David Dennis, vice president of United Native Nations, says that Aboriginals, who make up “a clear majority” of Vancouver’s homeless population, are being unfairly targeted by the Downtown Ambassadors program.

Credit: Doug Shanks

Not-so-civil city?

Human-rights complaint filed against Downtown Ambassadors program

The Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) has sought to illustrate the success of its controversial Downtown Ambassadors program by pointing out that it has received no complaints about the program. But the Pivot Legal Society, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and United Native Nations are blowing that claim out of the water by filing a human-rights complaint against the DVBIA and Project Civil City commissioner Geoff Plant.

The complaint, announced to the public last week, is to be launched via the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. “Our complaint argues that the policies of Project Civil City and the [DVBIA], through the Downtown Ambassadors program, discriminate against those with the disability of drug addiction and have a disproportionate adverse impact on Aboriginal and disabled persons by limiting their access to public space in Vancouver,” says Pivot lawyer Laura Track. “We want the Tribunal to clarify what constitutes appropriate conduct on the part of private security guards when they’re dealing with homeless people in public space.”

The complaint arrives in the wake of numerous concerns voiced by homeless, disabled, and drug-addicted people about how Downtown Ambassadors have treated them. “The class of people we’re bringing this action on behalf of is homeless people in Vancouver — an extremely marginalized population already, and a population that really doesn’t have the capacity to be making formal complaints about the treatment that they’re facing at the hands of security guards,” says Track, adding that the Tribunal process could take at least a year. “Whatever training [Ambassadors] are receiving in terms of sensitivity in dealing with the homeless population clearly isn’t enough because of what we’re seeing happening on the streets.”

Aaron Zacharias is a mental-health peer-support worker and Downtown Eastside resident who claims to have witnessed disturbing behaviour by Downtown Ambassadors in 2001. “I saw two Ambassadors abusing a homeless man in front of the Delta Hotel on Hastings,” he claims. “[The hotel] had their sprinkler system turned on to prevent him from sleeping in their doorways, and both [the Ambassadors] were laughing their heads off. I was appalled, but felt too intimidated myself to intervene at the time.”

United Native Nations vice-president David Dennis says Aboriginals are among the most negatively impacted by the Downtown Ambassadors program and the prerogatives of Project Civil City. “It’s pretty clear to us that a clear majority of the people that are homeless in Vancouver are Aboriginal,” says Dennis. “What makes us very angry is that we see this Civil City project [and] the Ambassador program as a tool of the city to push homeless people aside.”

The actions taken by Downtown Ambassadors to ask street people to ‘move along’ when they’ve taken a rest in an alleyway or on a curb worries Vancouver Public Space Network spokesperson Josh Paterson. “Having private security guards there to single certain people out — it’s not everybody that they’re telling to move along, it’s certain kinds of people that they’re telling to move along. We think that that diminishes public space, because one of the important qualities of public space is that it’s supposed to be for everybody,” he says. “That’s what this complaint is saying. It’s saying that it is targeting specific people on numerous different grounds, and a lot of them happen to be Aboriginal. And they may not be doing that on purpose. I don’t know whether they’re doing that on purpose or not. It doesn’t matter whether they’re doing it on purpose.”

Meanwhile, the DVBIA is confident that the Downtown Ambassador program will be, in the association’s own words, “vindicated” in the face of the human-rights complaint. “We have not seen the complaint, but plan to review the documents with our legal counsel once we receive them,” said DVBIA executive director Charles Gauthier, in a press release.

The DVBIA refused further comment, but concluded its press release with a vote of confidence for the program: “The DVBIA is confident its well-respected, eight-year-old program will pass the test of scrutiny.”