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OTTAWA
Title of 1971 Al Pacino film is a metaphor for wilful ignorance
LONGER AGO THAN I CARE to think about, I used to work in a news bureau on Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver. It wasn't the most salubrious of neighbourhoods even then, but that memory pales in comparison with what I saw on my last visit to what used to be called Gastown.
Drug addicts, prostitutes of both sexes and other socially marginalized folk throng the area, a kind of human zoo where the keepers are police, social and health-care workers, and sundry...