Downtown Eastside organizations admit: 'We don't know where the money's going' | Daily Hive

'We don't know where the money's going': What former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell says he's hearing from Downtown Eastside organizations

Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Larry Campbell says the deeper he looked into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood over the past six months, the more he realized the scale of the challenge was far greater than expected — shaped by decades of policy decisions, evolving drug toxicity, and a fragmented system struggling to respond.

He made the comments during a press conference earlier this week, providing an update on his work as Premier David Eby’s appointed provincial advisor for the Downtown Eastside.

Campbell was a longtime Canadian senator, B.C.’s chief coroner from 1996 to 2000, and the mayor of Vancouver from 2002 to 2005 under the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) party.

In September 2025, Campbell was given a six-month role to bring together governments, non-profit organizations, and other entities operating in the Downtown Eastside — focusing on recommending solutions for better outcomes and results on delivering housing, healthcare, and social services in the troubled area. His job is to get government entities and non-profit organizations working better together, make sure money and resources are used more effectively, and help create practical plans to address ongoing challenges like homelessness and addiction while advising provincial leaders on what actions to take.

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But this week, he says the work needs another six months — through late 2026 — because the complexity of it is far beyond what he expected from the outset.

“I thought that I’d be able to gather that information much quicker, and I was wrong. What has surprised me [was] the amount of despair [and] the amount of normalcy — that’s the one thing that I just cannot get over. And the first couple of months were rough for me. I’ll admit it, it was, you know, I mean, I was a coroner for 20 years, so I’ve got lots of bad things tucked away in the back of my head,” he said.

“It’s not about the amount that we spend. It’s about the results that we get.”

The complexity, he asserts, stems partly from the exponential growth in the number of organizations — both non-profit organizations and government agencies — since his time working in the Downtown Eastside, before he became a senator. He says there is a high degree of fragmentation in the work and investments carried out by these organizations, to the extent that they overlap inefficiently.

“There’s a certain amount of fragmentation that goes on. There’s a lot of organizations in government that are overlapping. There’s lots of organizations in government who don’t know,” he said, while describing an example of a scenario where a non-profit organization receives a government grant, but there is a shortage of information on whether another government entity is already involved in offering similar grants.

“There’s a fragmentation going on down there. We spend a lot of money down there. And it’s not about the amount that we spend. It’s about the results that we get. I go down and I look and I don’t see a huge amount of improvement in the Downtown Eastside.”

He shared that one of his focuses will be to find a strategy to better coordinate the organizations and significant public funding that goes into the Downtown Eastside.

While there is coordination among frontline workers, he says there are major structural issues within the broader system. He emphasized that the goal is not to reduce public funding for the area — with some estimates in recent years suggesting it could be anywhere between $6 million to $14 million per day — but to improve accountability and the use of public financial resources by measuring results through clear metrics.

“This is not about saving money. This is about taxpayers’ money going in to help a community that’s in dire straits and being able to see what the results are, the accountability of it, how we do the metrics for it and to be able to shift on it. Things change rapidly in the Downtown Eastside… food, for instance, [and ] shelters, overdose places, all of these, it would be nice to be able to coordinate them. Housing also, the housing end of it,” said Campbell.

“We don’t know where the money’s going… I don’t think you can buy your way out of this.”

In recent years, there has been some pushback from certain Downtown Eastside non-profit organizations and advocates on the idea of independent audits of their spending and work.

That lack of clarity extends to how funds are tracked and evaluated. Campbell said over the last few months, he has spoken directly with organizations about transparency and outcomes, and while he asserts many are willing to cooperate, the system itself lacks consistency.

“If I am supplying funds to an organization and I’m government, that’s taxpayer’s dollars and they need to know where’s going, how’s it being used, and the metrics of success. If it’s successful, we need to help them with that. If it’s not successful, we need to say, ‘This isn’t working, and what are we going to do?'” he said.

