NP View: Vancouver must vote to end disorder on its streets

Street drug use in the 200 block of E. Hastings St in the Downtown Eastside on March 13, 2026. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO/PNG

Article content

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is the worst example of the disorder that has been allowed to go on too long in Canada. The human misery that has plagued that corner of the city for decades has many triggers, including the long tail consequence of the deinstitutionalization trend to empty psychiatric hospitals across the country. However, things have become much worse in the last decade, as worsening homelessness and the fentanyl crisis emerged alongside permissive drug use policies at the provincial and federal levels.

Article content

Article content

Other communities in Canada — Winnipeg’s Point Douglas or Toronto’s Dundas-Sherbourne neighbourhood — experience similar dysfunction of open drug use, street encampments, the drug addled sleeping on sidewalks, public defecation, violent assaults and gang infestations. But the Downtown Eastside is Ground Zero for hell.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Public drug use is currently prohibited under federal, provincial and municipal rules, but those rules often go unenforced. One telling anecdote from reporter Allen Abel in his in depth story for the Post on the Downtown Eastside helps to explain the dysfunction. When he asked police why they weren’t ticketing for open use and confiscating their drugs, one officer told him: “We can’t arrest our way out of this.”

Article content

The progressive mantra for over a decade has been that enforcement of basic rules is unnecessary, even authoritarian, because, the argument goes, drug addicts are a vulnerable group suffering from stigma. Therefore, enforcing drug laws criminalizes a health problem, or, according to some progressives, criminalizes a legitimate lifestyle choice.

Article content

Article content

The B.C. government has accepted many of the arguments from activists who seem determined to remove any consequences associated with drug addiction, ultimately discouraging treatment.

Article content

The province asked for, and was granted, an exemption from the federal government’s controlled substances laws, in order to decriminalize the possession and open use of hard drugs, though it is a policy the NDP was forced to walk back after the drug crisis and general street disorder worsened, instead of improving, as was, bizarrely, assumed would happen.

Article content

To illustrate how broken drug policy is in this country, both the provincial and federal levels of government have engaged in “safer supply” programs, where addicts are prescribed hydropmorphone, a drug similar in strength to heroin, to give them an alternative to toxic street fentanyl. Those pills are then frequently resold on the street to fund the much harder drugs they actually want, driving up demand for fentanyl, the exact opposite of what was intended. Government sanctioned drug-injection sites have also contributed to disorder.