Heather Conn Blogs

A police officer tasers a homeless man who refuses to leave his temporary, tarp-covered dwelling on a city sidewalk, resulting in the man’s death. A crack dealer in a wretched downtown eastside hotel offers to pimp out his female friend so that she can pay him back for the drug money she borrowed. A clerk at a government housing office can find no record of a homeless woman’s application for rental accommodations, even though she’s made repeat submissions for the past seven months.

 

These dismal events, taken from real-life experiences of people who live on the streets, appear as provocative, grim scenarios in the Headlines Theatre play After Homelessness. Two weeks of performances at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver, BC and the Holy Trinity Cathedral in New Westminster have produced a compelling production, guaranteed to rip away the don’t-get-involved complacency of any middle-class viewer.

 

The play features six main characters, performed by actors who have all known homelessness in their own lives. These range from Nico (Justine Goulet), a young, dreadlocked rebel with a punk attitude and a desire to remain drug-free, and Shawna (Sandra Pronteau), a crack-addicted thief, to Bob (Kevin Conway), a near-broke man on lithium who finds solace in alcohol after eviction from his condo.

 

In another play, these characters could well appear as crusty stereotypes, eliciting pity or even dismissal from a contemptuous audience. But Headlines Theatre bills itself as “Theatre Making Policy”; as artistic director David Diamond tells us from onstage, it’s not enough just to write and perform a play about homelessness.

 

As a society, we need to come up with positive outcomes  for those who battle daily with homelessness and any accompanying combination of addiction or mental illness. How can social solutions reflect compassion, respect, and dignity when city authorities too often treat the homeless like a blight that deserves no cure?

 

The play After Homelessness invites audience-members to think beyond knee-jerk responses and bureaucratic models that degrade people and their situations. Instead, it offers viewers the chance to respond immediately, from their guts. How?

 

By yelling “Stop!” any time during the production when they can relate to a particular incident or attitude performed onstage. The audience-member who calls out goes onstage temporarily and replaces an actor, taking on the same role through improv interactions with the other characters. The results? Sometimes different outcomes and kinder choices, but always ones in keeping with the character’s original profile. In other words, no magic solutions.

 

At times, Diamond stopped the action, asking the actors to share their innermost secret thought in a scene, one that they would never normally share. In one case, the female audience-member whose character was angry and frustrated over her lack of success with the housing registry, replied: “I feel like blowing the place up.” Her remark shocked me, yet it reflected her true sentiments in that situation.

 

Diamond told our Wednesday-night audience at the Holy Trinity Cathedral that mainstream media were not reviewing this play because of its audience-motivated interaction, performances and discussion. Supposedly, this format did not render it a “real” play, worthy of coverage. What crap.

 

(Ironically, in the next morning’s Vancouver Sun, an editorial had the headline: “Policy breakthrough: House the homeless first, then help them with their problems.” It acknowledged the “classic Catch 22 — you can’t get help to solve your problems until you have a place to stay, and you can’t get a place to stay until you’ve already solved your problems.”) Gee, I wonder: Did the writer see the play? 

 

I applaud the performance format of After Homelessness, especially in a region where millions are spent on creating Winter Olympics venues, with comparatively little money targeted for adequate shelter and housing for the urban homeless.

 

A study by the International Olympic Committee concludes that the construction of new affordable and social housing has not kept up with the number of homeless people. A 2008 Metro Vancouver count recorded at least 2,660 homeless people, a whopping 373-per-cent increase since 2002.

Last week, at the University of B.C. in Vancouver, I saw a great multi-media presentation by journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, and Ian McAllister, conservation director and co-founder of Pacific Wild. They called their show A Story With Two Ends.

 

Nikiforuk, a Calgary, AB resident, focused on the Tar Sands project and the global implications of peak oil and Canada’s oil exports. Although Canada is the number-one supplier of oil to the United States, the U.S. is now saying that it doesn’t want our country’s “dirty oil.” Therefore, Canada is targeting China as its next huge market, since “they’re not as picky,” says Nikiforuk.

