For much of last summer, the mountains on the North Shore appeared to buffer Vancouver from the smoke of forest fires that had engulfed the rest of Canada. Even with its summer breeze of cedar and sea, the city felt uneasy. In particular, the infamously down-and-out Downtown Eastside—with its single-room occupancy rentals, its dive bars, its fentanyl, crack, and heroin, its encampments that police periodically remove, its alleys of the unhoused—had never seemed more on edge. Vancouverites accept a certain level of grit and abjection, which comes through in
