Cariboo North MLA Coralee Oakes says she has been meeting with different organizations and stakeholder groups in Quesnel and says they are telling her that they are seeing a lot of new faces in the community…
“So we’ve been working to ask the government….A: why are we seeing so many new faces in the community and B, to make sure we’ve got adequate resources to support that.”
Oakes says one of those organizations that is struggling to meet the needs of people is the Salvation Army…
“They’re feeding over a hundred people a day and last Friday (June 7th) it was 169 meals. That’s a lot of stress on the organization, it’s a lot of stress on volunteers and we need to make sure that we’ve got support for organizations like this that are doing great work looking after the vulnerable in our community.”
Oakes says that is more than three times the Salvation Army’s capacity and she says that is certainly not the only organization that is struggling…
“The Amata Transition House, I know that they have a lot of people utilizing their services, it’s such an important service in our community and I recognize, you know, situations like that. There are often people fleeing domestic violence and they may be moved from other communities for safety reasons.”
Oakes says what they’re saying is we’re compassionate, our hearts are open and our community is open, but if we have additional people coming into the community we need those resources to also help supplement these organizations.