Re: “Canadians record attendance leads to more seating at baseball games,” June 15.
The public consultations on the expansion of Nat Bailey Stadium were extremely limited in outreach and designed to ensure that well-connected area residents were once again able to quash any legitimate possibility at building a modern facility for all citizens that would accommodate everyone equally.
B.C. Stats and the City of Vancouver’s own demographic analysis reveal that 17 per cent of the citizens of Vancouver are impacted by some form of disability. Sixty-four years after opening as Capilano Stadium, the number of fully accessible seats at the city-owned Nat Bailey Stadium will balloon from 40 to 58 and none will be in the upper grandstands.
By comparison, the City of Winnipeg’s Shaw Park, home to the Winnipeg Goldeyes Baseball Club, has multiple elevators for people with disabilities to access all levels of the stadium and every washroom, water fountain, concession and even payphones are fully accessible. They have a mothers lounge for nursing mothers and those with small children, plus unisex facilities.
So how do they deliver more for less? Winnipeg has a ward system of municipal representation and no elected park board with inflated egos and bloated budgets to hijack priorities like Vancouver.
From Nat Bailey Stadium, you can look out at the vacant, once publicly-owned Little Mountain housing site that well-heeled area residents were finally able to close and bulldoze displacing hundreds from their homes with the land eventually sold-off to Vision backed private developers once the poor were gone. The other view is of Queen Elizabeth Park, a memorial to colonialism, the money-losing Bloedel Conservatory and where a zip-line was needed to prop up Vancouver Park Board losses.
George Brissette, Vancouver
