With the provincial election just days away, Megaphone Issue #129 highlights two important issues not getting much play on the campaign trail: mental health and justice for immigrants and refugees. We interview Downtown Eastside activist Harsha Walia about her struggle to ensure humane treatment for newcomers to Canada. Plus we discuss four actions the new provincial government can take, as outlined by the Canadian Mental Health Association, to improve the lives of people living with mental illness.

Also in this issue: W2 Belongs to Me splits up to create a proposal for getting the Woodwards space back; Megaphone vendor Ron McGrath pays tribute to a popular UBC homeless man; local artists re-imagine a 40 year old photography project capturing Vancouver landmarks; pieces from our writing workshops; and much more!

Photo via BCNDP on Flickr. 

Preliminary numbers from last month’s Vancouver Homeless Count show the number of people living on the street have fallen 11 per cent to 273 people since last year’s count. However, in a City of Vancouver press release, Mayor Gregor Robertson said there is still much work to do to end street homelessness by 2015.

“Affordable housing and homelessness is an issue not just for Vancouver, but for all of Metro and the province,” read his statement. “I urge the provincial parties to outline their plan for preventing and ending homelessness.”

Dave Diewart, a member of the non-partisan Social Housing Coalition, which is calling for 10,000 units of social housing per year for 10 years, has been asking parties for their housing platforms, too. 

“Certainly for the Liberals, they have an ideology that the market will take care of housing,” he said, adding their budget is one of austerity.

The Green Party’s social housing views align with Social Housing Now’s, but the group hasn’t bothered to ask the BC Conservatives, assuming the party wouldn’t support more social housing. 

Diewart says the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) response has been cautious. 

“There are too many people around the province that think it’s too extreme and we need to coax the market into producing more rental housing, which is one thing that Adrian Dix said [to us],” he said. 

But Diewart remains optimistic the NDP would respond to public pressure. “Probably the best shot at social housing would be with the NDP, but I don’t think it’s a matter of voting them in and then watching them pull it off,” he said. 

“It’s a matter of continuing to pressure them to put it into their platform prior to the election, and after the election, if they are the party in power, to continue to press them to take action on it.”

Pivot Legal Society has launched a private security edition of the ‘Know Your Rights’ card in an attempt to draw attention to survival sex workers’ issues with private security guards in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). 

Unlike the original ‘Know Your Rights’ cards which provide information on what citizens should do when dealing with police, Pivot lawyer Douglas King says the new cards are about what private security guards can’t do.

“There’s a pretty big misconception there about what private security powers are, so the main purpose of the card is to dispel that myth,” said King. 

Some of these myths include a belief that security guards can move individuals from public spaces like parks or sidewalks, and perform search and seizures of personal belongings.

King says the cards were inspired by complaints Pivot received from sex workers about CSC Security, a private security company contracted by the Strathcona Business Improvement Association (BIA).

“[Sex workers] experienced [verbal] harassment from the guards,” said King, adding guards have also taken photos and videos of sex workers and their clients. “In some cases, the guards have actually physically tried to prevent clients from picking up sex workers or followed clients once they’ve picked up a sex worker and put the sex worker under high beams.”

The Strathcona BIA has spoken to both Pivot and CSC about the complaints. Executive director Joji Kumagai told Megaphone “we’ve also instructed CSC patrol to make sure that they don’t undertake those activities in their rounds.” 

The BIA is issuing a Request for Proposals for a new private security contract soon. They’re expecting a proposal from CSC, as well as the Mission Possible Neighbours Program, which trains mostly DTES residents to patrol their neighbourhood. 

“We will be reaching out to our members very shortly to get some feedback and direction from them very shortly, and then that will help us understand what our membership is looking for,” said Kumagai.

With the NHL playoffs about to begin, Megaphone sits down with Canucks goaltender Cory Schnieder to discuss what we can expect in this season's race for the Stanley Cup. From his relationships with teammates, particularly the team's other goalie Roberto Luongo, to the team's winning streak and his own goaltending style, Megaphone Issue #128 gets a good look at the man behind the mask. 

Also in this issue:  Social housing activists break down political party stands in the provincial election; Pivot Legal Society shines a spotlight on misbehaving private security guards; Megaphone vendor Mick Goodhart remembers the turbulant times of a homeless neighbour who lived and died on the streets of Marpole; films featured in the upcoming DOXA film festival; and much more!

