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Aaron Vidaver, ed., Woodsquat. Issue 41 of West Coast Line. Burnaby: West
Coast Review Publishing Society, 2004.
Reviewed by Sandy Cameron and Jean Swanson
The Rain 2:3 (May/June
2004): 1
Woodsquat is a collection of
about 80 eye-witness accounts, poems, photos, posters, official
reports, and analyses about the occupation of Woodwards from September
14 to December 14, 2002. The book starts with Theresa D. Gray who
situates the squat in the context of 500 years of aboriginal resistance
and notes that all non-natives are squatters in Canada. Maxine Gadd
follows with a creative, blistering attack on the Gordon Campbell
government.
First of all, the book is an inspiring story told by
the homeless, low-income people who took part in the Woodwards squat.
Aaron Vidaver, the editor, was a squat supporter who helped produce an
almost daily newsletter of squat events and thinking, and accumulated
hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with the people involved. As
Vidaver says, the squat “was a self-managed poor people’s site of
reclamation that deserves to be studied and tried again wherever there
is an unused building and people who need to make dignified housing for
themselves.”
For us the best part of the book was reading about
the sense of power and community that the people involved created for
themselves. “It was an awesome feeling for me to be needed and that
sense of being in a family was there,” writes Skyy, who helped out in
the kitchen. “We were a lot more secure and safe. We held general
meetings and committees, democratically... And we the people are
standing up” wrote Craig Ballantyne. Tony Snakeskin said, “We made the
people see that whether we’re homeless or whether we’re alcoholics, or
whether we’re drug users, we’re still human. We still deserve a chance
at life as well.” A Native Man acknowledged the great support the
squatters received. He then commented on those with power, “They think
we’re disposable but we’re not ... Give us the right tools and we can
do stuff ... There’s a lot of very talented people down here.” Lyn
Tooley began to dream of the room she would build for herself in
Woodwards. “I imagined six floors laid out like villages” with learning
centres, workshops and “places we could all heal and learn how to care
for ourselves and each other.” Lyn went on to say, “We don’t need
charity, we need community.”
The interviews with the squat participants are
well-edited and forceful, pulling the reader along with the excitement
of the squatters in building their own community, the anger at police
brutality and at government policies that are oblivious to the needs of
people who are poor. Vidaver’s use of official reports juxtaposed to
the voices of the squatters shows a huge contrast between the humanity
of the squatters and officialdom. After 16 descriptions of the violent
way the police conducted the second eviction, and a four-page list of
the squatters’ possessions that were thrown in the garbage, Vidaver
puts in the report from the Sanitation Branch Manager who was
responsible for the garbage trucks that took these possessions to the
dump. The Sanitation supervisor, he reported, said that “nothing
appeared of value which was removed by his crews and discarded...”
In another report, police inspector Dave Jones
revealed that, “The cost for police to remove the squatters from inside
the Woodwards building exceeded the entire cold weather shelter budget
for the winter.”
The mood of the reader follows the mood of the
squatters as the book continues: excitement and hope as the action
grows; frustration, anger and sadness as it becomes clear that
squatters aren’t going to get decent housing. The squat ended on
December 14, 2002, when some people moved to single rooms at the
Dominion and Stanley Hotels.
If the book had a few more pages it could have
included more on the history of why we have such a huge housing crisis
in a wealthy country like Canada. This could have included information
about how the federal government under Paul Martin as Finance Minister,
ended funding for new social housing in the early ‘90s, and destroyed
the Canada Assistance Plan and with it the legal right to an adequate
income. Since then provinces have been free to deny welfare to people
in desperate need and reduce rates. This was a big reason for the
squat. Some people had no money to pay rent because they couldn’t get
on welfare. And even when they could, rates have declined a huge amount
since 1980. At that time the support portion of welfare (everything but
rent) for a single person was $191 a month. Today it’s down to $185 and
the cost of living has more than doubled.
Even though the squatters didn’t get the dignified
social housing they fought for, the squat and subsequent tent cities
did have a big impact in the city and maybe even the province. As
Shannon Burdock writes in her article, “... efforts made by an unlikely
coalition of working poor, drug users, urban aboriginals, disabled
people, homeless people and many others was successful in mobilizing a
sympathetic public around the crisis of the Downtown Eastside... The
housing crisis as an election issue gained prominence as a result of
the work done by the squatters and their supporters.”
Though they had nothing, the squatters became a
major force leading the fight against Gordon Campbell’s social program
cuts. They helped push the City or Vancouver to buy Woodwards. They
reached out for solidarity and received it from the larger Vancouver
community. They survived police violence. They found freedom in their
own caring community which they created out of empty space, abandoned
materials and their own imaginations. They inspired others to fight a
little harder for social justice. They had an effect on the result of
the city election in November, 2002. The squat may even have been part
of getting the province to back partially off its plan to impose
welfare time limits. The squatters sent a message that they will not be
pushed aside like trash, that they will be back, that someday dignity
and human rights, including the right to decent housing, will be an
important part of the lives of all the world’s peoples.
Reprinted in The Carnegie Newsletter
(1 June 2004): 9-10.