What are your priorities for improving social or community services?
Firstly, I think we need to look at addressing some of the areas Cochrane is lacking in and the full extent of what addressing those will accomplish. Things such as a women’s/family shelter, that we are missing, will do wonders for helping people feel safer in town and hopefully will work to reduce the number of domestic disputes overall which will create less stress on infrastructure such as policing and medical care. I would love to see more support for mental health facilities such as the one attempting to go up on William Street. Taking that a step further, we could look at another facility that acts more from an institutional side that can deal with things like drug addictions. As I’ve stated before, we should look at things like affordable housing and providing that as another service. Lastly, we have great groups that do many of these services already – let’s do more to support them. The Helping Hands food drive was great for the food bank but let’s look at plans for beyond the next six weeks, let’s look to the future.
