DEAD ADDICT REMEMBERED AS A RELIABLE VOLUNTEER

Businessman Says Binner Would 'Bend Over Backwards To Help People'

VANCOUVER - You probably saw Chris Giroux at least once, if you spent
more than an afternoon in Vancouver's downtown any time in the last decade.

A baby-faced guy with a mop of frizzy hair and endless energy, he was
always moving through the city, riding his shopping cart down a hill,
squirming through a dumpster, hustling through the streets to collect
enough bottles, scrap metal and secondhand clothes to get enough
money for food, smokes and crack.

He was anonymous to most passersby, just another one of the city's
many street people. But to those who are part of that small world, he
was a larger-than-life character.

Giroux was one of the small cadre of full-time binners who work their
traplines of dumpsters religiously and take pride in supporting
themselves. His territory was the alleys east of Granville around the
Drake, the Gathering Place, Glowbal and the Comfort Inn, where he had
a string of business owners who knew and trusted him enough that they
put out their bottles for him or left their dumpsters open.

He was a tough guy no one pushed around and he was never short of
opinions about the government and the causes of homelessness, some of
which were captured in a documentary called Homeless: A Movie, one of
his handful of media appearances over the years.

And, in recent years, he'd become a regular volunteer at the First
Baptist shelter at Nelson and Burrard who could be counted on by
staff to do everything from carting laundry around to being the security guard.

"If anything serious happened, we knew he had our backs," recalled
Sharon McFadyen, who was an outreach worker at the shelter until recently.

McFadyen was one of about 30 people, shelter workers and street
people, who gathered Thursday afternoon in a meeting room at First
Baptist to remember Giroux.

He was found dead in a bin in the alley of the 1100 Granville block
at 2:11 a.m. April 21 by a couple of other binners. He'd injected
heroin and nodded off after doing it. He'd fallen face forward on to
a plastic bag and suffocated. He would have been 42 on June 24.

Robert Swann, pastor at First United, said when he first heard that a
body had been discovered in a dumpster, he was sure it wasn't Giroux.

"I've run the shelter here for 81/2 years and if you'd asked me who
would have been the last man standing, I would have picked
Christopher Lee Giroux," said Swann as he opened the memorial.

Although Giroux had been barred recently from binner central in
Vancouver --the recycling depot United We Can -- for cheating on the
pay system, Swann remembered him as a guy who could always be trusted
to come through with what he said he was going to do.

That was an accomplishment, he said, for someone who "lived with an
addiction to deal with a broken heart."

From what Giroux had told people, he'd grown up in Ottawa and been
introduced to drugs by his grandfather. He'd worked as a telemarketer
and for a moving company. His first wife died of cancer and his
second wife died after being stabbed for the $20 in her bag when she
was on her way home from the grocery store.

After that, he left Ottawa and came to Vancouver, where he lived on
the streets for the last 10 years, running into occasional problems
with the law, but nothing serious enough to put him behind bars for
any length of time.

People like Shadow, who still lives on the street, and Kevin Sleziak,
who runs a demolition business, met him at places like Pigeon Park
and Oppenheimer Park way back then.

"At first I thought he was a shady character," said Sleziak. "But
he'd bend over backwards to help people."

His one-time girlfriend, Laura Giesbrecht, remembered how he would
push her around in a shopping cart when she was too sick to walk. And
even though he seemed like a tough guy with attitude to the rest of
the world, he was so grateful when anyone did a nice thing for him.

One day, he was arrested mistakenly (he has the same name as a
well-known child predator) and, by the time he got out of the police
station five hours later, he was yelling and hollering because he
hadn't been able to do his binning all day and had no money for food or crack.

When he found out that Giesbrecht had collected from all his regular
spots and come home with money and three rocks of crack, "he had
tears running down his face."

Giesbrecht is convinced he didn't take heroin on purpose, but that
someone mixed it up with "jib," or a form of crystal meth, that looks
and tastes the same.

"It was a freak accident.

"But God said he had enough pain and it was time to go."