Andrew Percy: Vancouver’s pro-crack smoking faction is out in force

VANCOUVER — On Oct. 17 Vancouverites will be offered the chance in a plebiscite to vote on two questions relating to public order and the addictions crisis facing the city. The first of these will ask if residents think the city should strengthen its laws on open air hard drug use — necessary for seizures given federal prosecutors are instructed not to prosecute for possession — and the second asks residents to back calls for the province to help provide 100 voluntary and involuntary care beds to help get the victims of this crisis into treatment.

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The fact that these questions need to be asked is astonishing, but even more astonishing is the fact that some elected officials voted against this proposal by Mayor Ken Sim and his councillors, whilst other groups are actively campaigning for a No vote.

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That’s right, there are people in this city actively campaigning against cracking down on people openly smoking crack in the middle of the day on city streets and against proposals to get people into treatment and out of the hands of the cruel drug pushers who profit from this human misery.

I first came to work in Canada in the late 90s on a youth work visa, earning my spurs in the Canadian economy working at Eaton’s (remember them) in the Pacific Centre. I fell in love with the city and B.C. immediately. There are few places more beautiful in summer than B.C., there really aren’t. It’s a beauty that assaults the senses from the sheer scale and size of the mountains to the glorious bays and inlets of the Pacific, to those sunsets at English Bay one can never tire of.

I realized though back then that there’s something else out here that assaults your senses and it is really rather shocking. It’s something anyone visiting me has commented on too. I’m talking of course of the heartbreaking addiction issues and homelessness.

Two and half decades after my first time working here, and after countless visits in the intervening years, I decided to make a home here two years ago and become a permanent resident. The mountains, the ocean, the scenery still speaks to my soul in the way it did in my 20s, but I have watched the flip side of that — the addiction crisis and street disorder — grow and deteriorate in the intervening years.

I’m not qualified enough to debate the medical side of addiction and mental health treatment, but I am qualified enough as a human being to speak to what I see on the streets, about what has been normalized in the streets and about the human tragedy Vancouverites see day in and day out.

I lived in London for much of the past 15 years and whilst it has many problems of its own, what we have on the streets of Vancouver is just not seen in London or other cities in the way it is here. Yes, there are terribly sad scenes related to homelessness and addiction in other cities too, but living here now, I have had to become accustomed to people openly injecting or smoking crack pipes in the middle of the day and to that all too regular scene of people bent double and contorted by the cruelty of the substances they’ve consumed. I’ve walked into coffee shop bathrooms to see brown stained tinfoil and the air thick with the aftermath of what was just smoked, open drug use on buses and of course the sad scene of people almost unidentifiable as human-beings comatose in alley ways.

Worst of all, I’ve become so accustomed to these scenes that, like so many in this city, I have gotten used to it and am only reminded of how abnormal this is when I overhear tourists in bars or restaurants talking about it or I see the shock on the faces of my own friends and families when they visit me. I do not want to be one of those walk on by people, but familiarity means we all become dulled to it in some way.

I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of any particular policy such as the abandoned progressive experiment with decriminalization (we can discuss that later), but what I know is that whatever it is we’ve been doing for the intervening decades between my first iteration as a British Columbian and my second doesn’t seem to have made it any better!

All I know for certain is that seeing young men and women who should be at the heights of their powers living and enjoying life, ravaged by the horrors of addiction, we are clearly on the wrong track. Too many of these people become statistics in B.C.’s awful opioid overdose rates. I care less about the statistics and more about these people as individuals, someone’s son, daughter, sister or brother.

It also seems clear to me that too many of these victims are not going to find their way to treatment voluntarily and surely the alternative of leaving them to fire up crack pipes in back lanes or on street corners cannot be considered kind or caring.  Not because it offends the sensitivities of me or other residents who have to observe this, but because it is abject cruelty.

Ideology and so called “progressiveness” cannot and must not be allowed to keep people in this cycle of cruelty. Mayor Ken Sim has fortunately taken a different approach and taken action to fund the police properly, pair them with mental health nurses and challenge drug consumption sites.

I left politics and had no interest in actively engaging in it again anytime soon, but I felt compelled to get involved to support Sim and his administration, precisely because I love this city and I find it incomprehensible that wanting to take firmer action to tackle this crisis is not only controversial but actively opposed by some who would like to replace him.

That it has come to the point where we need the public to send an instruction to elected officials due to the ideology that has inserted itself in this human tragedy is staggering. It is however necessary and I would argue, kindness and compassion requires it.

Andrew Percy is a former British government Minister and Conservative MP from 2010-2024. He now serves as a vice president at Crestview Strategy in Vancouver.

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