 Get your copy from a Megaphone vendor today for only $2!

From the Arab Spring to Idle No More, young activists have emerged as key leaders within contemporary social movements. For youth, activism can be a way to create positive changes in our own lives, shape our communities and re-imagine our world. Youth don't hold a lot of power in our society; age-based laws restrict our right to vote and run for office, while authority figures like parents, teachers, and employers hold a lot of power over us. For many youth, activism is a way for our voices to be heard. 

Founded in 1999, Check Your Head is a youth-driven non-profit, which means our approach to social justice places youth leadership at the centre. We don’t want to just add youth and stir. We believe youth have valuable experiences, knowledge and perspectives to share regarding the complex issues that we face now and in the future. We are working to build a dialogue within and across communities of young people by facilitating workshops on critical issues like gender representations, climate justice, income inequality and more. We’re interested in supporting and empowering communities of youth to address the issues that matter to them. 

According to Statistics Canada, there are over 10 million people under 25 in Canada, making us about a third of the total population. Youth are not just another problem to solve; we are millions of potential problemsolvers. The most effective way to address the issues affecting youth today is to empower young people to become leaders for change within our communities. 

Our generation is often labeled as aimless and apathetic but the idea that youth are disconnected from the world around us is far from true. In reality, youth are directly impacted by the social, economic and environmental forces shaping our world. 

Racism shapes the lives of young people of colour, who experience higher rates of surveillance and policing. Queer and trans youth are overrepresented within street-involved communities, which can be a result of homophobia and transphobia within our families of origin and other institutions. Youth from poor and working-class communities are disproportionately impacted by youth unemployment rates and discrimination in hiring. 

Youth are not a single community or special interest group. Rather, we belong to multiple, overlapping communities. Our lived experiences hold power and connect us as young people to broader movements for social change. We are the experts of our own experiences and we have valuable perspectives to offer any movement for justice and liberation. 

Unfortunately, youth perspectives are not always taken seriously, even within progressive movements and organizations. Since many young activists have limited institutional power—not even the right to vote—how can we shape our world for the better?

Youth are finding answers. We are organizing youth conferences, carrying banners at rallies, volunteering at community organizations, talking to our peers about social justice and bugging our parents to compost. We are asking more from schools, companies, and countries. For example, Kids for Climate Action is a group of Vancouver youth who are canvassing, protesting, and petitioning for action to end climate change. They recognize that it is the next generation that will pay for inaction today, and they’re not alone. 

Check Your Head works to educate, activate and engage young people on the issues that matter most to our communities. If we want to address housing and homelessness, the hundreds of street-involved youth in Vancouver have insight to share. If we want to fight homophobia, queer young people are on the frontlines. 

If we want to talk about sustainable communities, that’s where youth want to live. For social movements to make headway, youth need to be included as part of the effort, because we are part of the solution. These are our problems, this is our city, this our planet, and we’ve got work to do.

Kaitlin Pelletier is executive director of Check Your Head, a youth-driven not-for-profit organization based in Vancouver that educates and activates young people on various social issues.

To submit a column to Megaphone’s opinion section, please contact editor@megaphonemagazine.com

It’s one of the first sunny days of spring, and the herons have returned to their rookery in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Judy Graves walks slowly, pausing to admire the wiry herons’ nests, the new daffodils and the fluffy cherry blossoms. The 63-year-old’s nails are whimsically painted a lilac pastel that matches her goofy spontaneity and youthful inquisitiveness. “Here,” she says, leading us towards the Vancouver Park Board’s headquarters. We follow her to a side of the building thick with rhododendron bushes. “When I’m a homeless old woman, this is where I’ll live.”

It takes a moment to understand what she means. She points to a rectangular covered area with a clean white concrete floor. Short walls provide some shelter from the elements. “The people who live here are usually very organized,” she says. “One man, he would cook his food out on the beach. And he just loved the flowers.” The space, so small and hidden by the wall of flowers, is easy to miss. 

But to Graves, it’s one of countless spaces hidden in plain sight that are home to the city’s homeless. They are places and people she knows well. She has spent more than half her lifetime working with Vancouver’s homeless and hard-tohouse, and holds the City of Vancouver’s only position as an advocate for the homeless. It’s a title she’s held since 2010. It evolved from her work through the 1980s, ‘90s and the first decade of the 2000s as the city’s tenant assistance coordinator. 

