Amy Hamm: Vancouver votes for more drug chaos and street disorder

Vancouver, what the hell were you thinking?

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Saturday night, the city elected Green Party of Vancouver’s Pete Fry as mayor. They also wiped out former mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party, which went from supermajority to a lone, politically neutered councillor.

This all represents a 180 from the 2022 election, in which the city had briefly come to its senses and figured out that somebody needed to do something — anything — different than before in order to rein in Vancouver’s inexcusable homelessness and addictions crisis. While Sim could have done more in his term, he at least tried to do something.

Fry, by contrast, is as pro-drug and pro-chaos as politicians come. For example, he walked out of city chambers this summer in apparent protest of Sim’s proposed drug and street disorder plebiscite, as though merely considering a crackdown on open-air drug use was too much for him to countenance. He later called the plebiscite a “very bad idea.”

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The results of this plebiscite, which asked voters if they would support a ban on public drug use, or the addition of both voluntary and involuntary mental health and addictions treatment beds in Vancouver, will be announced by Oct. 21. Even if the public overwhelmingly voted “yes” to both questions, Fry will likely be unmoved by his constituents’ concern.

Days before the election, he dismissively told media that Vancouver already has a ban on open-air drug use, while 90 new mental health beds are in the works for the new St. Paul’s Hospital. In reality, police seldom enforce existing drug laws in the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside (DTES), and acute mental health beds are not drug treatment beds. Even if they were, a meagre 90 spots is dwarfed by the thousands of mentally ill addicts that roam Vancouver’s DTES in varying states of mayhem and despair.

Fry’s party has promised “safe, dignified places for unhoused and marginalized people to gather, rest, and access support” and a focus on “compassionate” approaches that utilize “diversion, outreach, and services before enforcement.” Fry previously expressed that he wants addicts to have “free prescribed opiates” and the city to have more supervised injection sites. Oh boy.

Hello, Fry? Is anyone home? That’s exactly what the various government and non-profit poverty pushers of Vancouver have been doing for decades, and which has gotten us so deep into this mess to begin with. Fry and those who think like him already consider the whole city, from its sidewalks to its Skytrain stations to its public parks, as “dignified spaces” for drug addicts to inject their poison and languish. Or at least they act like they do.

Must we keep pretending that layering on more of the permissive, enabling services that assist drug addicts to stay sick will magically tip the balance and make the problem disappear? This is like adding more salt to a too-salty broth in the hopes that it might become diluted in the process. It ain’t gonna work.

I thought Vancouver voters had finally figured it out when they elected Sim in 2022.

During his term, Sim increased Vancouver police and fire budgets, ordered the removal of sidewalk tent encampments (and said he would do it again if he had to), and promised to strengthen rules banning open-air drug use. It was a start. Sim also had to contend with the fact that he had little control over how health care services were administered in the city, or how the courts treated repeat offenders and drug dealers. (Two founders of Vancouver’s Drug Users Liberation Front (DULF) recently won a B.C. Supreme Court case that astoundingly ruled that laws against possession for the purposes of trafficking are unconstitutional.)

What has gotten into voter’s heads, electing Fry and a slate of far-left, pro “harm reduction” candidates? It is at this point that critics might throw our hands in the air and resort to the “you get the government you deserve” idiom. But even if voters might deserve some of the fallout from their poor choices, in the form of disordered and unliveable streets, those suffering and dying in the opioid overdose crisis certainly do not deserve to be abandoned to the despicable policy decisions of “progressive” politicians.

Other B.C. municipalities, including my own, New Westminster, saw a different outcome Saturday night: voters obliterated the lefty progressives that were crafting their cities as satellites of the DTES.

Vancouver, for whatever reason, made a terrible blunder.

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