Conversation overheard in a cafe recently: “Hey, do you live in a tent?” “Yeah, do you?!” “Yeah!” As in - that’s pretty cool, living in a tent, below the clay cliffs, for my summer spent in Whitehorse. A fun memory later on of “when i was young.”
But what if it’s not so cool and in fact it’s not a choice at all? And what if it’s not summer, but rapidly cooling fall, and what if you are a young single mother or a person struggling with alcohol - is it so cool then to have so few choices available you have to live in a tent?
Thank you to the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition for showing what this housing project was meant to be for our community and working so hard to make it so. “Boggles the mind” is one way of putting this action by the Yukon government.
I would really like to know where the Yukon Real Estate Association and the Yukon Landlords Association and the Yukon government were during the efforts the coalition was making to work on this Yukon Housing project. Coming in at the 11th hour to criticize and torpedo the project is government decision-making at its worst.
Where is the intention for community building, listening to and responding to the needs of the 90 per cent, and not just the 10 per cent in our community that was at the heart of this proposal and that the coalition worked so hard to promote?
There has to be a better way for the Yukon government and our business community to work with the rest of the community on making it better for all of us. I would really like to see our territorial government and local business community get that and act on it.
Gillian McKee
Whitehorse