Critics question B.C. premier's promise to house homeless by 2010
Last Updated: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | 8:18 PM PT
CBC News
Premier Gordon Campbell faced some tough questions about Vancouver's Olympic plans Tuesday morning in Beijing. (CBC)Homeless advocates and residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are questioning Premier Gordon Campbell's assertion that by 2010, visiting journalists will see how the city has overcome its homeless problem.
Campbell made the comments Tuesday morning in Beijing, where the 2008 Olympic Games are taking place, at a press conference intended to showcase the new high-tech and environmentally friendly Olympics media centre planned for downtown Vancouver for the 2010 Olympic Games.
Instead, reporters fired hardball questions at Campbell, beginning with a Chinese journalist who asked about plans to deal with protests and the possibility of rock slides along the Sea-to-Sky Highway during the Games. The highway, the only direct route between Vancouver and Whistler, was closed for five days following a slide on July 29.
The questions then turned to Vancouver's homelessness problem and the troubled drug-ridden Downtown Eastside. Campbell told reporters Vancouver is getting a grip on the problem.
Recent homeless counts estimated there are 2,600 homeless people in Vancouver. (CBC) "In terms of some of the shelter issues, I think you will see a city and a community that has invested significantly in housing those who need support," Campbell said.
"We have invested literally hundreds of millions of dollars, which, to be candid, has nothing to do with the Olympics and everything to do with trying to create healthy communities for all of us to live in," said Campbell.
But in Vancouver, housing advocates said there's not much time to find lodgings for Vancouver's homeless people before the Olympic Games come to town.
The city has donated 12 sites for affordable housing, but only about half will be ready by 2010, a far cry from what was promised in the bid to get the Games, according to some.
"That commitment was for 3,200 new social housing units, affordable social housing units, and we won't see them," said Rider Cooey, of the Citywide Housing Coalition, a community group formed to hold the government accountable to its Olympic promises.
Morris Brooks says international visitors are going to be surprised by Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. (CBC)In March, volunteers canvassed the streets and shelters of Greater Vancouver and identified nearly 2,600 people as homeless.
In raw numbers, that represents a 19 per cent increase over the number counted in 2005, and more than double the number counted in 2002.
People living in the Downtown Eastside say foreign journalists covering the Olympics will have plenty of homeless people to focus their stories on because the problems will only get worse.
"They're going to be right here, right in the middle of it, and all the people from the world are going to be scared," Morris Brooks said.
