By Plain Rhetoric

What walking the talk really means

Jul 3, 2018 | 5:00 AM

BEFORE WRITING this week’s column, I asked the mayor along with our eight city councillors if they could provide some perspective on a rather sensitive and fractious issue the city faces. Mayor Christian responded, as did Councillor Walsh, while Councillors Dhaliwal, Cavers, Dudy, Lange, Sinclair, Singh and Wallace did not.

I wanted to know where they stood on the needle buy-back program that Caroline King and Dennis Giesbrecht are leading, financing and volunteering their own time to make happen. Details on their idea can be found in a recent story by Chad Klassen’s that explains how Ms. King and Mr. Giesbrecht are using their own money to buy back used needles for five cents each.

The Interior Health Authority (IHA) provides these needles but has done nothing about used sharps such as an exchange or buy-back programs. As a result, users are simply disposing of them wherever they may be at the time. IHA claims that once used, the sharps are a biohazard and refuses to take them back, meaning most are discarded on the streets, back lanes and parks of Kamloops.

Both King and Giesbrecht feel ignoring the problem or passing the buck on this issue is wrong and decided to try and help Kamloops with their own citizen-led clean up. As the saying goes, talk is cheap, so they put their money where their mouths were and launched the buy-back program. Since then, a few like-minded donors have stepped up to the plate in an effort to help finance the program that Ms. King runs as a volunteer from the fledgling needle return centre located at Society of St. Vincent De Paul on Briar Ave.  

The whole drug harm-reduction program is a divisive issue within the city and King and Giesbrecht are trying to help by reducing the hazards for both non-users and users. Despite these good intentions and their efforts to make a positive difference, both have received some of the most vile, cowardly and anonymous messages I have read in a long time.

Question of the Week

Has there been any progress made in the overdose crisis since BC declared a public health emergency in 2016?

11h ago

Episode 6

1000 Ways to Heal: Inner Child

14h ago

One Man's Opinion

COLLINS: The changing face of business

Apr 14, 2024

One person suggested junkies should be sent to jail and executed. Another sputters, “…F— the junkies they made there (sic) choice… get clean or F— off should be the new policy”. Obviously, there are some very troubled people out there who need more help than the drug users they hate so much. Their belligerence, lack of compassion and inability to put a sentence together without the use of repetitive swearing shows an inability to grasp — let alone understand — what these two are trying to accomplish.

When I asked the city for its opinion, Mayor Christian stated, “I think Carol is doing great work…”  Adding, “…This is an IHA issue and I am pursuing it with them at many levels and have taken the matter up with Minister Dix and will be raising it with Minister Darcy at UBCM.”

The mayor believes the current harm reduction model is “outdated and empirically wrong, expensive and ineffective.” Apart from cost, the mayor feels “we need to look upstream in the supply chain if we want to reduce public exposure.”   

Denis Walsh, the only councillor to respond, asked the obvious question: “What did IH [Interior Health Authority] expect would happen to all those used sharps?”  

Mr. Walsh suggests, “IH should just accept full responsibility along with our new NDP government and initiate a return program for sharps or stop giving out new sharps until they figure out this obvious side effect.”  

Claiming Interior Health and the former BC Liberal Government had not thought things through, Walsh stated, “Now they [IHA] have had the time to assess the problem they created in our city; now they must do something.”

Caroline King and Dennis Giesbrecht may or may not agree with what Christian and Walsh have to say but they have come to understand that talk and blaming others were not solving the immediate problem.  

What they undertook a mere week ago and the success they’ve experienced in that short period of time has already been noticed by other municipalities. Vernon, facing a problem as large if not larger than Kamloops, is looking for solutions and invited the pair to speak to Vernon council about this people led solution. No such invitation has been forthcoming from Kamloops city council.

Both King and Giesbrecht are running for city council this fall, so there are politics involved. However, these two had an idea, thought it would help the community, championed the issue, put their own money and time up and actually did something constructive and beneficial. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here about leadership and actually walking the talk.