June 15, 2020 Carnegie Newsletter

3th.Annual Sandy Came:ron Memorial

June 15, 2020

Writing-contest Poetry and/or non-fiction Essay Prizes: 1St-$100

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Those receiving cash prizes o~~~nition ~

at an event during

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3rd-$so

per category.

for merit will be honoured

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To enter, p] _~tP contes1guidelines an en ry window on Carnegie Centre's main floor.

Or Email carnnews@shaw.ca to get a virtual copy..

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Deadline is by noon, September 15, 2020 The paper is on line: carnegienewsletter.org

. 401 Main Street Vancouver Canada V6A 2T7

(604) 665-2289

YES! The 2020 OTES Heart of the City Festival is happening!

2019 Festival Opening Ceremony, l-r Kat Norris, Terry Hunter, Louisa Starr, Nicole Bird - photo; Chris Randle

We are thrilled to let you know that the rz" Annual DTESHeart of the City Festival will take place this year at the end of October and early November. The exact dates will be announced in mid-July.

Due to COVID-19 safetyprotocols, this year's festival will feature fewer events and smaller groups of presenters, and take place in various formats: online, outdoors 1and if health safety permits indoors at a few small venues. The Carnegie Community Centre 'and other producing partners are on board, and we are in touch with our many community partners to see what we can do together and how to best present these activities. We have many exciting ideas in development and we look forward to sharing them with you in the months ahead.

The 2020 festival theme, is coping with a world realities of bigotry and isolated and are missing

This Gives us Strength, resonates today more than ever as our community pandemic, physical distancing, legacies of displacement, and the raw systemic racism. We also understand that many in our community feel a sense of cultural connection and opportunities to gather.

As we move forward through these challenging days, the Festival team is inspired by the strength, resilience, solidarity, creativity and support of people who live, work and play in the Downtown Eastside. We take heart from the words of beloved DTES poet Sandy Cameron: "When we tell our

stories we draw our own maps, and question the maps of the powerful. Each of us has something to tell, something to teach."

If you have an idea, project or activity for this or future festivals, please contact Teresa Vandertuin (Associate Artistic Producer) - thirteenofhearts@hotmail.com - or 604-255-9401 The Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival is produced by Vancouver Moving Theatre with the Carnegie Community Centre & Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, working with a host of community partners • on the homeland ofMusqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.

CARNEGIE COMMUNITY ACTION PROJECT

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NEWSLETTER

THE STORY OF THE KOMAGATA MARU

JUNE 2020

THE STORY OF THE KOMAGATA MARU Komagata Maru sailed from British Hong Kong, via Shanghai, China, and Yokohama, Japan, to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914,carrying 376 passengers from Punjab province in British India. Of these 376 passengers, 24 were admitted to Canada, but the other 352 were not allowed to disembark in Canada, and the ship was forced to return to¡lndia. This was one of several incidents in the early 20th century in which exclusion laws in Canada and the United States were used to exclude immigrants of Asian origin.

When Komagata Maru arrived in Canadian waters, at Coal Harbour in Burrard Inlet, it was not allowed to dock. The Conservative Premier of British Columbia, Richard McBride, stated that the passengers would not be allowed to disembark. Conservative MP H. H. Stevens organized a public meetinq-aqainst allowing the ship's passengers to disembark and urged the government to refuse to allow the ship to remain. On July 23,1914,the Komagata Maru was forced to leave without allowing the passengers to disembark; Local Indigenous peoples in provided food and water to the passengers while it was stranded.

On June 9th, a motion was passed at Vancouver City Council: THATCouncil formally apologizes for the previous Council's injustices and their cruel effects on individuals and families impacted by the Komagata Maru incident.

B.THATThe City of Vancouver declare, by proclamation, that May 23rd shall be known as "Komagata Maru Remembrance Day" in Vancouver.