“Bluntly, it’s a mixed bag,” he continued, with many organizations telling him right from the start: “We don’t know where the money’s going.”

“These are the people who are running the organizations. ‘We don’t know where the money’s going,'” he reiterated for emphasis to highlight the astonishing problem at hand. “Some of them are resistant to it,” he added.

“I think that it should be just a given that if I have a contract and I’m handing it out to somebody, there are expectations and there are metrics. Within that, there has to be an expectation from the people who are receiving the money that I’m going to come and see you and see you and talk to you about this.”

Fundamentally, he suggests, money alone will not fix the problems of the Downtown Eastside if there is a lack of coordination between governments and organizations, no coordination with public funding streams, and no accountability and metrics to measure success. “I don’t think you can buy your way out of this, for starters,” he quipped.

“A whole generation of people who are going to be severely brain damaged, and they’re young.”

When Campbell was Vancouver’s mayor, the prevalent drug in the streets was heroin, with the number of overdoses being a small fraction of what they are today. He also said the Downtown Eastside received significant funding from senior governments during his mayoral tenure as it could “piggyback” on the attention and preparations in the years leading up to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Since 2005, when he left the mayor’s office, he says, many more affordable housing buildings have been built in the area.

While the overdose crisis turned a dangerous corner with an exponential rise in the number of deaths beginning in the mid-2010s due to fentanyl, that is no longer the case now, a decade later.

“I think that actually using the term fentanyl is probably a misnomer because most of the drugs on the street, very little fentanyl. It’s all animal tranquillizers. It’s all stuff that humans should not be putting in. It’s all chemicals,” said Campbell.

While overdose deaths remain elevated, they have begun to decline slightly or at least level off. Campbell suggested this shift may be partly due to changes in the street drug supply, with dealers possibly recognizing that fentanyl’s high rate of lethality is reducing their customer base.

With the previous proliferation of heroin, he added, it did not create the same degree of brain damage seen from the more recent fentanyl use. He also asserts that a leading cause of death is a mix of substances, not necessarily the use of any one opioid. “If you take a look at coroner’s reports, you’ll see multiple drugs. Any which one could have been the one that tipped you over,” he said.

There is growing concern about the increasing number of people with highly complex healthcare needs, specifically those who have incurred significant permanent brain damage from repeated overdoses that deprive the brain of oxygen — on top of any other underlying physical and mental health issues.

“Just simply the fentanyl, the fact that we have a whole generation of people who are going to be severely brain damaged, and they’re young, they’re not old. And we have to start thinking about how do we, what do we do? How do we help these people? How do we house them? How do we, how are we able to treat them in what manner we can treat?” he said.

One thing that shocked him during his initial observations was that public disorder is now normalized in the Downtown Eastside — specifically people laying on the sidewalk.

“In the past, if somebody was laying on the sidewalk, almost always a citizen or somebody would turn that person over, put them in a recovery position and call for help,” said the former mayor.

Based on his months-long observations to date, Campbell said the neighbourhood operates on a daily rhythm that reflects the absence of stable living conditions, and described it in stark terms, comparing it to ocean tides.

“The Downtown Eastside is sort of like the ocean. So in the morning, the tide comes in, the shelters close, you’re tired of being in your eight by 10 ft. [SRO] room and you go onto the streets. There is no living room. You don’t have a living room. You don’t have a safe space to sit down and have coffee or talk to people or just do anything. And the street, Hastings Street in particular, by default becomes your living room. And then at nighttime around seven o’clock, usually eight o’clock, you see the tide go out and people go back to their rooms. They go back to the shelters and the street reverts to actually a fairly quiet place,” he said.

It is well known that a sizeable proportion of the perceived homelessness and public disorder in public spaces stems from people avoiding their SRO units due to the buildings’ dilapidated and unsafe conditions, along with minimal supports for the high concentration of residents with complex needs. During the warmer months of the year, this behaviour can increase from the lack of air cooling in such buildings, with many built in the early 1900s.

