To expect cops to be mental health experts is unrealistic, dangerous and naive.
To expect cops to be mental health experts is unrealistic, dangerous and naive.
This is a council so marked by internal strife, bumbling, ethical lapses, and general meanness that at the same meeting Caslin made his proclamation, Welland Councillor Paul Grenier made an emotional plea for the end of the toxic politics of the chamber.
The cold war between some factions of regional politicians has turned hot, and the lack of self-reflection and sober thinking among their ranks is astonishing.
Niagara’s politics are sick. The symptoms, like a wet cough that bespeaks a serious lung infection, are easy to see. If the proper cure is not administered, the illness will simply get worse and the body will grow ever sicker and weaker.
If math isn’t your thing, that means that 62.4% of citizens who could have voted chose not to. How many of those people, I wonder, have complained about Petrowski in the last week, or about or council as a whole since the 2014 election?
I wouldn’t call it a happy ending. But it might be a chance for a better future. Maybe. If everything goes right and with a little luck, it just might be. Readers of the Grant Rant will remember I wrote a few columns recently about a pair of teenagers who were living on the streets …
They are still just kids, human beings deserving of a little dignity and a life that doesn’t involve sleeping under an overpass.
In episode 2 of the Grant Rant podcast on NPN we look at regional chair Alan Caslin’s take on the local economy and Port Colborne councillor David Barrick’s bizarre attack on the town of Pelham.
Just how compassionate a city and its people are isn’t determined by doing those things that are easy and require little effort or risk of failure. It is measured by how it responds to those who are in the most need – even if those in need have, in many respects, made bad choices that put them in their awful situation.
There they sit in their own limbo. Three teenagers – one pregnant – on the street, subsisting on the kindness of strangers.
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