ATTACKING THE SYMPTOMS

Critics Say Safe Streets Act Doesn't Address Real Issues

It was just as Sunday turned to Monday that the homeless man got
stabbed in the chest. He was huddled in his sleeping bag on the steps
of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Pandora Avenue, sheltering from
the on-again, off-again rain, when he awoke to find his shopping cart
dumped over, and three guys hovering around.

Police figure the three were drunks staggering home from the bar. Some
snarling ensued before, the story goes, one of the drunks threw the
cart on the homeless man, then pulled out a big kitchen knife and
stuck him, right through the sleeping bag.

The 37-year-old was rushed into surgery. As of Monday afternoon, he
was in intensive care, but it looked as though he would pull through.

Gosh, good thing he had the Liberals' new Safe Streets Act to protect
him, eh?

Well, no -- the law currently working its way through the legislature
is supposed to save you and me from street people, not protect the
street people themselves. It would ban squeegee kids and aggressive
panhandlers, and bar beggars from hitting you up at a bank machine,
bus stop, public toilet or when you're getting into or out of your
car. The bill doesn't mention stabbing homeless people in their
sleeping bags.

Or maybe that's a cheap shot. Lord knows we're all tired of picking
our way past the grubby shrubs, drunks and junkies and the
thousand-yard stares of those whose internal demons have landed them
on the sidewalk, squatted behind the mute demands of their upturned
ballcaps.

Beggars are, at best, unsettling to the soul and, at worst,
frightening to those who feel vulnerable. They drive business away
from downtown; people would feel better if they just weren't there,
particularly the ones who get right in your face.

But the poor are not going anywhere, no matter how hard the authors of
the Safe Streets Act wish them away.

"It's just show. It's gas," says Rev. Al Tysick at the Open Door
street church, just down Pandora from the scene of the stabbing.
What's a judge going to do with an aggressive panhandler -- fine him
$10,000, seize his Mercedes? There's no room in prison for drug
dealers, let alone squeegee kids. Even if the system does go to all
the time and expense of locking a beggar away, it will just spit him
back on the street again.

Tysick points out the window to a City of Victoria street sign that
declares "no loitering, no sleeping on boulevard overnight and no
sleeping in vehicle overnight." You can usually find someone leaning
against the pole to which the sign is bolted. Some $100 tickets were
handed out, but the recipients just laughed and tore them up.

"I don't care how many laws they pass," says Tysick. "I don't care if
the Safe Streets Act passes. It won't solve our problems."

To him, the bill just avoids the question of why all those people are
on the streets. "I think it's a camouflage so we don't have to deal
with the underlying causes."

Housing is a huge issue in a city where rent outstrips disability
benefits. A crackdown on unsafe and unhealthy flophouses has meant the
loss of 80 beds in Victoria.

All the talk of melding treatment programs for the many, many street
people with dual diagnosis -- substance abuse and mental illness --
has gone nowhere. Drugs are everywhere. It can take weeks to get into
detox.

More than 600 people pour into the Open Door every day. "They're
hungry," says Tysick. "This isn't fake stuff."

Terry Colburn agrees, and he should know. Having lived with poverty
and mental illness for years, he has now gained a degree of prominence
as an outspoken advocate for people of similar background.

For the last couple of weeks, he has been a buckskin-clad sidewalk
sentinel, gathering signatures on a petition opposing the Safe Streets
Act. By Monday morning, when he delivered the results to MP David
Anderson's office, he had more than 1,000 names. Why go to a federal
politician with a complaint about provincial legislation?

"Maybe they'll listen to me at the federal level," Colburn said,
standing on Johnson Street, petition clutched in his hands. He seems
to have lost faith in provincial politicians. Besides, homelessness is
a federal matter.

Colburn wants to see more street-level mental health workers, not laws
designed to continually chase away the mentally ill for anti-social
behaviour. "I have people who say, 'Where are you going to put me?
Under a rock?'"

And there's the real objection to the Safe Streets Act. It's not that
it tackles the panhandling problem, but that it doesn't.

Victoria police were quick to react to the stabbing of the homeless
man. By Monday morning they had arrested three people -- two young
adults and a youth. The youth was to appear in court later in the day,
charged with aggravated assault.

By lunchtime, the stabbing scene was quiet, the only clues to the
previous night's violence being a length of yellow police tape
fluttering in the breeze and, if you climbed the steps of the church,
a small posy of white flowers beside the splashes of dried blood.
Nothing unsightly to disturb the good people of Victoria at all.