Hello again,
The fabulous municipal/provincial political mixer that is UBCM’s annual conference wrapped up on Friday, but the highlights keep coming.
In an open forum on housing with BC’s municipal leaders, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon acknowledged the housing crisis is province-wide.
“It’s every type of community that’s facing this pressure,” he told delegates at the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) annual conference. Speaking to reporters, he promised, “The time of talking is over. We need to get to the action.”
Which sounds like political jiujitsu, given that’s been BC United Opposition Leader Kevin Falcon’s main line of attack for a few years – the NDP is a lot better at announcing programs than implementing them. Falcon repeated the theme Thursday during a brief speech to delegates.
Another beautiful small town struggling to pay the bills
Community leaders also called for action in one-on-one interviews. In Clearwater, 275 new subdivision lots are approved for housing with either a builder or modular house poised to break ground. “We can build houses on cheap lands in a community where people want to live, with a hospital that's fully stocked with doctors, and all sorts of good recreational things for people to do. [But] we’re another small town that cannot afford the sewer and water infrastructure to make that happen,” said Mayor Merlin Blackwell.
With an annual municipal budget of about $3 million, the town would have to borrow four or five times that to lay the sewer and water lines needed to connect up the homes. “And we just can't do it.” Blackwell says more federal and provincial grants are needed. “And we need those grants not to be three to five times oversubscribed.”
Competition for housing grants can be a deal breaker for small communities. Which may be why, in the last minutes of the UBCM conference on Friday, Premier David Eby announced a new $61 million fund to help local governments create housing proposals. The fund will help “ensure that your housing policy is the best it can possibly be,” he said.
Neighbours ‘went through hell’
Of the many complaints voiced in open forums this week, one echoed repeatedly in hallway conversations with BC leaders. Victoria Councillor Stephen Hammond pleaded for more security or police funding to quell disorder at supportive housing facilities. Neighbours at one “went through hell” for two years dealing with criminal behaviour and “BC Housing didn’t do anything about that,” he said. At another, a nearby coffee shop owner has to open and close the place every day because staff are too afraid. And even the owner closes an hour early because a man routinely approaches her at the door and explicitly threatens her with sexual violence.
In Kamloops, emergency calls doubled from 400 to 800 from 2020 to 2021 on a single street laden with a concentration of supportive housing and harm reduction services, Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson said. As well, the number of people dead of overdose by the end of 2023 is on track to triple those who died in 2019, he said. Hamer-Jackson wants more complex care housing services and for the system to turn towards recovery. The health care system has gone from harm reduction services, to complex care, he said. Missing are the wraparound services that were supposed to come with supportive housing. “And now we're going right to complex care. What about recovery-focused?”
‘It’s never going to be perfect’
For Kahlon’s part, he said shelters are an access point to give people the support they need. “It’s never going to be perfect.” True, but the utter lack of supports in the ‘supportive’ housing model pretty much ensures those imperfections will spiral into criminal and health-threatening situations for at least some housing residents, let alone burn out the on-site staff (and surrounding community members) in the process. That’s if you can hire anyone in the first place.
Nanaimo Councillor Paul Manly, who runs an emergency shelter, said BC Housing is working hard on the issues, but is short-staffed and “things are moving really slow.” Progress towards getting a winter shelter ready is bogged down and another agency got its’ budget approved but it’s based on a $5 an hour wage differential with others, which hampers hiring, he said.
Some BC research indicates the most effective living situation for people with mental health and addictions issues is scattered housing in mixed populations, rather than concentrating people in the same facilities without adequate supports. But Kahlon said it’s not the housing that’s the problem, it’s the mental health issues and challenges. “If they weren’t in housing they would probably be in the park and those things would still be happening.” Which comes off like the government is throwing up its hands – it’s just the way those people are – and ignores that housing residents need more supports and people in the larger community need those residents to get them.
