Colleen Hardwick's TEAM vows to audit Downtown Eastside organizations

The Downtown Eastside homeless encampment on East Hastings Street, near Main Street, as of July 21, 2022. (Submitted)

Solving the complex issues emanating from the Downtown Eastside comes down to not necessarily only the matter of the level of new public funding, but the overarching effectiveness of the approach and how existing public funding is being spent, according to Colleen Hardwick.

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver has made a key campaign platform promise to create a commissioner for the Downtown Eastside, who will be responsible for auditing non-profit organizations and their use of public funding committed by municipal, provincial, and federal governments.

Hardwick, who is a current city councillor and the mayoral candidate for TEAM, says governments are “obviously miserably failing” in improving the conditions of the Downtown Eastside, adding that “we can’t keep taking the same approach and expecting different results – things keep getting worse and worse.”

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“We need to start with a complete examination of which level of government is spending what money on which services – and then start looking at different and better ways to help people in need and improve the disastrous situation faced by far too much of our city,” said Hardwick.

In 2014, the Vancouver Sun calculated that 260 non-profit social service agencies and social housing sites within the Downtown Eastside received and spent $360 million in 2013 alone — about $1 million each day. Of this total figure that year, approximately $265 million came from the municipal, provincial, and federal governments.

Nearly a decade later, the amount that governments now spend each year to support these organizations based in the Downtown Eastside has most likely soared — both from their response to the explosive growth in the opioid overdose crisis since the middle of the 2010s, and the homelessness, mental health, and addiction crisis as a result of the pandemic.

For instance, the City of Vancouver awarded a $320,000, six-month contract to the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) to keep the streets clean and clear within the Hastings Street encampment that formed this past summer. Another non-profit organization, Mission Possible, was also provided public funding to deliver private security for women in the area’s encampments. The effectiveness of their contracted work has been highly questioned by their clientele, and the organizations and the community they serve.

Despite the major new investments into non-profit organizations over the past few years, violent crime, random stranger attacks, and mental health and addiction issues continue to escalate.

“Mayor Kennedy Stewart has presided over four years of increased homelessness, failing to get provincial and federal help to reduce the impact of mental illness and addictions, rampant street crime and four stranger attacks a day,” said Hardwick.

“These events have made Vancouver an international spectacle and an example of exactly what not to do while creating terrible disruptions to businesses that deserve better.”

During her term as a city councillor, Hardwick successfully spearheaded the creation of the City of Vancouver’s auditor general, which ended the City’s run as one of the largest Canadian municipal governments without a dedicated auditing team independent of city staff and the rest of the bureaucracy.

In a sense, the commissioner of the Downtown Eastside mirrors the same rationale for creating the City’s auditor general.

“We need one skilled and experienced Commissioner for the DTES to audit what is currently happening and make strong recommendations for a significant change in approach – anything else will be a waste of time and taxpayers’ money,” said Hardwick.

“We need to develop a serious, holistic, and integrated plan that addresses the multitude of needs from health, mental health, addiction treatment, housing, job training and placement as well as community integration. This approach will replace the patchwork of programs that have clearly failed over the past 30 years, and we can use international programs that have already proven successful. We do not need to reinvent the wheel.”

In an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized, Hardwick said there is a “growing industry” in the Downtown Eastside as a result of governments moving people in need into the area, and focusing on mental health and social services, and social/supportive housing in the same location.

She also said the City of Vancouver, under former Mayor Philip Owen, developed the right strategy more than two decades ago to address the addiction crisis. But over the years, the execution of the Four Pillars Approach has been highly flawed, with governments, non-profit organizations, and activists only focusing on harm reduction and failing to follow through with the other three key principles of prevention, treatment, and enforcement.

TEAM also believes there were half measures in the provincial government’s approach to closing Riverview Hospital decades ago, which was supposed to be a strategy accompanied by more community-based support for the patients being released from institutional care. That did not happen, which led to the congregation of individuals experiencing mental health and addictions in SROs or becoming homeless in the Downtown Eastside.

“We know that putting a bunch of people who have serious problems within close proximity is a recipe for disaster, which is what we’ve been seeing,” said Hardwick.

“The simple fact is, what we have been doing isn’t working, and we need to make substantive and dramatic changes.”

She suggests the platform promises being proposed by her competitors — Kennedy Stewart of Forward Together and Ken Sim of ABC Vancouver — are problematic, as they are “the same old, tired, and failed models that have let the problems of the Downtown Eastside explode and expand elsewhere.”

She criticized Sim’s plan of expanding the Car 87/88 program that pairs a Vancouver Police Department officer with a mental health nurse for non-emergency mental health calls, with a municipal government led by ABC growing the program by hiring 100 more VPD officers and 100 mental health nurses. Stewart has also promised a dispatch team, but without the use of VPD officers, and considerably smaller in size with an initial team of 25 staff with specialized homeless outreach training, enhanced medical training, mental health and addictions training, and bylaw officers.

Before investments are made to such initiatives, Hardwick says her commissioner for the Downtown Eastside would immediately conduct an audit of existing services and public funding being spent, and then make “informed recommendations to the municipal, provincial, and federal governments for rapid changes to begin solving the problems.”

She also questioned whether Sim’s major plan to hire a combined total of 200 VPD officers and mental health nurses is feasible given the existing labour shortages and struggles with recruitment, and whether the municipal government should be spending on healthcare. ABC estimates their plan will cost $20 million annually.

“Throw even more money at the problem without any analysis of why it keeps failing – like his pipe dream plan to add police officers and nurses when none of either are even available – and when the provincial Health Ministry and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority hire nurses, not the city,” said Hardwick.

But ABC asserts topping up the VPD’s workforce is long overdue, and a necessary step towards tackling the Downtown Eastside’s issues.

“Vancouver has not had a fully funded police service plan in over a decade. ABC’s plan to hire 100 new police officers and 100 new mental health nurses will provide frontline resources to the communities that need them the most. We will support and expand health authority-led initiatives like Car 87 and peer-assisted car teams,” Peter Meiszner, a city councillor candidate for ABC, told Daily Hive Urbanized.

“The mayor’s plan of 25 counsellors and Colleen Hardwick’s plan of one commissioner are woefully insufficient to address the public safety crisis facing our city. Additionally, ABC will be opening up a 24-hour recovery centre on the Downtown Eastside and will be shifting Vancouver’s social and supportive housing strategy from a quantity-first model to a quality-first model, ensuring Vancouver’s most vulnerable residents have access to clean, safe, housing and proper wraparound supports.”

The civic election is scheduled for Saturday, October 15.

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