Social and Community Services are essential to the daily lives of citizens and to promote Community Wellness. These services include Harm Reduction Centres, Shelters, Food Banks, Community Clinics, and many more. These services are important to the city of Vancouver because they support individuals in need and offer aid. Vancouver is experiencing soaring inflation, steep cost of living, and an ongoing housing crisis. This has led to higher rates of food insecurity, high rates of addiction, overdoses, homelessness and mental health crises, resulting in an overall crisis in Vancouver’s Community Wellness. Adequate Social and Community services in the city of Vancouver will greatly improve Community Wellness.
Vancouver has a long history with drugs and addiction. While the city faced issues in controlling drug use since the the late 19th century, it was the wave of dangerous drugs and rising rates of addiction in the 1980s and 1990s that started to become concerning. Crack cocaine and heroin were rampant, along with other drugs. Then came the AIDS/HIV epidemic, worsening the crisis and resulting in higher death rates. The late 90s and 2000s were met with intense crackdowns and curfews in the downtown east side (DTES), beginning the police’s war on drugs. Since then, Vancouver has struggled addressing the rise in drug use, addiction, and overdose.
Currently, Vancouver has faced one if its most difficult challenges yet, and that is the growing fentanyl crisis. Since 2016, the city declared the increasing cases of laced drugs a public health emergency. The danger of fentanyl is that is is being mixed into other drugs to increase its potency, and its low price benefits the dealer. However, there is no quality control over the production and even the tiniest amount of too much fentanyl is deadly. The DEA has reported that lacing drugs such as fentanyl are now one of the main causes for overdoes in the United States. In Canada, 81% of accidental overdoses were due to fentanyl from January 2024 to March 2024 alone. Since this use of fentanyl was discovered in 2016, nearly 2000 people have died from fentanyl overdoses.
Harm Reduction Care is an urgent need unique to Vancouver due to the growing Fentanyl crisis, increasing addiction rates, and high number of overdoses.
As the cost of living in Canada has risen, so has the rate of homelessness. To combat this, the city of Vancouver has a number of shelters, however, there was a reported 25% of unsheltered folk in last year’s report due a shortage of space. For the last 10 years, the homelessness population has increased 7.7% on average every year, resulting in a growing need for more shelters. This mainly addresses the population of people self-identifying as homeless, therefore it is hard to get exact numbers and estimates of the total number of people who are unhoused.
The homelessness crisis in Vancouver first became prominent in the 1980s when funding for various social housing programs were cut. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was once a driving factor in ensuring affordable housing. The federal government took a direction into neoliberal policies and eventually decreased funding for many social programs and services, and handed the responsibility of housing over to provincial governments, resulting in many low income Canadians experiencing homelessness. From the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, the homeless population jumped from an estimated total of 600 people, to nearly 2200 in Vancouver.
Since then, the numbers have fluctuated for several years. The city has attempted to combat the homeless population, but there simply is not enough funding or space to keep up with the growing population. Within the last 10 years or so, the homeless population has increased every year, with factors like the Global Covid-19 Pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia War, and Global inflation playing a part, affecting the cost of living in Canada.