Now, her days with the city are drawing to a close. She turns 64 on Wednesday, May 29, a day that will also mark her retirement from a career that has spanned over three decades. In much the same way she’s approached other aspects of her life, she decided in January to leave, she says, because it simply felt right. She’s not aware of any plans to replace her. 

Graves isn’t the type to self-aggrandize, but she believes her position should be filled. “I think it’s important to have an informed advocate within the system who can speak truth to power. It's very easy for government to start believing its own spin,” she says. “And it's important for government to have people they trust within their own ranks. I think it's very important, as well, that there be somebody doing the public advocacy and the teaching for the citizens as a whole.”

But so far no one else at City Hall is taking on Graves’ mission to educate. While she humbly notes that many others have made a positive mark on the city, few have made such a resonant impact on the individual lives of Vancouver’s most vulnerable citizens. “I’m not a counter,” she admits, but she estimates the people she’s helped over the years to secure housing number in the thousands.

Karen O’Shannacery is a longtime friend of Graves’. She co-founded Vancouver’s Lookout Emergency Aid Society in 1971 when she was 20 years old, after living on the streets as a teenager. While she believes the work should continue after her friend has retired, she doesn’t expect anyone will be able to fill Graves’ shoes completely. “Nobody could replace Judy,” she says. “Her impact has really fostered the city taking such a leadership role in ending homelessness within the city of Vancouver, which challenges the whole region and challenges the province. I think she deserves recognition for that.”

“Right away, Judy became involved”

John Ethier is one among thousands who remembers Graves’ help during a difficult time in his life. 

The former commercial fisher moved to Vancouver from a small town in Ontario in the 1970s. When he wasn’t casting nets at sea, he, like other resource industry workers, lived in the previously abundant rooming houses downtown. He spent the ‘90s in the Downtown Eastside and was living in a downtown Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel when he met Graves, who at the time was working as the city’s tenant assistance coordinator. [Ed. note: John Ethier is a former Megaphone vendor and current member of Megaphone's board of directors.]

“I met Judy in 2003 when the old Plaza Hotel on Richards was being emptied for demolition and redevelopment,” he remembers. “We were approached by an agent for the owners who offered to help us relocate to the Marble Arch [Hotel]. We were told the city was closing the Plaza due to safety concerns. A call to City Hall revealed the city had no knowledge of this. We were, in fact, being scammed by the owners. Right away, Judy became involved.”

Under Graves’ watch, the Plaza tenants were moved to suitable accommodations. They were not displaced, as they feared. “I still run into Judy from time to time and she always has time to stop and chat,” Ethier says fondly. He now lives in seniors’ social housing in Downtown South. “Judy, to me, is a person who is very passionate and dedicated about ending homelessness.”

The lady in the blue coat

Graves’ work has inhabited two worlds: the streets of the homeless, and the territory of politicians, bureaucrats, community leaders and non-profit service providers. 

For years, she took overnight walks through the city, connecting with people sleeping on the streets, building their trust and walking alongside them to find and secure housing, social services and income assistance. 

In the dead of night she’d appear in doorways, under bridges and in other outdoor spaces where the homeless slept. 

She’d offer a cigarette, a piece of candy, a treat for the dog. Then they’d talk, and Graves would visit again and again until the person was ready to move forward—to a homeless shelter, onto income assistance or into housing. People on the streets know her as “the lady in the blue coat,” walking slowly through the night to find people all but lost to everyone else.

She spent her days at City Hall, reporting what she learned on her overnight excursions to the people in government who could make a difference through policy and funding. 

“She was able to get buy-in, persuade the powers that be to do something about it,” O’Shannacery says. Graves’ first reports on people sleeping on Vancouver’s streets in the 1990s “made it real” to the municipal government, O’Shannacery says. “She made it personal, putting a face on people who were homeless.” 

Graves also persuaded authorities to see that homelessness was neither unsolvable, nor an age-old problem that has always been with us. She remembers the 1970s and ‘80s in Vancouver, when higher vacancy rates and affordable rooming houses kept many people off the streets. 

