New Home For Needle Exchange: One Man's Opinion

By Ben Meisner

The City has an opportunity to now pay more than lip service to the downtown, by choosing a location that takes the needle exchange out of the eyes of some of the city's better restaurants and hotels.

There are locations that are less visible.   

Did the city purposely legislate the needle exchange to the area?  Think about it, the hooker trade and the junkies were encouraged to move into an area where, at one time, retail shops flourished.

Instead of trying to spread the street people around the area, a solid effort was made to put all of the problems into a few short street.  The effort was either deliberate or without thought.  I for one don't buy into the idea they didn’t know what their actions would do to the business in the area.

While it has not been officially reported, the fire that destroyed the businesses along George Street was deliberately set. So what do we have now?  The General Manager of one of  the leading hotels pleading with the city and the health authority to at least move the needle exchange away from his door to another location.

Our planning of the city was supposed to be far more forward thinking than communities such as Nanaimo or Kelowna where retail simply moved out of the core away from the problems of the street into a new area which quickly became, essentially, the downtown core.

We looked at bad planning in both Nanaimo and Kelowna and then, in its infinite wisdom, the city took exactly the same approach and so we have a new downtown and we have abandoned the old core to the folks of the street.

To make matters worse, they have been effectively placed in a specific area either by encouragement or by pressure.

We have businesses which established, spent good money trying to make an effort to survive, only to be thwarted by the decisions of a city which doesn't even feel the need to pay them lip service.

I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion 

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