To the Editor,
I spoke to council on Oct. 17 with my concerns placing low-barrier housing at 6025 Uplands Dr.
I stated that after speaking to many of the councillors one of them said to me, “Once these people are housed, they will be bombarded with love and inundated with medical and psychiatric help and they will be so well taken care of that in three to four weeks they will come around.”
I never identified the councillor and I spoke to six of them at length. And on Oct. 20 (Social housing opponents voice concerns), all you can report is that Pattje takes “exception to my comments”.
Well, I take exception to the lack of proper reporting of my speech.
On Nov. 3 (Social housing delay rejected), you used Coun. Bill Bestwick’s statement – “dishonest at best, deceitful at worst” – out of context.
I was at the meeting and so were more than 560 people and he was talking about the process of consulting the public. He was not addressing this personally to the council and city staff that Couns. Bill Holdom and Fred Pattje were begging apologies for.
If they wanted clarification, they should have come to the meeting when they were invited.
Was it not Holdom who made the motion to delay the Bowen Road project? And then he calls out Bestwick for following his convictions and asking to do the same with the Uplands site until the public is properly and democratically consulted?
I encourage everyone to vote correctly to put democracy back on the table in Nanaimo.
Katia Langton
Nanaimo