Looking at the broader history, prior to the rise of fentanyl, Campbell pointed to several key turning points that shaped the current situation, beginning with the gradual full closure of Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam and the inadequate replacement approach of providing community services to support its patients — many instead becoming homeless, ending up in homeless shelters, and finding their way to the SROs of the Downtown Eastside.

“The closing of Riverview was the first thing. That was the start. We closed it because we should have closed it because science said this is not the way that you treat mental illness. But we promised that there would be community support… just not enough of them,” he said.

“Everybody wants to blame this [BC NDP-led] government, but I take heat on this also. I was mayor, I was the chief coroner. In hindsight, there’s lots of stuff that I could have done at that point to not get to this point. So if we want to blame government, I don’t have a difficulty with that, but you’ve got to go back to the Socreds to start on this.”

The second factor, he says, was Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberals-led federal government’s decision in the 1990s to pull away from providing funding to build rental housing across the country due to federal budget constraints at the time.

Vancouver Police’s new training academy at Woodward’s is the right move, says Campbell

Campbell says he is very supportive of the recent decision to establish a new Vancouver Police Department training academy at the former London Drugs store space within the Woodward’s complex. This decision was later supported by the provincial government.

He notes that policing alone is not the solution, but his endorsement of this facility at the location comes from how it will provide the broader Gastown, Downtown Eastside, and Chinatown areas with more foot traffic that supports local businesses — not necessarily for its increased police presence.

“I was a big advocate for the police academy going into the Downtown Eastside. There’s some people who don’t like that, [but] I’m not looking at so much from a police point of view. I’m looking at it from the point of view of putting 200 to 300 people into a space who are gonna get haircuts and shop and do whatever,” he said.

London Drugs ended its tenancy at the location after a decade and a half of consecutive annual financial losses and safety issues, which escalated to intolerable levels in the years since the pandemic. Earlier this week, the Nester’s Market grocery store at Woodward’s — located in the complex’s atrium, just across from the former London Drugs space — sustained major damage due to an arson incident during business hours, with a man walking into the store and lighting a fire.

During his mayoral tenure, Campbell was highly instrumental in enabling the redevelopment of the former department store complex, with the project intended to become an economic anchor to support the Downtown Eastside’s revitalization, while also providing a significant infusion of mixed-income housing — not just affordable housing. Westbank’s Woodward’s complex with housing, retail/restaurant uses, office space, and a public atrium reached completion in 2010.

london drugs woodwards vpd training academy f

Press conference on Feb. 26, 2026, announcing Vancouver Police Departments’ (VPD) new training academy at the former London Drugs store space at Woodward’s. (Kenneth Chan)

Campbell hopes to see concrete action from the provincial government later in 2026, when he releases his full findings and recommendations, which could be summarized in a report if requested.

“If it’s just gonna go sit on a shelf, I would much rather make sure the government is actually taking action than just having a report. So I’m prepared, if the government wants a report, I’m prepared to do a report,” he added.

In response to Campbell’s remarks and the need to extend his work by six months, B.C. Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs Christine Boyle stated that the provincial government “will have more to share on Larry’s work to bring together all levels of government in the coming weeks.”

“Larry brings a lifetime of community-based experience, relationships and expertise to this role alongside the people who live and work in the Downtown Eastside. He has been working with people in the community, local organizations, the City, the federal government and others to listen, understand and align the important work being done to address systemic challenges in this community,” reads the statement by Boyle.

“Larry’s work to date has laid the groundwork for some upcoming next steps — and we are now at a critical juncture in the work he has been doing. He has been connecting with people in the community week after week, reviewing the co-ordination of organizations and initiatives, such as day spaces, to further support their meaningful impact in the neighbourhood, and leveraging his experience as mayor and senator to advocate for and advance efforts toward multi-government co-operation on housing in the Downtown Eastside. His focus has been bringing the right people together. Now it is time for those partners to take action and create impactful and long-lasting solutions for this community.”

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