CAN FOUR PILLARS BE A FINAL SOLUTION?

With much fanfare at the time, the Mayor's Task Force on Community Safety
and Harm Reduction was struck last fall.

But little has been heard about this task force or what it is up to since.

In today's Capital News (page A3), Daryle Roberts, one of the driving
forces behind this initiative to establish a similar Four
Pillars-enforcement, treatment, prevention and harm reduction- approach
that has made an impact on Vancouver's downtown street scene, apologizes
for the low profile. The initiative is moving forward, including the
adoption of a new name, The Central Okanagan Four Pillars Coalition, and a
series of public forums are planned for Rutland, Glenmore, the Mission and
the Westside hosted by Mayor Walter Gray. While we are glad to see this
initiative move forward, the importance placed on it makes one stop and
think about what has been accomplished with the money and time already
invested in addressing homeless and street drug problems in Kelowna in the
past two years.

While the Four Pillars approach is touted as a possible solution to our
city 's current social ills, that would suggest the efforts made in the
last two years by various agencies empowered with government grants has not
been successful.

One of the problems with addressing the homeless and street drug issues in
Kelowna is it is hard to quantify. There are no statistics to say these
problems are better or worse. So we rely on perception and appearance, and
in Kelowna that doesn't create a positive message.

So perhaps it is time for all these agencies trying to help to look
internally at their own initiatives, to determine if their goals are a
means to an end at some point or simply filling a cog in our city's social
service bureaucracy.