Letter to the Editor

To our Civic, Provincial, and Federal Government and Law Enforcement:

I am going to be blunt; you are failing your communities in our country.  Daily as I traverse our community I am reminded of the catastrophic effects of the opioid crisis on our people. The things that we have put up with are a major shift in cultural reality.

We have lost at least two children that I know of in our community, both around 13 years of age.  I have heard of many more children as young as 12 suffering overdoses and being saved by first responders. This is a thing that absolutely should not be, and yet here it is.

People are dying every year in our community. People are being murdered. Youth as young as 12 are being sex trafficked, and when the town is just starting to bubble up with a bit of outrage there are finally a few arrests. This better be a start of more arrests and those arrests better stick.

We need change. We need help. Help for addicts who are living this nightmare, and real punishment for those who are helping feed it. Including the complacent RCMP, who I am sure are exhausted by the open door of criminal punishment in Canada.

We just had a couple of murders in our community, likely perpetrated by the very criminals who are profiting off of the addicts in our town. Probably more if we include the couple of unhoused people who died of mysterious circumstances.

There is a lot of violence in Canada as well and our community is no exception. Violent crime has rose almost 50% since 2014. That is a shameful statistic that all who are in public office should be embarrassed by. You are not serving our community.

You need to stop passing the responsibility back and forth between provincial, federal, and civic government.   You are all responsible. You may not have been in office when this started, but you are now responsible for taking care of this and fixing this problem.

You need to work together on this and start finding ways to stem the tide of this problem that you have ignored for the past 10 years.

One last thing, we all remember the fact that our local law enforcement was too inept to keep the murderers of Leanne MacFarlane and Jeff Taylor behind bars. That should still have our community asking for the firing of those in charge of that investigation and the following court proceedings. We need to expect better of our local law enforcement.

If you do not start helping our community fight this plague, you may end up with the community deciding to do the fighting for you, and none of us want that.

I ask that as frustrating as all of this is to our community, to please keep in mind that it is not those who are most vulnerable in our community that are the problem, they are a symptom of what happens when a social and mental health crisis is ignored because of political buck passing.

It is those who are making money off of those who are sick with addictions and trauma, and those who are in power and have let this go for so long. Complacency can be how evil, and sickness invades a community.

To our politicians, our police, and our prosecutors.  Do the job you are paid to do.

To our social workers, medical first responders, and community minded local citizens, thank you so much for trying to slow down this flood.

Joel Huncar,

Cranbrook

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