GIULIANI SHARES ADVICE ON CRIME

SURREY B.C. -- The mayor who took a controversial hard line to clean
up the dirty and dangerous streets of New York City believes the main
solution for Vancouver's drug-addled and crime-ridden Downtown
Eastside is aggressive policing. In response to reporters' questions
before he spoke yesterday at an economic-development conference in
Surrey, B.C., former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani said it's a
"terrible mistake" to allow facilities such as Insite.

At the small government-funded operation in the Downtown Eastside,
heroin addicts can inject the drug under supervision. Needles are
supplied but heroin is not, and the program's principal purpose is to
stem the spread of infectious disease and offer counselling about
rehabilitation.

Insite is part of the strategy of harm-reduction, which is one of
"four pillars" pursued by the City of Vancouver along with prevention,
treatment and law enforcement.

"You should not encourage the use of drugs, that's a terrible
mistake," Mr. Giuliani said. "It's just going to make your drug
problem much worse."

The leading candidates to become the next mayor of Vancouver in
November, Gregor Robertson and Peter Ladner, both support Insite and
the city's four pillars, though Mr. Robertson has a greater emphasis
on treatment and prevention, whereas Mr. Ladner would focus more on
law enforcement.

Mr. Giuliani said he employed several solutions when he became mayor
of New York in 1994, underpinned by the "broken windows" theory.

The idea, developed by a Harvard University professor, espouses
crackdowns on petty crime in an effort to prevent more serious crime.

Mr. Giuliani's tough-on-crime approach has been in part credited for
dramatically reducing crime in New York, which now ranks as the safest
large city in the United States. But in his time as mayor, aggressive
policing by New York police led to a reputation for brutality and
racism, particularly for the 1999 killing of an unarmed black man in a
hail of 41 bullets.

Other major factors cited by various experts for the drop in crime in
New York - a trend of declining crime seen in other large cities -
have been additional police officers, demographic changes and a
stronger economy.

Speaking with reporters, Mr. Giuliani said one key is to arrest
small-time drug dealers and seriously take on minor crimes.

He also said drug rehabilitation is important.

Further, he said police need to carefully quantify success and failure
every single day, using live statistics to address crime trends as
they emerge and before they get out of control. Under Mr. Giuliani,
New York starting using and still uses a program called CompStat.

The men vying to be Vancouver's next mayor both agree assuaging the
disaster that is the Downtown Eastside - where several streets are
crowded with broken and homeless addicts openly smoking hard drugs and
injecting themselves with needles -is a huge priority in this election
and among all voters.

Mr. Ladner said he is a strong believer in the broken-window theory.
While he supports Insite, prevention and treatment, enforcement should
be the immediate priority, he said, including more police.

"The revitalization of the Downtown Eastside has to start with safety
and crime reduction," Mr. Ladner said.

Mr. Robertson blames the worsening conditions in the Downtown Eastside
on "three years of dithering" under Mayor Sam Sullivan and his
Non-Partisan Association, of which Mr. Ladner is a part of as a city
councillor and represents as mayoral candidate.