In the 1990s, however, homelessness became visible, as two trends struck the city at one time. In 1993, the federal government completed its long withdrawal from funding social housing across Canada. 

Meanwhile, an influx of cocaine fueled an active open drug market in Vancouver’s inner city. By 1997, Vancouver Coastal Health declared a public health emergency in the Downtown Eastside for its HIV/AIDS epidemic and high drug overdose rates. 

Today, “we've got a whole generation who don't remember that homelessness is not normal,” Graves says. “Anybody who was born in the late ‘80s would have no conscious memory of there simply not being a homelessness crisis.”

Counting what didn’t count to others

People view Graves’ work as heroic. “Judy has been the conscience of our city,” says Maxine Davis, executive director of the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation. “I defy anyone to hear her speak about her daily connection with individuals on the streets, in parks and under bridges and not be stirred to help make a difference.” But the overnight walks for which she has become known—and which were replicated, starting in 2002, by hundreds of volunteers in the Metro Vancouver Homeless Count—were borne of simple curiosity. 

Graves started work with the City of Vancouver as a receptionist at Kitsilano’s Pine Free Clinic. She was 25 and the new mother of a baby daughter. At 30, she started a job at Cordova House, a city-owned building for difficult tenants. 

Then, in the early 1990s, she and other tenant support workers started to notice people sleeping on the streets. 

As more people turned up on the streets, Graves felt compelled to understand a situation she figured everyone else knew more about than she. While her City of Vancouver coworkers held graduate degrees in urban planning, she had dropped out of high school. “I thought I was the only person who didn't understand this was happening,” she says. “So I started going out into the streets and asking people, ‘What happened? What can I do to help?’”

Against the wishes of her supervisor, who viewed her walks as a trivial hobby, Graves says, “I found the best time to do it was between two and six in the morning,” she says. “The world belongs to the homeless in the middle of the night.” 

As word of her walks spread around the office, people started asking her for information. And as Vancouver’s street homeless population grew, reporters started pressing the municipality for answers. By the late 1990s, Graves conducted Vancouver’s first homeless counts on her own—crude estimates done on hand-drawn maps. 

“Judy’s early street homeless counts in Vancouver demonstrated the power of hard numbers in the fight against homelessness, and doubtless inspired the first Regional Homeless Count,” says urban planner Margaret Eberle. Metro Vancouver took its first large-scale homeless count in 2002 and now takes a new count every three years. The City of Vancouver has conducted its own annual count since 2010. 

“Judy is the heart and soul of the Vancouver homeless count,” Eberle says. “What is essentially a data collection exercise is transformed in the training sessions where Judy teaches us how to approach the homeless, and how to understand and treat the homeless with respect and compassion. Most of us emerge from these sessions with a sense of awe for Judy—her compassion, humour and most of all, her skills.”

The counts Graves inspired have brought street homelessness into the public spotlight. “Some question the utility of homeless counts,” Eberle admits. “I firmly believe in the power of defensible estimates of homelessness in shaping housing and income assistance policy, and ultimately, in addressing homelessness.”

“Deal with homelessness as a disaster”

Graves’ long career has seen numerous ruling parties come and go at City Hall. She admits that municipal regime changes have affected how she’s been able to do her work— “but not predictably,” she says. “I certainly think that Phillip Owen was a wonderful mayor to work under. And I'm wildly impressed with the work that [current mayor] Gregor [Robertson] has done with homelessness,” she says. 

Beyond that, she won’t indulge in the criticism or gossip that often spring only too readily from government staffers when they’re ready to leave a job. “I don't believe in taking any individual on,” she says. “Any of us can change our mind in a heartbeat. I don’t see people as enemies.”

While she’s not willing to spend time attacking individuals for perceived shortcomings, Graves has a striking final message for all of Canada. 

Ending homelessness, she says, is probably one of the easiest problems facing cities to solve. But “until the powers—and I don't mean just the city, I mean the province and the feds—decide to deal with homelessness as a disaster, they could dab at it for another century and not get it done,” she says. 

“It could, actually, be quite easily done, very quickly. We need probably a couple of thousand units of housing. Not expensive housing. Not fancy housing. We need rooms with their own bathrooms, which is exactly what every homeless person I talk to is asking for. And beyond that, we need to look at ways of getting nutrition, good quality nutrition, to people who are very poor.”