 

“The energy ignorance in this country is absolutely profound,” he said while sharing daunting facts about Canada’s “earth-destroying economy”:

 

• 100% of the fuel we use in B.C. comes from the Tar Sands
• the Tar Sands use 20% of Canada’s natural gas
• the pipeline would increase Tar-Sand production by 40%
• it takes 12 barrels of freshwater to make one barrel of bitumen, the sticky, tar-like form of petroleum used to create synthetic oil in Canada’s Tar Sands
• the Tar Sands produces 36 million tons of carbon per year, which forms five per cent of Canada’s total annual carbon emissions
• 69% of crude oil from Canada to the U.S. goes through an Enbridge pipeline 
• unlike Norway, Canada has no sovereign fund, leaving it  with a very low percentage of the oil wealth it produces.

 

The U.S. corporation Enbridge  is lobbying to build 1,200 kilometres of pipeline across northern B.C. from Alberta’s Tar Sands project to Kitimat on the coast. This would end British Columbia’s current moratorium on related tanker traffic and open up a vast, pristine area, including the Great Bear Rainforest, to more than 200 oil tankers a year.

 

While sharing his stunning photos of grizzly bears, salmon-bearing streams, remote rivers, and wolf families, McAllister told us how the threat of tanker accidents and resulting oil spills would threaten the wildlife and vulnerable ecosystems in north-central B.C. Enbridge’s proposed pipeline would run through the world’s last intact salmon habitat, which includes 1,000 salmon-bearing streams and rivers in British Columbia.

 

Canada’s Pembina Institute provides a disturbing statistic: In one day, the westbound Enbridge export pipeline would transport almost twice the amount of oil that the Exxon Valdez spilled into Alaska’s Prince Willliam Sound in 1989.

 

 Canada stands at the crossroads

 

In this peak-oil era, is that the legacy we want to leave future generations? We cannot afford to let a massive oil spill devastate the land mammals and marine wildlife that depend on B.C. waterways for their habitat and food source.

 

Through its carbon emissions, Canada’s Tar Sands project not only destroys the environment at home, but harms our global earth atmosphere. It is an unsustainable form of energy production.

 

“This pipeline would introduce the largest oil tankers in the world to one of the most storm-ridden, dangerous, and difficult-to-navigate coastlines on the planet,” says McAllister. “Canada has a decision to make.  Will it build this pipeline and risk everything: our global reputation, fragile coast and international obligation to combat global warming?  Or will we cancel this pipeline/oil tanker proposal and show the world that Canada is ready to lead by example? 

 

He adds: “Canada is at a crossroads and the stakes have never been higher.”  

 

 As alternatives, Nikiforuk recommends a national carbon tax and carbon budget; hard targets for responsible, renewable energy; localized food production; and a sovereign fund that could bring substantial profits to Canada as a result of its  energy production.

 

To find out more, please visit www.pacificwild.org and www.pembina.org. You can download a copy of the Pembina Institute’s report Pipelines and Salmon in Northern British Columbia: Potential Impacts at www.bc.pembina.org.

Click here to see Nikiforuk’s short overview of the Tar Sands on YouTube.

I think it’s disgusting that until his recent decision to go, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had no plans to attend this month’s climate change conference in Copenhagen. It’s not surprising, considering he hails from Canada’s petro-province Alberta, home of the Tar Sands project, a major global polluter and carbon-producer. (The Alberta government calls the Tar Sands “the magic sandpile.”) Harper is the son of an Imperial Oil executive. His so-called environment minister, Jim Prentice, also comes from Alberta.

 

Harper appears to have changed his mind about attending the Copenhagen conference simply because U.S. President Barack Obama is going and because an Angus Reid poll showed that Canadians want him there. He certainly hasn’t made climate change or reducing carbon emissions a priority in our country. Hell, even China has vowed to cut its carbon emissions by up to 45 per cent in the next decade.