To the editor, regarding Bethany Horne’s story, “Out in the cold” (Nov. 27, News),
I was stunned when I heard that the city’s only wet shelter, Pendleton (truly a shelter of last resort), would not open this year. I was equally disturbed at the way the St. Leonard’s society went about not re-offering the service. The wet shelter had an advisory committee of shelter providers across the HRM. St. Leonard’s implements the program and St. Leonard’s went behind this committee’s back and proposed another deal to the province: They sacrificed the wet shelter with its 40 beds and exchanged it for 16 more beds for their existing shelters. Not only was it bad math, but it put a whole group of people who are the most vulnerable at risk of injury and even death, which, if we have forgotten, was the reason why the shelter was created in the first place.
By —Susan LeFort
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2008.