Harm Reduction Victoria’s nighttime guerrilla needle exchange at the corner of Pandora and Vancouver has proven popular.

The week - June 4

Needle-X meets demand

Demonstrating the ongoing demand for a fixed-site needle exchange in the city’s downtown core since the closure of AIDS Vancouver Island’s Cormorant Street facility in May 2008, a guerrilla needle exchange established last Sunday at the corner of Vancouver and Pandora streets has been doing brisk business.

On its first day of operation, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., volunteers from Harm Reduction Victoria distributed just under 600 clean syringes to drug users, according to the group’s spokesperson Kim Toombs. The following day, during a four-hour evening shift, almost 300 clean needles were handed out. Toombs was unsure of the total number of needles collected over the two days.

After ten months in operation, AIDS Vancouver Island’s mobile needle exchange service has distributed an average of 700 needles each day, according to data released by the Vancouver Island Health Authority in May.

Farmland funny business

The roles and responsibilities of members on the City of Langford’s Agricultural Advisory Committee—which serves as a gatekeeper for applications to remove local farmland from the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve—seem pretty straightforward. In fact, they’re only two pages long and the sole rule to appear in bold-face type states, “No member of the Agricultural Advisory Committee shall have an active application before the committee.”

Yet somehow, AAC member Thomas Atherton’s two-acre Happy Valley Road property was one among several scrutinized by said committee during its first meeting of 2009 in January before being passed on to Langford city council, which gave characteristic approval to ship them off to the province’s Agricultural Land Commission for the final say on whether they can be opened up to development.

Atherton was absent from the first meeting of the AAC where his application for an ALR exclusion was discussed, but he was present at a second meeting where a motion was made, and unanimously supported, to re-forward the recommendations of the first meeting to Langford council.

Also included in the ALR exclusion applications Langford considered were two from Atherton’s own Happy Valley Road neighbours.

Bringing the West Bank home

A pair of speakers plan to give a Canadian context to the ongoing construction of Israeli settlement housing in what was, until the last few years, Palestinian land in the village of Bil’in when they visit Victoria next week.

Palestinian anti-apartheid activist Mohamed Khatib and Israeli lawyer Emily Schaeffer will discuss, among other topics, a lawsuit filed last year in Quebec Superior Court against Green Park and Green Mount International, sister Canadian firms building settlement housing in the West Bank.

Schaeffer contends that the building companies are violating the Canadian Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act of 2000—which incorporates elements of the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—by profiting from and assisting in—the illegal occupation of the land.

“I think the issues that come up in Bil’in are really the main issues that come up all over the occupied territories, so it’s really something of a microcosm for the major injustices that you can see in all the different Palestinian villages all over the West Bank,” says Schaeffer. “But I’m also hoping that political pressure from within Canada will help both the [Israeli] court feel it’s justified in making the right decision, but also in the future that it might change Canadian foreign policy toward Israel.”

Khatib and Schaeffer will be at the BCGEU Hall at 2994 Douglas Street on Tuesday, June 9, at 8 p.m. Admission is by donation.

Shrinking supported housing

It seems the original design of a supported housing unit on Humboldt Street has fallen prey to zoning restrictions.

When first announced in January 2008, the Humboldt Street site was going to see construction of 53 units of supported housing—45 studios and eight one-bedroom apartments.

But that target has undergone a 20 percent reduction down to 44 units, because, as a BC Housing spokesperson told Monday, “A height restriction has been placed on the property by the owner of a neighbouring property who had a covenant on it. That covenant was not removed and the building design then proceeded with the height restriction that was in place, which has resulted in the 44 units.”