A mosaic commemorating found in CRAB Park.

can be

2nd Annual OTES Indigenous Day Salmon BBQ in CRAB Park

FIRST NATIONS DAY OF WELLNESS IJPANDEMIC POTLACH" Music by Curtis Clearsky and the Constellations and others Open mic Salmon BBQ "Community potluck" Free Overdose training Children's area with colouring books from aboriginal front door

Participating groups include: Drinkers Lounge Aboriginal Front Door Aboriginal Grandmothers Culture Saves Lives Antioch Church Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Vancouver Aboriginal Community Polici ngCentre

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Sunday, June 21st I 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm CRAB Park Bandstand All welcome! Volunteers needed

VPD BUDGET SPIRALS OUT OF CONTROL:

DEFUNDING POLICE IS OUR COMMUNITY ALTERNATIVETO THE DRUG WAR In light of recent events and current calls to de-fund the police, we are republishing an Op-Ed researched and written by Our Homes Can't Wait and Nathan Crompton and originally published in December 2079.

Vancouver's city council will soon be asked to approve an annual budget for the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).

The VPD budget has been dramatically increased in recent years and is now planned to reach $340.4 million, more than one-fifth ofthe city's entire 2020 operating budget and up from $317 million last year. In 2008 the police budget was almost half that, at $180 million per year.

For the past decade, city council has granted yearly VPD budget increases to the VPD without review and without accountability. In turn, the VPD has furnishedtan ever growing list of reasons for year-over-year increases, despite a steady decrease in crime. The first bigticket items came in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics, when the VPD requested new funds for crowd control, antiterrorism, and counter-protest measures during the Games. The effects were felt almost immediately, with the DTES vending and jaywalking crackdown in 2008.

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Since then, a whole host of special expense items have been used to garner more funding: a $700,000 drug processing facility, a new community policing centre in Strathcona, and the list goes on. But the reality is that these smaller expenses are not the real source of the balooning budget. The vast majority of funding has gone into street cops and police salaries, with a constant increase in on-the-ground officers.

And it's this change that is being most intensely felt by the community, because when dozens of extra pol ice have more resources and more time on their hands, the inevitable result is an increase in profiling; street checks, and negative police interaction.

Low-income, Indigenous people, drug users, women, two spirit, queer, trans and sex workers are the first affected by the trend towards over-policing and underprotection. It is these communities that are affected from the beginning and who continue to be circulated through the prison system at an alarming rate.

Recently, a coalition of grassroots neighbourhood groups organized an event to talk about the VPD budget and make plans for a re-energized community response. The event was organized and supported by the Vancouver Area Network- of Drug Users (VANDU), the Carnegie Community

Action Project (CCAP)and Our Homes Can't Wait Coalition, and Pivot Legal Society. At the Town hall, community members shared their stories and experiences of daily life at the hands of the VPD in Vancouver. Members talked about street checks, incarceration, and the current saga of unrelenting police pressure at Oppenheimer Park. They also called for the conscious re-direction of VPD funds into essential community services and supports.

In recent years there has been a minor but gradual shift away from traditional drug-war policing. The older drug war remains intact but is peppered with a new set of strategies and measures.

But many of the new policies actually result in more of the same. The VPD no longer gives out as many bylaw tickets for street vending, but the result has arguably been worse: officers continue to carry out confiscations of street vendors' belongings, and the morning street sweeps continue on the clock. The only difference is that now there is no paper trail- no bylaw ticket, no receipt of police interaction, and therefore no accumulation of police complaint evidence that was possible in 2008, when VANDU sucessfully pushed back against the crackdown. .,

At VANDU we are constantly hearing of people whose entire life possessions have been confiscated and discarded by the police. Places like Oppenheimer Park have been ground zero for this kind of heavy-handed but routinized approach to homelessness in Vancouver. At the event last week, countless VANDU members

cited the policies and practices of police, city, and parks workers at Oppenheimer over the past months. The camp remains in place today because of mutual solidarity and collective fightback of residents, pushing for the right to life and dignity amidst the worsening housing crisis.

