Pubdate: Thu, 20 Mar 2014
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2014 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Pete McMartin
Page: 1

PHS SOCIETY DIDN'T ALWAYS 'PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS'

Non-profit may have jeopardized the good work it has done in the
Downtown Eastside

One of the most unpleasant interviews I have endured in four decades
of journalism was a few years back with Mark Townsend. Townsend is the
guy who, with a stiff push from the provincial government, resigned
his job this week as executive director of the Portland Hotel Society.
The PHS is the Downtown Eastside's largest social welfare agency.

Joining him out the door were several board members and his wife, Liz
Evans, co-executive director of PHS, and co-founder of the society
with Townsend.

The couple earned hefty salaries: According to the latest remuneration
figures filed with the Canada Revenue Agency, the highest-paid
employees of PHS - presumably Townsend and Evans, though they were not
named - earned between $ 120,000 to $ 159,999. The poverty business
has not impoverished them. For our interview, Townsend and I met at a
coffee house downtown.

After the usual pleasantries were out of the way, the interview
rapidly deteriorated. He was confrontational, aggressive and
suspicious. Why was I interested in the PHS? What was my angle? What
kind of piece was I going to write? He clearly believed I had an
agenda that was meant to harm the PHS.

The talk grew tense, and after it became apparent it wasn't going
anywhere and I wasn't going to get any information, I got up and left.

Townsend and the PHS have thrived on friction. In 1997, Townsend, then
described as an AIDS activist, was dragged out of the Hyatt Hotel
ballroom after he shouted at Prime Minister Jean Chretien to do
something about Vancouver's drug addiction problem.

In 2007, when the federal government withdrew funding for Insite, the
supervised injection site, the PHS filed suit to keep it open and won
the case that eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

And the Society's sometimes fractious relationship with other social
welfare agencies in the Downtown Eastside is well known. In 2012,
Charles Campbell, a former Sun editor and editorial writer, was
commissioned by Vancouver Coastal Health to examine VCH's relationship
with the social welfare groups in the DTES. In his report, Working
with Health Agencies and Partners in the Downtown Eastside, Campbell
wrote:

"The Portland Hotel Society, the largest agency in the Downtown
Eastside, is widely regarded as an organization that has achieved
great things but does not always play well with others."

One of those agencies was VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug
Users, which, among other things, helped establish Insite. At one
time, VANDU operated under the aegis of the PHS, which handled funds
for VANDU under contract from Vancouver Coastal Health. Its overall
budget was, and still is, less than Townsend's and Evans's combined
salaries.

Yet by 2005, VANDU had ended its relationship with the PHS after it
approached Vancouver Coastal Health and asked to deal directly with
the health authority. According to Ann Livingstone, then VANDU's
executive program director, there was concern how the PHS was keeping
its books. The PHS, Livingstone said, was reluctant to share financial
information with them.

"Our main goal was to get away from ( PHS)," Livingstone said,
"because it was too difficult to deal with."

The PHS hasn't shirked from biting the hand that feeds it, either. In
2012, the PHS staged protests against a Vancouver Coastal Health
decision to not step in and take up funding of a women's addiction
program at the Rainier Hotel, which had been previously funded by the
federal government. The Rainier, no surprise, was operated by the PHS.

One PHS- organized protest was held in front of Premier Christy
Clark's Point Grey office. A second, featuring protesters carrying
black caskets, marched on the Vancouver Coastal Health offices at the
foot of the Cambie Bridge.

At present, the PHS has some 17 contracts with Vancouver Coastal
Health and in 2013 said it received $ 21,731,000 in provincial
funding. In the increasingly tight funding of social welfare, that is
cause for some serious apple-polishing, if not outright
ass-kissing.

Instead, the demonstrations showed an organization that had grown so
large and so convinced of its own power that it felt its work was
above the tawdry business of politics. Turns out it was wrong.

This column was written before the government released on Thursday
morning its audit of the PHS. That audit may be damning, it may be
less so.

But the story of the PHS isn't just in its numbers. It is also in the
harm it has done itself. Whatever its finances, it may have
jeopardized the good work it has done in helping the neighbourhood's
most marginal residents.

Said Karen O'Shannacery, executive director of the Lookout Emergency
Aid Society, and who admires the work the PHS has done:

"They have an approach that's different from Lookout ... that makes it
very aggressive in their approach, and that has been absolutely a
disservice to them ... and that is the reality that they have to live
with now. But the service they championed, that they've created, is
really, really excellent."
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MAP posted-by: Matt