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NP View: Vancouver must vote to end disorder on its streets

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is the worst example of the disorder that has been allowed to go on too long in Canada. The human misery that has plagued that corner of the city for decades has many triggers, including the long tail consequence of the deinstitutionalization trend to empty psychiatric hospitals across the country. However, things have become much worse in the last decade, as worsening homelessness and the fentanyl crisis emerged alongside permissive drug use policies at the provincial and federal levels.

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Other communities in Canada — Winnipeg’s Point Douglas or Toronto’s Dundas-Sherbourne neighbourhood — experience similar dysfunction of open drug use, street encampments, the drug addled sleeping on sidewalks, public defecation, violent assaults and gang infestations. But the Downtown Eastside is Ground Zero for hell.

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Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you........

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