An advocate for people living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside says the lack of transparency around the special consultant the province hired for the neighbourhood may have doomed the project from the beginning.
B.C. Premier David Eby announced Tuesday that the province had terminated its contract with Michael Bryant, three months into his six-month term, and a week after Global News first publicized the appointment.
Eby said controversy around the consultancy had become a distraction from the work, and insisted the failure to announce Bryant’s hiring was a simple communications failure.
The terms of Bryant’s six-month contract included $150,000 in remuneration, along with $25,000 in expenses to provide an outside perspective on the troubled neighbourhood and improve outcomes. It also included language that could see the pay doubled to $300,000 if his contract were extended.
He was ultimately paid about $75,000 for his work, which included meeting with a variety of neighbourhood stakeholders and over 100 residents with lived experience, but now will not include a final report.
Micheal Vonn, CEO of PHS Community Services Society, which operates numerous services in the Downtown Eastside (DTES), including supportive housing, told Global News that Bryant “was not set up for success.”
“It was very disappointing that so few people knew that this consultancy was underway or how it was operating, so all kinds of rumours and concerns were allowed to run rife. Obviously there should have been an appropriate announcement at the outset,” she said.
“So, very disappointed that this enterprise has been cancelled prematurely — in some ways, we don’t know what we have achieved on the basis of it, and the idea that we need some concerted thinking, that’s for real. So that problem still persists. How we are going to go forward is now the big question.”
Vonn said PHS had trouble confirming Bryant’s appointment with the province until the government asked PHS to give him a tour, at which point she was able to arrange a meeting.
But she said that was months into his mandate, which she suggested was already too broad for a single individual.
“You really are drinking out of a firehose to understand all of the systems and the complexities of what is going on in what I would characterize as a multi-system failure. You’ve got health, social services, housing, justice, all of the pieces,” she said.
Vonn isn’t the only one who said the province’s failure to communicate hindered the project.
Harm reduction and recovery advocate Guy Felicella said Bryant had recently emailed him but the pair hadn’t had a chance to meet.
“It wasn’t really communicated to me what exactly he was doing,” he said.
“I believe it should have been a team of people, not just one sole individual,” he added. “We have teams of people down there. What we need is a mandate: what needs to be done, outcomes, timelines.”
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said that neither the province nor Bryant reached out to the city in any meaningful way, something he described as “a little bizarre.”
“Just pick up the phone, it literally is that simple. People talk about how this is a very complex situation. I actually don’t think it is. It’s actually quite simple,” Sim said.
“We know we have to provide public safety on the street, we know there are people with significant mental health challenges or substance use disorder that need to be taken care of, and we know that we need bail reform for repeat offenders. If we do those three things, it will go a long way in solving this challenge.”
The only thing that everyone appears to agree on is that conditions in the Downtown Eastside need to improve — but what is the way forward now that the province’s approach failed to launch?
Vonn said the issue has become a “political football,” and that a strategy is needed that can win buy-in from partisans on all sides so that the work can happen without opponents trying to score points.
While she said there are some “common sense” things that could be achieved in the short term such as improving safety in supportive housing, bringing real change to the neighbourhood will require a strategic, multi-year plan — something that will need support on both sides of the aisle.
“These are deeply complex matters, multi-systemic,” she said.
“These are issues that governments the world over are looking for solutions to. I think we need to reach out in some kind of non-partisan way to understand that, this is going to take time.”
Felicella, meanwhile, said part of the solution may require helping DTES residents with the most severe needs to get out of the neighbourhood — not just for treatment, but long term.
“After that treatment, there needs to be a definite landing spot where people have access to housing and other social determinants of health to move forward,” he said.
“We have to do a better job also in other municipalities to really help people be connected to a community. One of the biggest things in recovery is purpose, and if people don’t have purpose, don’t expect them to leave the Downtown Eastside.”
Eby said Tuesday that Bryant had made “important recommendations we will look at developing in the future,” but did not specify what those entailed.
— with files from Rumina Daya