Larry Campbell has been appointed the Downtown Eastside provincial advisor.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Larry Campbell, the former chief coroner of B.C., former mayor of Vancouver, and former senator from the West Coast, is talking about the cool, new part-time job he’s taken on for the province.
Fixing Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. In six months.
We’re conversing about the many disparate viewpoints that exist around what a solution might look like when he asks if I’ve ever heard the story about the six blind men and the elephant.
“Six blind men are asked to touch an elephant and say what they believe they’ve touched,” Mr. Campbell explains over the phone. “So, one guy touches the side of the elephant and thinks he’s touched a wall. One touches the elephant’s trunk and thinks it’s a snake. A third one touches a tusk and thinks it’s a spear and so on. No one realizes it’s an elephant.”
B.C.’s former chief coroner Larry Campbell takes on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – again
The moral of the story is that their postulations are based on their own limited, subjective experience. “And that is sort of what you’re dealing with here,” Mr. Campbell tells me. “Everyone has their own ideas of what needs to happen to clean up the Downtown Eastside and a lot of that comes from their own world view or sometimes narrow personal experiences.”
Which is partly why nothing ever gets done there.
Now that is probably a little unfair to say, because there have been well-meaning efforts over the years to remedy some of the underlying issues that plague the area. The introduction, ages ago now, of supervised-consumption sites is an example. Still, the drug problem is as bad as ever, exacerbated by fentanyl, which continues to ravage the vulnerable. But broader change has been difficult to achieve.
Politicians talk incessantly about building more low-income housing, to get people off the street, and yet it just seems impossible to do at any kind of scale. There is renewed talk of gentrifying around the edges of the DTES to give it a more “normal” look and feel, but there aren’t many developers sticking their hands up to construct buildings that must contain a certain percentage of either supportive housing or below-market rentals in what remains a dangerous neighbourhood.
Mr. Campbell believes, and he’s certainly right, that you can’t have a “healthy community” that is just made up of the poor and homeless and others dealing with a multitude of complex health issues. And while a 35-storey residential tower may not be the answer, other forms of market housing have to be part of the solution.
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The drug problem in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is as bad as ever, exacerbated by fentanyl, which continues to ravage the vulnerable.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
There are voices, moderate and conservative, who decry the “poverty industrial complex” that has been built up around the DTES. And yet others understand what a thankless and crucial job social-service agencies perform to help the poor and homeless who live there.
Meantime, there are good news stories happening in the DTES that either don’t get amplified or are drowned out by the daily drumbeat of despair, Mr. Campbell tells me. There are a few new “triage” centres, for instance, where people can get housing and mental-health and addiction support all in one place. “Nobody talks about this,” he said.
Sure, there are some small wins. But as someone who’s written about and covered the DTES over four decades, the troubled neighbourhood has been a problem too politically fraught to fix. It certainly seems beyond the scope of a city council with a four-year mandate.
Everyone knows the area attracts people from all over who have complicated and often intractable issues. In 2023, Vancouver had over 75 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s shelter spaces, more than 77 per cent of the region’s supportive housing units and 50 per cent of Greater Vancouver’s social housing – while making up only 25 per cent of the broader area’s population.
This should be a region-wide issue, but few politicians outside of Vancouver want to take on any part of it for fear of a public backlash in their communities. And to be fair, some also believe the social-service providers in the DTES have built a bit of a wall around the neighbourhood. They don’t want anything to be dispersed. They encourage the isolation that prevails there and which has turned it into the miserable place it remains today.
Now, this is all Larry Campbell’s problem to solve – in six months. Fat chance.
If the provincial government is truly serious about this issue, it will ask Mr. Campbell to spend far more time on solving the problem than six months. Give the man a year or two to come up with a plan that may finally work. He may be the only person who can find a solution for what truly is an elephant-sized problem.