It is little wonder the [Canadian Occupy] protesters couldnt agree on what they wanted and even less surprising that the camps gradually deteriorated into hangouts for the dysfunctional dregs of society, pretending to be there for some noble cause.
Gwyn Morgan, The Province, Nov. 30
Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge.
In 2011, how could anyone think such a remark was acceptable, let alone write it and publish it?
Gwyn Morgan, one of the many appointed right-hand persons to Premier Christy Clark, might want to join thrice-elected NDP MLA Jagrup Brar and spend a month living on welfare to learn what it means to live among the homeless on the streets.
While doing so, he might learn how the Campbell-Clark governments have made a significant contribution to the numbers of British Columbians he called the dysfunctional dregs of society many of them from closed mental health beds.
Since thats not likely to happen, here are a few facts for Morgan to slip between the pages of his Dickensian pre-turkey primer:
One of the first actions taken by the newly elected 2001 Campbell government was to conduct an expensive sweep of the Downtown Eastside in an attempt to rid the streets of what it expected would be a large number of fraudsters inappropriately living on welfare.
Months later, much to the Liberals embarrassment, they admitted little fraud had been found. Instead, as recorded many times over the years by emergency responders and social agencies, a significant percentage of the homeless have had little option but to eke out a meagre existence on the streets.
In its 2010 draft report, Policing Vancouvers Mentally Ill: The Disturbing Truth, the Vancouver Police Department noted that a third of all police calls involve someone who suffers from a mental illness.
The paper an update of its 2008 document Lost in Transition noted that although progress has been made, Vancouver police officers are still viewed as de facto mental health workers.
The opening of the 100-bed Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction (BCMHA) was a welcome part of that progress, as was the more recent addition of 80 pre- and post-treatment beds.
Unfortunately, the report also stated that progress has been tempered by the acknowledgement that there are some 300 people on a waiting list and that around 40 per cent of BCMHA patients will need a high level of support and long-term residential care in order to sustain their recovery in the community.
The truth of the wait-list was borne out by the 2010 Homeless Count data prepared by the City of Vancouver Social Development Department.
Of the 1,715 people who were homeless in Vancouver on March 23, 2010 an increase of nine per cent since 2008 79 per cent had one or more health conditions.
The share reporting two or more health conditions rose from 35 per cent in 2008 to 47 per cent in 2010, and the share reporting mental illness also increased from 28 per cent to 36 per cent.
Thankfully, not all of the news is discouraging.
The City of Vancouver has donated land and provincial and private funding has made it possible to accommodate almost 400 previously homeless people across the city. Although its unclear how many of the 400 suffer from mental illness, this is a major step in the right direction for a compassionate society.
Last week, in a precursor to its official 2012 opening, Coast Mental Health began to move more of the homeless into a new 50-suite supportive housing facility at Dunbar and 16th Avenue in Vancouver.
Closer to home, the North Shore Schizophrenia Society acknowledges the efforts of families and other supporters on its website: Members of the NSSS, knowing from first-hand experience the tragedy of leaving the seriously mentally ill untreated to deteriorate on the streets, have been among those most active in . . . advocacy efforts.
When it comes to the effects of mental illness, who better than those caring families to explain all of the heartbreak hidden in Morgans accusatory word dysfunctional?
Talking of heartbreak, no discussion of homelessness can end without reference to that segment of British Columbian society we are allowing to move ever closer to that condition the 137,000 children who are living in poverty.
As I have suggested before, that number of impoverished children means somewhere between 137,000 and a quarter million parents also live in poverty.
The simple fact is: Kids cannot learn to be productive citizens on an empty stomach.
So if the Scrooge-like among us are hard-hearted enough to skip the compassion, if we continue to name-call instead of working together to find solutions, all we are doing is asking for a rapid escalation of todays estimated $55,000 annual per capita cost of emergency services.
That doesnt make sense at any level.
There are many reasons why Occupiers in Vancouver couldnt agree on what they wanted. Some were unable to express their ideas, while others had already turned to drugs and/or alcohol to dull the pain of their overwhelming problems.
But my guess is that the main thread throughout the Occupy Vancouver movement was an inability on the part of protesters to decide which among the myriad of societal problems should take precedence over all the others.
Too bad the media attention focussed on that indecision and on election campaign baffle-gabble, rather than on good-natured attempts to help the protesters articulate their legitimate concerns.
rimco@shaw
