Homeless bottle pickers gather on Kirschner Road in Kelowna, April 24, 2018

(JOHN MCDONALD / iNFOnews.ca)

KELOWNA - Dan is on the job, although you might not know it from looking at him.

Standing by his bottle-filled shopping cart on the side of Kirschner Road, Dan’s head never stops turning, scanning for customers, as he calls them, who pull up and give over their empties.

Traffic is heavy on Kirschner at lunchtime but Dan, a homeless bottle-picker, seems to spot the regulars before they even stop, jumping up to greet them with a warm smile, sometimes even a hug.

He’s even a bit flirty, telling one young woman who pulls up in a BMW that’s she’s looking very pretty today. She smiles right back.

If the woman has any fear, she gives no sign of it and walks right up to the collection of carts and bottle-filled recycling bags where Dan and his street family have set up shop.

“Oh, you’re smooth,” she laughs, dropping her empties in his cart before driving off.

She’s by no means the first customer of the day and won’t be the last, Dan says, pausing to roll a cigarette from a collection of discarded butts.

“We get at it pretty early,” he says. “I was here at 6 a.m. this morning."

Kirschner Road and the homeless scene that has sprung up around it was the focus of scrutiny and media attention last month as Kelowna city council debated changes and additions to the so-called Good Neighbour bylaw.

A law that aims to control busking in downtown Kelowna got most of the focus, overshading another part of the bylaw that would levy fines on the people who drop off their bottles.

It's not the kind of attention they want, but dealing with Kelowna bylaw officers is nothing new.

Dan has no regular income beyond a disability pension — as proof, he holds out his knobby, dirt-encrusted hands that he says have been ruined by frostbite and years of work as a roofer.

The money he pulls in from empties will go straight back to the local liquor store — he says he drinks about a dozen beer a day and is well into it by lunchtime.

Despite it being April, Dan and his street family — Sherry and her old man, as she describes him — are already sporting tans that a Kelowna beach bum would envy, the result of long days spent outdoors.

They, too, are in their cups despite the relatively early hour, although Sherry says the Kelowna RCMP generally leave them alone.

"The cops just told me to keep it in a different bottle," she says, pointing to a half-filled pop bottle sitting discretely by her lawn chair.

All three of them slept outside the night before, shunning the Kelowna homeless shelters they say are overrun with drug users — booze is their drug of choice.

“I booked a bed in the Kelowna Gospel Mission last night but I left after five minutes,” Dan says, instead retreating to the crude tarp-and-plywood shelter he’s rigged up somewhere nearby.

For security reasons, he won’t say exactly where.

Sherry and her partner — he offers no name — slept behind the Subway down the street, across from the bottle depot that draws them to Kirschner Road.

“It was cold but I had enough blankets,” she says, sporting a toque and at least three layers of clothes, even in the warm noontime sunshine.

All three are upbeat and friendly, chatting readily with anyone who walks by, be they well-dressed office workers heading to the nearby Landmark office complex or other street homeless with their own bottle-filled shopping carts.

With the sun beating down and no real schedule to keep, their lives can fleetingly seem almost bucolic and stress-free.

They aren't.

Despite having nothing much beyond the clothes on their backs and no real employment, they still sometimes end up paying a tax of sorts.

“Thirty per cent, that’s what he takes,” Dan says, of the man he first calls the bottle pimp. “Either bottles or money, doesn’t matter.”

He was around earlier in the day, Dan says, but didn’t do anything.

“Actually, he’s more like a bottle bully,” Dan adds. “Depends on his mood and if he’s got any money."

He refuses to name the man, describing him as a heroin addict with an expensive habit, but also a kind-of friend.

“I’ve picked bottles with him,” Dan says.

But even the man who supposedly reigns over Kirschner Road — or at least the homeless bottle pickers who congregate there — is complicated.

Dan says the bottle bully also polices the street, has stopped others from defecating by the side of the road and, perhaps mindful of how their image could affect their bottle business, cleaned up some of the garbage that so enrages local businesses.

The initial burst of media and community interest has faded, even though the bylaw has yet to be fully enacted but Dan and Sherry both expect a surge of enforcement once it is.

“They already harass us,” Sherry says, predicting it will get worse. “The cops mostly leave us alone but bylaw is always around. 'Move along, move along'.”

Dan says some customers remain defiant, vowing they will continue to drop off their empties, bylaw be damned. Others have suggested creative solutions to skirt the new rule.

“One guy said we should set up a lemonade stand,” he laughs. “They give us the bottles, we give them some lemonade, so it’s not panhandling.”

Sherry’s partner, busy unscrewing the caps off donated empties, says another customer suggested he would start handing them a bit of loose change along with his bottles.

“If we hand it right back to him, then it’s like we bought them,” he says.

All three of them describe Kelowna as a hard town in which to be homeless; not enough shelter beds, sky high rents and despite the friendliness and generosity that some people show, a largely hostile attitude to the down-and-out.

“I got evicted from the last three places I was in,” Dan says. “I couldn’t afford the rent anyway.”

Sherry says she’s been homeless for two years, the direct result of soaring rents and razor-thin vacancy rates which gives Kelowna landlords the luxury of choosing the best tenants.

"I'm 57. I'm too old for this," she adds.

All three of them are on the the wait list for supportive housing offered through B.C. Housing and have been for some time.

“I’ve been on the list for two years,” Sherry says. “I haven’t heard anything about it since."

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