Gabriel, I was living in Hintonburg in the mid-90s (Irving Avenue) and I don’t recall it being particularly run down or infested with drugs or prostitution. I do know that after there was a concerted effort to sweep the streets in the Byward Market, quite a few prostitutes relocated to Hintonburg. The lesson there is that there’s a lot of displacement going on, in which ‘problems’ are shuffled from one community to another, because there’s no serious effort being made to address the root causes of said ‘problems.’

I do know the Ottawa Police Service Street Crime Unit generally tries to get the landlords involved, and work with the owners of the units after they bust a house… but a fair number of the owners are really just slumlords and aren’t interested in the hassle of cleaning their places up. For the decent landlords it can be very difficult to evict someone, even if the renter has allowed their apartment or home to be taken over.

While I was living in Hintonburg I was “lucky” enough to get a few community tours with police officers and they knew where all of the crack houses were. They’d point to a house and say “I was in there last week, and I’ll be in there next week”… and then again, and again. I also had the Ottawa tactical people bust into my rooming house on Spadina a few times looking for “people of interest”.

Hintonburg has improved quite a bit since I lived there, my cousin has a successful store there now. But back in 1996 prostitutes and their johns were having sex in the park during the afternoon, kids were always finding handfuls of needles in the sandbox, I’d find used condoms tossed on the sidewalk and the Mac’s Milk was getting knocked over a couple times a month.

What they did to clean it up, from memory, was form a community action team which took down license-plate numbers of johns, they patrolled the parks at night in shifts, they cleaned the playgrounds everyday, they monitored their neighbours for suspicious behaviours and they had a direct tip line to the police. They also sent the tactical squad into my rooming house, as I said, a few times looking for “persons of interest” where none where. We were just the poorest people on the street.

Those Hintonburg people who are forming a new action committee against this Bill at tomorrow’s meeting might want to take a look at their own history, because it seems to me they got their area nice and sparkly by using tactics very similar to those in this Bill.

All that said, I assume this Bill will fail but I have no idea if it will or not. It doesn’t mean everything in it is bad or not warranted.

Gabriel, I’m not sure of what happened in Hintonburg 10 years ago, but I do know that there’s a rally AGAINST this bill at the Hintonburg Community Centre tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m.

If there are problems with crack houses and prostitutes in residential areas, why can’t the police deal with it? Why create another layer of surveillance with more power and less accountability than the police?

I’m not sure of the date (other than during Dalton’s reign), but Hansard has Richard Patten, the guy who represented Ottawa-Centre before Yasir Naqvi, saying this:

“In recent months the Hintonburg Community Association leaders have organized walkabouts in order to pressure governments to clean up crack houses and to keep prostitutes away from schoolyards and out of residential areas.”

Bills brought in by “private members” are mostly about really-local politics, and since I doubt Dalton is goofy in the head enough to allow this to pass I’d be willing to put money on this Bill being defeated.

But wasn’t there a focus piece on CBC TV news a few months ago looking into how difficult it can be for owners in Ottawa to reclaim their rental units after they’ve been turned into a drug house? I think it was CBC…