The Paul Wells Show - How Kennedy Stewart decriminalized drugs in Vancouver

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Kennedy Stewart is a former federal NDP MP and was mayor of Vancouver from 2018 to 2022. In his new book, Decrim: How We Decriminalized Drugs in British Columbia, he writes about how he worked with the federal government — and, eventually, with a provincial NDP government he saw as far less cooperative — to decriminalize simple possession of street drugs in British Columbia. He joins Paul to talk about that experience, as the national conversation around drug policy heats up. You can get a premium version of this show with extra content by subscribing to Paul's newsletter: paulwells.substack.com.

Music The Prime Minister told Kennedy Stewart he was never going to do it. In my Mayor's office right across the table, like, I am not going to decriminalize drugs. Like, okay. Then he did it. Today, the ex-Mayor who decriminalized hard drugs in Vancouver. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show, Season 2.

We're going to kick off our second season with a fascinating look at how government gets done on the hardest files, in the hardest places. My guest is Kennedy Stewart, the one-term mayor of Vancouver, who's written a fascinating new book about how he decriminalized drug possession there. It's pretty clear the next federal election campaign will be at least partly about drug policy. Pierre Pauliev has made that much clear. The Conservative leader started running on opioid policy when he was still a candidate for the leadership. His message is simple enough. Drug policy is broken. Woke liberal NDP mayors, as Poiliev puts it, broke drug policy. British Columbia is the place that does drug policy the worst. Alberta

does it best. Now, there's a lot of room to debate Polyev on every single one of those claims. Here's one example. Last December in the National Post, he wrote that overdose deaths in Alberta were down about 45% from their peak because they were doing everything right. And indeed, that was true in August of last year. But already by December, when his article appeared, Alberta's numbers were creeping back up. And while opioid deaths fluctuate pretty widely everywhere, in April of this year, they reached their highest level ever.

In Alberta, the place Pierre Poiliev holds up as the model for opioid policy. But all that really shows is that drugs are deadly everywhere, and addiction is a huge challenge everywhere. It's certainly true that opioid use, overdoses and fatalities are a big problem in British Columbia. And if there is such a thing as a woke liberal NDP mayor, I guess Kennedy Stewart was one of those. He used to be an NDP MP here in Ottawa from 2011 to 2018. Then he managed to get himself elected mayor of Vancouver. And then last fall, he was enthusiastically voted back out. Every candidate who ran on a slate with Stewart lost. But in between, while he was mayor, he worked with the Trudeau government in Ottawa

to decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs in Vancouver. When he ran for mayor, he didn't think that would happen. In fact, he was evasive every time he was asked about opioids. But then COVID happened, and a massive increase in opioid overdoses, and there was a new health minister in Ottawa, Paddy Hajdu, who saw eye-to-eye with him on these questions. And Kennedy Stewart started to change his mind about what was possible. He's written a book about what happened next. It's called Decrim, How We Decriminalize Drugs in British Columbia.

It's the best look I've seen recently at how hard decisions get made in politics and government. The debate that Kennedy Stewart kicked off is about to go national, so it's time for the rest of us to catch up. Kennedy Stewart, join me from Vancouver. I very much enjoyed this uh it's terribly indiscreet it totally is when i told patty hey do oh by the way i used our text conversations i thought oh but she said okay she took me out for dinner so that was good i have so many whys. Let's start with why did you want to write a book? Well, on this topic, I mean, I love writing in general.

It's my favorite thing to do. But on this topic, I just thought it was a story that needed to be told because the problem is so huge. And the policy solutions are so difficult. And I think I needed to describe from my vantage point about how we made a significant, but fairly small policy change happen. The policy change in question is decriminalizing what we commonly call hard drugs. That wasn't your plan when you became the mayor. As a matter of fact, on this file, you, as far as I can discern, you didn't particularly have a plan. Yeah. I mean, I was aware about overdose deaths as far back as, say, 2000, because here in Vancouver, we had a big debate over the supervised consumption site,

and I was somewhat involved in that. So I got to know a lot of people in the drug-using community here in Vancouver. When I was an MP with Jack Layton elected in 2011, the debate was all about, because Harper was prime minister, about war on drugs. So you're trying to save what you have, like supervised consumption sites. And then with Trudeau, when he came in in 2015, it was about legalizing cannabis. So when I was elected mayor in 2018, I didn't think there was any room for drug policy reform, as you call them, hard drugs or, you know, illicit drugs, because the prime minister told me right to my face that he wasn't going to do it. So, but then as I was mayor and, you know, I had these emails coming in every Monday about how many people were dying. I didn't quite

understand it until I was in the mayor's office. And then I thought, well, I got to do as much as I can about this. So I had a task force that started to identify issues that we could work on and had a chance of achieving. But it wasn't until Patty Hajdu became the Minister of Health that this came on the policy radar. The arrival of Patty Hajdu was the first time you had somebody in the federal government you could talk to about this sort of stuff. Yeah, I had had discussions with folks while I was in parliament about this.

I mean, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, for example, was keen on drug policy reform on the Liberal side. On the NDP side, I mean, Tom Mulcair was not a big drug policy reformer. I mean, Trudeau really outflanked him in 2015 on the cannabis legalization file. Remember, Tom Mulcair was just for decriminalizing that. But that really hogged up all the policy space in Ottawa. So I had some conversations, but nobody really wanted to talk about this at the federal level until she became the health minister. Let's back up actually a fair bit. I mean, my next question was going to be, how the hell did you become the mayor of Vancouver? But let's go.