Last days on the street

After we parted ways in English Bay at the end of our afternoon together in Stanley Park, I contacted Graves again to ask if I could meet her for an overnight walk this month. She’s usually open to having guests along with her. But she declined.

“Can’t,” she wrote. “The time in the street now is too personal. Too full of grief. Talking to people who will be still out there after I have left.” 

Graves has no firm plans after retirement. While she has an apartment in a West End co-op, she’s not sure where she’ll live next, as her daughter recently moved to Powell River. As has been the case with other events in her life, things will happen, she says, when the time is right. 

“I probably have survived by rolling downhill like water into a stream,” she says, laughing. 

One sure thing is she’ll be dearly, sadly missed. Especially by those who will no longer be visited in the night by the lady in the blue coat, with whom they’ll stay up late smoking, talking, helping each other understand.

This story was produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives Society. 

This series was made possible through the support of the Real Estate Foundation, Vancity, and BC Non-Profit Housing Association. Support for this project does not necessarily imply Vancity’s endorsement of the findings or contents of this report. TSS funders and Tides Canada Initiatives neither influence nor endorse the particular content of TSS’ reporting. Other publications wishing to publish this story or other Tyee Solutions Society-produced articles, please see TyeeSolutions.org for contacts and information.

Megaphone and the Tyee collaborated on the publication of this feature.

For almost 20 years Judy Graves has been advocating for Vancouver's homeless. Inspiring the homeless counts with her own mini-survey, Graves' advocacy and compassion for people living on the street is unparalleled. As the city's only full-time homelessness advocate prepares to retire next month, Megaphone talks to Graves, the person who knows Vancouver's homelessness issue the best.

Also in this issue: Check Your Head asks you to check your assumptions about youth and activism; John MacInnis questions the motives of anti-gentrification protestors in the DTES; Union Gospel Mission teams up with Elections BC to get low-income people to the voting booth; sex worker advocates ask for leave to president evidence at Supreme Court prostitution case; Megaphone prepares to launch its Voices of the Street literary issue; horoscopes; arts listings; and much more!

It’s lunchtime at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC). Women of all ages move quickly through a short line near the kitchen, filling plates with salad, thick open-faced sandwiches and a mug of soup. There are about 75 people seated in the dining area, eating lunch and socializing. There are no snaking lineups out the door and around the block here, unlike other agencies that serve free meals to low-income people. And though the place is busy there’s room around the centre’s many circular tables for anyone who wants to sit down. A group of Chinese senior women share one table with younger, English-speaking DEWC members; the two groups communicate by sharing food, gestures and jokes.

Sadly, however, this scene of cheerful harmony between Chinese and English speakers is an exception in the Downtown Eastside. When the 15 Chinese seniors gather in a basement common room to chat with me after lunch, they tell me, unanimously, that discrimination is the biggest issue they face.

“Other people are giving out food to any other race, but when they look at you, they say, ‘Oh, you’re Chinese. You’re from China. Go back to China,’” says 82-year-old Jay Gnun Foon. “They will deny a piece of bread that everybody else is getting. That makes me feel the worst.” But Foon and her 14 friends are strapped for cash after paying for housing, just like others in the area who stand in food lineups. They tell me that that while they don’t always feel welcome in the Downtown Eastside, they deserve to be there as much as anybody else.

Foon has lived in Canada for about 20 years. Her daughter asked her to come to help take care of her children, while she and her husband worked for minimum wage. Now Foon lives alone in old Chinatown, paying $400 a month in rent. She regularly comes to the DEWC to enjoy the company of friends.

Foon and the 14 other women I meet today speak a country dialect of Cantonese that 25-year-old Deanna Wong, the DEWC’s one bilingual Chinese seniors outreach coordinator, translates for me. Wong tells me that most of the women here are from Guangdong Province in China, once farmland but now an industrial region.

“A lot of them come from rural China, and they’ve been farming their entire lives,” she says. When they were coming of age back in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, China, as Wong describes it, was “a culture that didn’t support women. Women were treated like objects in Asia, like furniture. Your ownership [went] from your father to your husband.” Many continued to work as farm labourers after coming to the Lower Mainland.

Their health, Wong says, is generally better than that of the roughly 200 other Chinese senior women she works with in the Downtown Eastside. Instead, their most troubling issues are poverty, racism and age discrimination that sometimes find expression in verbal and physical abuse, financial mistreatment and conflicts and miscommunication arising from language barriers.

