Photo Courtesy of Kelsey Savage & John Woods, Real Talk

On paper, Alison Klein is a serious academic with a master’s in interdisciplinary studies focused on adult education and disability. Meet her at one of the Real Talk’s free public events (affectionately known as “pizza parties”), and she’ll be the first to greet you as a peer facilitator and make a joke—sometimes with anatomically correct models at the ready.

“I go, ‘Look, a present’, and then just walk away,” says Klein with a smile. “I have kind of a funny side.”

Founded and managed by sexual health educator John Woods, Real Talk is an initiative based in Metro Vancouver that supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Woods has worked in community living spaces, schools, and sexual health organizations since the early ’90s, both in Canada and in London, UK. He saw the urgent need for sex education tailored to the IDD community, and a slew of intersectional barriers rooted in eugenics. Now, in between pizza parties and Q&As, Real Talk works with the community living sector to support providers and those with cognitive disabilities.

“Step five is getting the public to acknowledge and affirm that folks with intellectual disabilities could be LGBTQ,” explains Kelsey Savage, Real Talk’s project developer. “Step zero is the general population believing that folks with intellectual disabilities have a sexuality at all.”

Since its founding in 2017, Real Talk has grown to include both certified sexual health educators and peer facilitators with lived experience, ensuring its initiatives are driven by community needs. While the disability rights rallying cry “nothing about us without us” has existed for decades, Real Talk remains one of the few accessible sex-positive resources that centre self-advocacy. It provides an extensive library of YouTube videos addressing common questions around sexuality and disability. Savage also oversees Connecting Queer Communities (CQC), a social group for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks with cognitive disabilities to connect across the Lower Mainland both in person and online. People often attend both Real Talk and CQC events, and several have joined Klein as peer facilitators themselves. As facilitators, honouring education and community could mean helping someone explain orgasms to their partner one day, and being with someone’s deepest traumas the next.

“It’s happened a number of times at our events, where people have discovered they’ve been taking birth control and it’s been called a vitamin, or they’ve had an IUD and they didn’t consent to it,” says Savage. “There’s already a lot in the room before you step into it.”

As Real Talk works across communities to expand its outreach, what’s needed to ensure the future of good sexual health education is clear: government-sponsored education and publicly funded accommodations and support so people with cognitive disabilities have an equitable pathway to become sexual health educators. “I want to ideally work myself out of a job,” teases Savage.

“Earlier, I was mostly around staff and disconnected from my community,” Klein says. “I hope Real Talk is a starting point, and that sex education can be taught in schools to kids from all different backgrounds, so they all have a frame of reference [for] each other.”

Holly Schmidt, Fireweed Fields, 2021-ongoing. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography

Fireweed is a tall, pink wildflower that blooms in areas burned by fire. For artist Holly Schmidt, it represents sustenance and resilience. In her residency, Vegetal Encounters, as part of the University of British Columbia’s Outdoor Program, Schmidt planted a fireweed field at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Fireweed produces an abundance of seed and sends out underground roots from its nodes, allowing new shoots to grow. Schmidt’s approach to art is similarly organic.

“I feel like the way that I work as an artist or my practice is very rhizomatic in that way, it’s sort of working in this one place, building relationships, and it sort of sends out shoots and new things kind of grow from that,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt said the idea to plant fireweed stemmed from the COVID-19 pandemic because of the way the plant interacts during a crisis. Her residency began in fall 2018 with preliminary research, followed by the grant process in 2020. The project began in 2021.

“At any university, there’s always a lot of work to be done in terms of seeking permissions to do things, especially things that might alter landscapes,” says Schmidt, who describes herself as a socially engaged artist. In the last decade, her work has mainly focused on the complexity of human relations with the natural world.

For Schmidt, Fireweed Fields acts as a way to bring people together. She held a two-day summer intensive in 2021 that included six UBC faculty and six artists. The intensive took place outside for participants to connect with plant life. She also got to host workshops and talks with students from different disciplines.

On the lawn of the Belkin, Schmidt planted the fireweed seed on April 12, 2021. She said that unlike working in a studio, working with the natural world is something the artist has little control over.

She worked with the UBC Horticulture Training Program and took a gentle approach to the project. Instead of lifting the turf and laying down seed, they worked to sow the seed into the lawn. But the lawn outcompeted the seed and the fireweed didn’t germinate. Still, the lawn grew to reveal the biodiversity that already existed.