I'm sorry. That sounds a little... I ask myself the same thing sometimes. Let's begin with how did you come to be in Vancouver? Because you grew up out east. Yeah, that's right. I grew up in rural Nova Scotia and, you know, kind of a middle-class family until my dad's alcoholism and bad economic times with high interest rates led to a bankruptcy in our family where we lost everything. And then I found myself in one of the poorest areas, I would say, in Canada, the South Mountain Indianapolis Valley, just trying to survive

in that environment, often without a car, for example, having to walk or take school buses to get places. And that really kind of, it was such a shocking immersion into poverty. You know, you go from having tennis lessons to that. And I think it really shaped who I am as a person. So I thought, well, how do I get out of this? So I turned to music. I became a musician. I was playing in the roughest bars in Nova Scotia from the age of 15 and then made my way out to Vancouver when I was around 22 just to play in bands, which I did for quite a while. And then for some reason, the Ivory Tower called me to try to understand power a bit better, mostly from a class perspective in my case.

So you were a political science prof at Simon Fraser. Were you always the kind of activist prof who is looking forward to the demo after work as much as to preparing course plans or? No, I mean, to sum it up, I was a bass player. So my job in the band was always to hold everybody together you know i would thank the crowd after the songs but i wasn't really i didn't really like to be out in front on stage and uh activism wasn't part of my early life uh so mostly it was about survival and uh so no i i wasn't uh i wasn't an activist prop i hung out with a lot of activists I was more trying to figure out how things worked and explaining it to people rather than change, at least early in my academic career.

And yet at some point, you decide you're going to run for parliament. What made you take that leap and how did it go? I ran in 2004 when Jack Layton had just become a national leader and you know I'd been studying politics for a long time and a friend of mine just said oh there's a seat open why don't you put your name in for the nomination and after some to-ing and fro-ing I decided to do it and I lost but I had such a it was such an enjoyable time like really just getting to know people. You know, the Nova Scotian comes out of me

because I really like talking to individual people or small groups of people, and that was perfect for campaigning, like door knocking and talking to folks. So I really enjoyed that. I really liked what Leighton was doing in 2004. I mean, here's a guy who had a grip on how organizations work.

And, you know, Canadians kind of thought of him as a used car salesman to begin with, with the cheesy mustache. But then eventually he really grew into, I think, one of Canada's best-loved political leaders. So that's why I jumped in. I had a great time. I almost lost.

Oh, I did lose. And then when I came back to university, they weren't very happy with me because I'd just been hired at SFU. So I really had to the university, they weren't very happy with me, uh, cause I just, just been hired at SFU. So I really had to put my head down and get my tenure. And that's, that's what I did, but it was something I never forgot. And then got back into it, had another similar call in 2011. Uh, and that's when I ran again for a nomination and this time, uh, won it and, uh, was to parliament. Were you very much an orange wave

MP when the campaign began? Were you going to win that riding? Well, Libby Davies told me afterward that they thought it was a goner. I mean, it was a very famous ride. I mean, Tommy Douglas won it in a by-election once. Sven Robinson was there for a very long time. He was succeeded by Bill 6A, but the margins of victory were shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. And, you know, I won it by just under a thousand votes by the skin of my teeth, really. And I think that had a lot to do with the Leighton effect. He held a rally on the last Saturday, and I think that really, in my writing, so it really just put me over the top, but it was, you know, the last writing declared in the country or something. And, uh, yeah, so it wasn't a safe seat for sure. And then a string of extraordinary kind of tragic events happen.

As soon as the largest NDP caucus ever gets elected, uh, two months later, Jack Layton has passed away and you're in a a leadership succession race and i get the impression that from that horrible event on you were never entirely comfortable as an ndp mp you know i loved a lot of my colleagues but what i really had trouble with was the kind of management of the party. Like I saw the conservatives and liberals being so professional, really, that kind of had organizational goals, you know, almost like corporate goals, but that wasn't the case in the New Democrats. And that's something that I'd studied and written about, you know, I taught public administration before, have, you know, done some consulting around that. I tried to help professionalize the party,

but it just didn't happen. They didn't even know where their money was coming and going, that type of stuff. And so I got quite frustrated by that. Let it be known in caucuses, in the caucus. So it didn't really get promoted to any prominent positions. Also, I was opposed to the TMX pipeline expansion from Alberta here to the West Coast.

And the party was uncertain about that project. And so my opposition, I was told many, many times not to go in public and talk about it. And I did. So, yeah, so frustrated, but it was of my own doing. And that's why I probably bonded with lots of people across the aisle who were doing the same thing, like, you know, Michael Chong and Scott Sims and Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and others so anyway lesson learned incidentally let's jump ahead your your opposition to uh the TMX pipeline produced a frosty relationship with a guy named John Horgan who would turn out to be someone you would

you would kind of rather have in your camp later on how did that play out with John Horgan who would turn out to be someone you would, you would kind of rather have in your camp later on. How did that play out with John Horgan? Yeah, it like TMX. I mean, we all look at it now as such a bad project. Like it, it just is costing so much money.

