WERA director Christine Ackermann, IOCC Chair Am Johal and Wendy Pedersen CCAP
photo by Doug Shanks
This article first appeared in the West Ender and is reposed here with the permission of the author.
homelessness, Olympics
Posted By: Jackie Wong
11/19/2009 12:00 AM
Housing, homelessness, and the 2010 Olympics will be the focus of a public forum on Monday (November 23) at SFU Harbour Centre’s Fletcher Challenge Theatre. The forum is part of the Right to the City lecture series organized by the Impact on Communities Coalition, an Olympic watchdog group.
The forum features speakers with a wide range of expertise on Vancouver housing and homelessness, including Martha Lewis of the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre; Wendy Pedersen of the Downtown Eastside’s Carnegie Community Action Project; and Reverend Ric Matthews of First United Church, the site of one of the first homeless shelters to open last winter under Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT).
While preparations for the 2010 Games have drawn criticism from housing and civil-liberties advocates, attributing all of the city’s housing issues to the Olympics is too simple, says Nathan Edelson, a former senior planner for the City of Vancouver and a speaker at the Right to the City forum.
“We often look at [the Olympics] and say, for instance, ‘Why did we spend a billion dollars on a convention centre when we could have housed everyone?’ But the choice usually doesn’t come down that way,” Edelson says. “The nature of the Olympics is such that some money probably never would have been a city priority. For instance, a billion dollars in security wouldn’t have been spent that way. So, would that money have been available for other things? Possibly, but it requires a different political context.
“The real issue, to me, is that we don’t have a national housing program, we haven’t had a provincial housing program, and we don’t have consistent infrastructure programs by the senior governments,” he says.
As for the controversial extreme-weather-shelter legislation that B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman introduced last month, which gives police authority to take people to emergency shelters, Christine Smith-Parnell is concerned about the possible impact the legislation could have on the aboriginal homeless population. Smith-Parnell will speak at the Right to the City forum representing her role as executive director of the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Society. “If they’re going to legislate that, they should be legislating more beds, so that if we have a certain amount of homeless people, we should have a certain amount of shelter space available to them.”
Smith-Parnell is concerned that, under the new legislation, people will be put in jail if there is insufficient space in shelters. “Our [aboriginal] population has always been over-represented, whether it’s in the criminal justice system or the homeless [population]… Because we are the most visible, our people are going to be the first that are being scooped up.”
For his part, Edelson would like the provincial and municipal governments to focus more on shelter issues. “I think we need a year-round shelter program that gives people at least a roof over their heads — not a mat on the floor, but in a bed, in a place where they can relax,” he says. “It’s going to take a number of years to build the housing that’s needed, but I don’t think we should condemn hundreds of people to live outside while we do the construction… It’s just so devastating for people when they don’t have a place that they can have some stake in, that they can’t be asked to move along from, and that they have the ability to be there when they need to get rest or get out of the weather.”
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