One of Schmidt’s project partners, Vancouver’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum, is taking samples on an ongoing basis to track the biodiversity changes and growth within the field.

“It was an incredible transformation just by allowing the lawn to grow,” said Schmidt, who is going to look at planting fireweed again.

Schmidt also co-created a reclaimed cedar boardwalk with Charlotte Falk, a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary designer and educator at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. The boardwalk leads people into the field and tries to surface the rhizomatic structure of the fireweed by creating nodules for gathering. The boardwalk also serves as a place for gathering while watching UBC’s digital screen that includes documentation of the field through different seasons.

Another project element, Forecast, is on the windows of the gallery. Its short, poetic texts describe the effect of weather on human, plant, and animal bodies on campus. The texts change seasonally and Schmidt is currently writing winter into spring.

“It’s almost like these very hyper-local weather forecasts,” she said.

Fireweed Fields is ongoing and Schmidt plans to curate other projects around the field. The field will continue to operate as a growing and changing space, but it also serves as a potential legacy of climate-engaged work.

Schmidt said some things in the space are tangible while others are not. One of the curators she works with, from the Outdoor Art program, describes the project as “learning in public.”

“There’s never working in the studio and then presenting something,” said Schmidt. “It’s always kind of all happening in the moment and with others.”

This was the opening scene of a landmark, limited-run revival of the musical Spring Awakening, where d/Deaf* actors were given the spotlight and their hearing counterparts acted as their vocal shadows. This integration of hearing and d/Deaf performers is what Artistic Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Landon Krentz and his team hope to achieve with Theatre Interpreting Services (TIS), a Vancouver-based company that helps theatre organizations gain exposure to d/Deaf culture and make theatre more accessible for the city’s d/Deaf population.

However, TIS is not your average interpretation service—it’s the only d/Deaf-owned business of its kind in Canada. “It’s important to have a d/ Deaf person to represent the d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community because of our understanding of our cultural values and ASL aesthetics,” said Krentz—one of six interpreters in TIS—in an email interview with This.

TIS interpreters—some of whom are also hearing—are specialized for theatre, which means their work involves much more artistry than simple translation. Rather than having a hearing interpreter stand off to the side of the stage and interpret on the fly, TIS interpreters must develop and rehearse an ASL version of the script. On top of that, Krentz says they like to encourage inclusive practices that allow for more artistic interpretations for d/Deaf audiences such as shadow interpreting, a method in which they follow actors around while performing ASL simultaneously.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to making theatre more accessible: most production companies usually don’t allocate budget for these deep-integration methods and often scramble to find interpreters for productions a month prior to performances, says Krentz.

“[Typically,] interpreters are expected to show up and disappear,” Krentz says. “This is not an authentic approach to adding artistic sign language stories on stage and often, d/Deaf people will notice a disconnect in synergy.”

To remedy this, the government offers funds through accessibility grants that can be used to bring interpreters in earlier in the production process, but Krentz said many theatre companies don’t know those funds are available.

“We have a social responsibility to people from our community to do this work and try to create these kind of important conversations within the Canadian theatre community,” said Krentz. “It is slowly on the rise.”

* This Magazine has stylized d/Deaf to be inclusive of all deafness on a spectrum

On January 20, 2017, women across the globe marched in resistance following President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The marches were symbols of protest, as a man with multiple sexual misconduct allegations against him had joined public office. As 2017 progressed, women began stepping forward, speaking up against misconduct, harassment, and rape, sparking an international movement, dubbed #MeToo. One year later, Canadian women reconvened to march on—to show their strength, to stand together. In Vancouver, even the tiniest of protesters raised their voices: Aria Brain, marching with her mother, sported a cape, the words “girl power” scrawled

Sandeep Johal. Photo by Britney Berrner.

When Vancouver-based artist Sandeep Johal read Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel, The Selector of Souls, she was deeply moved. The story of two Indian women tackles difficult gender-based issues Johal often finds herself considering: female foeticide, infanticide, femicide, domestic abuse, dowry, and rape. Soon after reading it, Johal was bringing a fictional goddess from the novel to life. She drew the goddess in her signature style: a black-and-white line drawing with patterns of geometrical shapes, and collaged bursts of colour. The result was a strong mandala-like human figure, empowered by many arms, and embracing onlookers with a steady gaze.