Wong tells me about Chinese seniors who arrive at the women’s centre with black eyes hidden under sunglasses. Yet few complain, or approach her for help. “They’ll force a smile to cover the pain, and overcompensate for it, to reassure me that things are fine when I know they’re not,” Wong says. “They have my contact information but a lot of times they won’t want to trouble me for it. They’ll try to get it done themselves.”

Wong also makes regular visits to three Downtown Eastside SROs and social housing facilities, where Chinese seniors live among a predominantly English-speaking population. She finds isolation and depression widespread among her contacts.

Her mandate is to connect Chinese seniors with each other and with community supports. Part of her job is to arrange outings for the seniors, designed both for entertainment and the less obvious goal of providing informal opportunities for the women to speak candidly, amongst themselves and with her. She has seen, firsthand, the difference such connections can make in the life of an isolated senior.

“The ones that are healthiest come in the biggest groups,” she says, describing the seniors who regularly show up at the DEWC with their friends. “They don’t have any education. They can’t read. They can’t write. But the way they’re happy, the way they survive, and part of why they’re healthy, is because they have each other.”

Life is much harder for people who have lost touch with their friends. “The ones most isolated are actually the ones who are educated and who are very independent and live alone,” Wong says. “They see all their friends pass away. They become more and more isolated, and they have fewer and fewer activities.”

“We get sworn at for no reason at all”

The close bonds among today’s group of 15 are evident in the way the women laugh together, leaning in to each other’s shoulders. When I first arrive, they are gracious and polite, but reserved. As the afternoon wears on they relax into a funloving rapport. By the end of my visit, So Gee Quan, one of the youngest of the group at 65, has the others in stitches, swearing like a sailor to imitate the people who yell at her as she walks the streets of the Downtown Eastside.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she yells. “We get sworn at for no reason at all. Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Painful as it is, her friends nod their heads and laugh. This is something they’ve experienced, too.

Quan has lived in Canada for 11 years. She worked on a farm in Surrey until the last year, when she could not work anymore. She rents her home in Vancouver’s Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood, paying $700 a month that she splits with her daughter.

“They make it so that it’s not welcoming.” Quan says, with understatement. “It’s very frustrating. They’re bigger than you. Verbal is fine, but sometimes it’s physical. And they can get really aggressive. So you can’t do anything back to them. The only thing you can do is yell back, but that’s about it.”

“My family paid head taxes and we worked until there were holes in our shoes,” she adds. “And we kept working. A lot of my family has been here for generations. And they’re Canadian. And they still face so much discrimination. It’s not fair.”

Quan’s experience validates the findings of a 2007 report to the City of Vancouver by the UBC School of Social Work, that found discrimination and racism, alongside language barriers, were the top concerns among Chinese seniors and service providers in the inner city.

The tension is felt most acutely among the Chinese seniors who must line up with English speakers, similarly struggling to make ends meet, for food and services.

“You’re set up to hate them”

Jason Nepinak has lived in the Downtown Eastside since 1994, homeless for the last 15 of those years. He’s a familiar face at the PHS Drug Users Resource Centre- better known as the Lifeskills Centre-across the street from Oppenheimer Park, where he has volunteered since the centre opened in 2002.

On this rainy morning in February, he’s working the front desk, welcoming people coming in to do laundry, take a shower, get toothbrushes and eat a meal. According to the tally sheets he and other workers maintain, approximately 130 people show up for breakfast here every day. For lunch, it’s closer to 150. The Drug Users Resource Centre is just one of many sources for meals in the neighbourhood. Outside its front doors in Oppenheimer Park, unaffiliated volunteers are off-loading boxes of sandwiches from an unmarked sports utility vehicle. There is already a long line that winds along Powell Street and around the corner to Dunlevy. Most in the line are Chinese seniors.

“You know, it’s a horrible thing to say, but everybody treats ‘em terrible, just terrible,” Nepinak says of elderly Chinese waiting in line. “They say bad things to them. They mock their accents. And it’s just horrible. I hear it a lot, the racial slurs. “

Nepinak, a First Nations man, says he tries to put a stop to any racist activity he sees. “Everybody in the centre knows me,” he says. “They know I don’t put up with violence or racial threats, slurs or anything.”

