Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Winnipeg South Centre for her comments tonight. She is very knowledgeable on aboriginal issues and she recently visited the downtown eastside, as she mentioned.
The member used the words “despair” and “notorious”. I have to say that sometimes I feel that the media spotlight on the downtown eastside portrays a stereotypical negative view of this community of about 10,000 people.
I know the member visited the Aboriginal Mother Centre Society, the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre and maybe other places. There are amazing organizations in this neighbourhood, such as the Knowledge Aboriginal Youth Alliance, KAYA, the Urban Native Youth Association, the Carnegie Centre, Downtown Eastside Residents Association, the First United Church, Vancouver Native Health Society, and Healing Our Spirit. There are incredible organizations that have a tremendous resiliency to what is going on.
There are groups like VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or WAHRS that I mentioned earlier. These are people who are fighting back. I am always very concerned about the characterization of the community. There is despair over how governments treat the community but the sense of community spirit, pulling together and uniting is unbelievable. I do not see it anywhere else to that extent.
I wanted to put that into the debate because we are left with these negative views about the community.