As Johal set out to add to the series, she learned about the murder of Natsumi Kogawa, a Japanese international student studying in Vancouver. She was heartbroken, crying as she drew another goddess form dedicated to Kogawa. Johal couldn’t stop: “It was like I was a woman possessed,” she says. She drew for three days straight, creating nine more portraits of women who had died from gender-based violence. Each portrait is captioned by words spoken by the women’s loved ones in the wake of their deaths. Johal completed the project with three vibrant paintings inspired by scenes from The Selector of Souls. She named the series Rest in Power, restoring strength to the memories of the women who had died brutally and unjustly.

NO ONE LISTENS 24″ x 30″, Acrylic on Wood Panel “She isn’t worth naming. Release this atman, girl-body. Let it return to the place that continues long before and long after this world. Let it take shape when this world is a better place for girls. No one listens to women’s wishes.” —The Selector of Souls, Shauna Singh Baldwin

More than half of the women Johal commemorates in Rest in Power are South Asian. Among them is Jaswinder Sidhu, a 24-year-old Indo-Canadian woman who was murdered in 2000 in an honour killing after she married a rickshaw driver. Like Johal, she was born in British Columbia, and if she was still alive today, they would be the same age. The artist also dedicated portraits to Amandeep Atwal, Jyoti Singh, and cousins Pushpa and Murti, women whose lives were cut short by murder and sexual assault in Canada and India.

Johal’s work draws on the aesthetic of Indian textiles and patterning to bring viewers into difficult topics that many people tend to avoid. “I’ve always been interested in pushing boundaries and talking about uncomfortable things because my parents didn’t want me to. It made them uncomfortable whenever I questioned things in their culture,” she says. In September, when Rest in Power went on display at Vancouver’s Gam Gallery, Johal’s mother told her daughter she was proud of her.

For Johal, the project is a cathartic process. The work helps her feel hope in the face of the rampant gender-based violence in South Asian culture and beyond. “Every time I see another headline about a woman being assaulted, or raped, or murdered, I get so angry,” she says. “And then I get really sad. I’m trying to process this grief I feel around what happens to women.” The artist has reached out to the loved ones of the women she has dedicated work to, hoping to give them prints to show they are being remembered.

Rest in Power is an ongoing project, and as drawings are being purchased, Johal is replacing them with portraits of other women. But it isn’t her only project on the go. In August, she painted a vibrant mural called Girls are Fierce like Tigers on the side of an Indian restaurant in her neighbourhood. The mural depicts Durga, the mother goddess of the universe who fights for liberation and peace. Johal is also working on a new portraiture series called Hard Kaur, celebrating the lives of remarkable women from India’s past and present. She’s already done drawing studies of 16 figures, including poet and freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu, South India’s first female taxi driver Selvi, and sex trafficking abolitionist Ruchira Gupta.

Johal hopes her art continues to empower women and inspire conversation. She will keep paying tribute to the women who embody resistance to gender-based violence, both in this life and the afterlife. “I want them to know that they’re loved and they’re not forgotten. And we’ll keep telling their stories to keep them alive.”

More information on the Outcasts Project can be found at outcastsproject.com.

Cheryl prepares to use drugs in her apartment in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

We need for you people to see that we’re not stereotyped monsters. We’re people just like you, just with an addiction. Something that we do a little bit more than others… When you look at this, take it with a grain of salt, because it could be your own daughter, it could be your own son out there doing exactly what I’m doing, but they had the door closed.

A drug addict’s world is not just the drugs, it’s how they get them, what you gotta’ do to get them. Sex trade, you know. Stealing, killing, whatever it might take just to get that extra dollar to get that extra fix so you can feel numb for the rest of the day. Not necessarily it’s always that, but in my life, I just want you to know that I’m struggling and I need that extra help.

Cheryl cries in the yard of a church where her father’s funeral was held.

I hope the people see through this [essay] all the points, all the emotions and desires, needs, and wants that we need, that you can help us down the road be able to successfully show our governments that people need the extra bit of help because we can’t do it on our own.

Cheryl self-injects her medication at Providence Health Care’s Crosstown Clinic in Vancouver.

