By Walter Neufeld. Mayor Banman and Council presided over homeless strategies which essentially harassed homeless people from one location to another while simultaneously ignoring the longstanding resources and service integrity provided by Abbotsford Community Services, et al. The City’s refusal to seek adequate stakeholder advisement is all the more astonishing in light of the City’s recent cascade of outrageously bad decisions.
But more astonishing still is the Mayor and Council’s reticence about providing its unambiguous support for ACS’s homeless initiative as a key component for the homeless in Abbotsford.
Abbotsford Council is challenged to come up with a better location, better service providers and a more cost effective solution to homelessness in Abbotsford than what has been proposed by ACS.
All this leaves reasonable people questioning why City Council’s narrative is so badly disconnected from the realities they see on the ground? For many concerned citizens, those disconnected narratives serve as a warning signal that bad decisions have been made for too long behind closed doors for the express purpose of serving special interests, but at the expense of the greater good.
It’s becoming clearer day by day that the only way to amend City Council’s proclivity for fairytale narratives is by helping it stop those kinds of destructive decisions in the first place.
The delusions driving those narratives need to be confronted.
And the politicians promoting those same delusions need to be held to account.
The integrity and vitality of our democratic process depends on it.
Originally published on Facebook.
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Walter Neufeld
*Walter Neufeld was born and raised in Abbotsford. He manages a development company operating in BC and in Alberta. Walter has been a critic of the provincial government’s dysfunctional Mines Act for over 12 years. Most recently, he’s critiqued both Honourable Randy Hawes and the gravel industries Aggregate Pilot Project. The Aggregate Pilot Project is a harmful private production document which Hawes is currently trying to offload onto BC’s public domain. He has been instrumental in publicizing details of the offer of millions of tax dollars to the YMCA by City staff and politicians.
His columns can be found here.
