Begging for a Loonie

A guy walks past me. Suddenly he turns around and whispers in my ear: 'I have a green garden at home, you wanna buy some? '

No thank you. I know where to get my own 'garden' stuff.

Something strange is happening to the population of Vancouver. I see more and more homeless and confused people on the street. First they only lived around Main Street and Hastings Street, now they are even sleeping in front of the shops on the Granville strip.

The Vancouver City Center counted a total of 1847 homeless people in 2016. That is a disturbing 5 percent rise from the two years before. Of this total 539 is unsheltered (29%) and 1, 308 sheltered (71%). All these people are living in a very small part of downtown (Main-Hastings area) and basically took over that part of town. (See http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/homeless-count-2016-report.pdf)

Time and time again I wonder how the rich, beautiful city of Vancouver can have such a dark side. It is a zombieland. People openly deal drugs, live in tent camps and walk half-naked on the freezing streets. What a life.

(Source)

When I asked some local Vancouverites about the issue, they shrugged their shoulders and said: 'they probably come here to enjoy the warmer temperature'. It is true that the minus 5 Degrees in Vancouver is a better temperature than the minus 30 Degrees in Calgary, Toronto or Montreal, but it can not be the total cause of the growth in the number of homeless people.

An interesting fact is that 38 percent of these people are Aboriginal, while the Aboriginal people only form 2% of the total Vancouver population. Although they have 'equal' chances now, compared to thirty years ago, when they were structurally suppressed by the Canadian government, they are still the least privileged group of the population.

Colonialism is a killer and the victims always bear the consequences for generations.

On top of that, rising house prices, unemployment, mental illness, medical needs and substance abuse are the main causes for these people to start a life on the street, according to the Lookout Society (an organisation in Vancouver that provides shelter and help).

I saw the urgency of the situation when I had to bring a friend to the emergency room of the Downtown St. Paul's Hospital. It is the only hospital downtown, and so the waiting room was overflowing with people from the street. A total of seven people were sitting on the chairs in the waiting room, probably recovering from their overdose of some sort of substance. At one point two people started to scream to each other, leading to one person attacking the other guy with vicious backpack punches. The security guards had to come to calm down the crazy situation, but it took long before everyone was calm again.

The St. Paul's Hospital is literally a beacon of light for the homeless people that crowd the waiting rooms.

(Source)

Are homeless people really stuck in the system? Or is it their inability to cope with the system what makes them homeless? It must be a mix of circumstances.

So is the city doing enough to get them off the streets? The opinions differ, but the city finally seems to realize that the situation is getting urgent. Vancouver is finally battling the housing crisis and also tries to create more shelters.

The action comes too late. The government should have started way earlier with creating jobs and building houses for lower income categories. This and other measures could have avoided the huge homeless crisis that we have now.

And the Canadian government shouldn't have done what it started some centuries ago: killing the spirit of the Aboriginal culture and with it the hearts and minds of a people that had to deal with this pain for generations to come. It's a shame.

To be continued...

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