Some of the hostility, he says, is motivated by faulty assumptions—chiefly that the Chinese seniors are wealthy, and don’t need the food or services as badly as others. But Nepinak’s of a mind that they should be welcome: “Everybody downtown has hard times,” he says.

Coco Culbertson is director of programs with the PHS Community Services Society that runs the Resources Centre. She has lived in Strathcona for 17 years and was the Centre’s first director. She’s seen the number of Chinese seniors who frequent the centre grow in the last 11 years. Now, 15 to 20 Chinese seniors walk through the doors every day. They’re not part of the drug-using population the centre was built to serve. But with few other places to turn, they need the free food and toothbrushes it gives away.

“The programming is targeted to engage active drug users and illicit alcohol drinkers,” Culbertson says. “It is funded to provide resources to those suffering with homelessness, drug addiction and alcohol misuse. We have on occasion had Cantonese-speaking volunteers there, but the language barrier, compounded with the population we serve, makes it difficult for us to fully support the seniors coming in.”

Despite their years in the community, neither Culbertson nor Nepinak could think of resources more suited for Chinese seniors that they could refer people to. Culbertson suggested the Carnegie Community Centre, “but I’m not familiar with what they offer,” she said.

Neither could Gail Harmer, a former social worker, longtime seniors advocate and board member of the 411 Seniors Centre who facilitates seniors wellness workshops with the Council of Senior Citizens’ Organizations of B.C. (COSCO). She could only name the DEWC as the one place where culturally specific programming is available to Chinese seniors.

The Women’s Centre is only a few blocks away from the Drug Users Resource Centre. As is often the case in this neighbourhood, it serves two distinct populations: Chinese-speaking seniors and English-speaking Downtown Eastsiders. Generally both are experiencing poverty, and both are competing for the same limited services.

“When you see those lineups, there’s a limited amount of food,” the DEWC’s Deanna Wong says. “And then when you see a whole group of seniors lined up in the front, you’re set up to hate them because now it’s like they’re taking your food away; this is your means of survival.”

Culbertson agrees. “Everyone feels pressured. And living day-to-day, not knowing if you’ll have food and shelter, doesn’t generally bring out patience for those who are different. The tension is down to poverty.”

More understanding required

What might be accomplished when people are no longer forced to compete against each other is visible every Thursday morning at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House community kitchen.

Taking inspiration from the right to food movement, the Neighbourhood House designs its activities intentionally to eliminate the stigma and indignities of lining up for a charity meal. It prides itself on offering fresh, culturally diverse food choices and welcomes people to join in the preparation in its open kitchen. The Thursday morning community kitchen, designed specifically for Chinese elders, has the effect of breaking down barriers between different language speakers.

“One of the things that we try to do here at the Neighbourhood House is have a range of food so that people from different communities and different cultural groups will see themselves reflected in our menu,” says Executive Director Irene Jaakson. “That’s one of the ways we’ve been able to chip away at some of those barriers. I don’t know that we’ve been 100 per cent successful. But I can tell you that we serve more members of the Chinese community than is typical.”

The DEWC’s Wong shares the view that food brings people together. She has been observing more connection between English- and Chinese-speakers during mealtimes at the Women’s Centre lately. “I’ve noticed at lunchtime, now, the Chinese women will pile together all the bread and salad and leave a [loaded] plate on the centre of the table. They’ll actively seek out other non-Chinese women to take the food,” she says. “I’ve noticed there are a couple of [non-Chinese] women deliberately sitting at those tables, actively trying to get to know them. And it’s really great to see things like that. But that’s only when you can give people food. When you have all those basic needs met.”

It’s a different story when people’s needs are not met. “When you take those away, and people compete for those basic needs, it’s no wonder discrimination happens,” Wong says. “When they look different, you can’t understand them, you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see that you come from so many similar struggles.”

She would like to see more recognition that the two populations in the Downtown Eastside are alike in their vulnerability and their poverty. “Housing is something I see that both populations are in dire, dire need of,” she says. However, she also thinks separate, linguistically appropriate services would particularly benefit Chinese seniors.

In the DEWC basement, the Chinese seniors are packing up to leave, to pick up grandchildren from school or prepare an evening meal for their families. They don’t speak English, but they understand the assumptions some English speakers make about them.