Most condescending mayoral speech goes to…
Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto argued in favour of full-on legalization of all drugs in a UBCM conference “discussion” on decriminalization and public drug use. Alto said a non-prescriber version (all drugs accessible like retail cannabis) of the current controversial, experimental safe supply program is the answer because it “acknowledges the fact that drug use is part of our culture and society,” and that “we've tried to get rid of it for decades and centuries and failed.”
Rather, Alto says we all need to “put on our big person boots” and accept the immutable fact of rampant public drug use in communities. People can either be “receptive,” “open-minded,” “part of the conversation,” and join the push for full legalization, she said, or presumably, they can cling to their narrow-minded, childish, judgey perspectives and callously not care about people who use drugs. There is no third option, as Alto apparently doesn’t have to be open-minded herself about any views in conflict with her own.
It’s the usual ideological trope: You bad. Us good. The end. No room for nuance, thoughtful discussion or multi-hued solutions. As if these aren’t wickedly complicated public health, civil society and socio-economic issues that deserve and require our leaders to have the intellectual and emotional capacity to hold many conflicting and confounding truths in mind at once without dismissing voices simply because they disagree.
“For us to be able to grow up a little and be a bit adult about this is really challenging,” Alto concluded, seemingly without irony.
When more drugs are the only answer
Pilots, doctors, nurses and public servants all have highly responsive and sophisticated mental health and addictions treatment options provided through their union or professional associations. If you are unhoused, without connections or wealth, possibly brain-injured from previous overdoses, you are offered unsupervised consumption of heroin, cocaine and fentanyl in the form of safer supply.
“If it really just is that the success rate for people without means are, for lack of a better term, too far gone, it would be nice if they just come out and say it. I know they never would. But that's what you're left to think,” said Terrace Councillor James Cordeiro.
“If the reason these people aren't getting help is because the unspoken word is they're past the point of being able to be redeemable – I guess, is maybe how you put it if you're going to be really harsh about it – then, it's maintenance,” said Cordeiro. “To me, harm reduction is just harm postponement. Because at some point, somebody's not going to have access to their safe supply. And really, once you're on that trajectory, the end of that trajectory is inevitable. It's either this week or next month. But you're on your way to your last overdose without real intervention.”
No one skis like the mayor
After surviving one of the scariest wildfire seasons the province has ever seen, communities like Clearwater know they’ve “jumped the shark” on what a wildfire season looks like, said Mayor Blackwell. “We set a new standard as to what we need for equipment, what we need for resources, what we need for involvement by citizens.” Rural communities are equipped to fight a house fire, but not necessarily a fully wooded five acre lot that’s caught fire. “We don't have the resources for that.”
After Shuswap residents defied evacuation orders to battle wildfire and save their homes, other places like Clearwater realized without outside help from other provinces or nations, “there's never going to be enough equipment, human beings or skills to take on something as big as this year,” Blackwell said. With increasing impacts of climate change, there will be times in the future where every firefighting jurisdiction is in crisis. “They're going to need all their own resources and they are not going to be able to loan them to us.”
Blackwell suggests minimally or moderately trained residents who are supervised, could go through a wildland firefighter version of the volunteer fire department, and be called on as a second or third line of defence. Eby surprised UBCM conference attendees by announcing $4.75 million towards rural firefighting teams to get the training, equipment and support they need “to be able to deliver for their communities in times of crisis and and to recognize their critically important work.”
Whatever the configuration, BC needs to get cracking before insurance companies start walking away from rural BC communities at high risk of wildfire, as has happened in California and in Florida for floods and hurricanes, Blackwell said prior to Eby’s announcement. “It's going to be incumbent on BC municipalities to get ahead of that, to start insisting on FireSmart and start building resources so that we don't have to get to that point.”
That’s all she wrote (for today). Thanks for reading!
Fran
Questions, comments or story ideas, contact Fran@NorthernBeat.ca
For brain calisthentics, read NorthernBeat.ca