I want to show the people that this place is where we get our injections for our heroin opiate program, just show them that we need these places so heroin addicts can get off the streets. Heroin can be contaminated with many different poisons out there that can severely give us infections, because they put hog dewormer in the heroin on the streets. The clinical heroin here, there’s no bad chemicals or poisons in the drug. It helps us through the day, takes our aches and pains away, everything that heroin used to do.

In other places of the world, they had this study and it’s helped them, that’s why they brought it to Canada, here to [British Columbia]. And for us, the people who are in it, we’re so lucky and should be so grateful to have such a great program.

Cheryl paints her nails prior to a court appearance for a sexual assault she experienced.

I’m sure there’s hundreds of photos that could show my life different. But my life today is a recovering heroin addict. I’m 124 pounds. I used to weigh 97 pounds. There’s so many good things, and positive ways of looking at my life. If a picture could show all that emotion in one? That would be great, but it won’t and that’s all that my voice could tell you.

Cheryl self-injects drugs in her apartment in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

I think that people see a girl looking in the mirror, looking in fear, like what is she doing with the needle in her neck, sticking in her neck, that’s a pretty dangerous site to be injecting. But that’s the reality of that picture. It’s me being all strung out on dope, trying to get that shot into me, and it’s filled with blood and I’m trying to plug it into my vein cause I need that drug that’s in there so I can get off and get high, numb whatever pain I’m going through in that moment.

I was all fucked up on drugs that day, yeah. It shows my emotion, my fear, my determination. [I wish the photo had] maybe a little bit more light… Just to show it’s hard to inject into your neck like that. Just to show the picture more. To see what kind of struggle it is to inject in your neck. And to show maybe just a little bit more emotion to the people just to show what and why I’m doing that to myself.

Cheryl returns to an alley in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside where she lived for several years.

People viewing this photo might see some young girl, downtown, in a back alley. Looks like it’s a rough alley. A young girl, maybe she’s strung out, or maybe she’s determined to find drugs or who knows what they see in this photo. They just see a young girl smiling and looking down the alley.

Yeah, it shows all of me. I just hope the people see me in this photo—that I’m a striving, struggling drug addict. That I’m trying to better my life.

A woman, Cheryl, self-injects at Vancouver’s Crosstown Clinic. From Aaron Goodman’s The Outcasts Project.

Except for a long line at the barbecue, where hungry older folk wait for a free meal, most people have left Oppenheimer Park for the day. But not Jim McLeod, who’s clutching a hot dog wrinkled with the cold, so engrossed in telling me his story that he’s forgotten about his dinner. It’s late February and we’re standing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the epicentre of Canada’s overdose crisis, talking about harm reduction—two words very much in vogue.

“You don’t bounce back from torture,” McLeod says almost casually, wind whipping tendrils of his long hair into a frenzy. He tells me that past trauma has much to do with his morphine use today. “I’m wired to it,” he says. “I use it daily because I’ve had physical pain most of my life.”

At 14, McLeod’s foster father threw him into a doorknob. The impact permanently damaged his spine. Years later, his best friend suffered a psychotic episode and nearly beat McLeod to death, confining him to a room for hours at gunpoint. “I was worked head to toe with the claw of the hammer, tearing strips out of me,” he says. McLeod rolls up his sleeves, revealing a scar that runs from elbow to wrist, the stitch marks still visible—like slashes of red ink from a pen. He gestures to his knees, pointing to places the hammer punctured his body, creating wounds that never quite healed. “I’ve suffered the kind of violence most people don’t see, unless it’s on TV.”

McLeod gets his morphine from the streets, relying on dealers rather than doctors to manage his pain. But he considers himself lucky. The morphine he takes comes in an uncrushable pill, making it hard to adulterate. He can always tell if someone’s been sneaking in additives.

It’s impossible to know what’s in other drugs. Fentanyl, a painkiller so powerful that only a few sand-like grains are needed for a lethal dose, has breached the illicit opiate supply. It’s found in everything from heroin to fake Oxycontin pills. Stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine aren’t safe either: One Vancouver journalist reported being offered “knock-down jib,” or laced meth, by a street dealer, while fentanyl-laced cocaine hit partiers in Ontario and B.C. last year. A 2016 Vancouver-based study found fentanyl in 86 percent of drugs tested.

