Yesterday, I attended the Community Safety and Wellbeing Conference the City of Victoria hosted. The conference organizers invited me to be a panellist on “Urban Cities Safety.”
The conference started with an opening on Truth and Reconciliation, where one of the key takeaways for me was that reconciliation starts with meaningful relationships. Before trying to “do reconciliation,” local government leaders need to go for coffee and tea with elders and leaders of host Nations, get to know each other, and build trust. This relationship-building takes time, but you cannot do challenging work without having a solid relational foundation. This relationship theme weaved its way throughout the conference.
I also heard from Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto about the work that her city is doing to create its first Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan. The plan started with talking with a large cross-section of the community, including people who usually don’t participate in local city initiatives. The plan includes actions that need to be taken by the province, police, non-profit sector, and the city. Three things stood out to me from Mayor Alto’s presentation.
The first was that the province plays a significant role in community safety and wellbeing as it funds housing and mental health care. If we had adequate housing for everyone and better access to mental health care (including treatment), we would be 80% there.
The second thing that stood out was that the City of Victoria will be asking the community if they want to increase their city property tax to fund some of the gaps in service that the federal and provincial governments should otherwise fund.
The third thing for me was that their Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan is very similar to the Citizens’ Assembly on Community Safety work we are doing in Langley City.
The former BC Chief Coroner Lisa LaPointe provided an overview of BC’s toxic drug crisis. Some key takeaways were that street fentanyl is still what is killing people. She said that the toxic drug crisis is a fentanyl crisis. She also said that of about 100,000 people who use fentanyl in BC, only about 5,000 have access to “safer supply” alternatives from their doctor. The final takeaway was that the province’s unregulated private treatment system may do more harm than good. She said the province must set and enforce private treatment centres standards.
I was a panellist on the “Urban Cities Safety” with the Mayor of Nanaimo, Leonard Krog and the Mayor of Bend, Oregon, Melanie Kebler. One takeaway from the panel was that to create community safety, we need to work on universality, which means that the best programs help everyone. An example of these kinds of programs could be a free food program in a school or, at the federal scale, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.
Another takeaway was that local governments need to play a facilitator role because many of the programs and groups that are meant to help out folks operate in silos, limiting their effectiveness. To see meaningful change, we need to bring the province and service providers together and have transparent measures to see what is helping and what is not.
The final takeaway was that the challenges we face in our communities cannot be addressed in one four-year election term; we need to embed a culture of working together and transparently measuring the effectiveness of our program in government and non-profit systems that can withstand political change.
It was a packed day yesterday, and for me, it confirmed that Langley City is on the right course as we work to improve community safety.