It'll never recover. When the original pipeline was built, it went through something like 15 reserves, you know, without, you know, at that point, indigenous people, when it was built, couldn't hire lawyers. Like, it's really a terrible project,

you know, and I know that Alberta wants to get its oil to markets or whatever, but this wasn't the way to go. Anyway, so when I was elected in 2011, soon after, my constituents said, we don't want this, and so I started to oppose it. But at that point, the federal NDP was opposing so many pipelines, Keystone and Bridge Northern Gateway, that they thought, well, we can't oppose all three major pipelines, especially since John Horgan, who was at that point the energy critic for the provincial NDP, he was such a proponent for this pipeline. And so after Leighton passed, I was kind of put into a critic role

where I had to directly interact with John Horgan. And we had kind of one conversation where he swore at me and slammed down the phone and that was it. And I don't think our relationship ever recovered from that. And I wouldn't describe John Horgan as a terribly

left New Democrat. He's much more resource development focused, like forestry, mining, he wants to promote and doesn't live in a big city. So urban issues never really were at top of mind for him. And, you know, that was a very, very tough relationship all the way through my time as an MP and especially when I was mayor., I mean, essentially wouldn't talk to me. So, which is an astonishing outcome, especially considering what was going on in the city and the streets of the city and in the world during the COVID crisis, you couldn't, you were the, you were the mayor of Vancouver, which is kind of half the province's population. You couldn't get the premier on the phone.

No. And it, it started right at the beginning of, um, my mayoralty and just went all the way through. And it was really devastating. I mean, I remember at the beginning of COVID, like, when I had to declare the first state of emergency in the history of the city, I couldn't get the premier on the phone. You know, when I had 10,000 low-income people in just totally terrible housing with really compromised immune systems. And I thought, well, how can I get PPE in there? And in fact, who came to my rescue was the federal cabinet. Every night I would have a call from Christy Duncan or from Harjit Sejan.

The big city mayors were on calls weekly with Christy Freeland or the prime minister. I mean, they were saying, what do you need? What can we get to you? Where it was really crickets from the provincial side, which just, it totally spun my head. I mean, the other thing we were facing was financial peril. I mean, a lot of cities still have not recovered from COVID. And my revenues dropped overnight by something like 25%.

This is before there was any income replacement programs or anything for residents or businesses. Many, many cities were just on the verge of economic collapse because we can't run deficits. And we had no tools, yet no conversations with the province. We had to go through, like I know other mayors like John Tory and Nenshi, we had to go through the feds to get to our provinces to get help. It was really just, you know, staggering for me. And part of the reason why perhaps our response was not as good as it could have been. Now, let's make sure we understand because you've got a national audience here. Some of the peculiarities of Vancouver municipal politics.

It's a bit of an odd duck. Oh, yeah. Especially, I grew up covering politics in Montreal, where there are dozens of city councillors. They are divided into parties and sit in caucuses, and mayors run as head of parties. They're divided into parties and sit in caucuses, and mayors run as head of parties. Some of that's true in Vancouver, but in one big way, it's not at all the case in Vancouver. Yeah, I mean, the major difference between Vancouver and all the other cities in Canada is that our electoral system is at large, meaning that councillors are not elected from a district or a constituency or a ward.

They're elected across the entire city. from a district or a constituency or a ward, they're elected across the entire city. So you think you're campaigning the 700,000 people, you can't do that on your own ever. So you have to join a party. So these kind of weird parties that are not attached to federal or provincial parties have dominated Vancouver politics since the 1930s. Now I ran as an independent mayor. I was clearly affiliated with the New Democratic Party federally, but I won as an independent mayor. So when I won in 2018, I had no councillors with me. And it was split, basically five councillors on the right and five councillors on the left. And just to give you a range, one of the counselors, you know, they wanted to cut property taxes down to nothing. And the other who was basically a communist wanted at a minimum 25% property tax

hike. So somehow I had to get budgets through that group of people and did it with, I'd say, fairly mild tax increases. But it was really, you know, and throw COVID on top of that, it was a pretty stressful endeavor for sure. So only 11 councillors for the whole city. 10 councillors and me. Yeah. And each one of them has to be thinking about the whole city. Well, yes, but they don't. They don't have a people in my neighborhood sort of thing.

They don't. They don't have a people in my neighborhood sort of thing. They don't. And so what that allows them to do is avoid many, many, many issues that they don't want to tackle because it's impossible to hold into account. Or they can wander into issues on a whim. So it is very different. And I think terrible. Actually, I'm just putting together a court case now to take this to court to finally get rid of this stupid system, which has been struck down in the U.S. in hundreds of cities. That's where it came from. We bought it from the U.S. Okay.

So you want to replace it with a ward system for councillors? Or something, yeah. Something that's better. Now, I say that anyone on council has to think about the whole city. anyone on council has to think about the whole city, but kind of the recent history of Vancouver, certainly for Vancouver mayors, has been mayor after mayor after mayor realizing that they absolutely have to be preoccupied

with the downtown east side, which is the epicenter of the drug crisis, the endless drug crisis. And you go through, you know, Philip Owen and Gordon Campbell and Gregor Robertson, all kind of with high hopes that they could spend their time working on other files. But this becomes very much, you know, one of the top two or three files for every mayor of Vancouver. Yeah, it does. And I mean, I knew this going in.

