All-hallowed consultants

Some headlines just make a person groan and reading the article makes it worse instead of better. That's how I felt after reading this article. So I wrote a letter to my politicians to let them know.

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/09/04/province-eyes-gps-tracking-of-garbage-trucks

There's several indications in the article that a fair bit of tracking is already happening. It wasn't lack of knowledge but lack of will that put such a long delay on searching the landfill.

And how tragic that we should be concerned this situation might be repeated and our only steps are to make it easier to "catch the guy"! What kind of steps might be taken instead to help women avoid ending up in such vulnerable and dangerous positions in the first place? How about building a society where anyone who treats vulnerable women like garbage is made clearly aware that is not acceptable?

And then there's the price tag: $200,000 just to engage a consultant to look at a system, before implementation? Purse strings are wide open for monstrously expensive consultant's fees just to look into a system?!? (Something a university class could be asked to do for free as a real-life-application assignment.)

Funny, $200,000 sounds like a familiar amount: isn't that's about what the city and province aren't willing to pay to keep a public bathroom open? A public bathroom that includes community supports. A public bathroom that could reduce overdose deaths, provide a connection point to social services, provide basic primary health care that can avoid more expensive tertiary interventions later on. And restore a tiny measure of dignity with a private, clean and safe place to go.

It's disgusting how generous governments are regarding consulting fees in light of how parsimonious they are toward basic community services that address human dignity.

I beg of you, if you must go through with this "closing the barn door after the horse has left" supposed "deterrence" waste tracking project, could you at least do the research for a more reasonable price and divert all the money saved to community programs that service social needs?

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