But this has not prevented aggressive policing at the park. VANDU member tvlyles Harps spoke about a morning at Oppenheimer Park during the early raids this year. Officials awakened a man who was sleeping in his tent. The man exited the tent rubbing sleep from his eyes, asking if he could quickly use the bathroom. "Before he even entered the toilet," tvlyles recalls, "the workers put a pitchfork through the front of his brand new tent." It was during this time that the VPD pushed several unsucessful measures to evict the camp, including a media campaign attempting to discredit the park as "voilent," But as CCAP put it in their response at the time: "Residents of Oppenheimer Park's tent city experience the greatest health and safety threats due to being unhoused, and external factors such as harassment by city workers and VPD, poverty and ill health."

One recurring issue is the VPD's one-footin one-foot-out approach to the drug war.

While the department claims that arrests for petty possession have decreased, the fact is that "shakedowns" continue at an steady rate. A shakedown is when a drug user is stopped and searched and their drugs and money are confiscated. Again with no receipt or ticket. At the Townhall, community organizer Aiyanas Ormond 05

asked the room how many people have experienced a shakedown. Nearly the entire room lifted their hand. 'This is important," Ormond suggested, "because if you ask this question in any other neighborhood people would not get it.

People don't realize this is happening."

There are faint signs in policy and even policing circles that the war on drugs has failed, and that the incarceration state has been unsucessful in its aims. There is a half-hearted recognition that mass incarceration only serves to entrench cycles of poverty and dispossession while doing nothing to reduce the harms of crimes. But the reality is that the prison system continues to expand, . and expanding police departments are an essential component of the overall functioning of the carceralstate. As Herb Varley pointed out at the Townhall, policing in Vancouver is not just about excessive budgets but is rooted in deeper structures of colonial disposession and everyday governance of the land. The policing of of low-income and Indigenous areas of the city is today a historic extension of the original mounted police and other militias who paved the way for white settlerfient.

In terms of the ongoing war on drugs, we have to ask hard questions about what today's new waves of police officers are doing with their extra time and resources.

As recently documented on Crackdown podcast, VPD continues to conduct regular visits to safe injection sites in the DTES.These visits have had a chilling effect in the community and in some

cases have pushed drug users away from life-saving harm reduction facilities.

The sobering fact is that the conjoined social crises of neoliberalism, capitalism and colonialism are only deepening as we enter a new decade. In this context, police officers are now increasingly adapting their practices and their discourses to the new reality as a means to continue to secure increased funding.

This includes a strategy of positioning police officers as social workers. Partly as a genuine response to the crisis, and partly as a cynical ploy to receive more funding, the VPD are now on the front lines of what should be a public health response. Valuable funding and resources are now being re-directed to the police, including public health funding itself.

The municipal fentanyl tax was also earmarked to help the community fight the overdose crisis but is being chanelled into VPD coffers.

Today's social crisis is also a mental health crisis. With each forced eviction, with each year of entrenched homelessness, rock-bottom welfare rates, and continued social dislocation caused by colonialism - including family separation - the mental health crisis deepens. At a time when housing stability and community economic supports are most needed, only police departments have seen the dollars. Not surprisingly, VPD officers are now a common feature of many of the mental health ACT teams. This new frontier of militarized community services needs to be rejected and discarded.

We know that our community does not need more policing. We also know that millions of dollars are being funneled into the failed war on drugs. As the police budget continues to expand, VPD officers in the DTES have more time and resources than ever, resulting in increased racial profiling, arbitrary police checks, property confiscations, and excessive by-law ticketing. Only by highlighting

these deep and systemic injustices can we begin to build a mass movement for change, because lavish funding for criminalization means austerity for the rest of us.

-Nathan Crompton, Homes Can't Wait

VANDU and Our

VICTORIA TO AllOW HOMELESS CAMPERS TO STAY AT BEACON Hill PARK While many cities in Canada continue to criminalize and displace the homeless, the City of Victoria has taken the progressive step of not removing campers' property unless it has been deemed abandoned for 72 hours. This article published on May 25, 2020 by CTV explains more.

