On January 18, 2026, I walked Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with Dallas Brodie.
I first met Dallas several months earlier, and after seeing the work I do documenting the realities of addiction, homelessness, crime, and government failure, she agreed to do something no other MLA has been willing to do — walk the DTES, unfiltered and unscripted.
Over the past year, I have asked more than a dozen MLAs to join me downtown. Every single one declined. Dallas did not.
Most politicians communicate from behind their phones, issuing statements and rhetoric toward other officials they believe are failing to do their jobs. Dallas Brodie chose a different approach. She put boots on the ground and walked the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with DrewCouver to see the reality firsthand — without spin, without filters, and without relying on secondhand reports.
As an MLA, your job requires constant awareness — political pressure, competing narratives, and nonstop scrutiny. Despite that, Dallas chose to see what government policy actually looks like on the ground.
What she witnessed was confronting:
Open drug consumption and severe addiction
Widespread homelessness and untreated mental illness
A visible immigration and temporary worker presence struggling to survive
Communities abandoned by systems meant to protect them
We also spoke about our shared respect for Indigenous history and how unimaginable it would be for our forefathers to see this land in its current state.
This walk wasn’t about ideology or optics. It was about truth. The visuals speak for themselves.
