In 1968, Vancouver was home to the people’s park. The site was prime waterfront, Coal Harbour next to the Bayshore Hotel. It was a big open squat on a developer’s lot. Fun in the park meant smoking dope, and hanging out with hippies from all over North America. It was the summer of love.
These days Coal Harbour is home for many new condominium dwellers. Concrete and green glass towers stretch up along the waterfront, on either side of the Bayshore, about a dozen in total. A two-bedroom apartment, 1,100 square feet, in the best location costs $750,000, on a lower floor. About one-third of the buyers are Americans. You have to wonder whether any of them ever hung out in the people’s park, before Mayor Tom “Terrific” Campbell sent in the police to shut it down.
The massive waterfront redevelopment has yielded some public benefits, notably a wonderful sea walk that allows the public to stroll along the harbour. Developers were required to put up money for it, and the City of Vancouver provided the plans and the regulations to make it happen.
The new luxury housing developments give a different vision to the city. The vista looking down Georgia Street, or crossing the Granville Street bridge is quite a surprise; countless new towers line the harbour waterfront, and False Creek inlet.
The vision along Hastings Street into the Downtown Eastside is surprising as well. This part of Vancouver has been skid row for a long time. But the row has got an awful lot longer, and the numbers of homeless an awful lot larger. A long stretch of Hastings has been boarded up.
Jim Sinclair is president of the B.C. Federation of Labour. He came to the Fed from the Fisherman’s Union. We are talking about Hastings Street. Sinclair tells me about a visitor he remembers to his high school in Toronto, Mel Watkins the University of Toronto economist. Mel told the class that if you want to understand why some people are poor you have to understand how others got rich.
B.C. gets five ministers in the new Martin cabinet. One, Stephen Owen, will be in charge of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, others move into high profile posts — Ujjal Dosangh into Health, and David Emerson into Industry. It is hard to know how much time will be spent on Downtown Eastside issues by the B.C. Ministers, but everything cabinet does has a bearing on what becomes of the Eastside poor, and others in similar circumstances across Canada.
The Human Development report of the UN shows that Canada fares poorly in dealing with poverty when compared with other rich industrialized countries. Overall we rate fourth on the HD Index but only 12th on poverty.
In Vancouver the growing inequalities can be seen from looking at the built environment. Just a short taxi cab ride from the down-and-out are the healthy and wealthy. What is harder to grasp is that there are links between the two: some people are rich because others are poor.
Low wages are the main cause of poverty. For business owners, wages are a cost of making a living; for companies, workers are a cost of production. Living wages make sense for both groups to support, but they have to be regulated into doing it. Just as the people’s park lives on in the public sea walk around Coal Harbour because developers were brought, against their will, into doing something that was in their interest, so higher wages represent a raise for business customers, and higher potential profits, and a reduction in poverty.
Everything we have seen from the Liberals since Paul Martin became Finance Minister over a decade ago suggest they will not be regulating business, and directing reductions in inequality. And their business friendly policies have caused the excesses in fortune we see in Vancouver.
So, where is the vision we see in the Coal Harbour sea walk going to come from? In fact, it’s been made available to the government in the alternative federal budgets produced by CHO!CES and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. That vision, not debt reduction is what is going to make life better on Hastings Street. The planning has been done by the many groups who have come together over the last ten years to write the people’s budget. All it needs is for the minority parliament to adopt it as its own.
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