Dan Fumano: 'Where can we go?' — Oppenheimer tent city debated at park board, council
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2019 01:12:32 +0000
There’s a debate going on, within and between Vancouver’s institutions — including the police department, city council and park board — over whether it would be better, in the interest of public safety, to seek an injunction to clear Oppenheimer Park of the 120-or-so tents and the people currently living in them, or, out of consideration for their human rights, to allow them to remain.
The Downtown Eastside park, and the Vancouverites calling it home, will be the subject of debate Thursday night at a special meeting of the park board, and at a council meeting next week.
But, on the subject of an injunction, there didn’t seem to be much disagreement inside the park Wednesday.
“Why get an injunction?” asked park resident Gary Humchitt, who slept in an alley a few blocks away before moving into the park during the summer. “Where can we go? You’re going to kick us to the streets where we came from?”
Another park resident, Sandy Parisien, said: “Quote me: if they got an injunction and they displaced 300 people here, then 300 people are going to move into different spots. It has the potential to make 300 tent cities. Would they rather have one?”
Wet clothing hanging to dry at Oppenheimer park in Vancouver, BC Wednesday, September 25, 2019. Nearly a hundred tents dot the landscape at the park which has pitted various levels of local government and agencies against each other as to how best handle the homeless encampment.
B.C. Housing has been trying to connect Oppenheimer residents with social housing, but many say the conditions in some single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels make the park a preferable option.
“I’d rather be out here than an SRO,” said Humchitt. He’s lived in decent SROs and bad SROs over the years, he says, and the bad ones are bad enough that he’d prefer the park, even in winter.
Tensions around Oppenheimer have been escalating. After police sounded alarms last week about how drug gangs jockeying for position around the Oppenheimer encampment were endangering public safety, this week saw three shootings within a 15-hour period in the neighbourhood.
Because the encampment is in a park, it falls under the jurisdiction of Vancouver’s park board, the only elected body of its kind in Canada. The park board’s seven elected commissioners, representing three civic parties, have already rejected Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s request to temporarily cede control over Oppenheimer to the city, and voted against city staff’s recommendation to seek an injunction.
Now, though, the park board will hold a special meeting Thursday to discuss Oppenheimer, at the request of the board’s two Non-Partisan Association commissioners, who were both in the minority supporting an injunction earlier this month.
Vancouver Police are renewing their concern about safety in Oppenheimer Park after the number of emergency calls increased 87 per cent from June to August 2019 compared to the previous year. This image shows some of the weapons and firearms seized from the area.
Stewart has made it clear that he believes something needs to change at Oppenheimer, but has stopped short of calling for an injunction, as the police have done. Stewart himself was charged and pleaded guilty to breaching an injunction last year, after he was arrested, while MP for Burnaby South, for protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.
Tent cities in Oppenheimer aren’t new, as Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer told reporters at last week’s police board meeting. But some years, Palmer said, encampments become big enough that an injunction is needed to clear the park.
The last time the park board sought an injunction for Oppenheimer was in 2014. Humchitt remembers it, he says: He lived in Oppenheimer then, and was one of a handful of people arrested when police enforced the injunction.
At that time, then-Mayor Gregor Robertson and the majority of council and park board were all affiliated with one party: Vision Vancouver. But, as Vancouver’s first independent mayor in decades, Stewart represents only one vote of 11 on council and, unlike his predecessor, has no party colleagues on the park board.
John Coupar, one of the NPA commissioners calling for Thursday’s special meeting, said that while he rejected the mayor’s request for the board to cede jurisdiction, he supports an injunction.
If the park board currently had an NPA majority, Coupar said, they’d likely take a different approach on the injunction question. Coupar has criticized what he calls the “weak response” of the “Green-COPE alliance,” the three Green commissioners and two from COPE who hold five of the board’s seven seats.
But those five commissioners have also been praised by others, including Jean Swanson, the sole COPE city councillor, for refusing to evict park residents without appropriate homes to send them to.
A cyclist rides through open space, and near tents, in East Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park in early September.
On council, NPA Coun. Melissa De Genova said she believes most of her four party colleagues believe the time has come for an injunction. Now an alliance of NPA and Green councillors will bring Oppenheimer to council next week, with a motion seeking, among other things, to urge the park board to work with the city to “facilitate the decampment of those currently living in the park.”
The motion doesn’t mention the word “injunction.” But NPA and Green councillors discussed the motion with The Courier on Tuesday, NPA Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung saying: “We’re asking the park board to revisit their injunction decision.”
Currently, five park board commissioners stand between the Oppenheimer residents and an injunction. It’s not clear if, after more meetings and more letters, that might change.