MAYOR TAKES HIS PLAN FOR DRUG REFORM TO THE STREET AND THE BOARDROOM

A Pillar Of Conservative Virtue, Philip Owen Is An Unlikely Champion For
Addicts

It was one of the mayor's regular forays through the Downtown Eastside and
he had dressed in his habitual uniform, the same one he wears to gala
dinners, council meetings and Board of Trade speeches. Others often feel
it's mandatory to scale down sartorially for a walk through one of Canada's
most notorious urban hells.

But not the son of a B.C. lieutenant-governor, the former owner of one of
the most elegant fabric shops in Vancouver, and a lifetime resident of the
city's premier old-money enclave, Shaughnessy. Instead, amid the pawnshops
and drunks and crowds of drug dealers on the corners, Mayor Philip Walter
Owen, attracting no inconsiderable amount of attention, strode along the
sidewalk in the bright spring sunshine wearing one of his many stunningly
tailored suits with, of course, a dazzling white shirt and dressy silk tie.
Outside the city's needle exchange on East Hastings Street, a
battered-looking native woman came smack up to him and asked who he was.
Well, I'm the mayor, he answered. What are you doing here? she wanted to
know. In the conversation that followed, she told him she had been an
addict but had been clean for six years now, and she came down from time to
time to do volunteer work. At that, the 68-year-old Owen, an imposingly
tall and broad-shouldered man, bent down and wrapped her in a hug, his eyes
filled with tears. "That's just great. Isn't that great? Six years."

Few people in Vancouver would have predicted eight years ago that Philip
Owen would emerge as the city's most outspoken champion for heroin and
cocaine addicts, arguing that they need to be treated like sick people, not
criminals.

Nor could they have predicted that the perpetually affable mayor could steer
a controversial drug strategy through a storm of nasty politics that pitted
him against people from his own political machine and council. Acerbic
opposition councilor Harry Rankin once dubbed Owen Philip the Dim. His own
bureaucrats would privately confide that this was not the man to carry an
argument forward on a complex policy issue, with his tendency to tangle
himself up in half-sentences, execute dazzling malapropisms, and veer off
verbally in directions seemingly unrelated to the topic at hand. And he
appeared to have no taste for forceful leadership, content to let his strong
councillors -- George Puil, Jennifer Clarke, Gordon Price -- take the lead,
while he took on the ceremonial load of dinners, daycare openings,
fundraisers, awards ceremonies and the like. But beyond that, he was the
embodiment of stock Chamber of Commerce values: What's good for business is
good for the city. A ward system for municipal voting, favoured by lefties
everywhere, is bad for the city. (Far better to stick to the democratic
system that has kept the conservative Non Partisan Association in power for
most of the last six decades.) Taxes should be low. Police money for
keeping the bad guys under control should be high. The loosey-goosey Charter
of Rights should be rewritten so it isn't so easy for criminals to get away
with murder. He still espouses all of that. And he's still no Bill Clinton
in the rhetoric department, in spite of occasional bursts of articulation
inspired by his new mission. But over the last eight years since he was
first elected mayor, he discovered a cause that sparked his passion and
revealed a new, energetic, tough man, one who has infinite compassion and
understanding for addicts and one who is ready to play hardball to get
people to agree with what he believes is the right thing to do. At times, he
sounds as though he is channelling the spirit of Dorothy Day, the radical
Catholic Worker Movement founder who worked among the poor and homeless in
New York in the 1930s. It hasn't been easy. "It's been quite isolating and
disappointing," says Owen, who has had to deal with people he thought were
allies confronting him in his office with a media circus in attendance, his
own council members meeting secretly with his opponents behind his back, and
a constant trickle of criticism coming to him secondhand from people who
wouldn't say anything directly. Owen's transformation took many by
surprise, but friends and family say the "new" Philip Owen was there all
along. "It's a side I've always known.

Within the family, he has always been seen as the straightforward,
principled and determined one," says his cousin Stephen Owen, who was at one
time the director of a large legal-aid office in the Downtown Eastside and
B.C.'s ombudsman under the NDP government, and is now a Vancouver Liberal
MP. "Now, he's energized." The two Owens have conferred many times about
city issues over the decades.

Those conversations multiplied in the last few years, as Philip called
Stephen, who mediated the province's contentious review of logging and land
use, about how to deal with the warring groups in the Downtown Eastside
whose Bosnia-like hostilities were paralyzing any attempts to improve the
area. Stephen, for whom his much older cousin became a combination young
father/older brother after Stephen's own father, Milton, died in a plane
crash in the 50s, believes it's only someone like Philip who could have
brought this policy as far as it has. "Philip is the quintessential
community champion, whether it's small businesses, the community church, or
going endlessly and enthusiastically to every cultural event." Like a
small-town mayor, he knows his city inside out and has a gut sense of what
people are ready for. Philip himself says he thinks it's his grandfather
who is at the root of what he's doing now. Walter Owen was a big, strong
guy, a Mountie for years, and someone who'd seen tough times after his
parents, Philip's great-grandparents, had to give up their house in North
Vancouver during the 1910 recession.

He was also the warden of Oakalla prison for 20 years. "When I was eight
and nine, up 'til I was 12, my brother and I would go out and stay with him
on weekends at the warden's house," Philip remembers. In the mornings,
Walter Owen would put on his uniform, get the two boys and take them inside
the prison. "He'd be calling everyone by name and we used to run off and
wander around with the prisoners, chat with them," Philip said. "Sometimes
the 'trusties'" -- prisoners who were trusted to be outside the prison yard
- -- "were allowed to come and work in the warden's house." Something Philip
doesn't know, but that history records, is that thanks to Warden Owen's
"enthusiastic support," B.C. became the home of a European-imported
experiment in criminal rehabilitation with the creation of the New Haven
program that emphasized a rehabilitative, treatment-based approach to
prisoners instead of the approach that was standard at the time: strictly
punishment and jail. Walter Owen never lectured the boys about the need to
be principled or compassionate or respectful with everyone.

