The nerve. Ethel Whitty, Director of Vancouver’s Carnegie Community Center who has established a reputation for banning poor and homeless people from Carnegie quicker than you can say “Nixon’s enemies list”, has now announced that she is a prime organizer of a “refuge” for the poor and homeless at nearby Oppenheimer Park. It is called the Oasis Winter Festival and will occur during the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Whitty announced the Oasis Winter Festival in her Director’s Report at the Carnegie Board meeting membership of Carnegie Center at the Sept. 4 meeting of the Board of Directors. The Oasis will be held on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 7-10 days in February 2010, during the Winter Olympics. A trial-run Oasis will be held in 2009.
“We’ll set up two large tents,” Whitty wrote in her Director’s Report. “One tent will be a source of nutritious food and beverage for participants and one for art activities and entertainment. ….” Whitty, who knows the poverty game as well as any Olympic athlete knows their game, is aware that a sure way to draw a crowd to any event on the Downtown Eastside is to offer free food. The other tent at the Oasis will be “for art activities and entertainment.”
Totem pole in Oppenheimer Park where the Oasis Festival on the Downtown Eastside will be held. Photo taken Oct. 2008.
“The intention”, Whitty writes in her report, “is to give homeless and poorly housed residents of the Downtown Eastside a chance to receive support from the community at a time, during the Olympics, when they will otherwise be the subject of media scrutiny and tourist interest.”
That’s not the real intention though, according to poverty industry watcher Dag Walker. The intention is to create “a sea of poor people” in plain sight of the media. “It’s not nearly as effective if the media just sees a few homeless people here and there,” Walker explains, “It’s more effective to attract a huge number of the poor and homeless to a small space.” Whitty and her povertarian partners will essentially be telling the media, ‘Don’t look at the elephant on the table’, but they know that the media scouring the notorious Downtown Eastside during the Olympics in search of stories will take photographs of this large congregation of poor people, photographs that will be transmitted around the world. The povertarians are arranging a media event, a photo op, with the intention of embarrassing the government globally.
The message transmitted through the global media will be the same as that regularly transmitted by the povertarians through the local media: “Poverty is an out of control problem on the Downtown Eastside and the government must direct more money toward this problem.” More money directed toward the Downtown Eastside means more money for povertarians who make their living in the lucrative poverty industry here.
Box for discarded needles of drug users attached to the fence of the baseball diamond at Oppenheimer Park. Park shack for storing supplies etc. can be seen in the background. Photo taken Oct. 12, 2008.
Anyone unaware of Whitty’s record of human rights abuses targeting the poor and/or homeless — she was even caught feeding fraudulent “evidence” to a CBC Radio interviewer about the reason for the barring of homeless man, William Simpson, from Carnegie after poor people elected him to the Carnegie Board — could get the impression from her Director’s Report that she cares about the poor: “This event will be ongoing everyday and will provide a refuge and a comfort zone where participants can be entertained or take part in organized art activities arranged by those who know them best; their fellow community members.” Arranged by their fellow community members? Most of the people working at Oasis will be well paid unionized povertarians who, at the end of their shifts on the Downtown Eastside, can’t get out of the neighborhood fast enough.
Just look at the groups Whitty lists as being recruited to operate the Oasis: “We hope the community partners will include Carnegie Centre staff from Oppenheimer [Park] and the Outreach teams, Aboriginal Front Door, VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users], VCH, Pivot, DEWC, Community Arts Network, Gallery Gachet, etc.” The overwhelming majority of workers in these groups – VANDU is a possible exception — do not live on the Downtown Eastside and their loyalty to one another is stronger than their loyalty to poor people.
Take Pivot Legal Society, a group of radical young lawyers who claim to be committed to improving civil liberties in the poor Downtown Eastside neighborhood and creating “trickle up” benefits for everyone else in society. When homeless William Simpson asked Pivot for help after Whitty hand-delivered him a letter banning him from the Carnegie premises and Board meetings just two weeks after poor people had elected him to the Carnegie Board – the barring was carried out under the supervision of City Manager and Olympic Organizing Committee member Judy Rogers – Pivot turned him away with the response, “But they’re our friends.”
All of these “friends” running grant guzzling organizations on the Downtown Eastside are experienced in dealing with media; they can be counted on to have designated spokespersons at Oasis who can be trusted not to veer off the message about the government obligation to give more to their assorted projects. Those projects range from a supervised drug injection site a few blocks from Oppenheimer Park to the annual Heart of the City theater production by Carnegie in which Whitty has been exposed for passing off actors from more affluent neighborhoods to the media as Downtown Eastside poor people speaking on behalf of their fellow poor people — not unlike the way Whitty is passing off Oasis as a refuge for poor people “arranged by those who know them best; their fellow community members.” Let the games begin.
