What will Red Deer look like under new management in the future? As I write this in the week of the election, I am filled with the questions about such things as: how will the City council look at and deal with the street population as the city continues to grow and will they adopt the same policies as before or try to be more progressive in their adaptation to a given situation?
Many city residents will agree we have a problem in Red Deer with the city centre being increasingly populated with folks who are unemployed, addicted, or otherwise discombobulated with and from the rest of society. This problem is really not unique to this fair city, it is a situation that almost every city in North America, if not the world, has to deal with. Some have more success than others, but they all have the same problems.
Although many thousands of dollars have been spent on studies and a few ideas have progressed from them, to spend more money on studies is, in my mind, ludicrous.
Instead, should we not be putting more effort into a task force to actually implement some of the ideas that have been successful in other cities?
A good friend at the kitchen often talks about how we deal with a situation as it presents itself to us. Do we react or do we respond? Reaction is often a knee-jerk adaptation to a problem, whereas a response is spending time and effort to determine the most equitable results.
It will not come as a surprise that in the current location of the soup kitchen, we garner a lot of complaints from businesses and workers walking downtown while the street people loiter outside of the building simply because they have nowhere to go. We used to have a place called Berachah’s, but the funding was pulled from that to put into more sustainable housing which never happened.
After some meetings with the city and all of the helping agencies, the funding was reinstated and put into a Warming Centre, which does not open till Nov. 1. Hence the population will loiter where it wants – around our building, the library, stores, wherever they can stay out of the elements until the next accepting place opens up.
So now the chore of reacting or responding will fall to a new group of city representatives. As I perused all of their profiles, I read all the promises and good intentions to help the situation of this part of our community, but the question remains, will they react or respond?
I fully believe that we live in one of the fairest cities in Canada and we love it here, so my wish is that we elect a council who will take a holistic approach to dealing with a segment of our community that is the most vulnerable to mishandling and knee-jerk reactions to their presence. We will always have them with us and so we need to find the best solutions possible to treat them fairly, responsibly, but firmly and with the compassion that every person in our community deserves.
Just moving the kitchen as a reaction to complaints is just so much political rezoning. Like I mentioned earlier, a response is dealing with a situation after spending time and making some effort as a city as a whole. This I believe should be more of what we might expect from a group of people who will call themselves our representatives.
Like a placard says on a demonstration,”Honk, if you agree!”
Chris Salomons is the kitchen co-ordinator of Potter’s Hands in Red Deer.