TOUGH LOVE FOR THE HOMELESS

Vancouver's Street People Should Be Forced To Get Help

I walked past a home in Vancouver's affluent West End the other day.
It was in an alley. At first it looked like a pile of rubble dumped
beside a construction site.

Another step brought me to the human being under its layers. Nothing
rare in Vancouver these days. This was a home of one of the homeless.

This is supposed to make us ashamed of our society. Should it?
Consider: Greater Vancouver's population is about 2.2 million. The
homeless by definition are hard to count, but last year the Social
Planning and Research Council of B.C. (SPARC) made probably the most
ambitious such survey ever launched. It placed the number at 2,174,
almost double the 2002 figure. My arithmetic makes that one-tenth of
one per cent.

Recently, Homeless Awareness Week's Beverly Pitman was quoted in
suburban Vancouver's tri-weekly North Shore News that between 2000
and 2005 the number of homeless on the affluent North Shore also
doubled -- from 44 to 85. (West Vancouver, which spars with
communities like Oakville and Markham, Ont., for the title of
Canada's richest, had exactly two, SPARC found.) The Vancouver Sun
reported in recent weeks that homelessness in the tri-cities of Port
Coquitlam, Coquitlam and Port Moody has risen "five times" since 2005
- -- to l77.

So the percentage today in Greater Vancouver might have risen to
one-fifth, maybe one-third of one per cent since the SPARC survey,
taken March 15, 2005.

Only about 600 of the region's homeless were defined then as
long-term -- homeless for one year or more. These figures are a
triumph for our society. Free enterprise and government combine to
accommodate almost all of the great migration of newcomers into the area.

Yet the homelessness issue is absorbing hugely disproportionate
amounts of government funds, social capital and bureaucratic and
academic time, to say nothing of indirectly subsidizing the media and
especially radio talk shows by providing a perennial subject for
phoney discussion and debate. We can all look, sound and write
terribly earnest stuff and go away satisfied that we are "concerned."
Very feel-good. Very B.S.

It says here that B.C.'s core homelessness can be reduced relatively
simply, and the disgrace is that it isn't.

The 2005 SPARC B.C. findings point the way: "Health conditions were
very common among the homeless, with 74 per cent of those counted
having one or more health conditions (i.e., addiction, medical
condition, mental illness, and/or physical disability)."

Got that? Three-quarters of the homeless have some kind of illness.

Next: "Addiction was the most common health condition. Almost half of
the homeless who responded to this (survey) question reported
problems with addiction. The share of street homeless reporting
addiction (53 per cent) was higher than the share of the sheltered
homeless (43 per cent)." Homeless youth under 25 had the highest rate
of addiction, a jaw-dropping 56 per cent.

Got that? About half of the homeless are addicts. SPARC reported:
"Most of those who reported they had a mental illness also reported
they had an addiction" -- 60 per cent of those staying in shelters
and 70 per cent of the street homeless.

Mental illness and addiction. Take those two factors out of the mix
and there'd be more money and resources for the rest of the homeless
- -- many of whom are just poor people with low skills, low literacy,
no work, or unlucky. The real scandal starts with the British
Columbia government's closing of Riverview Hospital, a
long-established facility for the mentally ill, and downloading care
of many of its patients on to hard-pressed regional health boards and
communities.

That's monumentally stupid or monumentally cynical -- especially if
the province isn't just saving costs on the backs of the mentally
ill, but is, as some think, furtively planning to sell Riverview land
to private developers.

(In fairness, Premier Gordon Campbell has been expressing doubts
about closing Riverview but has taken no action.)

Dumping the mentally ill onto the streets, above all the
schizophrenics who make up a large part of Vancouver's omnipresent
panhandlers and binners (who make their living cashing in
reyclables), is worse than stupid.

Schizophrenics are as helpless as children, easy meat for exploiters,
including thieves and pimps. Some schizophrenics' families abandon
them. For many of the long-term mentally ill, Riverview was the only
home they knew.

Incarceration, that pejorative word, meant protection and stability.

Now, the addicted homeless. This leads into larger territory. A
bullet has to be bitten here. The situation demands a massive,
no-nonsense crusade, beginning with police and courts moving against
big-time drug dealers with big-time penalties.

Meanwhile drug and alcohol addicts on Vancouver's mean streets should
be interviewed, offered ample medical treatment and counselling, and
required to show up at regular intervals for further treatment and
assessment. If they don't, after a certain period of time, they
should be picked up -- like those who have an outstanding warrant for
their arrest.

The prison hospital -- by any soft euphemism -- would await them,
where they could choose treatment or controlled access to their dream
stuff of choice, with the exit pass of either cure or death. They
wouldn't be on the streets. They wouldn't befoul the city. The
infamous Downtown Eastside would no longer be a free-shooting city
within a city, threatening law-abiding residents and scaring off
visitors, and sucking up a grotesque share of Vancouver's policing
budgets, health costs and political piety.

The Vancouver media's one voice of sanity and experience on this
issue was radio broadcaster David Berner, a street-wise former social
worker who scorned the weak nostrums of Vancouver's past mayor Philip
Owen and incumbent Sam Sullivan. His station dropped him.

Yes, the theorists and lawyers would cry out that individual freedom
was being compromised. They'd be right. At present our society is
protecting neither the freedom of the inner city's decent citizens --
their children, schoolyards, homes, property, streets in a state of
perpetual siege, a total dereliction of civic and provincial duty --
nor of the homeless mentally ill and addicted who are already unfree.
Once the latter use up the chances offered to them, only through
incarceration can they hope for true liberation.

The "experts" shake their heads and lament that the problems are "complex."

What they really fear is the simple solution that is hard.