Mail Bag

We welcome feedback from our readers. Letters may be edited for length. Email your comments to isabelle@ prliving.ca, or mail an old-school letter in the post to qathet Living, 7053E Glacier St, Powell River, BC V8A 5J7.

Crime conversation deserves nuance – and doesn’t always get it

Dear qathet Living,

Thank you for your January issue, where the complex issues around mental health, drug addiction, crime, and housing are getting the thoughtful dialogue they deserve. This recent series of publications that began like an episode of The Fugitive, with Ron Woznow as deputy marshal and the marginalized in our community as the one-armed man, is finally bringing forward voices that provide considered input on the issues at hand.

The one exception continues to be our mayor, who begins with the incredibly over-simplified comment that not all addicts “want out,” and then draws a parallel to the complexity of managing care in our community with coaching a hockey team.

I’m grateful that he is only one vote on our council.

Gary Shilling

Now, the focus must shift to holding the drug dealers accountable

Dear qathet Living,

qathet Living’s three-part series on the inter-related issues of crime, drug addiction, mental health, and homelessness in Powell River was a tremendous achievement. It would have been easy to focus on just one or two aspects of a fiendishly complicated problem, or to assign blame to one or another group of people while letting others off the hook, or to suggest that there is some single, simple solution when what is needed is many inter-related solutions, coming from individuals, institutions, and governments on many levels. So congratulations on a job well done.

However, given that the main focus of the series was on property crime, it is surprising that there was one road you chose not to follow, despite a huge neon sign shouting “this is crucial!”

In striking a balance between the extremes of “lock up those damn thieves and throw away the key” and “just give all the addicts free drugs” you looked into the life of Josh Bennett, a young man who grew up in Powell River in a succession of foster homes and, beginning at age 13, began a long fall into uncontrollable addiction to almost every drug imaginable, culminating in a need for fentanyl so overwhelming that stealing was the only way to pay for it.

After several attempts at rehabilitation he is clean and sober now, and it would be a hard-hearted person indeed who did not feel sympathy for him, or who felt that the world would be a better place if we had just locked him up and thrown away the key.

But in the middle of his story, you quote him as saying, “I wasn’t getting high anymore; I was just using to stop being sick, to stop having withdrawals. The drug dealers would give me lists of stuff they’d want stolen, and I’d go to the stores and get what they wanted.” You write that it was to fulfill those lists that he would steal clothes and electronics – and even meat and ice cream – from stores; and pick locks, break into houses and garages, and steal tools, weed eaters, vacuums and more.

It is hard not to have sympathy for him, and easy to be glad that he was able to get the help he needed. But what about the dealers that gave him those lists of things to steal? If ever there was anything that needed to be followed up in a story about property crime in Powell River, it is surely that there are those among us who are not only pushing drugs, but pushing drug users ever deeper into a life of crime.

I hope that thinking about this will move you to add one more installment to your series on crime in our city.

David Harris

Hotel versus Opera

Dear qathet Living, Thank you for the Blast from the Past article in January 2023’s qL

However please note the larger picture is the Marble Bay Hotel and smaller picture was the opera house and then hospital. The museum is in the old Van Anda elementary school on the site where the opera/hospital building was (not in the Marble Bay Hotel.)

Lynne Schroeder