The Vancouver Police Department is projecting to be over budget by the end of the year by nearly $8 million, according to a report heading to the police board Thursday. www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar...

VPD has zero credibility in reporting violent crime statistics. By selective & sensational use of stats, they helped their friends get elected to city council. Now Task Force Barrage is out of gas & VPD wants more money. dailyhive.com/vancouver/va...

Bombshell reporting by my @ctvnewsvancouver.bsky.social colleagues here This reflects very poorly on the Vancouver Police Department, which isn't being forthcoming about questionable assault numbers continually promoted ahead of the last municipal election www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar...

they do this for everything. make people fight each other for the opportunity to BEG for it. to make you indebted, grateful

"housing freezes" are a cruel policy that sees people prioritized for housing based on electoral interests. they are part of an explicit process of dehumanization @natecrompton.bsky.social & I obtained documents that offer insight into how they are engineered: themainlander.com/2025/09/02/d...

International Overdose Awareness Day brings people together against legislated violence of drug policy & militarizing, racial capitalist global war on drugs. DULF is facing protracted legal battle & prison time for harm reduction Join me in wage solidarity fundraiser: chuffed.org/project/dulf...

NEW: Housing sat empty as people were displaced to nowhere during Hastings decampment according to internal correspondence obtained by The Mainlander themainlander.com/2025/09/02/d...

"housing freezes" are a cruel policy that sees people prioritized for housing based on electoral interests. they are part of an explicit process of dehumanization @natecrompton.bsky.social & I obtained documents that offer insight into how they are engineered: themainlander.com/2025/09/02/d...

BC housing kept 117 PHS housing units vacant in the lead-up to the 2023 decampment, and no one can even say that anyone from the Hastings encampment received housing, per The Mainlander themainlander.com/2025/09/02/d...

VPD was aware of the intense public interest – and also of the “fear and anxiety” news of stranger assaults was causing in 2022. VPD issued at least 52 releases mentioning stranger assaults, but provided no updated data about the frequency of these crimes. www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar...

@sudubc.bsky.social is 🎯. and Eby's cynical plan for coerced hospitalization (aka "involuntary treatment") is another way his government is dodging accountability for its failure to respond honestly and effectively to the unregulated drug deaths emergency

The Surrey Union of Drug Users (SUDU) says a B.C. provincial housing task force is allowing the "government to dodge accountability for systemic failures." www.surreynowleader.com/local-news/b...

We are 9 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days into BC’s declared public health emergency of toxic unregulated drugs.

Nobody has ever had fentanyl/opioid toxicity from casual, secondhand smoke exposure, let alone overdosed. I have seen every report. I am even in direct contact with the people doing the tests in the buildings in Vancouver! And they were worried about this info being misinterpreted, which it has been

it takes well over 20 paragraphs to get to @ryanmarino.bsky.social challenging the idea of second hand fentanyl toxicity after setting the stage with these opening paragraphs

Aboriginal Front Door facing provincial cuts. Please take a minute to support our call to restore funding beyond September 2025. Thank you! as a link chng.it/MQDwwZGSK6

This new legislation is terrifying—not just because of the environmental destruction these laws will accelerate, but because of the ways our sovereign rights get watered down to “economic reconciliation,” a mere assimilation into a failing economy built on our dispossession and genocide.

Police interference w/ harm reduction services is a growing crisis. Surveilling services, arresting clients & other abuses cause service avoidance, violate peoples right to healthcare & highlights urgent need for binding non-interference policies. @filtermag.bsky.social @hivlegalnetwork.bsky.social

‘Recriminalization’ is part of a deathly policy maze designed to kill people who use drugs www.policeoversight.ca/p/recriminal...

“We cannot rely on assumed goodwill,” says Sabelli. “In our work, we have seen numerous attempts by non-profit housing providers to circumvent the RTA precisely to carry out unfair and unjust evictions." clasbc.net/bc-tenant-ri... #vanpoli

We are organizing the third annual Care Not Cops abolitionist health convergence! Interested in presenting at Unsettling Empire in Care Work: Toward abolition, liberatory harm reduction & disability justice in Vancouver this November? Apply here: forms.gle/7ydxNA9W9pbP...

“It’s not the institutions that push these policies forward, it’s the people.” briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/vie...

"Our findings speak to the dangers of political decisions that restrict access to harm reduction services within the context of the current unregulated drug poisoning crisis."