VICTORIA-- The City of Victoria has decided not to enforce bylaws that prohibit 24/7 camping in parts of the city, including Beacon Hill Park, until June 25.

Victoria council passed a motion to allow for all-day camping at a meeting Thursday. .,

Under normal circumstances, shelters on city property must be taken down and removed every morning.

Now, the city has passed a motion that calls for deferred enforcement of a bylaw that prohibits sheltering in parks from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., excluding the Topaz Park and Pandora Avenue areas, until June 25.

Additionally, the city has outlined more specific rules on how to manage campers' property during this time.

City council directed staff not to remove shelters or personal property if they appear to be abandoned or unused until 72 hours after they have been flagged by . a bylaw officer.

Any items that are removed by city staff must be stored in a secure facility for up to 30 days so that they can be picked up by their owners.

The city says that it will also work to improve communication between bylaw officers, people living outside and outreach workers to clarify what is permitted.

City staff are expected to provide a report on Victoria's homeless camping situation to council on June 25, as well as discuss more options for indoor sheltering.

CARNEGIE

COMMUNITY

ACTION

PROJECT

The Carnegie Community Action Project is a project of the board of the Carnegie Community Centre Association. CCAPworks mostly on housing, income, and land use issues in the Downtown Eastside (DTES),so that the area can remain a low income friendly community.

CCAP works with English-speaking and Chinese-speaking DTESresidents in speaking out on their own behalf for the changes they would like to see in their neighbourhood.

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CONCERN

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CONTACT US Office: 2nd floor ofthe Carnegie, 401 Main Street, Vancouver Phone: 604-665-2105 Email: info@carnegieaction.org Website: www.carnegieaction.org

Vancity

Thank you 0 Vancity for supporting CCf\P's work. Support for this project does not netessarily imply tha funders endorse the findings or contents of this newsletter.

CRUNCHI"V

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An Abandoned Woollen Blanket A careless person threw me out I now lie on the street Unwanted and unloved Oh how I wish I could meet A person who would pick me up Arid take me to his dorm And rest assured I will do my part To keep him nice and warm.

Vancouver has a homeless count Of two thousand people or more They sleep on sicfewalks and in tents Where the rain will often pour Perhaps a person will pick me up On a day of cold and storm Perhaps a squatter from Oppenheimer Park I will keep Iiim nice and warm.

One day a man came walking by He took me to his suite And then to the dry cleaners Which was just across the street And then to the First United Church On a day of cold and storm .

And said to the staff, "This blanket Could keep a homeless man nice and warm."

The homeless at ORfenheimer Park Have a very difficul time Harrassed by neighbours and police Who would not give them a dime.

Even sd, I lie contented In my master's makeshift dorm.

I take great pride in what I do In keeping Iiim nice and warm.

30-Minute Lunch Break Dr. Henry* says to go outside.

So, I go forth from the clinic To walk my mind-full-of-concerns Into a mindful state of being.

Inhale the fragrance of a white-blossomed shrub, Feel the touch of a breeze on my face, Watch eager dogs take their phone-entranced humans for reluctant strolls, Appreciate vibrant colours and beauty in neighbourhood gardens, Listen to an unseen songbird, Observe a sparrow searching for sustenance; fearless, hop towards me, Delight in the expression of a glee-filled toddler jumping in puddles, Return to work.

Refreshed.

Lisa David

Vaughn Evans

Cultura,1 Sharing. "to - go" Every Monday 6:00 - 7:~Opln Carnegie Centre Patio - 40. Main Street Carnegie Community Centre Elder in Residence LesNelson will be on the patio

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~ e \d.etsfor ,.. .ultura1 actiVIty c wn yoUto do on your 0 2

Cultural activity sheets Drop by to pick up a "to-go"pack~ge!

EVERYONE WELCOME

sage medicines for self-smudging