Editor:
No excuses this time, voters! You must exercise your wonderful right to vote for who will run the affairs of New Westminster for the next four years.
Firstly consider the school board, even if you don’t have children in it right now.
The present elected school board voted 6-1 to kick the police out of all of our schools. You should consider how important is it to bring back permanently the school liaison officer (SLO) program in schools. The program includes many other benefits and duties, and having the dedicated professional police on site is a huge benefit.
Otherwise the bad guys out there have a free hand to “recruit “ teenagers on school grounds to get into their deadly gangs.The police know who these bad guys are and will chase them away or arrest them. That protection for the children is worth its weight in gold! So ask which party or candidates are in favour or against this program. And in this day of uncertainty in many things in the world, we owe these children some security, trust and hope.
Then we have the core issues we expect the mayor and council to use their very limited time to address, fix and improve. The obvious ones are the road and sidewalk repairs. But as I know the majority of you want even more is to feel safe to walk about or go to the stores without being shot, stabbed or just generally harassed.
So while the homeless have their own problem (which I believe is a problem first for both the provincial and federal governments to deal with!), we, the law-abiding taxpayer citizens, shouldn’t need to worry about their fragile mental health ending up harming us or our children. And it’s obvious in the Lower Mainland that what is being done by governments simply isn’t working. And remember what Albert Einstein said his definition of insanity was: “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results!”.
And please support and give a huge shoutout to our police department, as they do an exemplary job for all of us.
Bill Davis, New Westminster
