APPROACH TO SOCIAL WOES A MORAL FAILURE BY ALL THREE MAIN B.C.
PARTIES

Betty Anne and Max Hunter crossed Canada by train to celebrate their
honeymoon. They got more than just scenery, though, when their train
trundled into Vancouver.

"You have such a beautiful country," Betty Anne said in her warm Texas
drawl, sipping a beverage inside the Terminal City Club. "But we were
so surprised when we got into Vancouver."

"Oh," I said. "Why's that?"

"Welllll . . ." she hesitated, clearly not wanting to be
impolite.

I urged her on.

"Well, when we were coming into Vancouver on the train, there were all
these homeless people living on the side of the train tracks and on
the streets, under plastic tents. It looked like something out of one
of those movies about the Depression. I was surprised, we didn't see
anything like it in your other cities..."

She took a breath.

"Then," Betty Anne continued, "when I was coming out of the hotel,
this young woman came up to me and asked me for money. She said that
someone had stolen her horse.

"At first I didn't know what she was talking about. I asked Max, 'Why
would she have a horse?' "

Max, sipping a beer, looked up.

"I told her horse is the word for heroin," he said. "The girl was
saying someone had stolen her drugs, Betty Anne."

"I wondered at first what she was talking about," continued Betty
Anne. "It was so strange a thing to see in a beautiful city like
yours. Someone ought to help all those poor people, don't you think?"

Sometimes it takes the eyes of an outsider to put a problem in its
full perspective.

The truth is, there's been something cruel and Dickensian about how
this city's homelessness crisis has been handled. Correction, make
that colossally mishandled.

You can't really put the blame on any one politician, either, though
the political activists always try. Just about everyone's culpable in
varying degrees since we've put up with this public policy failure for
years.

I found myself trying to explain to Betty Anne why she had seen what
she had in Vancouver. It was tough going. But here's the fast-rewind
of the amazing arc of policy blunders -- given to us by a melange of
Social Credit, New Democratic and Liberal governments -- that I tried
to explain.

First, imagine progressively shrinking the province's major
psychiatric hospital, Riverview, to save money. Then, in a cruel
twist, offer no safe harbour for many of those psychiatric patients,
who politicians told us would benefit from being "deinstitutionalized"
and put back into society.

Instead, let large numbers of these truly desperate souls fend for
themselves on our streets. Let them line up for a room in those
bedbug-infested flophouses our health inspectors, for reasons that
mystify, somehow allow to stay open. While we're at it, we'll also
slow down the construction of new social housing, too, since it's too
expensive.

"Oh, my," said Betty Anne.

And now the Downtown Eastside is gentrifying, Betty Anne; it's going
to be our version of New York City's Tribeca. So now we've got all
these lost souls begging and wandering the city's downtown, often in a
schizophrenic or crystal meth haze.

But we really haven't done much about it. We're not good at the tough
job of distinguishing between vagrants (who should be moved on by the
cops), or chronic criminals (who should be put in jail by judges) and
the truly sick (who should be taken to shelters or hospitals by good
beat cops, if we had enough of them).

Nope. We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks
and inside the doorways of the world's "most livable" city. I told
Betty Anne and Max that the young woman wanting money for her heroin
was probably not unlike other drug-addicted women who were the victims
of our serial killer, Willie Pickton. He saw the Downtown Eastside as
a human hunting ground.

"My gosh," said Betty Anne. "That's awful."

Sure is. The truth is that our approach to the mentally ill, drug
addicted and homeless has been a moral failure. It's never made
political sense. And now, it seems, it didn't even make financial
sense, either.

As The Vancouver Sun's Lori Culbert wrote on Saturday, an exhaustive
study commissioned by the Ministry of Health has found it now costs
society about $55,000 a year to care for each of our estimated 11,750
homeless people -- that's over $640 million. If, however, we invested
in social housing, that would drop to $37,000 per person per year.
That means savings of about $211 million a year.

This is a watershed finding. The bottom line is that our political
leaders have finally been given solid numbers to mount a business case
for investing big dollars in social housing. The Liberal government
deserves credit for starting to get this and its decision to start
buying up old rooming houses and fast-track social housing projects.
But this report shows there's reason for Housing Minister Rich Coleman
to think even bigger and try to do it faster.

Accelerating the construction of social housing -- and the ancillary
supports for our most vulnerable citizens -- will save us all money.
It will rescue lives. And, best of all, it will make me feel a whole
lot better about my city the next time I run into two train travellers
from Texas.