Fighting for Space by Travis Lupick

Author:Travis Lupick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551527130
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2018-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

In June 2000, Thomas Kerr was a young researcher working for the Dr Peter Centre, a care provider for people with HIV/AIDS attached to St. Paul’s Hospital on the west side of Vancouver’s downtown core. He was thirty-three years old, a father to a three-year-old and a newborn, and in addition to his work at the centre, was pursuing a PhD in health psychology. Kerr was working sixty-hour weeks while still trying to devote as much time as he could to his young family. Then he received a call from his boss, Maxine Davis, who asked if he would take on a project for HaRAS.

“I’ve been working with this group of stakeholders, including Downtown Eastside people, toward trying to maybe set up a safe-injection site,” Davis told him. “And everybody’s pitched in a couple of thousand dollars, so we have a tiny pot of money.”

Kerr was tasked with drafting a proposal for a government-run supervised-injection facility. Whereas the VANDU document that the health board had torpedoed two years earlier was thin, consisting of little more than ideas, the document that Kerr eventually completed was the real deal, a detailed proposal.

It begins by outlining the problems that such a facility aimed to address—primarily overdose deaths and the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and other communicable diseases, but also street disorder and crime. Next, it summarizes existing academic literature related to supervised-injection sites that were operating in Europe. It then details a program model for supervised injection tailored for Vancouver, right through from its establishment and an initial start-up phase to routine maintenance requirements and day-to-day operations. There are even suggested methodologies for reviews of the program.

Kerr remembers the experience as one that nearly killed him.

“One day I was ready to pack it in because I was too freaked out by Ann’s anger,” he says.

There are two things about Livingston that just about everyone agrees on. The first is that she gets things going. The second is that she is not an easy person to work with. At the time, one of her most important roles at VANDU was to focus Wilson’s erratic energy on specific objectives. But now Wilson was often managing Livingston’s increasing impatience.

“Dean came to the Dr Peter Centre and asked for me,” Kerr says. “He came to my office and said, ‘Look, I think you’re a good guy and your heart is in the right place. We can work this out and I can manage Ann.’”

Livingston wasn’t the only one who was taking out her frustration on Kerr. Even though he was on their side, Kerr was from the medical community, and Downtown Eastside activists did not trust an establishment that had never given them any reason to. Kerr remembers one HaRAS meeting convened to discuss the injection-site proposal when Bud Osborn barged in unannounced and unleashed on the group.

“Bud shows up and started yelling at us: ‘You people, you’re so fucking stupid!’” Kerr recounts. “I tried to speak reasonably to him, and he just screamed. I was devastated—this was Bud Osborn, an icon, a mythical figure whom I had never talked to before.

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