I was just evicted from my home of ten years where I lived with 3 other single men. I was the senior member and managed the house, collecting rent and paying the landlord every month. I was never late with the rent and never missed a payment.
During the ten years I lived at 719 6th Street, I turned the lawn into a permaculture garden that bothered a neighbour couple who complained to the City of Courtenay every year. A couple of years ago they got some real estate agents to threaten the city with legal action if they didn't enforce their bylaws. Interestingly, the city has taken Jean and Keith Dugal to court for a similar situation where nasty neighbours colluded with the city bylaw inspector to give them a hard time. Luckily, they own the property and have some good pro-bono lawyers to fight the city.
I could have done more to please the anal couple next door and the city bylaw inspector who came around every year responding to their complaints about so-called weeds like dandelion and clover, or like this year's “excessive growth”. But I'm an old, stubborn man that refuses to be pushed around by any authority. Every year I did the minimum required to comply and every year the inspector threatened to bring in a crew to clean up but it never happened. That garden, which began as a lawn, was featured in the CV Seed Savers annual garden tour this year. It was a messy garden, but it was like a jungle oasis in the middle of a suburban wasteland of lawns and shrubbery.
We had the audacity to be poor and different. We lived in a house they called a slum mainly because we are single men on small pension and disability incomes, and the landlord did little to improve the house, preferring to use the rents and leverage to acquire more property. To be fair, he did get the window frames painted a couple of times, replaced the roof after a patch job that didn't work, and replaced the old oil furnace.
A couple of years ago the anal ones complained to the city about an illegal suite in the basement but there wasn't one. I was forced to let them inspect the place despite my protests about the city being used to harass us.
Until recently, the North Island Compassion Club, a registered non-profit society, rented two rooms in the basement as a dispensary and lounge. I had been operating the medical marijuana dispensary for over seven years, providing cannabis to people with a host of ailments and debilitating conditions.
Although marihuana (sic) is a Schedule 2 substance in the Canadian Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), some people can get an exemption from the law for medical reasons. Ten years ago, the courts ruled that citizens had rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to cannabis for medical reasons. The government was ordered to change the law or provide a remedy. The federal government reluctantly created the Medical Marihuana Access Programme to use, grow or have someone grow cannabis marijuana for someone who can't grow for themselves. The problem, however, is that most doctors won't sign the required government forms.
For ten years court decisions have ruled in favour of access to medical marijuana and most recently, an Ontario Superior Court judge gave the government 3 months to change the law or fix the programme, citing the fact that doctors are refusing to sign the legal papers and naming compassion clubs and dispensaries as the only reasonable and safe place for people to get their medicine.
The RCMP knew about the compassion club since the day it was started by Noreen Evers, 10 years ago. She told them. She also told them when we opened the dispensary at my home seven years ago. In all that time the cops never had to respond to a domestic crisis, never had to shut down a loud party. Indeed, they had no reason at all to come to our home except on a couple of occasions about other matters, such as the crack house that had been operating around the corner for a couple of years and a neighbour's domestic dispute.
Until this year, when the RCMP raided our home twice, first in February and again in July. They confiscated our cannabis cookies, oil, herb and money, making it very difficult to provide the medicine that many people rely on. Many of our members were scared off after each raid, as were a number of care givers. After the second bust we had to raise our prices and we now offer a delivery service (250 871 5207).
And so we come to my conspiracy theory, whereby the anal ones, the city bylaw officer, and the cops leaned on the landlord to evict us.
The landlord was called to the cop shop a couple of months ago and threatened with proceedings to confiscate the property if he “knowingly allowed illegal activity to continue”. Curiously, the bylaw inspector was part of that meeting, nod nod wink wink. But since I had closed the dispensary after the second raid there was no longer any illegal activity, and since the landlord informed us of the threat, there was no lawful cause to evict. Unfortunately the adjudicator of the dispute resolution process ruled otherwise, allowing the landlord to evict us at the end of October.
He tried to evict all four of us but several people in the community prevailed on him to back off, pointing out that the others had nothing to do with the compassion club or the dispute with the city. Besides, his reputation might suffer if he tossed all four of us out on the street in the middle of winter.
As part of the dispute resolution process I took a poll of all the immediate neighbours (except the couple, we know what they think), asking them to rate us on a scale from 1-9, bad-good neighbour. Five gave us a 9, one a 7, and one a 4 (messy yard). Three of the five nines live in a two-story apartment across the street, and their windows have a clear view of the garden in all its messy glory.
The house immediately next to us is a care facility. Their kitchen window is barely 20 feet away from the back door which was the main entrance for the dispensary, which was open 3 afternoons a week. The manager wrote a lovely letter saying how much he liked us as neighbours.
So now I live at Occupy Comox Valley, 420 Cumberland Road, Courtenay. The entrance of my tent faces the front of the court house and I'm told there is a camera on the second floor that watches everything that goes on. Despite the two raids and RCMP recommendations to charge me (and other members) with “possession for the purpose of trafficking”, the crown has yet to lay charges. They know where I am if they decide to do so.