Hour Traffic Stopped to Protest Closure of Health Contact Centre

At rush hour on Monday, traffic was stopped at Main & Hastings by people protesting the closure of the nearby Health Contact Centre. There was another planned for Tuesday afternoon outside the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre. Protesters were chanting, "Save the Contact Centre, the Contact Centre Saves Lives."

Those povertarian jobs are union which is why the BCGEU yellow flags were there.

I was only at the Health Contact Centre a couple of times, when it first opened. I remember they had a gigantic board on the wall listing the programs they offered. One was knitting classes. I remember they also had free peppermint tea, that you could help yourself to.

I went there because a friend and his pals used to sit in there in the evening and use their laptops and he asked me to help him fix his laptop. So we went in there and sat in an empty room, one that musicians usually used. We were in there no more than 5 minutes and a woman who worked there came by and yelled at us to get out of that room. She was a real bull, just another abusive povertarian with zero communication skills.

There may have been some good going on in the Health Contact Centre; I didn't see it. I knew a guy who seemed to enjoy playing music in there at night after he left Carnegie.

There was definitely a nanny state function to the place. I saw that when I talked to an acquaintance who lived in a room on the Downtown Eastside with his wife. He used to be a fisherman and lived up Vancouver Island in a town that he said "went ghost". He and his wife started doing crack and had their last kid taken away, a kid they had named "Chance", as they considered him their last chance. They were hustlers and quite high functioning when it came to earning extra cash to top up their welfare. Anyway, he told me that his wife had told him to drop by the Health Contact Centre and get some sanitary napkins 'cause they were giving them out free, and why buy them if you can score them for free. So he went over there and came back with eight. Eight from the nanny state.

Now people have to walk all the way over to Oppenheimer Park to load up on free sanitary napkins. I guess that's what Coastal Health meant when they said services were being duplicated.

I got the impression the Contact Centre had shrunk when I looked in the door more recently, but I didn't pay much attention. I did notice Mark Townsend, who along with his wife is co-director of the Portland Hotel Society [PHS] which runs the Downtown Eastside poverty industry like a company town, quoted in the newspaper as saying that the Contact Centre was the size of a "postage stamp". He said it was too small to be a longterm drop-in centre, so he supported the closure. What he didn't mention was that the funding for the Contact Centre is being transferred to the LifeSkills Centre. Guess who runs the LifeSkills centre? Mark Townsend and the PHS.

Anti-Olympics Activists Hang "Riot 2010" Banner in Chinatown Today

This afternoon at about 4:20 p.m., I was walking down Main St. near Pender in Chinatown when I came across this huge "Riot 2010" banner. When I walked back 15 minutes later it was gone.


But a sandwich board on the sidewalk outside remained.

Trafficking in Disruption: Insite Supporters Hold Street Party in Rush Hour

I have an insight. The block party Insite supporters held yesterday afternoon was an attempt to embarrass freshly re-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Insite supporters -- particularly the Portland Hotel Community Services Society executives and staff who operate Insite -- don't want Harper to shut down this space where junkies in Vancouver can drop-in to shoot-up. The Harper government is appealing a court decision that the nurse-supervised drug injection site must be kept open because it is a health service to which drug users have a right. The use of tax dollars to finance a cocaine and heroin shooting gallery is enough to make Harper shiver in his trademark sweater vest.

On Thursday, a party was held on the street in front of Insite on the Downtown Eastside in support of keeping the facility open. It was a party against the Conservative party.

The dark green building in the background with people clustered around the door is Insite.

A white tent at the block party in front of Insite housed speakers blasting recorded music and a huge poster with the words, “Play Music Not Politics”. A band was scheduled to play but the cops put a stop to it, as organizers did not have a permit for this rush hour street party.

Don’t ask me how Insite supporters believed they could get public sympathy by suddenly disrupting traffic on the 100 block Hastings St. during rush hour, just after 5 p.m. That’s a six lane — four lanes of moving traffic and two parking lanes — major commuter artery. A witness who arrived early at the party, says there was some traffic flow until police arrived and shut down the entire block, apparently for safety reasons.

Photo: A cluster of Vancouver Police stood on Hastings, a few doors east of Insite, watching the party.

The City of Vancouver had refused the Portland Hotel Community Services Society a permit to hold the party on Hastings at rush hour, but organizers did so anyway. Breaking the law may not be a way for the Portland Hotel Community Services Society to convince Prime Minister Harper, who ran in this month’s federal election on a ‘law and order’ platform, to allow them to continue to operate Insite. (Insite needs the Harper government to renew it’s exemption from the law, an exemption granted temporarily by a previous Liberal government since Insite provides a place for injection of illegal drugs.)

Photo above: Motorcycle cops parked on Columbia St. to prevent cars and buses from traveling onto the 100 block Hastings once the party got going.

Anyone who listens to Vancouver talk radio knows that inconveniencing commuters by blocking traffic on streets and bridges is becoming an issue. This year commuters have demanded to know why police blocked them during rush hour on the Lions Gate bridge for a film crew and for hours on the Second Narrows for somebody threatening to commit suicide.

Photo above: Vancouver Police were preventing pedestrians from using the sidewalk on the south side of the 100 block Hastings, across from the party.

There were lots of placards saying, “Trust the Evidence.” Such slogans are often used by Insite supporters despite the fact that the evidence for Insite has been mixed. Margaret Wente of the Globe & Mail, Canada’s most liberal national paper, wrote a column in July, “We Still Await the Scientific Proof of Harm Reduction’s Success“, outlining just how mixed the evidence is.

The propaganda at the party was effective. There were several black and white posters of children, posters the size of bus shelter images — one of a kid posing with his bicycle, another of a kid posing for what appeared to be a school photo — with captions, “Before they were “junkies” they were kids.”

This party was a made-for-media event, like so many political events on the Downtown Eastside. Lots of media had obviously been notified of the event as they were everywhere taking photos and interviewing people. The mainstream Vancouver media is sympathetic to Insite and tends to accept the prepared scripts they are fed. As media personality Pia Shandel, who opposed the supervised injection site said while a host on CFUN radio, the Vancouver media seem to make up their minds early on to support Insite.

Once media are invited to a political protest on the Downtown Eastside, a crowd is attracted by giving out free food. A couple of hundred poor people lined up at yesterday’s party waiting to be served free burgers. Potato chips and pop were given out later. The line-ups may have been longer if the monthly welfare checks hadn’t come out Wednesday.

Photo above: A man serves burgers wearing a t-shirt reading, “Do what’s right, support insite.”

Note the bars on the windows of the shop in the background. About 20 years ago, I was in a bus going up Main St. and an American tourist said to his fellow travelers in a New Jersey accent, “What do you notice about this city? No bars on the windows.” Now there are bars on most shop windows. Cops say “drug sick” people needing fix are pulling many break-ins.

Photo: As soon as the party started on Hastings St., numerous police moved in and limited it to a couple of lanes. Police refused to allow any traffic onto the opposite lanes, apparently for safety reasons.

Vancouver Police spokeswoman Jana McGuinness said police and other City of Vancouver staff had discussions with the PHS Community Services Society about a less disruptive spot to hold the event. "We offered them a permit on a location 100 feet away on Columbia [Street] where they could party all night if they wanted to", McGuinness said. But these events are above all about attracting public attention to a cause. Disrupting Hastings St. traffic during rush hour, resulting in an inevitable clash with police, could draw more attention and get more press than a party on a side street.

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.