OPPONENTS OF CITY'S DRUG STRATEGY LASH OUT AT WRONG PERSON

The Gastown-Chinatown-Strathcona-Victory Square Community Alliance is so
against Vancouver's proposed drug strategy that it is lashing out at a
civic employee who is responsible for helping residents to revitalize the area.

The alliance, which claims to represent more than 30,000 citizens in the
four communities, recently demanded the resignation of Wendy Au, the local
community project manager.

If a group is upset about how the drug issue is being treated by City Hall,
then the city's drug coordinator, the elected councillors and the mayor
should be the target -- not Au, whose duty is to coordinate the Downtown
Eastside Revitalization Project, which involves trying to find a solution
to the drug scourge.

But the alliance recently issued a news release with the headline, "City
Hall Remarks Further Divide the Community."

In the release, Richard Lee, the chairman of the alliance, accuses Au of
showing "a complete lack of sensitivity to the needs of the whole
community, to understanding the key role that the city plays in pulling the
community back together, and to finding solutions that address all concerns."

Lee says Au's actions will further splinter the area. "Au continues to
alienate the majority of the community who are still hoping that the city
will act in their interests, and not just the interests of the dealers, the
addicted and agencies that served them."

Harsh words, and they are based only on Au's quoted remarks in a free
community paper: "We have some business interests [in the area] that say
they're only interested in enforcement." There was no mention of what the
"interests" refer to in the entire article. Yet the same day the paper hit
the households, the alliance sent a letter of complaint to the city manager
together with a news release demanding Au's resignation. It was a prompt
response, but it also raised the question whether the forthright demand was
prepared before the article even came out.

Whether Au said that or was misquoted by the reporter, it is not sufficient
reason for demanding her resignation. The strong words of the news release
and the manner of the response are typical of the way the alliance
approaches the long-standing problem of drugs in the area.

If making a slip of the tongue or being misquoted warrants the penalty of
resignation, then those representatives in the alliance who have passed
errant information to the media ought to have resigned.

The information they passed often did not tally with the facts. Examples
are legion: They said that two of the six police officers who regularly
patrolled Chinatown were on long-term leave; that the government planned to
convert the Roosevelt Hotel into a multi-level giant resource centre for
drug addicts; that the health board's recent proposal for a drop-in centre
in the Roosevelt Hotel was a drug addicts' treatment centre, and so on.

Such misinformation has created not only confusion in the news carried by
the Chinese media and a sense of dissatisfaction with the government among
the Chinese community, but also trouble for Chinese-Canadian politicians
who often have to deal with an angry community uproar because of the
misinformation.

Although Au's words do not deserve the charge levelled by the alliance's
chairman, her decision to set up a 27-member consulting committee for the
Chinatown Revitalization Project could be perceived by some "community
leaders" as a strategy to "divide the community" and to have their voices
weakened by other representation.

Perhaps another reason for the hard line against Au taken by the alliance,
which also wants the city's drug coordinator to resign, could be that it
was reacting to the city's new communications strategy, which is more
responsive to and more targeted towards the Chinese community.

Realizing that some of the Chinese media and the Chinese community often
misunderstood the city's Downtown Eastside Revitalization Project, the city
changed its past strategy of treating the Chinese and the English media in
the same way.

City officers actively translated relevant information into Chinese and
sent it out to the Chinese media. They also arranged meetings between those
officers in charge of drug policies and patrols and journalists in the
Chinese media.

Other than the regular public notice ads, there are ads which aim to
counter misunderstanding. One such misunderstanding is to portray a
proposed drop-in centre and life skills centre as an injection house for
addicts.

Au may not have said things that sound pleasing to some people, but she,
and the city, are headed in the right direction.