MAPLE RIDGE, B.C.— The mayor of a Vancouver-area suburb is under fire for characterizing homeless and drug-addicted people as “raping and pillaging” his community.

The comments, released in a YouTube video on April 5, framed the rising homelessness in Maple Ridge, B.C., as a drug-addiction issue, not a housing-affordability issue.

In an interview with The Star on Tuesday, Maple Ridge mayor Mike Morden acknowledged the superheated nature of his language, but ultimately doubled-down on the comments.

“You’re probably right to call me on it,” Morden said, “but the neighbourhoods are being raped and pillaged for everything that isn’t bolted down.”

Morden said the crime is a symptom of a complex web of problems that B.C.’s social safety net is failing to address.

“You’ve got criminals who are essentially feeding (users) a lot of drugs to keep them doing what they’re doing, and the thefts are required to feed that habit,” he said.

Morden said his community doesn’t have the social supports to deal with rising homelessness and the growing opioid crisis, and there’s much work to be done to strengthen the social safety net that has failed thousands of people, including — at one time — his own son.

But one poverty advocate said Morden’s rhetoric represents a “politics of fear” that does little to help people who need it most.

“[The mayor] has a consistent message, which pits housed residents of his community with the homeless residents of his community,” said Anna Cooper, staff lawyer at Pivot Legal Society and a longtime advocate for people experiencing homelessness.

Mounting tensions among Maple Ridge residents about homelessness culminated in the city putting a longtime encampment of tents under 24/7 guard in March. The move followed a February court injunction that allowed the city to confiscate items like heaters in the name of fire safety.

While enforcing a fire-safety order, dozens of tent-city residents were ordered out of the camp and were not permitted to return.

Where those residents should go has been the subject of heated squabbling between Maple Ridge’s city council and the B.C. government, with the mayor claiming his city is already doing more than its fair share to help people experiencing homeless.

Then, on March 20, the provincial government announced its plan to install a 51-unit modular housing project in Maple Ridge — the second of its kind in the city — despite city council’s refusal to agree to it.

In response, the mayor released the 34-minute interview, conducted by a PR firm, to clarify his position on increasing homelessness in his city.

“We feel we have done more than our share, but people keep coming to our community and we just can’t get on top of it, which is largely an addictions problem,” he said in the video.

“This is about fentanyl. That is the problem.”

Morden said his “passionate” rhetoric is born of frustration with what he sees as systemic failures to help vulnerable people in his city, something his family experienced first hand while trying to support his son, who also struggles with addiction.

He said his son, who is now 34, has a complex series of challenges that B.C.’s health care system failed for years to properly diagnose.

“We kept pressing for health assessments to be done, and all they would do is look at him and say ‘you’re a drug addict, how much drugs do you use?’” Morden said.

It wasn’t until they finally got an assessment, and access to individually tailored supports, that things started to turn around.

“I think everyone needs to be assessed on an individual basis,” he said. “Our health care system has gotten to the point where it’s starting to use one hammer try and fix multiple different problems.”

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Morden is especially critical of the province’s modular housing strategy.

In response to the homelessness crisis, his city council put together a “community safety plan” that included new low-barrier beds. It also called for more support from the province to build more affordable housing, more social housing and build a facility in the Burnett neighbourhood to provide the wraparound care that people struggling with addictions need.

Morden said the province rejected that plan in favour of a second modular housing project that he described as a one-size-fits-all approach that neglects the complex needs of many people.

“My goal is to make sure that there are more options than that available for people so they can choose when they are ready, willing and able,” Morden said.

In the video, he suggested that Maple Ridge’s first modular housing project at Royal Crescent, opened last fall, has been a failure because two people have already died there. He insinuates that the deaths were drug related, but the housing project manager said one person died of cancer and the other from diabetes.

Morden also claimed 80 per cent of people who experience homelessness in Maple Ridge use drugs, but didn’t cite his source. But in a 2013 study of 500 of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside residents who experienced homelessness and mental illness, researchers found 29 per cent of them used illicit drugs daily. Another 24 per cent did not use drugs in the past month.

Julian Somers, a health professor at Simon Fraser University and lead author of that study, explained that addiction and homelessness are caused by the same thing, which is social exclusion.

It can include everything from living in economically disadvantaged parts of the city to being shunned by mainstream society to not being able to find a job. Somers agreed with Morden’s assessment that any solution to homelessness and drug use involves a complex range of resources, not just housing.

“Modular housing is a stopgap solution and it can help,” said Somers, “but it is not an adequate response to the growing number of people who are homeless, because of unmet psychological needs, Indigenous-related needs, youth-related needs.”

Somers, who has studied addictions and mental health issues for 20 years, said the mayor’s comments were unhelpful.

“I think that language is unnecessarily inflammatory,” he said. “This is an issue of social and economic exclusion, not of Viking invasion.”

Cooper, a staunch advocate for people living in poverty, agreed that any solution to homelessness will be complex. But she said the Maple Ridge mayor’s rhetoric around homelessness and crime and drug use encourages “acts of violence against marginalized people by propping up this belief that it’s OK to judge marginalized people.”

She took particular exception to Morden’s comment that people who experience homelessness are “raping and pillaging” Maple Ridge’s community and businesses.

Read more:

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