While attendees praised her lifetime achievements, I mourn a mission left unfinished: housing everyone in southwest BC.
About 75 people, largely from the homeless and indigenous communities, gathered at Centennial Square in Victoria to commemorate Chrissy Brett, known for her fight to get a home for every person in our communities, and to demand her vision be realised.
She gained notoriety not solely through relentless work and advocacy, but by staging several protest tent encampments, at Oppenheimer Park, Strathcona Park, Regina Park, and the Victoria courthouse, to name a few. She shared the lot of the homeless she steadfastly championed and even got herself arrested as a result.
That is indeed how she was remembered by the event organisers, who lamented there was no one out there capable of filling her shoes, and indeed credited her for making them persevere when they all felt like giving up a seemingly vain struggle against a callous society setting people to fail.
After the memorial proper, the mourners took to the streets, all the way to the very Victoria courthouse grounds where she set up an encampment, chanting demands of affording a home for everyone. Oddly, it seemed for a moment that the police, which had been nearly invisible until then, would block the marchers’ way back by closing Burdett Avenue with one vehicle in each lane, but must have wisely changed their minds; this is exactly the kind of fight the crowd was wishing for, after all.
The procession turned back and returned to Centennial Square, back where it started. And it seems to me that, without a champion like Chrissy Brett who can bind communities together into fighting society for human rights and decent living conditions, this movement is too back where it started, homelessness now being worse than ever with no positive resolution in sight.
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