PROVINCIAL SUPPORTIVE HOUSING TASK FORCE SCAPEGOATS TENANTS, ALLOWS GOVERNMENT TO DODGE ACCOUNTABILITY FOR SYSTEMIC FAILURES
SURREY, BC – The Surrey Union of Drug Users (SUDU) are disturbed the announcement of the BC NDPs intent to remove the tenancy rights of low-income supportive housing residents. The task force will result in a mass eviction of violently marginalized people in Surrey and across the province. SUDU members say the solutions to lack of safety and indoor smoking in supportive housing aren’t less tenancy protections - it is expanded services and empowering residents to make decisions in their buildings.
“Everything is going backward. We’re losing prescribed safe supply, harm reduction, and now our housing rights. Shouldn't it be the other way around, shouldn't the government try to lift us up? What's next, our right to vote? We’re going to lose what little rights we do have.”
Dave Webb, SUDU Board of Directors
“Safety and stability are essential for my state of being. Independent housing is the very basics of that. This effort to make evictions for supportive housing residents easier makes it impossible to find that stability.
Billi Brintnell, SUDU Board of Directors
The proposed revisions to the Residential Tenancy Act will expedite evictions. Prohibitionist drug policy, the toxic drug supply, police crackdowns, and drug seizures result in debt, conflict, and drug market-related violence which echoes into supportive housing environments to create a lack of safety. Lack of culturally-informed, well-resourced, and trauma-informed supportive housings make it even worse for Indigenous and racialized people, as well as women and gender-diverse people.
“It is abhorrent that the Minister of Housing has established a "task force" to dismantle what scant rights still exist for "supportive housing" residents. If the upstream solutions to the intersectional crises of housing and the toxic drug supply were adequately addressed through meaningful consultation with residents, this incredibly harmful, punitive policy response would be unnecessary."
Gina Egilson, SUDU Board of Directors
The BC NDP has refused to take real steps to address second-hand exposure to fentanyl smoke, instead scapegoating supportive housing residents. BC has not opened enough safe inhalation sites, as documented by the findings of BCs Auditor General and acknowledged by BCs OPS Minimum Standards. In response, the Harm Reduction Nurses Association has called for safe inhalation sites on hospital grounds.
“The tradition of colonial violence appears to be alive and well within our government. For years, we have come up with policies and PPE requirements for dangerous workplaces. Unions and health and safety committees across countless industries have helped to address and mitigate dangers to workers. How come the same approach is not acceptable now?”
Pete Woodrow, Peer Harm Reduction Worker, SUDU Board of Directors
“Why hasn’t the government been held to account for its own actions? We aren’t allowed to sit on the committees and at those tables to represent the people that this policy change affects the most. They're entrenched in their thinking and won’t change their minds.”
Sandy Mavety, SUDU Research and Policy Committee
SUDU proposes a different approach to improving safety in supportive housing that goes beyond performative responses blaming tenants for decades of policy neglect. If the quality, safety, and security of supportive housing mattered to the BC NDP, it would:
Consult people with lived and living experience of unregulated substance use and supportive housing residence to inform policy development in supportive housing
Create minimum service standards and training requirements for supportive housing providers which include transparent third-party inspection, building maintenance, de-escalation, OFA 2 first-aid, trauma-informed care, and advanced overdose response with naloxone
Stop exploiting workers through casual, non-unionized, and underpaid positions. Instead fairly compensate, provide ongoing training, and create unionized and non-casual positions in supportive housing to prevent burnout and maintain quality working conditions
Require contracted housing providers to create authentic peer-led support, operational, emotional first-aid, and de-escalation roles for housing residents to more formally support site safety within their homes
Require contracted supportive housing providers to solicit and follow-up on resident feedback, suggestions, and complaints through regular community and by creating tenant advisory committee
Expand the role of harm reduction-informed peer workers in all supportive housing environments
Create peer-supported supervised inhalation spaces in low-barrier supportive housing, provide staff with effective PPE, organize floors by tenants’ drug of choice, ensure proper negative pressure ventilation, adequately maintain buildings, and seal windows to mitigate indoor smoking and related concerns
Regulate the toxic drug supply, expand prescribed safer supply access, reverse harmful witnessed ingestion policy for new safer supply clients; & FREE DULF
We remain committed to creating safer, functional, and less hazardous working and living environments for everyone in supportive housing. Both residents and workers have the right to safety. SUDUs urges policymakers not to hesitate to contact drug user groups, who are interested in working jointly toward this end.
“Why aren’t we at the table?”
SUDUs Research & Policy Committee
