5573 replies to this topic

[UDeMan]

Go by the McDonalds on Douglas and View, any time of day, open and unchecked drug use outside. Not by one or two, but crowds of people. Crack pipes, meth pipes, injecting drugs. Have to cross the street sometimes as the sidewalk is blocked.

[max.bravo]

Yeah, it's not limited to pandora. Anyone driving into downtown on Douglas is going to see it well before Pandora, and it continues until Belleville st. It's all of downtown where you'll see junkies strolling across the road, stooped over, pushing stolen bikes, or yelling at clouds. Some days are worse than others, but it's all over downtown.

[aastra]

Methinks the Pandora scene specifically continues to stun a lot of people who aren't familiar with Victoria because it comes out of nowhere and it's not the kind of "no man's land" area where you'd expect that activity to be facilitated to that degree. On the other hand, few people would be surprised to see the same stuff happening out on the Douglas/Blanshard strip, or in industrial Rock Bay, or on the shabby side streets of north downtown.

 

I've personally experienced this reaction to Pandora while showing out-of-towners around town. If you're heading west toward downtown through the neighbourhoods from Oak Bay it can seem on a bad day as if a bomb has gone off, but in a setting that otherwise resembles the pleasant areas that you've already been through. It's an abrupt shift in tone. If a tone shift like that can be enabled to happen in an area like that then it could theoretically happen in any area, anywhere.

 

Anyway, the shocked reactions are nothing new. But for some reason some Victorians are still shocked by the shocked reactions, even after 15-20 years of hearing them.

 

 

[Mike K.]

The poverty industry, meanwhile, is alive and well, and headquartered here in Victoria. A network of provincially-funded non-profits, Indigenous-impact consultancies, harm-reduction operators, and policy shops, many of them within walking distance of one another in this city, has built lucrative careers on files that have not improved on any measurable axis in the decade their architects have been managing them. The drug deaths continue. The unhoused population grows. Family housing is not built. Children leave the city. Schools close. The boards and the funding flow regardless. Your paper has covered none of this as a structural story. You have covered each piece of it, when you have covered it at all, in the institutional press-release framing of the organisations whose interests are served by its continuation.

The three councillors who brought the cooling motion forward are not arms-length policy makers on rental housing. Councillor Dell was associated with Homes for Living, a Victoria housing-advocacy group whose public material at the time of his 2022 election named developers among its members. Councillor Thompson was associated with the same group in the same period, as was Councillor Loughton. The Society has since amended its bylaws to bar politicians and developers from voting membership, but the pre-election ties of three sitting councillors to the same housing-advocacy organisation, including two of the three co-sponsors of the cooling motion, is the kind of structural relationship a reader of your paper should be told about. Your paper printed the cooling motion as a “save lives” Council initiative. The housing networks behind it do not appear in any of your coverage.

Councillor Caradonna’s record this term is the structural case study. In March 2024, he brought forward a motion to raise councillor pay by 25 per cent, taking effect immediately. The motion passed 5-3 on March 14, 2024 with no advance public notice. After significant public backlash, Council unanimously voted on April 4, 2024 to pause the raise and refer the question to an independent task force. Council ultimately accepted the task force’s recommendations, with any pay increase deferred to take effect only after the 2026 election. No raise has been implemented during the current Council term. The same councillor who moved the mid-term pay raise, who would have personally benefited had it not been paused, is now running for re-election in October 2026. His campaign financial agent is Todd Scott Lyons, the same individual who served as Authorized Principal Official for the Vote YES For Crystal Pool campaign, a third-party advertising vehicle funded at approximately 85 percent by the leadership and operational network of Aryze Developments. The relevant funding architecture is documented in our piece “Not So Crystal Clear.” On May 7, 2026, eight days before your heat-plan front page, he and Councillor Dell moved a motion granting $20,000 of municipal money to FernFest, defeating an amendment by Councillor Gardiner to reduce the grant to $14,500. The next day, May 8, the same Council unanimously approved Aryze’s 934 Balmoral United Commons project, a 129-unit development. Aryze’s Melanie Ransome publicly confirmed that Aryze had contributed $10,000 to FernFest. Your paper covered the curling-club grant. Your paper covered the cooling motion. Your paper has not covered, as a structural sequence, the pattern in which the same councillor brings the cooling motion and the FernFest grant, while Aryze, simultaneously, gets unanimous council approval for its next project, funds his re-election campaign through its leadership network, and pays the community festival to which he just steered public money.

