As the Killing Fields protest the year before had jolted Libby Davies, the “Out of Harm’s Way” conference caught the attention of one politician in particular, Philip Owen, the city’s right-of-centre mayor. “It had a big impact on me,” Owen says. The Frankfurt story especially struck him as one from which he thought Vancouver had a lot to learn. In the years that followed, officials from Germany stopped by city hall whenever they were in Vancouver and met with Owen. “I learned a lot,” he recalls.
The day was a brilliant success, with one postscript.
In 1998, Angela Jardine was twenty-eight years old and living at the Portland Hotel. She had short brown hair and looked barely older than a teenager. The perception that she was younger than her age was helped by a mental disability that stalled her intellectual development at the level of a child’s.
“She was a little girl trapped in a woman’s body,” her mother, Deborah, told a newspaper. “Her dream was to someday be married to her Prince Charming, have her own family and live happily ever after.” Stuerzbecher recalls Jardine as a great help at the conference that day. “She wore a pink satin dress,” Stuerzbecher recalls. “She was hosting and helping people. She was so lovely and so proud. And that was the last day she was seen.”
That evening, Jardine never returned to the hotel, which was not unusual, Stuerzbecher continues. She was a sex worker and sometimes would spend the night with a john or at a friend’s place. But she would always call.
“We were her home,” Stuerzbecher says. “We were mum and dad. When she wasn’t going to come home at night, she would call … The day after the conference, she didn’t call. We knew right away.”
Years later, Jardine’s DNA was found on a farm in Vancouver’s neighbouring city of Port Coquitlam. The property’s owner, Robert Pickton, confessed to murdering forty-nine women there, the vast majority of whom were taken from the Downtown Eastside during the 1980s and ’90s.
Stuerzbecher is absolutely adamant that she and Evans called the police and reported Jardine missing the very next day, on November 11, 1998. According to the Canadian Press, police didn’t open a file on her disappearance until December 6.
The CP article includes a description of Jardine’s room at the Portland Hotel. “Posters of kittens and unicorns were tacked to the walls, a jumble of pictures, World Wrestling Entertainment paraphernalia and colouring books,” it reads. “Go-go boots to wear during the day, teddy bears for whispering secrets to in bed at night.”
Evans is quoted in that article. “She certainly had an incredible imagination,” she said. “She had a way of drawing you into her imagination, into the world she was living in, which wasn’t always the world everyone else lived in.”
Shortly after the Out of Harm’s Way conference, the Portland picked up its fifth and final founding member: Dan Small.
Small didn’t join PHS full time until 1998, but his history with the organization began in 1992. That year, Small was employed at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute as a recreational therapist. His patients were extremely marginalized—people who had committed violent crimes but, due to a severe mental illness, were deemed not criminally responsible for their actions. There wasn’t a housing agency in Canada willing to give these people a home.
“Nobody would take my patients from Colony Farm,” Small says, using the institute’s nickname (it’s on Colony Farm Road). “Not even mental-health centres. So I organized this thing called a ‘coping fair,’ and that is when I first met Liz and Kerstin, at forensic.”
PHS became the one organization that did take forensic patients, creating a relationship between Small and the Portland’s management team. “There’s something special about these people, I thought, even though I didn’t know anything about them,” Small says. “So I made a little footnote in my mind that I would one day visit them.”
Evans recalls walking away from that meeting thinking the same thing. “He just understood what we were doing,” she says. “One thing we all had in common from the very beginning, very strongly, was an anti-psychiatry kind of bent.”
Small already had an interesting background related to drugs, addiction, and psychiatric care. His mother has a mental illness and his father was an RCMP officer who worked on the drug squad in the conservative Canadian province of Alberta. “Which isn’t to read into any kind of deep, psychological, Freudian analysis of things,” Small says. “But it did give me a point of view about drugs and the war on drugs.”
As an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University in the 1980s, he grew very close to one of his professors, Bruce Alexander. “I thought he was crazy,” Small says. “The fundamental idea that he had at that time was that drugs were not inherently addictive and that you had to look at other issues in terms of people’s suffering to understand the nature of addiction. But I believed that drugs were inherently addictive.”
Small made clear that he intended to disprove Alexander’s work on addiction, to which the professor replied: “Why don’t you become my honours student?”
“I spent every ounce of my being as a young undergraduate writing an honours thesis to prove his theory wrong, to prove that drugs were inherently addictive and that the war on drugs was a legitimate response to these issues,” Small says. “I attacked his theory quite relentlessly. I made a poignant, hard-working effort. But I didn’t succeed … At the end of that honours thesis, I started to have questions,” he continues. “And then I realized that Bruce was right, but actually hadn’t gone far enough.”
Then Small went to work for Colony Farm. There, he made himself a student of the problems that lay below his patients’ mental-health issues. “When I went to forensic, the first thing I did was read every single file,” he says. “I saw every person’s story. And then I started seeing what a soul-destroying place it was. It was meant to care for people, but it was very abusive.”
