Sea-to-Sky

... is the name of the highway that runs between Vancouver and Whistler, where all the skiing etc events will be held in 2010.  This notoriously dangerous, winding coastal highway has been under construction for the past two years, preparing it for the huge increase in traffic it will see in those two weeks of media and tourism frenzy.

Oh and also, I guess the folks who end up buying the luxury mansions that are (coincidentally) being built alongside the new highway will use it to commute to work as well.

It's gonna be a very pretty (as these things go) modern highway ... but in the meantime it's one of the ugliest things I have ever seen in life (and that's saying a HELL of a lot, people, make no mistake).  Because every time I see the raw rock and blasted slopes of the construction zone, I can't stop myself thinking, "This is the land that Harriet Nahanee gave her life for".

Harriet Nahanee was an elder of one of the local native nations of the west coast.  I have met her granddaughters - one of them owns the spa where I get my occasional mani/pedi indulgence.  Harriet was 71 years old and in poor health when she was arrested under an injunction while protesting the destruction of the Eagleridge Bluffs watershed for the highway.  ("Injunction" being a familiar word to environmental activists ... basically it is a court order making it illegal to physically protest a particular project, once the company developing the project has established its right to do so.)

Mrs. Nahanee was jailed in contempt of court for refusing to acknowledge the court's right to permit detruction of a key part of her ancestral territory.  She spent two weeks in a notoriously tough pretrial centre, and died a week after her release from complications from pneumonia.

Construction never even missed a beat.

Now, in related news:

NEIGHBOURS CAMP WITH THE HOMELESS TO PROTEST UNFAIR TICKETING


July 17, 2008, Vancouver, BC:  Police continue to ticket and confiscate belongings of "homeless" campers at Oppenheimer Park in the Downtown Eastside every morning.  The sweeps typically happen between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. and campers were threatened today that multiple tickets will turn into arrests tomorrow.

Neighbours are concerned about this and not for the usual reasons the public would expect.  Kathy Walker, a parent of 5 and resident of a house across the street from the park, will sleep out with the campers tonight.  She said: "The park has been very much under control all year.  People are quiet, they clean up after themselves and they support each other.  They put away their tents before the park opens at 8:00 a.m.  These people are part of a community.  We want Oppenheimer exempt from this unfair by-law."

With a virtual zero % vacancy rate, closure and upscaling of many local residential hotels, 40,000 turnaways from shelters over a 9 month period in the area, the campers themselves wonder where they are expected to go.

Brian Humchitt and his partner Tina Eastman were ticketed this morning.  They said:  "We're homeless in our own land.  We are struggling to survive in our home which is our tent."

Wendy Pedersen, parent of 2, resident of the DTES and organizer for the Carnegie Community Action Project, says "these tickets will turn into warrants.  This by-law is the perfect tool to aid the police to move people where they want them to go before the 2010 games - out of the Downtown Eastside."

(source:
C A R N E G I E * C O M M U N I T Y * A C T I O N * P R O J E C T Vancouver/Coast Salish Territories, British Columbia, Canada

For Immediate Release)

People, can you imagine this?  City workers grabbing homeless people's stuff right out of their hands and throwing it into the backs of garbage trucks, the victims, some on their knees, begging, "At least let me keep my ID cards, man!"  The bits of food they may have been saving up for days.  Everything they had in the world.  This is what happened the first day this bylaw criminalizing homelessness came into force.  Middle ages much?

Now, if you know me, you know I sometimes give into the temptaion to speculate on the mental state of people who cause these kinds of tragedies to happen to the less fortunate and/or privileged among us.  I'm not gonna do that this time.  Instead I'm gonna repeat this one phrase that you hear so often in relation to poverty issues that we sometimes miss the full import of it: "Where are they supposed to go?"

I mean really?  None of us can wave a magic wand and make our problems disappear ... so, where are all these people, hundreds, thousands of 'em, flesh and bone with real world problems, gonna go if they can't be here?  Think about it.