So I wrote a long tirade last night...deleted. If you read it, sorry.
I am just so angry that repeatedly every agency, whether it be city or social or health related, privately or publicly funded or paid by our tax dollars, lies to us.
Blatant lies to our faces or glaring omissions of facts.
Or simply ignore our questions(VIHA, City Social Planner, I mean you, in particular). Do not respond to correspondence. Leave us out of the planning of services that will directly and PROFOUNDLY affect US...since none of you actually live in the places you assault.
The new by-laws from Mayor and Council that allow social services to go in without a zoning meeting means that now we have NO SAY whatsoever. None. Kiss your voice goodbye. And guess where VIHA wants their new drop-in centre, needle exchange, crackpipe hand out station? And guess where the 7-10 Club plans to go? And the projected 10-unit wet housing from our city social planner? And guess where Mayor and Council is going to let them go?!?
All within two blocks of the Salvation Army Walmart Style Super Centre....cuz that's about the only place the new zoning bylaws affect. Go figure. We found out all of this about the same week that the city offered us curbs. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors.
Despite spending our tax dollars on several different studies(tens of thousands of city tax dollars per study, mind you) that have repeatedly all said one thing...that concentrating social services DOES NOT WORK, it seems that is what they are bound and determined to do it anyway. You know, cuz it has worked so well in places like Skid Row and Vancouver's Downtown Lower Eastside. Huge, glaring examples, time and time again, city after city, of what not to do disregarded in favour of the same old non-working plan. There is not one original idea, not one plan that sees beyond the next five minutes, not one agency that is empathetic to the suffering of hard-working, tax-paying, home-owning people in the south end who are overwhelmed with the bad choices of the SOCIAL SERVICE INDUSTRY here in Nanaimo....time and again. VIHA has taken no responsibility for the dismal running of the drop-in centre that has been pushed out of three seperate leases in two years.
Now, they just plan on buying a place(and even though they said in the paper just yesterday that they don't have the money for it YET, they did in fact make an offer to purchase a place so we count another lie down in their column, whether blatant or by ommission can be your call).
And, after the city has dumped 80+ million and counting of your tax dollars, Nanaimo, into "revitalizing" the downtown core, to the detriment of nearly every other tax related service(roads, lifeguards, maintennance, etc), every single high impact(and countless low impact) social services will be right there, too. Congratulations. Oh, and then, let's raise your property taxes.
The southend now rivals the northend in tax rates and property assessments and yet the northend does not have to deal with any needle exchanges, drop-in centres, wet housing, crack-pipes handout stations, yaddayadda....why is that?
*Lou Reed inducted Leonard Cohen, reading selections from his lyrics. “We are so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is,” he said. Of all the honorees, Cohen seemed most surprised to be there. “This is a very unlikely occasion for me. It is not a distinction that I coveted or even dared dream about,” he said, adding a joke that played off a famous quote about Bruce Springsteen: “So I’m reminded of the prophetic statement of Jon Landau in the early Seventies: I have seen the future of rock and roll and it is not Leonard Cohen.”
* In his affectionate induction speech for Mellencamp, Billy Joel celebrated him as an American rebel at a time when the nation needs one. “This country has been hijacked,” Joel said. “People need to hear a voice like yours to echo the discontent in the heartland … Someone’s got to tell ‘em don’t take any shit, and John, you do that very well.”