In B.C, lives lost to drug overdose nearly doubled over the last two years. In 2016, almost 1,000 people died. In the same period, Alberta saw 343 fentanyl-related fatalities, a three-fold rise in only two years. That’s comparable to diabetes, which consistently stars in the province’s top-10 lethal causes list. Eastern provinces aren’t exempt, either: According to reports, drug-related deaths in Ontario have more than quadrupled since 2000.

But McLeod doesn’t hold manufacturers, dealers, or poor policing accountable for the spike in overdoses. The problem, he says, is a system that doesn’t recognize the social determinants of addiction, the many faces of pain. “If they would actually legalize and regulate drugs, it wouldn’t just end the crisis,” says McLeod. “It would almost end overdoses, period.”

Treat addiction like any other disease: That’s the seemingly radical idea activists like McLeod demand in the face of these fatalities. Calls to set up special clinics, prescribe heroin, and reform prohibition brought McLeod and 300 others to Oppenheimer Park, part of a nation-wide protest organizers called the biggest mobilization for harm reduction Canada has ever seen. The rally doubles as a memorial service; most in attendance clutch wooden feathers scrawled with the names of the dead. It’s not the first time drug users have insisted on their right to equal care. But they’re hoping, in the face of a national crisis, it’ll be the last.

***

Main and Hastings might be Canada’s most notorious intersection. Hotels with crumbling facades hint at a once-thriving entertainment district; many have been converted into welfare housing with patchy hot water and pest problems. Theatres have closed. Walking past these buildings, it’s not uncommon to step around tents fashioned from umbrellas, dodge garbage thrown from windows, or hop over trash cans torn apart by salvagers. The sidewalks buzz with casual drug deals, and residents smoke and inject openly.

The City of Vancouver, to its credit, largely defies traditional approaches to drug use—namely policing, shaming, and abstinence-only services. When I first arrived here last fall, I wondered why nobody was doing anything about the mayhem. I’d see needles in the gutters, people smoking meth under tarpaulin erected on the sidewalks, dealers hawking Valium and codeine at the bus stop. But like anyone else reading the literature, I learned that exhorting drug users to get clean at all costs wouldn’t help those living with severe pain, trauma, or mental illness. All the evidence I could find pointed to embracing the kind of harm reduction that’s blossomed here in the last two decades, such as needle exchanges, low-barrier housing, and cops that turn a blind eye to small-time drug trade.

Perhaps the most convincing data for harm reduction can be found in Portugal, which decriminalized everything from cannabis to cocaine in 2001, effectively ending the drug war. The country saw a drop in drug use, HIV transmissions, and overdose deaths a decade later. While drug use is still punishable by prison time here, Vancouver too has moved away from the “hard on drugs” mentality. On Hastings, unlike elsewhere in Canada, health often comes before penalty.

One activist I spoke to called the Downtown Eastside “a visual living affront to the way mainstream Canadians would like to see themselves,” a place where marginalized populations have come together and formed a thriving community—one with political clout, no less. Among the worn-out buildings and tent cities, it was here in the 1990s where drug users took harm reduction into their own hands, opening illegal injection sites and forming needle distribution teams who would comb alleys to make sure everybody had a clean rig.

Their nose-thumbing resulted in official harm reduction services like Insite, North America’s first “supervised injection site” where clients can legally use their own street drugs. It offers supplies and social workers alongside injection booths, private desks where users shoot up in a clean environment. Nurses have reversed hundreds of overdoses since the service opened in 2003, while HIV infections and crime are down in the area around Insite. Despite the influx of fentanyl, not a single person has died there. “People talk about enabling, but you’re just enabling someone to live longer,” McLeod says. “That gives them a chance to make changes. Dead men don’t detox.”

The federal government seems to be listening to the evidence, but it’s still illegal to open injection sites without a special Health Canada-approved permit. In December 2016, Health Minister Jane Philpott introduced Bill C-37, which would streamline approval so more places like Insite can work their magic across the country. But Toronto, Ottawa, and Victoria are still on the waitlist, and for other communities, the research and surveys required by C-37 to open a site may stand in the way of even applying. “It’s labour intensive, expensive,” says Marilou Gagnon, a nursing professor and founder of a coalition of nurses fighting for harm reduction policy in Ottawa. “Meanwhile, it should just be standard practice.”

