City of Vancouver bars elected official from Board meetings

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Bill Simpson, Carnegie Centre Board Member

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William "Bill" Simpson, a homeless man who was barred from the Carnegie Learning
Centre for allegedly blogging and was elected to the Board of Directors
this month by low income members of the Carnegie Centre, has now been barred
again. This time he has been barred from the entire building for daring to feature "links" to a blog which contains criticisms of
Carnegie with which management disagrees.

The barring was executed on the morning of Friday, June 22nd, just hours after the Downtown Eastside Enquirer and
Blogger News Network reported that old guard Carnegie Board member,
Margaret Prevost, had instructed Security guard Ted Chaing to rip up
leaflets Simpson was using to invite supporters to a meeting.

The
barring, Simpson points out, comes "on the eve" of the Election of
Officers -- President, Vice President, etc. -- to be held on Monday, June
25th at Carnegie. "I'll be barred from being elected to office," he says.  Having been elected to the Board, Simpson was
planning to attend that meeting to vote for officers. But when he
arrived at Carnegie on Friday, he learned that the City of Vancouver had changed his plans.

Trey, a Security guard, met Simpson at the front
entrance of Carnegie and told Simpson he was required to stop him there
until Ethel Whitty came downstairs. "I couldn't enter any farther than the front desk," Simpson says.  He emphasizes that Trey, a
black American ex-pat whom he says is one of the better security guards at
Carnegie, had nothing to do with instigating the barring. "Trey was
following orders; he could have lost his job if he'd refused."

When
Whitty arrived in the front reception area with Assistant Director Dan
Tetrault, she gave Simpson a letter on City of Vancouver letterhead
announcing that he was barred from the Carnegie Centre building.  The
letter dated June 21, 2007, on City of Vancouver letterhead, was signed
by Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, General Manager, Community Services, City of
Vancouver. Forbes-Roberts works at City Hall, not specifically at
Carnegie. At the bottom of the letter was the notation: "cc: Ethel
Whitty, David Hill."

Despite giving Simpson the letter
announcing this fresh barring, the City of Vancouver and Whitty
continued their six months of stalling in regards to his request for a
written reason for the first barring which was executed in Dec. 2006 so
that he could appeal. He was barred at that time from the Carnegie
Learning Centre and it's public access computers. Shortly after that
barring, Simpson submitted a letter to Whitty and Learning Centre
Co-ordinator Lucy Alderson requesting that the reasons for the barring
be put in writing. Carnegie receptionist, Donna, refused to sign for
the letter,though she did put a copy in Whitty�s mailbox. The letter
was then ignored by Whitty and Alderson, despite a verbal reminder to
Alderson that Simpson was awaiting a response.

At the time of
the first barring, Alderson told Simpson that it was due to the fact
that he had been blogging on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog.
Alderson, an out-dyke who is presented on the internet and
elsewhere as a friend of the marginalized, met Simpson at the door of
the Carnegie Learning Centre and escorted him to the office of the Head
of Security, "Skip", where she gave him this news. There was never any
evidence against Simpson of wrongdoing, or in fact even even being a
blogger.

Simpson says he has never posted on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer
blogspot, although he supports the content of the site. (He has since
opened his own site with an almost identical name, Downtown Eastiside Enquirer.ca., from which
he provides a link to to the blog.) Carnegie Board member Gena Simpson
admitted in a comment on NowPublic.com news site earlier this year that
Simpson was barred for merely being a "suspected" blogger.

The
fact that Simpson had not been blogging on the Downtown Eastisde Enquirer blog seems to now be conceded by the City of
Vancouver. In the letter on City of Vancouver letterhead delivered to
Simpson Friday, Forbes-Roberts stated that Simpson was being barred for
having a site which "links" to the Downtown Eastisde Enquirer blog which she claimed contains "numerous inaccuracies and allegations of misconduct, and unwarranted
invasions of privacy of other patrons and staff at the Centre."
Forbes-Roberts did not provide even one example to support her sweeping allegations.  The Downtown Eastside Enquirer bloggers maintain that this is because documented evidence and witness testimony is available to support all stories on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer.

"What are the inaccuracies?", Simpson asked Whitty on Friday, after she barred him.  She declined to answer his question.  Simpson pointed out to
Whitty that, "The blog is open to rebuttal and correction," unlike the Carnegie system in which people too often are left with the Freedom of Information Act as their only route for finding out what they are accused of.  "She can respond to charges and we can't," Simpson says emphatically.  "We can't even find out what we're charged with."   

