Rookie Councillor Ahmed Yousef on the Changing Face of Maple Ridge

10/28/19 • 65 min

It wasn’t that long ago that British Columbians were saying, “What the hell is going on in Maple Ridge?”

In 2014, voters elected Nicole Read as mayor of the region’s eastern outpost ...and then subjected her to a virulent strain of online harassment which, after two years, resulted in threats that prompted an RCMP investigation, and ultimately her decision to not rerun in the 2018 election.

The reason for the harassment? The appearance of a homeless camp in an empty lot at a cul-de-sac on Cliff Avenue within six months of her election, alongside Mayor Read’s apparent desire to project empathy for those occupying it, and efforts (fruitless for some time) to work with the provincial government to house them permanently in the ‘regular city’. While that work was underway, the camp at Cliff Ave begat one at Anita Place and, well...it’s still a work in progress. But this time, despite sustained inner conflict amongst the city’s leadership, Maple Ridge is doing the work in cooperation with Coast Mental Health, BC Housing, and the Province of BC.

The problem with the ‘protest camp’, says councillor Ahmed Yousef in this wide-ranging interview, were the three types of people thwarting progress. First, the ‘sympathy brigade’ in Maple Ridge took it upon themselves “to be so righteous” in providing sympathy for the homeless, many of them “aggressive panhandlers”. Next was the ‘revolutionary brigade‘ — non-residents who came into the city “to do away with capitalism and private property”, and espouse free everything to everyone. Then there were those behind the ‘so-called treatment centres’, who he felt were not there to help individuals, but to go after government contracts for the funding (“as long as you have a body in the bed,” was his view of their motivation).

While homelessness and criminal behaviour in Maple Ridge may reflect the impact of the lack of non-market housing, poverty, and social and health challenges afflicting the most vulnerable of the city’s 80,000-plus residents, Yousef — who experienced hard times and homelessness himself in Maple Ridge, at one point sleeping in his car — is skeptical that housing is a moral right in Canada. A resident since 2010 and a citizen for 3 years, Yousef claims there’s a difference between people who have fallen on hard times and deserve the social safety network (like himself), and those with mental health issues, who legitimately require medical care, but perhaps not a home, and certainly not to be warehoused.

It is perhaps for this reason — the tyranny of being lumped in the same category as those who, for some reason, lacked the bootstraps, or the will to pull them up, or the necessary medical support needed to learn how to pull bootstraps — that he dislikes the term ‘homeless’.

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It wasn’t that long ago that British Columbians were saying, “What the hell is going on in Maple Ridge?”

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xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Member Wade Grant, on What Canada is Today

What does it mean to change a street name? What does it mean to be able to fish? What does it mean to have title over the land upon which you, and your people, were born?

This line of questioning may not immediately resonate with the majority of Canadians going to the polls today, intent on electing (or re-electing) the next Prime Minister. But it matters a hell of a lot to Indigenous people, to the Musqueam Indian Band, and specifically to Wade Grant.

In this long-awaited discussion with the UBC alumnus, former Musqueam council member, 2018 Vancouver city council candidate, and current Chief of Staff to Musqueam band Chief and Council, Grant entertains some direct questions from the settlers in the room (Gord and Rob) on issues we’re still only beginning to understand in mainstream Canadian society.

Beginning with some essential background — that, first of all, First Nations peoples didn’t even gain the right to vote until 1960, they couldn’t go to university unless they gave up their status as Indian, and the residential school system which has been the source of unimaginable cruelty and injustice was alive and desperately unwell until the 1990s — Grant steps us through some of the key factors that have led Canada, and BC, to this time of reconciliation. Whatever that means.

It’s actually meant different things at different times. Perhaps it started in 1982 with Section 35 in the Constitution. There’s no question the R v Sparrow decision is part of reconciliation. In fact, any measure that has specifically supported the health and welfare of people like the Musqueam — now numbering close to 1,400 people, after the smallpox epidemic of the 1860s reduced their population from 30,000 to just 100 people — could be considered a form of reconciliation.

Or...does love belong in the process? It’s a meaningful consideration and holds some currency to Grant, in that it allows him to consider himself Canadian, even while working to forgive those who have historically ground down the rights and resolve of First Nations peoples. Love, in fact, could be one of the key factors tempering the natural inability to forget the atrocities settlers committed, or simply endorsed (either way, we’re looking at you, Joseph Trutch).

Land, of course, is the other essential factor. Grant speaks about MST Development Corporation, a partnership between the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation, and which fully or partially owns many valuable parcels of land in the Lower Mainland: Jericho Lands, Heather Street Lands, and the former Liquor Distribution Branch site on East Broadway in Vancouver, Marine Drive Lands in West Vancouver, and Willingdon Lands in Burnaby.

There’s the promise that all this land might make something greater than the sum of their parts, just as Grant himself represents as a product of many ethnic backgrounds. Such fabric comprises the blanket that is Confederation today.

It’s a conversation that might have promised, as Gord suggests, some quicksand and a land mine or two. Yet, perhaps thanks to Grant’s deft approach to defining and discussing reconciliation, it’s all very Canadian. Have a listen.

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No Days Off for Sarah Blyth or the Downtown Eastside

Sarah Blyth first started to see the spike in drug overdoses in the Downtown Eastside community in 2016.

From her vantage point as manager of the DTES Market, she couldn’t help but see it. People were literally dying in the street.

So she decided to do something about it. Rob sums it up: “You saw the need, set up a tent, and tried to save lives”. Yup.

Blyth’s role as founder and Executive Director of the Overdose Prevention Society is the latest in a series of contributions to the city by a person who, as much as anyone here, can speak to having lived a life of privilege, marginalization, social entrepreneurship, leadership, selflessness, and grace under extreme pressure. (And she’s not even halfway through.)

Blyth, the former skateboard advocate, Park Board Commissioner, and City Council candidate, fields the tough questions from Gord — specifically on the question of safe supply and induced demand. They circle around housing insecurity and authority in Oppenheimer Park, tangle on addiction, and there’s a quick tease about Tyndall’s machine.

And of course, the big question — will she run again? Maybe she should.