“When people look at us, they think that we look healthy or that we’re well-kept and that we’re not deserving,” says So Gee Quan.

Only in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhoods could an absence of obvious signs of poverty be mistaken for an absence of need—rather than a rare, if fragile, sign of dignity and hope preserved.

This series was produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives Society. This series was made possible through the support of the Real Estate Foundation, Vancity, and BC Non-Profit Housing Association. Support for this project does not necessarily imply Vancity’s endorsement of the findings or contents of this report. TSS funders and Tides Canada Initiatives neither influence nor endorse the particular content of TSS’ reporting. Other publications wishing to publish this story or other Tyee Solutions Society-produced articles, please see TyeeSolutions.org for contacts and information.

Megaphone, Sing Tao Daily and The Tyee collaborated on the publication of this series on Chinese seniors.

It was a bright sunny afternoon. I was walking along the sea wall and as I got to English Bay I noticed this peculiar man standing there in a space suit, handing out some flyers. I asked him what this was all about. He said his dream was winning a trip into outer space. People could vote for him and he could go if he received the most votes. I said I could help if I put the story in the paper and all the readers could vote and spread the word. His name is Herbert Bossaerts.

Herbert always dreamed of going into space as a young boy, and as a boy, he would read many space-related books. His dad and older brother found it fascinating about how there could be so much diversity among the planets in our solar system. As a young adult, he started to forget about his dream of space travel, until December 2012.

Inspired by his employers’ (Nurse Next Door) Dreams program, he wrote down that he wanted to go into space. Little did he know that a month later the company AXE would start a global contest to send 22 people into space. The first round is all about getting votes. The 120 people with the most votes go to Florida for actual astronaut training. He wants to be one of them.

To show everyone, he lives as Herbert the Astronaut, wearing his space suit every day to work, shopping or any other activity. He will continue for the next seven months until they find out who got in.

His favourite thing about space is that it allows him to expand beyond his current boundaries as a person. To him, space holds all the possibilities that life has to offer. When he thinks of this, he is able to recognize those things that limit him and he can find ways to break through those limitations.

Herbert was born in a small town called Lier in Belgium until he moved to Canada 12 years ago. He also volunteers for Vancouver Adaptive Snow Sports (V.A.S.S.), an organization that teaches students of all ages with disabilities to use adaptive equipment and/or specialized teaching techniques to maximize a person’s independence on the snow. It helps a person feel good about themselves.

Herbert says he encourages people to listen to the voice of their heart and follow their dreams. Dreams turn darkness into light, and they also create something out of nothing. Without them, we are organic robots.

You can support Herbert's dream by voting for him at VoteForHerbert.com, or follow him at Facebook.com/herberttheastronaut.

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read my story and I encourage you to get family and friends to vote and help make Herbert’s dream come true.

Peter Thompson sells Megaphone at Robson and Howe in downtown Vancouver.

Women on average make up one-quarter to one-third of the people on official homeless counts, like the one recently conducted by the City of Vancouver. But according to the YWCA Canada, an additional 75,000 to 100,000 women and children who stay in safe houses to hide from their abusers aren’t included in these counts.

YWCA Canada launched the national Homes 4 Women campaign last month to draw attention to women who are homelessness and to advocate for solutions. 

“What happens in a lot of places is they are able to get emergency shelter and services, but getting to a secure home in the community is really a problem,” said Ann Decter, YWCA Canada’s director of advocacy and public policy.

The campaign also addresses housing issues for women living on the street or sleeping on friends’ couches. Some are battling addictions and mental illness, and others are struggling to afford food and shelter on social assistance.

Decter says there’s a lack of services aimed at women. These include women-only detox beds and youth shelters, and shelters that accommodate women caring for children. 

Homes 4 Women is also advocating for solutions that would help all homeless people. These include increasing social assistance, a return to federal funding for a national housing program, and increasing affordable housing options with rental subsidies and social housing units in new housing developments. 

“Our approach will be to target specific remedies to the level of government that can actually enact them,” said Decter, adding YWCA is still looking for partners to work with on the Homes 4 Women campaign. 

“A lot of people really don’t understand homelessness as a women’s issue, and I think in large part because women try not to be visible when they’re homeless because it’s such a high risk.”