When someone says that they are "white-hot angry,” usually it means that there is going to be hell to pay. Somewhere.
But when the person uttering such a statement is a politician like David Eby, I have to just mark it up to a good sound bite. Or a headline in the newspaper. And that’s where it will stop.
Let's see where this "white-hot angry” statement came from. Well, it comes from the actions of one Brian Evan Donnelly. Donnelly is well known to the authorities. In 2006, in Kitimat B.C,, Donnelly stabbed his 16-year-old daughter to death but was not found criminally responsible because of a mental health problem. So he went to Riverview Hospital.
You remember Riverview Hospital. Or should it have been called the Riverview Asylum. It doesn’t matter now because whoever was premier in those days somehow came up with the idea of closing Riverview and mainstreaming its patients into the Lower Mainland population.
How’d that work out?? Anyone who's lived in the Lower Mainland, when all this was going down, can tell you that it has become a miserable failure.
When Donnelly got the door opened for him, he attacked another person who apparently was minding his own business. I guess the powers that be judged that to be a misdemeanor. So Mr. Donnelly played the game and ended up getting a 28-day pass because he was, you know, doing “well.”
So, Donnelly picked up some knives, went down to Chinatown and stabbed three people, whose only mistake was going to the Light Up Chinatown Festival.
It makes you want to scream, “What the hell is going on?!” I’ll give you the answer. Nothing!!
There are people in this city who have spent much of their time trying to revive Chinatown, trying to bring the appeal back to Gastown, and just get the Lower East Side out of the “eyesore” category. Believe me, it is not going well. Everything is against them.
The Lower East Side has become a dumping ground for the rest of the country’s problems. The press has said that Donnelly came from somewhere outside of B.C.
Why he wasn’t sent back to wherever he came from is another head-scratcher. So now a former cop is going to head up an investigation of what went wrong with the Donnelly fiasco. This is how it goes. He’ll put all his findings together in a beautifully bound binder and snuggle it up to some other good “solutions” that are collecting dust somewhere in our fine city archives. And the story will continue. Unfortunately.
Bruce Allen is a music manager and commentator.
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