He showed by example. So when Philip started visiting the Downtown Eastside
regularly as a park board commissioner, he didn't find the area particularly
alarming. And once he became mayor in 1993, he started doing what his
grandfather had done: He patrolled his territory, he got to know people down
there, and he treated them like human beings struggling to be better. "The
first time I went in, I was mayor.

I drove through early one Sunday and saw a lot of drug-dealing. So I went
down a couple of times at night by myself.

You know, you have a hat and an umbrella, nobody looks at you." One
Christmas Day, he went to one of the dinners at the Carnegie Centre. "I got
the biggest reception. They were clapping and 'God, thank you for coming'
and 'Merry Christmas' and I suddenly realized there were a lot of
compassionate, lovely people that were hurting." At around the same time,
Owen was also starting to get an education about drug addiction from a very
different source. In the spring of 1993, he went down to San Francisco for
a special seminar at the Hoover Institute, a right-wing think tank that puts
on seminars for leaders in order to disseminate their ideas on social
policy.

Like Canada's Fraser Institute, the Hoover Institute had crossed paths with
the left on what to do about drugs.

At Stanford University that weekend, Owen heard 25 speakers talking about
the failure of the war on drugs and the need to find new models. He went to
another seminar there two years later.

By 1998, he was interested enough in taking on the issue that he convened a
drug-policy seminar in Vancouver, including speakers from Europe who spoke
about the harm-reduction model that was being tried there. As he grew more
interested in taking on drug policy as a city issue, he got personal support
from groups of west side families, other mayors, drug-policy experts around
the world, a core of his own staff, and a group that had sprung up in the
Downtown Eastside to advocate for drug users. He'd never known an addict
before. As far as he's aware, no one in his family has ever had a problem.
But his new mission brought into his life people like Dean Wilson, an
activist in the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users -- so far into his life
that Wilson will drop in to his office for unannounced visits or gravitate
naturally at public meetings to the man he calls simply "Mayor." Owen also
found out about other sides of his own part of the city. "I know of people
on Point Grey Road and Shaughnessy who are big-time users." But on the
other side, his council colleagues, friends, and political allies were
telling him he was nuts. He was wasting his time, going down a road of
political self-destruction for a crusade that had no mileage and probably
wouldn't succeed anyway.

After all, the city had no real power to achieve any of the changes it
wanted.

That was all in the hands of other levels of government. So it ran the risk
of having to wear a potential failure, with no real power to ensure
success. But as the resistance increased, Owen got tougher. In July 2000,
hostilities increased when a group of Gastown and Chinatown business owners
calling themselves the Community Alliance, which included the NPA's campaign
manager Grant Longhurst, packed a meeting in his office to protest any more
services for drug users in the area. "He was very upset when they showed up
in his office with reporters," says one city hall source. "That was a real
turning point that galvanized him into thinking they weren't fair-minded."
He acceded to their demand for a 90-day moratorium on new services, but the
meeting "seemed to harden his line against them," says the source. Another
storm erupted in October 2000, when he and the city's new drug policy
coordinator presented a draft of a proposed new drug strategy in a private
council meeting.

His councillors attacked him en masse, accusing him of having developed it
secretly with staff, and picking dozens of holes in it. That ambush also
brought out a steely side in him. Owen put them in the deep freeze, leaving
town and refusing to talk to them. That wasn't the end of it. A few months
later, Owen discovered that many of his councillors had held a secret
meeting with Community Alliance members, talking about who among the
Alliance might be put forward as NPA candidates in the next election. He's
had a meeting with at least one where he gave out the George Bush ultimatum:
You're either with me or against me. Ultimately, his council voted
unanimously to endorse the policy. Not that all of them supported it, but
the all-important winds of public opinion were blowing Owen's way. A
city-commissioned poll came out showing an overwhelming majority of city
residents supported the ideas in the strategy. Even the most controversial
items, consideration of a safe-injection site or heroin trials, didn't
produce any signs of a dangerous split in community opinion. But the storm
is far from over. His council remains fractured and, as November elections
approach, councillors would prefer to shelve controversial issues, as they
have in past years.

The unambiguous support he desperately needs from provincial and federal
politicians keeps arriving in statements and speeches that sound supportive
but sometimes seem to have quicksand underneath. Little that is concrete has
come through so far. And many are gunning for him, either because they don't
like his policy or because they want someone else to take his job. As one
city hall source says: "He's out on a limb and you can hear saws running."
One council member, Jennifer Clarke, is running a barely underground
campaign to replace him and the 68-year-old Owen himself seems to be
undecided about whether he's ready for another exhausting three years of
politics, backstabbing, and rubber-chicken dinners. "I love the city and
like the job" is his most committed statement to date. He says he has no
idea whether his own political party would support him if he did make a
fourth run for office.

Asked whether the NPA is prepared to endorse him, he shrugs and says in the
tone of a man who couldn't care less: "I should phone them up and ask." On
the other hand, he talks frequently about how much more there is to do.
"There's still resistance and there's a huge burden. Someone has to bring
this all together." Whatever happens, he's sure what he's doing is right.
"I'll rise or fall politically, but this isn't about politics. This is
beyond everybody's politics.

We're putting in a program for 25 to 50 years that's going to save future
generations from decay."