Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside gets new lease on life
By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 15, 2012 - 0 Comments
Signs of hope and renewal in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood
Rafal Gerszak
For decades it was an acknowledged, if largely unspoken fact: if you lived in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside odds were you lived a Third World life and died a Third World death. Twenty years ago women living in what was called Canada’s poorest postal code died 4½ years sooner on average than those living in the rest of British Columbia. They died almost 6½ years before residents of suburban Richmond just a few kilometres to the south, which has the longest life expectancy of any city in Canada. Men in inner-city Vancouver died almost 11 years before those in the rest of B.C.; they lost 14 years of life compared to men in Richmond. Health officials declared a public health emergency in the Downtown Eastside but the problems seemed intractable: poverty, addiction, homelessness, an epidemic of HIV-AIDS, drug overdoses and a host of chronic diseases. “There was nothing else like it elsewhere in Canada or North America,” Dr. Patricia Daly, chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, says of her arrival in the city 15 years ago. “The rates of HIV in that population were the highest reported in any city, I think, anywhere in the developed world at that time. There was despair. Overdose deaths were unbelievable. It seemed overwhelming.”
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Harper’s hard right turn
By Paul Wells - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 465 Comments
Social conservatism is on the rise in Ottawa, and across Canada
Photograph by Chris Wattie/ Reuters
It says in all the papers the well has run dry. The commentators keep writing that Canadian conservatism has died on the vine, that four years into his reign of tactical obsession and fiscal profligacy, Stephen Harper has forgotten why he ever went into politics.
“Where’s the big, strategic agenda for the next election?” John Ivison quoted a senior Conservative in the National Post. “I haven’t found one yet.” In the same paper, Terence Corcoran ran a string of columns identifying programs the feds should cut, because Harper seems unwilling to do the work himself. And Andrew Coyne delivered his annual post-budget verdict of despair and mourning. “Those Conservative faithfuls who have been hanging on all these years, in the hopes that, eventually, someday, with one of these budgets, this government would start to act like conservatives, must now understand that that is not going to happen. Conservatism is not just dead but, it appears, forgotten.”
But it’s a funny thing. If Canadian conservatism is dead, somebody forgot to tell Canadian conservatives.
