There isn't a B.C. lawyer more faithful to the charitable values that are the mainstay of a community court than Judge Tom Gove, a child advocate who has earned nation-wide praise for his efforts to protect our kids in care.

But not even a legal pundit with the rare ability to be pals with the destitute and delusional as well as with those trolling the corridors of power can make a restorative justice initiative work without the right tools at his judicial fingertips.

Community courts -- increasing in popularity with more than 52 in South Africa, the U.S. and Britain and 27 more on the drafting table worldwide -- are all about buttonholing the afflictions that drive an offender's relentless crime career and then deploying an assortment of well-meaning health and addiction service advisors to help repair the harm and reform the harmer.

With the in-your-face property and drug crimes that sustain Vancouver's grim and grimy Downtown Eastside, it's no wonder our police, politicians, prosecutors and merchants chose to set up the first such court on B.C.'s bleakest block.

The scores of offenders facing Gove or Judge David Pendleton when order in court is called for the first time next week will be urged to plead guilty and choose a sentencing option that calls for intervention by social-services providers.

This course of action relies heavily on the interaction and synergy of treatment counsellors and the specialty courts as well as the co-operation of the accused and his or her lawyer.

Community court assessments in Britain and South Africa found such unity wasn't always a given.

But an alternative court's ultimate success in lifting the lot of lowlifes, thereby restoring peace in local neighbourhoods, depends not on the depth of professional dedication but on the abundance of tough-love measures to tackle what ails the chronic offender: poverty, addiction, mental illness. And the power to make them stick to their vows of abstinence.

"The provincial government put funds into the Contact Centre, street level clinics and Insite [injection site], which are supposed to direct addicts to treatment, but oops!" 

Someone forgot to build the beds.

It's not the first time government and east-side addiction industry activists who preach harm reduction have overlooked the essentials.

Think injection site -- the public and drug counsellors bought the rhetoric surrounding Insite on the basis that it was one leg of a four-pillar plan to clean up the addicts and the area. But the treatment facilities that would place withdrawal and recovery within their reach never materialized.

Gove's commitment to the community court idea is laudable but he, more than anyone, knows the consequences of government's failure to boost services: The judge proposed dozens of service improvements in 1995 following a public inquiry into the torturous death of five-year-old Matthew Vaudreuil by his deranged mother.