This dog bylaw comes up every once and awhile. I lived in Vancouver for 30 years and we never had the problems with dogs like Nelson did when I first came here.
Now I can walk downtown and not feel something squish under my feet. I don’t know what law Vancouver has, but it has worked for years and you don’t hear anybody, even dog owner, complain. And here, as in Vancouver, we have places where people can walk there dog, and most citizen pick up after there dogs business. That is, if your watching.
When we had the hippy wannabees with their dogs, the dogs did their thing where they wanted and the owner just left it there. Maybe we should relax the bylaw and hire people to clean-up after the dogs and just pass that cost onto the store owners.
It’s nice to have large outside concerts that people can go to and have fun. They bring money to the town buying stuff to go to Shambhala for four or five days. But when they come back through town with no money, that’s where the trouble starts. Just ask the local police how they deal with that.
In the last five or six years, I have not seen the tourism get so big in this town as it has. More people are coming from Vancouver, Alberta and the US. So if the stores are having a problem, maybe they should change some of the items they sell. Carry more of what the traveller wants, but please let’s not bring the dogs back. Let us deal with the real problems this city has: revitalize the downtown core to reflect its history, have a park-and-ride for the tourist, put some of the street cars up to Baker Street in the summer. After all, look at what San Francisco has done, and it gets busier ever year. We have a beautiful city let’s keep it that way.
Barry O’Sullivan
Nelson