Just stealing money from our grandchildren
And again our prime minister has dropped by to sprinkle our communities with feel-good money, brought to you by the hard-working people of this country, who (perhaps surprisingly) actually know what it means to pay taxes.
Here’s a thought to our progressive/greedy mayors and members of the provincial legislature: When a child offers to buy you candy with money that isn’t his, why not say no for a change, send him home unrewarded and put an end to selling elections with money robbed from our great, great, great grandchildren for good.
Mike Houle
North Saanich
Victoria mob greets the prime minister
I happened to be in downtown Victoria on Monday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was exiting Victoria City Hall after his meeting with Mayor Lisa Helps.
He was greeted by a mob that lined up along the curb and screamed at him for being a “communist dictator” while giving the middle finger to his motorcade.
I couldn’t help but wonder what would be the consequences for these folks had they behaved this way in Putin’s Russia.
Janet Laxton
Victoria
Langford leads the way on electric vehicles
During his visit to the capital region, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promoted the benefits in the government’s recent budget on spending on infrastructure for electric vehicles.
“We need to do even more, even faster,” Trudeau said during an appearance on radio station CFAX.
The federal Liberals last month committed to a tighter schedule on shifting Canadian vehicle sales to electric models, mandating one in five new passenger vehicles be battery-operated by 2026, 60 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2035.
Once again. the City of Langford is leading edge with regard to accommodating the burgeoning demand for EV charging as we move to electric vehicles.
More specifically, the municipality by leading the Island in approving higher density dwellings is also encouraging EV charging in such new multi-family dwellings. Apart from the downtown Victoria core, surrounding municipalities may encourage EVs, but they are not approving much higher density development.
Retrofitting in older domiciles is both costly and inconvenient. Within a few short years, the demand for EV charging will be enormous and other surrounding municipalities will need to play catch-up.
This fact will undoubtedly just make Langford even more attractive as a place to live.
Avi Ickovich
Victoria
Increase medical schools as quickly as possible
Re: “Physicians in B.C. need to be paid fair salaries,” commentary, April 12.
Dr. Jason Wale has got it right. Family doctors need to be paid to work as family doctors, not rewarded better financially to work in walk-in clinics.
Family docs have long, expensive training to assess and treat complicated patients. Once they finish, many seem to want to only see simple, quick patients because it is easier and pays better.
This needs to change. Opening multidisciplinary clinics with no one to staff them isn’t going to be much help while walk-in clinics are overloaded and shutting down.
Since this has been many years in the making, quick solutions won’t be enough. We also need to take a long-term view and increase the size of our medical and nursing schools as soon as possible, as it will take years to increase our supply.
It would also help to look at other countries and provinces, as we are almost the only place where family docs don’t work alongside physician assistants, who can deal with many of the simpler problems and follow up.
Perhaps we also need to start a program training physician assistants.
Clearly our system needs major changes.
Dr. John Miller
Retired family doctor
Victoria
Housing unaffordability due to a shortage of land
Our strategy so far in trying to address the housing problem has been a failure because politicians are afraid to address the heart of the problem — land.
Example: Our son was house-hunting shortly before the pandemic, and said: “You know why a house that costs $1.2 million is so much more impressive than one that costs $1.1 million? The $1.2-million house is a $200,000 house on a million-dollar lot, and the $1.1-million house is a $100,000 house on a million-dollar lot.”
What drives the price of housing isn’t the cost of building, it’s the cost of land because so little land is available.
About 94 per cent of B.C. is Crown land. Of the six per cent that is not, a significant amount is in Agricultural Land Reserve, even land not remotely economical to cultivate.
Much of the rest is held by hoarders and speculators who let it out in dribs and drabs to keep its price outrageous.
The province needs to ease the land squeeze by selling more Crown land into private ownership. The ALR needs to exclude property that is economically unsound for agriculture.
It also needs to address undeveloped land hoarding, and communities that enforce it. Speculators should be discouraged from sitting on land through massive tax hikes on undeveloped or underdeveloped land.
Measures like this will not only help with the housing shortage, they will fill the coffers of B.C.’s government, allowing them to, say, hire more doctors.
John Hutchinson
Victoria
Create more housing or face a service desert
Yes, we have a desperate shortage of family physicians in Victoria. And nurses, lab techs, radiology techs, paramedics, police officers, firefighters, bus drivers, ferry workers, day care workers, trades people, retail clerks, and on it goes.
The common cause of these shortages is our inability to attract families to our community because they cannot afford to live here. It is the inevitable consequence of protecting our sprawling neighbourhoods of quaint picturesque single-family dwellings.
Adding to the supply of high-rise condos for wealthy retirees in the downtown only compounds the problems.
We desperately need a dramatic increase in the supply of medium-density housing for families within our residential neighbourhoods.
Without it, we will continue down the road to becoming a dysfunctional community of real-estate-wealthy seniors struggling to maintain our quality of life in the midst of a services desert.
Mike Pennock
Victoria
Growing government leads to dictatorship
It seems every day I read the TC there are demands from various people and institutions demanding that the government (i.e. taxpayers in the private sector — all government money comes from this source) give them more.
I hate to be one of those old guys who talks about the good old days, but I will anyway.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, government was only a small fraction of the economy. Government in Canada today now accounts for just over half of GDP.
The national debt was less than $20 billion in the 1950s, today it’s roughly $1 trillion.
Back in the “good old days,” everyone had a family doctor, there were no or limited wait times for hospitals, there were mental hospitals and virtually no homelessness. Houses could be purchased for three or four times the average wage earner’s gross annual income.
Other than the massive growth of government bureaucracy and debt that can never be repaid, I find it hard to understand how this massive growth of government is a good thing.
In the words of the 19th-century Scottish philosopher W. Fraser Tytler:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Mike Spence
|Victoria
Imagine Dragons had a superb show
The sold-out, two-hour Imagine Dragons concert, full of music-starved patrons from across the age spectrum, was indeed a spectacle.
Set changes were done during a mono colour video storyboard shown on a screen that ran the width of the stadium. Sound quality of the show was superb and the feel was very intimate, tears followed a few songs.
Kudos to the band and Victoria.
Ted Baker
Royston
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