The Guilty Taxpayers
While making my way to work in 2011 along Powell Street in downtown Vancouver I was given a pamphlet while waiting at a traffic light. The guy who approached me as I sat at the light mumbled something about ‘Save the downtown Eastside’ as he presented his informative missive. The title read ‘BOYCOTT! Pantages/Sequel 138 – Condo$ are Destroying Our Low-Income Community‘.
This is asking the working, contributing taxpayer to support their quest to maintain the tattered, depressing hell-hole that is our downtown Eastside. Let’s save the slums, the misery, the abject poverty and the legions of drug-addled, homeless people wandering into traffic.
Vancouver’s downtown Eastside eats the city from within, spreading its filth and drug addiction through violence and crime, affecting the lives of all that live and work within the city. Those that pay for the system are victimized by those that live off the system. Whether through theft of our belongings, the panhandlers who accost us at street corners, the ranting of drunks and drug addicts as they wander into stores and restaurants looking for money and food or the numerous other daily tragedies that occur as we attempt to make a living or do some shopping.
So why maintain the Vancouver Eastside if it’s full of the very people that victimize us? Because poverty is a business. Non profits and charities use the mentally ill, addicted and homeless to demand funding from municipal, provincial and federal governments while enjoying hefty salaries, expansive offices and car allowances all in the name of helping those it victimizes. They have no interest in solving the problem as it would spell the end of the gravy train that is government funding.
In 2022 Global News reported that Vancouver’s social safety net was costing $5B per year. That’s FIVE BILLION dollars a year, and that was in 2022. A confidential report commissioned by the Vancouver Police Department, which was never released publicly, advised that about $7,200 per Vancouver resident or $14 million was being spent per day. The report stated that ‘the funding provides for a “copious amount” of resources and services, it states, which “may not be allocated appropriately or managed well,” pointing to mounting overdose deaths and entrenched homelessness’.
It’s not going to get any better as history continues to prove. The streets are more crowded with the walking wounded than ever before as the amount taxpayers are forced to spend increases with the crime and suffering.
So what’s the answer? Start enforcing the laws for one and stop enabling addiction and poverty with injection sites and free drugs. Stop pouring taxpayer money into non-profits and charities that simply maintain the problems. No one is winning in this battle, neither the homeless, mentally ill and addicted or the hapless public that are forced to fund and be victimized by the very people it enables. It’s time to get tough and deal with it head on rather than pander and fill the coffers of those that profit from such misery. Enforce the laws and ignore the various groups, coalitions and committees that ensure the problem will never be addressed but offer no solutions.
I think we’ve all had enough.