I asked Andrew MacKendrick, Minister Philpott’s press secretary, why Health Canada seemed to be sitting on its hands in the midst of these preventable deaths. “We are in a national public health crisis in Canada. Minister Philpott is committed to using every lever at her disposal to combat this crisis, and to working with all levels of government and partners across the country to do so,” MacKendrick said over the phone. “The minister has stood up and said the evidence is very clear: When properly managed and operated the sites save lives.” And while invoking the Emergencies Act, as activists have demanded, would allow Philpott to override these political barriers, MacKendrick says there’s a number of “quite high-profile criteria” to be met before she would consider doing so.*

Having a safe place to use drugs is only part of the solution. Supplying medical-grade heroin means opiate users know exactly what they’re getting and helps severely dependent users lead more fulfilling lives, giving them the time and peace of mind to pursue activities other than drug-seeking. In Vancouver, about 100 patients receive heroin daily from Providence Health Care’s Crosstown Clinic, which opened in 2011. “[It’s] a sanctuary for those people,” says activist and Crosstown patient Dave Murray. “You ask any one of them and they’ll tell you they might not be alive today if it hadn’t been for the clinic.”

Four years after opening, a study out of Crosstown found heroin therapy lowered use of street drugs and crime, allowing patients to get their lives on track without quitting opiates. Canada legalized prescription heroin last year, but advocates say accessibility has yet to catch up to the law. Gagnon, who steadfastly believes in the harm reduction philosophy, warns that some doctors aren’t trained in the science—or ethics—underlying these measures, and may not feel comfortable prescribing heroin to patients. “We can’t expect health care providers to embrace harm reduction across the board,” she says.

Aside from Crosstown, harm-reduction services stop short of supplying the drugs themselves. But activists say that’s exactly what should happen to end the overdose crisis: regulated drugs, accessible to anyone who decides to use them, including those who only indulge recreationally. They’ve floated the idea to Justin Trudeau during his recent pilgrimages to B.C., but unlike cannabis, full regulation of narcotics has proved too radical for him to support. In 2015, Trudeau told a reporter he doesn’t believe harm reduction entails the decriminalization of “harder” drugs such as heroin. “Despite some of the examples around the world, I don’t think it’s the right solution for Canada now or ever,” he said. A year later, Trudeau told the Vancouver Sun that “more work has to be done” to determine whether regulating illicit drugs is the best course of action.

That position strikes Gagnon as a blow to harm reduction work. Other experts agree. “We should have the primary goal to reduce drug-related harm, and we should be open about the best ways to reach this,” says Dr. Jürgen Rehm, director of addiction policy at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Health. Insisting on abstinence as the only form of treatment—think ideology-based 12-step programs like Narcotics Anonymous—means that patients like McLeod, who use street drugs to medicate for pain and past trauma, will inevitably fail.

***

Back on Hastings, I meet up with Karen Ward, a woman in a black hoodie frowning into her cigarette. We’re outside the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, a dilapidated storefront converted to a user-run resource centre back in 1998. They hold meetings every week, and have recently been letting users inject in a back room—their own unsanctioned injection site, an emergency measure to prevent more deaths. When we go inside, the front desk is plastered with funeral notices.

Activists like Ward hate the way governments have handled the crisis. She tells me, firmly, that fentanyl isn’t even the problem. “It’s always going to be something. If it’s not one substance panic it’s another,” she says. Vancouver suffered another overdose crisis in the late ’90s, when an influx of potent heroin from Southeast Asia flooded the Vancouver market, leaving 200 dead in a six-month period. The problem repeats itself, Ward explains, and bad policy is to blame. “We expect our roads not to collapse. We expect the food we eat to be safe. We expect the buildings we live in to not fall down,” she says pointedly. “We need to acknowledge that people are using substances for pain, whatever pain that is, and give them the substances in the safest way possible.” Her voice trembles. “But instead we turn around and punish them for it. We leave them to die in the street.”

To date, Canada’s response to overdoses has largely focussed on the emergency medication naloxone, which brings someone back from the brink of death. When a powerful opiate like fentanyl enters the system, it attaches to opiate receptors, which can interfere with respiration. Naloxone works by shoving the opiate molecule off its receptor, allowing the patient to breathe again. But it’s not foolproof, and not everyone knows how to administer the medication. When Jerry “Mecca J” Verge, from Surrey, B.C., was found unconscious in a washroom at his workplace with a needle still in his arm, his colleagues didn’t know how to help, and he couldn’t be revived. Even when naloxone is given in time it can take a while to work, which may lead to oxygen deprivation and irreversible brain damage. “I compare it to somebody on the street bleeding to death and having Band-Aids thrown at them,” Ward says. “We can’t naloxone our way out of this.”