So what I was focused on was getting as much social housing built as I could, because we have a significant, you know, population here that's living without homes. And what everybody needs to keep in mind is this is primarily an indigenous population, right? 40% of the folks living on the street are from either some from local nations, but mostly from across the province that come to the city to seek a better life. So that's what I did. And that's why I was very happy about my links with the feds, because I could get money for social housing, which I did. And when David Eby came in as housing minister here, I was able to get provincial money. So overall, I was able to bring in about a billion dollars in social housing investments, but only because that was like one of my primary goals.

But the other thing with the downtown east side, of course, is the drugs where we have a person dying here a day and firefighters respond to maybe 150, 200 overdoses a week. And that's just firefighters. That's not everybody else. You know, we had a spike of deaths in the early 2000s because heroin and cocaine were so pure here. People were not expecting such a potent drug, and we had many, many deaths, which led to a policy response, which is the supervised consumption site initially won, and now I think 10. And then things calmed down for a while, but in 2016, a public health emergency was declared here with just so many people dying of now poison drugs.

It's not that the cocaine and heroin and other drugs are too pure. It's just that they're all laced with fentanyl or some other synthetic opioid that is just unpredictable and super deadly. You will hardly be unaware of the strong impulse that a lot of people have that says, look, if the problem is drugs, get drugs away from people. Get people to stop using drugs. Take the drugs away when you find them with drugs and get them into treatment. Obviously, to some extent, I'm paraphrasing some of the language that Pierre Poiliev has used recently. And it's got a hell of a lot of surface credibility to it. What would you say to people who say that?

Well, talk to the police, talk to health officials, talk to researchers that it's the fantasy version of how this is going to get fixed, is that we just get the poor person off into treatment, we wean them off a certain substance, and then they can go on happily ever after, and that's not what happens. When people go into treatment. We wean them off a certain substance and then they can go on happily ever after. And that's not what happens. When people go into treatment, and I write about this in the book, I had a family member, Susan Havelock, who died when I was mayor, died of poison drugs. And

I got permission from her brother, Ray, to explore her life. She died in her 50s. And just all the things that had happened to her and all the things she had tried to get to this magical place of not using drugs. And it just doesn't happen because of underlying trauma. People are talking about involuntary treatment even, which is just never going to work. So what we have to realize is that treatment only works for about 10% of folks who use drugs, hard drugs, as you call it, on a regular basis. 90% of folks will relapse. And when you relapse from, you know, my dad was an alcoholic. So when he, if he stopped drinking, when he drank again, he'd just go to a bar or a liquor store. But if you're using hard drugs, you go back to the street and into that

poison supply. And you're much, much more you go back to the street and into that poison supply. And you're much, much more vulnerable after you get out of treatment. Your kind of tolerance is lower, and that's when a lot of the fatalities happen. So this is, whether it's willful with Mr. Polyev, it could be, or it's naive, it's that it's not going to work. Treatment is necessary, but there have to be new policy tools that are put in place. And to arrest people that are essentially ill just makes absolutely no sense. And who brought this forward first were the National Association of Chiefs of Police. They were the first ones to really officially call for decriminalization of drugs in 2018.

Chief Palmer is the Vancouver police chief, and he was leading that organization. And soon after that, we had Dr. Bonnie Henry, who's our provincial health officer, who wrote a report on this. And it was starting to gain momentum, I think, among drug users forever were saying, let's decriminalize. drug users forever were saying, let's decriminalize. But it was these very high-powered, well-respected professionals who were saying, look, this is not working at all. And so I think that's what opened the space for me to do my work and then Patty Haydu to come in and sign on with British Columbia. Now on the police thing, what we often hear is the chiefs of police are in the same ivory

towers that everyone else is, but the cops on the street, they get it. And they understand that drugs are the problem. You've got to take the drugs away. Well, I, I see, I talked to a constable the other day. I was, who is a student here, actually, just finished a degree and said, thank you so much for this. Because, you know, he works out at the University of British Columbia and was saying like, okay, so I run into somebody and they've got a small amount of substance on it. I have no idea what that is.

I can't test it. If I don't take it away from them and they die, I may be liable. If I do take it away from them and then force them into very precarious situation to get more drugs, I also may be killing them. So police on the ground were in such a difficult situation. And I think the executive, the police executives recognized this and said,

when we don't take drugs away from people, that is a discretionary choice by police. And it happens a lot here in Vancouver. When we don't arrest people for possession, that is a discretionary choice because it is against the law. So I think why they were pushing for it is to give their folks on the ground certainty and actual decisions by policymakers as to what to do with small quantities of illicit drugs. So I think that's where that came from. And just realizing that arresting folks for having heroin and putting them in jail overnight and having them released, it's not going to fix anything. It just makes it worse. So you go the far more difficult route of getting possession of drugs decriminalized within the city bounds of Vancouver. First of all, why was that the path forward? Well, this is all with the discussions with Patty Haydu. Actually, so because I knew Ottawa well, when Trudeau sworn his cabinet in, I think, late 2017, I went to Ottawa on that day.

And because I had an MP pin, I could walk around the hallways and talk to all the new ministers, right? That's one of my favorite parts of the book, is that you sort of have the Wonka golden ticket and it actually doesn't have an expiry date. I did a little while ago too. So I mean, so I did run into Patty Haydu and I said, look, we got to do something about drugs here.

