LOWER MAINLAND DRUG PROBLEM, UP CLOSE & PERSONAL

Oblivious to the drug problem in the Lower Mainland? Guess your car
hasn't been broken into repeatedly or your worldly goods stolen, or
you haven't been forced to pack up, move and unpack twice in three
days.

If it had happened to me, I'd be right chuffed, but it's my daughter
and I'm freakin' furious.

She's attending BCIT, with its crushing workload that leaves no time
for a life, let alone cleaning up the messes left by drug addicts and
dealers. During the first week of school in September, her car was
broken into in the student parking lot, window smashed, passenger lock
punched out, stereo and everything else of value stolen. It's the
third or fourth, or maybe fifth, time in four years her car has been
vandalized.

Many landlords aren't keen to rent to a student, which is why she
ended up in a ground-floor dump in Burnaby. The best sliding glass
door locks were installed and, where they couldn't be, the sticks in
the window channels were sturdy. The thieves simply smashed the
apartment window and made away with absolutely everything of value,
taking time to sort through the change in the piggy bank and leave the
nickels.

So she moved again, this time to a posher place in a middle floor in a
safe-looking, solid concrete construction highrise apartment.

Don't you just hate moving? Especially when the last box has been
heaved and you learn the previous tenants were evicted for running a
grow op?

The electricity wasn't on and, after increasingly terse phone calls to
BC Hydro, it turned out the power had been shut off. Many more phone
calls confirmed no one had any idea when it would be turned on again -
a paper failure between the RCMP, city of Burnaby, BC Hydro and the
landlord.

While they sort out when and how to turn the lights on, my daughter
and her roommate are freezing in the dark.

The image of my daughter wrapped in blankets doing her economics
homework by candlelight may one day be a touching anecdote, and the
$2,000 hole in my overdraft from replacing windows, paying deductibles
and providing the take-out sushi-crisis-cure will eventually heal.

She's not dead from opening the door to a gunman looking for the
previous tenant or getting caught in the crossfire between drug thugs,
and this is a blessing.

But she has been harmed collaterally and cumulatively, and I am very
angry. We, and all the other people robbed, and the landlords left
with uninhabitable homes, are paying the consequences of an utter and
absolute failure of all governments to mitigate the effects of this
scourge.