Issues, Municipal

Snow? Freezing cold? To bad.

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It was good to step out Saturday morning and see that the snow they had been predicting for Friday night/Saturday morning had not arrived, even though it was unseasonably cold for March.

The City of Abbotsford, despite the predictions of snow and subzero temperatures, had just torn down the home (his camp) of an acquaintance of mine: turning him out into weather that had extreme weather shelters opening across the lower mainland to provide protection from the predicted freezing weather.

I spoke to him after his home was hauled away and he assured me he had already found another spot to camp. Still it is a different matter to be headed into freezing cold weather in an camp you are just setting up, rather than a camp that was well established and in which you had already survived the earlier snowfalls in.

The City had been informed that there was no housing suitable to meet the housing needs of this individual (and others like him) and that because there was no place for him to move to, tearing down his camp would render him without shelter from the elements.

The only thing the City’s actions accomplished, other than wasting the limited resources of the City, was to place this person’s health and life at risk by turning him out into the freezing weather.

Abbotsford seems desperate to close down the camps before the image of the Peardonville bridge fire fade from the public’s memory and they lose their excuse to be turning people out of their shelter, their homes.

And it is no more than a deceitful excuse until they start throwing everybody out into the street from apartments, condos and houses to protect them from fires – since far more people die from fire inside than out.

With the City apparently dedicated to continuing their pointless behaviour of tearing down homes and forcing people to relocate to a new camping location, other experienced homeless are asking about my supply of (or access to) blankets. Thus when the City comes by to haul their shelter away they will be able to get replacement bedding to survive the weather and the elements.

With all the money the City has wasted over the years I have been watching and writing about this pointless behaviour of chasing the homeless around the city, the City could have built the needed housing. But no, the City would prefer to cry poverty while pointlessly wasting taxpayer’s money – as opposed to spending it wisely and accomplish something.

Message to City Council: we are in a recession; we cannot afford this continued pointless waste of money; we need thoughtful behaviour for a change.

Issues, Municipal

Simply because we can?

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If Mayor George Peary is correct and the Abbotsford Police lack “adequate resources”, why are they wasting any of their limited resources chasing the homeless from campsite to campsite around the City of Abbotsford?

I would not have thought that engaging in the pointless moving of the homeless from campsite to campsite around Abbotsford would have been a priority the APD would be spending its limited resources pursuing.

I am reasonably sure that in this time of cutbacks and restraint (at least for other city councils in BC) that taxpayers, having to dig deep in their pockets for the $4,000,000 increase in the police budget, expect to have that money spent wisely on priority needs.

I am also reasonably sure that taxpayers do not consider chasing the homeless from campsite to campsite a priority when gunfights are breaking out on city streets.

So why are we?

Municipal

“adequate resources” don’t exist

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Mayor Peary was not the only politician saying that their police force lacked “adequate resources” to deal with guns, gangs and crime. The television news was and is full of politicians making these statements.

Of course “resources” is politico speak for taxpayer dollars and “inadequate resources” is politico speak for more taxpayer dollars. In other words – tax increases.

The vital question that Mayor Peary and the other assorted politicians have all ignored is “What is an adequate level of resources in terms of taxpayer dollars?”

One can only hope that this failure is political self-interest and not because it never occurred to the politicians to ask “What is “adequate,” what is enough taxpayer dollars?”

Political self-interest because trying to solve social problems using the police, the courts and incarceration creates a black hole into which as many tax dollars as the politicians can wring from the public will disappear – with no discernable effect.

Doubt that? Examine the evidence.

Over the past 7+ decades society has spent more and more money on police services; increased spending which has had no discernable effect on the growth and the problems associated with addiction. Over seventy years of law enforcement and these social issues have grown larger and more costly each of those 70+ years.

This continuing of behaviour that has been repeatedly demonstrated to be so ineffectual as to be pointless is understandable for the police and the politicians. Under this policy the police not only get to keep their jobs but to expand their bureaucratic empires; the politicians get to keep their bogeymen and whipping boys for public hate and fear mongering at election time.

Getting off the merry-go-round of doing the same thing over and over and over hoping that one of these decades (centuries?) the outcome will change would provide the opportunity to stop the continuous haemorrhaging of tax dollars into this black hole.

Focusing on the underlying realities of these social problems, rather than what ideology says is true or what one believes is true or what one wants to be true, would open the door to making policy choices that would acheive positive outcomes in addressing these social problems.

I don’t hold out much hope for this behaviour change until the cost of staying on the merry-go-round of this behaviour becomes so painful to the public they have no other options but to demand a change in approach/behaviour.

In the meantime in this time of economic downturn, with city council’s seeking cutbacks and restraint (except Abbotsford’s council), lower mainland police forces will receive millions of dollars in increases to their budgets.

For all those decades of failure and being ineffectual to the point of open gang warfare on our streets the Police are rewarded with million dollar budget increases.

Irony of the first order.