And she said, let me think on it. And then she phoned me. She came to Vancouver and took a look and she knew all about this stuff. Her whole career is about harm reduction and then called me and said, look, we're not having much luck at the provincial level, but we found a way that you can decriminalize drugs within your city boundaries. And do you want to go for it? I just said without hesitation, absolutely. And then was really racing against the

clock because it was a minority government, because it was COVID, because it was all this stuff to get this done. And so we got our application into Health Canada and the province of British Columbia totally panicked. They realized that this is a health minister who was serious about decriminalizing drugs. They tried to stall every which way till Thursday that the provincial government did. And in the end, you know, I know there were tough conversations between the health minister and then later with Minister Bennett who took over the file as the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions

after another cabinet shuffle. And in the end, the province just had to go for it. It would either be Vancouver only or province-wide and they would have lost control of it if it was in the city. So they went for it at the provincial level, which I'm really happy about because then all these other communities can kind of also, you know, have the benefit of not having basically their young people arrested for drug possession or have their drugs taken away and then put in harm's way. or have their drugs taken away and then put in harm's way. You and the then health minister federally were both kind of rebels within your own families. I mean, the cities are the creatures of the provinces, but you believe that John Horgan never really wanted to decriminalize these substances.

Oh, no. No, and I think most of his cabinet, no, either. And yet his government ended up putting in an application very, you know, broadly similar to yours. You figure that was part of a stalling tactic or? Yeah, I mean, I think often the province would try to shut me out and not tell me what was going on. But then Minister Haiti would check with me and say, is this true? And I would say, absolutely not. Like at one point they said, oh, I was willing to drop my application and roll it in with the province, which was not true at all, right? And so because of this, because of the communication and trust with Minister Haydu, the province kind of got to the point, remember John Horgan had written in his ministerial mandate

letter that this would happen, again, I think as a stalling tactic but um in the end they had to go for it they would kind of box them in enough that they went for it and that's why you don't really hear it's really interesting so if you try to do interviews with provincial or federal ministers now about this topic nobody wants to nobody wants to talk about it because they all were kind of forced into it by this action which is which is why i think is an important part of the book is is um how do you really get policy change in a kind of difficult area is that sometimes you have to be willing to take big risks to do it so that's on the provincial side at the federal side just Justin Trudeau gets elected with a mandate to legalize cannabis. But plainly thinks that's enough trouble for him on the drug front.

And therefore, he shuts down any discussion of further bold moves on the harm reduction front. Let's put it that way. Right. He says to you at least once, look, I'm not going to decriminalize hard drugs. Yep. Right. In my mayor's office, right across the table,

like I am not going to decriminalize drugs. Like, okay. And at that point when he told me, I wasn't, I wasn't actually pushing for it. He told me proactively that he's not going to do this. So by the time Patty Hajdu becomes your interlocutor, becomes the federal health minister, is his mind starting to change or is she stretching her mandate? Well, I think she's trying things.

trying things uh so his mind hadn't changed by that point mainly because like andrew sheer was his opponent and he was so you know along the harper lines of war on drugs and so his opponents are making it really really difficult after cannabis was legalized the conservatives flipped to the oh now trudeau wants to legalize heroin and i think that's a very difficult position i totally understood what the prime minister was like. We don't really need to do this. There's a lot of skepticism. And among middle Canada, you know, there's a lot of fear around this issue. Lots of people think, well, people just, you know, they make those choices.

So that's why they die. And unfortunately, that's what they're thinking. And others may be open to it, but they're scared. But I think the prime minister was there and it took really the championing of Mr. Hayden to make that happen. But I still don't think it would have happened without his final sign off.

So we may never know. If I'm Andrew Scheer or Pierre Poiliev, I would say, sounds like Andrew Scheer was telling the truth. Like he, he warned in 2019 that heroin would be legal. And now if I'm caught in Vancouver with an amount of heroin below a threshold, I'm not in trouble. Yeah. I mean, there is a big, and I try to define this at the beginning of the book, there is a big difference between legalizing heroin and decriminalizing it. So decriminalizing means still you can't produce it.

You can't sell it. Like that's still all illegal. You can't import it or traffic it. You know, you can with cannabis now, right? You can get licenses to grow it. You can sell it. But with decriminalization, it just doesn't punish the user. That's really all decriminalization, it just doesn't punish the user. That's really all decriminalization does.

It's like, here's the poor sex worker who's also addicted, and she gets caught by the police, and then they take her drugs away, and then she's forced into an incredibly precarious position to get the drugs she needs, and they're all still poisoned. So, I mean, all decriminalization is take is take the, take the, the focus off the user and put it on to those who are producing, um, uh, poison drugs. So there is a big difference there, but the rhetoric works and Polyev is really using it to is a huge advantage. I think at this point.

We are going to talk some more about that. But since we're talking about the early days of your mayoralty and since your book roves fairly far afield from this file as such, I want to talk about a surprising cameo appearance by Chrystia Freeland, who calls you soon after you become mayor and says, look, I'm coming out to Vancouver. We need to talk. And it's not what you expected her to talk about. and it's not what I expected to read about. Why was Christopher Ealing in Vancouver? I mean, I had this very weird kind of persona in parliament because everybody knew my leader didn't really like me very much, but I still got things done. You know, I, I really supported Michael Chong on his reform act and, and worked on the new Democrats to, uh, New Democrats to support that. I co-authored a book with Michael Chong and with Scott Sims.

