A stink has stunk up the air above pre-Olympics Vancouver by the sea. Effluent spewing from one affluent nook on the west side. From pleasant Dunbar. From a vocal pack of elitists who presume to speak for all Dunbar.
The story, Thursday. Vocal pack of local elitists advise area businesses to call 9-1-1, the police emergency line, to have panhandlers moved along...somewhere else, obviously. Vocal pack claim the police recommend this action. Police are quick to deny it. There is much outcry...waste of police resources...nimbyism...from the general public, and saner Dunbar residents the vocal pack apparently do not speak for.
Friday, afternoon: the story changed. Corrections. Clarifications. Disclaimers. Water on the fire.
From the police: "This is a mistake..." — whatever mistake means. Their reminder the public should only ever call the non-emergency line in regard to non-emergency situations.
A somebody on the vocal pack's unmoderated online forum now pointed at for the inflammatory description of panhandlers as undesirables and certainly non-residents who, if not shooed away, will "...multiply like cockroaches". Simply, the vocal pack distancing themselves, and I'm guessing in a buzz over what all this unwanted attention might do to area business. CBC's online comments filling by the hour with public vows to never again shop in Dunbar. Hotter heads comparing the mind that dehumanizes, sees a person as vermin, as no different than the Nazi who might concentrate them all in camps.
Such a kerfuffle!, they must've thought. They weren't presuming to do the government's job. They weren't trying to fix a social problem. They were only trying to keep their neighbourhood as they like it.
Sloppy as news services can be, possibly CBC got enough of the thing wrong to warrant the rewrite. I must say I barely recognized the gutted thing when I went online to re-read it and its comments Friday night. You can have a go yourself, read between the sanitized lines. Here's the story: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/04/23/bc-dunbar-panhandlers-email.html
Easter Monday in B.C. 2024!
5 weeks ago
1 comment:
The CBC at its worst pretending they're hard hitting media. They misattributed sources and took quotes out of context. The local CBC kept the story alive after requests from the CBC Media Relations that it be shelved. The CBC Ombudsman has these details in his hands.
The POLICE made the comment about phoning 911, not anyone from either Dunbar or the DRA. The Dunbar Patrol have an official contact officer and the comment was just REPEATING police advice. Talk about confusing the messenger with the message! Duh!
The CBC skewered an old man after he answered their questions about homeless people. Mind you he had had a murder a few weeks before within walking distance from his house... and a lot of media then were suggesting Wendy Beaudry was killed by someone living in the park. Duh!!
The CBC allowed venom to pour out of their readers onto the Dunbar Residents Association through emails and the CBC Comment section, and then wrote a tiny correction absolving the DRA. Duh!
Dunbar has a mailing list and every email address is valid, whereas the CBC have an unmoderated "comments" forum where they keep NO contact information. Duh!
Two Dunbar people made LOUD STUPID comments in the Dunbar Mailing List about the "panhandlers" but a 100 people made just as vicious remarks about the DRA and Dunbar people on the CBC site and in emails. Duh!
"No panhandlers were hit or injured in the making of these comments."
Too give a slightly different sense of the Dunbar Scene, it's the yearly Salmonberry Days, a local festival of walks, talks and adventures. On May 1st, it was Dunbar's Night Skies with a number of volunteer astronomers with their telescopes and over 200 people in a park in the dark. Everyone had a glorious time... even the police who came to answer a noise complaint from a house party... and found the rowdies lined up to have their look through a telescope at the moon.
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