PETERS – Vernon shopping cart ban rolls homelessness problem down the road
(Image: Mel Rothenburger photo)
IMAGINE BELIEVING you can do something positive for your community by banning shopping carts.
That’s just what Vernon did this week, after a business coalition came to council with a suite of recommendations on how to better handle the homeless population in the city.
The head of that business coalition told our colleagues at Beach Radio in Vernon that the city needs to turn around its reputation as one that turns a blind eye to bad behaviour associated with homelessness.
Here in Kamloops, we’ve had our own shopping cart wars.
James Peters is the radio anchor at CFJC, coming to Kamloops in 2006. He anchors the afternoon news on B-100 and 98.3 CIFM, and contributes weekly editorials to the CFJC Evening News. He tweets regularly @Jamloops.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
We have a guy in our neighbourhood who regularly dumps his cart full of garbage, and I mean garbage in our lot, he will dump it right beside or even around the dumpster but never in. Yesterday I was out watering my plants when I had gone into refill the water, I came out to him beginning to empty his cart. Now innthis cart of his there’s bags of excrement, things with vomit on them, and numerous take out containers and brand new items that sometimes probably haven’t even been used because some are still in packages. Point being, if he didn’t have that cart to haul around I believe he would t be dumping as much, and as far as I am concerned, being someone who has to clean it up regularly, I believe it’s a step in the right direction. Will it work, we don’t know, but at this point any step is a good step, even if it shows us that it’s one of the things that isn’t working. Hopefully it will lead to one action that will work. Asking nicely does not deter this behaviour. And cleaning up needles, excrement and vomit every day or week, should not be part of operating a business, but it has become one. Some people do not use the carts to just haul their belongings, and unfortunately it’s those people that have wrecked it for the ones who use their carts for their belongings.
We all are being effected by the ones who either don’t care or are so far gone they don’t know what they are doing, and none of us need to be going through this everyday.
I feel for these people, but I also feel for people going through the after effects of their addictions. It’s my hope that the new Government will implement services that actually work for these poor people so hopefully in future this situation will be a thing of the past, for everyone.
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What are you guys doing in Kamloops? You have had homeless and street entrenched ppl for many years. I’m curious what you have tried or have done or are doing
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