So I had this, the joke I say is, I'm the most popular MP in everybody's party but my own. And the leader at this time is Tom Mulcair. That's right. Who just thought you were too much of a lefty? I just didn't like me standing up in caucus saying we're not managing stuff

correctly i think that you know just the party apparatus was in such bad shape and on tmx that made everybody really not happy because i wouldn't let it drop right so um yeah so so i had this reputation of like being somebody that uh uh, was a straight shooter, wasn't a, wasn't a, you know, kind of broadly liked by people that weren't leaders. Uh, and so I think, um, she came out and said, I need help with the NDP caucus to get the new, uh, free trade agreement done. And she was being blocked on, on a committee. And I knew Daniel Blakey very well, who was on that committee, who also we still talk all the time.

And I was able to help kind of craft a deal to get that finished before the deadline for the treaty to be signed. So, yeah, I was really surprised. But it worked. So that, because people thought this is the guy that gets stuff done in Vancouver. And frankly, the federal liberals and the federal conservatives kind of see the West Coast as a bit of a mystery. You know, they're focused on central Canada, maybe Alberta. But then they get to BC and they're like, oh, we don't really understand this place. So who can help us figure it out? And I, because I also knew their world in Ottawa, I was able to kind of help on a whole bunch of files.

So that was one of them for sure. So the finance minister who had renegotiated NAFTA with Donald Trump was afraid that it was going to get hung up in parliament because of. Radical New Democrats. Yeah. And so she came. Didn't want it to pass through committee. Yeah.

So she asked you to be the radical New Democrat whisperer for her. Yeah. And it worked. So, and in fact, that continued like on the housing file. I did a lot of work with other mayors. So that, so, you know, the feds are trying to get all this housing money out. So I would talk to other mayors across the country and kind of whisper to them and try to make deals about how to get, the feds are having a terrible time getting money out

the door for housing. And so that was another file that I was able to help on and on the drug file. I mean, I did a lot of trying to convince mayors across Canada that they were starting to see this pop up in their cities. You know, before it was really just a West coast thing, but now it's spreading everywhere. And so I was able to kind of take that, take a bit of the heat off them on this, on this file too. There's one other moment that really struck me and kind of surprised me in the book, which is that the early COVID restrictions against interacting with people outside your bubble. This is back in the early days in March, 2020. interacting with people outside your bubble, this is back in the early days in March 2020,

you described them as a death sentence for many drug users. How come? Yeah, so early on when everybody was, I don't, you know, I kind of get shivers when I think about COVID and just when it hit and how dramatically it affected our whole society. But so what happened, we have a lot of single room hotels down here that people now use as permanent homes. And they're very old buildings, they're 50, 75 years old. So that you can think of it as a dorm room, there's not a bathroom in it, there's not a kitchen in it. These are where these folks are living. And we have 7000 of these rooms downtown,

which which is a lot. So there is a policy where you can have guests and, you know, you can stay overnight, they can't really live there, but many, many, many of these rooms have guests, like partners, right? Spouse or your, you know, whatever, family member. And so if you overdose, then this person is there to kind of use naloxone or get help. But at the beginning of COVID, we had physical distancing meaning that people couldn't unless they are an immediate family member or they couldn't really be in the same space as you and what happened in these hotels is that immediately the physical distancing meant no guests so overnight we had all these people that were finding shelter in these uh in these hotel

rooms and also saving lives by being partnered up with folks in there that all of a sudden hit the streets overnight. And then the death rate just shot up because people were really using these poison drugs alone now. So either the guest who had left and gone on the street or the person who is remaining in the building. The other thing that happened is when we closed the borders, it completely disrupted the drug supply. So you had this completely disrupted drug supply where people who need to use every day, many, many, many times a day, all of a sudden their sources dried up and they were using alone because of the physical distancing orders. And we had just this huge spike in in deaths that continue now um and so who like if you think about of the of the now you know hundreds and hundreds of people that have died a lot of the people that died were caretakers in their own community too like they were like you know i talked to folks involved

and they say oh this person who saved maybe 100 hundred people is now dead themselves. So you've had a total disruption of, of a community that was really good at looking after itself. And that's why you're seeing just so much death and carnage still is that the effects of COVID have, we've never recovered from it. Like you think toxic drugs is the biggest killer of young people in British Columbia. More than suicides, more than car accidents, more than, you know, are there times of death or cancer? And yet we're treating it like, oh, we don't want to see this thing. And we have to address it. And we have to take risks. Like maybe decriminalization won't work, but at least we found out through trying it and going through scientific research to really judge the policy so and i don't

think we like we're still figuring out what happened through our covid measures and this is one of the things like the coroner saying oh geez we have all these people who died because they now are not with their with their loved ones, even in these terrible conditions. That leads to a question that's just fraught, but I'll ask it anyway. Are we still due for a broad general rethink of government's reaction to COVID? Oh, yeah. I mean, I know people who in Ontario marvel at how students were kept home from school