There’s been “a lot of talking and not much doing” on the government’s part, according to Gagnon. “The actions that have really made a difference in this crisis have been done by volunteers on the ground.” She means organizations like the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, who defy the law to prevent overdoses, refusing to wait months for bills to crawl through Parliament or for public opinion to shift. “There are ways of responding to the crisis where you can overlook bureaucracy and actually save lives,” says Gagnon. Ward agrees. “We just need someone to have the political bravery to say, ‘Go and do it, it’s the right thing to do.’ Saving lives is always the right thing to do.”

For people like Jim McLeod, who may always use opiates, granting these demands could one day save his life, too. When we part ways in Oppenheimer, I pass under a row of leafless trees, wooden feathers from the rally now tied to their boughs. Almost a thousand of these makeshift monuments dance in the wind, names flashing in the sun. Each one a reminder of a human life lost not to drugs, but to radical policy: prohibition, the biggest killer of all.

* UPDATE (MAY 30, 2017): Since this story was published in our May/June 2017 issue, Bill C-37 has passed, and four supervised injection sites have been approved. This paragraph has been updated to reflect these changes, including an updated quote from Minister Philpott’s press secretary Andrew MacKendrick.

“This event is organized and led by women in the DTES [Downtown Eastside] because women—especially indigenous women—face physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual violence on a daily basis,” the Feb 14 Women’s Memorial March Committee writes on the march website.

The site describes the January 1991 murder on Powell St.  as a catalyst that moved women into action. The victim’s name is not shared out of respect for the wishes of her family, who will attend the Vancouver event at the Carnegie Community Centre Theatre on 401 Main St.

According to “The Tragedy of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women of Canada” a 2011 report by the Vancouver Police Department and the Women’s Memorial March Committee, though Aboriginal women make up only four percent of the Canadian female population, they also make up the majority of missing or murdered women.

“Out of this sense of hopelessness and anger came an annual march on Valentine’s Day to express compassion, community, and caring for all women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Coast Salish Territories,” reads the February 14 event description. “Twenty years later, the women’s memorial march continues to honour the lives of missing and murdered women.”

March events will take place in not only Vancouver but Victoria, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Thunder Bay, Edmonton, Calgary, London and Owen Sound.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna writes Gender Block every week and maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Inequality, thy name is doorknob!

Recently, here at the offices of This Magazine, where the magic of journalism comes alive, and even the chairs have a political opinion, we’ve installed a doorknob. We retired our door lever, and got a doorknob. Folks, let me tell you, I do not like it.

The first morning after the installation, I arrived as I normally do—groggy, slightly out of breath (I’ve been taking the stairs lately) my cotton gloves still on and a coffee in one hand. I go to clutch what I thought would be—what my muscle memory had trained me to expect as—a lever, but I got a sad, slippery fistful of doorknob. The cotton glove slides, my body shifts, my coffee sloshes and spills a bit on my right pant leg. Mood: sour.

This is the thinking behind the City of Vancouver’s recent decision to ban doorknobs. No, not so fumbling grumps such as myself have to dry-clean their pants less often, but so mobility, accessibility is equal for all. The Center for Independence of Individuals with Disabilities (CID) lists on its website that of all the different types of door handles, the knob is perhaps the most inaccessible, since it “requires tight grasping and twisting to operate”. The Vancouver city officials, in banning the doorknob for new housing and building construction, are trying for “universal design”, an egalitarian principle of creating space that is equally accessible and enjoyable for all people, including the elderly, and those with disabilities.

But where, some are asking, does this leave the knob, that most iconic of door handles? When we venture to doodle a house now, must we master the curvature of a lever? Allen Joslyn, president of the Antique Door Knob Collectors of America, says “to say that when I build my private home and nobody is disabled that I have to put levers on, strikes me as overreach.”

I for one think that the reach is just far enough. The only reason one might have for choosing an object with poorer usability is for cosmetic effect. And when an aesthetic feature literally stands in the way of certain individuals’ right to accessibility and mobility, we don’t, as a society, need it.

Plus, I just hate opening doorknobs with winter gloves.