TO CONJURE up the BC Civil Liberties Association view of Terrace you’d have to go back to early 1960s Alabama and think of pot-bellied, cigar-chewing white sheriffs holding back snarling Alsatians.
And from the RCMP, the image is of a variety of miscreants who had turned the downtown core into a vast unlicensed 24/7 beer garden with George Little Park standing in as the VIP section.
The truth is always somewhere in between but on this occasion, the situation in 2006-2008 and into 2009 far more resembled the latter than the former.
Everyone loves to talk about freedom of movement, activity, expression and so on. But with freedom comes responsibility best described through the old saying, “the freedom to swing your fist stops when it touches my nose.”
This is particularly the case in Terrace where there’s not a lot of public space, meaning that a large cross section of people with different interests and activities in mind frequently come into close contact with each other.
Translated into everyday Terrace activity, that means a quiet snooze on a park bench might be fine. But urinating down a slide on the children’s playground behind the library in the park is not.
Downtown Terrace is a much different place than it was just two years ago. Hands up who wants to return to the old days.
