12th & Cambie
We don’t know much about the mother who lost her newborn baby in a portable washroom last Wednesday in the Downtown Eastside.
Many have speculated on her mental state, her desperation and the sadness she must have experienced after losing a child in, of all things, a grimy blue plastic rental toilet plunked on a sidewalk outside the Carnegie Centre.
So tragic.
Whatever the woman’s condition at the time, and likely continues to be, it is not a stretch to say it was rooted in poverty and the absence of mental health support services.
Was she homeless?
There’s a statistical chance, considering the number of people living in the Oppenheimer Park homeless camp, and those sleeping on sidewalks and in alleys along the East Hastings Street corridor.
Vancouver police told me Monday they still hadn’t located the woman, whose story likely wouldn’t have made the news had she lost her child at home.
Within hours of the newborn’s reported death, teddy bears and bouquets of yellow flowers adorned two bright orange pylons positioned outside the toilet on East Hastings Street.
The makeshift memorial swiftly and effectively made what happened on an early Wednesday evening more real, more heartbreaking.
Which is an emotion hard to find for many in a neighbourhood afflicted by so much human suffering, with overdose deaths and the tragedy of missing and murdered women still driving the sorrowful side of the community’s narrative.
Many are simply numb from decades of destruction.
But this was a newborn baby.
So, in the days that followed the police’s grim discovery, more people arrived at the growing memorial of stuffed animals and flowers to pray and gather in ceremony.
The tragedy reached the B.C. government, with its Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, Shane Simpson, acknowledging the newborn’s death in his opening remarks Saturday at a news conference.
It was a news conference where Simpson and other ministers announced an ambitious plan to relocate up to 700 homeless people from Oppenheimer and camps in Victoria to hotels, motels and community centres.
People will not only get housing, but access to health care, counselling and a “safe supply” of drugs, if needed. Daily meals will be provided.
It is an unprecedented and admirable effort, albeit driven by the coronavirus pandemic and the need to prevent the transmission of the deadly virus.
Would such an effort pre-pandemic have helped the woman who lost her child?
Difficult to say without knowing her living situation, and we may never find out. But we do know that something happened in her life that led her to this unimaginable loss.
I thought of Paige Gauthier’s story when I was writing this. She was a 19-year-old woman who died in 2013 of a drug overdose in a washroom adjacent to Oppenheimer Park.
Two years after her death, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who was the Representative for Children and Youth at the time, released a report detailing Gauthier’s story.
Turpel-Lafond’s report revealed that Gauthier died after years of abuse, neglect and “persistent inaction from front-line professionals and an indifferent social care system that led to this young woman’s demise.”
Was the mother who lost the child Indigenous? We don’t know. Does it matter?
Absolutely, particularly when reports from various B.C. agencies — year after year — reveal how Indigenous people are overrepresented in homeless counts, overdoses and across-the-board poverty.
What I’ve heard from experts over my decades of reporting on poverty is that having safe, secure housing with access to health care, counselling, an income and healthy food provides stability for people.
The temporary modular housing you’ve seen go up around your neighbourhoods in the last three years are examples of that model.
You can thank the NDP for that.
The 13 social housing buildings that went up several years ago around town with those wrap-around health care services are other examples.
You can thank the B.C. Liberals for that.
But one week after a woman lost her child in a portable toilet in the poverty-stricken epicentre of one of the wealthiest cities in the world, there is nothing to thank government for here.
And they know that.
@Howellings