for longer in Ontario than almost anywhere in the world. And in Vancouver, they were never kept home from school. Right. Would you advocate for, you know? Absolutely. I mean, you know, as a policy nerd, I would

say, wow, this is a fantastic opportunity to learn some real lessons is because you have multiple provinces that had multiple responses. You think about the Atlantic bubble and how well that worked for a while and then it didn't. polarized environment, could you actually get something that was not completely politicized and points the finger at whatever administrations were in power. So, I mean, you know, that's why in the past, there were two ways of doing this. One was royal commissions, you know, and they, they were fantastic because you had, you know, a head that was usually a judge, but then academics who would pose the questions, or you had incredible Senate studies, you know, that were also fabulous. And this is exactly the thing we should learn about. You know, and I still think the thing that hasn't come out is just, you know, the feds and the provinces didn't really have any fiscal difficulty during COVID. And they,

and they didn't like, for example, lay off any employees, but cities were devastated. I had to lay off 20% of my workforce overnight. The coffers are still depleted and Toronto is in a billion dollar deficit from COVID, but yet we're not examining these issues and we don't really know how smaller communities have been hit. You know, what are the lasting impacts? So unless we understand this, we're kind of doomed to repeat it. So, so maybe the lockdowns were too fast. Maybe they were not fast enough. You know, we need to really understand this because something else, some other similar thing is going to hit that we better have a better response to.

Is there something in our politics that keeps people from having these conversations? Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a weird place politically, partly because of COVID. I know when I was elected in 2018, in 2019, it was a pretty good year. People were pretty happy and you know the things are going along there were some bumps and things you know there's a housing crisis to deal with it was too expensive but mostly people are happy but through covid and post people are super grumpy and very prone to polarization you know and i think a little bit of the due to like the decline of, of, of, of news media in some ways. Like I was at my, like my in-laws place,

my 83 year old father-in-law and he's watching YouTube all the time. He's getting his news. I think when 83 year olds are getting their news about Donald Trump off of, of YouTube, things have moved on. And I think the news media have to kind of address that. I know everybody's trying, but it's pretty serious. And it's led to this, where do I get my information from that I can trust?

And until we sort that out, I think you still are going to get people going to suspect places to get their news. There's something striking in your book, which I'm not sure you intended. And I, I, you may not even have noticed you refer several times to the media. Um, it's always undifferentiated. It's not, you know, that son of a bitch at the Vancouver sun is just the media. And it's always pejorative. Uh, the, the media was always a kind of a foul cloud that ruined your day it seems yeah there were a couple of good reporters but i have to say i was i was really shocked but i mean i had a reporter work with some other folks to pay people to camp outside my condo building having a camera set up, um,

when we were having difficulty in one of the parks claiming, and then they were moved on because they were, you know, illegally blocking the entrance, filming it, and then, uh, running a,

a, you know, a news, the top of the news saying, Oh, mayor gets people moved out from in front of his building but not from the parks like paid them because i know i went and spoke to the folks who were who were camping in front of our place as well as city employees did and they said oh these people

were paid to be here like that's recorded and and that's just one of these incidents and i think you know what is that like this is is not, this is gutter journalism. Paid by one of the mainstream news organizations? Yeah, one of the reporters arranged to have these people paid. And there was a political hijinks for sure going on all the time. And then the questions people are asking through COVID, like, you know, we were on the edge of collapse and they would continue on these little news stories

that didn't mean anything. And I thought, how are you informing people about what's good? So, you know, maybe it's because we're a bit parochial here. Like I really find the national media doesn't, I never got asked those questions from national reporters,

but it's really the local crews that that were i think missing the bigger picture and maybe had career ambitions or something i don't know what it was but it was it was pretty constant um and lots of stuff taken from twitter and things rather than face-to-face interviews and now like my my predecessor now doesn't do any media availability really i did every two weeks because I thought that's what you're supposed to do. But now I think, why would you bother? You know? So, which is alarming to me because you should be explaining what you're doing as an elected official. The new mayor is Ken Sim.

In the last chapter of the book, you're not, you say he was elected by cruel Vancouver, which is NIMBY and gentrifiers and haters. As far as you're concerned, is he dismantling the legacy of harm reduction in Vancouver, or is he becoming the latest mayor to realize that he can't? Well, his latest action has been to actually close an overdose prevention site. Like, I mean, that is not somebody that's serious about harm reduction.

You know, there's some pushback from the community that, you know, there's some activities around this facility that they don't like. Some of it's fabricated, some of it isn't. But the reaction was, well, we're canceling the lease and we're going to shut the place without any, I mean, this place facility is saving hundreds of lives a day. These folks will still be in the neighborhood. They'll just be dying on the street.

So for me, that's not somebody who's committed to this. And I really worry because we're at the worst state we've ever been with illicit overdose deaths. And I got in trouble a few months ago because I tweeted out when they were clearing Hastings Street, they were taking people's shelters away and throwing them in the garbage, leaving the people there on the street. I said, well, this is, you know, you got to remember 40% of these folks

are Indigenous who have suffered what we declared in parliament as a genocide right and you're doing this and the public seems okay with it so it's it's you get the leaders you ask for and it really makes me sad about the city the only reason that philip owen and and larry campbell and um gregor robinson were able to do things is because the public was behind them. You know, some of them paid a political price. But when the center of the political spectrum moves to the it's okay for drug users to die, that really worries me. It really does. And it makes me think, well, what have we become here? That there's something else that's more important.

