Letters May 27: A message for a thief; wearing masks; helping the homeless

A message for the garden-box thief

To the cowardly spewpot who stole my new garden box in the dead of night:

You are a festering wound on the heart of Canadian niceness. No one should hold the door for you.

You are a disappointment to your chiropractor.

Your very presence curdles milk and causes flowers to fade.

Nausea itself becomes sick at the sight of you.

Your most distant cousins will genetically engineer themselves to remove any connection to your legacy.

The shame of having besmirched the Earth with your birth will drive your parents into an early grave.

You’re a tosser. I dislike you quite a bit.

P.S. Please bring it back.

Joshua McKenty
Victoria

Encourage public to wear masks

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Canadian officials have actively discouraged, then weakly recommended the use of non-medical masks by the public.

Wearing masks to reduce catching infectious quantities of airborne disease is as old as history. There must be many, many studies as to how masks lower infection rates, but all our health officials have at one point recommended against this common-sense practice. This policy has undoubtedly taken the lives of Canadians.

Wearing masks should be mandatory when publicly mixing with strangers.

Jim Ramsden
Victoria

A longer-term plan to help homeless

Whilst I applaud the compassion behind the province’s short-term initiative to move homeless people from Pandora Avenue and Topaz Park into hotels and motels, I wonder when the government will provide a mid- to long-term strategy for addressing the many challenges that we face in dealing effectively with the homeless issue.

Moving 400 people from Pandora and Topaz is a start. What about the other homeless people in various areas of the city?

Do “we” (because ultimately it is a collective “we”) put them into hotels as well? Do we buy more motels?

When homeless people elsewhere see that in Vancouver and Victoria they can get free accommodation, food, health care and safe access to drugs, what do we do when they come to town and set up a tent on Pandora or in Stadacona Park?

Are taxpayers prepared to pay for these supports on an ongoing basis in addition to all the other debt that is now being accumulated? Apart from the Comfort Inn, will hotels/motels want their rooms back when tourists return?

I am reminded of a caution that applies here, and that is: “When you open a can of worms, get a bigger can.”

Hopefully the province can soon provide us with a plan to address homelessness that is both transparent, costed and more detailed than buying the Comfort Inn and at some point redeveloping that site for affordable housing.

Andrew Lane
Victoria

Hundreds of homeless still need help

Re: “Eight arrested as officials clear campers from Pandora Avenue boulevard,” May 24.

After reading the story about the final police action to disperse the homeless sheltering in tents along Pandora Avenue, we fear Times Colonist readers may be left with the mistaken impression that all those without homes have either been housed or been offered housing.

So far, 344 people have moved into hotels and temporary accommodations like the arena provided by B.C. Housing and that is to be applauded.

The last point-in-time count in 2018 found approximately 1,500 people in need of permanent housing in Victoria. More than half of those enumerated were unsheltered or living in emergency shelters.

There are at least 300 people currently on the street who weren’t at Topaz Park or Pandora Avenue on April 25, when the provincial order was passed, and who haven’t been provided the option of shelter. There is much more work to be done.

While the province and city have made strides far beyond any taken in the past, the fact remains that many people have few options for sheltering beyond tenting at the moment.

As health-care professionals, we strongly encourage officials to continue to pursue a housing-first approach and to abandon the enforcement actions that serve only to disperse, displace and destabilize people already vulnerable to harms. Actions like those taken this weekend by the police don’t help anyone and can only serve to further isolate people at a time when services are limited and risk for overdose is highest.

We can’t reach Social Development and Poverty Reduction Minister Shane Simpson’s goal of permanent housing solutions if we stop halfway.

Corey Ranger, RN
Anne Nguyen, MD, CCFP (AM), dipISAM
Ashley Heaslip, MD, CCFP, MPH, PhD (candidate), dipISAM
Kelsey Roden, MD, CCFP
Victoria Inner-City Covid Response (VICCR)

Damage in Beacon Hill might be irreversible

The province assumed emergency measures control in Victoria and overturned permission for homeless tenting in Beacon Hill Park.

Why then exclude Beacon Hill tenters from housing plans implemented for the mandatory dismantling of Pandora and Topaz?

Is it optics, because park tenting is less concentratedly visible? Surely, this area is environmentally sensitive; the damage will be expensive to repair and perhaps irreversible.

A sample situation. In the upper park, I encountered a tenter bike-riding on delicate plant-life along upper rock ridges, shouting about the difficulty of navigating that craggy terrain, then barrelling down a very narrow path directly toward me.

When asked to please walk his bike, he exploded in threatening swearing — declaring me a female dog, and proclaiming his entitlement to do as he pleased because, pointing in the direction of his tent visible below, just above the native plant garden, the area was his home.

Were I mowed down or otherwise physically hurt by said clearly unstable individual, which jurisdiction would this senior need to sue?

Which authority will take responsibility for ecological damage to a unique area that already decimated-in-numbers park gardening staff and many volunteers have, for decades, worked so diligently to preserve and protect?

Who has sanctioned the contravention and reversal of the city bylaw that stipulates dismantling and removal of tents by 9 a.m. daily?

Answers and action are urgently needed. Another month of this fiasco is unacceptable.

Bat-Ami Hensen
Victoria

Bring B.C. Ferries back into public sector

Re: “As it loses $1M a day, B.C. Ferries has few options,” Les Leyne, April 21; and “When you can’t board the ferry despite being fourth in line,” Jack Knox, May 23.

As Les Leyne pointed out a few weeks ago and Jack Knox repeated in Saturday’s Times Colonist, B.C. Ferries is losing a million dollars a day. That’s no accident. When the former government fitted the ferries into a corporate business model, they were exposing an essential service that British Columbians depend on to market forces.

They did this for ideological reasons, believing with the true fervour of business devotees that business models are always better at delivering services — even public ones — than government models. This turns out to be wrong, obviously.

Now we see where that kind of ideological governance leads: straight to the fundamental vulnerability, in the event of a crisis, of any service that has to show a profit or that depends too much on user-fee revenue.

We need resiliency and reliability in our essential public services much more than we need corporate efficiencies, corporate C-suite salaries, and fiscal exposure to disasters.

It’s time for the NDP government to take B.C. Ferries back into the public-service sector and make it a reliable and resilient extension of the highways that it once was. Oh, and they should probably do the same thing with TransLink while they are at it.

Andrew Gow
Victoria

Fix potholes instead of Clover Point

Re: “Clover Point has no clover and that’s a problem,” comment, May 20; and “Clover Point just fine the way it is,” letter, May 21.

I agree with the letter-writer. For 13 years I have been walking the path from Cook Street, along Dallas Road around Clover Point and onto Gonzales Beach. I had no idea there was a problem.

Last Saturday, I walked along May Street on the new sidewalk.

I wondered what could be the reason for a new sidewalk alongside the cliff below Moss Rock Park. There is a perfectly usable sidewalk on the south side of May Street.

Since there seems to be funds for this kind of work, might I suggest to city council that they fix the ruts and bumps on Chapman, Oxford and Linden Streets so my bones stop getting jolted when I am cycling.

Sharon Fitch
Victoria

Send us your letters

• Email: letters@timescolonist.com

• Mail: Letters to the editor, Times Colonist, 2621 Douglas St., Victoria, B.C. V8T 4M2.

Letters should be no longer than 250 words and may be edited for length, legality or clarity. Include your full name, address and telephone number. Avoid sending letters as an email attachment.