A small population of homeless people continue to try and live in tents and makeshift sleeping areas along Pandora Ave. in Victoria, B.C., on Sept. 19.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
Julian Daly has dedicated his career to helping society’s neediest people. He doesn’t have to go far to find them.
Mr. Daly heads up the Our Place Society, a big social agency that provides struggling residents of Victoria with meals, beds and showers. Right outside its doors is the most notorious homeless encampment on Vancouver Island.
Life on the 900 Block of Pandora Avenue is a daily parade of human misery. Some of its residents lie prone on the cold pavement. Others huddle together to draw heavy white smoke from blackened drug pipes. Many bear the telltale signatures of life on the street: knife and injection scars, missing teeth, artificial limbs.
Eric Audet has been homeless since 2020. He used to be a landscape artist before his life changed.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
Pandora is a vivid example of the triple plague of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction that is afflicting Canadian cities. Many Victorians won’t go anywhere near the place, whether because they are afraid for their safety or shrink from witnessing such heartbreaking scenes.
Visit Pandora on a weekday morning and it is easy to see why. A middle-aged woman with bright blonde hair punches at the air, muttering to herself. A young man stands in the middle of a bike lane, slumped over from the waist like a marionette, the posture of someone in the depths of heavy drug use. A sun-browned guy sells packaged blankets boosted from a big-box store.
Mr. Daly walks by all of this every day. After years of similar work in London, Edmonton and now Victoria, he has become accustomed to the tragic and the horrific. When he sees someone passed out on the street, he stops only briefly to check they are alive and breathing, then goes on with his business.
“The fact that I’ve come to accept it, on some level, as a new normal is shocking to me,” he says. “It’s immoral that this should be happening on the streets of our cities. It’s utterly unacceptable.”
Pandora is a vivid example of the triple plague of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction that is afflicting Canadian cities.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
He is surely right about that. Encampments such as Pandora have sprung up in cities across Canada in recent years. They clutter many public parks and squares, often leaving them strewn with garbage and discarded needles. Though there is much fellowship, mutual aid and resilience in these street communities, there is danger and conflict, too.
Fires often break out among the tents and tarps. Fights and overdoses are common. In Kingston, Ont., this month, two men were killed in a violent incident near a local encampment.
The authorities appear powerless to do anything. So the tent camps linger on, a seemingly permanent and almost accepted feature of Canada’s urban landscape.
To Mr. Daly, that is just not right. Though he has all the sympathy in the world for those who live on Pandora, he would like to see the encampment gone, along with the camps in local parks.
An unidentified man holds pieces of fentanyl.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
Victoria has a plan to make it happen. The city administration is working with the provincial government and local social agencies to offer more shelter beds, housing and health supports for those who would be displaced.
The effort got a push this summer when a man being treated by paramedics kicked one of them in the face. For a while, first responders refused to go to Pandora unless they had a police escort. In a street sweep, the police seized drugs, cash, knives, air guns and bear spray, making 50 arrests over a couple of weeks.
Prodded by a public fed up with the disorder they are seeing in their streets, several other cities are taking action. Edmonton dismantled 2,600 encampment sites in the first six months of this year. Last year, under a new mayor, Ken Sim, Vancouver took down a tent city on the sidewalks of East Hastings Street in the city’s Downtown Eastside.
South of the border in San Francisco, another mayor, London Breed, is vowing what she calls “aggressive” action to clear out the city’s famous encampments. She faces a tough re-election fight this fall and is under pressure to act.
The dangers of the camps to the general public can be overblown. Most people who live in them pose no threat to anyone except themselves and sometimes their street neighbours. Mr. Daly worries about a growing demonization of homeless people, fed by cruel posts on social media.
But he gets why Victorians are upset at what they see on Pandora. “People want it sorted,” he says. Like it or not, that may require some “robust” enforcement.
“As long as someone is living unhoused and rough on the streets, outside where I work,” Mr. Daly says, “I cannot rest easy.” None of us should.