And, you know, maybe that's why people get annoyed with me but i i just can't see like how can you have a great city if you've got all the suffering in the middle of it like i don't get it other people say you've got about a 20-year record now of harm reduction advocates getting concrete success after concrete success, needle exchange, supervised injection sites, safe supply, decriminalization. And you just told me that the situation now is worse than it's ever been. Yeah. That seems paradoxical. Right. Yeah.

It's because the other supports aren't there, like housing. that seems paradoxical. Right. Yeah. It's because the other supports aren't there like housing. Can you imagine trying to live in Vancouver on social assistance? You know, like you just can't. And so that, that's also what's driving the despair and trauma is, is,

is like, this is whatever your income is. This is where your community is. And if all of a sudden you can't live here or your income isn't enough, then you're being ripped away from. And it was initially with impoverished people, but now it's increasingly moving into the middle class here where you can't work at Starbucks and live in Vancouver. You have to live.

So it's really becoming Los Angeles in that sense. Or I mean, to rent here, 50% of the city rents, 50% of the city owns, the renters are just, the entire workforce is being driven out of the city. And the nature of the city itself is changing. Now, I wanted to be a city for everybody, but I don't think that's necessarily what 85,000 voters wanted last time. They want a city for them, and they want the streets cleaned up. And that means more cops, and that means moving people along, or that means, you know, arrest them if they have drugs. You know, that very, I would say, arrest them if they have drugs. That very, I would say, US Republican response to, which I don't feel is Canadian. It really unnerves me when somebody, I say to people, oh, I had a friend who passed

away in an overdose. It's like, well, it was their choice and what can we do? That to me, by treating people as subhuman, it's's like how can we possibly do that but maybe people like me aren't supposed to be mayors like i don't know like i but i feel i feel like canadians in their guts think that's what i want to do but i'm scared like i don't want my kid to be on drugs but if they are look out all of a sudden you're on the other side of the tracks and you're in deep crap because the treatment's not going to work and they're going to be forced into precarious positions like when i talk to people who have lost folks in this you know what's almost a slaughter now really you know like at the end of the book i say like we could fill our major performance theater every seat with the dead bodies of the book, I say we could fill our major performance theater,

every seat with the dead bodies of the folks that have died. It's becoming a slaughter. And we're just sitting there watching it happen. And I'm just saying, wake up, guys. This could easily be somebody you know or somebody in your family. Weekend warrior, take some cocaine, get some fentanyl, you're dead. Or you get brain trauma and then you lose your job and you're on the street and you can't afford it.

Like this is, it's so, lurking so close to the middle class and in it. So many people listening live in cities whose downtowns they barely recognize these days. The walking wounded everywhere, businesses that are afraid to open, governments that seem reluctant to acknowledge these realities, let alone full of solutions for them.

What do you think the next 10 years looks like in urban Canada? And what would you like to see happen? Well, I think once everybody is kind of recovered a little bit more from COVID, we got to admit that it's had, you know, I guess it's like chemotherapy, like it's going to have a long-term impact and mostly in urban areas. So we have to admit the change that has been caused by something that wasn't really planned. So once we get there and we can all say, all right, so now we've got, we're in this situation, you know, what are the policies? Get the experts together. What are the policies that will help? But a lot of it comes back to, um, housing. It really, when the federal government moved out

of housing provision for low income people in the nineties, it really just 95% of the housing stock in Vancouver is privately owned. Like we hardly have any social housing here. So what do you think is going to happen? Like the market does not provide for a hundred percent of people so government has to intervene it does in every country and now you can see trudeau just trying to catch up but it's it's not a concerted effort and that way polyev's in a way he's right like there are gatekeepers and they're basically people that don't want density in their neighborhoods it's not municipal governments it's it's the public. So I actually think it's the provinces that are going to have, they have the constitutional ability to do something about housing and they're going to have to do a lot more. Probably not the Doug Ford route

with the green belt, but they're going to have to probably take some powers away from municipalities that are stopping this. And they're going to have to look seriously at social housing investment. Because we built a ton of modular housing here, about 1,100 units. I went to talk to people that were on the street. They were super traumatized drug users. They get into even these kind of very modest places. One woman, she had a tool belt on. And she said, oh, yeah, I was on the downtown east side.

I was living on the street. I was using drugs. this place i went and got my uh ticket now i'm working on building the new subway and she went down and got her sister off the street and they were living together in this place so so housing is it makes a massive difference i but i just the provinces have kind of shirked their responsibility on this a bit like everywhere and they keep saying oh the feds aren't giving enough money well that's never how it The provinces have kind of shirked their responsibility on this a bit, like everywhere. And they keep saying, oh, the feds aren't giving enough money. Well, that's never how it really was. The feds gave some, provinces took it more seriously. So I would shine the spotlight on the provincial governments, I think.

But will homeowners reject what they do? Will the homeowning voters reject radical moves by the province? It may be what has to happen. Let's leave it there. Kennedy Stewart, you learned your lessons, you took your lumps, and it's generous of you to share the lessons with our listeners. Thanks very much. Thank you. Really enjoyed this. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. If you're enjoying this show, spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.