Advocates Rally for Shea Smith on National Homeless Persons Memorial Day

Two dozen community advocates and fellow homeless people attended a celebration of life for Shea Smith, who recently died victim of forced displacement. Then half marched to a vigil in remembrance of those who died on the streets during this homelessness crisis.

I’d been itching to organise a celebration of life for Shea, since for a while it looked like nobody would do so even though no one in town was more deserving of remembrance. And I felt like doing it on the 900-Block of Pandora Avenue when I realised news of his death hadn’t reached there yet.

I ended up calling it on National Homeless Persons Memorial Day, for a different reason: The Alliance to End Homelessness in the Capital Region had discreetly been sending private invitation to a vigil at Whale Wall (Reeson Park, by the Johnson Street bridge) in which Her Worship Marianne Alto, mayor of Victoria, was to read a National Homeless Persons Memorial Day proclamation.

I imagine Shea, of all people, would have been outraged that our mayor, whose repressive policies murdered dozens upon dozens on our streets, was to attend a commemorative event on homelessness at which the unhoused themselves and community advocates weren’t invited. Everyone in my circle who knew about this certainly was outraged, starting with myself.

That’s when I decided to kill two birds with one stone: holding a memorial event for Shea, and rallying people on the block to counter the other event. I discussed direct action with Shea days before he died, so I knew his feeling on the subject, and decided the best way to honour his memory was to carry on his battles.

While activists like me are ill-suited to lead memorials, I did my best to come up with a proper address, especially since he was on board with the Victoria Liberation Front, which I started last month, so I was honouring one of our own. This is how I launched the event:

Let’s hold a celebration of life for Shea Smith, a notable unhoused actor and advocate who died on December 5^th, his mission to end homelessness in town unfulfilled.

Before anything else, I would like to acknowledge we hold this event on territory stolen from the Lekwungen people over a century ago by an overseas monarch. Let’s denounce the colonial enterprise which led to the forced assimilation and genocide of indigenous populations, which are massively overrepresented among the homeless population. Shea himself identified as Metis, via his maternal grandmother, and was likewise displaced to his death.

Shea became known for his advocacy in his podcast, The Homeless Idea, which he started while staying in Beacon Hill Park, at the onset on the pandemic. Many unhoused people on the streets were then swept indoors, in so-called hotel-shelters, during the public health emergency; Shea did not win the lottery and remained stranded outside. He was actually offended that it took such an emergency for the government to implement a solution. While I didn’t know him back then, I think he would have agreed, like many of us homeless people at the time, that we were being treated like disease-spreading vectors, without any genuine concern for our well-being.

And indeed it wouldn’t take long for the City of Victoria to file a petition to the BC Supreme Court seeking an injunction against the Beacon Hill Park residents, the prime petition respondent being of course Shea, requiring them to move out of an environmentally sensitive area. Its rationale, showing greater concern for the grass in parks than the welfare of its constituents, became a refrain in recent years, the same argument having been invoked ad nauseam to displace residents of other municipal parks. The residents lost every time, because they did not have the resources to retaliate, whether in a court of law or in the court of public opinion.

I became involved with Shea last summer, during his stay at Irving Park, in a capacity of legal advocate, working alongside Stop The Sweeps Victoria, a network of legal observers whose mission was to keep bylaw officers honest. But cameras and notebooks did not suffice at repelling the relentless waves of bylaw sweeps. Even an old man hanging himself to a tree in desperation on August 1^st only delayed the park’s closure by a few weeks. Shea and I were the only people to witness the fencing of Irving Park on August 26. While I would normally have advised him not to talk to the officers, on that day I let him curse at them to his heart’s content, knowing they deserved every last bit of his vitriol, and that he had nothing to lose anyway; the sweeps were displacing him to Hell.

But this time he was fighting back. He would become within a couple months one of three petitioners asking the BC Supreme Court for a judicial review of the latest amendment to the Parks Regulation Bylaw. This time he had finally found allies to take the fight to the City, switching roles from respondent to complainant.

Four days before his death, Shea spoke at a rally at Centennial Square, which I had called under the banner of the Victoria Liberation Front. One of his interventions was about the power of organisation and its role in resistance. Allow me to replay the recording:

“… one hundred percent. We don’t have the capacity, as we are surviving, to get on the Internet, to get on a computer, to write the letters, to address City Council, you know, we don’t have the capacity to do that, we don’t have the resources. So if we have people fighting side by side with us, especially right here with boots on the ground, willing to stand beside us and talking them what’s happening, […] if we can get that, we can have a successful tent city down here. […] Because they don’t take us seriously. They can’t take us seriously, because they know we don’t have the resources to fight back. But you guys are here with us. You guys see this. They’re a lot less likely to do the things they have been doing to us. And we can use the system to fight the system. This is what we actually need to do. We need to fight back through the system against the system. Because the powers otherwise, as Martin said, we’re not powerless, we need your support, thank you for coming out today. Hopefully you can make this successful.”

Shea’s life was one of resistance against forced displacement and the colonial mindset. I find it fitting to hold a celebration of life for him on the sidewalk, the only public space where the system ever allowed him to be. He spent much of his short life on the streets, and while he didn’t belong here any more than the rest of us, he always looked like he was in his element. He died undaunted and unbroken, his fight unfinished. The rest of us must live to carry on his battle and earn his victory from beyond the grave.

Rest In Power, Shea. And as he would say: Fuck Bylaw!

Since I made the rest an open mic event, several acquaintances came forward to speak of how they remembered him. Everyone agreed he was above all a fighter and a leader, who deserved better than the cruel end he met. The event being a memorial for the fallen, I have taken no recordings of those speeches and will disclose no more about what the attendance had to say about him.

At about 3:45PM, I announced to those who weren’t already into the secret (the remaining few were actually a minority) that I indeed intended to march to the vigil with enough numbers to chase away the mayor. It seemed more of us would have come than those who actually did, but several had limited mobility and regretfully stayed behind. That still left about a dozen of us who made it in time for the vigil at 4PM on Wharf Street.

Well, Big Surprise! Her Worship Marianne Alto was nowhere to be seen, which was just fine; instead of crashing the event, we attended it. The Alliance’s plan for the vigil was also an open-mic event, this one live-streamed, and I volunteered to be first to speak. I denounced government policies of forced displacement to nowhere, responsible for the hecatomb on our streets, including of course Shea Smith who had just died weeks ago after being expelled from Irving Park, and closed my statement by pointing out we didn’t actually experience a homelessness crisis but a policy crisis, manufactured by people who don’t know what they’re doing and often do not care.

More speakers would follow, a few more echoing my sentiment about Shea’s preventable death and stressing the fact that bylaw sweeps were directly responsible for these tragedies. Glancing at the emcee, I could tell this wasn’t exactly the tone she expected from the attendance’s contributions, and would have preferred speakers to sound more solemn.

After the event, I learned of a memo circulating to the effect that Marianne Alto would not read the proclamation after all, and was reconsidering attending the event altogether; in other words she chickened out, and rightly so. That’s why this year we had no council member and no police chief in attendance, instead two VicPD goons there to keep the peace. This is one way for us to make a statement: remember these people are politicians, and chasing them away from public events starves them of the support they need to remain afloat in the political arena. I’m certain every unhoused person in town, alive or deceased, would agree it’s about time our elected representatives get a taste of their own medicine and experience forced displacement themselves.