🔹let’s hear it for our local male nurses to get free parking too !! Victoria firefighters say giving up parking atop Johnson parkade for park, while firefighters need parking access, is bad governance🔹 More from the Victoria Firefighters Association: The Victoria Firefighters Association, IAFF Local 730, is speaking out after Victoria City Council voted to explore converting parking stalls atop the Johnson Street Parkade into a community garden, shortly after rejecting firefighter parking proposals and eliminating employer-provided parking for firefighters reporting to their downtown headquarters. After recently losing parking, Local 730 brought forward several practical solutions to address the issue. Every proposal was rejected. The Union subsequently filed a policy grievance with the employer, which was denied. “Our members are angry, and they have every right to be,” says Josh Montgomery, President of IAFF Local 730. “The City rejected practical solutions because dedicated firefighter parking was deemed an unreasonable use of public assets. Now we’re hearing there is excess parking capacity and that those same assets could be repurposed for garden plots. That contradiction speaks for itself.” Local 730 says the issue is about more than parking. “What began as a parking issue has now become one of respect for the members of Local 730,” says Montgomery. “Our members raised legitimate operational concerns, proposed practical solutions and were flat out told no. It’s hard not to conclude that those concerns were never taken seriously.” The Union notes that providing parking for firefighters reporting for duty or emergency call-ins is standard practice throughout North America. Firefighters responding to a call-in should be focused on getting into service, not searching for parking. Unlike most workers reporting to a single location for the day, firefighters are frequently reassigned between stations on short notice to maintain minimum staffing levels across the city. Being late by even a few minutes can leave an engine or truck temporarily browned out and unavailable for service. To the Union’s knowledge, Victoria is now the only fire department in Western Canada that does not provide parking for firefighters reporting to duty. “This isn’t a perk. It’s an operational requirement,” says Montgomery. “If there’s enough excess parking capacity to build garden beds, there should be enough parking to support all first responders who protect Victoria 24 hours a day.”
Located in Berlin is an unassuming concrete box with a single window and a small screen inside. This is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism. It recognizes gay men, and men accused of being gay, who were targeted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The old law criminalized sexual relationships between men, but in 1935 the Nazi regime expanded it and turned it into a broader weapon of persecution. The law did not work alone. It had help from a society already conditioned to believe gay people were immoral, diseased, predatory, or defective. Once that belief took hold, punishment could easily be made to look like order. Humiliation could be dressed up as morality and violence could be explained as consequence. Thousands of men were arrested. Many were imprisoned. Men were forcibly castrated. Most were sent to concentration camps, where gay prisoners were often forced to wear a pink triangle, a symbol. The end of the Nazi government did not mean freedom for every gay man imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Some men liberated from concentration camps were re-arrested and sent back into prisons. The Nazi-expanded version of Paragraph 175 remained unchanged until 1969. It was not fully repealed until 1994. The regime had fallen, but the boogeyman it helped create was still useful. A government does not have to begin with mass violence to do enormous damage. It can begin by telling the public that a small, vulnerable group is a threat to children, families, faith, order, or civilization itself. Once people believe the threat is real, they will excuse almost anything done in response. That same machinery is still familiar today. When governments, churches, and institutions describe LGBTQ people as threats to children, families, faith, morality, or social order, they are not simply expressing concern. They are teaching the public who to fear, who to blame, and whose mistreatment can be justified as protection. Pride is not a celebration of wickedness. It is a refusal to let shame do its old work. It is a refusal to become the boogeyman someone else needs in order to feel righteous. It is what happens when people choose visibility.
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