Good riddance column showed no compassion

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: “Goodbye downtown Kelowna, we might not miss you,” Oct. 9.

I was disappointed to read this type of journalism come from The Daily Courier, a paper that I read pretty regularly during my time living in the city.

In the past four years of my post-secondary education, I have learned mainly about communications, but also a bit about journalism as well.

While I understand that the safety of the staff, and your coworkers is obviously important to you, I found this piece profoundly distasteful.

As an editor and a journalist, I trust that you would know about the importance of ethical reporting. The circumstances that a community of people find themselves in, especially in downtown Kelowna, is riddled with drug use and mental-health issues that are largely underfunded and go uncared for and ignored by many.

Instead of bringing light to this issue. this piece ridiculed a problem that is rampant not just amongst the homeless population, but the housed and the more fortunate.

The only difference between these two communities is that one has their problems more publicly displayed. Compassion and ethics are some of the most important things that I have learned in my time as a communicator. I hope in the future any articles published by The Daily Courier can show a bit of this compassion towards a community that needs help, rather than ridicule.

I understand the frustration at a seemingly endless situation of crisis that is happening in our country currently with both the opioid epidemic and the homelessness epidemic. These problems were not created overnight, so I doubt they can be fixed overnight.

Nadia Guest