Last week, the Lethbridge Police Service released data for calls to service in Lethbridge. For some reason, they organized that data in reference to the Supervised Consumption Site,
Here are two images for reference.
Author: Kim Siever
I live in Lethbridge with my spouse and 5 of our 6 children. I’m a writer, focusing on social issues and the occasional poem. My politics are radically left. I recently finished writing a book debunking several capitalism myths. My newest book writing project is on the labour history of Lethbridge.
I’m also dichotomally Mormon. And I’m a functional vegetarian: I have a blog post about that somewhere around here. My pronouns are he/him.
I decided to try a new feature here on my blog last month: my most popular social media posts. Well, here is the second installment:
I get that it’s problematic for Justin Trudeau to dress up in brownface, but it’s also problematic when we focus on it.
During the Macleans/CityTV federal leadership debate, Andrew Scheer, was asked whether he would implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada if elected. While he did indicate in his response that he found UNDRIP to be an important provision with “many laudable goals”, he also said the following:
I keep seeing people holding up Portugal as the preeminent example of how to respond to the drug crisis. In the last two decades, drug usage among youth has dropped, their STI rate has dropped, their drug-related death rate has dropped, and their treatment rate has gone up.
Those results are certainly better than Canada’s, so it makes sense that Canadians would want to mirror that.
Except, Portugal’s approach doesn’t go far enough.
Every time we have a municipal election, candidates claim they have the solution to improve transit ridership. The problem is that none of their solutions will work.
Their solutions are always bandaid solutions that never address the underlying causes of low ridership. Few people take the bus in Lethbridge because it is way too convenient to drive.
If you want to be serious about increasing ridership, you have to make driving more inconvenient.
It’d take drastic, unconventional measures to increase ridership, but most city councils (present and future) will never go for it.
Here are a few measures I could think of off the top of my head to make driving more inconvenient and transit more attractive:
- Eliminate bus fares
- Make 15 min frequency standard (7 min across Whoop Up)
- Have fewer routes stop downtown
- Make holiday/Sunday service same as the rest of the week
- Stop adding lanes to existing roadways
- Stop creating additional arterials
- Don’t build a third bridge
- Implement exorbitant commuter parking fees
- Outlaw non-resident parking in London Road, Tudor, and Varsity Village, and near the hospital.
- Make university and college parking exorbitant for Lethbridge users
- Make drivers yield to buses at all times
- Give buses ability to change traffic lights
- Increase number of bus shelters and make them heated
But campaigning on all of these, let along implementing them, would be political suicide. So no one will do it, and we will continue to have low transit ridership.
Does anyone else find it rich that Americans want to stop Mexicans from crossing their border?
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5 ways to finally address drug crime
Drug crime is an issue in Lethbridge.
Dealers sell their drugs in the city. People steal from business, homes, and cars as a way to raise money to buy drugs.
But the only solution we’ve tried is enforcement. It’s not working.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Richard Nixon coined the phrase “war on drugs”. But this so-called war hasn’t really solved anything.
I mean, sure, our prisons are filled with people convicted of drug-related offences. But drug usage is still happening. Drug dealing is still happening. And property and violent crime related to the drug trade is still happening.
We need real solutions that address the underlying causes of drug crime: supply and poverty. Here are 5:
By decriminalizing all drugs and creating a pharmacare programme that would see distribution of those drugs through pharmacies at no cost to the consumer, we’d virtually eliminate drug dealers and improve the quality of the drugs (thereby reducing health risks for the users).
By redirecting enforcement funding (since drugs would no longer be illegal), we could improve prevention and treatment programmes to discourage addiction from even becoming an issue and properly addressing it when it does.
By implementing programmes that reduce or even eliminate poverty, people will no longer have an incentive to commit crime as a way to get money.
Unfortunately, most politicians don’t want to do this because it’s political suicide, and the general public opposes it because it sounds like money.
Not too long ago, I went through a phase where I was watching YouTube videos of debates, interviews, and round tables of the new atheists. I was drawn to what seemed to be their rationality. This led me to the broader skeptic community on YouTube.
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How landlords exploit renters
People don’t agree with me when I tell them that landlords exploit their renters to make money.