Forbes-Roberts claimed at the end of her letter that, "Your right to free speech does not entitle you to damage people's reputations...."  It is the position of DTES Enquirer bloggers that City staff seem to confuse accountability with damage to their reputations.  Simpson was first barred after the DTES Enquirer blog began reporting back to taxpayers when richly funded services for the poor at Carnegie were not being consistently delivered.  Despite the roughly $500,000 worth of management and supervisory staff on the third floor, it was not unusual for members to arrive to find either the Learning Centre or the Computer room locked, sometimes both.  When Ethel Whitty and others presented the opera, Condemned, to the media and funders as having been written and performed primarily by homeless people, the DTES Enquirer pointed out that this was not accurate.  When a Carnegie volunteer supervisor demonstrated a pattern of engaging in ongoing sexual relationships with clientele, some of whom were troubled and committed or attempted to commit suicide, the DTES Enquirer reported that pattern (but withheld her name at the request of sources.) The City removed her from Carnegie so they obviously knew the story was not fictional. Never in the decade or more that Forbes-Roberts has been the City Hall overseer of Carnegie and Tetrault has been Assistant Director has there been this level of accountability. 

One more reason Forbes-Roberts provided in her letter
for Simpson's barring was that he had "used the Centre's address and a
Centre phone number for Internet purposes". Here, Forbes-Roberts lied by
omission. She is well aware that all Downtown Eastside residents, and
even transients passing through, are authorized to use the Carnegie
address and telephone as their personal contact information. This
service has been offered for two decades because many Downtown Eastside
residents do not have phones or stable addresses. Thousands of people
over the years have taken advantage of this well-known service; Bill
Simpson is not unique. Kim, Dan, and other front desk receptionists at
Carnegie take phone messages on a daily basis for residents who have
given out the Carnegie telephone number as their own; one need only
walk into the Carnegie reception area to see the lists of telephone
messages and mail for residents. People give out the address of
Carnegie, which the City bills as the "living room" of the community,
all over the B.C., Canada, and anywhere else transients end up. Now
with mail expanding to the internet, Carnegie's address is being used
there too. One volunteer uses the Carnegie phone number as his contact
for collecting computers, etc. from a Recycling Depot -- but he is in
the left-wing in-crowd at Carnegie and would never be challenged. James and others working in the
Carnegie Learning Centre have allowed members to use Carnegie's contact information on the left wing Homeless Nation website, which hosts
individual blogs that tend to trash the Conservative Harper government. (Simpson has incidentally never used the Carnegie contact information
for commercial purposes.)

After Whitty handed Simpson the letter from Forbes-Roberts, he specifically asked her if he would be allowed to enter the Carnegie Centre to
attend future Board meetings. She told him that he would not be allowed
to enter.  He could not attend a Board meeting in future "unless it's held outside the Centre," Simpson reported her saying.

Longterm Carnegie members who say the letter barring Simpson, were not suprised to see that Forbes-Roberts had signed it.  Forbes-Roberts has a documented record of
allowing undemocratic use of Carnegie's barring policy that now dates
back several years. There is a paper trail in another case -- which an
advocate has told the Enquirer he will turn over on condition
that we not reveal the complainant's name without her consent -- in
which a woman was barred from Carnegie computers after complaining
about massive sexual harassment. When this female member would sign up
for a public access computer funded by the City of Vancouver, she would
be asked by a coffee seller to go home with him and watch pornography,
to die her hair and lose 20 lbs. to be more attractive to men.  And she
was told by another coffee seller when she wore a fisherman's knit
sweater and a plaid skirt, that she was turning him as he liked that
school girl look. After lodging complaints, she arrived one
day to learn that she had been barred from all public computer access
at the Carnegie Centre.

The female member would find herself
subjected to a pattern of undemocratic practices that were not unlike
those to which Simpson would be later subjected. She was expected to
serve her "sentence" without first being allowed access to an appeal
process or being given a reason why she was barred. A paper trail
reveals that Forbes-Roberts allowed Carnegie staff to ignore the
woman's written request to be given a reason for the barring in
writing. A paper trail reveals that both Forbes-Roberts and her
supervisor Judy Rogers, City Manager currently on the world stage as a
member of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Winter
Olympics, were complicit in the barring harassment of this woman. (An article will be posted about Rogers handling of that woman's complaints.) "Both Forbes-Roberts
and Rogers should have been fired after that case," says an individual
familiar with the case in an e-mail sent to the Enquirer. "Why are they
still around to pull this stunt again?" Current Carnegie Assistant Manager,, Dan Tetrault was Assistant Manager
at the time that barring was executed and the woman denied due process.

Only
this time around, in the Simpson case, the barring has involved
activity which DTES Enquirer contributors and several Carnegie members
believe warrants criminal investigation into the conduct of City of
Vancouver staff.  To read the rest of this original article, see Downtown Eastside Enquirer