Early on Thursday morning, Sara Ladret was one of several people camping in Italian Square Park near Port Place Mall who were woken up by City of Nanaimo bylaw officers \u2014 accompanied by RCMP \u2014 and told that they had to pack up and leave.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a lot less tense than I expected for the situation,\u201d said Ladret. \u201cBylaw showed up and explained that everyone was going to have to exit the park, not just pack up but to exit the park.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once they had collected their belongings and left the entire parkette was sealed with a sturdy metal fence.<\/p>\n
Ladret has been spent \u201ca good majority\u201d of the past 40 years living on the streets in Nanaimo.<\/p>\n
A self-described \u201cactive drug addict,\u201d Ladret said she first started using drugs during a traumatic period in her life when she split up with her husband, gave birth to her second child \u2014 who she didn't raise \u2014 and her only brother died by suicide.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kind of lost my mind and went a little crazy,\u201d she said. \u201cI wouldn't say this is the end result, but it is the ongoing result.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Ladret, people who were camping in the park were \u201cdisturbed and obviously disrupted\u201d by the order to pack up and move along, leading to some \u201cup and down emotions\u201d but it in the end people left peacefully.<\/p>\n
According to records obtained by CHLY<\/em> through Freedom of Information requests, City of Nanaimo bylaw officers issued 27 tickets totalling $4,050 in fines related to shelters in city parks between April 2019 and Feb. 22, 2021.<\/p>\n Almost all of the tickets with location information were issued in Bowen Park or along Bowen Road, along with three on Comox Road and one on Townsite Road in the same area of the city.<\/p>\n 15 tickets were issued in 2019, at least 10 were issued in 2020 and two were issued between Dec. 15, 2020 and Feb. 22, 2021.<\/p>\n Seven tickets have been issued since the fire at the Wesley Street camp in early December prompted the removal of the people from that site. After the city closed the Wesley Street camp a fence went up blocking access to the street and the parking lots where the camp had been.<\/p>\n Shortly after the dispersal of the Wesley Street camp some people started camping near the picnic area of Bowen Park and four tickets for shelters were issued on \u201cBowen Road\u201d around the same dates the city closed the picnic shelters in the park and fenced them off.<\/p>\n \u201cWe're being caged out of every part in Nanaimo,\u201d said Ladret. \u201cWe're not allowed to go anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog, the decision was made to fence off the park due to \u201cnumerous complaints\u201d from shoppers and business owners at the mall.<\/p>\n Krog said he was concerned that if the camp grew in size it would become another large encampment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe weren't prepared to see another Wesley Street with active drug transactions and use open prostitution, chop shops operating,\u201d said Krog. \u201cPublic order is important.\u201d<\/p>\n Krog said that he stopped at the mall on Friday to run some errands.<\/p>\n \u201cI spoke to the security guard who came up to me and thanked me profusely, he said, 'it's a lot quieter down here.' He said, 'if people only knew I've been spat on, I've been harassed, I've been sworn at over and over again.'\u201d<\/p>\n Ladret said that wasn't her experience at the park.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just needed a place to sleep, not pleased to be a place to have our stuff and not have to pick it up and move it every day,\u201d she said. \u201cWe weren't causing problems, no one was getting robbed, and no one was being harassed.\u201d<\/p>\n Problems like homelessness, mental health and substance use are too big for the city to fix according to Krog and require the resources of the provincial and federal governments.<\/p>\n He repeated his controversial call for higher levels of government to provide \u201cthe kind of facilities that provide the complex care\u201d for people with \u201csevere mental health, addiction and acquired brain injury issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Ladret says that life on the streets of Nanaimo can be tough but she also feels a sense of community.<\/p>\n \u201cThis town will eat you alive if you let it,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if you actually let yourself get to know and trust the people down here to do good by you, then you can be okay. There's some really, really decent, incredibly brilliant people here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Early on Thursday morning, Sara Ladret was one of several people camping in Italian Square Park near Port Place Mall who were woken up by City of Nanaimo bylaw officers \u2014 accompanied by RCMP \u2014 and told that they had to pack up and leave. \u201cIt was a lot less tense than I expected for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":47802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57,3265],"tags":[3374,4149,7389,1098,7390],"radio":[240],"origine":[280,265,231],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47800"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=47800"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=47800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}