Splurging Tax Payer Money on Criminalizing Poverty
Haleluya Hailu (she/her) // Contributor
Santiago Ospina (he/him) // Contributing Visuals
Imagine if you had $409,536 to try and fix something in your city and you can use it however you see fit. Maybe you want a new bike lane, maybe a new traffic light or maybe you pocket the cash to make your life better. I know a lot of people in the Lower Mainland would have thoughts on how to spend $409,536.
For the City of Vancouver, that is the reported amount of tax payer dollars used to take down the encampments in the Downtown Eastside in 2023.
Regardless of the political opinions you may hold, the visibility of people unhoused and drug use has grown in the City of Vancouver and the surrounding municipalities.
This strikes a stark contrast to the grey, glass, empty skyscrapers and developments that have filled the city. As we enter the B.C. municipal elections this year, the two competing approaches to social policy have become a focus in political campaigns and have filled our social media feeds. Do we prioritize public safety through law enforcement funding and criminalization? Or do we approach homelessness and drug use through a holistic lens and decriminalization?
The story of Ken Sim’s first term as mayor of Vancouver shows us the first approach. Ken Sim has always been police first. He’s a hard-on-crime mayor wrapped in a bitcoin bro outer shell. Sim leads the centre-right ABC (A Better City Vancouver Electors Association) party with an endorsement from the Vancouver Policy Union. His policies include a faster permit process and hiring 100 police officers and 100 mental health nurses to aid law enforcement.
These policies—although some politicians argue are well meaning—do often create more harm. Outside of the high-taxpayer cost, many people living in Downtown Eastside encampments lost valuable documents, personal belongings and medications during the 2023 encampment sweeps. Visible poverty is a systemic failure. By taking away the few possessions these people have in encampments you make it harder for these individuals to escape poverty and put them in unsafe situations.
Housing is a hot button issue across the country. Waitlists for social housing have grown 27 per cent, just in Metro Vancouver. While the living wage of Vancouver has grown to $27.85 an hour. This is a three per cent increase from 2024.
More and more people are closer to homelessness than we realize.
When we punish people for being unhoused and trying to survive, we often forget how one missed paycheck could derail a life. Many of those who are active opioid drug users are disproportionately also homelessness, according to an article in the National Library of Medicine. Additionally, they found that the unhoused are at a higher risk of overdose death. We are living in a poisoned drug crisis that has killed more people than COVID-19 in B.C.
The cost of living in Canada is becoming unbearable for many, especially with a growing threat of tariffs from our neighbours down south. When discussing housing-first strategies, harm reduction and more socially left-leaning policies, the honest reality is that—at least in Vancouver—we have been too afraid to commit or properly execute them. Instead, policies are half implemented in clunky ways, where they are declared a failure and a shift to the opposite.
The province decided to let the drug decriminalization policy expire on January 31, 2026 with no plans of renewing it. This policy did not include more support for nurses, mental health practitioners or steps towards aiding the poisoned drug supply. Without large tangible changes to how we address our overdose crisis and significant support of critical services, decriminalization cannot be seen as the only solution to the increasing homeless population nor the sole cause for the issue.
Despite clickbait titles and 15-second reels on local news, the hard truth is that criminalizing poverty is not the quick fix to solve larger systemic issues. If we do not approach social policy with empathy and understanding, I fear that we will spend more time arguing about theoretical policy rather than applying political pressure or committing to community care. In election years, there are more stakes to vote and let your voice be heard. But I hope that my community prioritizes policy that takes care of our most vulnerable. If I had $409,536, I would spend every dollar to try and patch every hole in what is left in our social safety net.