Strength in Numbers

Last year I witnessed VicPD deny a distressed My Place resident health care by butting in uninvited and arresting him without charge, while outreach had actually called for an ambulance. According to outreach, the police officers went as far as ordering the paramedics to back off. He spent the night in a jail cell instead of a hospital bed.

I also witnessed an outreach worker here at My Place lie to security about a resident on a bar refusing to leave and telling him to call the police, while the two actually hadn’t had any contact since she walked in. When I pointed out to him that a recent policy allowed residents on a day bar to return for the night, he told me flat out: “You don’t need to concern yourself with that.” She would end up being discharged after the relentless bullying by staff drove her to a downward spiral of alcoholism.

I also witnessed an outreach worker here at My Place call the police on a very old, shrivelled, one-handed resident so meek he could barely walk with 6-inch steps and speak louder than a whisper, and had the officer escort him all the way to a police car.

I also witnessed, on a night the Emergency Weather Response Protocol was activated, an outreach worker kick out from an EWR shelter a lady with severe anxiety and psychotic tendencies who only needed a moment to recollect herself, with barely any clothes on and at subzero temperatures. I tried advocacy, in my capacity of EWR volunteer, only to be ignored by the worker in charge. I never saw the lady again.

I could go on and on. And if I included the allegations that have been shared with me in confidence, starting with all the wrongful evictions and all the bogus accusations of threatening or assaulting outreach staff, then I would never finish, because they keep pouring in nonstop.

I since had ample opportunity to ponder what I should have done to help these people, but the truth is that I am only one person and my clout as a volunteer, even with sky high karma, is limited. In hindsight, the answer is obvious: what we need is numbers. Alone I can be ignored; leading a mob of hundreds, not anymore.

Hence the change in strategy. If outreach unfairly bars or discharges one of us, then it will have to bar or discharge us all. If the police unfairly arrests one of us, then it will have to arrest us all. Even then, we will keep coming back, over and over. We will not give up. We will turn their Kafkaesque system against them with asymmetric warfare, by having them waste obscene amounts of resources prosecuting people who have nothing to lose and can fight back at negligible cost. In the end, the economics of attrition shall prove to be their undoing. Because Canada is not Syria or Myanmar. They will not kill us all, torture us all, or lock us all up. Sooner or later they will yield and move on, prowling for easier targets. They are hyenas, after all, not lions, and even lions fear large herds turning on them as one.