Frankly Speaking

Hawthorne Park is popular with neighbourhood residents, as it is a quiet oasis in a very busy part of Surrey between Whalley and Guildford. Surrey council has voted to put 105 Avenue through the park, adding a great deal of traffic and cutting the park in two. While council has made its final decision, citizens who disagree can fill out a form to oppose the action through what is known as the alternative approval process. More than 30,000 forms need to be returned to city hall by mid-September in order to stop the council action. Frank Bucholtz photo In the past 10 years, Surrey council has become more and more remote from the huge number of people it governs. The last time there was a competitive election was in 2005, when Dianne Watts challenged incumbent mayor Doug McCallum and his dominant Surrey Electors Team (SET) which she had been part of. Watts went on to win and eventually corralled almost all the incumbent councillors, SET and otherwise, into the Surrey Firs...

A series of stories published in The Surrey-North Delta Leader on Friday, Feb. 26 (also available online at http://www.peacearchnews.com/news/370284771.html ) is called “No Fixed Address.” It sheds some welcome light on a challenge which Surrey and many other cities all across North America are struggling with. Most importantly, it features stories and photos of individuals who are or have been homeless. These allow readers to identify with and understand these individuals as people, who face very real challenges. The stories also point out that the road which leads to homelessness, and the road out of it, is complex and involves many very different factors. As is ever the case with human beings, each person’s story is unique. Each set of circumstances is unique. And solutions to this problem for each individual are also unique, which is one of the reasons the problem remains so intractable. Surrey’s response to homelessness has been somewhere in the middle of the pack, whe...