WRITER - Vancouver Lifestyles -
Vancouver is Smaller than Maple Ridge
Some people do good; others meddle.
Gordon Robson is a self-made millionaire. He is not an Accidental Millionaire. He has worked hard and kept his eye on the prize. He has remained focused and involved and, blush if you must, caring.
On November 19, 2005, Mr. Robson was elected, by a considerable margin, the new Mayor of Maple Ridge. During the campaign leading to his victory, Mr. Robson promised that, if elected, he would open a treatment facility for young crystal meth addicts.
Most election promises – childcare, GST, clinical wait times – are simply that: promises. They vanish into the smog the morning after the ballots are counted.
But Gord Robson is made of a different cloth, and no sooner did he take office than he hired a well-known and highly skilled psychologist and a small team to operate the 5-bed house he had set aside for crystal meth recovery.
Let us pause and note a most significant element in this story before we continue, before we introduce you to the Villains in the piece. Mr. Robson, who I mentioned is a wealthy young man, opened this treatment facility with his own money. Let’s say that again. HE USED HIS OWN MONEY, FOLKS!
Robson was no stranger to the issues. He had already been a central player in a committee that managed to get 400 people off the streets of Maple Ridge and into treatment, work, housing or back to Quebec or Prince Edward Island or wherever they had come from in the first place. And more. The committee made a small movie of their work, shared it with other communities, who have since established their own grass-roots crystal meth committees.
Note that all of these good deeds have been grass roots, ground level, solution-in-the-jungle answers from ordinary folks looking square in the face of real problems and refusing to flinch.
Now the Catch.
Now sooner had Gordon Robson and his team set up shop to address a terrifying and epidemic problem that is decimating the young people of his community, no sooner had they opened the doors of their program without using a single penny of government money, than The Letter arrived.
The Letter came from The Fraser Health Authority. The Letter advised Mr. Robson that his crystal meth recovery house had not been registered as a “community care facility,” that it was in violation of the Community Care Facility Act, and that he would have to shut down his program at once.
For a moment, Gord and his friends considered breaking the law. The stakes here are high; the issue is life and death. But, after short deliberation, it was agreed by all that little could be gained by having the Mayor of Maple Ridge break the law, even to make a moral point.
As VANCOUVER LIFESTYLES goes to print, Mr. Robson and others are petitioning MLA’s and provincial cabinet ministers to get an Order in Council which might exempt their much needed treatment program from the petty concerns of the local health authority.
But let’s put this in a larger context.
Canada has a Compassionate Leave program in place. Canadians who leave their jobs to care for spouses or children who are dying have received $11 million in income support through this initiative. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The Catch? Taxpayers have spent $69 million administering this fiasco!
Shades of the Gun Registry – budgeted at $2 million, eventually costing $1 Billion. Heck, only $998 million out. And RevCan is questioning you about your return. Ha!
If these and the CBC and the Post Office and CN Rail aren’t demonstration enough that governments are well-nigh incapable of running programs, what will convince you?
So, here in Vancouver, the Vancouver Agreement has tied together all those Pimps of the Poverty Industry, all those 220 agencies plying the waters of the Downtown Eastside, and they have come up with…what? A needle injection site, free needles, and some free heroin to a handful of willing experimental dupes, er, dopes. Where are the treatment beds? Where are the Get Clean programs? Where is the Real Compassion and Effective Resolution that all reasonable citizens so dearly want?
A family I know have created a kind of recovery house for addicts. They took their addicted daughter back into their home when she said she wanted to quit. And they took her addicted friend, as well. Here’s what they wrote me:
“ What we have done in society is create a service mentality – we have professionalized care. We turn citizens into clients who need professional care. We have come to believe that your family can’t help you because they are not professionals. The professionals have, in effect, undermined the family. Many parents have lost confidence in their authority to make and enforce rules.”
Yet this loving family has, with great courage, spelt out the rules at their home and saved two lives.
Gordon Robson, with great courage, is trying to do the same thing in Maple Ridge by thinking and operating outside the box, outside the ingrown, self-serving, costly, ineffective, enabling system that has produced no known measurable results.
Mr. Robson and the family I quoted and the many small communities around the province who are beginning their own addiction initiatives are all on the right track. But where is Vancouver? We have a new council; but the old managers who have presided over the old rot are still there interfacing and conferencing.
When it comes to drugs, when will Vancouver show as much courage as Maple Ridge?
