DOING BATTLE AT THE POINT OF A NEEDLE

Vancouver's Drug Problem Focus Of Mayor's Race. Ex-Coroner Poised To Win
Upset Victory

VANCOUVER--The grim streets of the downtown eastside and their in-your-face
drug use are something most city residents prefer to avoid.

But as voters go to the polls to elect a new mayor today, the fate of
Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood -- and drug addicts there and throughout
Canada's third largest city -- has become a key election issue.

In an increasingly bitter fight, former cop and coroner Larry Campbell is
poised to stage an upset victory and change the face of Vancouver, most
notably with his promise to open the country's first safe-injection site
for drug addicts within weeks.

"We have to start treating these people like human beings who have an
illness and not like a criminal invading force," Campbell said during a
debate this week.

Campbell, whose career inspired the CBC Television show Da Vinci's Inquest,
and his left-leaning Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) portray
themselves as the party for change next to the rival Non-Partisan
Association (NPA), which has held the mayor's seat and the majority on city
council for the past 16 years.

The strategy appears to be working.

Last week, an Ipsos-Reid poll for the Vancouver Sun found that 56 per cent
of decided voters backed Campbell compared to 29 per cent for the NPA's
Jennifer Clarke and 14 per cent for Valerie MacLean of the Vancouver Civic
Action TEAM party.

Perhaps even more significantly, 72 per cent said they wanted a change.

But Clarke, a nine-year city council veteran who has been branded an
elitist, refuses to go down without a vigorous fight. She has accused
Campbell of "hijacking" the campaign by focusing on one issue --
harm-reduction programs for eastside drug addicts -- and claims she would
represent all residents.

During the final week of the campaign, attack ads have linked Campbell and
COPE to the New Democratic Party government that ran British Columbia for a
decade before the Liberals almost wiped them off the political map in 2001.

The NDP's biggest scandals are resurrected in the ads, including the
so-called "fudge-it budget" in which the party said the province's books
were balanced during the 1996 election campaign, revealing a large deficit
soon after winning, and the fast ferry project that came to symbolize
government incompetence.

"Don't let Larry Campbell and the COPE/NDP do to Vancouver what they did to
B.C.," the ads say.

Another NPA ad refers to former COPE mayoralty candidate and current
council contender, Jim Green. It says he pocketed "hundreds of thousands of
dollars" in salary and expenses as chairman of the NDP-established Four
Corners bank, catering to low-income residents of the downtown eastside,
only to see it lose $4.2 million.

Green has launched legal action.

But Clarke is unmoved.

"Our ads are actually drawing the factual connection between COPE and the
NDP," she told a debate at the University of B.C. this week.

COPE has also gone negative. In a radio ad, Campbell refers to Clarke's
"character flaws and questionable loyalty" in connection with her
high-profile battle for the NPA nomination for mayor, which led to the
ouster of three-term mayor Philip Owen.

"I sincerely did not mean in any way to offend her," Campbell said in
pulling the ad this week and urging Clarke to do the same with the NPA's spots.

Partisan politics has long been a part of municipal elections in Vancouver,
where voters will choose today from 119 candidates for mayor, council,
school board and park board.

This time around, former NDP premier Mike Harcourt, an independent
three-term mayor who often backed COPE in votes, has endorsed Campbell in
large part because he has "the courage and toughness" to deal with the drug
issue.

Meanwhile, many observers suspect Clarke and her colleagues in the
right-of-centre NPA could suffer a backlash from voters angry at the
austerity measures of Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell, who is a former NPA
mayor of Vancouver.

UBC political scientist Richard Johnston says the hard-hitting ads from
both sides are not surprising given the "intense partisan passions here,"
but the tone is nastier than usual.

"The deepening of the drug crisis in the city has raised the stakes,"
Johnston says. "It's a marker for another wider range of problems, but it's
also a particularly embarrassing problem as well as an unusual example of
social distress."

Ironically, the NPA's Owen is most closely linked to safe-injection sites
as part of his so-called four pillars drug strategy: prevention,
enforcement, treatment and harm reduction.

That link is seen by many observers as the reason Owen was told by the NPA
he would have to fight for the party's nomination. He instead chose not to
seek re-election.

Today, the three main candidates for mayor say they support the concept of
safe-injection sites.

Unlike Campbell, however, Clarke and MacLean of TEAM advocate waiting for
Health Canada to establish guidelines for the sites, likely by year's end,
before setting up the facilities on a trial basis.

But Campbell, pointing to the several hundred drug overdose deaths on
Vancouver streets each year, says they cannot wait any longer.

"Our city can be great," he said at a fundraising dinner earlier this
month. "But our city won't be great unless we respect everyone in it --
until we take the concerns of everyone seriously, until nobody in Vancouver
is disposable.

"If we're fortunate enough to be elected on Nov. 16, then Nov. 17 is the
first day of the four pillars."