Local Thunder Bay leadership explore community safety conversations – Anishinabek News
October 11, 2023
THUNDER BAY — Fort William Chief Michele Solomon recently participated in the Thunder Bay Public Library’s Community Conversations panel discussion, How do we make our city safe?, on Oct. 3 at the Brodie Library. Elevate Northwest executive director Holly Gauvin, Canadian Mental Health Association CEO Jennifer Hyslop, and Thunder Bay Police Chief Darcy Fleury also participated on the panel.
“It went really well — I think it was a great first community conversation,” Chief Solomon says. “I would love to see it continue, I would definitely like to see other Indigenous organizations be involved and represented so that we’re having a really fulsome conversation. If there was one message I wanted to leave here tonight it was you have to talk to the people who are experiencing the systemic racism and the discrimination, those are people we really need to be talking to.”
The first question for the Community Conversations panel was: What does public safety mean to you?
“When I think of public safety, I think of the opportunity for all members of the society to feel safe in their community and that there’s safe spaces for everybody to be,” Chief Solomon says. “I think that sometimes the idea is out there that it’s, what I would consider, the most vulnerable that make our city unsafe when in fact those folks are probably the most unsafe in the community, so it really means having a safe place for all of Thunder Bay public.”