On the morning of Oct.12, 2008 when this photo was taken, there was one person sleeping in Oppenheimer Park.
Janeefromvancouver blogs at the Downtown Eastside Enquirer
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5 users commented in " “Don’t Believe the Truth”: Oasis for Poor During Olympics to be Photo-Op for Media "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYou write that “The workers in these groups – VANDU is a possible exception — do not live on [sic] the Downtown Eastside.” As a staff person at DTES Community Arts Network (CAN), I assure you that I do in fact live in the DTES, and that CAN is very much driven by DTES residents. We have been approached about this festival, but so far have not endorsed it and will not be operating it in any way, as you suggest in the article.
I also live in the DTES, am a director of CAN and community representative with the Pivot Legal Society. I can personally vouch as an active member, that both of these organisations strive for and do a lot of good work to benefit the residents of the DTES.
laniwurm,
Thanks for the input. I’m not as familiar with the arts groups as I am with the major employers on the Downtown Eastside, such as Carnegie which has staff at their community center at Main & Hastings as well as outreach workers at Oppenheimer Park.
One problem is that Downtown Eastside residents define the boundaries of the Downtown Eastside differently than some povertarians. A povertarian living in neighboring Strathcona — most povertarians actually live much further away — and working on the Downtown Eastside may find it politically convenient to subsume Strathcona under the Downtown Eastside. But they know full well that residents of the Downtown Eastside clearly distinguish in day-to-day conversation between the Downtown Eastside and the higher income Strathcona. A DTES resident will say that somebody “lives on the Downtown Eastside” or “lives in Strathcona.” They don’t confuse the two. And I’ve yet to hear a home owner in Strathcona say they live on the Downtown Eastside.
There are no doubt exceptions to the rule that Downtown Eastsiders are having their lives run by outsiders who flock to the neighborhood every day to make a buck in the poverty industry. But there is no question that the majority of the workers who have real power on the Downtown Eastside do not live on the DTES. And there is no question that some of these staffpersons from more affluent areas are quick to violate the civil liberties of Downtown Eastsiders, knowing that they can’t afford lawyers. In this article, I identified Ethel Whitty, who comes to the DTES from a more affluent neighborhood everyday, as being involved in civil liberties abuses in her role as Carnegie Director. But there are many others I could have identified. A few of them are identified in the comments section of the copy of this article which appears on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blogspot.
henny,
Whether Pivot does, as you claim, “good work to benefit the residents of the DTES”, is a matter of disagreement amongst residents.
The young lawyers at Pivot opened up shop on the Downtown Eastside claiming that they would defend the civil liberties of Downtown Eastsiders. Yet one place on the DTES where civil liberties abuses occur systematically and regularly is Carnegie Center, a community center known as the “livingroom” of the Downtown Eastside. Pivot has done nothing.
Pivot has proven reluctant to challenge left-wing groups such as Carnegie which hold power in the neighborhood. (Pivot’s staffperson, David Eby, just unsuccessfully attempted to securt the nomination to run for the centre-left civic party, Vision.) Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty has learned that Pivot won’t touch her, and there is speculation that Pivot’s inaction has emboldened her to continue the civil liberties abuses at Carnegie. A woman recently was told by Whitty’s head of Security, Skip Everall, that she was barred from the building because she had dared ask him his name. She didn’t take her case to Pivot because she says she knows they won’t do anything. And Whitty knows they won’t do anything.
If you sit at Carnegie or other meeting places on the DTES and listen to low income residents talk about Pivot, the general feeling is that Pivot has a preference for the ‘freak show’ aspect of the neighborhood; Pivot works to empower prostitutes, drug abusers, etc. Some of the young radical lawyers at Pivot appear to want to make a name for themselves by liberalizing prostitution laws etc. But the basic rights that are already in place in a democracy, like the right to actually hold office once you are elected, are not being upheld by Pivot. It would have taken Pivot half an hour to review the letter that Whitty hand-delivered to homeless William Simpson banning him from Carnegie Center just after he was elected to the Board, and to at least take a position on the issue. But they didn’t.
UPDATE: Since writing this article, I have learned that the Winter Oasis was mentioned in a recent staff report to Vancouver City Council, as organizers are seeking a portion of the $1 million civic fund for Olympic social sustainability programs.
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