‘Vancouver Is Dying’: New Film Lays Bare Vancouver’s Ballooning Crime and Addiction Problem

A man's belongings are placed on the street to be moved to storage after his tent was cleared from the sidewalk at a sprawling homeless encampment on East Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, on Aug. 9, 2022. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

“Vancouver Is Dying,” a documentary released by independent journalist and city resident Aaron Gunn, has garnered over 2 million views since it premiered on Oct. 7.

The one-hour film highlights the overdose crisis, increasing crime, public disorder, and homeless situation in Vancouver, and in particular criticizes what Gunn calls government “failed policies that have ravaged our downtown cores, especially Vancouver, over the past 20 years.”

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Gunn, a conservative social media commentator who had been rejected as a BC Liberal party leadership candidate, says he made the documentary out of frustration with the deterioration of his city.

Vancouver is “leading the way” in ill-advised policy, says Gunn, noting that the city has “the highest overdose death rate in Canada” and is seeing dramatic increases in crime, especially violent attacks, despite the “most ‘progressive’ drug policy in North America.”

Gunn interviewed residents, business owners, law enforcement, mental health and addiction experts, victims of violent crime, and recovered addicts for the documentary. He says originally the film was going to be 20 to 30 minutes long, but it soon expanded in scale and scope.

“What is happening in Vancouver today—the crime, the degeneracy, the deaths from overdoses—is not normal. The policies of the past 20 years have failed and it’s time to try something new,” he says.

Decriminalizing Hard Drugs

B.C. announced in May that it will become the first province in Canada to decriminalize possession of small amounts of otherwise illicit drugs for personal use. Beginning Jan. 31, 2023, adults can possess up to 2.5 grams of substances such as opioids, cocaine, or methamphetamine without facing arrest or drug seizure, although these substances remain illegal.

“Decriminalizing the simple possession of drugs is a historic, brave, and groundbreaking step in the fight to save lives. It marks a fundamental rethinking of drug policy that favours health care over handcuffs,” said Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart at the time.

Gunn disagrees. He told CTV news on Nov. 6, “When it comes to things like heroin, fentanyl, and crystal meth, I think there should be a societal stigma around those substances.”

He said that, as a society, “we need to remove the stigma about seeking treatment,” get people into recovery, and help them recover from addictions so that they can be productive citizens.

At some points during filming, which began in April, Gunn said he had a police escort for the seedier parts of the city. “There’s zero chance I would have felt safe or comfortable ... without the police there,” he said.

Executive producer of the documentary, Angelo Isidorou, director of the Free Speech Club at the University of British Columbia, tweeted on Oct. 10 that the film “is now the most consumed piece of content” in the Vancouver municipal election, which took place Oct. 15 and saw Stewart defeated as mayor.

New mayor Ken Sim, who campaigned on a platform of immediately hiring 100 more police officers and 100 mental health nurses to tackle Vancouver’s drug and crime crisis, officially takes office Nov. 7 with an overwhelming majority vote.

“Hard drugs like heroin are stigmatized for a reason. They destroy lives, wreak havoc on families, and place a tremendous burden on communities and taxpayers,” says Gunn.

He wants his documentary to send the message that recovery from addiction is possible, and treatment is available.

Successful Public Servant Was Once an Addict

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff, Marshall Smith (no relation to the premier), is prominently featured in the documentary. Formerly chief of staff for Alberta’s associate minister of mental health and addictions, with considerable experience in the private drug treatment industry, Smith has advocated for an abstinence approach to drug recovery.

He speaks from experience. Falling into alcoholism, his battle with addiction cost him his career in B.C. provincial politics in the early 2000s, and left him homeless.

“I ended up hanging up my suit and tie, leaving my office at the legislature, and found myself a new resident of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, where I lived as a homeless addict for five years on the streets of Vancouver until I found treatment, until I found recovery,” he told CBC News in May 2017.

For a time after he got clean, Smith was the director of a private drug addiction treatment centre in Prince George, B.C., and then brought his views on an abstinence-based treatment model to the Alberta government.

He says in the documentary that the government needs to understand that drug use is “the root cause of homelessness, crime, and overdose.” He said focusing on “harm reduction”—which is basically “less stigma, more drugs"—and safe consumption sites has changed what was years ago a high of 150 overdose deaths a year, to now routinely over 2,000 overdose deaths a year.

“I don’t know how you reach a conclusion that [harm reduction] has been a success,” said Smith. He said the province has failed by focusing on “reducing stigma.”

If his children ended up addicted to drugs, he said in the film, “the last thing I would want is for someone to give them more drugs, watch them overdose, give them Narcan, give them more drugs. ... Eventually they just successfully overdose one day.”

“There is nothing safe about handing out opioids,” Smith said. “When you supply somebody with a drug like fentanyl, or heroin, or cocaine, or methamphetamine, there’s nothing safe about that. You are perpetuating an illness. You are perpetuating addiction, and it’s essentially state-sponsored addiction.”

‘Threat’ of a New Trend

The documentary maintains that Vancouver residents “are living under threat of a new and terrifying trend of random assaults and stranger attacks.”

The film provides a list. “Delivery service employees stabbed, a woman casually walking down the street struck in the head with a hammer, racially motivated assaults, and even a woman who was literally set on fire, and these are only a few of the many stranger attacks that occurred on the streets of Vancouver this year alone.”

“It’s gotten so bad that according to the Vancouver Police Department, unprovoked attacks on strangers have jumped 35 percent,” according to the film, referring to statistics on those attacks during the first three months (Q1) of 2022 compared with the three-year Q1 average between 2017 and 2019.

This statistic is based on the Vancouver Police Department’s April 5 Public Safety Indicator Report covering Q1 2022. Such a comparison to the pre-pandemic three-year average is among the various comparisons made in that report.

Other alarming statistics from that report cited in the documentary include a 12 percent increase in violent crime and a 36.1 percent increase in serious assaults when comparing Q1 2022 to the three-year average before the pandemic. Compared to Q1 2021, violent crime was down 0.8 percent, falling from 1,408 to 1,397, and serious assaults were down 5 percent, falling from 442 to 420.

There were 46 assaults against peace officers in 2021 and 31 in 2022, but compared to the three-year average, these assaults have increased by 20.8 percent.

‘Recovery Is Possible’

For the documentary, Gunn interviewed Ralph Kaisers, president of the Vancouver Police Union, who attributed a “revolving door justice system” to eroding public trust in police.

Regarding that issue, Arezo Zarrabian, a crime analyst with the Vancouver Police Department, says in the film: “It’s not uncommon for an offender to be arrested in the morning, let’s say in the early hours of the morning, and within that same 24-hour period be rearrested.”

Gunn says the most powerful part of the documentary is an interview with Cody Hall, a recovered addict who, less than two years ago, was addicted to opioids and living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“He is living proof that recovery is possible, and sentencing those suffering from addiction to a life sentence of drug use is not a compassionate solution,” he says.

For Gunn, the solution is clear.

“[We have] to get people into treatment and recovery programs and return them to being productive, taxpaying members of society once again,” he says.

“We also have to be clear that living on the streets, injecting yourself with drugs in plain sight, is not a socially acceptable outcome for us as a society. These individuals need help and we have to be prepared to give it to them.”