Pivot urges Vancouver City and Fire & Rescue to work with Oppenheimer Park residents to come up with a solution for a serious health and safety risks faced by camp residents.

Despite the heavy snowfall we are experiencing, Oppenheimer Park residents continue to be refused onsite-options for warming. We recently sent letters calling on both Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services and the City of Vancouver to “meet people where they are” and provide warming options for those who will inevitably remain outside in the cold this season.

As we close out this year and look back on the past few months, we commend the steadfast, principled advocacy of Oppenheimer Park Tent City residents. We stand in solidarity with the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in the Park. As long as people must rely on public space, we must respect Tent Cities as the safest option in a list of undesirable alternatives.

We must develop a flexible definition of Social Condition that includes an element of disadvantage and explicitly identifies housing status.

Park residents, neighbours, and advocates will be gathering on the 1 year anniversary of the rent city for a warm meal, music, and legal information about rights for people who rely on public space for survival, and to celebrate resilience in the face of a housing crisis, a drug poisoning crisis, and the ongoing criminalization of homeless people.

In December 2019, our counsel Dan Sheppard (of Goldblatt Partners LLP), will explain to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice how a refusal to permit effective access to prison needle exchange programs will disproportionately and unconstitutionally harm individuals along lines of sex, race, and “disability”—in particular, women, Indigenous people, and people who use drugs.

In December 2019, Pivot is intervening in the precedent setting case of R v Zora, an important case with far-reaching impacts on the people we serve.