Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Seven Part One.

   Chapter Seven - Part One


    A young woman's voice with an English accent came over the phone. "This is Libby Davies from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association," she said. "Do you want to come and work with us?"  It was August 1979. I wanted to do something useful. I was tired of living on welfare, having book proposals rejected and selling things on the phone. Also Eric's demands were wearing me out.
     I contacted the Downtown Eastside Residents Association or DERA as it was called. I ended up working in DERA's office often praising DERA's tall thin no-nonsense leader Bruce Eriksen. I worked alongside Elizabeth 'Libby' Davies, who 20 years later became the N.D.P. Member of Parliament in Vancouver-East.
    I became friends with Jean Swanson, a tall committed activist who even to-day (2016) speaks out for the homeless and the poor. A former iron-worker, the Winnipeg-born Bruce Eriksen joined me up in the progressive civic party, the Committee of Progressive Electors or COPE. Here I met long-time city councillor Harry Rankin, whose acute legal mind impressed me. His friend, Bruce Yorke, was a committed communist and economist. He was another pillar of COPE. So too was Fred Wilson, a short bearded organizer for the B.C. Communist Party. At that time, Wilson loathed the N.D.P.. and he and I sometimes clashed over policies.
     The downtown eastside however, always brought me back down to reality. In those days, back in the late 1970's, the streets of the downtown eastside were chockful of poor people, working people looking for a drink in the many taverns, alcoholics down on their luck and strangers passing through the neighbourhood. Many of these people lived in run down hotels that had a tavern on the hotels' grounds floors. DERA worked hard to improve the lives of the area's residents. At the time I showed up at DERA, Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies were continuing to press the Vancouver city government to open the Carnegie Centre as a community centre for the downtown eastside.
     Eriksen had started this campaign way back in 1972. Soon he would succeed and the centre finally opened to the public in 1980. "We went back and forth so many times to city hall," Davies once recalled. "We just met so many politicians giving us the run-around.
     In the end Eriksen and Davies decided to run for office too under the COPE banner. They were elected to city council. But it took time. Eriksen became a city councillor in 1980. Davies won a seat on council in 1982. Joining DERA meant joinng COPE  and this for me was a learning experience.