In 1996, he left forensic and took a part-time job at the old Portland Hotel. “I had worked with people who were even more challenging than the Portland residents, so I was no stranger to this,” he says. “What was unusual to me is that I could see they had a paradigm at work here, one that was completely antithetical to any paradigm that I had ever seen before. It was intuitively congruent with mine.”
He was a perfect fit, but in 1996, felt he wasn’t done with his education. Despite having already obtained a master’s of philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Small left the Portland to pursue a PhD in cancer genetics at the University of British Columbia.
The following year, he accepted a job at another Vancouver nonprofit, Coast Mental Health. When Evans and Townsend heard he had taken that position and was now based at an office just outside the Downtown Eastside, they decided to get back in touch and pay him a visit. Townsend sat on the corner of Small’s desk and said, “The mental health field doesn’t need you. Come work for us.”
Small thought about it for a few days, but they all knew right away that he was going to accept the offer. When he did, the three of them sat down for a brainstorming session about what it was exactly that Small would do for PHS. One idea that Townsend had was for Small to work with what they described as a “drug-user union.”
“Yeah, that sounds interesting,” Small remembers saying.
30Lauren B. Currie, Akm Moniruzzaman, Michelle L. Patterson, and Julian M. Somers, At Home/Chez Soi Project: Vancouver Site Final Report (Calgary, AB: Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2014).
Chapter 12
From Housing to Harm Reduction
Before November 1998, the Portland Hotel Society was essentially a housing agency. After the Out of Harm’s Way conference in Oppenheimer Park, it became Vancouver’s foremost advocate for harm reduction, albeit with the Carnegie Community Action Project or VANDU usually taking the credit (and the blame). In the months and years that followed, PHS pioneered harm-reduction programs that nobody had tried before anywhere in North America.
Townsend had broken the rules on needle exchange for
years, essentially having staff run distribution centres from the front desks of the three Portland hotels. Tanya Fader recalls that this was no simple task.
“We had to account for every needle. But of course we had people who said, ‘I need more than one needle.’ And if you didn’t give it to them, you knew they were going to reuse the same needle, which is not good.”
PHS was getting its needles from the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society, which was still enforcing a one-for-one exchange requirement. DEYAS wasn’t forcing nonprofit staff to count dirty syringes by hand. It provided yellow plastic bins for the safe disposal of needles, and they held a volume of needles equal to the number distributed. That left room to game the system, to which Stuerzbecher devoted significant time.
“Kerstin spent hours measuring and counting needles in those disposal bins with markings on the side, so we knew what our return amounts needed to look like,” Evans says. They found creative ways to ensure the boxes always appeared full. Stuerzbecher recalls the situation as almost comical. “When funders came to tour the building, we were hiding needles in the bloody desk, for crying out loud,” she says.
In a partnership with VANDU, PHS began to push the limits on needle exchange in an effort to break the rules outright. Ed McCurdy was the man Townsend assigned to liaise with the drug-user group. The arrangement was similar to Fader organizing the Out of Harm’s Way conference and then putting the Carnegie Community Action Project’s name on it. Except VANDU wasn’t quite the team player that CCAP was.
“I met with Mark Townsend and Dan Small and they said, ‘Here’s the thing,’” McCurdy recounts. “They [VANDU] have this volunteer coordinator position but they only want a drug user to do it, and they certainly don’t want anyone affiliated with the Portland doing it. So you cannot ever let on that you work for us.”
McCurdy said he’d give it a try. But the Downtown Eastside is a small place with a tight community that loves to gossip. He was immediately outed as the spy that he was. “My fucking god they hated me,” McCurdy remembers. But somehow he convinced the VANDU board to give him a chance. They agreed—with one catch. “Someone got me a rock and a crack pipe, and I smoked it in front of them. Then I was hired,” he says. “That’s how I started my job at VANDU.”
The first project that McCurdy led through this partnership between PHS and VANDU was not a glamourous one. “One of the many things VANDU was working on at the time was public washrooms,” McCurdy begins. “There was a problem of feces in the neighbourhood, so we had this ongoing crusade to get more bathrooms in the Downtown Eastside.”
The city’s homeless population was growing rapidly. Many of them used intravenous drugs, and if you looked like an addict, no private business would let you use their washroom. McCurdy acknowledges that it sounds like a mundane issue, but just finding a toilet became a major struggle. Finally, VANDU convinced the city that something had to be done. But action still wasn’t taken until after the usual bureaucratic hoops were jumped through.
“The city sent us an engineer to basically be guided through the alleys with a map to mark an X wherever we’d find a poop,” McCurdy says. “We had a poop map to prove to the city that people were in fact shitting in the alleys.”
Finally, city hall supplied a pair of portable toilets. But it insisted they be deployed with a security guard—god forbid that drug users be trusted with their own toilet. Around this time, Ann Livingston was mostly home with her two young boys. But she always remained in the background of events at VANDU, and when the city said it would deploy security guards, she got involved.