- https://open.substac...-times-colonist

[mbjj]

Wow, I just quickly skimmed over that and will read in more detail later. That is quite the article. Can you post that on social media so others can see it? 

[Mike K.]

Not without an author, no.

And even then, the content may have an agenda that is unknown to the casual reader.

[mbjj]

Okie doke. Interesting though. 

[Victoria Watcher]

https://x.com/spence...508808067543268

 

 

 

Everythng says makes sense.  Everything he says about LA is of course exactly how we do it too, now.

[Victoria Watcher]

British Columbians now show the lowest support in Canada for a purely “public health” approach to drug addiction after the province’s controversial decriminalization experiment was linked to worsening disorder and rising overdose deaths.

Blacklock's Reporter says new federal Health Department research found only 15% of people in British Columbia believe a public health strategy focused on prevention, education and treatment funding is the best solution to Canada’s opioid crisis.

Instead, most Canadians — particularly in B.C. and the Prairies — now favour combining health measures with tougher law enforcement.

The findings were published in a federal report titled Follow-Up Survey And Qualitative Research On Controlled Substances Awareness, Knowledge And Behaviour For Public Education 2025-2026.

“When asked about approaches they believe would be best to end the opioid crisis, a combined approach that integrates both public health measures and law enforcement emerges as the clear plurality preference,” the report stated.

Support for a mixed approach reached 64% in British Columbia and the Prairie provinces, higher than in Quebec at 50% and Alberta at 51%.

 

https://www.westerns...-collapse/73666

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 24 May 2026 - 01:41 AM.

[todd]

Yeah, it's not limited to pandora. Anyone driving into downtown on Douglas is going to see it well before Pandora, and it continues until Belleville st. It's all of downtown where you'll see junkies strolling across the road, stooped over, pushing stolen bikes, or yelling at clouds. Some days are worse than others

Biked through the messiest part of it today (I needed an adrenaline rush to compliment the tall boys I had ingested). Didn't look good, usually does look more crowded as the summer approaches, one ambulance providing treatment, another ambulance on the way preventing me from getting through the intersection. Did they need to choose blue temporary fencing?

Looks like a job for the Canadian military as an aid mission, to be honest..

but it's all over downtown.

Those might just be modern punks.. maybe not your taste in outfits, but maybe not that bad?

[todd]

British Columbians now show the lowest support in Canada for a purely “public health” approach to drug addiction after the province’s controversial decriminalization experiment was linked to worsening disorder and rising overdose deaths.

Deaths weren't rising. Pockets of disorder with arguable reasons.


BC Coroner Service: https://app.powerbi....jg1ZTM1OWFkYyJ9

[LJ]

We can do better, let's get that back up to the 2023 rate.

[todd]

We can do better, let's get that back up to the 2023 rate.

Can I suggest an antipsychotic?

[Victoria Watcher]

In her “Road to Recovery” commentary in the May 31 Times Colonist, Jody Paterson asked why we aren’t studying what works in addiction treatment. It’s a fair question.

It’s also about a decade overdue, and the reason it’s overdue isn’t a mystery.

 

British Columbia’s ­overdose response was dominated for years by a single research infrastructure: the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, an academic centre housed within Providence Health Care and affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia.

 

BCCSU designed programs, trained clinicians, wrote clinical guidelines, and then evaluated its own work. The research it prioritized reflected the ­interventions it was building, which were harm reduction programs.

 

Recovery research, which has a substantial evidence base going back decades, didn’t fit that agenda.

 

Recovery research was never the priority. BCCSU had its own agenda: drug checking, opioid substitution treatment, safer supply. Those were the programs it was building, and those were the programs it studied. Everything else waited.

 

Now the political wind has shifted. Recovery language is ascendant. The B.C. government launched its Road to Recovery initiative, and the public conversation has moved toward treatment and long-term outcomes. Paterson’s article is part of that shift.

 

But here’s what her commentary doesn’t mention: BCCSU co-developed Road to Recovery. BCCSU clinician scientists are leading the research evaluation of it.

 

The organization that spent years designing and self-evaluating harm reduction programs is now positioned to design and self-evaluate recovery programs.

 

https://www.timescol...atters-12373301

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 04 June 2026 - 08:11 AM.