Law and disorder

        Two years out of law school, David Eby could easily be living the dream life, splurging on thousand-dollar suits and drawing on an expense account to impress clients at upscale eateries.
But those are somebody else’s dreams. When the newly minted lawyer followed his own aspirations (and his fiancée) to the West Coast after graduating from Dalhousie Law School in 2005, it wasn’t the gleaming highrises of the downtown core that lured him. It was the decaying social fabric of the Downtown East­side and the opportunity to apply the power of the law to seek solutions.

It was a calling that law school did little to prepare him for.

“There are seminar courses where you deconstruct the law, but nobody tells you what to do when you get to a parking lot where the police have barricaded all the tenants inside a building and won’t let them leave,” says Eby, who has been a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society since shortly after his move to Vancouver. “There’s no training you can do in law for that kind of situation.”

The reception area of Pivot Legal Society, on Hastings Street about six blocks east of Main Street, is respectable but spartan. Eby, looking even younger than his 31 years, emerges from his back-room office smiling and extending a hand as he strides purposefully toward his visitor. He has apparently dressed up for the occasion, his gangly frame sporting an off-the-rack blue suit several shades lighter than the navy or black that is de rigueur for his downtown counterparts in the legal profession.

Seated at a small kitchen-style table in his cramped office, Eby describes the successes he has notched so far in his short career.

There’s the international exposure he has brought to the Downtown Eastside through frequent interaction with UN representatives, both here and abroad. Then there was the apology he extracted from the Vancouver Police Department over its treatment of Downtown Eastside residents after five years of pursuing the issue in court. On his to-do list: find a case that would force the city to use a long-neglected bylaw empowering it to repair substandard rooming houses at the owners’ expense.

Solutions to poverty and homelessness don’t rest entirely with politicians, Eby says: “We need business to go to the city and say, ‘Hey, we can help out with some of these things.’”

Developers, for example, could bank some goodwill by voluntarily including low- and middle-income housing

Eby listens attentively to his visitor’s questions, occasionally frowning as he pauses to decipher less-than-eloquent ramblings. He delivers intelligent answers in complete sentences. When asked how long he pictures himself in the role of front-line crusader, he answers with typical understatement.

“This is very difficult work to do for an extended period of time,” he admits. “It takes a lot of energy and personal commitment, and some of the things you see are quite awful.”

Where does he see himself in 10 or 15 years?

“I think it’s realistic to expect that someday I might throw my hat in for municipal politics.”