Advocates and unhoused people say bylaw officers told residents, with little to no warning, that they had to pack up their entire campsite and move to a different part of the tent city. @michellegamage.bsky.social reports. #bcpoli

“We’ve lost a lot of lives:” the impact of the closure of North America’s busiest supervised consumption site on people who use substances and the organizations that work with them via @ulethbridge.ca researchers: rdcu.be/epM3G #drugsky

My fam has lost 3 young men to substance use in the last 2 1/2 yrs. My son (Dec 2022), My cousin (June 2023) my other cousin (yesterday). They were twins, & both close to my son. We don't talk enough about the devastation that is left in the wake of untimely & tragic deaths. It has a domino effect

per usual—as the political class creates spectacle from the toxic drug crisis, @crackdownpod.bsky.social shows us the intimate realities. important new episode: www.crackdownpod.com/episodes/epi... ft. @momsstoptheharm.bsky.social @4bharmredux.bsky.social

The Strong Borders Act would allow "Canada Post to open mail based on vague criteria [and] law enforcement to get IP addresses w/o a warrant ... police will be able to ask digital service providers to hand over data voluntarily and protect them from being sued ..." www.thestar.com/opinion/star...

By me: Black communities in 2020 did not march for months,risking arrest & tear gas, to receive apologies & platitudes, nor did they plead for more Black officers, bodycams, yet another “community policing” program, or long discredited programs of mass criminalization www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

do tenants in supportive housing know that a coalition of Supportive Housing Operators are asking the government to “remove supportive housing from the Residential Tenancy Act”

Jeremy Omand of the Gastown Residents Association appears to grab, force person to the ground in video www.policeoversight.ca/p/jeremy-oma...

this is a bad article—for one, CEOs of private services, cops, church reps, and condo owners are inappropriately the only sources—and when it veers into interpretation it leaves out important histories of exclusion & conflates a single opioid with wide-ranging social issues bsky.app/profile/theg...

the Mental Health Act was already being weaponized outside of its terms 'on paper' before this expansion, just as many forms of carceral discretion are in BC and beyond. Eby was the head of the BCCLA and of course knows this. He just doesn't care. bsky.app/profile/mehl...

I missed this: BC is holding involuntarily hospitalized people - by definition among the most vulnerable - in solitary confinenent. This runs counter to Mandela Rules and, going by prior court rulings, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. www.mapleridgenews.com/home2/bcs-fi...

This article explores how drug policies in Canada are rooted in colonialism and racism, especially impacting Indigenous and racialized communities. briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/vie...

forced treatment, prescribing experiments/coerced de-prescribing, expansion of law enforcement scope and resources—the violence of these interventions are not 'unintended,' they are purposefully cruel and enabled by those who benefit economically, politically & socially bsky.app/profile/nurs...

People need belongings to survive: shelter, medical goods, clothing, food. We’re suing the City of Vancouver because their cruel bylaws violate the right to life, liberty, and personal security. These new restrictions are dehumanizing and discriminatory. vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/05/16/v...

The BC Prosecution Service says a Vancouver police officer has been charged under the Motor Vehicle Act for driving without reasonable consideration for others, a year after a pedestrian was hit in the city's Downtown Eastside.

stop debating "does torture work?" bsky.app/profile/idpc...

Vancouver Coastal Health has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the municipal Code of Silence Award for its routine breaking of access to information laws during the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s jury also agreed to bestow a dishonourable mention to the Region of Waterloo. caj.ca/news

The British Columbia government has hired a former Ontario cabinet minister and CEO of Legal Aid B.C. on a lucrative contract to advise the premier on the future of the Downtown Eastside. globalnews.ca/news/1117587...

Great reporting

this article by @mssinenomine.bsky.social importantly reflects what occurs when individuals/groups—in this case, non-disabled people—who are not most impacted become 'negotiators,' and narrow scope of problem. same pattern emerged when drug user mvmt got decrim on agenda... doi.org/10.1080/1526...

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim is sidestepping questions on how the budget for a five-million-dollar task force aimed at cracking down on the Downtown Eastside was approved. www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar...

"Addison said that since mid-February, the policing strategy in the Downtown Eastside, dubbed Task Force Barrage...could explain the increase [of police] around supervised consumption sites" #drugsky www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

If the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act has "public health and public safety objectives," as its bureaucrats claim, they are already lost. Instead of the new government doubling down yet again on police power, it's time to abolish the Act. From @tsk.bsky.social: 4/ drugdatadecoded.ca/untitled/

"as intersecting and seemingly unending crises continue to become more urgent, the acuity and nature of this violence has changed in shape. Both the frequency of gendered violence and lack of remaining space for respite is alarming" the mainlander.com/2025/04/29/gbv/