The fallout from our surprise revelation that 200 Disraeli was the chosen location for the NDP’s drug consumption facility garnered strong reaction from the area residents, businesses and a church deemed unworthy of prior consultation.
But they weren’t the only ones with valid concerns about the possible ramifications for the neighborhood, who the “harm reduction” proponents kept in the dark. And in Episode 36, we review a lengthy email sent to TGCTS by Mynarski Councillor Ross Eadie- who thanked us because “no city councillor could find out to answer resident’s requests for information.”
Part 1- “I believe safe consumption sites are needed to generally save lives as we hear from parents and family expressing the sorrow of the deaths of loved ones on the street,” Coun. Eadie wrote.
However, “What no one has brought up except myself is the pilot mobile safe injection site funded by the federal government in Winnipeg summary report and recommendations released some time ago.”
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14.00 Hear why Eadie prefers mobile and multiple smaller sites over a single destination-:”what reality has already demonstrated in the move of SSCOPE to the former Neechi Commons building to provide temporary housing.”
He described that reality in stark terms and how it affected the quality of life in North Point Douglas. He doesn’t want to see it come to the other side of the CPR tracks.
“Continue the mobile safe consumption site program in other areas so there is no mass migration to the edges of South Point Douglas where there is already so many struggling in life.”
19.20 Part 2- In the course of the controversy unfolding, the Point Douglas Residents Association raised the problem that at City Hall, there is no unified voice through a single council member for the area.
While the group maintained the ward boundaries are a result of “gerrymandering,” Eadie pushes back on that belief.
Listen to a redistricting solution he tried to put forward that was quashed by another councillor, and about a meeting held without his knowledge by two other councillors that intends to interject “the brainiacs” from the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative into core area planning “when the NGOs and residents already know the solutions to the underlying problems.”
We go into what the Harvard project – a program of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University– is about with excerpts from their website.
When you hear which the other Mayors from Canada are involved, you’ll be wondering why Mayor Gillingham is wasting your tax dollars on something that very much resembles Metro’s discredited Plan20-50– a make-work project for out-of-town, out-of-touch consultants.
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