The graffiti is getting dark on Pandora, and for good reason. Deaths of people living homeless in BC tripled from 2020 to the end of 2024, says the BC Coroner. The Island has the highest number of deaths in the province. Not highest per-capita – highest overall. And yes, 78 per cent of those deaths involved the poison drug supply, but 22 per cent didn’t. All kinds of health problems are killing people living in desperate poverty in our city, and it is absolutely wild that the “solution” has been to hit them so hard with enforcement that people have to run and hide as a daily practice just so they don’t get everything they own taken away and garbaged. So they have a blanket to spread on themselves tonight. A woman I talked to yesterday – 60 years old, evicted last year after a decade housed, has epilepsy and regularly has seizures – said bylaw told her to pick between the brown boots or the black boots they’d found while rummaging through her stuff recently, because she couldn’t keep both. Sweet Jesus, what are we doing here?? Plain and simple, we are creating the conditions for people to die, and our governments are washing their hands of any responsibility for it.