“I said, ‘If you put security guards on those toilets, the people who are shitting in the alleys will keep shitting in the alleys because they’ll think they can’t use those toilets,’” Livingston says. “So VANDU would guard the toilets. That was the beginning of that project.”
The location selected for the toilets was a small alcove adjacent to the Carnegie Community Centre, just around the corner from the intersection of Main and East Hastings. That crossroads is a beehive of activity. Its epicentre is the southwest corner, outside the entrance to Carnegie. There, an open-air drug market operates twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. The cast of characters that occupies this intersection of mental illness and drug addiction is an eclectic one. Dealers from Central America controlled most of the cocaine and heroin trade at the time. A lower caste of addicts sold just about everything else, mostly single prescription pills and the occasional psychedelic (never that popular among the Downtown Eastside’s entrenched user population). Young Indigenous men peddled cigarettes and dishevelled customers of all these substances came and went in constant flows from every direction.
Now there was a pair of porta-potties there and a VANDU member stationed to keep them safe and clean. From that vantage point, the need for a needle exchange was so obvious and so dire that Livingston just went ahead and set one up.
“You called them poison parties,” she recalls. “You would see someone handing a needle they had just used to someone else to use it. So I thought we had to have [clean] needles. If you’re going to see that much public drug use and you’re going to see someone hand someone else a needle, you can intervene and say, ‘We have some needles here.’”
So on the corner of Main and Hastings, right outside the Carnegie Community Centre’s front door, out in the open and obvious for everybody to see, VANDU and PHS set up a table, pitched a small tent over it, and opened a needle exchange.
“The VPD came and smashed the table and broke up the tent,” says Townsend.
Townsend watched this from the Washington Hotel, directly across the street from Carnegie. Each evening, he created a distraction, the cops left, and then, from the Washington, a team grabbed the table, tent, and a large bag of clean needles, and rushed across the street to set it all up.
“We’d call the police and tell them that people were unbolting the mufflers of all their cars that were parked outside the Carnegie,” Townsend recounts. “So they would run back and move them. And then, when they moved them, we put the tent up.”
The cops wouldn’t bother with this hassle every night, so once the table was up, they often left it alone. The trick was to take the corner. “It was a weird battle for space,” Townsend says. “This police sergeant said he was going to break the table over his knee if it was put up again. So late at night, in the evening, there was a mini battle between us and this sergeant over who was in control of the area.” The war of attrition eventually wore the police force down. “We just kept on putting [the table] there,” Townsend says.
While Townsend waged his guerilla war, Dan Small fought on a bureaucratic flank. He and the rest of the Portland’s management team had built alliances with prominent health researchers working in HIV/AIDS and related fields. When the VPD took VANDU’s needle-exchange table, Small reached out to a doctor at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS named Martin Schechter and asked if he would put the prestigious organization’s name on a letter to the police department. Schechter agreed.
It read, “Every night this needle exchange is gone, there is one more HIV infection. You are killing people.” The letter was received by the police department on July 16, 2002. Two days later, VANDU, with significant but silent support from PHS, took to the streets.
“I said, ‘Let’s make a 100-foot-long needle,’” Small recalls.
Enter the Portland’s notorious maintenance team, which consisted of a scrappy Vietnamese guy named Phong Lam, a thick-accented German named Christoph Runne, and an older remnant of the hippie era named Patrick O’Rourke. This trio, sometimes a team of four when joined by O’Rourke’s son
Allen, played a quiet but crucial role in just about every protest, memorial, and black-ops mission that the Portland Hotel Society has ever held. They also kept the hotels together, in a very literal sense.
“The maintenance crew are heroes,” Evans says. “They worked incredibly long hours doing repairs, helping with de-hoarding rooms, preparing for pest control, moving people in and out, managing every aspect of maintenance in very old buildings housing very complex people.” Day or night, Lam was almost always the first person on the scene of a fire or a flood, “Of which there were many,” Evans adds.
The team’s official job description included plumbing and carpentry. “My job, basically, was fixing doors,” Runne says with a laugh. “Because doors were constantly being kicked in. So I would start on the top floor, work from the top down, and then by the time I made it down to the bottom floor, I could basically start again from the top down, constantly fixing doors.”
But the official job description only accounted for half of the team’s work for the Portland. “They were our ops crew,” Evans says. “They showed up at everything. They were always everywhere.”
She remembers how, while she was taking care of the Portland’s paperwork, Townsend would scheme with this crew and come up with ridiculous plans, some of which were never carried out but many more of which were. “Sometimes they didn’t tell me what they were doing because they didn’t want me to know,” Evans says. “Mark and them had all the fun.”
There were some interesting projects—building fifty black coffins, for example, or finding a way into a hotel where the health minister was speaking. In July of 2002, Small asked the maintenance team if it would build him a 100-foot-long needle.