The LeBreton Flats Neighbourhood Watch is one of five such groups in the area, which includes Chinatown.
Before her door was kicked in and her house ransacked, before she learned what the tell-tale signs of a crack house are, before she began pushing for a new law to make neighbourhoods like hers safer, Stephanie Strudwick was a middle-aged federal public servant who shared a century-old house on Elm Street with her son.
Strudwick launched the LeBreton Flats Neighbourhood Watch and saw the mailing list for her e-mail bulletins mushroom from 79 to more than 400. She sat on committees and across the table from provincial ministers. And she joined in the fight to bring the Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act forward in hopes that one day it becomes law in Ontario.
For her, it all began with that kicked-in front door.
February 17, 2006 was a Friday. There was blowing snow and the windchill blew the temperature to well below -20 C. Strudwick, whose shoulder-length hair and eyes are the same shade of chocolate brown, left for work around 11 that morning and expected her son would be back from class within the hour. What she didn’t expect was to be robbed.
Thieves rifled through the house. They emptied the top drawer of her dresser and took CDs, DVDs, even rolls of pennies. Whatever they could get their hands on.
She soon learned this was a pattern in her neighbourhood and that she was just another victim.
Strudwick reported the incident to the police, but also took matters into her own hands. She canvassed neighbours to see if anyone had seen anything out of the ordinary. She made 100 copies of a handwritten note about the robbery and took to the street, delivering copies to nearby mailboxes.
By the time she got back to her house, two people had called. They couldn’t tell her anything about the break-in at her house, but they did say the same thing had recently happened to them.
As more reports came in, Strudwick realized there was a problem and called her city councillor, Diane Holmes, who put her in touch with Pam Connolly, another local activist Holmes had appointed to chair a new Dalhousie Somerset Community Safety Committee. That got the ball rolling.
Strudwick took to the streets of her neighbourhood again, only this time she brought a clipboard. She knocked on doors, introduced herself and gathered names for the LeBreton Flats Neighbourhood Watch. Hers was one of five neighbourhood watch groups in the area created around the same time.
Strudwick took the e-mail addresses she collected and began sending out regular bulletins. They included everything from police reports and home security tips to neighbourhood notices and petitions. Strudwick says she has sent more than 100 bulletins since 2006.
Const. Nathan Hoedemann is a community police officer. He met Strudwick in 2006 and says she is a vocal advocate for her neighbourhood. Crime is down and although he can’t pinpoint by how much or exactly why, he says Strudwick and volunteers like her deserve some of the credit.
“If we had more people like Stephanie, there would be less need for us,” he says.
Strudwick agrees the neighbourhood has improved. Her wistful smile accentuates the deep lines around her eyes, proof she has witnessed a lot in her days.
“Right now it doesn’t look that bad, but if you could have seen what was happening three years ago, it was horrible. You couldn’t believe this was your own city.”
She recalls with a grimace the time a crack dealer sold drugs from the fire escape of a nearby building and the reports from several female residents that they were mistaken for prostitutes by johns on the prowl.
And the break-ins made it nearly impossible for people to leave groundfloor windows open or screen doors unlocked.
The common denominator became clear – crack houses.
“There were certain properties that had been problematic for over 10 years and they tended to house the same types of people with a propensity for the same types of habits. They brought an unhealthy element to the neighbourhood,” she says.
One possible solution used in other jurisdictions was a piece of legislation called the Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act (SCAN). Strudwick and about half a dozen others began meeting under the name Concerned Citizens for Safer Neighbourhoods to push for the law to be enacted in Ontario.
“We started trying to move this forward and the rest is history,” she says.
The group met with Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi and he promised to take the issue forward. His private member’s bill passed second reading in the provincial legislature last October.
Should it pass, SCAN would give judges the power to close a property for up to 90 days or evict individual tenants if he or she decides that illegal activity is consistently taking place there and having a negative impact on the surrounding community.
Currently, crack houses can only be shut down by landlord and tenants boards or through the charges and convictions of residents under the criminal code.
SCAN legislation is not new in Canada. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador all have similar laws.
Naqvi says the bill has been referred to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy, but the timeframe for when the committee might actually look at it – and move it closer to becoming law – is unclear.
“The purpose behind SCAN is to make sure properties are not being used for illegal activities,” he says. “It puts the onus on landlords and owners of property.”
Some have argued the law is a means of criminalizing drug addiction or stigmatizing those who use drugs. It’s also seen as a tool for displacing people.
Strudwick says that’s precisely the point.
“It’s better to displace than allow these people to get a real root in your community because once they get a root in your community, the whole community goes down,” she says.
That opinion – among others she has held firmly, including the installation of closed circuit television cameras in the downtown core – is not necessarily a popular one, but her broad shoulders seem able to handle the weight of criticism.
“I’ve had people yell at me that if I don’t want it in my yard, I should move to Barrhaven. I don’t feel I should have to. I’m not going to run away from it. I’m a single parent, I bought my house with my own, hard-earned money and I didn’t work that hard to be pushed off,” she says.
Strudwick speaks with determination, but there is fatigue in her voice. She says she has pulled back on the e-mail bulletins and is looking for someone to replace her. In addition to working two jobs, the volunteer work consumed as much as 20 hours some weeks.
She has seen certain victories – an increased sense of personal safety and better dialogue between the police and her community among them. She’d like to see SCAN become law and hopes to be watching from the visitor’s gallery at Queen’s Park when it happens.
“You can never be completely safe, you can never let your guard down, but I’d say it’s improved,” she says of the break-ins and crack houses.
“The word has been very loud and very clear that we’ve had our share of that nonsense and we just can’t have it anymore.”