The Connaught Youth Centre (CYC) is being proposed as a late-night and off-hours site for street-involved youth to use.
It is better than nothing, and something that has been called for for decades, said a longtime Prince George youth advocate, and Ivan Paquette has used the place himself for activities to give youth-at-risk a place to enjoy recreation and music.
However, he doesn't like the idea of the CYC as home base for street youth.
"It's useless," he said. "If I'm going to build programs, where am I going to put them? There's nowhere in there. It is too busy with what the cadets are doing and other user groups. The Gateway facility, as I call it, should be opened up for the whole community, all sorts of user groups, but it is not an appropriate place for youth-at-risk."
Paquette has been an active frontline youth worker in Prince George since 1992 when the Native Friendship Centre brought him back to his hometown from the Vancouver music and film industry to help run the Reconnect Program, an intervention service for street youth.
He had previously done a six-month pilot project in 1983 for Carrier Sekani Family Services as a recreation leader in the VLA neighbourhood where youth were particularly troubled then and still are today.
"I grew up in the 'hood - Uplands Street and Sherwood Court," said Paquette who had extended family and some friends get into trouble with the law and addictions but his own household was positive and uplifting.
He is a relation of well-established local families the Moffats and Myttings and Allens and credits his strong family upbringing with pointing him in positive directions early in his life. He also saw those who weren't so grounded, kids on the street who had all the same skills and talents and intelligence he did, he said, but lacked that guiding force.
Those kids, he said, just need a consistent home base to help compensate for a lacking household.
"The biggest part of the solution is a space and a place that they can call home," he said. "They needed a space to come together collectively, and not be judged. And it happened. We'd [Reconnect] have dances once a month and had 100, 200 people there."
Despite clear indications from youth, the findings of local studies and the voices of social advocates, the years have produced no such facility in Prince George. Paquette fears the proposed plans for the CYC will create the impression of a home for street youth, but really just perpetuate the void.
