Pubdate: Sun, 19 Nov 2006
Source: Winnipeg Free Press (CN MB)
Copyright: 2006 Winnipeg Free Press
Contact:  http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/502
Author: Trevor Lautens
Note: Lautens, a retired Vancouver Sun columnist, editorial writer 
and opinion-page editor, lives in West Vancouver, B.C.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

TOUGH LOVE FOR THE HOMELESS

Vancouver's Street People Should Be Forced To Get Help

I walked past a home in Vancouver's affluent West End the other day. 
It was in an alley. At first it looked like a pile of rubble dumped 
beside a construction site.

Another step brought me to the human being under its layers. Nothing 
rare in Vancouver these days. This was a home of one of the homeless.

This is supposed to make us ashamed of our society. Should it? 
Consider: Greater Vancouver's population is about 2.2 million. The 
homeless by definition are hard to count, but last year the Social 
Planning and Research Council of B.C. (SPARC) made probably the most 
ambitious such survey ever launched. It placed the number at 2,174, 
almost double the 2002 figure. My arithmetic makes that one-tenth of 
one per cent.

Recently, Homeless Awareness Week's Beverly Pitman was quoted in 
suburban Vancouver's tri-weekly North Shore News that between 2000 
and 2005 the number of homeless on the affluent North Shore also 
doubled -- from 44 to 85. (West Vancouver, which spars with 
communities like Oakville and Markham, Ont., for the title of 
Canada's richest, had exactly two, SPARC found.) The Vancouver Sun 
reported in recent weeks that homelessness in the tri-cities of Port 
Coquitlam, Coquitlam and Port Moody has risen "five times" since 2005 
- -- to l77.

So the percentage today in Greater Vancouver might have risen to 
one-fifth, maybe one-third of one per cent since the SPARC survey, 
taken March 15, 2005.

Only about 600 of the region's homeless were defined then as 
long-term -- homeless for one year or more. These figures are a 
triumph for our society. Free enterprise and government combine to 
accommodate almost all of the great migration of newcomers into the area.

Yet the homelessness issue is absorbing hugely disproportionate 
amounts of government funds, social capital and bureaucratic and 
academic time, to say nothing of indirectly subsidizing the media and 
especially radio talk shows by providing a perennial subject for 
phoney discussion and debate. We can all look, sound and write 
terribly earnest stuff and go away satisfied that we are "concerned." 
Very feel-good. Very B.S.

It says here that B.C.'s core homelessness can be reduced relatively 
simply, and the disgrace is that it isn't.

The 2005 SPARC B.C. findings point the way: "Health conditions were 
very common among the homeless, with 74 per cent of those counted 
having one or more health conditions (i.e., addiction, medical 
condition, mental illness, and/or physical disability)."

Got that? Three-quarters of the homeless have some kind of illness.

Next: "Addiction was the most common health condition. Almost half of 
the homeless who responded to this (survey) question reported 
problems with addiction. The share of street homeless reporting 
addiction (53 per cent) was higher than the share of the sheltered 
homeless (43 per cent)." Homeless youth under 25 had the highest rate 
of addiction, a jaw-dropping 56 per cent.

Got that? About half of the homeless are addicts. SPARC reported: 
"Most of those who reported they had a mental illness also reported 
they had an addiction" -- 60 per cent of those staying in shelters 
and 70 per cent of the street homeless.

Mental illness and addiction. Take those two factors out of the mix 
and there'd be more money and resources for the rest of the homeless 
- -- many of whom are just poor people with low skills, low literacy, 
no work, or unlucky. The real scandal starts with the British 
Columbia government's closing of Riverview Hospital, a 
long-established facility for the mentally ill, and downloading care 
of many of its patients on to hard-pressed regional health boards and 
communities.

That's monumentally stupid or monumentally cynical -- especially if 
the province isn't just saving costs on the backs of the mentally 
ill, but is, as some think, furtively planning to sell Riverview land 
to private developers.

(In fairness, Premier Gordon Campbell has been expressing doubts 
about closing Riverview but has taken no action.)

Dumping the mentally ill onto the streets, above all the 
schizophrenics who make up a large part of Vancouver's omnipresent 
panhandlers and binners (who make their living cashing in 
reyclables), is worse than stupid.

Schizophrenics are as helpless as children, easy meat for exploiters, 
including thieves and pimps. Some schizophrenics' families abandon 
them. For many of the long-term mentally ill, Riverview was the only 
home they knew.

Incarceration, that pejorative word, meant protection and stability.

Now, the addicted homeless. This leads into larger territory. A 
bullet has to be bitten here. The situation demands a massive, 
no-nonsense crusade, beginning with police and courts moving against 
big-time drug dealers with big-time penalties.

Meanwhile drug and alcohol addicts on Vancouver's mean streets should 
be interviewed, offered ample medical treatment and counselling, and 
required to show up at regular intervals for further treatment and 
assessment. If they don't, after a certain period of time, they 
should be picked up -- like those who have an outstanding warrant for 
their arrest.

The prison hospital -- by any soft euphemism -- would await them, 
where they could choose treatment or controlled access to their dream 
stuff of choice, with the exit pass of either cure or death. They 
wouldn't be on the streets. They wouldn't befoul the city. The 
infamous Downtown Eastside would no longer be a free-shooting city 
within a city, threatening law-abiding residents and scaring off 
visitors, and sucking up a grotesque share of Vancouver's policing 
budgets, health costs and political piety.

The Vancouver media's one voice of sanity and experience on this 
issue was radio broadcaster David Berner, a street-wise former social 
worker who scorned the weak nostrums of Vancouver's past mayor Philip 
Owen and incumbent Sam Sullivan. His station dropped him.

Yes, the theorists and lawyers would cry out that individual freedom 
was being compromised. They'd be right. At present our society is 
protecting neither the freedom of the inner city's decent citizens -- 
their children, schoolyards, homes, property, streets in a state of 
perpetual siege, a total dereliction of civic and provincial duty -- 
nor of the homeless mentally ill and addicted who are already unfree. 
Once the latter use up the chances offered to them, only through 
incarceration can they hope for true liberation.

The "experts" shake their heads and lament that the problems are "complex."

What they really fear is the simple solution that is hard.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman