had enough of NIMBY's

How many people are there in your immediate family? How about your extended family? Ok, how many people do you work with? How about friends, how many do you have? How many are really close to you? How many people out there, reading this have more than 5 people in their lives that are important to them.

Hopefully there are more than 5 people out there that will read this post...

About a week ago I came home to find a single paged leaflet in the mail alerting me and the fine folks of Hastings Sunrise to a potentially disastrous development about to take place at 2750 East Hastings. (site of the former Bell Funeral Home) The group that produced the flyer (sorry, I can't remember their name and my wife recycled the flyer before I had the presence of mind to write this) is urging residents to do whatever we can to stop this atrocity from occurring in our back yard. Write or call your MLA or city hall, take part in a rally... whatever just do something else our neighbourhood will surely be doomed!

So what is the development that is chilling the bones of this very concerned group? A supervised injection site? Is it another liquor store? An arcade (are there still arcades out there?) Is it a skateboard park or are they thinking about building mechanical dinosaurs in Hastings Park? Slot machines?

Sorry, all good guesses but its none of those...coming soon to 2750 East Hastings, Bosa Land Corporation hopes to build a 3 story building that will house a Shoppers Drug Mart on the main floor and offices for Vancouver Coastal Health on the 2nd and 3rd floors. Scary huh! Ok so VCH plans to use these offices to provide counselling and outreach services for patients suffering mental illness. I guess I can see how the ignorant and uninformed might be a little bit scared. These people probably aren't aware that 40% of the clients that will use the facility already live within walking distance of it as they are likely stuck on the fact that 1 in 10 of the people who will use the facility have a chemical dependency. So what!

The group that is opposed to this new mental health facility, in truth offices for outreach workers and approximately 70 clients per day, is clearly misinformed and they would like the rest of us to believe that by allowing this development our neighbourhood will become the next downtown eastside. Once built, according to those ignorant about mental illness and the services that VCH already provides in other communities, our community will be flooded with drug addicts, panhandlers and the homeless. At least those that aren't here already. The truth is however, that there is already a mental health facility that services the DTES located at 330 Heatley meaning that there would really be no sensible reason to believe that our facility would service anyone other than primarily our residents.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association nearly 1 in 5 Canadians or about 20% of the population will personally experience a mental illness within their lifetime. So again I have to ask, how many people do you know? When I look closely at my friends and family some days I think this number could be more like 1 in 2, but seriously what do we tell our loved ones who need the help as we write our letters, make our phone calls and march en masse to stop this development. Personally I'm ashamed!

Mental illness accounts for approximately 4% of all hospital visits in this country and its treatment costs us about $7.331 billion per year. There are proven and effective treatments for most forms of mental illness and many of those treatments will be available to our community (and others) at 2750 East Hastings. Unless our own selfishness and ignorance gets in the way, you see the trouble with mental illness and the greatest barrier to a persons ability to get treatment is the stigma that we hang on our friends and family members that suffer from it.

Shame on those of you out there that would stand in the way of this badly needed facility!

On another note... sometimes I find myself trapped between the things that I like and my own ideologies (see the comments on my last post). While I really used to enjoy drinking Miller Genuine Draft I had to stop only because of the fact that Miller is owned by cigarette giant Phillip Morris. Many of you will think that this is ridiculous but then I've never admitted to be anything other than ridiculous. In doing research for a tobacco-free strategy at my last job I also learned a surprising fact about Shoppers Drug Mart, a fact that in my mind makes the above development thousands of times more objectionable than the mental health facility that will occupy most of it. Shoppers Drug Mart is owned by none other than Imasco... the same company that controls about 69% of the Canadian tobacco market through its "Players" brand.

So while I personally support VCH's bid for a new facility, guess which new drug store in the community I won't be using.