Philip Owen

So I think they've, they've shown their emphasis on enforcement.

Um, again, I'll take my history lesson and go back to Philip Owen and the four pillars when, um, we started to, to see things really deteriorate in the early days in the Downtown Eastside.

And it was about, again, balance between prevention, uh, recovery, enforcement, and ultimately we, what we've come to view as, um, uh...

Oh, it just es- escaped me, the, the, the right language for it, but, uh, harm reduction.

Well, I think the most important thing, again, coming back to the sen- the theme of balance, we have lost our balance as a city with respect to how we've been ha- ha- handling public safety.

Going back even further than you mentioned to, uh, the time of, of, of, um, Philip Owen as mayor, when he introduced the four pillars approach, the idea was that we needed to have these four pillars in balance.

Um, and that included of, of course, prevention.

We need to be teaching our, our kids that it's a bad thing to, um, to get into being drug addicted.

And then, of course, the predators came in shortly thereafter.

And it continued to fester up through, I think, back to when Philip Owen was mayor and he brought in the four pillars approach.

And the intention was, as we were seeing this escalate, to try and achieve a modicum of balance between those four pillars.

But what we have seen in the last decade certainly was an over-reliance on harm reduction as the solution.

You know, the Vancouver Accord now is 25 years old.

Philip Owen brought it in to help revitalize the downtown east side and improve the health there.

The two important pillars, well, they weren't really pillars, but the results or the ideas behind it was destigmatization of mental health and addictions, and decriminalization.

People have compassion fatigue.